The Mask of James Bond Part 2
The Bond films until now
by Richard von Busack
So:
Dr. No (1962)
Maurice Binder’s op art commences this, accompanied by spacey electronic tones wrought by an uncredited Daphne Oram. Here is the introduction of the “gun barrel logo,” of the figure whirling, shooting, and being eclipsed a sheet of blood. The shootist vanishes into what looks like an animated Lite Brite set, dots dancing around the film’s snub nosed title. “This is an unnatural piece of work,” editor Peter Hunt said on the Criterion narration track for Dr. No, and the flat colors and abstract titles suggest the ruthlessness of the adventure to come. The music is ruthless, too, credited to Monty Norman but arranged by John Barry, working from the model of Henry Mancini’s theme for Peter Gunn.
Within 2 minutes of this opening, the entire British secret service staff in Jamaica is shot to death by a trio of assassins.
The call goes out to a British ministry of defense room where it looks as if the war never ended*. Bond is introduced during a 2AM game of chemin-de-fer at a private London club. Connery, with a Cary Grant level tan, acts around a cigarette, displaying a blissful harmony between the gentleman and ruffian sides. Reporting in the wee hours to his boss’s office, he suffers the gibes of M (Bernard Lee):
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Never on the firm’s time.”
As the agent exchanges his Beretta for a Walther PPK, we get two bits of information. First, Bond, chafing under his grouchy superior, has elements of the then-popular Angry Young Man of the British theater.
Also, we learn that this is not his first rodeo. 007 has been carrying a gun for the government for 10 years, or so M says. Casino Royale had been printed almost a decade previously.
After he arrives in Kingston, Bond figures out that a forbidden island called Crab Key is where the culprit is lurking. On the beach, he meets a partner in what Orson Welles claimed was one of the two best reveals he’d ever seen of a character in the movies.**
Ursula Andress emerges from the sea. She is called ‘Honey. ‘ Andress has a certain lithic glamor, like Half Dome at sunrise, this Aphrodite bringing her own sea shells. The hard part is her Rima the Shell Girl dialogue about how well she knows the natural world; director Terence Young had a great faith in dubbing accent-heavy actors.
Doctor Julius No is first introduced off screen, the voice coming through an intercom in a questioning room with a spiderweb lattice on its roof. We don’t see his face until an hour and a half in the film; he’s just elongated shadows slinking through a cell in the ‘mink lined prison’ where an unconscious Bond and Honey are kept. There had been a variety of thoughts on how to make the villain stand out; these including casting Noel Coward and (in Wolf Mankowicz’s script draft) having him be a talking super-intelligent chimp. Ultimately, production designer Ken Adam made the Bond villain plausible through the expressionism of his sets; it was a trick he’d repeat in six other Bond films..
Because of Dr. No’s aquatic lair and the very good Disney/Robert Stevenson movie of 20000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), some critics tended to compare Dr. No to Captain Nemo. Richard Schickel wrote in The Disney Version that Walt Disney himself was a sort of Nemo, “in love with vanished graces and futuristic technology”. This phrase sums up the mask of Bond, and the atmosphere of these movies, where fine old hotels and railway dining cars meet death satellites and jet packs. And it explains why so many Disney-sotted kids graduated to 007.
The solicitous doctor (NYC actor Joseph Wiseman) is in what might be called half-yellowface. Dr. No is supposed to be half German***. The rapport between Bond and Dr. No is silky and tinged with disappointment. Over a headhunting dinner with candelabra and champagne, Dr. No urges Bond to leave the cold war behind and join the team of tomorrow: “East, west, just points in a compass.” Refusing the generous offer, he is called out as “a stupid policeman whose luck has run out,” beaten up good, and left in a cell for further attention.
After this, one of the first cinematic escapes through a heating duct, and one of the last interesting ones.
Most notable about Dr. No is what Young does to form the character of Bond before he became a super-agent. At this point in the series, the only gadgets are a reed cut into a snorkel, and a spit-pasted strand of hair as a burglar alarm. Bond is human, yet cold — -note that Jane Fonda got an Oscar in Klute for repeating a bit about checking a wristwatch in the midst of sex, originated by Connery here. For the next six decades, the conception of Bond will oscillate between Young’s saturnine assassin and Guy Hamilton’s single-entendre quipping playboy.
*So many of the Bond series originators were vets. Young had been with the tank corps at Operation Market Garden; photographer Ted Moore and production designer Ken Adam were in the RAF. Guy Hamilton told interviewer Adrian Turner that he’d had “a noisy war.”
** Omar Sharif’s rising from the desert in Laurence of Arabia was Welles’ other choice. How modest of Welles to bypass his own emergence from the dizzying Viennese shadows in The Third Man, which is actually the best reveal.
*** As far as racism is concerned, the worst thing about Dr. No is the treatment of the sidekick character Quarrell, whom Bond hires as a ferry man to Crab Key. John Kitzmiller was an ex-GI from Italy who stayed in Europe after WWII and acted in some 40 films, most notably Paisan. In the matter of a few scenes, he changes from a shrewd Caribbean boatman, nobody’s patsy, into a superstitious native spooked by a beach crab. Then he guzzles out of a giant jug of rum the size of an Alhambra water bottle. (Poor man was a drinker, dead at 51.)
From Russia, With Love (1963)
“Well, the first thing you should know about us is that we have people everywhere” — Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), Quantum of Solace.
A young Russian clerk named Tatiana (Daniela Bianchi) stationed at the Soviet Embassy in Istanbul is offering to steal a decoding machine for the west. In exchange, she wants to be escorted by James Bond across the Iron Curtain into Europe. She got a crush on 007 by reading about his exploits in the files. Sure, why not. It’s a trap, but the bait is enough for the gamble.
Earlier Dr. No had heralded the new world power. From Russia with Love isn’t about the Communists, who are mere patsies for SPECTRE. The Russians are figures of fun, blusterers — as in the joke about how “Russian clocks are always on time.” Deepening the satire is Lotte Lenya, gone from the political burlesques of Brecht to this satire of a desire-struck lesbian commissar.
Here, the Cold War isn’t something to be met with paying any price and bearing any burden. Instead, it’s a matter of both sides driving around Istanbul watching each other. A vacation, really. The killings that begin right as Bond drops in are a puzzle to the British Intelligence’s Turkish station head, the agreeable Kerim Bey (a last role by a dying Pedro Armendariz, the Mexican film’s Epoca del Oro’s “Clark Gable of Mexico”). Kerim is astonished to see what was once a polite game of spies start to have a body count.
This is the smoothest of the Connery Bonds, full of a good deal of Istanbul before it was invaded by the skyscrapers. The exterior of the place Lenya’s Col. Klebb is holed up in was a 700 year old hostelry, and the crew was allowed to film in an empty Hagia Sophia. Later comes romance and rescue on the Orient Express …as well as a gratuitous girl fight scene that doesn’t do the Rom any favors. Studio-based exotica heightens the mood throughout. Surprising how much a piece of painted plywood can do for a film: in a giant wall-sized chessboard in a Venetian meeting room. Or, through a train window, the slow, letter by letter reveal of the word “ZAGREB.”
Connery is at his best, interested in every scene, and quite human; note the little squeeze he gives to the shoulder of a dead friend. He’s also does that time-honored cowboy movie gesture of adjusting his clothes after the movie’s big fight. Bond is a kind of cowboy, and Barry’s soundtracks always give him a few licks of cowboy electric guitar. And Bond is comic, conjuring up some lingerie with a magician’s flourish — a gift for the poor Russian girl who never got anything lacy back in the USSR.
From Russia With Love is famous for the savage fight between Bond and his ‘guardian angel’ Grant (Robert Shaw). Shaw uses a parody of a British upper class accent, with a lot of quack in it. He says ‘old man’ too many times, and he has lousy table manners. (In the train dining car, he eats like someone who’s been in the joint, protecting his food with the other arm.) All this leads to two minutes of cinema made to grab one by the medulla; a pair of burly fighters in a small blue-lit train compartment. It was done a weekend with three cameras, the two principles and a stunt double. Young had been a boxer, and he claimed he acted out the fight choreography.
From Russia With Love begins with a reference to Last Year in Marienbad. Bond, tuxedo-clad and alone, tiptoes through a topiary garden, with statues and fountains. He’s obviously being stalked. An owl calls his name, a twig cracks, and Barry’s trumpets come crashing in as Bond is garroted by Grant. The stadium lights flood in, and the mask is stripped off the corpse. It’s only been a training exercise (“like dressing up your dog as a lion and hunting him,” complained one critic). Grant’s control in this exercise is Walter Gotell, who we’ll see again later in the series; he’s the one who walks into the shadows, dangling the mask of James Bond from his hand.
Goldfinger (1964)
For a little while, it was the biggest movie in the whole world. (It’s hard to resist Fleming’s tic.) Adrian Turner’s much recommended book on the film describes the scope of the phenomena, particularly in details…such as the story of the print arriving at the royal premiere at the Leicester Square Cinema in London in gold-painted film cans.
One’s first recollection of the film is its shininess: in Bond’s hotel room, modest by todays standards, the glow of Miami sunlight reflected on a gilded corpse. But one really begins with the theme song, as Dame Shirley Bassey rallies for the preposterous Gunga Din last blast.
The best title sequence in all the Bonds is Casino Royale ’06, with animated playing cards coming to life. But this is the most iconic, with the adventure foretold on the golden screen of Margaret Nolan’s bikini-clad body. It’s a Windmill Girl thing, ironically in a film that came out the year the Windmill Theater turned from a cabaret into a cinema. The most torrid nightspot in midcentury Britain was a London club where models performed in nude tableau vivants, as stock still as they were stark naked. Nolan is neither nude nor a corpse; one can see her breathing, and she’s in a variety of poses. She seems to be is some entranced oracle of cinema, dreaming up the explosions, the planes, and the look of hot defiance Pussy Galore gives Bond.
There’s a variety of styles in the Bond title songs. Some are more like dirges than anthems (Adele’s “Skyfall” is a sort of funereal version of the theme for Diamonds Are Forever. And the ever-lugubrious Sam Smith’s theme for SPECTRE is almost as grim as “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The more interesting ones are meta-songs about watching a Bond film. Take Tina Turner’s theme for Goldeneye, with its lyrics by Bono and The Edge: “You’ll never know how I watched from the shadows as a child…” The worst ones (“Nobody Does it Better” or Sheryl Crow’s “Tomorrow Never Dies”) are about having sex with Bond, though The Pretenders “If There Was A Man,” about yearning for Bond is polite, sweet, and attractively plaintive. No Time To Die’s theme is a transition point. Billie Eillish’s tune is about breaking up with Bond and leaving this childish fantasy behind forever. It’s like they’re trying to tell us something.
But Goldfinger, like the subsequent Thunderball, and, later, Man With The Golden Gun, has lyrics about the villain himself. Our hero starts the adventure duly warned.
At Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel, the CIA’s Felix Leiter (Cec Linder) shows up while 007 is recuperating from the events in in the pre-title sequence. Bond is asked to keep an eye on one of the guests, Auric Goldfinger (“Sounds like a French nail varnish (polish)!”) Goldfinger (Gert Froebe) seems to be one more terry-cloth wrapped alter kocker around the pool. He’s actually a card cheat with an interesting scam. An assistant named Jill (the pleasing Shirley Eaton, a Monroe without the angst) watches Goldfinger’s opponents’ cards via binoculars from the hotel’s balcony and radios the details to Goldfinger’s hearing aid. In zero time, Bond sneaks in and ends Goldfinger’s gaff. The upshot is Jill’s murder, a gilded body left as a warning.
There’s no equivalent for the novel’s epigraph: “Mr Bond, in Chicago they have a saying. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” But due to the law of threes, 007 beards Goldfinger on an English golf course, and tracks him to Switzerland. Bond ends up in a gentleman’s imprisonment in Kentucky — a horse stud farm close to Goldfinger’s actual target, the gold reserves at Ft. Knox.
Strange. If you don’t count M’s orneriness, everyone likes each other in this movie. Or at the least, they admire each other’s gall. The antagonism between Goldfinger and Bond is cordial all the way to the end, when the criminal prepares to handcuff 007 to an A-bomb; note the genuine regret in the farewell. Over mint juleps, Goldfinger grins as Bond figures out the plot. “Go on,” he encourages 007. Whenever Bond deduces something, Goldfinger enjoys his temerity. This great villain has the reserve of a professor pestered by a too-bright pupil, trying to figure out whether or not it’s safe to accept a compliment.
Later, Bond says Goldfinger is mad — he isn’t at all, he’s just astonishingly venal and willing to take thousands of lives in the pursuit of money. He’s an even-tempered evil genius, though, a ingratiating host host if he doesn’t kill you. Goldfinger withstands even the flying putdowns. Invited by Goldfinger to admire his racehorse, Bond mutters “better bred than his owner”.
Goldfinger’s famous servant with the deadly bowler hat is Harold Sakata’s Oddjob, and he’s cheery all the way to the ghastly pyrotechnic end. He’s funny, too. I’ve been laughing for a half century at Sakata’s stagey moment of triumph after abetting Goldfinger’s cheating: first dropping a golf ball down his pants leg, than discovering it on the green with a bark of surprise: “Ah! Ha!”
The amusement lasts all the way to the assault on Fort Knox and the seeming murder of thousands of soldiers, keeling over as if in a fairy tale. The tonal changes between horror and comedy recall James Whale’s films.
The movie stands apart from the SPECTRE side of the saga, and was so many people’s first 007 movie. Which is a pity, because it has “The Ass-slap That Cleared a Thousand Theater Seats”: Nolan, who plays Bond’s masseuse, is smartly patted out of the way. (“Man talk,” says Bond. Oh, Jesus.). In From Russia With Love, it tends to be forgotten that Bond pattied Tatiana’s butt to get her to scoot. “There are some English customs that are going to change,” says Tatiana; we could take this as a knowing joke about the ‘vice anglaise,’ to which Ian Fleming was a fervent devotee.
Moving right along, it’s not everybody who can invent a brand new sexual fetish, and a new way of death, even if skin suffocation through gilding turned up in Val Lewton’s 1946 Bedlam. The business of a girl murdered by gilt gives Bond all the more reason to send the ogre off in the end.
This calvacade of murder and style was a world wide hit and commenced a 1960s phenomena. One reads that white dinner jackets sold out in Paris within 24 hours of the film’s debut. No actor since Bogart in Casablanca had looked as rough and handsome in such a coat as Connery did. Children worldwide who’d made the relatively sane career choice to be cowboys or spacemen suddenly wanted to grow up to be spies.
I never saw this first run, and I saw just about everything. I was 7, my mother was a devoted Fleming reader, and she probably thought it wasn’t meant for little boys. I eventually caught it in rerelease in Pasadena in 1973, in a very bad print double billed with Bananas. Presumably the Latin American sequences in both films made a sort of match. I was most dazzled by Goldfinger’s Mexico-set pretitles. Within a minute or two, 007 transforms from floating seagull to frogman to commando to dinner-jacketed gent with boutineer.
Thunderball
(1965) James Bond starts and ends this movie flying. Critics justifiably started to group him among superheroes. (Bond scholar John Cork dug up the odd fact that Michael Wilson, who became one of the series’ producers, was the son of the first actor to play Batman on screen.) For this brief window of time — a window that closed after everyone saw You Only Live Twice and figured that they’d had enough — Bond defined cool.
Connery is still alert and a threat, and very smooth. The quippage is lively; after an underwater tryst, he murmurs, vide Rogers and Hart’s “I’ll Take Manhattan,” “I hope we didn’t frighten the fish.” Previous to the pretitles brawl that demolishes a fusty French living room, Bond is conversing with an agent from Paris; she asks him if there is anything they can do for him. Connery rolls the thought around in his head delightfully.
Terence Young had more of a sense of this character than almost anyone who directed a James Bond movie, and this was to be his last outing with Bond. Young always excelled at shading the mask of Bond with melancholy. Part of Bond’s assignment is low: seducing and manipulating Domino (Claudine Auger) the kept woman of the eyepatch-wearing tycoon Emilio Largo (Adolpho Celli). Dancing with Bond, Domino says she can never meet the right kind of man. Bond murmurs, “Only men like me and Largo.”
The plot is coincidence-heavy — Bond keeps bumping into the conspirators, even before he gets to the Bahamas, where it’s easy to explain a lot of people rubbing shoulders on a small island. The case sort of falls in his lap when he’s at a British spa getting a high colonic (business that didn’t get explained as it did in the book; Bond was flunking his secret service physical because of ciggies and drink).
The slow revelation of menace is counterpointed with farce. At an English spa, Bond is chasing a naughty nurse named Patricia, played by Mollie Peters. It’s again material open to charges of rapiness…if you pretend not to see the heavy flirtation on both sides, or forget the later scene where Patricia is enjoying Bond, giving her a thorough massaging with mink gloves. As she lays there, we hear the roar of jets outside.
Largo, SPECTRE’s #2, is supervising the hijacking and ransoming of a pair of atomic bombs for $240 million. To get them, SPECTRE honeytraps and murders the Italian pilot scheduled for a NATO training mission, replacing him with a double. The switch is helped by a member of their Execution Branch, Fiona Vulpe (Lucianna Paluzzi, a bantamweight Claudia Cardinale).
Paluzzi’s femme fatalism keeps Thunderball lively, and the movie suffers once she’s gone.
For a tropical movie, Thunderball has a lot of twilight in it, as when a SPECTRE operative lands a bomber of gassed corpses into the ocean, or during Bond’s own one-man assault on the villain’s estate, Palmyra. As the Bonds got humongous, they begin to break up into sequences. Particularly fine is 007’s scuba exploration of the drowned Vulcan bomber under its camouflage net. It’s still holding its dead-man’s crew as the sea scavengers gather. No one designed a cold-war era jet as well as Ken Adam, who also created the bombers in Dr. Strangelove. The jet is flat grey, tapered and sharp-finned, matching the color and shape of the sharks swimming around it. John Barry’s score — it’s one of his most elementally thrilling — is every bit as ominous as the plundered bomb bay of the plane.
Barry’s work is particularly devastating during a scene at the outdoor Kiss Kiss Club where a wounded Bond is cornered by several SPECTRE gunmen. Before turning him over to the killers, Fiona tolerates a last dance. The sequence, staged to King Errison’s minor key electric guitars and congas, is modeled on the orchestral crescendo assassination in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.The shock of the punchline demonstrated the ruthlessness of the Terence Young Bonds. They were bypassing their influence Hitchcock, who was then entering his sleep-apneac period as a director.
The long and rich adventure is in Panavision, a wide screen format that had its sources in underwater photography. The technology captures a new kind of battle: the then-novel SPECTRE/Army frogmen scuba battle at the end.
Tropical fish are soothing, but everything moves slower underwater. Far more fun than the undercranked, out of control hydrofoil sequence that wraps this up…despite a jet-fuel powered explosion that knocked out windows 30 miles away in Nassau…is an opening scene at SPECTRE’s Paris headquarters. There, the organization proves their fast-company qualities by publicly killing a rogue employee, in order to convince the survivors to pursue excellence and think outside the box.
It’s a malicious sequence, set in a leather and steel office. One notes Largo, unlike the other flop-sweat soaked other SPECTRE board members, pretending not to notice the stench of barbecued hench. It’s counterpart, the war room in London, has a drive-in screen sized map diagramming the global hunt for the missing bombs. Gigantism in the visuals underscore the threat to the world. Eventually comes the news that the times are so out of joint that Big Ben has struck 7 at 6 o’clock.
You Only Live Twice
(1967) This was the peak, the point where the world-wide fever broke. Spy films crowded the screens. Studios launched their own series in imitation: four Matt Helm opuses from Columbia, three Harry Palmer films from UA, two Derek Flint films at 20th Century Fox, and a pair of English films reviving Bulldog Drummond. The Harry Palmer stories were about a low-rent and reluctant spy, with Michael Caine barely avoiding being shot by both sides. The Helm and Flint films seemed as much musical comedies than spy movies. There are certain films — Roxie Hart (1942), for instance, where the cast seems to be on the verge of breaking into song. Whether it was tipsy Dean Martin putting on his own hits, or the electronic fanfare of Flint’s telephone, these Helm and Flint films showed an understanding of how important music was to the spell of the spy saga.
However, when the rush really began, it seemed these entertainments were a vessel you could put anything into: cartoon cavemen (1966’s The Man Called Flintstone), European angst (Modesty Blaise, also 1966), Sean Connery’s younger brother Neil (1967’s Operation Kid Brother aka O.K. Connery), or a microphone-carrying bulldog (1966’s The Spy With the Cold Nose).
Less than two months before You Only Live Twice opened in June 1967, came an oddity with an actual Ian Fleming title, Casino Royale. How the first James Bond novel escaped the canonical 007 movies is a long dull story of development hell. Producer and super (talent) agent Charles Feldman couldn’t figure out what to do with the material, so he tried to take every approach at once, with five credited directors. Casino Royale preserves some seriousness from the plundered book. Peter Sellers plays the fatal high stakes card game at Royale les Eaux, with Orson Welles as Le Chiffre. Sellers carries on a romance with Ursula Andress as Vesper, in a love scene shot through a huge aquarium, as Dusty Springfield’s hushed “The Look of Love” gives this explosive farce a moment of gentleness. Woody Allen, clearly in charge of his own gags and dialogue, is the villain no one suspected. David Niven (as an old and retired 007) and Deborah Kerr drift into the sort of easy romantic comedy they’d played on screen often. Casino Royale’s anxious escapism reflects its times, just as Otto Preminger’s later Skidoo does. It’s a display of shaken confidence and uncertainty, one of a number of movies demonstrating how nerve-wracked the old Hollywood was at the end of the 1960s.
You Only Live Twice is mammoth. “This is the big one, 007,” Bernard Lee’s M tells him. The astonishing pre-title sequence is a sort of climax even before the film starts, with more than 50 edits in several minutes. It’s remarkably speedy for the cinema of the time. A sublime piece of film music in F-minor, John Barry’s harp and flute-laden “Capsule in Space,” shows us how the unthinkable spins out of the banal.
In Earth orbit, a Gemini-like craft hovers, checking with terrestrial radar stations as it passes overhead. “Chris,” one of the astronauts prepares for a space walk. A tympany booms. From the darkness, a bullet shaped ship makes a sneak attack. It opens up and swallows up the capsule, cutting Chris’s tether and leaves him to float in dead silence.
The theme “Capsule in Space” is reprised and resolved with full fury at the end of the film under the title, “Bond Averts World War III.”
WWIII? Connery wasn’t even over WWII, yet, and he didn’t mind implying as much, during his time on location in Japan. Even before the public discerned it, Connery intuited that the great bird of cool was about to fly away. Plus, with the commercial threat of Casino Royale, Broccoli and Salzman started an ad campaign that insisted “Sean Connery IS James Bond,” which was inarguable, and moreover was a response to the wacky non-canonical Casino Royale with its scads of 007s, including everyone from actor Terence Cooper to a trained seal. Connery didn’t care for the campaign; he didn’t want to be known just for being Bond.
There were a series of indignities for 007: being shot out of a torpedo tube, getting slammed up in a Murphy bed and falling down a stainless steel slide while wearing weird oxford shoes. And then the real deal-breaker for today’s viewers: the infamous Japaneseoplasty to disguise Bond as an Asian, with bangs and slanted eyebrows.
Connery met the contractually obligated embarrassments with toneless line reading. “I like sake” is the saddest and most defeated bit of dialogue; the poor man can’t even work up enthusiasm for a drink. And for a lesson in what an actor must not made to be say, here’s the bit about the mocking Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) giving Bond the secret password, “I love you.” Actors and actresses look preposterous saying those three little words. For decades, scriptwriters have learned to avoid them unless it’s not possible.*
Against slowmo elements of Japanese travelogue — one title on the soundtrack is a composition called “Mountains and Sunsets,” which says it all — the action sequences stand out in relief. One surprise is the flight of ‘Little Nellie’ the 9 ½ foot, 250 lb, killer-bee painted autogyro, flown by RAF Wing Commander Ken Wallis. (Wallis survived his many flights in this contraption and died in bed at age 97.) Icicles of malicious plotting decorate the script, such as the story of the killing of a tourist who took the wrong snapshot at the wrong time. Here appears to be the debut of the ninja in the western cinema, carrying out a unique assassination with a long thin ribbon and a tiny bottle of poison.
The finale takes place at Blofeld’s fabulous hollow volcano lair, with its own monorail, functioning helicopter pad, piranha pit, and a missile base. As last revealed, Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld wears a real job of horror make up. He had good reason for hiding behind screens with his Persian pussy. Monocled villains had been around since the days of the Kaiser, but Blofeld has a monocle made of flesh. He looks, as critic Alexander Wolker said “Like an egg cracked in the boil.” Pleasance doesn’t let the makeup overshadow the colorlessness of the accent: “As you can see, I am about to inaugurate a little war…” Never would a spy film have this mad scope again. It would be camp. It would be too much like a James Bond film.
*When, in an extreme moment in SPECTRE, Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann told Bond she loved him, the fans groaned.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
1969 was a fine year to be a quitter. George Lazenby, an Australian model, walked away after this one film. But this untried actor is often just right for the part — mainly because he’s often overwhelmed. Until Daniel Craig shows up decades later, there is to be no better demonstrations of the hazards and limitations of being Bond. Run to earth, exhausted, this former superman crouches in the stalls at an Swiss ice rink, pulls his coat around his face, and waits for the end.
It’s possible the romantic drama here would have aroused Connery’s interest. Still, the problem of the vanished Connery is addressed right away: “This never happened to the other fella,” Lazenby says in the pretitles, after he’s ditched on the beach by the troubled woman he was trying to rescue.
Apart from its rivals Casino Royale (2006) and From Russia With Love, OHMSS is the most sheer movie of all the Bond movies — it has the best arc, the most commando excitement, the most doomed love, and the most remarkable top of the world scenery, at 9700 feet up at the Schilthorn in Switzerland. The dialogue is the best-turned in the series. Simon Raven (of the ‘Alms for Oblivion’ books) is credited as the script polisher. Particularly startling is a bit of poetry by James Leroy Flecker used at Raven’s suggestion. It’s recited by Diana Rigg at an alpine sunrise, as she tries to flatter Blofeld into unwariness: “Thy dawn, o master of the world, thy dawn…”
And the impressive heroine Tracy (Rigg) exemplifies the lady in a Bond novel at her most lost-generation romantic; in the book, Tracy had a baby that perished of meningitis. Tracy exemplifies the kind of woman Bond was always interested in — what Ian Fleming described as “a bird with a wing down” — a woman to match his own PTSD and sorrows. Not that Tracy’s personal problems keep her from defending herself. (Rigg had been agent Emma Peel on TV’s Avengers and knew karate.) But we know Tracy is on a downward spiral from the beginning, as she walks into the ocean wearing an butterfly-sleeved evening gown. It’s the finale of Humoresque (1946) done at top speed.
The unusual editing (director Peter Hunt had been an editor before he turned director) resembles little in cinema of the time. It’s brutally tight, even jagged, but not with the flashforward-ridden style of Antonioni and Nicolas Roeg.
This iteration of Blofeld (Telly Savalas) is not a Mao-suited Dr. Evil, but a brilliant and elusive gangster with a streety side. Blofeld is a Napoleon of crime with Napoleon’s own weakness for love. As an actor, Savalas excelled as the kind of old WW2 soldier who had scams on side: exactly the milieu of the Blofeld of the books. He also has the doll-like eyes as described by Fleming — what the Japanese call ‘sanpaku,’ the kind of eyes with the whites visible completely around the irises. (For a contemporary example of this kind of gaze, check a photo of Elizabeth Holmes, the chair of Theranos. I repeat, her company was called Theranos. And now you can remind me again of how over the top the Bond films are.)
It was a technical innovation on different levels. OHMSS has the novelty of a Moog synthesizer on the soundtrack, supposedly the first example of this instrument in a feature film. The doom-laden obbligato tones in the instrumental title seem to be a state-of-emergency, minor-key version of the “Westminster Quarters” of Big Ben. The lens flares that show up during the never-topped skiing scenes were a 1960s staple — an accident brought back to remind you ‘this is really happening’. The ravishing “nuit-American” day for night photography is of a particularly rich ultramarine blue. And the stinging ending of OHMSS’s grounds the wild tale, while shooting a hole right through the box office.
I saw it 50 years ago, New Year’s Day 1970, at a regular haunt, the Academy Theater in Pasadena. It was a big empty cavern with the usual inscrutable Art Deco murals on the wall. The streets were still littered with the rubbish of the Rose Parade. Mom was hanging out with some college pals about a mile away, watching the Rose Bowl over plastic cups of scotch and crock-pot chili. She needed to get rid of her clingy first born, so she gave him a couple of bucks and sent him to the movies. I remember her glancing at the LA Times. Oh, good, James Bond, perfect for a growing boy. Final score: Trojans 10, Wolverines 3; odd that she cared, given that she was a UCLA fan. “Not today, Coach McCay!”
I bought a ticket, sat down alone — the best way to see a movie — and became a film critic on the spot. It’s something I could only explain by using actress Evelyn Keyes’s words about Gone With The Wind: “I’d never really seen a movie before.”
I was not a purpose-wracked kid, and this was to be my first obsession. Home video wasn’t going to be invented for several decades, there were no tv broadcasts of the Bond films until 1972, and there were few revivals over the course of the years. I combed through LA’s relatively few bookstores, and flipped through record stores for the soundtrack albums. When there is no such thing as the Internet, and you are delving through a midden of pop culture, the moment right after the craze has peaked is the most difficult time to try to find evidence. The public has moved on to new novelties and can’t be expected to remember what it was that bewitched them. Asking adults, “What was that movie like?” was no help. Nor was reading the loftily-written reviews of the Bond films in the magazines and newspapers, in leads found via the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. I holed up with the LPs, read the paperbacks, and tried to imagine what the Bond movies I hadn’t seen were like.
Diamonds are Forever
(1971) A million dollar salary, which Sean Connery donated to the still-existent Scottish International Educational Trust, lured him back to don the holster and the toupee. Then it’s off to the last refuge of the sliding celebrity, Las Vegas. This movie is a little drunk and disheveled. The fourth wall is breached after 007 slips his own wallet into a fresh cadaver’s pocket, and Tiffany Case (Jill St. John) gasps “My god! You’ve killed James Bond!” The films to come during this decade just about did.
It’s a story of diamond smuggling from South Africa to Holland, and then to Vegas; the end of the pipeline is an aerospace lab in the Nevada desert. There is cause for lament throughout the way: cornpone sausage magnate Jimmy Dean as a Howard Hughes surrogate, Connery’s wacky Dutchman imitation, a pair of comedy homosexual villains (jazz musician Putter Smith and dad-of-Crispin Bruce Glover).
Yet the record shows that the so-called ‘Star Wars weapon’ actually debuted here, in the form of a giant diamond satellite, menacing the world in what was then glorious state of the art animation.
Diamonds are Forever was a bit painful to deluded fans who’d hoped that Blofeld would have the stature and personality he’d had in OHMSS. He’s impersonated by the ultra-fey Charles Gray, best known as the Criminologist in Rocky Horror Picture Show. Gray stretched for Olympianess as he menaces the world from a Baja oil derrick, deriding the world’s powers for ‘flexing their muscles like impotent beach boys.” John Barry did his best, often single-handedly reviving the tension in the movie with the icy synthesizer futurism on the soundtrack, as well as the Shirley Bassey’s impressive proto-disco torch song on the titles. Here are a few of the series’ better death traps. Bond is knocked out and welded into a pipeline at one point. In another, he’s nailed into a coffin and sent down the conveyer belt of a crematorium alive. The funeral home’s Muzak is first a celestial chorus, and then a screaming chorale of the damned.
I returned to it a few times in its first run at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood, in hopes it would become a better movie if I watched it enough times. People today try this method out with Godfather 3. At this point I was 13 1/2 and I finally understood Bond’s appetite for naptime. 007’s “fulsome friend” Plenty O’Toole (Lana Wood) appeared in a lobby card, in a dress cut all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. I bought a copy at Larry Edmunds’ celebrated Hollywood Boulevard Cinema Shop for further study.
Lana, Natalie Wood’s sister, was no fan of Connery. She said he smelled like the bottom of a lion’s cage. Sweaty polyester had that effect, and this movie wears a lot of it. St. John didn’t seem to mind, playing this pleasingly zonked international diamond smuggler with enthusiasm. Seeing a hench getting machine-gunned, she utters a “Yeesh!” that has the freshness of an ad lib.
Live and Let Die
(1973) This one exemplifies the problem of writing about these movies over the course of the decades: the Bond films are always better and always worse than you remember, but they’re never better or worse in the same places as the last time you saw them.
One unfortunate aspect of the series is the moss that grows on the display of technical wonders. Behold, the digital watch! Now man has wings, thanks to this HANG GLIDER. Here, director Guy Hamilton matched of one of Fleming’s most violent (and racist) novels, with the lightest-weight actor to play 007, Roger Moore. MGM charm school sanded Moore’s mojo to the thinness of a ukulele pick, but that didn’t keep him from Earth’s worst double-entendres and the raising of what Anthony Lane described as his “stunt eyebrows.” Beyond the dad joke, beyond even the uncle-joke: there lies the double-entendres of Roger Moore.
Donning the infamous powder-blue safari suit, Bond goes from New York to the voodoo-haunted island of San Monique. From there, he surveilles a heroin laboratory in the Louisiana swamps, trying to undo the scheme of Harlem crime lord Mr. Big.
What possibly can be the connection between Mr. Big and the Babydoc Duvalier-like President Kanaga? Wait for the shock reveal. Mr. Big is played by an uneasy Yaphet Kotto, a particularly Brando-struck actor. If Kotto obviously thought the material was problematic, he eventually embraces the role of an evilly grinning, overly-polite mastermind.
Moore’s diary of the film recalls Kotto chafing on the set. As well he might, considering the really repellant way the script kills him off. (Kotto also discovered that there was among the film crew a person nicknamed ‘ ‘N — — r,” on account of a sunburn he’d got during the filming of Dr. No.)
Without the gravity Kotto brings in, the camping continues apace. Enjoy a centuries-long speedboat sequence in the Louisiana bayou, with some really abominable Southern sheriff caricaturing by Clifton James. The Bond films were full of monsters, but no single figure in the series was as completely unaesthetic as James. So naturally they brought him back for The Man With the Golden Gun. For another boat chase.
Recalling his war years to Adrian Turner, Hamilton — personally responsible for the efficient cheddariness of three mid-period Moore Bonds — said one of his duties was to deny Mussolini’s soldiers equipment as the fascists marched into Nice. “I had the great pleasure of driving Rolls Royces off the jetty into the water.” Something about this happy experience so marked the director that he could never get enough of big cars hurling into whatever lake or canal was nearby.
Live and Let Die is the kind of movie that establishes an exotic location by cutting straight to the hotel floor show at the resort. On the bright side, the star of that two-drink minimum fiesta is Katanga’s marvellous hench, who has the film’s last stage laugh. He is the tall and richly syllabled Geoffrey Holder, who poses as obeah-demigod Baron Samedi in a top hat cockaded with blood-stained chicken feathers. Holder’s theatrical significance brings music to lines as insignificant as “He’s heading up the hill”. Holder gives Live and Let Die something to live for.
All honor to sometimes Sanford and Son guest star Julius Harris, as the hook-handed and amiable main hench, who was in a very good mood about feeding Bond to the alligators. Guy Hamilton Bond movies are cheese, but, by God, the characters enjoy themselves.
Unfortunately, Gloria Hendry, vaunted as the first black female with whom 007 cuddled up with, is treated badly by the script. Jane Seymour, as the card-reader Solitaire gets far less agency than she should, even though there’s an interesting attempt to make her up with painted golden curls on her forehead, as per Dietrich in 1944’s Kismet. In a New Orleans club, obscure soul singer B. J. Arnau puts some fury into the title theme — a hit by Paul McCartney and Wings either despite or because of its grody white-reggae bridge.
The Man with the Golden Gun
(1974) Probably not as bad as a ninth movie in any other series, and yet. I saw it with fellow fan Wiley Carter, and I can still remember his look of dismay after it was over. It mirrored my own.
The Bonds were always lesser when they were playing catch up, to Blaxploitation (as in Live and Let Die) and to Run Run Shaw’s kung fu movies (as here). Maybe the most clear sign of diminishment is the hench Nick Nack here: lethal midget* Hervey Villechaize, a detailed ⅓ scale replica of Harold Sakata’s Oddjob, complete with bowler and butler’s livery. (Come to think of it, Goldfinger had a wielded a golden pistol, years before.)
In the background is the problem of a missing scientist who invented a 90 percent effective solar panel. In the foreground, 007 has been challenged, by mail, by the notorious million-dollar-a-hit assassin Scaramanga (Christopher Lee).
A never more exasperated M (Bernard Lee) points out something often complained about by real life professionals in espionage. The man’s cover is completely blown. Everyone knows what James Bond looks like. No one knows what Scaramanga looks like, so the hit man has a chance of getting the drop on our hero. Searching for clues, Bond travels to Beirut, Macau, Hong Kong and Bangkok, to track the killer down to his island lair in the South China Sea. Scaramanga’s bored mistress Andrea (Maud Adams) and the British secret services’s Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland) vie for Bond’s attention.
The pretitle sequence is sadness-inducing. To Scaramanga’s island comes a real Central Casting mafiosa (HUAC name-namer Marc Lawrence) complete with black shirt and white-tie outfit. Triumphing over this mook in a gunfight, Scaramanga celebrates by shooting the fingers off of a statue of James Bond. In the pretitles in From Russia With Love at least they had a live guy dressed up like Bond. This is a statue.
Moore exhibits instances of Connery-worthy ruthlessness, twisting Andrea’s arm, after surprising her in the shower. Bond uses this depressed mistress as a way of tracking Scaramanga. Moore’s poreless, polished style makes both the interrogation and subsequent kissing oddly remote. In the love scenes, Moore was so gentlemanly he wasn’t really there — which may be why his female co-stars remember him so fondly, and with relief. When Moore shows emotion, it’s usually at inconvenience. He’s less like 007, the man who fits in everywhere, and more like an angry tourist.
Some movies rape childhoods, some movies ruin beaches: this one did both. Scaramanga’s HQ — a virgin location near Phuket, since rebranded as ‘James Bond Island’ — has been fairly done in by tourists.
The risque gives way to raunchiness here; elsewhere, porn was getting chic. The British pop singer Lulu hits the lines in the title song — “He has a powerful weapon…He comes just before the kill” — so hard that there’s no room for a double entendre. The jest about Phuyuck wine is in this film, and the butt-joke is at its peak. One scene commences with a dancer’s ass at the camera, at the “Bottoms Up” strip club in HK. Later, Ekland’s Goodnight butt-starts a death ray’s console.
Grimmest of all, the return of Clifton James’ C. W. Pepper, ugliest of ugly Americans, chewing his terbacky. What is this Louisiana yokel doing in Thailand? Why does he have to be in the passenger seat of an AMC Hornet during stunt driver Loren Willard’s sensational corkscrew leap across an intimidatingly wide river?
There’s a lot for Bond to see, though. The 1970s Bangkok and Hong Kong footage is evocative. Production designers Peters Lamont and Burton wrought a particularly impressive set, a temporary MI-6 Hong Kong HQ inside the Queen Elizabeth, half-sunk on its side and rusting in Hong Kong harbor. Everything inside is at an 15 degree German Expressionist angle.
The since demised Dragon’s Inn locations in Hong Kong are authentically sinister. There Nick Nack conceals himself as a masked polychrome statue among the half-sized Chinese opera plaster warriors. Two unusual airplanes stir the fading interest, a flying Ford Pinto with jet engine and a Republic RC-3 Seabee. The latter is actually real, a sort of airborne Volkswagen Beetle still flying in some archipelagos.
With every bit of conviction he could muster as an actor, Christopher Lee delivers a speech about the day he realized that he loved killing people. Lee was a WWII commando and may or may not have taken lives for his country — suave and hammy devil that he was, he certainly knew how to keep that an open question.
One wishes there’s been more spice to his and Bond’s collegiality. Before their duel, Scaramanga wanted to have lunch and talk about their murderous trade. Of course Bond can’t countenance such a thing. Moore never looked more like a disapproving schoolmaster when he shuts that door of inquiry.
Yet Lee keeps the dynamics clubby. Note Scaramanga’s modest disinterest in all the high tech stuff that has been installed on his premises by unnamed foreign powers, likely the Chinese. He lets Bond describe what it is they’re looking at, demurring politely to Bond’s technical expertise. Things stay cordial. Scaramanga jots down a wine recommendation when 007 makes one.
*Villechaize preferred this term to the more common ‘proportionate dwarfism’.
The Spy Who Loved Me
(1977) In Moore’s favorite outing as Bond, he had poise, mild manners, and a trustworthy and alert chin. He looked very spruce in black and navy blue, as opposed to the powder-blue tuxedos, pastel ski suits and (occasional) clown outfits he sometimes wore while defending the world.
There’s something fishy about Stromberg (Curt Jurgens) a shipping magnate who lives in what looks like an amphibian version of the theme building at LAX. A Roman emperor type with watery blue eyes, he swans around in kaftans guiding his empire of supertankers. Stromberg has just purchased a method to trace the atomic submarines of the UK and the USSR. The disappearances of a pair of pigboats are investigated by the Soviet agent Anya Amasova, agent XXX (Barbara Bach) who teams with 007 as a joint powers operation. “Rival companies” is Bond’s soft-on-Communism description. In a subplot eventually kidded aside, Anya plans to kill Bond after the mission is over, in revenge for the way he shot her hairy-shouldered KGB boyfriend. Stuntman Rick Sylvester’s boggling ski-jump stunt off of Mount Asgard on Baffin Island capped this story in the pretitles.
Claude Renoir’s photography is worthy of his famous name, in views of Sardinia and Egypt during a son et lumiere show at the Pyramids. There we see a two-shot of a pair of monstrous heads: the Sphinx and the massive skull of Richard Kiel. Kiel, two inches taller than the much-vaunted Andre the Giant, was a favorite of the kids; going from midgets to giants, the mid 1970s Bonds continued to turn into circuses.
While the Moore Bonds after this point tended to be a fondue pot in which the cheese bubbled away, Spy was made in an era where at least you were allowed to look at the craftsmanship. Ken Adam’s stainless-steel cavern this time was the center of a vast $3 million set. The supertanker Liparus is a 63-foot long “miniature.”
It’s You Only Live Twice done over, without the power of John Barry soundtrack music. Barry had sometimes mixed feelings about his scores — ”million dollar Mickey Mouse music,” he complained once. As Barry was the son of a theater organist, he was using that slang for the old practice of thumping out repetitive melodrama-heightening crescendos — ”Mickey-mousing it.” Barry is missed here. Carly Simon’s theme song was used for a chain of supermarkets in America, which says it all. When composer Marvin Hamlisch’s chorus reprises “Nobody Does it Better,” one imagine not tuxes and evening gowns, but straw hats and sleeve garters.
Steven Spielberg had been a proposed director for this one; Spy seemed to have the vice of Spielberg movies as identified by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum — films that are like Chicken McNuggets, morsels without any organic connection between them. Spy opened on my 19th birthday, and watching it made me think I’d outgrown the Bond movies…enough so that I didn’t show up for the next episode.
Moonraker
(1979) Roger Moore hooked the younger kids during the dismal 1970s when older people were too mature or too depressed for paperback heroes. Moore was a gent, a good family man, a UNICEF ambassador. His English phlegm enforced an Agatha Christie creed of the Bond films: the violence shouldn’t hurt too much. (In Murder on the Orient Express, the victim was politely anesthetized first.) In 007’s case here, he does the job with a wristwatch-triggered curare dart.
No pussyfooting: this is the worst. It is the South Pole, the Marianas Trench. The series could only rise from this low point. I recall the bleak feeling of seeing a poster for it, when I was walking late at night in the fog in Santa Cruz. There was Roger Moore in an aluminum foil-colored space suit brandishing a pistol. It was a reminder of my personal brand of puerility, of foolish things that I, as a mature and fully-grown college student, should have left behind. I was certain that this was it for me and these crappy movies. I’d gotten this ridiculous secret agent bushwa out of my system for once and for all.
This was in the days before we properly understood the power of retroviruses.
I finally saw it on tv ten years later, over the howling objections of two stoned female friends who ordered me to change the channel. The first impression were correct. The locations were sumptuous, if profaned by the DOA script. Richard Kiel and his steel teeth were, sadly, back. A fight aboard the cable car to Rio’s Sugarloaf Mountain has excellent rear projection, though Blu-Ray exposes that illusion today. There are not one, but two, boring boat chases. Moonraker sports a particularly clumsy fight between Bond and a person in a Kendo outfit. The battlers destroy an entire room full of Venetian glass artifacts. It looks wanton instead of anarchic. The climactic battle of astronauts zapping each is an underpowered finale. And it turns out that in space, you can hear a Wilhelm Scream.
Still, John Barry’s music does a startling amount of heavy lifting, particularly in the outer space scenes. Shirley Bassey’s vocals on the string-heavy title song has affecting gravitas, considering that she’s serenading the silhouettes of trampolining topless chicks. The title, meaning ‘a pirate,’ is as elegant as the film is tatty.
Michael Lonsdale, looking like a cross between Hitler and Stalin, has the most drastic plan of any Bond villain ever. He plans to turn the world over to a new breed of apparently speechless Eloi. His spaceport/Mayan ruin HQ demonstrates the underachievement of so many casino architects.
And for another view: Tom Allen’s Village Voice review, calling this lox “impudent, wry and exhilarating…the most expensive avant-garde movie since Barry Lyndon”. He cited its cousinly relation to the animation of Tex Avery — perhaps it was the classical music cues that Moonraker picks up, like the kind Carl Stalling always used in Warner Brothers animation. Here is that cartoon favorite, Strauss’ “Tish-Tash Polka” when Bond is puttering around in the Venetian canals in what, I’m sorry to say, was nicknamed the ‘Bondola.’
Allen’s citation of Avery isn’t a bad call — in “Bad Luck Blackie” (1949) the animator Avery figured out that if you dropped a battleship out of the sky fast enough, no one would question where it came from. And it seems Averian when Bond is aboard a space station and sees a sign on the door reading “Normal Gravity Zone.”
The question of how well known Werner von Braun was in April 1955 is outside the scope of whatever it is that I’m trying to do here. I was given the middle name ‘von’ with a little ‘v’ by my whimsical parents for two reasons. One was that there was a castle in Konigsburg that my great-great aunt grew up in, though it was bombed to aquarium gravel in the Big War. (And it wouldn’t have been mine, even if the Communists hadn’t taken over. Henry V tipped me off that no females inherit in Salic land.)
The other reason: they didn’t want me to forget the story of how the Americans rehabbed a German war criminal, in the name of a space race.
It might be fun to imagine Fleming’s rocketeer villain Sir Hugo Drax, in the quite good novel Moonraker, as a von Braun surrogate. It wasn’t quite too late for disfigured vengeful Nazis in ’79. In this era the films were at the apogee of their orbits around the Fleming novels. And as always, what ruined the series in the 1970s were the efforts to play catch up: first with Jaws, then with Star Wars.
For Your Eyes Only
(1981) An honorable last ditch attempt to take things seriously during the Moore years, which I duly overpraised in the Daily Californian. A British spy ship bumbles into a WWII mine and sinks into the Ionian sea. It takes to the deeps an ATAC system. This valuable gadget, which looks exactly like a Texas Instruments desk calculator, can override commands to nuclear submarines. A Greek-English couple of agents try to get the ATAC back for the British, but they’re strafed by a plane. The killing happens on front of their daughter Melina (the ravishing yet stolid Carol Bouquet). She and Bond head to Spain and Cortina to find the culprits. In the mountains, 007 has the entire winter Olympics thrown at him. After a fist-fight on a ski jump, he skis down a bobsled run — a harrowing stunt — and eventually makes a trio of murderous hockey players eat a Zamboni.
Somewhere in there is a quick tryst with Lisl, an alleged countess. She’s played by Cassandra Harris, a sort of British Stephane Audran. Harris was married in real life to Pierce Brosnan, though she perished young of ovarian cancer. Lisl does something realistic here, brushing Bond off after a night together, rather than facing him over the breakfast table. “When you’re ready to leave, you can take my car,” she hints.
Similarly, there’s an about-damn-time moment: Bond dissuades a too-young ice skater (Ice Castle’s Lynn-Holly Johnson) from, as Philip Marlowe put it, trying to climb into his lap when he’s standing up.
The impressively edited commando film would be remembered as fondly as Where Eagles Dare or Guns of Navarone on the basis of the finale alone, a nerve-racking rock climbing scene at the spire of Mt. Athos. Bond gets assists from the agreeably menschy smuggler Topol (of Fiddler on the Roof) who show us how to detect an intruder using empty pistachio shells. In the car chase, Bond commandeers an ‘iron snail,’ a Citroen 2CV, tumbling down a terraced hill full of trees netted to catch chestnuts.
Moore displays maturity and wariness here. These qualities are a bore and a deal breaker for those who preferred egregious quips and pigeons doing double takes. Despite the Russian scheming, Bond is once again a force of Cold War disarmament. And the Tories get it in the end, with a nice serve up of a simpering Margaret Thatcher (Janet Brown) being sweet talked not by Bond, but by Chrome, a talking blue and gold macaw who has 007’s two-way wrist radio in his metal feeding bowl.
Chrome was formerly the companion bird of Dame Diana Rigg, and gets a later role in The Living Daylights. This parrot’s reprise is as good a way as any to note the phenomena of the Bond repertory cast and crew. They came back again and again, no matter how ravaged by age, booze or molting. Note that Nadja Regin is both the Turkish afternoon-delight on Kerim’s divan in From Russia With Love and the cantina dancer whose brown eyes reflect the approach of an assassin in the pretitles of Goldfinger.
The name Sheena Easton may make a British person wince, but the dentist office theme song has a soothing life-aquatic vibe. Bill Conti’s score keeps things from being too exciting. The understated title tune makes up for a painful pre-title sequence, with a wheelchair-bound Blofeld is dropped down a smokestack after much cackling and grim puns: “I trust you had a pleasant fright.” It was meant to remind audiences of the downbeat ending of OHMSS; instead it was more of a laugh for the producers’ lawyers.
Octopussy
(1983) It was released the same year as the uncanonical Thunderball retread Never Say Never Again — not having Connery, they tried harder. I’ve been soft on this entertainment ever since its opening day. It’s made with brio, and it has a tiger, and a rogue atom bomb. It tips off its confidence early on with a kit-built BD-SJ ‘Aerostar’ — for 25 years the world’s smallest jet, weighing less than 500 lbs — emerging from its place of concealment in the ass of a mechanical racehorse.
All this is a prelude to a suicidal stunt flying through an aircraft hangar where the door is slowly closing. James Bond: The Legacy by John Cork and Bruce Sciavally quotes pilot J. W. ‘Corkey’ Fornof: “As big as a space looks on the ground, it’s a lot smaller when you’re moving at 150 knots.”
The script was co-written by the author of the Flashman chronicles, George MacDonald Fraser, which explains the dashing spirit of the film…dubious as it is for tough-Bond lovers. Frasier’s book about his screenwriting days, The Light’s On at Signpost, has a chapter titled “You Want to Put James Bond in a Gorilla Suit?” They did, but it’s justified when Gorilla Bond checks his watch to synchronize it with the countdown of an atomic bomb.
Dressed as a clown, 009 crashes through the glass door of the British embassy in East Berlin, a throwing knife in his back. He spills a Faberge egg from his hand as he dies. Meanwhile in Moscow, evil bald Communist General Orlov (Steven Berkoff) is ready to start something with NATO: “The west is decadent and divided!” he shouts.
The Soviet Politburo, led by series regular General Gogol, are aghast at this warmongering. ”World socialism will be achieved peaceably!” Gogol cries — now, goddamnit, that was a line you would hear nowhere else in the popular cinema of the 1980s.
Like Oliver North, the snarling Orlov continues his efforts sub rosa, raising money by selling Russian artifacts to a smuggling ring. His criminal connections are exiled Afghani royal wastrel Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan) and his female associate Octopussy (Maud Adams). She’s an international gang leader who runs a circus as cover for her operation. She’s also the guru for one of those octopi-worshipping cults that they apparently have in India
Following Khan, Bond flies to the subcontinent to patronize Hindus — ”this will keep you in curry for a while!” says James, loading an assistant (Vijay Amitraj) with a wad of rupees. Fortunately, Khan has a very large hench, a Sikh called Gobinda (Kabir Bedi — ”glowering like a Turk at a christening,” as Fraser wrote elsewhere). Gobinda avenges the ethnic slur in a fight on the back of an airborne plane.
When Jourdan and Bond get into the traditional high-stakes gambling game, this time over a backgammon board, we’re watching a couple of performers who learned their styles during the glory days at MGM. When they’re together, it’s like watching a good bad movie made in the 1940s. The beats are all hit with Gene Krupa precision.
Gobinda enters and announces “The Englishman has escaped!”
Even Moore’s quips detonate, for a change.
“You have a nasty habit of surviving,” Khan chides.
“Well, you know what they say about the fittest.”
Pauline Kael, who liked Octopussy fine, identified the central problem. The sinister lady of mystery starts fierce, swanning around in a satin kimono with an octopus on the back. But she rolls over fast. The film’s genteel theme “All Time High” by Rita Coolidge — the most muted in the 007 series — heralds a love scene between Bond and Octopussy that’s as mature and dignified as a married couple’s 40th anniversary coupling.
Octopussy is all over the map like India, which is used for nail-beds and fakirs and ivory palaces and elephants and blunderbusses. Kristina Wayborn’s female hench Magda makes a most lyrical escape by tying one end of her sari to a window railing and unspooling her way sideways to the ground. Everything here is far more fun than the Indianosities in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which came out later.
The preposterousness is charged up in a way the Moore Bonds usually aren’t. Even if Bond ends up dressed like an ape and a clown, this is Moore’s best. John Barry’s score has wheeling violins that sound like Jerome Moross’ soundtrack for “The Big Country.” The numerous death traps are fresh. They include a flying guillotine razor yoyo, and a deadly venomous octopus that sounds like bullshit when you hear about it. Then you go to Australia and find out otherwise.
A View to a Kill
(1985) Except for that time that George Lazenby was behind the table at a fan convention, Roger Moore was the only James Bond actor I saw in the flesh. He and Grace Jones were scurrying out of the San Francisco City Hall after doing locations work in San Francisco. They were in a hurry to pop into their limo, as well they might have been. It was of dubious sensitivity to stage the assassination of a fictional San Francisco mayor right in the building where just such an event had happened eight years previously.
The sleek Jones is an assassin working for Christopher Walken, a titan in the the silicon chip industry. His scheme is to wobble the San Andreas Fault and destroy the Bay Area.
See the rule in Live and Let Die about how the good/bad coordinates change. This constant disappointment has expensive SF and Parisian scenes, plus some business at the Ascot races providing upper-clash starch. At this point, a 67 year old Moore might has well have been Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun series.
It’s absolutely hopeless, and I can’t say too little about this film. One moment honors the Keaton side of the Bond saga. Clinging to a rope hanging from the nose of a dirigible, 007 pulls himself up to make sure he doesn’t get the point of the Transamerica Pyramid right in the plums.
The Living Daylights
(1987) The peremptory and vaguely Welsh Timothy Dalton brings a welcome impatience to the role of a man who drives a sports car that has a laser gun in its hubcaps. Starting off true to the story from Fleming’s collection A View to a Kill, it veers away as Bond helps a defecting Soviet general (Jeroen Krabbe) whose girlfriend Kara (Olivia d’Abo) is a Soviet sniper posing as a concert cellist.
And yet The Living Daylights opposes the ramped up Cold War politics of the Reagan era. What appears to be a revived version of SMERSH, the Beria-era Soviet spyhunting program, is killing western agents. Everyone insists Bond should take this as a renewed Soviet threat. Our long-time detenteist susses out a double-cross. He is Bond, and therefore right.
Per the Yeats, one loves D’Abo for her yellow hair rather than herself. Her Kara has elements of feist, as when she chases after Bond on horseback and ends up as the proverbial stewardess who has to fly the plane. Dalton’s 007 is distracted from piloting by a really superb fight scene with Andreas Wisniewski, in a net flapping out of the back of a cargo plane, in which is tangled a ticking time bomb.
Living Daylights amps up the romance by having Bond and D’Abo at the Wiener Prater in Vienna, riding the bumper cars and the roller coaster. This may be too sweet. They were trying to roll this new 007 in the spoor of The Third Man, referred to in both the famous ferris wheel and a weird balloon salesman lurking about at its foot.
Dalton, who’d been Heathcliffe once, oscillated between the lethal and moist-eyed sides of Bond. Desmond Llewellyn, who played Q, said that Dalton was the one who most resembled the Bond of the books. He may not have been wrong.
Gogol’s grandfatherly presence at the end of the picture may too thick for people who endured living in the Soviet Union or its satellites. And incidentally, until Casino Royale, this as close as Bond came to the war on terror. Bond is in Afghanistan giving some covert help to the mujahideen. This is an object lesson on why it was a good thing to keep 007 as far away as possible from the tarpit of the Forever War. (It was always my bad-taste hope that someday Blofeld would make an offhand remark, dismissing Osama Bin-Laden slightingly, as a minor former employee who had gone too far.) John Barry’s last soundtrack is perhaps livelier than the movie. And, in honor of Vienna, there’s a lilting waltz performed by The Pretenders.
License to Kill
(1989) About 25 years ago I went with my pal Mike Monahan to a Bond convention. As we entered the lobby of the LAX-area business class hotel where it was held, we heard some talented fan playing “Capsule in Space” from You Only Live Twice on a grand piano. I was enraptured. I stood in a reception line to thank George Lazenby and Peter Hunt for their service.
I admired the props on display, the cars and the weapons. One exhibit was a drawer full of plastic maggots. License to Kill had a fight scene at a Florida bait shop, and Timothy Dalton’s Bond shoved a dead hench into a drawer full of them. And as I saw these fake maggots, I realized that, even though I was not a Star Wars maniac or the kind of person who’d pay beaucoup bucks to grip ’n’ grin with a retired football player, I was a fish too. I just didn’t bite at everything. The bait had to be plastic maggots.
It could have been worse. They could have exhibited the expanding rubber head of Anthony Zerbe. I’d rather not explain that remark to someone who didn’t see this movie.
The series that had once defined cool was playing catch-up again, chasing after a brace of tv hotshots called Crockett and Tubbs. Miami Vice had debuted 5 years previously. Until Casino Royale, this was the most violent episode. Despite the epic stunt work here, with Bond being dragged by tanker trucks and a seaplane, it misses the weightless violence of its forebears. It’s suffused with the end of the 1980s malaise, wracked with the punitiveness of the action films of that era. It’s post-Rambo Bond. It’s a Bond movie I hadn’t rewatched much over the years on grounds that it doesn’t seem like a Bond film.
007’s quarry is the international drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) who messed up both the pesky CIA agent Felix Leiter (a grey David Hedison, returned from Live and Let Die) and his bride Delia (Priscilla Barnes). Called off the case, Bond jumps the service, tending his resignation by kicking Robert Brown’s M in the stomach. The assault takes place on the balcony of Hemingway’s house in Key West. Talk about returning to the roots of this kind of adventure. Off to ‘Isthmus City’ (Panama) where 007 poses as a gun for hire to follow his blood-soaked trail of vengeance.
The loose cannonism doesn’t prevent Llewellyn’s Q from turning up with his Rip Taylor’s Prop Comedy of Death shtick, to remind us this is a Bond picture. No Pinewood studios, so no impressive villain’s lair; here instead is Otomi tribe cultural center near Toluca, Mexico, built in speculative homage to their pre-Columbian culture. And there’s also nothing really world-shaking here beside the threat of the use of some stinger missiles, allegedly bought from Nicaraguan contras to use against a civilian plane.
Mitigating factors include a young Benicio del Toro as the main hench, who comes quite close to killing 007. And the pretitle’s business of lassoing a private plane in mid air would be restaged by Christopher Nolan in the opening of The Dark Knight Rises. The effect here is diminished by the dove-grey wedding regalia Bond is wearing during the lassoing, making him look like a male bridesmaid.
Two quite beautiful but inert female leads; Cary Lowell giving a plausible impression of strength as a former Army pilot who throws in her lot with 007, only to be scowled at and grabbed a bit. Talisa Soto looks splendid in crimson cocktail gowns as the unhappy and battered lover of Sanchez, who seems to be sweeter on his pet iguana than he is on her.
For those whose lives are rocked by truck stunts, there’s a brutally difficult sequence of pre-CG mortal danger with a quartet of gasoline trucks on winding Mexican roads. Our hero drives a tanker on 9 wheels and pops a wheelie, inducing all suitable and customary explosions. At the time, it was reported that the crew saw a perfectly formed celestial hand with fingers in the smoke left from one giant fireball. The locals had told them this particular stretch of road was hoodooed.
Goldeneye
(1995) Commentators wrung their hands about how Bond should retire, now that the Berlin Wall was down — missing the point that he didn’t really fight Russians in the movies. But this first 007 film in 6 years had Bond in Russia — first, infiltrating a secret base during the Communist era, and then, years later, returning to the modern kleptocracy. The alert if sometimes facile Pierce Brosnan, debuting, held steady between the Moore and Connery points of the compass. He has a spectacular introduction in the pre-titles, a bungee dive along the face of the Contra dam in Switzerland. The leap is a heart-stopper. It’s hard to imagine a scene that would have done a better job of saying, “He’s back.”
It was the first of two times that Martin Campbell was going to do over Bond, as a loving renovation job instead of a demolition. This capable director wasn’t a young man when he made this, and he had old fashioned tastes for swashbuckling and chivalry, as well as action movie alarums and excursions.
Campbell understood that the real problem isn’t how 007 functions without an evil empire to fight. It’s how he exists without seeming to be a relic of the 1960s.
Campbell brought 007 up to date by making this story a contrast between Bond and his double. Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), formerly 006, is Bond gone bad. If Bond is a seducer, Alec is a grabber. “James and I shared everything,” he says, planting an unwanted kiss on the captive heroine Natalya (Izabella Scorupco)
The troubling aspects of the character are redone — for example, the standard flirtation with Moneypenny. In late period Roger Moore films, it was getting sad. The implication that there could be no other man for Moneypenny but Bond kept getting more depressing as Moore and Lois Maxwell aged. When the flirtation began in the 1960s it was light and literate — Connery’s Bond quoting Henry V, and asking his boss’s secretary if she’d ever seen the moon along the Bosphorus. Toward the end in the Moore films, it was starting to look like something out of Terence Rattigan — quiet desperation. Samantha Bond, the new Moneypenny, parries 007’s out of date “What would I ever do without out you…” very well. This, right before Bond gets a coldly-offered drink and a calling on the carpet by Judi Dench’s no-nonsense M.
Thieves steal an EMP-proof helicopter right off the deck of a battleship in Monaco. The night before the crime, Bond matched wits at the Monte Carlo card table with a Natasha Fatale-accented Russian called Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen). Janssen plays this role with vigor. Her characters’ taste for mayhem is so great, she even gets a gleam in her eye when she realizes that she’s about to be hit head-on in a train derailment. Onatopp is connected with the mysterious Janus crime syndicate out of St. Petersburg, which plots to hack into some old Soviet hardware in Earth’s orbit.
As a Russian military analyst who survived what was supposed to be a massacre, Scorupco is one of the most neglected of ‘Bond girls’. She’s impatient, smart and absolutely not there to be a pretty body. And her bathing suit scene is edited to have as little reveal as possible. Natalya saves Bond more than once, and she has a heated argument with him about his glibness, about his ‘boys with toys’ methods:
“It’s what keeps me alive,” Bond says, unconvincingly.
“No, it’s what keeps you alone.”
The Keaton moment in Goldeneye has 007 chasing the kidnapped Natalya through Russia’s St. Petersburg, in a strangely agile tank (it does donuts). The tank is topped, after a collision, with a charging equestrian statue. Natalya’s captor is one General Ourumov, played by Gottfried John, a regular in Fassbinder’s movies. To double-down on the Keatonisms, John even looks like the peculiar Snitz Edwards, Keaton’s co-star in Seven Chances.
Along for the ride is a Russian gangster named Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane), the cozy-bear post Communist entrepreneur of the sort people supposed were keeping the newly free nation in good entrepreneurial hands. Coltrane gives Goldeneye some buoyancy during a scene of a gauche floor show in his nightclub, with a cameoing Minnie Driver slaughtering “Stand By Your Man”. Alan Cummings, later to go on to greater things, is annoying as the computer expert Boris, a hacker of the dial-up modem internet hacking days. His infantile harassment of Natalya gives us another reminder that the makers of the Bond films had learned that sexism was bad and they were very sorry about it.
I used to be thrown out of the mood by the American Marine intelligencer Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker) coming in to give Bond some covert aid. These days, I appreciate Baker’s out of bounds acting. When Baker is in Tomorrow Never Dies, he gives Bond in his Naval uniform a surreptitious, admiring once-over twice. Here Wade is at the film’s finale at a secret Cuban base. It’s set at the mile-wide SETI satellite dish at Arecibo, matching the giganticism of the dam in the pretitles. Before he heads off, Wade looks around at the island seascapes and sighs with satisfaction, “Banyan trees!”
Eric Serra’s electronic sighs and thunks on the soundtrack is a career worst for the series; a modernization that could have been done without, and eventually was. That situation got fixed with David Arnold’s score in the subsequent…
Tomorrow Never Dies
(1997) The best of the Brosnan Bonds by a considerable stretch; it’s 2 hours long and as lean as a $25 pastrami sandwich. Today, it seems like a relic of short-lived Age of Good Feeling. Looking back, it was almost possible to believe the fatuous New York Times prognosticators who were claiming that history had ended with the fall of the Berlin wall. Now all we had to do was to keep our Lexuses from crashing into the olive trees. The 1990s weren’t angst-free, but the real calamities that followed it tinted those days rose-colored. First 9/11 and the overreaction thereof. Then a hair-blanching recession. And then, the majority-defying election of a president with the wits, temper, and dull pink eyes of a Hereford steer.
Let us, then, return to the thrills of yesteryear. Bond and a Chinese secret agent named Wai Lin (played by Michelle Yeoh) are investigating a crazed millionaire called Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), a figure who is both Rupert Murdoch and a turtlenecked Steve Jobs. His tabloid Tomorrow is everywhere and skyscraper-sized billboards reflect his cult of personality.
The rousing opening is on a snowy mountaintop landing strip in Asia; in a war room, a joint Russian/British military action surveilles a terrorist swap meet. Things go south after Judi Dench’s M glimpses a stolen nuke on the premise, noticed the instant right after a Royal Navy admiral had ordered a missile strike. The Russian officer gasps: “There’s enough plutonium there to make Chernobyl look like picnic!”: precisely the line what you want to hear at such a time and in such a movie. And the missile’s abort button is broken.
The lavish appetizer has a purpose. It justifies Bond as a figure of relevance, a human failsafe, a detective smarter than a missile and yet able to cause as much ruckus. The scene also introduces the lurking-about assistant villain, a Berkleyite who’d gone from radical to anarchist. Wearing an astrakhan and calling himself Gupta, Ricky Jay poses quietly, colorlessly and plausibly Hindu. Jay brings as much here as he did to David Mamet’s films. The Bond formula is that the villain has two key henches, one a wonk, one a lunk; too bad the muscle, Mr Stamper (6’6” Gotz Otto), all bulk and no mystery, isn’t up to Jay’s standards.
After the titles, the movie gets busy with a border incident. The HMS Devonshire, misled by a tampered-with GPS system, strays into Chinese waters. The pilots of a pair of People’s Liberation Amy Air Force MIGs order them into the nearest port. Meanwhile a nearby radar-proof boat (another of John Richardson’s fine miniatures) unleashes an iron-lamprey torpedo that guts the Devonshire. The sinking ship’s survivors are perforated with Chinese bullets by the stealth boat’s crew; then they down the MIGs with missiles. War is imminent, and 007 gets 48 hours to stop it.
Brosnan is light footed and funny, but he displays both fury and weariness convincingly. He’s able to mourn for others and — after a bad beating by a group of men in tuxes — even to mourn a little bit for himself, drinking Smirnoff’s out of the bottle in a hotel room. The business with Carver’s wife is the kind of thing Bond did for decades, a sort of seduce and destroy mission. One would never describe Teri Hatcher, the actress playing Paris Carver, as Marlene Dietrich. But Hatcher shows how far an actor can get by being shaped like a screen legend; she has Dietrich’s heavy lidded eyes, and a black feather-epauletted gown. There’s a credible aura of doom to her. Plus she’s the only woman who ever greeted James Bond the way he probably deserves to be greeted: with a giant slap to the face.
The fun rarely stops in this sleeker, faster answer to Thunderball, with the lobster-faced Vincent Schiavelli’s endearing bad German accent in the doctor who has ways to make people talk, as well as a stunning five mile high altitude/ low opening (HALO) jump to the wreck of the Devonshire.
For once the series’ international cool-hunting paid off, as they appropriated Yeoh, one of the fiercest of Hong Kong cinema’s women warriors. A motorcycle chase surpasses even her scenes in Police Story III. Director Roger Spottiswoode conducts a pursuit across rooftops and through houses, along the top of a collapsing arcade, and finally into a sort of chicken run against the blades of a helicopter.
K.D. Lang’s rousing title theme — one of the series’ best — was inexplicably switched to the end titles, in favor of a boring ballad by Sheryl Crow. Daniel Klienman’s title animation was quite futuristic in its day, with printed circuit boards stirring, waking and turning into the figures of women. A diamond necklace on a model’s neck flies apart, morphing into a circle of satellites orbiting the Earth.
The World is Not Enough
(1999) There were better and worse episodes, but this is the single most frustrating James Bond film. It was the last one of the century, and the last one before 9/11, before Americans learned personally the real-life after-effect of covert government scheming. And yet this schizoid effort was just a few rewrites away from being at the top of the series. It had been 30 years since OHMSS came out, and Albert Broccoli’s death was memorialized on the end titles of Tomorrow Never Dies. Clearly, there was an attempt here to reach for the spirit of OHMSS by having a wounded Bond fascinated by a self-destructive heiress.
Without getting entertainment-journalism maudlin, let’s note that Brosnan had his share of personal tragedy. He tries his best to feel it in The World is Not Enough. During a moment of trouble with the romantic antagonist Electra King (Sophie Marceau) in bed, Brosnan was right at the limits of his acting ability, which is exactly where the really interesting work occurs.
The director was the late Michael Apted — probably a good pick to handle this long-lived series, given the way he spent a half century of his career watching the British age on camera, in the 7 Up series. Apted described his intention “to wrongfoot Bond and the audience.”
After yet another boat chase with a lot of wanton destruction in London’s Docklands, Bond gets a dislocated collarbone caused by a fall from a hot air balloon. (It’s a nod toward realism; a more serious version of what happened after Jaws fell on a tent in the pretitle of Moonraker.)
The injury is compounded by a serious error on Bond’s part. He escorted a pile of cash into MI-6’s HQ that turned out to be soaked in explosives; the blast kills a personal friend of M’s, Sir Robert King (David Calder). Bond shadows King’s daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau) who is still suffering the after effects of a kidnapping ordeal years before. She was maimed just like John Paul Getty III was in real life.
The film’s backstory has it that M didn’t advise paying Elektra’s ransom, even though Elektra was a family friend.
Apted makes use of Hitchcock Fork: Bond’s Vertigo-like emotional indecision between his maternal employer M, and this dangerous but alluring Elektra. Trying to cope with Elektra as both a lover and object of surveillance, Bond gets close to a breakdown. The action shifts from one Central Asian oilpatch to another, along with Bond’s newest car (the car is on autopilot, like some of this film). Later there’s a mountain attack scene with parahawks. Vehicles lacking in menace, they resemble rider lawnmowers taking a skydiving lesson. And it’s all there mostly there just to recall the classic skiing scene in OHMSS.
Perhaps the most crazily emotional scene in the nigh-60 year old series has Bond researching the case, poring over the kidnapped Elektra’s ransom video. She’s weeping, as she begs for help. Without thinking about it, Bond reaches his hand to the computer screen and tries to brush her tears away with his fingers.
Why doesn’t this work? It’s the usual identity crisis that struck Bond now and again. The weltschmerz and melancholy of the international killer didn’t elude Brosnan. Since he left the series, Brosnan excelled in anti-Bond roles, as a sleazy but charming hit man in Matador, as an all-but-cashiered secret service wastrel in The Tailor of Panama, and as a straight-up, remorseless killer in The November Man. Brosnan has since, in a 2014 interview, said that he feels he was never good enough as Bond in his four movies, and that he can’t bear watching himself as the character. But his alertness, elegance, whimsy and gift for sotto-voce asides deserves praise. His underplaying has merit. At his best, Brosnan is the too-handsome man whose feelings and intelligence you underestimate.
I can’t praise the undersized villain Robbie Carlyle here, Renard, with a glazed eye and a shaved head and a leather outfit that just makes him look smaller. The story is that his Renyard caught a bullet to the head that deadened his senses, making him unable to feel pleasure or pain. It will eventually kill him, but on the way out of life he’ll keep getting stronger. Isn’t exactly how it works with, say, Hansen’s Disease, yet the backstory was swiped for the unstoppable Ronald Niedermann in the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series. Carlyle is supposed to look like Donald Pleasance in You Only Live Twice a bit, though he’s also has disciples who treat him as a magus, all of them hanging out at a cave set called “The Devil’s Breath” which is based on the far more impressive Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmenistan.
Renard embodies the anhedonia that comes from a killer’s life. The real difference between him and James Bond is that the latter can still feel pleasure and pain.
During Elektra’s writhing sex scene with Renard — and I was so very glad I wasn’t escorting kids to this movie — he displays a deep sort of impotence that goes beyond the kind Viagra can cure.
Sophie Marceau is avid for the part, especially when she has Bond tied up to an Ottoman garotte. (Brosnan later said that this was the one 007 prop he really wanted to own; perhaps evidence that he had been trying his hardest as an actor in this film.) The garotte scene has the kind of malevolence that doesn’t usually make it into a glossy movie. The business thrills Marceau like playing a witch in a fairy tale. She has a great bright grin of evil. It’s something the Bonds should have done more, giving a woman a chance to go as megalomaniac as the men. There’s even a shocking Naked Lunch jest when she climbs aboard the strapped-up, choked-up Bond: “Do you know what happens when a man is strangled?”
The movie’s failure of nerves shows when it introduces the voluptuous but egregious Denise Richards as a standard issue Bond girl named Dr. Christmas Jones. One sample line: “The world’s greatest terrorist wandering around with six kilos of weapons-grade plutonium … it can’t be good.” It isn’t. Thanks to Richards, The World Is Not Enough disappointed some of its audience by being too stupid. Thanks to Sophie Marceau; TWINE disappointed others by being too smart.
Die Another Day
(2002) #20. The title is pinched from A. E. Housman: “the man that runs away/lives to die another day.” 007 tries to keep a step ahead of an age of technical wonders, and that means that this is the Bond movie with the holodeck and, worse, the infamous invisible car. Before you complain, we take you to Japan where, in 2003, Dr. Sasumu Tachi invented a coat that creates an illusion of invisibility, via a number of cameras that projects upon the front images taken from the back. (It’s a study for what the monster was wearing in the 2020 version of The Invisible Man.) If this coat is not an invisible car, it is a species of invisibility, and if anyone is going to have that technology first, it ought to be James Bond.
Brosnan is attractively dogged and grey around the temples, and is as honorable as a samurai in the beginning. He surfs into North Korea to intercept a general’s son who is trying to trade in ‘conflict diamonds’ (aka blood diamonds); after a hovercraft chase over a minefield, his quarry vanishes over a waterfall. 007 survives only to be caught and tossed into one of Chairman Kim’s prisons. General Moon (Kenneth Tsang), the noble old Communist patriot who arrests Bond, tells him “You took away my son.”
“Your firing squad should have done that for you.”
The titles are a Nine Inch Nails style video, sabotaged by Madonna’s temporary flirtation with electronica. Put on the earmuffs and note that here is something that, for a change, advances the plot. In Thunderball, there’s a typically ruthless Terence Young moment: Adolpho Celi’s Largo menaced the tied up heroine Domino with a bowl of ice cubes and a lit cigar — ”Theese for cold, theese for heat” — leaving us to imagine what would happen once the camera had cut away in understandable disgust. In Die Another Day’s titles, dancing fire and ice maidens indicate what goes on in the dungeon.
Bond endures 14 months and is traded for another spy. Looking hairier than Edmund Dantes sprung from Chateau d’If, he’s given a good dressing down by M. Clues take him from Hong Kong to the Caribbean. In Cuba, he encounters NSA agent Jacintha, called “Jinx” (Halle Berry, very much that year’s model). Meanwhile in London, a Richard Branson style zillionaire called Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens, Maggie Smith’s son) is working on a diamond-studded “Icarus satellite” able to keep the sun on all night. It’s a project he will launch at a junket at an Iceland ice palace.
The World Is Not Enough tried for doomed romance. Die Another Day goes cosmic, trying to mash every crazy moment from the series into an end of the century spectacle.
Allegedly there’s a reference to every single of the previous Bond films in this. At this point in the series, the tone was like steering an ocean liner — overcorrection happens between the comedy and the suspense.
But Lee Tamahori’s film was a hit, as surreal and fantastic as Goldfinger must have been on the day it opened. And it dealt with berserk science fiction in a secret Cuban “DNA-replacement therapy” clinic (the joke is that it was built there to keep Fidel Castro young.) The problem is that, once you’ve been agonizingly transformed under circumstances as awful as getting a bone-marrow transplant, you lose your ability to sleep. Rick Yune’s Zao, a hench who didn’t complete the regimen, is baby faced, with blue infant eyes to go with all his muscle. It is a new one: James Bond vs. Frankenstein.
Toby Stephens is an enjoyable Graves, snarling and wearing a tux with a wing collar like a capitalist on a Soviet propaganda poster. In the good old tradition of the Fleming villains, Graves is a wealthy showboater who can’t hide his psychopathic bad sportsmanship. Die Another Day includes a highlight of this series. Graves and 007 have a tremendous sword fight set at the Reform Club. It starts with buttoned fencing foils, masks and an electronic scoreboard; the battlers ditch these and pick up heftier blades as they duel. They smash a vitrine encasing a suit of armor in passing, and the fight ends in a neo-Gothic fountain. It’s like seeing 700 hundred years in the history of duelling, unfolded in reverse
The sturdy internationalism of this is refreshing after all the jingoism that fouled the air in the US after 9/11. In Die Another Day, we have the ancient gaff of the Oriental villain who went to Harvard. (It was Oxford in Lives of a Bengal Lancer; by the time Three Kings came out, the villain’s college had devolved into Michigan State.) Only the Bond films would have added the line “I majored in Western hypocrisy.” There’s always a sense of a larger picture in this large picture: a touch of John Le Carré in the way 007 is left in the cold by M.
The cutting is as relentless as the early digital effects are fail prone — the electroshock animation is particularly poor. And despite Halle Berry doing the Andress/Aphrodite rise from the sea, we never get a good long look at the female leads. The unsettlingly pretty Rosamund Pike, making her debut as an MI6 agent, went on to bigger things in Gone Girl. The movie never slows down to see her.
Brosnan has written this off as ridiculous, and everyone with a computer keyboard has deemed it one of the worst Bonds ever. Thus Scott Meslow in GQ: “007’s frothy world-serving antics had already been outmoded by spies like Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer, who occupied the murkier, more complicated global landscape viewers actually recognized.”
In fact, the follies of the War on Terror demonstrated how little anyone in the west recognized what was going on in the mid-east, and how badly aimed and futile the war was. Bond fans realize that outrageous ideas, such as the invisible car and the DNA replacement clinics, are elements that can’t be touched by red-eyed Jack Bauer and boring Jason Bourne.
Incidentally, a website called the James Bond Museum notes that James Bond 20 was titled “Death Can Wait” in Finland and Italy, “A New Day to Die” in Brazil, “Another Day to Die” in three other South American nations, “Death Comes Tomorrow” in Poland, “Don’t Die Today” in Czecia, and “Die, But Not Today” in Russia.
Casino Royale
(2006) If only all reboots were like Martin Campbell’s, here: a painstaking renovation job, not a demolition, taking care of the familar elements (David Arnold working as if straight from John Barry’s horn charts). It introduces Daniel Craig is as homely/handsome as Clark Gable, and very well built. When Craig, as manscaped as Brosnan was wooly, rises from the sea, he is his own Andress.
He’s bemusingly human too. And his debut was based with much faith on an enduring piece of pulp. 007 is overmatched in his attempt to break a Paul Manafort style money man at the gambling table. Le Chiffre (“the cypher”) is played by Mads Mikkeson, a Danish actor with the face of an angry monkfish. Aiding Bond is self-amused Vesper Lynd (the lynx-eyed Eva Green) a British government aid there to hold the money; she’s smart enough to recognize this scheme as a bad idea.
Which it is. It’s a terrible idea. When you have a degenerate gambler who is soon to be chastened by his moneylenders, why interfere with the inevitable trouble to come? Bond does, and gets caught.
Casino Royale goes without million-dollar pretitle. The animated title sequence has a deck of cards coming to malicious life — ”who cares for you, you’re all just a pack of cards” — this yields to a sensational parkour scene set in Madagascar, with Bond fighting a fleeing terrorist on top of a construction crane. It causes an international incident after 007 blows up the courtyard of an embassy — here Bond is most open to the charge of hunting poor people. This is the edge of the War on Terror, a place Bond shouldn’t be. His heedlessness results in yet another calling on the carpet by M that begins: “This may be too much for a blunt instrument to understand…”
When Bond chases a clue to the Bahamas, he’s on much safer ground, knocking a row of rich punters’ sports cars to cause a diversion. In this luxo world, he seduces a neglected wife, tracking her criminal husband to a Miami drop off, at one of those hideous plastinated Chinese corpse-art displays. The first such ever in USA was apparently in Tampa in 2005; by picking up on this, once again, the Bond films set a style instead of following one. Learning of a secret password “Ellipsis,” Bond stumbles into another solid sequence, intercepting a bomb aboard a jet-fuel tanker truck. It’s a pop-thriller expression of the post 9/11 fear people had of airports and planes; there’s drama in the jumbos booming toward the runway, the jet exhaust scattering police cars like fallen leaves.
The Miami airport scene is a robust action sequence, in what is elsewhere an romantic adventure movie. My friend Mike Monahan says that there’s a difference between adventures and action movies. One difference: in an adventure, the characters go out to dinner. The Bond films are related to film noir, with a love of old hotels and trains — Bond even travelled on tatty Amtrak for Live and Let Die. Vesper and James feel each other out on the way to Montenegro to the fateful casino. They trade some psychologizing. She judges him “a maladjusted young man” who finds women “disposable pleasures instead of meaningful pursuits”. One wishes scriptwriter Paul Haggis had gone easy on the Paddy Chayefsky.
The gruelling night-long sessions of Texas hold’em in Montenegro (played by Karlovy Vary, Czechia) are interrupted by assassination attempts. Certain he’s lost his quarry, Bond swipes a steak knife off a table, determined to go kill LeChiffre in the hallway. It goes back to where this series all started, with Sean Connery’s Bond being caught in the act of palming a butter knife off the fancy dinner table of Dr. No.
There is no substitute for a ball struck squarely and firmly, sang Billy Bragg. This film has everything that’s particularly exciting in Craig’s Bond. In action, he is as self-reflective as a big dog that just broke a chain. After the terrible ordeal he suffers at LeChiffre’s hands, he’s left in the hospital, where more than a couple of the Bond novels ended. But there’s an extra-innings session of pursuit into a Venetian building under reconstruction, floating on inflatable pontoons. And this time, unlike OHMSS, we had an audience ready for a downbeat ending, given a demonstration of why it’s never safe for a man in Bond’s profession to allow a lover to come too close.
Casino Royale is about the making of Bond, how he became what he is. In his hotel room, Craig strips off a bloody tuxedo shirt after a terrible mano-y-mano in a staircase. He looks with a battler’s satisfaction in the mirror. Never before in this mad series of films did we see the tension between what Bond is made to do, and the appetite he might have for what he does.
Quantum of Solace
(2008) The inexplicable title comes from a Somerset Maugham-like story Fleming from the collection A View to a Kill. Originally published in Cosmopolitan, it’s an uncharacteristic piece about a husband’s cruel yet non-violent revenge on his straying wife. Sometimes Fleming had ambitions to write women’s fiction — the odd novel The Spy Who Loved Me was written from what Fleming imagined was a lady’s perspective.
As for director Marc Forster’s film — Casino Royale II in all but title — it’s very unpopular, and suffers from writer’s-strike confusion. It’s better than you’ve heard. Bond heads to Italy and South America to track down the people responsible for the events in Casino Royale. It’s tragically edited by Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson (of The Bourne Supremacy) to look like a Jason Bourne movie. Still, there are sequences as bold as anything in the series, such as an upside-down fight in a clock tower in Siena. Another elegant passage: Bond staking out the stairwells and gantries of an Escher-like opera house in Austria where a group of villains are having a board meeting. Tonight is Tosca: a particularly grisly item “filled with horror, sadism, murder and suicide,” says Ewen’s New Encyclopedia of the Opera. Part of the decor is a giant Magritte eye filling the stage, icon of surveillance: that’s SPECTRE (as it of course is, though we don’t know yet), the eye that never sleeps.
Trying to track down the culprits who outwitted him, Bond meets Camille (Olga Kurylenko) a woman with her own reasons for revenge against a sadistic South American military officer. Here too is the standard person from the home office who gets in over their heads (Gemma Arterton as ‘Strawberry Fields’).
Undue haste shows up in more than just the action scenes. Surely a mad-scientist speech should be lingered over like a fine cigar. Mathieu Amalric’s Dominic Greene, the head villain, is the chair of something like the Nature Conservancy gone evil. He has the moist insinuation of the young Polanski as actor. One fun part looks almost improvised: furious at Bond’s refusal to die, Greene grabs a fire ax and charges, roaring, like a cat in a Warner Bros. cartoon.
Craig’s masculinity and speed is contrasted to the vulnerability of Judi Dench’s M., seen taking her makeup off with cold cream after the end of some 18-hour day. Forster doesn’t stint on the trauma of Bond, whom we see shaken and stirred during the course of a six-martini flight across the Atlantic. Giancarlo Giannini excels here repeating his part as Mathis from Casino Royale, demonstrating, as he did in the last picture, what Edmund Wilson called “Old Europe strutting its stuff.”
Onscreen are some of the usual opposites in a 007 film: the sea with the desert, sweet rich hotels with bad dark alleys. Forster, however, doesn’t get that all-important opposition of speed and leisure. Even the dolce vita scenes have a squirrel’s restlessness.
Skyfall
(2012) The most conservative of the series, and one of the most popular. Skyfall is the one where Bond played defense instead of offense, standing his ground and bunkering in England, rather than sojouring forth in a jet and blowing things up. It’s also the one with the displeasing revelation that Bond was not just a defiant plainclothes civil servant doing a hazardous job with perks, but actual landed gentry with some grouse-shooting acreage in Scotland. (He wasn’t poor in the books, but he didn’t have this kind of money.)
As this crumbling hero tries to stay alive, Craig matches one of the series’ most soulful moments; the instance in OHMSS where Lazenby’s 007 is folded over, winded and ready for the end at a Swiss ice rink. The message in Die Another Day’s title goes farther here: it is clear that 007 will go the way of all warriors and gamblers. Daniel Craig’s Bond has the weight of a character who had been around the block, and whose day is almost done. In Skyfall, Craig’s 007 has a meeting with Ben Whishaw’s Q (it’s short for “quartermaster”) at the National Gallery in London. Q chooses the place of rendezvous, on a bench in front of J. M. W. Turner’s painting “The Fighting Temeraire.” It depicts an obsolete battleship being towed away for scrap. (Longtime watchers, old enough to lay awake at night worrying about their own obsolescence, felt this scene acutely.)
It commences with a pre title sequence in which Bond is certainly doomed, after a failed attempt to retrieve a thumbdrive with a roster of British agents on it. He’s shot by friendly fire (Naomie Harris, his fellow agent, pulls the trigger) and plummets into a river somewhere outside Istanbul. The chilling animation by Daniel Klienman has a tiny Bond dangling in a long fingernailed hand, soaring over cemeteries where the crosses are the handles of daggers. Adele’s hit theme song, a poisoned lullaby, has a “Pomp and Circumstances” sonority in the horns; the animation ends with the closeup on Craig’s gaze. It’s a visual rendition of the ee cummings: ”how do you like your blue-eyed boy mr death”.
Craig’s 44 year old Bond is a grizzled man, in a two weeks grey beard that makes him look leonine. What’s here is what people revere in late period Clint Eastwood films. Pulling himself together after at some Mediterranean-side dive, he returns to London after he learns of a bombing attack on MI-6 headquarters. In a remote island in Asia, he tracks down the man responsible — an intelligencer called Silva (Javier Bardem) who has a long past with the British secret service.
Skyfall was a deserved hit, and a very hard act to follow. The IMAX format is particularly stunning in a reveal of the Shanghai skyline from 2000 feet up, more Vegassy than the real Vegas. The Chinese saw Blade Runner and, for some reason, decided to make it all come true. On the 100th floor of one of these towers is a fight between Bond and a gunman in silhouette. It looks like a Jim Steranko page for Nick Fury comics. It has the sheer visual delight of the best MGM ‘Scope musicals or Tohoscope swordfight, backlit with images of jellyfish rising and falling up the skyscrapers. Roger Deakins recalls that electric, eye-popping quality the ’60 Bonds and John Boorman’s Point Blank. The startling locations include Hashima, a derelict coal mining island with arresting ruins, and a studio version of a Macau casino where komodo dragons roam as pets.
Many former 12 year old boys wished that there was a deadly “Skyfall” satellite in this film. And it goes haywire at points with matters that should have got puzzled out. How do you take an immensely dangerous criminal into custody and fail to search the inside of his mouth? Some could question how the fabulous old Goldfinger Aston Martin DB-5 materializes, as it does, to make its last stand. This is one of the saddest moments in the series; I’ve seen men gasp from a sense of loss watching this. It’s all the more poignant when we learn that the DB-5 is, like James Bond, just one more relic of the past. This whippy dream-ride of the 1960s has bad suspension. Dench’s M grumbles about how cramped it is. Truth is, it was probably just like all the other little British sports cars, a mechanic’s annuity even when it was new.
The ret-conning here on 007’s childhood is based on something Fleming mentioned in passing in the book You Only Live Twice. (It’s in the same obituary where we learned James Bond wasn’t English, but instead a Scot/Swiss hybrid.) The British secret service, like the Pony Express, apparently preferred to hire orphans. Yet this business is far too obviously linked to the sad childhoods of Bruce Wayne and Harry Potter.
Let me show ingratitude: just because I was helped out of a reliably disappointing childhood with all this bizarre fantasy didn’t mean that I wanted to hear about how sad Bond had it. Moreover I had mixed feelings at the way this installment mans up the Secret Service, insisting on Whitehall as a last line of defense, and in getting a gentleman back in the driver’s seat at MI:6. It’s a Brexit Bond.
SPECTRE
(2015) For the first time, Craig strides in with gun barrel trained on him. Blackout, and the title card: “The Dead Are Alive:” Bond, masquerading as a black-suited calavera in top hat, is enjoying a sensational but completely fictional Day of the Dead celebration near the Zocalo in Mexico City. He strides through his long tracking shot syncopated to the drums; a lady (Stephanie Sigman) is with him inside an old iron birdcage elevator, as she whispers a little something in his ear…in their room, Bond hesitates for a sec before tossing his top hat on the bed, shrugging off the superstition. (Decades before, in Istanbul, Connery did this too.) Then he steps out the window and catwalks along the ledges to surveille some terrorists planning to detonate a futbal stadium. As a result of a gunfight, he accidentally detonates a parcel of plastique which collapses the entire building.
The adventure leads to unfinished business in Austria and Tangiers, and a finale on the Thames where James Bond makes the kind of pistol shot only James Bond can make.
For decades, the Bond series were prohibited from using SPECTRE or its Polish-born mastermind Blofeld. This was for reasons so legally complicated that it takes a book to sort them out. (The book is titled The Battle for Bond by Robert Sellers.) A 1960s lawsuit over the script of Thunderball gave the Irish producer Kevin McClory the apparent rights to Blofeld and SPECTRE. Every producer needs a bit of hubris, but McClory had baskets of it, attempting to parlay his one-time rights into a rival Bond series. You’ve heard the rumor of a Bond film that was to have sharks with lasers on their foreheads? That would be McClory’s handiwork. Hence the non-canonical Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again, and an attempted remake later on, even of that.
Those who had first thrilled to the paranoid Pynchonean daydreams of SPECTRE wanted Blofeld back, despite what Mike Myers did to him in the satirical guise of ‘Dr. Evil.’ “Austin Powers fucked the James Bond series,” Craig complained in 2012. At last he and his myriad henches returned, complete with remote secret lab and octopus signet rings.
Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) is introduced in Rome at a board meeting capped with the usual killing of a hench pour encourager les autres. It turns out that the mastermind is tangled in 007’s childhood, the result of a retrofitting of the series, done in a manner to make the oldest followers sob.
Blofeld is the successor instead of the anticipator to a Peter Thiel or a Steve Jobs. He has Jobs’ nauseating habit of wearing sockless shoes. In a whispered bit before he starts to speak at the board meeting, he makes an assistant move the microphone close to him. (My friend Dee saw this and commented, “Oh, he’s a germaphobe.”) Blofeld is the ultimate data-miner and now, we realize, the author of all of misfortunes in the Craig versions of the Bonds.
Despite third-act trouble, and the four-handed script, Spectre follows the Howard Hawks rule: if you have five good scenes in a movie, you’ve got a good movie. Overlook the script problems, and the film is rich with style. Even if one endorses Dorothy Parker’s comment that the Alps are beautiful but dumb, the photography brings out absolute solitude as Bond travels alone on a boat through a snow-bounded mountain lake. He intrudes into the raven-haunted lair where the moribund Mr. White (Jesper Christiansen, as impressive as always) has been put paid by Blofeld for insufficient ardor in killing women and children. A dusty chessboard sits between White and Bond as they chat: “Here we are, Mr Bond. Two dead men enjoying the evening.”
Dave Bautista continues to impress here as a hench with the fingernails-on-a chalkboard name Mr. Hinx. (For what it’s worth, Hinx is an actual French village in Aquitaine). Second only to the Zocalo opening is the arrival of Bond and Léa Seydoux’s Dr. Madeleine Swann at a train station in the African desert, where they’re to be the guests of the natty, cheerful megalomaniac Blofeld. The madman has his musings about the best way to torture, in uncredited dialogue by Kingsley Amis. (Amis wrote a first-rate Bond novel once under a pseudonym, Colonel Sun.)
Over the titles, with their skulls and billows of squid ink, the depresso Sam Smith moans about the writing on the wall. He’s just serenading the morbidity at the heart of this series. How long can James Bond go on? How long can we go on, watching him? The writing’s on the wall. The odds are bad for him, and worse for us.
James Bond toys @AC Gilbert, 1964
A Disclaimer.
At the end of the 1980s, in the early days of Blockbuster, when you could rent a small VHS player, I brought the kit down to my grandmother’s bedside so we could watch some Dick Powell/Ruby Keeler musicals. I was taking notes, she was propped up. When Dames was over, she sighed, “I’d have rather remembered that as a good movie.”
Mixed feelings are my business. That sudden distaste could happen to me at any time. The kiss kiss bang bang of it all seduced me when I was young and loved adventure and travel. There may come a time when I won’t be subject to that Bond fever, that malady that most people have a touch of in their adolescence and then get over for life. I can see some point — during a bad illness, maybe languishing on the chemotherapy lazy-boy chair or the dialysis lounger — that there’ll be a Bond movie on the tv and I’ll just want to turn my face away from it.
I know how bad they can look. Once, on a small motel tv in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I viewed part of a broadcast of Goldfinger that was slammed with carpet warehouse commercials. As an added gift from the TNT channel, little animated figures popped up and scurried like leprechauns at the foot of the image, promoting the next movie playing after this one. It’s amazing how little effort it takes to make something once very big and exciting look small and stupid.
Now that the age of the movie theater may be over, No Time to Die may debut on streaming — one more smaller than life experience.
But maybe it won’t happen that way. If there is to be a next Bond even beyond that, it might be directed by someone who understands the arresting blankness at the series’ heart, someone who understands the mix of gothic romance and science fiction. Whoever comes next, one hopes the mask of James Bond will fit well on them. I’ve watched them kill the series with silliness and then bring it back to life before. I may get to a point where I’m done with it, but it may not quite be done with me.
