James Bond
More Bond: Double bill DaF & L&LD
Diamonds Are Forever
After the disappointment of On Her Majesty’s…, I expect everyone was as glad as me to see Sean Connery resuming Bond duties, taking the role back from Lazenby for one last Bond film. I had hazy memories of Diamonds Are Forever being - as well as one of the better titled Bonds - one that I’d particularly enjoyed. Sadly, it seems I was getting my Bond films confused: DaF is a pretty dull outing, really.
I’ll give the creators some credit: the henchmen are pretty creepy. Mr Kidd and Mr. Wint march around killing off a variety of implausibly trusting truck drivers and smugglers. It’s more than can be said for Blofeld, though, who makes a fairly pathetic villain here. There’s none of the mastermind threat that he had in earlier films: it seems that in each appearance he moves another step towards Dr Evil…
Most of all it isn’t that DaF is bad in any real sense (at least no more bad than other Bonds) but that it’s not a lot of fun. Bond just isn’t serious or important enough to get away with being boring. Even the quiet bits are supposed to be fun. Lurching between explosions, fights, car-chases, innuendo-laden chitchat and sex scenes Bond films are supposed to rattle along at a pretty relentless pace. Sadly DaF is just a little too slow. The climactic show-down just sees Bond gently bashing Blofeld’s submarine against a wall… Even Lazenby had a helicopter-attack-on-mountain-fortress payoff! This one’s just too tame. And not even Shirley Bassey can rescue it from that.
**Live and Let Die **
**L&LD can be accused of many things but it’s certainly not boring. It’s almost as if, face with reinventing Bond in a Roger Moore shape, the producers just decided to throw all sorts of fun at the film and see what stuck. **
It obviously cashes in heavily on the then-popular blaxploitation trend (just two years after Shaft!). Too those unfamiliar with those films it might seem more racist than er… anything else: Bond has left genealogists in stuffy British boardrooms behind and is now traipsing through Harlem (and sticking out like a sore thumb). For a large part of the film it does seem worryingly like every single Black character might well be a baddie, which does get a little awkward. Eventually the goodie-baddie balance is restored somewhat so it’s definitely not racist, no, not at all, never. Hmm…
Either way, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. They just ramped everything up a bit. We have poisonous snakes, revolving walls, super-gadgets, speedboat chases, comic characters. This is perhaps the first Bond film that feels really self-referential - it verges on the edge of pastiche at times - but for the most part it carries it well, staying just the right side of the line.
The ‘comic’ sheriff was a mistake though: a Southern States, gum-chewing, noisy, moron character played for laughs, it’s hard not to wince at each appearence he makes. Mercifully, his role is only brief, and it is intercut with the pretty-awesome speedboat chase. The producers made no such mistake with the villains though: claw-handed henchman Tee-Hee, snake-wielding face-painted Baron Samedi and the mastermind-villain-who-relies-on-Tarot-cards Kananga make a pretty formidable bad-guy line-up. Even if they do repeatedly fall for the classic mistake of explaining their entire plan first and then leaving Bond to die and looking away as he escapes…. But we can’t all be perfect.
L&LD ushers in the Moore era which, if I remember rightly, brings with it a fair number of pretty awful films but, in itself, is a pretty mad and fun Bond movie.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
In my last post on a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, I admitted that the James Bond project was moving along somewhat slowly. Inwardly, I promised myself that I’d speed it up a bit, crack through a few more films and get on with it. But then I looked at the next film on the list: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Oh dear.
OHMSS is a film I’d only seen once. It has a reputation as a low-point of the Bond series: people can argue forever about who their favourite Bond is but none of them ever say George Lazenby. Ever. More than that, it’s one of the very few Bond films that, after watching it, I never felt the need to return to again. But that was years ago. Surely my memory was deceiving me? Surely it wasn’t that bad?
It was.
Well… maybe not entirely as bad as I remembered. Just mostly as bad. There are a few decent moments and sequences in it but, for the most part, this is a pretty dull film. First off, it’s slow. Bond films usually move along at a fairly brisk pace - conversation, fight, conversation, fight, etc. etc - but OHMSS just crawls along. Although the plot itself is no better or worse than most other Bond films - Blofeld + world domination + mind control - it just takes forever to actually get exciting. When it does pick up, the film’s actually not bad. The final, say, 20 minutes are pretty pacey. We have a bobsled-run chase/fight, some decent explosions and good gunfights. It’s just such a shame it took so long to get there!
There’s basically two ways of looking at OHMSS: if you treat it as a Bond film, it’s a disappointment. The tone’s all wrong, Lazenby isn’t a great Bond and Telly Savalas is a rubbish Blofeld. On the other hand, if treated as a generic spy/action flick it’s pretty decent. The [spoilers!] grim ending is so very out of place amongst Bond films: usually marooned in the sea/jungle/desert cosying up to a beautiful woman, Lazenby’s Bond is left biting back tears, sat next to his dead wife. It’s not a bad ending - but it’s not Bond.
Still, OHMSS was slightly-less-bad than I had expected, which is pretty much all I was hoping for. Hello and goodbye Mr Lazenby. Next time it’s back to Connery…
You Only Live Twice
The James Bond project is going slowly. When I decided, back in October, to watch every Bond film in order I didn’t expect it to be a marathon of back-to-back viewings (not like Argento week!) but if I’d been asked I’d probably have predicted to be beyond Film #5 after 9 months! As it is, You Only Live Twice marks a milestone of sorts: it’s the last film with Sean Connery. Ok, well… it’s not. Because he came back after Lazenby. But it’s the last film where only one actor had played Bond.
And it’s a good one. You Only Live Twice has long been a favourite of mine. It’s hard to explain really but, in many ways, it feel like one of the most Bond-like of Bond films. It just ticks so many of the boxes. James Bond has, in my opinion, never really recovered from the end of the Cold War (Media barons just don’t have the same level of villainy…) and YOLT is a good demonstration of Cold War threat: even if it’s not actually the Russians who are the bad guys, the danger of M.A.D. looms over the space-race backdrop and spurs Bond into action. Because when the Yanks and the Ruskies are at loggerheads, it obviously falls the Britain to save the day!
In the process, we get some prime Bond action. Q turns up with a tiny fold-up plane in a box (one of the more perfect Bond gadgets that gently mocks his hyper-masculine reputation), the Japanese secret service supply NINJAS (with throwing stars!) and, Bond punches and fights his way through a series of Japanese paper walls. They even manage to create a clever, highly-trained and sympathetic female character and (even more surprisingly) resist giving her a name like ‘Pussy Galore’. As Bond in the 60s goes, that’s about as close to progressive or feminist as you’re going to get!
The plot is reassuringly bonkers: a Spectre spaceship keeps swallowing the US/Russian spaceships and vanishing before anyone can find it. Tasked with stopping it, Bond has to fight a handful of subservient Spectre drones, find the lair and put a stop to Blofeld’s sinister spaceship-swallowing plans. The lair in question, nestled in a Japanese volcano with a metal fake-lake hiding it from view is pretty spectacular and one of the more memorable of Bond Villain lairs (I’ve always considered the submerged satellite in GoldenEye to be in imitation/homage to this one, really). Add to that a handful of really memorable scenes (poison on a string!) and you have a pretty neat Bond film.
As might be expected, there are a few clumsy moments - the less said about Bond’s Asian disguise and the Japanese security-chief’s harem of subservient women, the better… - but all in all this is a Bond film that takes some beating. Great stuff.
And it’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service next. Now there’s something to look forward to…
James Bond triple bill
So, from the exciting introduction to the Bond universe that Dr No provided, I moved along (chronologically, of course) to a trio of films that pretty much embody what James Bond is. These films are the very peak of ‘Bond-ness’, they’re so jam packed with all the exciting (and ridiculous) tropes that came to define the the Bond film as a series that it’s no surprise that Austin Powers found the vast majority of its material here - some of the scenes are almost shot-for-shot identical!
From Russia With Love (1963 / Terrence Young / Sean Connery)
Goldfinger (1964 / Guy Hamilton / Sean Connery)
Thunderball (1965 / Terrence Young / Sean Connery)
Both From Russia With Love and Thunderball feature Spectre plots for our heroic agent to battle, whilst Goldfinger is much more of a one-man villain. From Russia takes us from the early form of Dr No and ramps it up by throwing a whole lot more excitement at it. Bond now has some serious gadgetry (albeit relatively basic) and his quick-assembly sniper rifle is particularly useful. We also meet some of the most fabulously English of scenes - the foreign spy on the train who gives himself away by drinking red wine with fish! What a mistake! Sean Connery, as ever, is fabulous throughout but I couldn’t help feeling that, whilst From Russia threw an awful lot of exciting elements at the plot, the structure of the story itself was slightly lacklustre. Like Dr No, it had it’s peaks and a few very memorable moments but as a film it was certainly lacking something.
Goldfinger, easily one of the very best of Bond, takes all the elements that From Russia contained and turned them up a bit. Rosa Klebb’s killer shoe becomes Oddjob’s killer hat, a comparatively timid attempt to steal a code-machine becomes an audacious plot to irradiate all of America’s gold, etc. etc. Goldfinger turns the heat up - and possibly overdoes it. Here then, we find lasers! gadget cars! sprayed gas! an implausibly strong Korean! and all sorts of other madness.
I’d call it a film of hits and misses: when it gets it right, it gets it very right indeed… but occasionally it’s not quite so strong. A prefect example of the latter would be the extended Bond vs. Goldfinger golf showdown. I’ll repeat that: golf. I mean, whoever thought to set a dramatic encounter over a (long) game of golf? When we’ve been teased with bullet-proof cars and tear-gas briefcases, an elaborate ball-swapping plot that centres on Bond’s recognition of the Slazenger 5 golf ball is… boring.
That said, some of the scenes are undeniable classics. The sight of Bond, strapped to a chunk of metal with a high-power metal-cutting laser edging ever closer towards painful emasculation is as unforgettable as James Bond films get. It would be sublime even without dialogue but the now classic exchange “Do you expect me to talk / No Mr Bond, I expect you to die” is so wonderfully blunt that it just makes the scene perfect.
The only thing, to my mind, that really stands in the way of Goldfinger being the absolutely perfect Bond film is the utterly ridiculous names used throughout. So Goldfinger likes gold? And his first name is Auric? Like the element? And his odd job man is er… called OddJob? And the major plan to contaminate Fort Knox is called Operation GrandSlam? And the sex-interest woman is called Pussy Galore? All this and more: Goldfinger is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Whilst I’d never demand a thoughtful or challenging Bond film, Goldfinger does occasionally feel like it’s treating us like idiots. I had absolutely understood that the sexy woman would have sex with Bond without her being named Pussy Galore (suitably mocked by Austin Powers’ Alotta Fagina). It’s, sadly, the kind of choice that makes this film feel so dated - even more than its two predecessors.
The last time I saw Thunderball - where we’re back with Spectre and have a plot of nuclear-ransom - was before the Austin Powers films; it’s hard to watch it in the same way now. We get scenes in the Spectre lair with ’number one’ frying his cheating agents (whose steaming, but now empty, chairs return to the table), an eye-patched villain and a fantastic opening scene with a Spectre agent dressed as a grieving widow. Bond doesn’t actually shout “That’s a man, maaaaan!” but I could here it in my head…
As a film Thunderball is the most coherent and elaborately plotted yet but (for all that I teased Goldfinger) it lacks some of the more outrageous fun. There’s no decent villain - eyepatch man does little besides giving grumpy orders - but there are some decent scenes (chase scene through the carnival!) and it does hang together as a pretty decent film. Sadly, there are far too many dull action sequences for it to be a true classic… Underwater scenes galore here and none of them are much fun. Some stirring music isn’t enough to save a long, slow, flippers-and-wetsuits harpoon-battle snooze of a scene in what ought to be the most exciting part of the film.
Despite some flaws in each, these three Bond films are a pretty exciting triple-bill of action fun and, taking over where Dr No left off, make a convincing case for crowning Sean Connery as best Bond ever. From here, there’s only one more Connery-Bond left before we come to George Lazenby’s disasterous effort…
Watching James Bond films. All of them. In order.
So… this week I’ve taken on a new and exciting challenge: I’m going to watch all the James Bond films, ever single one, in the order they were made. Now, I’m not a complete masochist so I’m not going to set any kind of time limit on this: I’m not watching all 22 (twenty two!) back-to-back! I’ll take it nice and slow; I’ll put on the tux, shake my vodka martini and then relax and watch Bond, SPECTRE and all manner of exciting things.
Dr. No (1962 / Terence Young / Sean Connery)
And what better place to start than at the beginning? Dr. No, the film that started it all, is still a decent litle thriller by today’s standards. It’s packed to the brim with awesome and very memorable moments - Ursula Andress emerging from the sea! - and it cracks along at a decent pace, with attempted spider-aided assassination, fist-fights and car-chases. It doesn’t have some of the classic elements we came to associate with later Bond films - gadgetry is decidedly thin here - but it does a lot of what you’d expect from a Bond film and does it well.
Sean Connery lays down a serious argument for his place as Best Bond Ever with his brilliantly suave performance, whether flirting in the casino or punching SPECTRE agents in the head - leaving the bloodied, dead agent in the car for the valet to deal with! There’s no evil henchman on show (although sometimes that’s a good thing) but Dr. No himself with his EVIL METAL HANDS is charismatically evil, a perfect villain.
The unavoidable criticism of the film, sadly, is that the ending just isn’t very good. After such a decent story and some brilliant scenes, Bond and Dr. No’s fight in what appears to be a climbing frame over the er… yellow-lit toxic bubbling water of death is really pretty lacklustre. Having built him up as a booming-voiced overseer, a metal-clawed monster, a smooth-talking SPECTRE agent, Dr. No’s ignoble exit into the - oh so terrifying! - bubbling water is a complete let down really. Still, at least they make up for it a bit by blowing up the base… We all like a good explosion!
It’s a good film, great fun to watch and, in many respects, just what you want from a James Bond film. But it’s not perfect. Right, on with the list…. From Russia With Love next.
