Sean Connery
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.
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.
