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Everything I Ever Needed To Know
I Learned From
The James Bond Movies
*Note: I am indebted to Peter Smyth of the newsgroup alt.fan.jamesbond for his help with the writing of this article. – Vince.
DR NO (1962)
FROM HIS REMARKABLY well-staffed underground base on Crab Key, one of the less well-known Jamaican islands, mad-as-you-like evil scientist Dr No is using atomic energy to ‘topple’ American space rockets, as a favour for the sinister criminal organisation SPECTRE - the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. Presumably, by demonstrating his evil credentials and his keenness to take part in their insane plans for world domination, Dr No is hoping that SPECTRE will let him take over their gang, when really all he has to do to improve his social life is to get a girlfriend, join an Arts and Crafts society, and make friends of his own.
Being the world’s Superpower, the Americans have taken a laid-back attitude to the whole affair; they’ve stationed some cool CIA agents in Kingston, Jamaica, to soak-up some sun, have a few beers, listen to calypso, and keep an eye out for anything unusual. In short, America is in control of the situation, and knows that there’s nothing to panic about.
In contrast, the British are running around like headless chickens when one of their agents misses a telephone call, and put Secret Service agent James Bond on the first plane to Jamaica to find out what has happened to him. Bond is much more pro-active than his CIA counterparts, and after a near-fatal encounter with a tarantula, bedding beautiful women, killing a chauffeur, wrecking several cars, and, finally, being chased through marshland by a flame-throwing tank disguised as a dragon (don’t ask), he is captured by Dr No and invited to dinner. Under the guise of making polite dinner conversation, Bond is keen to show-off just how smart he is at having figured-out that Dr No’s nefarious scheme is being financed by Red China…
Bond: “With your disregard for human life you must be working for the East…” To which Dr No, unimpressed, replies: “East, West… Points of the compass, Mr Bond.”
There is, needless to say, a stony silence during the After Eight mints.
WHAT I LEARNED
• If you don’t know where China is, don’t be afraid to say so; mumbling something incomprehensible about compasses isn’t going to disguise your appalling geography.
• And if you’re going to take it out on someone, don’t bother the Americans-go and knick your old Geography teacher’s car, or something.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)
UNDERSTANDABLY PISSED-OFF by James Bond’s meddling in the Dr No affair, SPECTRE are keen to exact their revenge upon him and the British Secret Service. But who could be smart enough to conceive a plot fiendish enough to satisfy the picky SPECTRE No 1, a man who was probably unimpressed with every Christmas present his parents gave him? Why, Czechoslovakian chess Grandmaster Kronsteen, of course! He plays chess all day, so obviously he’s a master plotter (it helps that he’s already a member of SPECTRE, of course). Kronsteen’s Cunning Plan™ is thus:
He wants to:
(a) Lure the British into a trap by baiting them with the Lecktor - a Russian cipher decoder machine - thus antagonising Anglo/Soviet relations;
(b) Get James Bond to shag an attractive Russian cipher clerk, which SPECTRE will capture on film;
(C) Kill Bond and the girl, fake their suicide notes, and then use the footage of their lovemaking to embarrass the British;
(d) Err… that’s about it.
Anyway, the mysterious SPECTRE No 1 rubber-stamps Kronsteen’s arch plot (presumably because he couldn’t be arsed to think of anything better himself), and assigns a butch lesbian old trout to oversee the operation (presumably because he couldn’t be arsed to take control of things himself). She in turn recruits hard-as-you-like Red Grant to handle the rough stuff, and the very lovely Tatiana Romanova to seduce James Bond. How could anything possibly go wrong?
Err… Naturally, the British suspect everything is a feeble trap right from the very start (though Kronsteen, bless him, had anticipated this and is playing a game of bluff, double-bluff, and counter bluff your double-bluff… or something), and obviously it all goes wrong anyway, but that’s what you get if you rely on a nerd to do your thinking for you.
The scene is set for a roller-coaster ride of action and espionage which- after the intriguing and remarkable (if episodically entertaining) Dr No - pretty much catapults the Bond movies into the super-league of box-office and cultural successes, and, in Sean Connery’s confident, dangerous, and highly-seductive performance, makes James Bond an icon. If there is one scene which encapsulates the cinematic bravado and invention of the Bond series (and the underrated, embryonic Dr No had plenty of these too), then it’s in From Russia With Love’s fantastic confrontation between Bond and Grant aboard The Orient Express. Here, explicit violence, Hitchcockian-suspense, wry humour and class snobbery are fused into a fascinating cocktail, the like of which had never been seen in cinema before, and which every subsequent Bond film would attempt to replicate, with varying degrees of success.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Russian chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov is obviously a SPECTRE agent. Nigel Short, on the other hand, is a poor substitute for Sean Connery.
• SPECTRE No. 1 is a rubbish boss-a bit David Brent.
• Here’s an end to all those ‘who’s-the-best-Bond?’ pub arguments: Sean Connery is James Bond.
GOLDFINGER (1964)
IN WHICH SECRET SERVICE agent James Bond, 007, licensed to kill, The Most Dangerous Man In The World™, widely considered to be the prototype for The Hollywood Action-Hero- challenges criminal mastermind Auric Goldfinger (a man who has allied himself with Red China and the cream of the American criminal underworld in his fiendish plan to detonate a nuclear device inside Fort Knox) to a deadly game of… golf.* Gosh. Thrilling stuff!
Never mind. Goldfinger more than compensates for this in other areas (and besides, the golfing scenes are lovingly filmed, immaculately performed, and hugely entertaining) such as: Goldfinger’s henchman: the mute, hat-throwing Korean, Odd-Job; Bond’s car, the superb Aston Martin DB5, fitted-out by Q Branch with bullet-proof windscreens, radar tracking screen, front-wing machine guns, rotating blades in its wheel hubcaps, and best of all, that wonderful passenger-side ejector seat; the tragic, startling death of Jill Masterson - she’s covered head-to-foot in gold paint in a movie moment that is nothing less than iconic; the celebrated Bond-is-threatened-with-a-deadly-laserbeam-pointed-at-his-groin-scene, with it’s classic exchange of dialogue: Bond: ‘You expect me to talk?’/Goldfinger: ‘No, Mr Bond – I expect you to die!’… and much, much more, in a film that ranks amongst the very best of the Bond range, and therefore, the very best cinema has to offer.
Who can blame the podgy Mr Goldfinger for his obsession with all things golden? He is, after all, named Auric Goldfinger, and with his strange pigmentation and golden-ginger hair, he even looks like… well, he looks like iron pyrite, actually. Fools Gold.
*Satisfyingly, both players cheat - though it is, of course, Mr Bond who wins.
WHAT I LEARNED
• If you’re involved in a deadly battle of wits with a criminal mastermind, you should at least try to take it seriously: engaging him in a game of tiddlywinks, or a protracted game of twister isn’t going to impress anybody.
• Everybody should own an Aston Martin DB5.
• Take care when naming your child, especially if you have a distinctive or unusual surname-you wouldn’t want your child to grow up with a pathological obsession for the thing he is named after. This applies doubly for anybody whose surname is ‘Dildo’.
THUNDERBALL (1965)
IMAGINE IT’S 1965, you’re a cabinet minister in Harold Wilson’s Labour government and you’ve been called to an emergency cabinet meeting at Ten Downing Street. You sit down at a big table (possibly next to the Chancellor Of The Exchequer, who owes you a fiver) and you look around you at all the familiar faces wondering what sort of emergency needs to be dealt with this week - a sex scandal, perhaps, or another pay dispute with the unions. Then Mr Wilson stands up, puffs fiercely on his pipe, and says, “Good morning gentlemen, I’m sorry to have had to call you in on a Saturday, but there’s this crackpot organization called SPECTRE who have broken into a top-security NATO Air Force base in Sussex, and stolen an RAF Vulcan bomber armed with two nuclear warheads, which they intend to use to blow up a major city unless we pay them ten million pounds.” And then you just know that today is going to be different.
At the start of Thunderball, 007 is slinking panther-like around a health clinic - which just goes to show that a life of excitement, vodka martinis and expensive cigarettes can take its toll on even the most robust of physiques (there’s hope for this reviewer yet!) but it’s not long before our wily secret agent persuades M with the flimsiest of evidence (a photo of a beautiful woman) that he should be on the first plane to the Bahamas, where he spends an inordinate amount of time in a wet-suit, swimming with sharks. Now, it’s fair to admit that Commander Bond is a man of many talents (not least in the bedroom), but subtlety ain’t one of them, as his attempts to rattle SPECTRE no. 2 Emile Largo into revealing his villainous identity prove…
Bond: “I thought I saw a spectre at your shoulder…”
Largo: “What do you mean?”
Bond: “The spectre of defeat”
This roughly translates as:
Bond: “You’re a nutcase working for SPECTRE, aren’t you?”
Largo: “I might be. What’s it to you?”
Bond: “I’m on to you, matey. Just you watch it.”
One other observation about Thunderball (which is in the premier league of Bond films): Bond’s casual misogyny has, up to this point, gone unremarked by the many women he has bedded and swiftly dumped; Thunderball readdresses the issue in that it introduces a thoroughly emancipated villainess, the highly-sexed Fiona Volpe; after having very wild sex with Bond, she delivers this scathing rejection of Bond’s morally suspect ‘for-Queen-and-Country’ attitude to sexual relationships: “I forgot your ego, Mr Bond. James Bond, who only has to make love to a woman and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing. She repents, then immediately returns to the side of right and virtue. But not this one. What a blow it must have been … You, having a failure…”
Bond, of course, isn’t the least bit put-out: “You can’t win ‘em all,” he sighs…
WHAT I LEARNED
• Some days simply don’t turn out the way you expect them to: just when you think you can spend a lazy Saturday mowing the lawn, some bastard goes and steals a nuclear bomb and ruins everything.
• Leave subtlety to those who can do it with confident finesse; if you want to tactfully hint that your wife is putting on a bit of weight, calling her a Fat Cow isn’t the best approach to take.
• Bad girls are great in bed but tend to be very stroppy afterwards.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967)
JAMES BOND IN JAPAN! SPECTRE have built this massive spacecraft-eater-thing which they use to swallow-up US and Soviet space rockets… Sorry, but even writing that sentence makes me shake my head in amused, admiring disbelief, and when you add to that the fact that SPECTRE’s base is in a hollowed-out volcano on a remote Japanese island, and that they inexplicably intend to precipitate Word War 3… you swiftly realise that SPECTRE are desperately in need of a big hug and immediate counselling.
James Bond is sent to Japan to investigate; true to form, he indulges in casual sex, gets involved in violent punch-ups, uses the latest Q Branch technology (notably a heavily-armed Gyrocopter called ‘Little Nellie’) to blow-up as many things as possible, and dispenses his usual quotient of gallows humour witticisms. He also trains as a ninja, and gets married to a Japanese island fisher girl. As you do.
The moment we’ve all been waiting for arrives when James Bond finally gets to meet the head of SPECTRE: a small bald bloke with a cat-obsession. He introduces himself…
Small-Bald-Bloke-With-A-Cat-Obsession: “James Bond. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Ernst Stavro Blofeld. They told me you were assassinated in Hong Kong.”
Bond: “Yes, this is my second life.”
Blofeld: “You only live twice, Mr Bond.”
…And the moment is perfect. As is the lunacy and wit of You Only Live Twice.
WHAT I LEARNED
• If your job seems dull, it’s not too late to vary your routine. Why not train as a ninja or marry a girl you’ve just met?
• People who like cats are insane. They live in hollowed-out volcanoes, and secretly harbour insane plots to start World War 3. Dog people are much more sensible.
ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (1969)
(Reviewer takes a deep breath, and sits down to write a love letter…)
LIFE, AS GARETH Southgate once said, is full of regrets and lost opportunities. Consider, for example, the career of 'swinging 60s' drummer Pete Best – one minute he’s the most popular member of a Mersybeat pop combo who are destined for great things, the next minute he’s watching from the sidelines as Ringo Starr takes his place behind the drum kit, and the band – The Beatles, for those who need reminding - carve their place in history. Or take the long-forgotten Australian model/actor George Lazenby. Just how stupid was he to listen to the council given by 'trusting' friends, when they advised him to ditch the role of James Bond after one movie, stating that the 'Bond phenomena' had run its day and was becoming increasingly out of place in the 'counter culture' rebellion spearheaded by low-budget films such as Easy Rider? For contrary to the opinion of Lazenby’s fair-weather chums, James Bond has never lost favour with the movie-going public, and remains as iconic now, in the 21st century, as he did when we first saw him 40 years ago, dressed immaculately in evening dress, insouciantly smoking a cigarette as he flirts effortlessly with a beautiful woman over a high-stakes game of Baccarat. Furthermore, despite the critical panning Lazenby received from the press, and his one and only Bond movie’s disappointing box office, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is quite simply the finest Bond movie made to date, due in no small part to Lazenby’s interpretation of the secret agent. Not for the first time, the critics and the movie-going audience, not to mention Lazenby’s trusted confidants, quite simply got it wrong.
OHMSS is unique amongst the Bond films for several reasons: most obviously, it is the only Bond film to star George Lazenby as 007; it’s the only film directed by ex-Bond film Editor, Peter Hunt; it’s the most faithful of the series to the Ian Fleming source material (word for word in some scenes); it’s quite possibly the most patriotic Bond movie (OHMSS treats the British Secret Service as a deadly serious organisation); it’s the only Bond film in which Commander Bond falls in love and gets married; and, of course, OHMSS stands out from the cannon because it has a tragic ending.
Peter Hunt’s direction is outstanding. Purely on a visual level, OHMSS is a fantastic film; no other Bond movie can match it for its cinematography, and its edgy mise-en-scéne lends it an urgency missing from the sprawling Bond movies that were to become the norm for the next decade. Of particular note is the frenetic editing style, a Peter Hunt trademark. The fight scenes and action sequences in OHMSS are fast, brutal and thrilling. That Peter Hunt never returned as the man-behind-the-megaphone on a Bond film production is a tragedy as great as the non-reappearance of George Lazenby. It’s not simply for the bitter ending that watching OHMSS brings out a sense of regret in this reviewer.
So what of Lazenby? What was he like in the role of the world’s most dangerous man? Lazenby/Bond comes across as a rather contradictory character. There’s the brutish force of Connery/Bond, but Lazenby lacks the refinement and sophistication that Connery (and later, Moore, Dalton & Brosnan) would bring to the character. Instead he exhibits an awkward physicality; oddly, he lacks the grace that one might assume a model would bring with him. Underneath this, there’s an air of vulnerability: he’s a wounded Bond; a thousand times more human than the Bond we would see throughout the 1970s. No doubt these attributes are the result of an inexperienced actor faced with the daunting prospect of stepping into the shoes of an actor hugely acclaimed for his performance, but whatever the circumstances, Lazenby’s take on James Bond is by no means the disaster most contemporary critics proclaimed it to be. Far from it.
Of the supporting cast, Diana Rigg stands out (she always does), breathing life into Tracy; portraying her as suicidal and vital at the same time – a good trick if you can do it (I certainly can’t). Rigg’s casting is simply one of the best ideas the Bond production team ever made – if James Bond is to be married (and swiftly widowed) then it makes perfect sense that his bride should be Emma Peel (rather than Lois Lane -Tomorrow Never Dies-the very idea that a quintessentially English hero such as Commander James Bond would ever marry an American doesn’t bear thinking about). Telly Savalas is a muscular, threatening Blofeld; a genuinely scary Bond villain.
OHMSS has an absolutely superb soundtrack, courtesy of veteran Bond scorer, John Barry. And there’s a real poignancy to the Louis Armstrong song We Have All The Time In The World; Mrs Tracy Bond is murdered on her wedding day, and George Lazenby would never again play James Bond. Like the sands in the hourglass from the film’s opening titles, time is something this very human James Bond has in very short supply…
WHAT I LEARNED
• I don’t care what anybody says, George Lazenby was terrific as James Bond.
• This is easily the best Bond film of all.
• I’m in love with Diana Rigg.
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)
IF EVER THERE was an award for Dedication To The Cause Of Grand-Scale Insane Super-Criminal Plans Against Humanity, it would surely go to ex-SPECTRE big-shot Ernst Stavro Blofeld, a man who doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘small’, and who never takes a holiday because he’s too busy planning to hold the world to ransom for the umpteenth time. In Diamonds Are Forever, The Man-With-The-Cat has obviously taken the advice of his Estate Agent, who has pointed out that basing his criminal operations in hollowed-out volcanoes (and atop Alpine mountains) is bound to attract attention, and so Blofeld has sensibly de-camped to Las Vegas, a place of such utter lunacy and tastelessness that his grandiose mad schemes seem perfectly normal.
Blofeld’s ‘Plan B from Outer Space’ involves the construction of a fucking great big diamond-powered laser beam mounted on a satellite in orbit around the Earth, with which he intends to blackmail the world (where does he get these ideas from?). Predictably, it’s not long before everything’s gone wrong again and James Bond is hot on his heels*, so to facilitate a hasty getaway, Blofeld puts on a frilly wig, slaps on some lipstick, totters into high heels and attempts to pass himself of as a woman. But given that he’s spent the entire movie mincing around with a cigarette holder and dropping effete Noel Coward-esque witticisms, nobody is the least bit surprised when Blofeld reinvents himself as an ageing Drag Queen.
*It’s amusingly obvious that The World’s Most Famous Scotsman™, Sean Connery, has obviously been spending his time away from Bondage in a fat pie shop, which makes me wonder if Thunderball’s tagline – “Look Up! Look Down! Look Out! Here Comes The Biggest Bond Of All” wouldn’t be much more appropriate for this film!
WHAT I LEARNED
• Though dedication and resilience are admirable qualities, sometimes you just have to admit that you simply don’t have the talents necessary for the job. Give up. See a Careers Advisor.
• If you like tousling with butch men, spending your evenings bitching to a cat, and dressing-up in women’s clothing, it’s probably time to come out of the closet. Go to a Barbra Streisand concert.
LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)
WHEN AGENTS IN New York, San Monique, and New Orleans are killed in the same day by voodoo-worshipping super-fly drug-dealers, the British Secret Service find their stiff-upper lip cultural imperialism under threat from the unlikeliest of sources: Blaxploitation film clichés. Faced with the prospect of having the Old Boy Network, cucumber sandwiches, rained-out cricket matches, and public school buggery marathons usurped by bad-ass jive-talking bro’s, crack whores, and funk-adelic Isaac Hayes disco-action (damn right, baby!), the British respond by dropping Roger Moore in the centre of Shaft-era New York, and signing-up Paul and Linda McCartney to write some silly songs.
WHAT I LEARNED
• "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine..?." Not Roger Moore, baby.
• Afro haircuts were cool.
• Wings were rubbish.
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)
THIS IS REALLY a two-hour public information film on the economics of the early seventies dressed-up as a James Bond film - which perhaps explains why it’s dramatically unsatisfying and surprisingly drab in places. But beneath all the misguided references to the then-topical theme of an energy crisis (hardly the stuff of adventure and escapism), a much more interesting and surreal psycho-drama is struggling to break free: a psychological examination of James Bond and his ultimate nemesis, the one-million-dollar-a-hit Francisco Scaramanga, The Man With The Golden Gun. Even more fascinating is the idea of this dark melodrama being played out against a backdrop of cheap-skate Enter The Dragon bandwagonism. And more fascinating still is the fact that the principal characters - the lethal secret agent James Bond, and the near-psychopathic, sadistic assassin Scaramanga - are played by two actors who seem to be challenging each other to a game of who can out-suave the other. Christopher Lee, playing Scaramanga, oscillates between creepy and unflappable, whilst ‘quintessential Englishman’ Roger Moore (as James Bond) is so laid-back and gentile that it seems as if he’s wandered in from a matinee performance of Blythe Spirit. Add to this the outrageously coarse lyrics of the title song (‘He’s got a powerful weapon…’), Britt Ekland’s Mary Goodnight - the best ever screen bimbo-in-a-bikini, a waxwork effigy of Roger Moore, and a midget butler, and the result is one of the oddest films of the 1970’s… and that’s saying something.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Sod Mike Myers and his Austin Powers films – some Bond movies are simply beyond parody.
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977)
(CUE THE ‘JAMES BOND THEME’) HMS Ranger, a British nuclear submarine, is attacked - and then stolen - by an unknown enemy. The Russians reveal that a similar fate has befallen their nuclear vessel, Potempkin. In London, M promises to “put our best man on it at once”. The message reaches James Bond, who is called away from a romantic liaison with a lovely young lady in a cosy log cabin somewhere in the Austrian Alps. “But James,” pouts the young woman, “I need you!” “So does England,” responds 007, as he prepares to ski down a mountain. But all is not as it seems, for the woman reveals herself to be an enemy agent, and soon Bond is attacked by a company of Russians on skis… An exciting chase ensues, during which Bond despatches several Russians to their deaths whilst skilfully navigating the perilous mountain ravines. Bond completes his escape by skiing off the edge of a cliff… whereupon he freefalls for what seems like an eternity before ripping open his parachute – cheekily adorned with the Union Jack - and as our hero floats safely to the ground, the ‘James Bond theme’ segues into the beautiful voice of Carly Simon, who sings, “Nobody does it better…” And how right she is.
What follows is a splendid reworking of all the familiar Bond clichés, but it’s done with immense good humour and considerable style. And as James Bond, Roger Moore presents us with a likeable, debonair, enthusiastic playboy secret agent; a man who is so fore-square and decently English that one suspects that if you cut him in half you’d find the Union Jack imprinted in his body, like a stick of Brighton rock.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Just when you’ve given up all hope, James Bond skis off the edge of a cliff, and the old magic is back.
• You can say what you like about the English, but when it comes to saving the world in style, nobody does it better. Except the Americans. And possibly the Russians. And the Japanese. But apart from them, nobody does it better.
MOONRAKER (1979)
JAMES BOND IN SPACE! (Some people might have been thinking that by this point outer space was precisely the right place to send Roger Moore*… but that’s by the by.)
Hugo Drax, a man obsessed with space, like some sort of psychopathic Patrick Moore, has built seven Moonraker space shuttles. He’s sold one to NASA, and somehow kept the others secret from the whole world. But when one of his secret space shuttles develops an irreparable fault, Drax steals the Moonraker he sold to NASA, because he needs a compliment of six for his fiendish plan to wipe out the entire human race using some sort of lethal sap extracted from a rare black orchid found only in the upper reaches of the Amazon, and then repopulate the planet with a Nietzschean-like super-race. If that wasn’t nutty enough, Drax also makes an elementary personnel blunder by employing the buffoonish steel-teethed Jaws to handle his security. Clearly, the man needs professional help.
We can forgive Drax his sins, however, because he has a genuine hidden talent: he is a hysterically funny stand-up comic, capable of delivering a stream of straight-faced witticisms that makes Bond’s relentless innuendos sound like the awkward stumbling of a just-started-wanking teenager. Here are a few choice samples of Drax’s cutting wit:
“Look after Mr Bond. See that some harm comes to him.”
“James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.”
“At least I shall have the pleasure of putting you out of my misery.”
“You defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you.”
Mark my words, if Drax had decided to give-up all that space nonsense he could’ve made it big on the late night alternative comedy circuit.
WHAT I LEARNED
• If one of your friends hatches a bonkers plot to eradicate life on Earth, don’t give up on him: get him a guitar or a set of watercolour paints. He may turn out to be the next Jimmi Hendrix, or Vincent Van Gogh.
• *In space, nobody cares if Roger Moore raises an eyebrow.
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981)
SOLARIS, THE NAME given to submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) and the mainstay of the British nuclear deterrent force during the 1970s and ‘80s comes under threat when the spy ship St Georges is sunk accidentally in the Ionian Sea, and ATAC, a missile launching/detection device sinks with it. The British must recover ATAC, or at the very least prevent it from falling into enemy hands, at all costs. Do the British send in the SAS, the elite special operative force, to recover this vital equipment? Do the British engage the services of their highly-trained navy? Do they even ask for help from the US Navy Seals? No, they do not; such actions would be far too sensible for the lackadaisical MI6. Instead, the British Government ask an ageing marine biologist to find ATAC for them. So when the ageing marine biologist and his wife are murdered, the ATAC device is left rusting somewhere at the bottom of the sea, and with the Russians hot on the trail, when the British Secret Service decide to get off their arses and do something about it and M finally hands James Bond a file marked ‘For Yours Only’, surely it should have read, ‘It’s All Gone Terribly Pear-Shaped, And We Now Wish We’d Done Things Properly’ instead?
For Your Eyes Only often feels like a particularly grim version of Eurotrash. Instead of silly European Antoine De Caunes as presenter, how about Hector Gonzales, a Cuban hitman who wipes-out families with a crossbow! How about East German psychopathic skiing/shooting champion Erich Kriegler? Or nutty-boy Emile Leopold Loque, a Belgian ‘enforcer’, who escaped prison by strangling his psychiatrist? Or Ari Kristatos, a drug smuggling Communist thug who fancies under-age girls? Perhaps he’s in league with slimy fifty-four year old British Secret Service agent James Bond, who is desperate to shag twenty-four year old Melina Havelock, daughter of the murdered marine biologist?
WHAT I LEARNED
• When planning your holidays, remember to avoid Europe. It’s full of assassins, Communists, and seedy old men who keep reading Lolita.
• The British Secret Service will never call a man out to fix their video player; they’ll simply can prod it a few times with a Phillips screwdriver and hope for the best.
OCTOPUSSY (1983)
IN WHICH JAMES BOND, in order to precipitate his mission (something about fake Faberge Eggs and the planned detonation of a nuclear bomb at a NATO airbase, or something*) reinvents himself as a Clouseau-like Master of Disguise! A crocodile moustache, a silly hat and a uniform, and presto! Bond is transformed from a suave secret agent into a General of a South American Army! A bright red shirt and a black leather tunic swiftly turns agent 007 into a circus acrobat! And the piéce de résistance (drum roll, please…) A slap of white paint, a big red nose, floppy shoes and baggy yellow clothes… James Bond is a clown!* That’s entertainment, folks!
*The screenwriters don’t bother to make any of the major plot details clear, so I’m not going to bother to try to figure out what the hell’s going on.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Just when you think you know somebody, they go and surprise you by revealing that they have a hitherto-hidden talent for dressing-up in silly clothes and defusing a nuclear bomb.
• * This makes a refreshing change: instead of having a clown dressed-up as James Bond, we’ve got James Bond dressed-up as a clown!
A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)
FOLLOWING THE OBLIGATORY pre-credits action sequence (which is nothing special here), A View To A Kill begins with a lacklustre soft-porn title sequence featuring silhouettes of naked women, covered in luminous paint, writhing to crap 80’s pop music; it’s so hackneyed and boringly un-erotic that even quintessential naff-80’s-film-director Adrian Lynne (Fatal Attraction, 9½ Weeks) would probably have rejected it as being rubbish. Things go down-hill from here.
Let’s pause for a moment to remember where we are, and how we got here. James Bond is the creation of Ian Fleming, a writer who confessed to writing books which were anti-intelligentsia, with no message or deeper meaning, but which were written instead for “…warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes or beds”. Bond had made the leap from the printed page to the big screen with remarkable ease, because, arguably, Bond is a one-dimensional character, more suited to action-cinema, with its scant regard for depth of characterisation, than to the internal emotional complexity demanded of characters created for novels. Fleming’s James Bond lead the life any man would want to live (well, any man who didn’t eat quiche, anyway); he bedded the most beautiful women in the world, he wore the finest clothes, he had the best toys in the toy box, he travelled extensively (he wasn’t tied to a desk-but even if he was, he still had a very sexy secretary to flirt with), and he had a licence to kill.
The 60’s movies found their stride almost from the moment Maurice Binder’s gun-barrel graphic appeared on cinema screens. The perfect casting of Sean Connery; the visual style developed almost instinctively by directors Terrance Young and Guy Hamilton; Peter Hunt’s astonishing skills as a second-unit director and film editor (Hunt’s frenetic cutting virtually invented action cinema); and the playful sexual sadism of the scripts… all of these things are evidence that the 60’s Bond films were made by people who were perfectly attuned to the mindset of their audiences, but, more importantly, they were so insightful, so creative, that they could think ahead of their audience. The Bond films didn’t follow trends. Bond films set the trends.
After a shaky start in the early 1970’s, the Bond films soon found their feet again. Roger Moore’s amiable interpretation, though occasionally irritating, smug and unconvincing, coupled with an altogether lighter, more outlandishly cartoon nature to the narratives (re-inventing Bond as a straight-man feed to screamingly funny grotesques- such as Jaws) was a winning formula, at least in terms of box office takings.
Midway through the 80’s, however, and you’ve got A View To A Kill, a film about microchips, and which features Grace Jones. Ah well.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Duran Duran were rubbish.
• A View To A Kill is rubbish.
• The 80’s were rubbish.
THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)
REMEMBER WHEN YOU and your school mates used to argue fiercely over who would win a punch-up between Superman and Batman? Or a brawl between Starsky and Hutch? Or if the Daleks teamed-up with the Cybermen, would they be able to beat-up Dr Who and the Timelords? Well, such bruising playground speculation had obviously crossed the minds of the Bond film screenwriters as they sat down to conceive The Living Daylights.
“What if,” ponders screenwriter Richard Maibaum, “the 00-Section had a fight with… I dunno, the Navy Seals?”.
“Yeah,” enthuses fellow Bond-scribe Michael G Wilson, “or if the 00-Section had a rumble with the SAS?”
“The SAS! Cool! The S-bloody-A-S! Yeah, let’s do it,” drools Richard. “And let’s have the 00-Section beat the fu…”
“… Absolutely, I get the picture”, says Michael, “and we’ll make it the pre-credits teaser, and we’ll introduce the new Bond, and it’ll be wicked.”
“Ace,” says Richard.
“Cool,” says Michael. There’s a pause. “So who would win a scrap between Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk?”
Timothy Dalton is James Bond. And about bloody time, too. In The Living Daylights, we catch our first sight of Dalton/Bond (apart from the ‘gun-barrel’ opening) in long shot as he scales the Rock of Gibraltar, part of a routine 00 Section training exercise with the SAS. But someone is killing off the 00 agents, and as an agent plummets screaming to his death, Dalton/Bond whips his head round to reveal himself. It’s a marvellous introductory scene-the best since Connery/Bond’s smouldering casino scene in Dr No. Very shortly after, Dalton/Bond head-butts the assassin as they brawl inside a jeep, laden with explosives, as it plunges off the edge of a cliff. Clearly, the Roger Moore days are over…
WHAT I LEARNED
• Ah-Ha were rubbish.
• If you want to make an immediate impression, head-butt somebody off a cliff.
LICENCE TO KILL (1989)
WHO’D BE A FRIEND to James Bond? For in the most adult and violent of the Bond movies, this is the question that the usually amiable Felix Leiter must have asked himself. Having risked his life countless times to help out 007, Felix Leiter has finally resigned from ‘the Agency’, taken a job with the (comparatively) less stressful DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), and has even decided to give-up bachelorhood. What a shame, then, that he has chosen James Bond to be his best man, for within hours of cutting the wedding cake and making come-to-bed eyes at his lovely new wife, Leiter is fed to a tank of man-eating sharks whilst his wife is brutally raped and killed by a pock-faced South American Drugs Lord who wears pink cardigans and kisses lizards. Bummer.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Never ask The Most Dangerous Man In The World™ to be the best man at your wedding - you’re only asking for trouble.
• If you’re going to settle down, do it properly. Take-up gardening/stamp collecting/building model aircraft, or something. Becoming a federal agent in the war against drugs isn’t going to give you an awful lot of time to crash-out on the sofa watching Neighbours.
GOLDENEYE (1995)
ONCE UPON A TIME, there were two best friends called James Bond and Alec Trevalyan. James and Alec were spies; they were 00 Agents, licensed to kill, working for the British Secret Service. One day, Alec woke-up and thought to himself, “Hmmm… I’m pretty fed-up with being a silly 00 Agent. I don’t get paid enough to risk my life as often as I am called upon to do. I’m sick of James bloody Bond, who always gets the best missions, and who always gets to drive the best and fastest cars… and he sleeps with the best-looking women, and he gets to do all that oh-so witty banter with Q… and he never does any bloody paperwork, and he never comes to the Christmas party - and guess who has to organise the flipping thing every year… yep, muggings here; nobody appreciates how bloomin’ difficult it is trying to get a sensible, non-lethal Christmas tree from Q Branch. And on top of all that, I’ve had to lie about my parents - I don’t think MI6 would appreciate the fact that my parents were Lienz Cossacks, and that I secretly harbour feelings of resentment towards the British at the way my mum and dad were treated by the British army during the war. Bloody rotten job this is. I never wanted to be a spy, anyway. I always wanted to be a Lumberjack.*”
So Alec Trevalyan decides to do something about all these gloomy thoughts he has. But instead of going to a psychiatrist, and being medicated with Prozac, silly Alec fakes his own death whilst on a mission with his friend James, and then spends the next six years plotting to steal billions from the London stock market, and then works out how to cover his tracks by using GoldenEye - a top secret spy satellite which uses nuclear explosions to form an electromagnetic pulse which can disable and destroy electronic devices. It’s always sad when you discover that one of your mates is a certifiable fruitcake, isn’t it?
GoldenEye features a new Bond-Pierce Brosnan (not bad, not great, but not bad); a new, female M (who gets some cracking dialogue); a fetching, liberated Miss Moneypenny; and a new direction for the Bond movies. And exuberant, thrilling stuff it is too. It’s all utterly barmy, of course. But that’s what we want, isn’t it?
WHAT I LEARNED
• In every office, there’s always a socially-inadequate loser-type from Middle Management who ruins everybody’s fun by constantly whingeing about being passed over for promotion again, or how the girls in the Secretariat snigger at him behind his back. Keep an eye on him: he may well turn out to be a double-crossing terrorist with grand schemes to team-up with the Russian mafia and steal millions from the Bank of England.
• *He’s a Lumberjack and he’s OK; he sleeps all night and he works all day.
TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997)
ELLIOT CARVER, HEAD of the Carver Media Group Network, is pissed-off because (a) his wife loves a previous lover (James Bond) rather than him, (b) China won’t broadcast his crappy programmes, and (c) his conglomerate’s initials don’t create a nifty acronym - CMGM is about as imposing as MGM, or AOL and with acronyms that shite, even little kids snigger at him behind his back. Naturally, Elliot (still smarting over the fact that his parents named him after a character from ET) wants to trigger World War Three (WW3), so that everything will be talked about in the macho-world terminology of acronyms and initials. Everything will be nuclear weapons, though he will reject, as did successive US and USSSR regimes, the catchy ICBMs: Accelerated Elimination of Land-Based Strategic Missiles. If it doesn’t smell of death, it’s not for a madman. MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction. Hah Hah! Die!!!
WHAT I LEARNED
• If your wife keeps moaning the name of her previous boyfriend during sex, she probably doesn’t love you as much as she pretends to, so you’d be much better off finding somebody else. Put ‘Divorce the bitch’ on your ‘to do’ list post-haste.
• Don’t trust men who like acronyms
• Lighten-up!
I Learned From
The James Bond Movies
*Note: I am indebted to Peter Smyth of the newsgroup alt.fan.jamesbond for his help with the writing of this article. – Vince.
DR NO (1962)
FROM HIS REMARKABLY well-staffed underground base on Crab Key, one of the less well-known Jamaican islands, mad-as-you-like evil scientist Dr No is using atomic energy to ‘topple’ American space rockets, as a favour for the sinister criminal organisation SPECTRE - the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. Presumably, by demonstrating his evil credentials and his keenness to take part in their insane plans for world domination, Dr No is hoping that SPECTRE will let him take over their gang, when really all he has to do to improve his social life is to get a girlfriend, join an Arts and Crafts society, and make friends of his own.
Being the world’s Superpower, the Americans have taken a laid-back attitude to the whole affair; they’ve stationed some cool CIA agents in Kingston, Jamaica, to soak-up some sun, have a few beers, listen to calypso, and keep an eye out for anything unusual. In short, America is in control of the situation, and knows that there’s nothing to panic about.
In contrast, the British are running around like headless chickens when one of their agents misses a telephone call, and put Secret Service agent James Bond on the first plane to Jamaica to find out what has happened to him. Bond is much more pro-active than his CIA counterparts, and after a near-fatal encounter with a tarantula, bedding beautiful women, killing a chauffeur, wrecking several cars, and, finally, being chased through marshland by a flame-throwing tank disguised as a dragon (don’t ask), he is captured by Dr No and invited to dinner. Under the guise of making polite dinner conversation, Bond is keen to show-off just how smart he is at having figured-out that Dr No’s nefarious scheme is being financed by Red China…
Bond: “With your disregard for human life you must be working for the East…” To which Dr No, unimpressed, replies: “East, West… Points of the compass, Mr Bond.”
There is, needless to say, a stony silence during the After Eight mints.
WHAT I LEARNED
• If you don’t know where China is, don’t be afraid to say so; mumbling something incomprehensible about compasses isn’t going to disguise your appalling geography.
• And if you’re going to take it out on someone, don’t bother the Americans-go and knick your old Geography teacher’s car, or something.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)
UNDERSTANDABLY PISSED-OFF by James Bond’s meddling in the Dr No affair, SPECTRE are keen to exact their revenge upon him and the British Secret Service. But who could be smart enough to conceive a plot fiendish enough to satisfy the picky SPECTRE No 1, a man who was probably unimpressed with every Christmas present his parents gave him? Why, Czechoslovakian chess Grandmaster Kronsteen, of course! He plays chess all day, so obviously he’s a master plotter (it helps that he’s already a member of SPECTRE, of course). Kronsteen’s Cunning Plan™ is thus:
He wants to:
(a) Lure the British into a trap by baiting them with the Lecktor - a Russian cipher decoder machine - thus antagonising Anglo/Soviet relations;
(b) Get James Bond to shag an attractive Russian cipher clerk, which SPECTRE will capture on film;
(C) Kill Bond and the girl, fake their suicide notes, and then use the footage of their lovemaking to embarrass the British;
(d) Err… that’s about it.
Anyway, the mysterious SPECTRE No 1 rubber-stamps Kronsteen’s arch plot (presumably because he couldn’t be arsed to think of anything better himself), and assigns a butch lesbian old trout to oversee the operation (presumably because he couldn’t be arsed to take control of things himself). She in turn recruits hard-as-you-like Red Grant to handle the rough stuff, and the very lovely Tatiana Romanova to seduce James Bond. How could anything possibly go wrong?
Err… Naturally, the British suspect everything is a feeble trap right from the very start (though Kronsteen, bless him, had anticipated this and is playing a game of bluff, double-bluff, and counter bluff your double-bluff… or something), and obviously it all goes wrong anyway, but that’s what you get if you rely on a nerd to do your thinking for you.
The scene is set for a roller-coaster ride of action and espionage which- after the intriguing and remarkable (if episodically entertaining) Dr No - pretty much catapults the Bond movies into the super-league of box-office and cultural successes, and, in Sean Connery’s confident, dangerous, and highly-seductive performance, makes James Bond an icon. If there is one scene which encapsulates the cinematic bravado and invention of the Bond series (and the underrated, embryonic Dr No had plenty of these too), then it’s in From Russia With Love’s fantastic confrontation between Bond and Grant aboard The Orient Express. Here, explicit violence, Hitchcockian-suspense, wry humour and class snobbery are fused into a fascinating cocktail, the like of which had never been seen in cinema before, and which every subsequent Bond film would attempt to replicate, with varying degrees of success.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Russian chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov is obviously a SPECTRE agent. Nigel Short, on the other hand, is a poor substitute for Sean Connery.
• SPECTRE No. 1 is a rubbish boss-a bit David Brent.
• Here’s an end to all those ‘who’s-the-best-Bond?’ pub arguments: Sean Connery is James Bond.
GOLDFINGER (1964)
IN WHICH SECRET SERVICE agent James Bond, 007, licensed to kill, The Most Dangerous Man In The World™, widely considered to be the prototype for The Hollywood Action-Hero- challenges criminal mastermind Auric Goldfinger (a man who has allied himself with Red China and the cream of the American criminal underworld in his fiendish plan to detonate a nuclear device inside Fort Knox) to a deadly game of… golf.* Gosh. Thrilling stuff!
Never mind. Goldfinger more than compensates for this in other areas (and besides, the golfing scenes are lovingly filmed, immaculately performed, and hugely entertaining) such as: Goldfinger’s henchman: the mute, hat-throwing Korean, Odd-Job; Bond’s car, the superb Aston Martin DB5, fitted-out by Q Branch with bullet-proof windscreens, radar tracking screen, front-wing machine guns, rotating blades in its wheel hubcaps, and best of all, that wonderful passenger-side ejector seat; the tragic, startling death of Jill Masterson - she’s covered head-to-foot in gold paint in a movie moment that is nothing less than iconic; the celebrated Bond-is-threatened-with-a-deadly-laserbeam-pointed-at-his-groin-scene, with it’s classic exchange of dialogue: Bond: ‘You expect me to talk?’/Goldfinger: ‘No, Mr Bond – I expect you to die!’… and much, much more, in a film that ranks amongst the very best of the Bond range, and therefore, the very best cinema has to offer.
Who can blame the podgy Mr Goldfinger for his obsession with all things golden? He is, after all, named Auric Goldfinger, and with his strange pigmentation and golden-ginger hair, he even looks like… well, he looks like iron pyrite, actually. Fools Gold.
*Satisfyingly, both players cheat - though it is, of course, Mr Bond who wins.
WHAT I LEARNED
• If you’re involved in a deadly battle of wits with a criminal mastermind, you should at least try to take it seriously: engaging him in a game of tiddlywinks, or a protracted game of twister isn’t going to impress anybody.
• Everybody should own an Aston Martin DB5.
• Take care when naming your child, especially if you have a distinctive or unusual surname-you wouldn’t want your child to grow up with a pathological obsession for the thing he is named after. This applies doubly for anybody whose surname is ‘Dildo’.
THUNDERBALL (1965)
IMAGINE IT’S 1965, you’re a cabinet minister in Harold Wilson’s Labour government and you’ve been called to an emergency cabinet meeting at Ten Downing Street. You sit down at a big table (possibly next to the Chancellor Of The Exchequer, who owes you a fiver) and you look around you at all the familiar faces wondering what sort of emergency needs to be dealt with this week - a sex scandal, perhaps, or another pay dispute with the unions. Then Mr Wilson stands up, puffs fiercely on his pipe, and says, “Good morning gentlemen, I’m sorry to have had to call you in on a Saturday, but there’s this crackpot organization called SPECTRE who have broken into a top-security NATO Air Force base in Sussex, and stolen an RAF Vulcan bomber armed with two nuclear warheads, which they intend to use to blow up a major city unless we pay them ten million pounds.” And then you just know that today is going to be different.
At the start of Thunderball, 007 is slinking panther-like around a health clinic - which just goes to show that a life of excitement, vodka martinis and expensive cigarettes can take its toll on even the most robust of physiques (there’s hope for this reviewer yet!) but it’s not long before our wily secret agent persuades M with the flimsiest of evidence (a photo of a beautiful woman) that he should be on the first plane to the Bahamas, where he spends an inordinate amount of time in a wet-suit, swimming with sharks. Now, it’s fair to admit that Commander Bond is a man of many talents (not least in the bedroom), but subtlety ain’t one of them, as his attempts to rattle SPECTRE no. 2 Emile Largo into revealing his villainous identity prove…
Bond: “I thought I saw a spectre at your shoulder…”
Largo: “What do you mean?”
Bond: “The spectre of defeat”
This roughly translates as:
Bond: “You’re a nutcase working for SPECTRE, aren’t you?”
Largo: “I might be. What’s it to you?”
Bond: “I’m on to you, matey. Just you watch it.”
One other observation about Thunderball (which is in the premier league of Bond films): Bond’s casual misogyny has, up to this point, gone unremarked by the many women he has bedded and swiftly dumped; Thunderball readdresses the issue in that it introduces a thoroughly emancipated villainess, the highly-sexed Fiona Volpe; after having very wild sex with Bond, she delivers this scathing rejection of Bond’s morally suspect ‘for-Queen-and-Country’ attitude to sexual relationships: “I forgot your ego, Mr Bond. James Bond, who only has to make love to a woman and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing. She repents, then immediately returns to the side of right and virtue. But not this one. What a blow it must have been … You, having a failure…”
Bond, of course, isn’t the least bit put-out: “You can’t win ‘em all,” he sighs…
WHAT I LEARNED
• Some days simply don’t turn out the way you expect them to: just when you think you can spend a lazy Saturday mowing the lawn, some bastard goes and steals a nuclear bomb and ruins everything.
• Leave subtlety to those who can do it with confident finesse; if you want to tactfully hint that your wife is putting on a bit of weight, calling her a Fat Cow isn’t the best approach to take.
• Bad girls are great in bed but tend to be very stroppy afterwards.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967)
JAMES BOND IN JAPAN! SPECTRE have built this massive spacecraft-eater-thing which they use to swallow-up US and Soviet space rockets… Sorry, but even writing that sentence makes me shake my head in amused, admiring disbelief, and when you add to that the fact that SPECTRE’s base is in a hollowed-out volcano on a remote Japanese island, and that they inexplicably intend to precipitate Word War 3… you swiftly realise that SPECTRE are desperately in need of a big hug and immediate counselling.
James Bond is sent to Japan to investigate; true to form, he indulges in casual sex, gets involved in violent punch-ups, uses the latest Q Branch technology (notably a heavily-armed Gyrocopter called ‘Little Nellie’) to blow-up as many things as possible, and dispenses his usual quotient of gallows humour witticisms. He also trains as a ninja, and gets married to a Japanese island fisher girl. As you do.
The moment we’ve all been waiting for arrives when James Bond finally gets to meet the head of SPECTRE: a small bald bloke with a cat-obsession. He introduces himself…
Small-Bald-Bloke-With-A-Cat-Obsession: “James Bond. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Ernst Stavro Blofeld. They told me you were assassinated in Hong Kong.”
Bond: “Yes, this is my second life.”
Blofeld: “You only live twice, Mr Bond.”
…And the moment is perfect. As is the lunacy and wit of You Only Live Twice.
WHAT I LEARNED
• If your job seems dull, it’s not too late to vary your routine. Why not train as a ninja or marry a girl you’ve just met?
• People who like cats are insane. They live in hollowed-out volcanoes, and secretly harbour insane plots to start World War 3. Dog people are much more sensible.
ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (1969)
(Reviewer takes a deep breath, and sits down to write a love letter…)
LIFE, AS GARETH Southgate once said, is full of regrets and lost opportunities. Consider, for example, the career of 'swinging 60s' drummer Pete Best – one minute he’s the most popular member of a Mersybeat pop combo who are destined for great things, the next minute he’s watching from the sidelines as Ringo Starr takes his place behind the drum kit, and the band – The Beatles, for those who need reminding - carve their place in history. Or take the long-forgotten Australian model/actor George Lazenby. Just how stupid was he to listen to the council given by 'trusting' friends, when they advised him to ditch the role of James Bond after one movie, stating that the 'Bond phenomena' had run its day and was becoming increasingly out of place in the 'counter culture' rebellion spearheaded by low-budget films such as Easy Rider? For contrary to the opinion of Lazenby’s fair-weather chums, James Bond has never lost favour with the movie-going public, and remains as iconic now, in the 21st century, as he did when we first saw him 40 years ago, dressed immaculately in evening dress, insouciantly smoking a cigarette as he flirts effortlessly with a beautiful woman over a high-stakes game of Baccarat. Furthermore, despite the critical panning Lazenby received from the press, and his one and only Bond movie’s disappointing box office, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is quite simply the finest Bond movie made to date, due in no small part to Lazenby’s interpretation of the secret agent. Not for the first time, the critics and the movie-going audience, not to mention Lazenby’s trusted confidants, quite simply got it wrong.
OHMSS is unique amongst the Bond films for several reasons: most obviously, it is the only Bond film to star George Lazenby as 007; it’s the only film directed by ex-Bond film Editor, Peter Hunt; it’s the most faithful of the series to the Ian Fleming source material (word for word in some scenes); it’s quite possibly the most patriotic Bond movie (OHMSS treats the British Secret Service as a deadly serious organisation); it’s the only Bond film in which Commander Bond falls in love and gets married; and, of course, OHMSS stands out from the cannon because it has a tragic ending.
Peter Hunt’s direction is outstanding. Purely on a visual level, OHMSS is a fantastic film; no other Bond movie can match it for its cinematography, and its edgy mise-en-scéne lends it an urgency missing from the sprawling Bond movies that were to become the norm for the next decade. Of particular note is the frenetic editing style, a Peter Hunt trademark. The fight scenes and action sequences in OHMSS are fast, brutal and thrilling. That Peter Hunt never returned as the man-behind-the-megaphone on a Bond film production is a tragedy as great as the non-reappearance of George Lazenby. It’s not simply for the bitter ending that watching OHMSS brings out a sense of regret in this reviewer.
So what of Lazenby? What was he like in the role of the world’s most dangerous man? Lazenby/Bond comes across as a rather contradictory character. There’s the brutish force of Connery/Bond, but Lazenby lacks the refinement and sophistication that Connery (and later, Moore, Dalton & Brosnan) would bring to the character. Instead he exhibits an awkward physicality; oddly, he lacks the grace that one might assume a model would bring with him. Underneath this, there’s an air of vulnerability: he’s a wounded Bond; a thousand times more human than the Bond we would see throughout the 1970s. No doubt these attributes are the result of an inexperienced actor faced with the daunting prospect of stepping into the shoes of an actor hugely acclaimed for his performance, but whatever the circumstances, Lazenby’s take on James Bond is by no means the disaster most contemporary critics proclaimed it to be. Far from it.
Of the supporting cast, Diana Rigg stands out (she always does), breathing life into Tracy; portraying her as suicidal and vital at the same time – a good trick if you can do it (I certainly can’t). Rigg’s casting is simply one of the best ideas the Bond production team ever made – if James Bond is to be married (and swiftly widowed) then it makes perfect sense that his bride should be Emma Peel (rather than Lois Lane -Tomorrow Never Dies-the very idea that a quintessentially English hero such as Commander James Bond would ever marry an American doesn’t bear thinking about). Telly Savalas is a muscular, threatening Blofeld; a genuinely scary Bond villain.
OHMSS has an absolutely superb soundtrack, courtesy of veteran Bond scorer, John Barry. And there’s a real poignancy to the Louis Armstrong song We Have All The Time In The World; Mrs Tracy Bond is murdered on her wedding day, and George Lazenby would never again play James Bond. Like the sands in the hourglass from the film’s opening titles, time is something this very human James Bond has in very short supply…
WHAT I LEARNED
• I don’t care what anybody says, George Lazenby was terrific as James Bond.
• This is easily the best Bond film of all.
• I’m in love with Diana Rigg.
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)
IF EVER THERE was an award for Dedication To The Cause Of Grand-Scale Insane Super-Criminal Plans Against Humanity, it would surely go to ex-SPECTRE big-shot Ernst Stavro Blofeld, a man who doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘small’, and who never takes a holiday because he’s too busy planning to hold the world to ransom for the umpteenth time. In Diamonds Are Forever, The Man-With-The-Cat has obviously taken the advice of his Estate Agent, who has pointed out that basing his criminal operations in hollowed-out volcanoes (and atop Alpine mountains) is bound to attract attention, and so Blofeld has sensibly de-camped to Las Vegas, a place of such utter lunacy and tastelessness that his grandiose mad schemes seem perfectly normal.
Blofeld’s ‘Plan B from Outer Space’ involves the construction of a fucking great big diamond-powered laser beam mounted on a satellite in orbit around the Earth, with which he intends to blackmail the world (where does he get these ideas from?). Predictably, it’s not long before everything’s gone wrong again and James Bond is hot on his heels*, so to facilitate a hasty getaway, Blofeld puts on a frilly wig, slaps on some lipstick, totters into high heels and attempts to pass himself of as a woman. But given that he’s spent the entire movie mincing around with a cigarette holder and dropping effete Noel Coward-esque witticisms, nobody is the least bit surprised when Blofeld reinvents himself as an ageing Drag Queen.
*It’s amusingly obvious that The World’s Most Famous Scotsman™, Sean Connery, has obviously been spending his time away from Bondage in a fat pie shop, which makes me wonder if Thunderball’s tagline – “Look Up! Look Down! Look Out! Here Comes The Biggest Bond Of All” wouldn’t be much more appropriate for this film!
WHAT I LEARNED
• Though dedication and resilience are admirable qualities, sometimes you just have to admit that you simply don’t have the talents necessary for the job. Give up. See a Careers Advisor.
• If you like tousling with butch men, spending your evenings bitching to a cat, and dressing-up in women’s clothing, it’s probably time to come out of the closet. Go to a Barbra Streisand concert.
LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)
WHEN AGENTS IN New York, San Monique, and New Orleans are killed in the same day by voodoo-worshipping super-fly drug-dealers, the British Secret Service find their stiff-upper lip cultural imperialism under threat from the unlikeliest of sources: Blaxploitation film clichés. Faced with the prospect of having the Old Boy Network, cucumber sandwiches, rained-out cricket matches, and public school buggery marathons usurped by bad-ass jive-talking bro’s, crack whores, and funk-adelic Isaac Hayes disco-action (damn right, baby!), the British respond by dropping Roger Moore in the centre of Shaft-era New York, and signing-up Paul and Linda McCartney to write some silly songs.
WHAT I LEARNED
• "Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine..?." Not Roger Moore, baby.
• Afro haircuts were cool.
• Wings were rubbish.
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)
THIS IS REALLY a two-hour public information film on the economics of the early seventies dressed-up as a James Bond film - which perhaps explains why it’s dramatically unsatisfying and surprisingly drab in places. But beneath all the misguided references to the then-topical theme of an energy crisis (hardly the stuff of adventure and escapism), a much more interesting and surreal psycho-drama is struggling to break free: a psychological examination of James Bond and his ultimate nemesis, the one-million-dollar-a-hit Francisco Scaramanga, The Man With The Golden Gun. Even more fascinating is the idea of this dark melodrama being played out against a backdrop of cheap-skate Enter The Dragon bandwagonism. And more fascinating still is the fact that the principal characters - the lethal secret agent James Bond, and the near-psychopathic, sadistic assassin Scaramanga - are played by two actors who seem to be challenging each other to a game of who can out-suave the other. Christopher Lee, playing Scaramanga, oscillates between creepy and unflappable, whilst ‘quintessential Englishman’ Roger Moore (as James Bond) is so laid-back and gentile that it seems as if he’s wandered in from a matinee performance of Blythe Spirit. Add to this the outrageously coarse lyrics of the title song (‘He’s got a powerful weapon…’), Britt Ekland’s Mary Goodnight - the best ever screen bimbo-in-a-bikini, a waxwork effigy of Roger Moore, and a midget butler, and the result is one of the oddest films of the 1970’s… and that’s saying something.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Sod Mike Myers and his Austin Powers films – some Bond movies are simply beyond parody.
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977)
(CUE THE ‘JAMES BOND THEME’) HMS Ranger, a British nuclear submarine, is attacked - and then stolen - by an unknown enemy. The Russians reveal that a similar fate has befallen their nuclear vessel, Potempkin. In London, M promises to “put our best man on it at once”. The message reaches James Bond, who is called away from a romantic liaison with a lovely young lady in a cosy log cabin somewhere in the Austrian Alps. “But James,” pouts the young woman, “I need you!” “So does England,” responds 007, as he prepares to ski down a mountain. But all is not as it seems, for the woman reveals herself to be an enemy agent, and soon Bond is attacked by a company of Russians on skis… An exciting chase ensues, during which Bond despatches several Russians to their deaths whilst skilfully navigating the perilous mountain ravines. Bond completes his escape by skiing off the edge of a cliff… whereupon he freefalls for what seems like an eternity before ripping open his parachute – cheekily adorned with the Union Jack - and as our hero floats safely to the ground, the ‘James Bond theme’ segues into the beautiful voice of Carly Simon, who sings, “Nobody does it better…” And how right she is.
What follows is a splendid reworking of all the familiar Bond clichés, but it’s done with immense good humour and considerable style. And as James Bond, Roger Moore presents us with a likeable, debonair, enthusiastic playboy secret agent; a man who is so fore-square and decently English that one suspects that if you cut him in half you’d find the Union Jack imprinted in his body, like a stick of Brighton rock.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Just when you’ve given up all hope, James Bond skis off the edge of a cliff, and the old magic is back.
• You can say what you like about the English, but when it comes to saving the world in style, nobody does it better. Except the Americans. And possibly the Russians. And the Japanese. But apart from them, nobody does it better.
MOONRAKER (1979)
JAMES BOND IN SPACE! (Some people might have been thinking that by this point outer space was precisely the right place to send Roger Moore*… but that’s by the by.)
Hugo Drax, a man obsessed with space, like some sort of psychopathic Patrick Moore, has built seven Moonraker space shuttles. He’s sold one to NASA, and somehow kept the others secret from the whole world. But when one of his secret space shuttles develops an irreparable fault, Drax steals the Moonraker he sold to NASA, because he needs a compliment of six for his fiendish plan to wipe out the entire human race using some sort of lethal sap extracted from a rare black orchid found only in the upper reaches of the Amazon, and then repopulate the planet with a Nietzschean-like super-race. If that wasn’t nutty enough, Drax also makes an elementary personnel blunder by employing the buffoonish steel-teethed Jaws to handle his security. Clearly, the man needs professional help.
We can forgive Drax his sins, however, because he has a genuine hidden talent: he is a hysterically funny stand-up comic, capable of delivering a stream of straight-faced witticisms that makes Bond’s relentless innuendos sound like the awkward stumbling of a just-started-wanking teenager. Here are a few choice samples of Drax’s cutting wit:
“Look after Mr Bond. See that some harm comes to him.”
“James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.”
“At least I shall have the pleasure of putting you out of my misery.”
“You defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you.”
Mark my words, if Drax had decided to give-up all that space nonsense he could’ve made it big on the late night alternative comedy circuit.
WHAT I LEARNED
• If one of your friends hatches a bonkers plot to eradicate life on Earth, don’t give up on him: get him a guitar or a set of watercolour paints. He may turn out to be the next Jimmi Hendrix, or Vincent Van Gogh.
• *In space, nobody cares if Roger Moore raises an eyebrow.
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981)
SOLARIS, THE NAME given to submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) and the mainstay of the British nuclear deterrent force during the 1970s and ‘80s comes under threat when the spy ship St Georges is sunk accidentally in the Ionian Sea, and ATAC, a missile launching/detection device sinks with it. The British must recover ATAC, or at the very least prevent it from falling into enemy hands, at all costs. Do the British send in the SAS, the elite special operative force, to recover this vital equipment? Do the British engage the services of their highly-trained navy? Do they even ask for help from the US Navy Seals? No, they do not; such actions would be far too sensible for the lackadaisical MI6. Instead, the British Government ask an ageing marine biologist to find ATAC for them. So when the ageing marine biologist and his wife are murdered, the ATAC device is left rusting somewhere at the bottom of the sea, and with the Russians hot on the trail, when the British Secret Service decide to get off their arses and do something about it and M finally hands James Bond a file marked ‘For Yours Only’, surely it should have read, ‘It’s All Gone Terribly Pear-Shaped, And We Now Wish We’d Done Things Properly’ instead?
For Your Eyes Only often feels like a particularly grim version of Eurotrash. Instead of silly European Antoine De Caunes as presenter, how about Hector Gonzales, a Cuban hitman who wipes-out families with a crossbow! How about East German psychopathic skiing/shooting champion Erich Kriegler? Or nutty-boy Emile Leopold Loque, a Belgian ‘enforcer’, who escaped prison by strangling his psychiatrist? Or Ari Kristatos, a drug smuggling Communist thug who fancies under-age girls? Perhaps he’s in league with slimy fifty-four year old British Secret Service agent James Bond, who is desperate to shag twenty-four year old Melina Havelock, daughter of the murdered marine biologist?
WHAT I LEARNED
• When planning your holidays, remember to avoid Europe. It’s full of assassins, Communists, and seedy old men who keep reading Lolita.
• The British Secret Service will never call a man out to fix their video player; they’ll simply can prod it a few times with a Phillips screwdriver and hope for the best.
OCTOPUSSY (1983)
IN WHICH JAMES BOND, in order to precipitate his mission (something about fake Faberge Eggs and the planned detonation of a nuclear bomb at a NATO airbase, or something*) reinvents himself as a Clouseau-like Master of Disguise! A crocodile moustache, a silly hat and a uniform, and presto! Bond is transformed from a suave secret agent into a General of a South American Army! A bright red shirt and a black leather tunic swiftly turns agent 007 into a circus acrobat! And the piéce de résistance (drum roll, please…) A slap of white paint, a big red nose, floppy shoes and baggy yellow clothes… James Bond is a clown!* That’s entertainment, folks!
*The screenwriters don’t bother to make any of the major plot details clear, so I’m not going to bother to try to figure out what the hell’s going on.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Just when you think you know somebody, they go and surprise you by revealing that they have a hitherto-hidden talent for dressing-up in silly clothes and defusing a nuclear bomb.
• * This makes a refreshing change: instead of having a clown dressed-up as James Bond, we’ve got James Bond dressed-up as a clown!
A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)
FOLLOWING THE OBLIGATORY pre-credits action sequence (which is nothing special here), A View To A Kill begins with a lacklustre soft-porn title sequence featuring silhouettes of naked women, covered in luminous paint, writhing to crap 80’s pop music; it’s so hackneyed and boringly un-erotic that even quintessential naff-80’s-film-director Adrian Lynne (Fatal Attraction, 9½ Weeks) would probably have rejected it as being rubbish. Things go down-hill from here.
Let’s pause for a moment to remember where we are, and how we got here. James Bond is the creation of Ian Fleming, a writer who confessed to writing books which were anti-intelligentsia, with no message or deeper meaning, but which were written instead for “…warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes or beds”. Bond had made the leap from the printed page to the big screen with remarkable ease, because, arguably, Bond is a one-dimensional character, more suited to action-cinema, with its scant regard for depth of characterisation, than to the internal emotional complexity demanded of characters created for novels. Fleming’s James Bond lead the life any man would want to live (well, any man who didn’t eat quiche, anyway); he bedded the most beautiful women in the world, he wore the finest clothes, he had the best toys in the toy box, he travelled extensively (he wasn’t tied to a desk-but even if he was, he still had a very sexy secretary to flirt with), and he had a licence to kill.
The 60’s movies found their stride almost from the moment Maurice Binder’s gun-barrel graphic appeared on cinema screens. The perfect casting of Sean Connery; the visual style developed almost instinctively by directors Terrance Young and Guy Hamilton; Peter Hunt’s astonishing skills as a second-unit director and film editor (Hunt’s frenetic cutting virtually invented action cinema); and the playful sexual sadism of the scripts… all of these things are evidence that the 60’s Bond films were made by people who were perfectly attuned to the mindset of their audiences, but, more importantly, they were so insightful, so creative, that they could think ahead of their audience. The Bond films didn’t follow trends. Bond films set the trends.
After a shaky start in the early 1970’s, the Bond films soon found their feet again. Roger Moore’s amiable interpretation, though occasionally irritating, smug and unconvincing, coupled with an altogether lighter, more outlandishly cartoon nature to the narratives (re-inventing Bond as a straight-man feed to screamingly funny grotesques- such as Jaws) was a winning formula, at least in terms of box office takings.
Midway through the 80’s, however, and you’ve got A View To A Kill, a film about microchips, and which features Grace Jones. Ah well.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Duran Duran were rubbish.
• A View To A Kill is rubbish.
• The 80’s were rubbish.
THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987)
REMEMBER WHEN YOU and your school mates used to argue fiercely over who would win a punch-up between Superman and Batman? Or a brawl between Starsky and Hutch? Or if the Daleks teamed-up with the Cybermen, would they be able to beat-up Dr Who and the Timelords? Well, such bruising playground speculation had obviously crossed the minds of the Bond film screenwriters as they sat down to conceive The Living Daylights.
“What if,” ponders screenwriter Richard Maibaum, “the 00-Section had a fight with… I dunno, the Navy Seals?”.
“Yeah,” enthuses fellow Bond-scribe Michael G Wilson, “or if the 00-Section had a rumble with the SAS?”
“The SAS! Cool! The S-bloody-A-S! Yeah, let’s do it,” drools Richard. “And let’s have the 00-Section beat the fu…”
“… Absolutely, I get the picture”, says Michael, “and we’ll make it the pre-credits teaser, and we’ll introduce the new Bond, and it’ll be wicked.”
“Ace,” says Richard.
“Cool,” says Michael. There’s a pause. “So who would win a scrap between Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk?”
Timothy Dalton is James Bond. And about bloody time, too. In The Living Daylights, we catch our first sight of Dalton/Bond (apart from the ‘gun-barrel’ opening) in long shot as he scales the Rock of Gibraltar, part of a routine 00 Section training exercise with the SAS. But someone is killing off the 00 agents, and as an agent plummets screaming to his death, Dalton/Bond whips his head round to reveal himself. It’s a marvellous introductory scene-the best since Connery/Bond’s smouldering casino scene in Dr No. Very shortly after, Dalton/Bond head-butts the assassin as they brawl inside a jeep, laden with explosives, as it plunges off the edge of a cliff. Clearly, the Roger Moore days are over…
WHAT I LEARNED
• Ah-Ha were rubbish.
• If you want to make an immediate impression, head-butt somebody off a cliff.
LICENCE TO KILL (1989)
WHO’D BE A FRIEND to James Bond? For in the most adult and violent of the Bond movies, this is the question that the usually amiable Felix Leiter must have asked himself. Having risked his life countless times to help out 007, Felix Leiter has finally resigned from ‘the Agency’, taken a job with the (comparatively) less stressful DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), and has even decided to give-up bachelorhood. What a shame, then, that he has chosen James Bond to be his best man, for within hours of cutting the wedding cake and making come-to-bed eyes at his lovely new wife, Leiter is fed to a tank of man-eating sharks whilst his wife is brutally raped and killed by a pock-faced South American Drugs Lord who wears pink cardigans and kisses lizards. Bummer.
WHAT I LEARNED
• Never ask The Most Dangerous Man In The World™ to be the best man at your wedding - you’re only asking for trouble.
• If you’re going to settle down, do it properly. Take-up gardening/stamp collecting/building model aircraft, or something. Becoming a federal agent in the war against drugs isn’t going to give you an awful lot of time to crash-out on the sofa watching Neighbours.
GOLDENEYE (1995)
ONCE UPON A TIME, there were two best friends called James Bond and Alec Trevalyan. James and Alec were spies; they were 00 Agents, licensed to kill, working for the British Secret Service. One day, Alec woke-up and thought to himself, “Hmmm… I’m pretty fed-up with being a silly 00 Agent. I don’t get paid enough to risk my life as often as I am called upon to do. I’m sick of James bloody Bond, who always gets the best missions, and who always gets to drive the best and fastest cars… and he sleeps with the best-looking women, and he gets to do all that oh-so witty banter with Q… and he never does any bloody paperwork, and he never comes to the Christmas party - and guess who has to organise the flipping thing every year… yep, muggings here; nobody appreciates how bloomin’ difficult it is trying to get a sensible, non-lethal Christmas tree from Q Branch. And on top of all that, I’ve had to lie about my parents - I don’t think MI6 would appreciate the fact that my parents were Lienz Cossacks, and that I secretly harbour feelings of resentment towards the British at the way my mum and dad were treated by the British army during the war. Bloody rotten job this is. I never wanted to be a spy, anyway. I always wanted to be a Lumberjack.*”
So Alec Trevalyan decides to do something about all these gloomy thoughts he has. But instead of going to a psychiatrist, and being medicated with Prozac, silly Alec fakes his own death whilst on a mission with his friend James, and then spends the next six years plotting to steal billions from the London stock market, and then works out how to cover his tracks by using GoldenEye - a top secret spy satellite which uses nuclear explosions to form an electromagnetic pulse which can disable and destroy electronic devices. It’s always sad when you discover that one of your mates is a certifiable fruitcake, isn’t it?
GoldenEye features a new Bond-Pierce Brosnan (not bad, not great, but not bad); a new, female M (who gets some cracking dialogue); a fetching, liberated Miss Moneypenny; and a new direction for the Bond movies. And exuberant, thrilling stuff it is too. It’s all utterly barmy, of course. But that’s what we want, isn’t it?
WHAT I LEARNED
• In every office, there’s always a socially-inadequate loser-type from Middle Management who ruins everybody’s fun by constantly whingeing about being passed over for promotion again, or how the girls in the Secretariat snigger at him behind his back. Keep an eye on him: he may well turn out to be a double-crossing terrorist with grand schemes to team-up with the Russian mafia and steal millions from the Bank of England.
• *He’s a Lumberjack and he’s OK; he sleeps all night and he works all day.
TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997)
ELLIOT CARVER, HEAD of the Carver Media Group Network, is pissed-off because (a) his wife loves a previous lover (James Bond) rather than him, (b) China won’t broadcast his crappy programmes, and (c) his conglomerate’s initials don’t create a nifty acronym - CMGM is about as imposing as MGM, or AOL and with acronyms that shite, even little kids snigger at him behind his back. Naturally, Elliot (still smarting over the fact that his parents named him after a character from ET) wants to trigger World War Three (WW3), so that everything will be talked about in the macho-world terminology of acronyms and initials. Everything will be nuclear weapons, though he will reject, as did successive US and USSSR regimes, the catchy ICBMs: Accelerated Elimination of Land-Based Strategic Missiles. If it doesn’t smell of death, it’s not for a madman. MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction. Hah Hah! Die!!!
WHAT I LEARNED
• If your wife keeps moaning the name of her previous boyfriend during sex, she probably doesn’t love you as much as she pretends to, so you’d be much better off finding somebody else. Put ‘Divorce the bitch’ on your ‘to do’ list post-haste.
• Don’t trust men who like acronyms
• Lighten-up!
