Die Another Day – Blood and Porridge

January 16, 2024January 17, 2024

The literary Bond revisited: Colonel Sun

© Vintage Publishing

Here’s the latest in a series of posts wherein I look at the original James Bond novels and short-story collections from the 1950s and 1960s. This time, however, I’m looking at a Bond novel that wasn’t written by Ian Fleming. It’s 1968’s Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis. Why? Well, I slagged off Amis’s The Old Devils (1986) on this blog a few months ago, and I feel a bit guilty about giving poor old Kingsley a (verbal) kicking then. So here’s my take on Colonel Sun, which I believe is much better.

In some ways, the 21^st century has been a difficult time for James Bond. On the film front, the new century began with one of the worst Bond movies ever, 2002’s Die Another Day, an ignoble end to Pierce Brosnan’s tenure in the role. And, though the franchise was steadied with the recruitment of Daniel Craig and a more serious, mature and sensitive approach to the character, trouble never felt far away. See, for example, the long periods between productions – six years from Spectre (2015) to No Time to Die (2021) – and Craig’s well-publicised reluctance to play Bond again after Spectre. And the fact that, in the most recent movie, the filmmakers took the unprecedented step of – MASSIVE SPOILER AHEAD! – killing him off at the end.

Plus, there’s been much talk in recent years about Bond’s ‘obsolescence’. The thinking goes that as a privileged, white, stuck-up, sexist macho-man rooted in the early decades of the Cold War, Bond has become embarrassingly anachronistic in our more socially-aware era today. Laurie Penny, for instance, said as much in a New Statesman article in 2015. There’s a parallel argument that in the high-tech modern world Bond is obsolescent too. This was even referred to in Spectre, when Bond is faced with a new, tech-obsessed superior called C (Andrew Scott). C vows to “bring British intelligence out of the dark ages, into the light” and argues that “an agent in the field”, like 007, can’t “last long against all those drones and satellites.”

And yet, no matter how unfashionable Bond might be nowadays, you can’t deny that well-regarded modern writers are still keen to follow in Ian Fleming’s footsteps and have a go at writing new Bond novels. These include Sebastian Foulkes (with 2008’s Devil May Care), Jeffery Deaver (with 2011’s Carte Blanche), William Boyd (with 2013’s Solo) and Anthony Horowitz (with 2015’s Trigger Mortis and 2018’s Forever and a Day). Long before Foulkes, Deaver, Boyd and Horowitz got in on the act, though, another writer attempted to construct a novel around Fleming’s legendary superspy.

In 1968, just four years after Fleming’s death, Kingsley Amis wrote a Bond adventure called Colonel Sun and published it under the pseudonym Robert Markham. By then, Amis was a big noise in British letters thanks to works like 1954’s Lucky Jim and 1960’s Take a Girl Like You. I should say my 2015 Vintage Classics edition of Colonel Sun makes no mention of Robert Markham on its cover and advertises it unapologetically as a Kingsley Amis novel. Anyway, before I offer my thoughts on Colonel Sun, here’s another spoilers warning. There are lots of them ahead…

© Ian Fleming Publications

The novel is set a little while after the events of Fleming’s Bond swansong, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), which Amis is rumoured to have polished up when Fleming died before he could revise it himself. It begins with an audacious attempt by some unidentified villains to kidnap both Bond and his secret-service boss M. They’re only half-successful. M is abducted and whisked out of England, but Bond manages to elude his would-be abductors and is tasked with tracking M down. He soon homes in on an island in the Aegean Sea. There, M is being held by a Chinese officer, ‘Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the Special Activities Committee, People’s Liberation Army’.

The Colonel has a dastardly plan. The Soviet Union is hosting a secret international conference in the area and Sun plans to destroy it and the delegates in a mortar attack, the blame for which will then be pinned on Britain. Sun intends to make it look like one of the last mortars blew up accidentally, before firing, and leave Bond and M’s dead, but still identifiable, bodies in the wreckage. Thus, China will benefit from the discrediting not only of the USSR for sloppy security, but also of the UK for warmongering.

To rescue M and thwart Sun’s scheme, Bond joins forces with a woman called Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek communist who’s been working for the Soviets; and a Greek World War II veteran called Niko Litsas who, after fighting Nazis, fought communists during the 1946-49 Greek Civil War. Amis discreetly skates over Britain’s sorry role in this episode of Greek history. In 1944 the British government decided to back the anti-communist faction in Greece against the left-leaning one, even though the former faction contained many Nazi sympathisers and collaborators and the latter contained many partisans who’d fought for the Allies. Despite their ideological differences, the trio bond – ouch – and are soon prowling the Aegean Sea in a vessel called The Altair whilst figuring a way of taking the fight to Sun and his many henchmen.

Amis’s plot is generic and a few things don’t make sense. For example, why does Sun want to plant the elderly and normally deskbound M at the scene of the crime? This is the literary M we’re talking about, not the feistier and more empowered cinematic version played by the likes of Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes. Wouldn’t it look more believable if the body of another, physically-able British agent was found there next to Bond’s? It’s hard to see this as anything more than a perfunctory excuse for the novel’s main gimmick, the kidnapping of M.

But Colonel Sun is still good entertainment and feels more credible as a Bond novel than the other non-Fleming Bonds I’ve read. For one thing, unlike the rather bland villains in most of the 21^st century Bond-novels I mentioned above, Colonel Sun makes a memorable baddie.

© Methuen

Yes, he belongs to a long tradition of Oriental supervillains found in pulpy colonial adventure fiction – Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books being the most notorious examples. He’s not even the first bad guy in the Bond canon to follow this dubious blueprint, an honour that belongs to the titular character of Fleming’s Dr No (1957). But Sun is splendidly eccentric. He’s irritatingly polite and addresses friends and foes alike by their first names. He also sees himself as an Anglophile: “Sun did not share his colleagues’ often-expressed contempt… for everything British. He was fond of many aspects of their culture and considered it regrettable in some ways that that culture had such a short time left.”

Then there’s his penchant for torture. Near the novel’s end, just before he lays into Bond with an array of kitchen utensils (‘knives, skewers, broom-straws’), he explains: “True sadism has nothing whatever to do with sex. The intimacy I was referring to is moral and spiritual, the union of two souls in a rather mystical way.” Later still, he surprises us when he confesses to Bond that “I didn’t feel like a god when I was torturing you back there. I felt sick and guilty and ashamed.”

Admittedly, I could have done without the linguistic quirk that Amis gives him. Thanks to his “quick ear and passionate desire to learn” English and a “total ignorance of the British dialect pattern”, he’s ended up with a bizarre accent combining the “tones of Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast, Newcastle, Cardiff and several sorts of London…” As a result, every time Colonel Sun opens his mouth in the book, I imagine his voice sounding like an Artificial Intelligence one created from a dataset involving Liam Gallagher, Billy Connolly, Ringo Starr, Van Morrison, Jimmy Nail, Charlotte Church and Ray Winstone.

Colonel Sun also feels like a proper Bond novel because Kingsley Amis’s authorial voice doesn’t sound that different from Ian Fleming’s. Putting it more crudely, it feels closer to the originals than the modern pastiches do because Amis was as much of a curmudgeonly snob as Fleming was. By the 1960s, Bond’s rarefied world of Bentleys, dinner jackets and private members’ clubs were on their way out; and Amis bellyaches about it as you’d imagine Fleming would. When Bond drives through some English farmland, he writes: “Places like this would last longest as memorials of what England had once been. As if to contradict this idea, there appeared ahead of him a B.E.A. Trident newly taken off from London Airport, full of tourists bringing their fish-and-chip culture to the Spanish resorts, to Portugal’s lovely Algarve province, and now… as far as Morocco.”

Also activating Amis’s Licence to Grump is the prospect of the great, fish-and-chip-loving unwashed discovering the Greek islands. Describing a waterfront, he observes: “At the near end were whitewashed cottages with blue or tan shutters and doors, then a grocery, a ship’s supplier, harbour offices, a tavérna with a faded green awning. No neon, no cars, no souvenir shops. Not yet.”

Still, some aspects of Colonel Sun are surprisingly liberal, considering Amis’s cranky right-wing politics. Adriane, the book’s heroine, is resourceful and able to look after herself and Bond comes across as less of a sexist boor than one might expect. Meanwhile, some Soviet characters are depicted sympathetically: for example, Gordienko, Moscow’s man in Athens, who believes Bond’s warnings that something fishy is afoot and will have bad consequences for both their countries; and Yermolov, the pragmatic, vodka-loving dignitary who at the end expresses the USSR’s gratitude to Bond for foiling Sun’s plan. Indeed, Yermolov feels like a prototype for the tough but avuncular General Gogol, the KGB head played by Walter Gottel, who appeared in every Bond movie from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) to The Living Daylights (1987). In Colonel Sun, Yermolov even offers Bond the Order of the Red Banner; just as Gogol awards Roger Moore (‘Comrade Bond’) the Order of Lenin at the end of 1985’s A View to a Kill.

© Eon Productions

But before we assume that old Kingsley has gone all hippy-dippy and peace-and-love, we should bear in mind that the Soviets are the good guys here only comparatively – because the bad guys are the Chinese. The novel even postulates that the West and the Soviet Union are on the brink of working together because of the increasing threat posed by China. Richard Nixon’s jaunt to China in 1972 must have knocked that notion on the head. Happily, by the time of the 1997 Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, which has Pierce Brosnan joining forces with Michelle Yeoh to take on Rupert Murdoch, sorry, an evil, fictional media mogul played by Jonathan Pryce, the Bond-verse had decided that the Chinese could be good guys too.

While Colonel Sun has never been filmed, it’s interesting how a few of its ideas have turned up in the Bond movies. The kidnapping of M was a key plot element in 1999’s Tomorrow Never Dies, while a villain called Colonel Tan-Sun Moon features in Die Another Day. And if Colonel Sun’s musings during the book’s climactic torture scene sound familiar – “Torture is easy, on a superficial level. A man can watch himself being disembowelled and derive great horror from the experience, but it’s still going on at a distance… a man lives inside his head. That’s where the seed of his soul is… So James, I’m going to penetrate to where you are. To the inside of your head….” – it’s because they were used as dialogue in Spectre, during the scene where Christoph Waltz violates Daniel Craig’s skull using a torture device that looks like a dentist’s drill on a robotic tentacle.

In Spectre, Waltz’s character is revealed as being none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Having James Bond’s great arch-enemy borrow his best lines? Colonel Sun would have been flattered.

© Eon Productions

July 22, 2023

People who stunted my development

© The Mirisch Company / United Artists

I read recently that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – better and less grandiosely known as the folk who dole out the Oscars every year – are currently considering creating a new Oscar that will honour the work of the movie industry’s stunt performers. A yearly award for the film featuring the best stunt-work looks a real possibility thanks to the efforts of Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick series (2014-23). He commented last month, “We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations… Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars. It’s going to happen.”

Also creating a buzz lately about stunt-work – proper, practical stunts carried out by real people, as opposed to artificial action-sequences created with cartoony, shit-looking Computer-Generated Imagery – has been the trailer for the new Mission Impossible movie. This is framed by a stunt involving the world’s most famous scientologist in which he deliberately barrels off a very high cliff. The last person to do this so spectacularly was Roger Moore – or more accurately, stuntman Rick Sylvester – in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1978).

Anyway, now seems an opportune time to dust down and repost this piece about my favourite practitioners of the art of stunt-work, which originally saw the light of day in 2018.

In my boyhood, there were no personal computers, video games or Internet to keep me inside the house. For amusement, I had to go outside and play in a variety of locations that, thinking about it now, were a wee bit dangerous – at roadsides and riversides, in derelict buildings and old sheds, and on any roof or in any treetop I managed to climb up to. I suppose many kids in the 1970s played in places like those, but I had an advantage. I lived on a farm, which was full of machinery sheds, hay-sheds, grain stores, slurry pits, silage pits, workshops and outhouses. It was also right next to a river and a busy road. Perhaps it was this potential for injury and death in my play-area that prompted me, like most pre-pubescent males in the 1970s, to resolve that when I grew up I was going to be a film stuntman.

Accordingly, when I went fishing one day at the age of nine and fell off the riverbank, into the river, the way I recounted the mishap to my school-mates later made it sound like how Paul Newman and Robert Redford had famously jumped off the cliff and into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). This feat of derring-do had actually been performed by the stuntmen Howard Curtis and Micky Gilbert. To be honest, the bank I fell off was only two feet above the water, and the water itself was only three feet deep, but in situations like these you’re allowed to use your imagination.

In fact, I became much less enamoured with action-movie stars when it occurred to me that, most of the time, they didn’t perform the breath-taking stunts featured in their films. Those were done by unsung stuntmen and stuntwomen, who therefore were the people I should admire. If I’d been on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, with my autograph book, I think I would have ignored Harrison Ford and made a beeline instead for stuntmen Vic Armstrong and the late Terry Richards. And that’s a big reason why I despise the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, which made heavy use of CGI during its action scenes. It seemed a betrayal of all the stunt-work that’d distinguished the Bond movies during their previous 40-year history and an insult to all the people who’d contributed to that stunt-work. (By my count, Armstrong and Richards both worked on six official Bond movies, and each had one ‘rogue’ 007 production to their names too – Armstrong with 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Richards with 1967’s Casino Royale.)

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourite stunt performers throughout history….

© Walter Wanger Productions / United Artists

Born to a US ranching family in 1895, Yakima Canutt became a world-champion rodeo rider and by 1923 was involved in the fledgling motion-picture industry, inevitably playing cowboys in westerns. However, he’d had his voice ravaged by flu during a two-year stint with the US Navy and he realised he couldn’t continue as an actor when silent films gave way to the talkies, and so he started to specialise in stunt-work. Canutt ended up as stunt double for John Wayne, who claimed to have got many of his famous cowboy mannerisms – the strut, the drawl – from him. As a cowboy, after all, Canutt was the real deal.

His most famous stunt is one he performed in 1939’s Stagecoach, in which he leaps onto a team of horses pulling the titular stagecoach, falls between them, gets dragged along and then disappears under the stagecoach itself. This inspired the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is dragged beneath a German truck. Canutt later became a second-unit director and staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur. And despite sustaining injuries that required plastic surgery on at least two occasions, he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

Bud Ekins was a champion motorcyclist as well as a stuntman. It was he – not Steve McQueen, as was believed for a long time – who rode the Triumph TR6 Trophy motorbike near the end of 1963’s The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, pursued by half the German army, attempts to leap the giant fence that separates him from Switzerland. (The famously petrol-headed McQueen did ride the motorbike during the preceding chase and was keen to perform the jump himself, but the filmmakers talked him out of it.) That alone earns Ekins a place in my Stuntmen Hall of Fame, but he went on to do lots of other cool stuff. He worked with McQueen again in Bullitt (1968), driving that film’s iconic Ford Mustang 390 GT, and he was also involved in Diamonds are Forever (1970), Race with the Devil (1975), Sorcerer (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

Every time I’m on board a cable car and spot another cable car approaching from the opposite direction, I wonder if I’ll see Alf Joint perform a suicidal leap from the roof of one car onto the roof of the other – for Joint was the stuntman who doubled for Richard Burton in 1967’s Where Eagles Dare when Burton’s character had to hop cable cars close to the fearsome Schloss Adler, the mountaintop stronghold of the SS. Like many a great British stuntman, Joint’s CV is a roll-call of Bond movies (he made two), Star Wars movies (one) and Superman movies (three). He doubled for Eric Porter, playing Professor Moriarty in the acclaimed 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the character plunged to his doom at the Reichenbach Falls; and for Lee Remick in The Omen (1976), presumably during the sequence when Remick is pushed out of a hospital window and crashes through the roof of an ambulance passing below.

© Winkast Film Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I also remember Joint performing a memorable stunt during the adverts for Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which ran on TV from 1968 to 2003 (though I hear they were revived a few years ago). These featured the Milk Tray man, a Bondian character who kept risking life and limb in order to deliver boxes of the chocolates to a beautiful lady, with the tagline being: “And all because… the lady loves Milk Tray.” I can’t recall if it was the same lady receiving all the chocolates in all the adverts – if it was, the poor woman must have developed type 2 diabetes by 2003. Anyway, Joint did the Milk Tray man’s dive off a vertiginous cliff, into a shark-infested sea, in perhaps the most famous of these adverts in 1972.

Also involved in Where Eagles Dare was Eddie Powell, a stuntman who seemed to divide his time between James Bond movies – he made ten official ones, plus Never Say Never Again – and Hammer Films, where he was a stunt double for Christopher Lee in movies like The Mummy (1959), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976). For that last film, he also did a ‘full body burn’ stunt during a scene where satanic forces cause Anthony Valentine to spontaneously combust inside a church. In addition, Hammer gave him a few acting credits, predictably eccentric ones, such as the lumbering, bandaged monster in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and the half-man, half-beast Goat of Mendes conjured up at a witches’ sabbat in The Devil Rides Out (1968).

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

Later in his career, Powell performed stunts as the titular, drooling, acid-blooded, multi-mouthed beastie in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). For instance, he took part in the first film’s engine-room scene where the alien swoops down on the hapless Harry Dean Stanton.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t mention William Hobbs here as he wasn’t exactly a stuntman. He was a fight choreographer, more precisely a sword-fight choreographer, and his work enlivened many a swashbuckler over the years. He directed the swordplay in The Three Musketeers (1973) and Four Musketeers (1974) and presumably had the difficult task of restraining Oliver Reed, who from all accounts threw himself into the movies’ fight scenes with the enthusiasm of a blade-wielding Whirling Dervish. He also worked on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), for which he devised the samurai fights. I generally can’t stand the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, but the sequence where Sam Jones fights Timothy Dalton on a platform while spikes erupt at random points and at random moments through its floor, again overseen by Hobbs, is one of the film’s few good parts. Near the end of his life he was still working, on TV, arranging fights for Game of Thrones (2011-19).

Actually, you can see Hobbs in action in this instalment of the long-running TV show This is Your Life (1955-2007), rehearsing a gruelling-looking swordfight with Christopher Lee just before Eamonn Andrews surprises Lee and shepherds him off to a TV studio for a star-studded retrospective of his career. (I usually found This is Your Life tacky and maudlin, but I thought this one was fascinating because, besides Lee and Hobbs, it corrals such movie legends as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and the afore-mentioned Oliver Reed together under one roof.)

© Troublemaker Studios / Dimension Films

And now for a lady, the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless in the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) involved a stunt where a shotgun blast hurled Bell backwards – this did so much damage to her ribs and wrist that she spent months recovering from it. But there were clearly no hard feelings between Bell and Tarantino because for his next movie, 2007’s Death Proof, he cast her as herself. She plays a movie stuntwoman – called Zoe Bell – who turns the tables on Kurt Russell’s car-driving serial killer. Tarantino shares my disdain for CGI and insisted that all the vehicular action seen in Death Proof was the real deal, including a ‘ship’s mast’ stunt where Bell straddles the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger R/T with only a couple of straps to hang onto. Since then, she’s done more gigs for Tarantino, as a stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds (2009), as an actress in Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2016), and as both in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Finally, no roundup of my favourite stuntmen would be complete without mention of Vic Armstrong, who’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s busiest stunt double. His brother Andy, his wife Wendy, and a half-dozen members of the younger generation of his family all work in the stunt / special-effects business too, which must make the Armstrongs the Corleones of the stunt-world.

As well as seven official and unofficial Bonds, his filmography includes three Indiana Joneses and three Supermen, plus a Rambo, Terminator, Omen, Conan and Mission Impossible. He served not only as Harrison Ford’s stunt double while he played Indiana Jones, but also in Blade Runner (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988) and Patriot Games (1992). Indeed, back in his youth, his resemblance to the star was so striking that Ford once quipped to him, “If you learn to talk, I’m in deep trouble.”

© Titan Books

October 2, 2021October 4, 2021

Stop getting Bond wrong! (Part 1)

© Eon Productions

When I’m browsing through a newspaper or magazine website, or a website devoted to popular culture, no headline is more likely to fill me with despair than the one ALL THE JAMES BOND FILMS RANKED FROM WORST TO BEST. (Well, maybe except for the headline FLEETWOOD MAC TO RELEASE NEW ALBUM.) That’s because such articles invariably get Bond wrong. And that’s because they’re written by young, acne-pocked dipshits with zero life experience and less-than-zero knowledge of James Bond in either his cinematic or literary incarnations. Or, worse, they’re written by someone from the older end of the Generation X demographic, i.e., they were a kid during the 1970s and believe Roger Moore was the best actor who ever lived.

Now that the latest Bond epic No Time to Die is being released – after a zillion Covid-19-inspired delays, which had me worried that by the time it finally was released poor Daniel Craig would be turning up at the Royal Premiere with a Zimmer frame, hearing aid and dentures – there’s been another rash of these hopelessly ill-informed articles, in the likes of the Independent and Den of Geek.

So, to sort out this confusion, misinformation and stupidity once and for all, here is my – and hence the correct – ranking of all the James Bond films from best to worst. Don’t even think about arguing with me.

© Eon Productions

24: Die Another Day (2002)

Winning the unenviable title of Worst Bond Film Ever is Pierce Brosnan’s final outing as 007. Because it was released in the 40^th anniversary year of the franchise, the makers of Die Another Day packed it with homages to the previous 19 films, such as bikini-ed heroine Halle Berry rising out of the sea like Ursula Andress in Dr No (1962) or villain Toby Stephens swooping into central London with a Union Jack-emblazoned parachute à la Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). But these homages, as well as seeming smug, highlight how inferior Die is in comparison. And with the film’s stupid plot contrivances (an invisible car), its derivativeness (what, another killer satellite?), its Carry On-level, innuendo-ridden dialogue and Madonna’s horrible theme song, we’re talking greatly inferior. What I hate most about it, though, is its use of Computer-Generated Imagery during the action sequences, an insult to the stuntmen in the old Bond films like Vic Armstrong, Terry Richards, Eddie Powell and Alf Joint, who did those stunts for real and made them so viscerally exciting.

23: Octopussy (1983)

I remember seriously not liking Octopussy when I saw it because it seemed desperate to cash in on the recent success of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and deposited Roger Moore in a version of India populated with palaces, turbaned swordsmen, fakirs and snake-charmers, which had only ever existed in the imaginations of Hollywood scriptwriters and looked ridiculously corny by 1983. Having worked in India several times since then, I suspect I would hate it even more now. The film’s one saving grace is the sub-plot taking place in its other main setting, Germany, which has Steven Berkoff as a deranged Soviet general wanting to knock NATO for six by engineering an ‘accident’ with a nuclear warhead. Opposing, and in part thwarting, Berkoff’s insane plan is General Gogol (Walter Gotell), who appeared in half-a-dozen Bond films as 007’s respectful adversary and occasional ally in the KGB. Indeed, I’d say Octopussy marks Gogol’s finest hour.

22: Moonraker (1979)

Moonraker also attempted to cash in on a recent hit movie, in this case Star Wars (1977). Thus, it has Roger Moore going into outer space in search of a stolen space shuttle. It piles silliness upon silliness: not just the far-fetched science-fictional plot, but also sequences with gondolas turning into speedboats, speedboats turning into hovercraft, speedboats turning into hang gliders, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Kiel) crashing through the top of a circus tent, Jaws finding a girlfriend, and so on. Michael Lonsdale as the big villain Hugo Drax gives Moonraker some dignity it really doesn’t deserve. Brace yourself for the inevitable “He’s attempting re-entry!” joke at the end.

21: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Another entry in the series where the only thing going for it is the villain, the impeccable Christopher Lee as the super-hitman Francisco Scaramanga. Elsewhere, Lulu warbles the cheesy, innuendo-slathered theme song (“He’s got a powerful weapon / He charges a million a shot!”), Britt Ekland is barely contained by her bikini, and redneck comedy-relief American policeman Sheriff Pepper (Clifton James), who was so annoying in the previous film Live and Let Die, makes an unwelcome reappearance even though the film’s set in East Asia. Pepper just happens to be holidaying in Thailand with his wife when he bumps into Bond again. (He refuses to have his picture taken with a local elephant, telling Mrs Pepper: “We’re Demy-crats, Maybelle!” Surely not.)

20: Live and Let Die (1973)

And that brings me to Live and Let Die, in which Roger Moore makes his debut as Bond. From all accounts Moore was a lovely bloke and he kept the franchise massively popular during the 1970s and 1980s, but his lightweight acting style meant the character was far removed from the one imagined by Ian Fleming in the original novels. Even by 1973’s standards, Live and Let Die’s plot about a villainous organisation of black drug-smugglers, headed by Yaphet Kotto’s Mr Big, dallies worryingly with racism, although Moore’s presence actually defuses some of that. His portrayal of Bond as a posh, silly-assed Englishman gives the bad guys some gravitas in comparison. I suspect modern audiences might feel more uncomfortable with Bond’s pursuit / stalking of love interest Jane Seymour – Seymour was only 22 years at the time while Moore, already in his mid-forties, was old enough to be her dad. The film’s spectacular speedboat chase anchors the film in most people’s memories, though it’s spoilt somewhat by the involvement of the aforementioned Sheriff Pepper. The theme song by Paul McCartney’s Wings is, of course, great.

19: A View to a Kill (1985)

A View to a Kill, Roger Moore’s final film as Bond, is often ranked bottom in lists like this, but it at least has something most 1980s Bond movies lack – memorable villains, i.e., Christopher Walken’s Max Zorin and Grace Jones’s Mayday. Also, Moore gets to form an agreeable double act, for a while, with Patrick Macnee and I like how General Gogol pops up at the end to give ‘Comrade Bond’ the Order of Lenin. Still, the film contains much duff-ness. Duran Duran do the theme song and one unkind critic once described Simon Le Bon’s vocal performance as ‘bellowing like a wounded elk.’

18: Quantum of Solace (2007)

Daniel Craig’s second appearance as James Bond, in which he comes up against a sinister, secret organisation called Quantum, was savaged by the critics. When I watched the film, I remember thinking it didn’t seem as bad as everyone made out. That said, I can hardly remember anything about it now.

17: The World is Not Enough (1999)

A frustrating film, The World is Not Enough has much going for it, including Sophie Marceau and Robert Carlyle as the baddies, Robbie Coltrane returning as ex-KGB man / lovable rogue Valentin Zukovsky, and a plot that anticipates Skyfall (2012) wherein Judie Dench’s M is threatened by a villain whose relationship with her is more complex than one of simple professional enmity. And like Skyfall, it has scenes set in Scotland, the introduction of a new Q, and an explosion that rocks MI6’s London headquarters beside Vauxhall Bridge in London. Plus, the theme song by Garbage is the best one in yonks. But the quality stuff is cancelled out by some rubbish bits, including Denise Richards as Bond girl Christmas Jones – so-named, apparently, to allow Pierce Brosnan to crack a joke about ‘coming once a year’. Particularly cringe-inducing is John Cleese’s debut as the replacement for Desmond Llewelyn’s Q, here making his 17^th and final appearance in the franchise. Not only does Cleese clown around to no comic effect whatever, but the scene where he’s introduced is also the one where Llewelyn bids farewell and Cleese’s slapstick robs the scene of its poignancy.

16: Diamonds are Forever (1971)

Diamonds are Forever features a beyond-caring Sean Connery, enticed back into 007’s shoes by a 1.25-million-pound paycheque after George Lazenby jumped ship, in a lazy film where the plot meanders nonsensically from one action set-piece to another and the visuals are packed with easy-on-the-eye spectacle and lavishness. At least it’s pretty funny. It depends on your tolerance level for sledgehammering 1970s political incorrectness whether or not you enjoy the banter between gay assassins Mr Kidd and Mr Wint. (Sticking Connery into a coffin and feeding him into a crematorium furnace: “Heart-warming, Mr Kidd.” “A glowing tribute, Mr Wint.”) However, uber-Bond-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld is very amusingly played by Charles Gray. While he’s wreaking havoc with a deadly laser beam mounted on a satellite, he sneers: “The satellite is now over Kansas. Well, if we destroy Kansas, the world may not hear about it for years.”

15: For Your Eyes Only (1987)

For Your Eyes Only makes a noble attempt to bring the franchise down to earth again following the excesses of Moonraker. Mostly, it works nicely as an action / adventure piece, although the villain Krystatos, played by the normally reliable Julian Glover, is a bit drab. More effective is the excellent Michael Gothard as the taciturn Belgian assassin Locque. Alas, it runs out of puff towards the end. After some exciting mountaineering stunts while Roger Moore and the good guys ascend to a mountaintop monastery / villains’ lair, the climactic battle is a damp squib. Also, there’s an excruciating ‘comic’ final scene where Margaret Thatcher (played by impressionist Janet Brown) phones Bond to congratulate him on a job well done and ends up speaking instead to a randy parrot: “Give us a kiss!” “Oh, Mr Bond…”

14: Goldeneye (1995)

Pierce Brosnan’s debut as Bond, after the franchise had endured a six-year hiatus, won a lot of praise. I find it slightly unsatisfying, though. It tries a bit too hard. There’s a bit too much packed into it, a few too many twists and turns, as it tries to prove to audiences that a Bond movie can still be relevant and with-it in the 1990s. Also, its good intentions are undone by the occasional piece of Roger Moore-style silliness and a cobwebbed plot-MacGuffin – yes, it’s another killer satellite threatening the world, or in this case, the City of London. Sean Bean and Famke Janssen are cool as the main villains, though it’s a pity that Alan Cumming and Joe Don Baker are both allowed to act with their brakes off.

13: Spectre (2015)

Another Daniel Craig Bond that got a critical kicking, I think Spectre deserves a little more love. The film brings back Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played here by Christoph Waltz as a Euro-trash scumbag who commits crimes against fashion by not wearing socks under his loafers. Also back is Blofeld’s insidious criminal organisation SPECTRE. (After decades of legal wrangling, the Bond producers had by 2015 won the right to use Blofeld and SPECTRE again in the franchise.) However, Spectre’s Bond / Blofeld backstory earned hoots of derision. Blofeld, it transpires, is the son of Hannes Oberhauser, the man who looked after the young James Bond after his parents were killed in a climbing accident. Oberhauser much preferred little James to little Ernst, leaving his biological son with some serious personality issues. Yes, it sounds contrived, but I didn’t have a big problem with this, since the adoptive father-figure of Hannes Oberhauser existed in the original, literary Bond universe created by Ian Fleming and Bond referred to him in the short story Octopussy, published in 1966. The opening sequence in Mexico City, filmed by director Sam Mendes in one long, supposedly continuous take, is brilliant, but the film’s attempts to incorporate / retcon the previous Daniel Craig Bond films into its plot are clunky. For example, we learn that the Quantum organisation in Quantum of Solace is only a subsidiary of SPECTRE. Another negative is the comatose theme song performed by Sam Smith.

And my next blog-post will rank the remaining Bond movies from number twelve to number one.