George Lazenby – Blood and Porridge

June 13, 2024

Still got a Licence to Kill – and thrill

© Eon Productions

Another unwelcome reminder that I’m now old and decrepit… I’ve just discovered that 35 years ago today, on June 13^th 1989, Licence to Kill opened at the Leicester Square Odeon in London. Time, I think, for a 35^th-anniversary tribute to one of my favourite Bond movies.

Few events depress me more than when a film critic like Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian or Pete Travers in Rolling Stone, who knows nothing about James Bond and whose general opinions I don’t think much of either, decide it’s time to pen a feature ranking the Bond films from ‘best’ to ‘worst’. That invariably means that the 1989 movie Licence to Kill with Timothy Dalton playing Bond ends up near the bottom, held off the ‘worst’ spot only by 1985’s A View to a Kill. Bradshaw, Travers or whoever the no-nothing critic is will invariably damn Licence to Kill with such adjectives as ‘humourless’, ‘dour’, ‘violent’ and ‘misjudged’.

This was the film where Timothy Dalton and the Bond production team decided it was time to shake up the tried-and-tested formula of fantasy plots, over-the-top villains and unlikely action set-pieces and incorporate something more authentic. In fact, Licence to Kill is a trailblazer for the Bond films of the 21^st century, when the series was rebooted into a darker, grittier and critically acclaimed form with Daniel Craig. But it rarely gets any credit for that.

Well, today, 35 years on, it’s time to stand up and be counted. I think Licence to Kill is a great Bond movie. When it appeared, I believed it was the best instalment in the series since the 1960s and I still regard it as being among the best half-dozen in the series’ 60-year history. That its critical reputation is tarnished is down to bad luck. It was unlucky in the reaction it got from fickle film critics who’d spent the previous two decades complaining that the Bond movies, during the tenure of Roger Moore, had become ‘too silly’ and had lost the ‘serious’ tone of the Ian Fleming books on which they were based. But the moment that Licence to Kill appeared, they wailed that it was ‘too serious’ and lamented the loss of the glorious silliness of good old Roger Moore.

Licence to Kill was unlucky too because, although it made a respectable profit outside the USA, the American takings were the lowest ever for a Bond movie. Despite what many think, this wasn’t a reflection of its quality, but the result of it being released at an inopportune time when cinemas were already crowded with Lethal Weapon 2, Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (a film that coincidentally was choc-a-bloc with Bond alumni like John Rhys-Davies, Alison Doody, Julian Glover and the original 007 himself Sean Connery).

© Eon Productions

And it was unlucky to be the last movie before the great Bond hiatus of 1989 to 1995, during which no new Bond films were made due to a legal dispute between Danjaq, the franchise’s holding company, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / United Artists. This gave people the false impression that Licence to Kill, and Timothy Dalton, had crocked the series for half-a-dozen years.

When I saw Licence to Kill 35 years ago, what impressed me first was that it had a plot. Not a tangle of subplots and diversions created because producer Cubby Broccoli and his writers wanted to fit in copious action and special-effects set-pieces involving, say, gondolas that turn into speedboats, and speedboats that turn into hang-gliders, and crashing cable cars, and Bond falling out of a plane without a parachute, and laser-gun shootouts in outer space, but a plot that moves smoothly from A to B and to C.

Licence to Kill begins with Bond being best man at the wedding of his CIA buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison, who’d already played Leiter in 1974’s Live and Let Die). Leiter’s big day proves even more eventful than expected because he has to interrupt his nuptials to seize Latin American drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi). Sanchez has suddenly turned up on American soil in pursuit of his errant mistress Lupe (Talisa Soto) and her boyfriend – whose heart Sanchez cuts out before Leiter and the Feds clamp the cuffs on him.

© Eon Productions

Felix gets married as planned, but things take a dark turn when Sanchez escapes from captivity, with the aid of crooked DEA agent Ed Killifer (Everett McGill). He and his henchmen turn up at the Leiters’ home on their wedding night to get revenge. Leiter’s new wife Della (Priscilla Barnes) is murdered – Sanchez’s number-one scumbag minion Dario, played by a very young Benicio Del Toro, crows at Leiter, “Don’t worry, we gave her a nice honeymoo-oon!” Leiter himself is dunked in a shark tank in a marine research centre in Key West, which is one of the fronts for Sanchez’s US drugs-smuggling operation. Later, Bond discovers Della’s dead body and Leiter’s just-about-alive one, minus a couple of limbs, and vows revenge.

Bond starts by investigating the marine-research lab and then Sanchez’s research vessel the Wavekrest – by this time Sanchez himself has returned to base, a fictional Latin American country called Isthmus. He tangles violently with Dario and Sanchez’s sleazy American lieutenant Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe) and, gratifyingly, he drops Killifer and his suitcase of blood money into the shark tank that Leiter was maimed in. (“You earned it! You keep it!”)

Along the way, he finds an unexpected ally in the form of Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), an airplane pilot who’s been working for Leiter in some mysterious capacity, and incurs the wrath of his boss M (Robert Brown), who thinks he’s getting involved in matters that don’t concern him (“We’re not a country club, 007!”) and revokes his licence to kill. This was why the film had provisionally been titled Licence Revoked until, the story goes, research in the USA suggested that many Americans didn’t know what the word ‘revoked’ meant.

Now rogue, Bond steals a fortune in drugs money from the Wavekrest and uses it to fund a trip to Isthmus for him and Bouvier. There, he tries to assassinate Sanchez but fails and, in the process, unwittingly exposes a secret operation being run against Sanchez by agents from Hong Kong. This leaves Sanchez with the impression that the agents were the ones trying to assassinate him and Bond, by exposing them, is actually on his side. An unlikely bromance ensues and Sanchez, enamoured with Bond, tries to recruit him into his organisation.

© Eon Productions

Aware that Sanchez is obsessed with loyalty, Bond starts planting doubts in Sanchez’s mind about the fidelity of his many henchmen who, in addition to those already mentioned, include his head of security Heller (Don Stroud) and his whizz-kid accountant Truman-Lodge (Anthony Starke). Time, though, is running short for Bond because the two members of Sanchez’s organisation who know his true identity are returning to Isthmus: Krest, on board the Wavekrest, and Dario, who’s coming by way of El Salvador, where he’s managed to procure some stinger missiles. Sanchez intends to use these to shoot down American aircraft in revenge for his recent incarceration.

What follows involves much mayhem and gruesome death – death by being doused in gasoline and set alight, by being blown apart in a decompression chamber, by being impaled on forklift-truck blades, by being fed into a cocaine-grinding machine. A lot of this is inflicted by a now-paranoid Sanchez on the people who work for him. Yes, Licence to Kill seems a million miles removed from the Roger Moore Bonds, where the most gruesome things were the inuendo-laden jokes cracked while Moore got intimate with ladies about half his age. But while the brutality here may shock someone accustomed to the escapist fantasises of the 1970s and 1980s Bond movies, I loved it.

This was the sort of Bond imagined by Ian Fleming, most of whose books I’d read before I saw any of the films. Not that Fleming ever wrote about 1980s Latin American drug dealers – his gangsters were of the James Cagney variety, with names like ‘Jack Spang’, ‘Sluggsy Morant’, ‘Sol Horowitz’, ‘Sam Binion’ and ‘Louie Paradise’. But Dalton nails it as the screen Bond who was closest to the character described by Fleming. Smooth and confident on the surface, but subtly troubled underneath, he does some bad stuff in the line of duty and hates having to do it. But even more, he hates the evil deeds – like the murderous violation of his best friend’s wedding – that compel him to do it.

© Eon Productions

Not that the film is unremittingly dark. It has some amusing lines and likeable performances. One thing that brings a smile to the face is the entry into the plot, halfway through, of Bond’s secret-service armourer Q, played by the venerable Desmond Llewellyn. Q takes some leave and nips over to Isthmus to help Bond and Bouvier out, bringing with him a cache of his famous gadgets. (“Everything for a man on holiday. Explosive alarm clock… Guaranteed never to wake up anyone who uses it. Dentonite toothpaste… To be used sparingly. The latest in plastic explosive.” “I could do with some plastic,” Bond notes.) After the Moore films, where Q’s main function was to be the butt of Bond’s jokes, it’s nice to see him with an expanded role and in a different dynamic with Bond. In Licence to Kill, the two men actually like, respect and care about each other.

Llewellyn, though, is just one player in a generally delightful cast. A 1980s / 1990s action-movie character actor, and nowadays a Sinatra-esque crooner, Robert Davi is excellent as Sanchez. He tempers sufficient quantities of rottenness with some unexpected integrity – for instance, he insists on honouring the deal he’s made with Killifer, even though his sidekicks urge him to take the easier option of whacking the guy. Some similarly distinguished character actors play the other villains: Zerbe, Stroud, McGill and, of course, Del Toro. Plus you get some familiar and welcome faces in smaller roles, including Frank McRae from 48 Hrs (1982) and The Last Action Hero (1993) and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa from the Mortal Combat franchise.

Also deserving praise is Carey Lowell. Just as Davi is the great overlooked Bond villain, Lowell is the great overlooked Bond girl. From the very beginning, when she shuts up the odious Dario by shoving a pump-action shotgun into his crotch, her Pam Bouvier character means business. Her gutsiness is immensely refreshing after so many Bond actresses in the 1970s and 1980s had been given roles that were wooden (Carole Bouquet), insipid (Jane Seymour) or just plain dumb (Jill St John, Britt Ekland, Tanya Roberts). It’s good too that she doesn’t just exist to follow Bond but has her own agenda. She plans to retrieve the stinger missiles before Sanchez does serious damage with them, a scheme for which she’s enlisted the help of the duplicitous Heller.

© Eon Productions

What else do I like about Licence to Kill? I like its references to Ian Fleming’s fiction. Milton Krest, the Wavekrest and Sanchez’s fondness for whipping Lupe with a stingray’s tail come from the 1960 short story The Hildebrand Rarity, while Leiter’s encounter with the shark is lifted from the 1954 novel Live and Let Die. I like how the secondary Bond girl, Talisa Soto’s Lupe, survives the film. The secondary Bond girl in many films, from Lana Wood’s Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever (1971) to Berenice Marlohe’s Severine in Skyfall (2012), ends up as a sacrificial lamb, killed to show how beastly the villains are.

And I like how the film is a spiritual sequel to perhaps the best-ever Bond movie, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which ends with Bond getting married and then seeing his new wife Tracy murdered by his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld. This is referenced in Licence to Kill by a moment when Bond becomes melancholic during Leiter’s wedding. “He was married once,” Leiter tells Della, “but that was a long time ago.” (When I saw the film in 1989 in a cinema in Aberdeen, someone in the row behind me declared: “Aye, an’ he looked like George Lazenby at the time!”) This suggests that later in the film Bond isn’t just avenging Leiter and Della, but Tracy too.

Licence to Kill isn’t perfect, though. There are a couple of longueurs. For a man who’s recently lost wife and limbs, David Hedison’s Leiter seems unfathomably cheerful when he reappears at the end. Maybe it’s the drugs they were feeding him at the hospital. And Carey Lowell’s Bouvier is ill-served by a scene where she encounters Lupe, finds out that she’s spent the night with Bond and reacts like a sulky, jealous schoolgirl. When Q diplomatically suggests that Bond only did it for the sake of the mission, she retorts: “Bullshit!”

Licence to Kill was, alas, Timothy Dalton’s final showing as Bond. When the franchise finally got going again with 1995’s Goldeneye, it was with the cuddlier Pierce Brosnan in the role. I like Brosnan, but always found his attempts to combine the physicality of Sean Connery with the smoothness of Roger Moore a little unconvincing. As I’ve said, Dalton strikes me as the actor who came closest to portraying Bond in the way Fleming had imagined him and, for me, there’s no higher accolade. He’s the connoisseur’s Bond.

© Eon Productions

October 4, 2021October 5, 2021

Stop getting Bond wrong! (Part 2)

© Eon Productions

Continuing my ranking of all the James Bond films from worst to best, here are my candidates for the franchise’s top twelve. Candidates? No, they are the top twelve. Don’t even try to argue with me.

12: The Living Daylights (1987)

Lately, The Living Daylights, Timothy Dalton’s debut as Bond, has seemingly been reappraised and now figures highly in some rankings of the franchise. It was even placed at number 4 in a recent feature in the Independent. Well, hold on. It’s good, but not that good. After 14 years of quips, raised eyebrows and safari suits, Dalton’s more serious Bond is a breath of fresh air. While preparing for the role, he even read Ian Fleming’s original books, which no doubt helped. He and love interest Maryam d’Abo make a likeable couple and the film begins strongly, its first act following Fleming’s 1962 short story of the same name. Later, alas, it gets unnecessarily muddled and the two main villains, despite being played by Jeroen Krabbé and Joe Don Baker, are rather blah, although Andreas Wisniewski is memorable as the lethal hitman / henchman Necros. The scene where Necros engages in vicious hand-to-hand combat in a kitchen, using various kitchen utensils and appliances, was evoked in last year’s Christopher Nolan epic, Tenet. I hated Aha’s theme song at the time, but since then it’s grown on me. (The same can’t be said for Duran Duran’s A View to a Kill.)

11: Dr No (1962)

I feel guilty ranking Dr No, the first entry in the series and the film that turned former Edinburgh milkman Sean Connery into a superstar, at only number 11 on this list. However, when I saw it as a kid I was disappointed and that sense of juvenile disappointment has lingered ever since. This was because I’d read Ian Fleming’s 1958 novel Dr No beforehand and loved the fact that (1) it had a giant squid in it and (2) Bond killed Dr No at the end by burying him alive in bird-guano. I was looking forward to seeing these things in the film, but neither appeared – the squid presumably because of budgetary restrictions and the guano presumably because it would have grossed out the audience. So, if Connery had got to have a scrap with a giant squid and got to drown Dr No (Joseph Wiseman) in bird-shit, I’d have enjoyed the film more and placed it higher.

10: Thunderball (1965)

The previous movie in the series, Goldfinger (1964), got the emerging Bond formula exactly right. In comparison, Thunderball seems slightly askew. It’s overlong and the copious underwater sequences slow the pace somewhat. Still, it has much to enjoy. Connery is at the top of his game and the film shows off its set-pieces (for example, Bond being pursued during some Bahamas Junkanoo festivities), its gadgets (for example, the jet-pack in the opening sequence) and its villains (for example, Luciana Paluzzi as Fiona Volpe) with as much brassy aplomb as big-lunged Welshman Tom Jones sings the theme song.

© Eon Productions

9: You Only Live Twice (1967)

I’ve always had a soft spot for You Only Live Twice, which has Sean Connery battling Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE in Japan, although it’s commonly rated as one of the lesser Connery Bonds. Maybe it’s because I lived in Japan for a good many years myself. The theme song by Nancy Sinatra is, of course, lovely and there’s a good supporting cast, including Donald Pleasence as Blofeld and Tetsuro Tamba as Tiger Tanaka, head of Japanese intelligence and one of the great ‘Bond allies’ – up there with Pedro Armendariz’s Karim Bey in From Russia with Love (1963). Apart from the Japanese setting, the film jettisons almost everything in Fleming’s dark, introspective 1964 novel and replaces it with an archetypically ludicrous Bond-movie scenario: Blofeld wanting to trigger World War III by nicking American and Soviet spacecraft and hiding them in his secret hollowed-out Japanese volcano-HQ. The futuristic volcano set, courtesy of production designer Ken Adam, is amazing. Alas, its impact is vitiated in the final scenes when we see it as an obvious model, being rocked by explosions, with little dolls (representing the casualties of the film’s climactic battle) bouncing up and down on its floor.

8: Casino Royale (2006)

Any half-decent movie was going to look good after the debacle of 2002’s Die Another Day, and I feel Casino Royale, which rebooted the series and introduced current 007 Daniel Craig, is slightly overrated as a result. But it’s still pretty good. Craig gives Bond an impressively physical exterior whilst suggesting that not all is as solid internally. As Vesper Lynd, the sublime Eva Green is easily the best Bond girl since Michelle Yeoh. And Mads Mikkelsen is great as the evil but harried Le Chiffre. For once, the violence actually looks like it involves pain, stress and fear, no more so than when Bond gets his nuts whipped on a bottomless chair. Kudos to the filmmakers for keeping the scene in which Le Chiffre gets his comeuppance as low-key as it was in Fleming’s 1953 novel, although the subsequent stuff set in Venice, where Bond has to rescue Vesper from a building sinking rapidly into the Grand Canal, seems a tad gratuitous. It’s as if it was decided that a big, dumb action climax was necessary to keep the traditional Bond audience happy.

7: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

Some Roger-Moore-sized eyebrows will be raised at my inclusion of Tomorrow Never Dies in my top dozen Bonds. But while this film isn’t massively memorable, it doesn’t do anything wrong either. Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin is easily the best Bond girl during Pierce Brosnan’s four-movie tenure, Vincent Schiavelli makes a brief but memorable appearance as mordant assassin Dr. Kaufman, and the scene where Q, played by a now-octogenarian Desmond Llewelyn, gives Bond custody of a remote-controlled car is delightful. And Jonathan Pryce has fun playing villainous media tycoon Elliot Carver, trying to trigger a war between China and Britain – aye, right, the Chinese would really be quaking in their boots at the prospect of a war with Britain. Pryce is clearly channelling Rupert Murdoch, so what’s not to love?

6: The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Among Roger Moore’s entries (ouch), The Spy Who Loved Me is the one that undeniably belongs in the premier league of Bond movies. On paper it looks as lazy as all the other ones made in the 1970s and early 1980s – cars that travel underwater, a villain who kills people by dropping them into shark-pools, a giant henchman with steel teeth and a plot that’s been copied from 1967’s You Only Live Twice, though with stolen nuclear submarines instead of stolen spacecraft. But it’s done with such élan that Moore, director Lewis Gilbert and writer Michael Wood get away with it. The corking pre-titles sequence here made it a rule for all subsequent Bond movies that they had to begin with a big stunt. No wonder that in season two of I’m Alan Partridge (2002), Steve Coogan gets upset when he discovers that Michael-the-Geordie has taped over his copy of The Spy Who Loved Me with an episode of America’s Strongest Man. “Now you’ve got Norfolk’s maddest man!” he rages. Quite.

© Eon Productions

5: From Russia with Love (1963)

Although the first Bond movie, Dr No, sets the template for the series – larger-than-life villain hatches grandiose, ludicrous scheme amid gorgeous locations, gorgeous ladies and exciting action sequences – and the third one, Goldfinger (1964), consolidates that template, the intervening movie From Russia with Love does something a little different, with a scaled-down plot-MacGuffin (getting a Soviet defector to the West with a valuable cryptography device) and a storyline that’s unusually gritty and realistic by Bond standards. Mind you, From Russia with Love still has a great roster of villains – Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Klebb, Vladek Sheybal’s Kronsteen and Robert Shaw’s Red Grant. Shaw’s vicious battle with Connery late in the film has been emulated in other Bond movies – see Brosnan vs. Sean Bean in Goldeneye (1995) or Craig vs. Dave Bautista in Spectre (2015) – but never bettered. Also praiseworthy is Mexican actor Pedro Armendariz as Kerim Bey, the wise, wily head of British intelligence in Istanbul who takes Bond under his wing. Tragically, this was Armendariz’s last movie – during filming, he was dying from cancer, quite possibly caused by his participation in the notorious 1956 John Wayne film The Conqueror, shot just 137 miles from the location of an atomic-bomb test in Nevada.

4: Skyfall (2012)

Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (2008), the latter a direct sequel to the former, and both preoccupied with Vesper Lynd and Jesper Christensen’s villainous Mr White character, can often seem like they’re locked in their own, private, non-Bondian universe. From the old, pre-Daniel Craig movies, only Judi Dench’s M remains. What makes Skyfall a pleasure is that it starts to join the dots and make the series feel like the Bonds of old again, adding a new Q (Ben Wishaw) and a new Moneypenny (the divine Naomie Harris). It also, eventually, brings in a new M to replace Dench, Ralph Fiennes, who in a gratifying bit of character-development is initially presented as an arsehole but gradually wins Bond’s respect and trust. Javier Bardem makes a good villain and, when Bond and Dench’s M take refuge at Skyfall, the Scottish Highlands estate where Bond spent his childhood, we get a welcome appearance by Albert Finney as the estate’s irascible but handy-with-a-shotgun gamekeeper Kincaid. It’s been said that director Sam Mendes originally wanted to cast Sean Connery as Kincaid, which would have been weird… but awesome.

© Eon Productions

3: Licence to Kill (1989)

The dark horse of the series in more ways than one, Licence to Kill got a bad rap because it underperformed at the box office, earned itself a British 15 certificate with its violence, and offended critics who, after condemning the Bond movies for years for being too silly, suddenly started carping about how they missed the loveable silliness of Roger Moore. However, if you’re a Bond connoisseur who likes to see 007 taken seriously, it’s one of the best. Timothy Dalton goes after drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) when Sanchez maims Bond’s best buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison) and murders Leiter’s wife on their wedding night. This, of course, echoes what happened to Bond after his wedding back in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), making Licence to Kill a spiritual if not direct sequel to that film. Much mayhem ensues as Sanchez and his henchmen (Anthony Zerbe, Don Stroud, Everett McGill, Anthony Starke and a young Benicio Del Toro) meet a range of gruesome fates. The sight of Del Toro’s sneering scumbag Dario getting fed into a grinding machine is particularly delightful. But there’s light amid the darkness. Carey Lowell is excellent as Pam Bouvier, a truly capable and no-bullshit Bond girl, and there’s a lovely sub-plot where Desmond Llewelyn’s Q turns up to give Bond some unofficial help, showing that however much they’ve bickered in Q-Branch over the years, the two men are actually friends. Also, Robert Davi’s Sanchez is more than a simple thug. Valuing friendship and loyalty, he likes Bond when he first meets him and is aggrieved later when he discovers that Bond has really come to destroy him.

© Eon Productions

2: Goldfinger (1964)

The film that ticks all the boxes in the list of things you want from a Bond movie. Action-packed opening sequence where Bond puts a previous adventure to bed? Tick. Shirley Bassey booming her way through a classic John Barry composition? Tick. Memorable villains? Tick. Gadgets, gimmicks, classy cars? Tick. A great Bond girl? With Honor Blackman, definitely a tick. A great Bond? Well, it’s Sean Connery, so definitely a tick too. Basically, the series could have stopped here, because after Goldfinger there was nothing that could be done again any better – The Spy Who Loved Me’s refrain Nobody Does It Better might have been written about this film. Incidentally, Auric Goldfinger’s scheme in the movie makes more sense than his scheme in Ian Fleming’s 1959 novel. In the book, Goldfinger just wants to rob Fort Knox, which would be logistically impossible. In the film, he cannily plans to explode a nuclear device in the fort, making the US’s gold reserves unusable and skyrocketing the value of his own gold.

1: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

It’s generally agreed that Australian actor George Lazenby wasn’t much cop as an actor. Ironically, his single movie as Bond, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is in my opinion the best one of all. It helps, of course, that the film follows Ian Fleming’s 1963 novel closely. The main change is an upgrading of Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s fiendish plan. In the book, he intends to decimate Britain’s agriculture, whereas in the film it’s the world’s agriculture that he’s gunning for. (Accordingly, the instruments of Blofeld’s plan, the disease-carrying ‘Angels of Death’, are upgraded from a group of brainwashed English schoolgirl-types in the novel to a bevy of brainwashed international glamour-pusses, including Angela Scoular, Anoushka Hempel, Jenny Hanley, Julie Ege and Joanna Lumley, in the film.) Director Peter Hunt orchestrates some brilliant action sequences on the icy slopes around Blofeld’s Alpine lair, the theme tune possibly constitutes John Barry’s finest hour, Telly Savalas makes a formidably physical Blofeld, and Diana Rigg is splendid as the confident but simultaneously vulnerable Tracy di Vicenzo, the woman who finally wins Bond’s heart and gets him to the wedding altar – though with events taking a dark turn soon after. It’s arguable that because it’s so different from the usual entries in the series, wistful in tone and tragic in its ending, the awkward and uncertain Lazenby actually fits in nicely. Here, Bond appears fragile and wounded, and Lazenby is believable in terms of what the character goes through. You couldn’t imagine Connery swaggering through the movie with his usual insouciance and having the same impact.

© Eon Productions

And now we have a new Bond movie in the cinemas. Where will 2021’s No Time to Die figure in future rankings of the 25 Bond films, from best to worst? Well, I see that the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw has just given it a five-star review. So… it’s probably rubbish.

September 15, 2020September 15, 2020

The real Princess Diana

© ITV / ABC / Thames

2020 has been a rotten year and I suspect it still has more rottenness in store. One of the many reasons why I’ve found it so godawful has been because it’s seen the deaths of two actresses who meant a lot to me, firstly because they both had leading roles in James Bond movies and I’m a big James Bond fan, and secondly because they both starred in one of my favourite TV shows, The Avengers (1961-69). I’m talking, of course, about Honor Blackman, who died in April, and now Diana Rigg, who died last week.

I never got to see Diana Rigg perform on stage, where she appeared in plays by Edward Albee, Bertolt Brecht, Anton Chekov, Noel Coward, Henrik Ibsen, Molière, Jean Racine, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams and, obviously, William Shakespeare. Nor did I catch her when, after becoming a Dame in the mid-1990s and being recognised as a national treasure, she appeared in prestigious TV productions like Rebecca (1997) or Victoria & Albert (2001), both of which resulted in her winning or being nominated for Emmy Awards. I was living abroad and didn’t have access to English-language TV at the time.

I didn’t even watch her much-praised performance as Olenna Tyrell in the TV show Game of Thrones from 2013 to 2017, since I thought I should first read the George R.R. Martin books on which the show was based – something I’ve yet to get around to doing.

Despite what I’ve missed, however, I offer here a collection of Diana Rigg performances that I have seen and remember fondly.

Playing Tracy di Vincenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is ostensibly about James Bond (George Lazenby in his one-and-only shot at the role) tangling with his arch-enemy Ernst Stavros Blofeld (Telly Savalas). However, it also explores Bond’s emotional side and highlights his vulnerability. Key to this is OHMSS’s sub-plot about the romance between Bond and Contessa Theresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo (Rigg), daughter of the boss of the crime syndicate the Unione Corse of Corsica. At the film’s end, Blofeld is seemingly vanquished and Bond and Tracy get married. Then Blofeld makes a sudden reappearance in the final scene, sprays their honeymoon car with bullets, kills Tracy and leaves Bond as a babbling wreck.

Fascinatingly, for a film franchise that’s often accused of de-humanising the Ian Fleming novels that inspired it and emphasising big, dumb spectacle at the expense of characterisation, Tracy is a more fleshed-out character in OHMSS-the film than in OHMSS-the-novel. She’s given more to do and, played by Rigg, has a sparkle that’s missing in the rather aloof, ambiguous character that Fleming sketches.

© Eon Productions

Particularly memorable is her appearance after Bond escapes from Blofeld’s Alpine headquarters. Hunted by Blofeld’s henchmen, exhausted, frightened even – something that Lazenby, despite or perhaps because of his acting inexperience, conveys well – he takes refuge in a crowded Christmas market / ice rink in the local town. Just as he thinks he not going to make it, Rigg comes to his rescue, unexpectedly skating into view in front of him like some heaven-sent angel of mercy.

Playing Sonya Winter in The Assassination Bureau (1969)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service wasn’t the only instance in 1969 of Diana Rigg rubbing shoulders with Telly Savalas. In Basil Deardon’s black comedy The Assassination Bureau (based on an unfinished Jack London novel), she plays an aspiring female journalist in Edwardian London sent by Savalas’s unscrupulous newspaper proprietor to investigate a secret criminal organisation offering assassins for hire. Armed with a bagful of money that Savalas has provided, Rigg brazenly hires this Assassination Bureau to assassinate its own chairman, Ivan Dragomiloff, who’s played by Oliver Reed. Admiring Rigg’s audacity, Reed accepts the commission and, with her in tow, spends the movie zigzagging around Europe dodging the efforts of his own board of directors to kill him.

It’s a pleasantly silly film and, admirably, doesn’t waste any time in setting up its convoluted premise and getting into the action. Rigg is delightful as the uppity Sonya Winter, determinedly doing her job and flying the flag for women’s rights amid a world of starchy, patronising male chauvinists. Meanwhile, Reed had only just played the brutish Bill Sikes in Oliver! (1968) and at the time was in contention to play James Bond, although his reputation for drunken offscreen hi-jinks put 007 producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman off the idea. His pairing with Rigg in The Assassination Bureau is no beauty-and-the-beast affair, however. He dials down the roughness and dials up the charm so that their chemistry together is actually very pleasing.

© Paramount Pictures

Playing Edwina Lionheart in Theatre of Blood (1973)

Douglas Hickox’s brilliant comedy-horror movie Theatre of Blood has Vincent Price as an insane and hammily over-the-top Shakespearean actor who starts killing the snobbish London theatre critics who’ve bad-mouthed his performances, using murders methods borrowed from the Bard’s plays. “They’re not going to start killing critics for giving bad notices, are they?” exclaims the campest critic Meredith Merridew, played by Robert Morley, who eventually meets a grisly fate modelled on events in Titus Andronicus. As the corpses pile up, murdered in ways suggested by Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, Richard III, Henry VI: Part One and even The Merchant of Venice (Price rewrites it so that he can extract a pound of flesh from Harry Andrews), the youngest and least obnoxious critic, played by Ian Hendry, and the investigating police officers, played by Milo O’Shea and Eric Sykes, turn to Lionheart’s supposedly normal daughter, Edwina (Rigg), for help.

Distraught about what her father is doing, yet repulsed by the critics who destroyed his career, Edwina is initially a troubled and conflicted character. Yet as the film progresses, it transpires that Rigg is having as much fun in her role as the Bard-quoting, soliloquizing Price is in his.

Taking the mickey out of herself in The Morecambe and Wise Show (1975), The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and Extras (2006)

Rigg never took herself too seriously. She teamed up with Britain’s most famous comic double-act Morecambe and Wise for their 1975 Christmas TV special, where she appeared in the inevitable Ernie Wise-penned play. This featured Rigg as Nell Gwynne, Eric Morecambe as Charles II and Wise as Samuel Pepys. (“Have you read Ernie’s play?” demands Morecambe. “Yes, I have,” replies Rigg. “And you’re still here?”) Better still is her appearance in The Great Muppet Caper, the second movie starring Jim Henson’s much-loved puppets, in which she plays the snooty fashion designer Lady Holiday, who’s robbed of her jewellery by a gang led by her devious brother (Charles Grodin). Predictably, Miss Piggy approaches Rigg in the hope of securing a job as a fashion model and insists on showing Rigg her portfolio: “This is me reeking grandeur!”

And then there’s a 2006 episode of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s comedy show Extras, which is about a struggling actor (Gervais) trying to make ends meet with bit-parts and uncredited roles in films and on television. This scenario enables the show’s gimmick of having real, famous actors and actresses play versions of themselves – usually twisted, unpleasant versions. In this particular episode, Gervais gets a three-day job in a new fantasy film starring the then-17-year-old Daniel Radcliffe and Dame Diana Rigg. The joke is that Radcliffe is a randy, boorish and clueless teenager. Whilst eating with him in the studio canteen, Radcliffe tries to convince Gervais that he’s a man of the world by whipping a condom out of his pocket – he’s unravelled it but seems to think he can still put it on – and then accidentally pings it through the air to a nearby table, where it lands on the unamused Rigg’s head. Radcliffe asks her for his ‘johnny back’ and gets a schoolmistress-ly reply: “May I have my prophylactic back, please?”

Later, Radcliffe sidles up to her and inquires, “You still got that catsuit from The Avengers?” Rigg retorts: “Go away, Daniel.”

© BBC / HBO

And that brings me nicely to…

Playing Emma Peel in The Avengers (1965-67)

By the time Rigg joined The Avengers in the mid-1960s, the show, under the guidance of creator Brian Clemens, had gradually mutated from being a conventional action / thriller show with Patrick Macnee’s John Steed and Ian Hendry’s Dr David Keel as a pair of crime-fighters to being a television phenomenon that did everything on its own terms, both determinedly non-realistic and restlessly inventive.

Rigg’s tenure on The Avengers was surely its golden era. With her Emma Peel character partnering Macnee’s now surreally debonair Steed, and the show being broadcast in colour for the first time, it was a self-confident cocktail of the funny, the silly, the fantastical, the baroque and, occasionally, the gothic and the kinky. (The kinkiness factor came to the fore in an episode called A Touch of Brimstone, wherein Rigg dons a costume comprising a spiked collar, whalebone corset, black leather boots and a snake. Funnily enough, this attracted the highest viewing figures of any episode in The Avengers’ eight-year history.)

Rigg brought to the show a bemused, unruffled quirkiness that was the equal of Macnee’s majestic imperturbability. She was also his equal in being proactive, having no qualms about wading into fights to show off her martial arts prowess or hurtling around in a Lotus Elan. As a villain in one episode remarked, “She’s well and truly emancipated, is that one.”

Rigg wasn’t comfortable about the fact, but Emma Peel also became a sex symbol. She couldn’t well avoid it, being ephemerally gorgeous and clad in a succession of leather catsuits, mini-skirts and mod-inspired outfits that, inevitably, ended up being sold in the ladies’ fashion shops of the real Britain. Wisely, though, sex was off the agenda in her character’s onscreen relationship with Macnee’s Steed. The two indulged in a relaxed, platonic flirtatiousness and left it at that. Macnee did get a kiss from her at the end of her final episode on the show, when she left him with the parting advice: “Always keep your bowler on in times of stress, and watch out for diabolical masterminds.”

Appearing at the height of the swinging 1960s, but tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted rather than smug, which is how I find many productions from the time, The Avengers, and especially the Emma Peel-era Avengers, projects a charming and not-taking-itself-seriously notion of Britishness that seems light-years removed from the discredited, embittered, clapped-out Britain of 2020. The death of Diana Rigg, who’d been one of the last links with the show, just seems to emphasise that it’s now all in the past.

August 16, 2020August 17, 2020

Britain’s number-one pub argument answered

A news story printed last week raised a few eyebrows. It even raised some ultra-stiff, Roger Moore-style eyebrows. It transpired that the Radio Times magazine had just announced the results of a poll in which its readers were asked to identify the best actor to have played James Bond.

While the overall winner of the poll was hardly a surprise, many people were shocked at who ended up in second place – and indeed, at who didn’t manage to get into the top three. Thus, this seems an opportune time to update and re-post the following meditation, first published on this blog in June 2016, on how I’d rank the six cinematic James Bonds.

Sean Connery.

There. That’s conclusively settled the argument that flares up regularly in pubs the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, especially after the participants have sunk a few pints. (Well, it flares up in pubs whenever they’re allowed to open during the current Covid-19 pandemic.) It’s Sean Connery.

The argument, of course, centres on the question, “Who is the best James Bond?”

Actually, I’ll go further and offer a ranking of all the actors who’ve played James Bond over the years, from best to worst. I’ve limited my ranking to the Bonds of the official franchise made by Eon Films, by the way. I’ve made no mention of Bond actors from ‘rogue’ productions such as Barry Nelson, who played 007 in a 1954 adaptation of Casino Royale for the CBS TV anthology show Climax!, or David Niven, who played him in another adaptation of Casino Royale, the dire, zany, swinging-sixties comedy released by Columbia Pictures in 1967. Or for that matter, God help us, the endearingly naff TV quiz-show host Bob Holness, who played Bond in a 1956 South African radio adaptation of the third Bond novel Moonraker (1955).

So in descending order, we have:

Sean Connery
Timothy Dalton
Daniel Craig
Pierce Brosnan
George Lazenby
Roger Moore

To be honest, in my opinion, anyone who doesn’t think that Connery is the best Bond needs his or her head examined. He swaggered in at the start of the film series, dark and Byronic but equipped with that inimitable Scottish burr, and made the role his own. He invested Bond with a ruthless but suave lethalness, a threatening but graceful physicality, a cruel but entertaining laconicism. In fact, 58 years ago, Connery was such a revelation in the role that even Bond’s literary creator Ian Fleming, still alive and still writing at the time, was sufficiently inspired to put a bit of the brooding ex-Edinburgh-milkman into his spy-hero. No doubt Fleming had Connery in mind when he ended his final Bond novel The Man with the Golden Gun, published posthumously in 1965, with Bond turning down the offer of a knighthood. “I am a Scottish peasant,” he retorts, “and will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant.”

It has to be said that at the turn of the century when Connery himself was offered a knighthood, he displayed none of Bond’s reluctance. He took it and promptly became Sir Sean. (Or Shirrr Sean.)

Yet having just said that Connery is the best Bond, I must confess that he isn’t quite my favourite Bond. That accolade goes to number two on my list, the Welsh actor Timothy Dalton, who played him in the movies The Living Daylights (1987) and Licenced to Kill (1989). Mainly this is because I’d read most of Ian Fleming’s novels at an early age, before I saw any of the films; and Dalton struck me as the actor who came closest to portraying Bond in the way Fleming had imagined him and the way I’d first imagined him from the books. (While researching the role, Dalton read the original literary canon, so this was to be expected.) His was an edgier and more troubled 007. It’s fitting that The Living Daylights begins by using the plot of the Fleming short story of the same name, which has Bond refusing to kill an enemy sniper – a woman – and declaring bitterly that the secret service can sack him for all he cares.

Alas, Dalton didn’t capture the imagination of the public, who still seemed in thrall to the jokey tone of the previous Bond movies of the 1970s and early 1980s. He wasn’t helped either by Britain’s fickle film critics. They’d spent years moaning that the Bond films had become ‘too silly’. But as soon as someone tried to toughen up the films, they started moaning that the series had lost its lovable silliness.

Ironically, Daniel Craig has approached the role in a similar way – a minimum of silliness, a maximum of seriousness – and won much acclaim in recent years. Today’s world just happened to more ready for Craig’s approach. It was less ready when Dalton did the same thing 30-odd years ago. Anyway, I’d put Craig third in my list of Bonds, while fourth place goes to that genial Irishman Pierce Brosnan. I like Brosnan as an actor and at his best he brought a believable toughness to the role; but overall his version of Bond was a bit too bland for my tastes. He also was unlucky with the quality of some of his films. His swansong in the role, 2002’s Die Another Day, is a particular stinker.

Fifth, and second from the bottom, is Australian George Lazenby, who definitely wasn’t much cop as an actor. Ironically, his single Bond movie, 1968’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is perhaps the best one of the lot. It’s arguable that because it’s very different from the usual entries in the series – wistful in tone and tragic in its ending – the awkward and uncertain Lazenby actually fits the bill nicely. Here Bond appears vulnerable and wounded and Lazenby is believable in terms of what the character has to go through. I couldn’t imagine ‘Big Sean’ breenging through the movie in his usual insouciant manner and having the same emotional impact.

And in last place… Well, I’ll say one thing for the late Sir Roger Moore, which is that his Bond movies were massively popular in their day. (In fact, I’ll say two things – offscreen, he was clearly a good guy. He did masses of work as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF on behalf of the United Nations Children’s Fund. He was also involved in the campaign by PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, against the gruesome processes used in the making of foie gras and he helped to persuade the department store Selfridges to stop stocking the stuff.)

During his reign as 007 the franchise flourished and made millions. So even if I didn’t think much of old Roger as James Bond, or of most of the Bond films in which he appeared, vast numbers of other people evidently did.

The above-mentioned Radio Times poll saw Sean Connery secure first place in the battle of the Bonds. Surprisingly but gratifyingly, Timothy Dalton finished in second place, while Pierce Brosnan finished in third. (I’d ranked Daniel Craig third, but I shan’t begrudge Brosnan his success.) So that’s Connery, Dalton and Brosnan: a Scotsman, a Welshman and an Irishman. For the Radio Times’ readers, the Celtic Bonds are evidently the best ones.