Tag: You Only Live Twice

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The best of the Bonds (Part 1)

 

© Jonathan Cape

 

Today, I’ve learned, is James Bond Day – even though it’s a bit hard to celebrate the occasion when (1) the franchise now belongs to Jeff Bezos, who, with his vast fortune, private space programme and bald head, would make a good Bond villain, and (2) we currently have no idea who the next James Bond will be.

 

However, to celebrate the occasion, here is the first half of a lengthy treatise I’ve written about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: both the 1963 novel by Ian Fleming, which I think is possibly the best of the books, and the 1969 movie, which I think is definitely the best of the films.  For simplicity’s sake, I’ll abbreviate the title to OHMSS.  Oh, and if you aren’t familiar with the storylines of the book and film, be warned that his entry will be chock-full of spoilers.

 

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the tenth of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels.  He wrote it in early 1962 at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica.  Nearby, meanwhile, Jamaican locations were being used for the filming of the very first James Bond film, Dr No.  Thus, James Bond was undergoing a metamorphosis – from a literary phenomenon into something bigger, a franchise incorporating large-scale moviemaking and merchandising and whose central character would soon be an icon of 1960s pop culture.  Though the novels were refined examples of pulp fiction, Fleming – who was methodical about his research – at least tried to give them a veneer of believability.  With each successive film, however, Bond seemed to drift further from the realm of possibility and into that of outright fantasy.

 

OHMSS-the-novel feels different from its literary predecessors, but not because Fleming tries to take it in the direction the films were going.  He does the opposite.  It makes Bond more believable as a character, not less.  It’s ostensibly about the first face-to-face encounter between Bond and his archenemy Ernst Stavros Blofeld, who is head of the secretive and deadly crime syndicate SPECTRE.  But OHMSS 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, a woman whose father, Marc-Ange Draco, runs a crime syndicate too, the Unione Corse of Corsica.  At the novel’s end, with Blofeld seemingly vanquished, Bond and Tracy get married – only for Blofeld to suddenly reappear in the final pages, spray their bridal car with bullets, kill Tracy and leave Bond as a babbling wreck.  As a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement noted at the time, this Bond was “somehow gentler, more sentimental, less dirty.”

 

When Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman got around to filming OHMSS six years later, five Bond books had been turned into movies and, already, the continuities of the books and films were hopelessly at odds.  In the books, Blofeld had made a ‘backstage’ appearance in OHMSS’s immediate predecessor, Thunderball.  In OHMSS’s successor, You Only Live Twice, Bond and he have a second and final meeting.  It’s the grim tale of the traumatised Bond hunting down and getting his revenge on Blofeld, much of it taking place on a bizarre ‘island of death’ off the Japanese mainland, whose deadly fauna and volcanic discharges attract a steady stream of visitors wanting to commit suicide.

 

In the Bond movie-world, though, Blofeld had featured in the backgrounds of From Russia with Love (1963) and Thunderball (1966) and then played a leading role in the film immediately before OHMSS, 1967’s You Only Live Twice – yes, the title that came after it in the book series.  As a result, there isn’t much grimness in You Only Live Twice-the-movie.  It’s a jolly science-fictional romp involving stolen spaceships, a secret base disguised as a Japanese volcano and Donald Pleasence playing Blofeld with a white jumpsuit, severe facial scar and fluffy white cat.  The film is a cartoonish thing compared with the book because, as far as the films are concerned, the murder of Bond’s wife hasn’t happened yet.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

When OHMSS began filming, the filmmakers – Broccoli and Saltzman, scriptwriter Richard Maibaum and director Peter Hunt, who’d worked as a film editor and second-unit director on the previous five movies – made the brave decision to follow Fleming’s book closely, right up to the tragic denouement.  So keen was Hunt to be faithful to the book that supposedly he carried a copy of it with him around the set, its pages marked with his own annotations.

 

At the start of OHMSS-the-book, it seems like business as usual for Bond.  As with the previous novels, he’s a sophisticated, money-is-no-object consumer of the sort of food, drink, cigars, clothes and cars that most of Fleming’s post-war, austerity-Britain readers could only dream about.  Although Fleming writes early on that “James Bond was not a gourmet.  In England he lived on grilled soles, oeufs cocotte and cold roast beef with potato salad,” a page later we hear him bitching about the quality of a meal he’s just had in a French eatery, about “…the fly-walk of the Paté Maison (sent back for a new slice) and a Poularde à la crème that was the only genuine antique in the place.  Bond had moodily washed down this sleazy provender with a bottle of instant Pouilly Fuissé and was finally insulted the next morning by a bill for the meal in excess of five pounds.”

 

However, the tone soon changes.  Bond is in France at the tail end of a mission to locate Blofeld, an interminable and fruitless mission that’s pissed him off to the point where he’s ready to hand in his resignation to M.  Then he crosses paths with the troubled but imperious Tracy.  In a pricey hotel-cum-casino she commands him: “Take off those clothes.  Make love to me.  You are handsome and strong.  I want to remember what it can be like.  Do anything you like.  And tell me what you like and what you would like from me.  Be rough with me.  Treat me like the lowest whore in creation.  Forget everything else.  No questions.  Take me.”

 

Later, on the coast, Bond intervenes to prevent Tracy from committing suicide and the two of them fall into the clutches of some heavies who turn out to be working for Tracy’s father, Draco, godfather of the Unione Corse.  Draco is delighted with Bond taking a protective interest in his daughter and urges him to marry her – offering a one-million-pound dowry as a sweetener.  Bond declines the marriage offer but agrees to continue romancing Tracy, if it’ll help her mental state.  He also manages to coax some information out of his would-be father-in-law regarding Blofeld’s whereabouts.  The super-villain, it transpires, is hiding in Switzerland.

 

The same events occur in the film version, although in a different order.  First, Bond saves Tracy from drowning herself, then he gets to know her intimately.  Also, the action takes place not in France, but in Portugal – Peter Hunt felt that by this time cinemagoers were overly familiar with the French coast.  Just before the credits kick in (and we get to hear John Barry’s instrumental OHMSS theme, regarded by many as the best Bond tune of the lot), there’s also some breaking of the fourth wall as Bond turns towards the camera and quips, “This never happened to the other fellow.”  For yes, this movie features a brand new James Bond.  Gone is the slurring Edinburgh brogue, hairy Caledonian brawn and insouciant Scottish scowl of Sean Connery – who by then, apparently, couldn’t even bring himself to exchange words with Cubby Broccoli – and in his place is the inexperienced Australian actor George Lazenby.

 

Actually, such a novice was Lazenby at the time that the only thing he was known for was appearing in a TV commercial for Fry’s Chocolate Cream.  I’ve heard a story that Broccoli saw him a barber’s shop, liked the ‘cut of his jib’ and picked him on the spot.  However, interviewed on the making-of documentary that accompanies my DVD copy of OHMSS, Lazenby claims that he already had an audition for Bond lined up.  He went to that barber’s because he knew that Connery had used it in the past and he thought it was his best bet for getting a ‘Bondian’ haircut.  The establishment was used by other people associated with the Bond movies and Broccoli happened to be there when Lazenby walked in.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

In contrast with the inexperienced Lazenby, the actress playing Tracy in the movie was already a star – Diana Rigg, who’d made a name for herself playing Emma Peel in the gloriously baroque 1960s TV show The Avengers (1961-69).  Fascinatingly, for a film series that’s often accused of de-humanising the books and emphasising big, dumb spectacle at the expense of characterisation, Tracy is a more fleshed-out character in the film than in Fleming’s novel.  She’s given more to do and, played by Rigg, she has a sparkle that’s missing in the rather aloof, ambiguous character that Fleming sketches.  Tales about how Lazenby and Rigg didn’t get on during the shoot are legion – most notably about Rigg munching garlic prior to the filming of scenes where Bond and Tracy kiss.  Director Hunt has disputed these claims, although I’ve seen at least one interview with Rigg where her comments about Lazenby are uncomplimentary.

 

Both the book and film show Bond getting an unexpected lead about where to find Blofeld in Switzerland – the College of Arms in London has had dealings with his adversary, who wants them to prove he is heir to the aristocratic title of ‘Compte Balthazar de Bleuchamp’.  This allows Bond to adopt the guise of Sir Hilary Bray, a College of Arms genealogist, and travel to Blofeld’s hideout, a mysterious medical clinic perched on top of the Piz Gloria in the Swiss Alps, where he promises to do some research in support of Blofeld’s claim to the title.

 

In the novel Fleming devotes a lot of time to the College of Arms, whose work clearly interests him.  It also allows him to explore the theme of snobbery.  As Sable Basilisk, a genealogy expert interviewed by Bond, comments: “I’ve seen hundreds of smart people from the City, industry, politics – famous people I’ve been quite frightened to meet when they walked into the room.  But when it comes to snobbery, to buying respectability so to speak, whether it’s the title they’re going to choose or just a coat of arms to hang over their fireplaces in Surbiton, they dwindle and dwindle in front of you… until they’re no more than homunculi.”  It’s satisfying that Blofeld’s snobbery is the weakness that allows Bond to ensnare him.  Mind you, some would say this is rich coming from Fleming.  His Bond novels, with their suave, sophisticated, well-travelled and well-heeled hero, have often been accused of snobbery themselves.

 

It’s also during this stage of the book we learn about Bond’s family.  For example, he’s informed by the College of Arms that his family motto – and coincidentally a title for a Pierce Brosnan Bond movie 30 year later – is ‘The world is not enough’, of which he says, “It is an excellent motto which I shall certainly adopt.”  And we learn that his father was a Scotsman who “came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe” (a detail honoured by the 2012 Daniel Craig Bond movie Skyfall), while his mother was Swiss.

 

Not that Fleming is complimentary about his parents’ nationalities.  Another genealogist, Griffin Or, says of the Scots in olden times: “In those days, I am forced to admit that our cousins across the border were little more than savages…  Very pleasant savages, of course, very brave and all that…  More useful with the sword than with the pen.”  Of his mum’s homeland, meanwhile, Bond snorts, ”(m)oney is the religion of Switzerland.”  M replies to this: “I don’t need a lecture on the qualities of the Swiss, thank you, 007.  At least they keep their trains clean and cope with the beatnik problem…”  (If M reckoned there was a problem with the beatniks, God knows how he felt in the late 1960s when the hippies appeared.)

 

Fleming gave Bond a partly Scottish parentage because, it’s said, he was impressed with the job Connery did of portraying his super-spy when filming of Dr No took place in Jamaica in 1962.  Dr No-the-film’s influence is detectable elsewhere.  In Blofeld’s Alpine base, which in the book is a ski resort as well as a clinic – in the film it’s only the latter – a character points out to Bond a certain lady among the fashionable skiers: “And that beautiful girl with the long fair hair at the big table, that is Ursula Andress, the film star.”  Andress, of course, was Connery’s co-star in Dr No and has a place in cinematic history as the first major Bond girl.

 

To be continued…

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

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Under the dome: the Cloud Forest

 

 

A while back, my partner and I decided to tackle one of the to-do things on our Singaporean bucket-list and paid a visit to the city’s celebrated Gardens by the Bay.

 

Every day I get to view the Gardens, or at least the two huge domes that dominate them.  They’re visible from the bridge over Marina Bay that my bus crosses when I’m travelling to and from work.  With their exoskeletons of giant, curved ribs, the domes resemble a pair of gargantuan woodlice huddling in the vegetation not far from the Marina Bay Sands building (which is distinctive in appearance too – like a huge, futuristic version of one of the structures of standing stones and lintel stones at Stonehenge).

 

We entered the taller dome first.  It contains what’s known as the ‘Cloud Forest’ and, to quote the Gardens’ website, is “home to one of the world’s tallest indoor waterfalls and a lush mountain clad with plants from around the world.”  Our visit coincided with the dome hosting a temporary display called Avatar: The Experience.  For the most part, this meant that life-sized fibreglass representations of the Na’vi and other examples of the flora and fauna of Pandora, the planet featured in the James Cameron movies Avatar (2009) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2013), were positioned among the vegetation inside, allowing fans of the movies to pretend they were seeing them in the movies’ alien jungle.  Even if I’d been an Avatar enthusiast, which I’m not – I thought the first one was merely okay and I haven’t seen the second one – I would have found these annoying.  Their presence was a distraction from the works of ethnic / indigenous art, from such places as East Timor and Malaysia, that stand permanently amid the foliage.  Still, it wasn’t too difficult to ignore the Avatar paraphernalia, even if a lot of people – especially young kids – clustered around them taking selfies.

 

 

The dome’s main feature is a hulking, sandcastle-shaped mountain covered in a shaggy cloak of ferns, leaves, fronds, creepers, briars and occasional flowers.  However, like the volcano in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967), the mountain isn’t what it first appears.  It’s not the secret HQ of a supervillain planning world domination, but behind the greenery festooning its exterior, it’s a structure of decks, terraces, lift-shafts and staircases.  Not only can you go up inside the mountain and look out from its various levels, but you can follow elevated catwalks that swirl away from it, past the tops of the surrounding trees, to the internal surface of the dome itself.

 

When we came through the entrance doors, we were struck by a chilly mixture of water droplets and water vapour emanating from the bottom of the waterfall mentioned on the website – really, five streams of water pouring down from five spouts near the mountain’s summit.  The water hits the ground near a Māori sculpture, made out of totora wood, slightly reminiscent of a Japanese torii, and unveiled there by Jacinda Ahern during a visit in 2022.  Thereafter, you need a couple of minutes to get accustomed to the organisation of the place.  To your right, the path takes you around the base of the artificial mountain.  Above you, the catwalks encircle the mountain like hula-hoops swinging around a burly torso.  And above and beyond everything else, the dome’s glass extends in a massive, curved grid of steel.  At the time, three cleaners in abseiling-like harnesses were working their way down the outside of the dome, scrubbing it with long-handled brushes, sluicing it with jets of water, and looking absolutely tiny.

 

 

A lift took us to the mountain’s top.  From there, you gradually descend, enjoying the different levels’ views and wandering along the catwalks as they loop out and back again.  Amid the botanical displays at the very top is one containing pitcher plants, bladderworts, butterworts, sundews and Venus flytraps – yes, it’s a collection of carnivorous plants.  The Venus flytraps are contained in a couple of glass globes suspended above the display, their fanged maws sprouting from masses of soil and plant-matter. This was the first time I’d seen the famously fly-hungry plant for real and I was surprised by how small it was.  Despite its diminutive size, it still looked sinister, like a vicious, vampiric little Pac-Man.

 

 

Obviously, we took advantage of the catwalks.  These lead you away from the mountain, past the treetops, and right to the dome’s inside surface, where you can peer out through the last leaves and stems at such Singaporean landmarks as the aforementioned Marina Bay Sands building or the Singapore Flyer, the observation wheel that looms over the Formula One track.  It feels like being an explorer who’s just set eyes on the great, lost city of Singapore from the edge of a giant jungle-clearing.

 

 

Beneath the mountain, on a basement level, there’s an area known as the Secret Garden.  Threads of water leak down from the complex above, into what seems a congested and chaotic muddle of ferns, shrubs, branches, vines and flowers – though this being Singapore, it’s no doubt highly structured and organised in reality.  One reason why I liked the Secret Garden was because of its collection of sculptures, made from gnarly and sprawling segments of tree-trunk, tree-branches and tree-roots.  Not only have these been trimmed, smoothed and varnished, but among them lurk cunningly-hidden, carved animals. Thus, a zig-zagging chunk of tree-trunk that serves as a garden-bench has, skulking along its surface, a crocodile’s head; while a twisting, tangled section of treetop, erected like a statue, is home to a wolf reposing along one of its branches.

 

 

The dome’s temperature is controlled and kept to an agreeably cool level.  It made a pleasant change to be able to walk amid nature in Singapore for an hour and not end up drenched in sweat.

 

As I said, the Avatar exhibits (which also included cubicles in the basement-area where you could get your photo taken and have it superimposed on a Pandoran landscape, and an animatronic dragon-creature that threateningly stirred and crankily growled), didn’t impose too much on our Cloud Forest experience.  The biggest imposition was probably when we found ourselves sharing a lift with an incredibly excited wee boy, who was enthusing to his mother about how wonderful the dome was because it was so full of Avatar stuff.  Then he became aware of my surly, bearded presence behind him, turned around, looked up at me, and declared, “I love you, Mr Klingon,” before kissing my belt-buckle.  Well, that was unexpected.  Though if I had to be mistaken for an alien species, I would far rather it was a grumpy warrior race who dress like they’re in a 1980s heavy metal band and say cool things like, “Surrender or die!”, rather than a wimpy bunch of blue-skinned James Cameron-ian space-hippies like the Na’vi.

 

Then we headed for the other dome at Gardens by the Bay, the Flower Dome.  But that’s a topic for another blog-post.

 

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Daniel Craig’s Swann song

 

© Eon Productions

 

At last!  Two years after its first scheduled release in November 2019 (abandoned when Danny Boyle, originally lined up to be director, departed from the project), and a year-and-a-half after its next scheduled release in April 2020 (abandoned because of the Covid-19 pandemic), and a couple of months after it went on release in the UK, the 25th James Bond movie No Time to Die has made it to Sri Lanka and I’ve been able to watch it on a big screen.

 

It was odd to finally see the movie in its 163-minute entirety.  I’d become accustomed to seeing it as a two-and-a-half-minute trailer during my infrequent trips to the cinema during the past two years.  Up it popped before Tenet (2020) last summer, up it popped again before Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) in May this year…  And when the No Time to Die trailer popped up yet again before I started watching Dune (2021) in a cinema a few weeks ago, I thought, ‘My God, am I ever going to see this thing as a film?’

 

Anyway, here are my thoughts on No Time to Die, which marks Daniel Craig’s final appearance as James Bond.  I’ll start by listing what I didn’t like about it, then what I did like about it, and then I’ll give my overall verdict.  I will, as much as I can, try to avoid spoilers.  But be warned that some spoilers will inevitably appear.

 

DIDN’T LIKE…

Rami Malek’s character

I’m not dissing Malek’s performance as the film’s big villain Lyutsifer Safin.  It’s just that he doesn’t get enough time to establish Safin as a character or a threat.  Yes, he’s effective in No Time to Die’s opening sequence, which with its arty snowbound setting, violence and jump-scares resembles something from an especially stylish 1970s giallo movie.  But after that we hardly see him again until the film’s final reel.  Also, while a twisted and unsettling connection clearly exists between him and Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann character, the love of Bond’s life, we frustratingly never learn much about it.  Contrast that with 1999’s The World is Not Enough, which was a generally clunky Bond entry.  But at least it was more disturbing in how it depicted the warped relationship between Bond’s nominal love interest Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) and psychotic bad guy Renard (Robert Carlisle).

 

© Eon Productions

 

Rami Malek’s character’s age

Also, Rami Malek looks too young to be the same character who menaced Madeleine Swann when she was a child, as seen in that opening sequence, and who menaces her again as an adult.  My partner watched the film with me and speculated that, because he’s disfigured, his damaged facial skin might have slowed the development of wrinkles…  But no, I’m not buying it.

 

While we’re on the subject of age, I was perturbed that when Bond goes to mourn at the tomb of Vespa Lynd (Eva Green), his late and much-lamented love interest in Casino Royale (2006), a plaque on the tomb-door informs us that she was 23 years old when she died.  What?  In Casino Royale she was working as an agent with the British Treasury’s Financial Action Task Force.  I know her character was young and something of a whizz-kid, but surely she wasn’t that whizz-kiddish to have landed such a job and such responsibilities at the age of 23?

 

Blofeld’s bionic eye

Despite having been banged up in Belmarsh Prison since the events of 2015’s Spectre, it transpires that Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) has been secretly running his Spectre organisation from his cell with the use of a sneaky high-tech bionic eye (replacing the eye he lost in the helicopter crash at Spectre’s finale).  We even get a daft scene where, during a Spectre party, Blofeld manages to orchestrate and comment on events via a bionic-eye-receiver that a minion is carrying around on a tray.  Where did this bionic eye come from?  How did Spectre smuggle it into him at Belmarsh?  Was it Blofeld’s birthday, and a visitor managed to get it to him hidden inside a birthday cake?  And why didn’t the prison’s security systems – which seem pretty thorough, considering that Blofeld only gets to meet visitors inside a mobile metal cage, which is shuttled along tramlines to the meeting area – let this past them?  No, it’s a total failure of plot-logic.

 

How You Only Live Twice’s ‘Garden of Death’ gets shoehorned in

Ian Fleming’s 1964 novel You Only Live Twice is one of my favourite Bond books, largely because of its bizarre plot.  This has Blofeld retiring to Japan, acquiring a castle and taking up gardening.  Blofeld being Blofeld, though, the garden he cultivates around his castle is a Garden of Death.  It’s infested with poisonous vegetation and wildlife and dotted with boiling, sulphurous mud-pools.  Perversely, the garden’s lethal features begin to draw visitors – Japanese people who want to commit suicide head there to die.  I’d always hoped one day the Garden of Death would feature in a Bond film and it does, finally, in No Time to Die.  But it appears only for a couple of minutes while Safin gives the kidnapped Madeleine a tour of his headquarters and, as a setting, its potential is wasted.

 

The action finale

No Time to Die’s ending has proved controversial.  I have no problem with the events that occur in the last 20 minutes or so.  But I’m annoyed that the finale is rather fragmented and isn’t the big sustained rush of excitement I’d wanted for the end of Daniel Craig’s tenure as Bond.  There’s a bit of action, then things stop for a while, then there’s another bit of action, then things stop again, then a bit more action, then another pause…  It isn’t so much Craig going out with a bang as with a stuttering series of pops.

 

Lashana Lynch’s excellent Nomi character features here but isn’t given enough to do.  Come to think of it, instead of just her and Bond being sent to infiltrate Safin’s lair, wouldn’t it have been better if they’d led an army of commandoes to attack the place?  That way, the action might have been more sustained, widespread and exciting.

 

© Eon Productions

 

LIKED…

Madeleine Swann’s arc

Lea Seydoux isn’t my favourite Bond-lady of the Daniel Craig era.  (Four days of the week, I worship at the temple of Eva Green.  The other three days, I worship at the temple of Naomie Harris, aka Miss Moneypenny.)  But at least her character Madeleine Swann gets to develop beyond the supposedly happy ending of Spectre and explore darker territory in No Time to Die.  This is a relief, as I’d heard rumours that the movie would be a re-tread of 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and I’d feared that her character’s only function would be to get bumped off early on, leaving Bond to spend the rest of the film on a simplistic revenge mission.

 

Ana de Armas and Lashana Lynch

Meanwhile, the other main actresses in No Time to Die are great.  De Armas (who co-starred with Craig in Rian Johnson’s splendid 2019 whodunnit Knives Out) is a delight as Paloma, the supposedly inexperienced CIA agent who’s assigned to help Bond with some espionage-related business in Cuba.  I shudder to think how a Roger Moore-era Bond movie would have portrayed her.  She’d have been a bumbling incompetent whose klutziness was a source of slapstick gags and mocking, sexist humour.  But here, when the shit hits the fan, Paloma proves to be more than capable.  Indeed, if the character has a fault, it’s that she’s not in the film long enough.

 

© Eon Productions

 

As I’ve said, Lynch’s Nomi character – whom, Bond discovers, has been made the new 007 in his absence – could have been given more to do too.  But she still makes an impact and if producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson want to stay in this version of the Bond-verse a little longer and give Nomi her own spinoff movies, I’d happily pay money to go and see them.

 

The regulars

One of the pleasures of Craig’s stint as Bond has been seeing the gradual reintroduction of the franchise’s regular characters, rebooted and played by new but dependable actors – Jeffrey Wright debuting as Felix Leiter in Casino Royale, Rory Kinnear as Bill Tanner in Quantum of Solace (2008), Ralph Fiennes as the replacement for Judi Dench as M in Skyfall (2012), and Naomie Harris as Moneypenny and Ben Wishaw as Q also in Skyfall.  All are excellent again in No Time to Die.

 

I suspect the next Bond will be another reboot and we won’t be seeing these actors in these roles again – Wishaw has already remarked that this is probably his last outing as Q – which is a shame.  I haven’t enjoyed a Bond ensemble like this since Bernard Lee played M, Lois Maxwell played Moneypenny and Desmond Llewellyn played Q back in the days of Connery, Lazenby and Moore.

 

© Eon Productions

 

The fan service

As Casino Royale made clear, Craig’s Bond is a new Bond.  He’s not the same bloke as the one who encountered with Mr Kidd and Mr Wint in Diamonds are Forever (1971), or battled against Jaws in a space station in Moonraker (1980), or rampaged through downtown Moscow in a tank in Goldeneye (1995).  Still, it’s nice that No Time to Die contains references to the pre-Craig Bonds, though not so intrusively that they threaten the continuity established since 2006.  It’s cool, for example, that Bond drives the Aston Martin DB5 that Sean Connery drove in Goldfinger (1964), complete with similar gadgets, and we also see him climb into an Aston Martin V8 Advantage that Timothy Dalton drove in The Living Daylights (1987) – it’s even got the same number plate (B549 WUU)!  In MI6 headquarters, we see not only a framed portrait of Judi Dench’s M, but also one of Robert Brown, who played M during the late Roger Moore years and the Timothy Dalton ones.  Meanwhile, the title sequence echoes that of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by featuring a trident-holding Britannia figure, Union Jacks, clocks and hourglasses.

 

That said, I could have done with a little less of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s music on the No Time to Die soundtrack.  John Barry’s OHMSS theme accompanies one scene set in London and Louis Armstrong’s We Have All the Time in the World plays over the end credits.  This is wonderful, timeless music, of course, but it shows up the inferiority of No Time to Die’s theme song, sung by Billie Eilish – which, while it’s way better than Sam Smith’s dire The Writing’s on the Wall from Spectre, is still no classic.

 

Bond’s arc

Daniel Craig’s Bond movies have been a daring experiment.  Since Casino Royale, we’ve seen him carry out his first mission and make his first kill, fall in love, suffer tragedy, discover some uncomfortable truths about his upbringing and fall in love again.  In No Time to Die, he falls out of and back into love and has to make some difficult, final decisions.  Things haven’t always gone smoothly – Spectre, in particularly, had to do some clumsy retconning to the story – but generally it’s been a success.  Daniel Craig’s performance in the lead role has helped hugely, of course.  So, hats off to Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson for being bold and keeping their nerve.

 

Mind you, I was relieved to see the words JAMES BOND WILL RETURN at the very end.

 

VERDICT?

Well, I liked it more than Quantum of Solace and Spectre.  But due to the issues I’ve described above, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Casino Royale or Skyfall.  Which is a pity, because I’ve liked Daniel Craig’s Bond and wanted him to go out on the highest note possible.  As it stands, I think No Time to Die is pretty good, but it’s not going to alter the rankings in my top half-dozen, or possibly even my top ten, Bond movies.

 

© Eon Productions

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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.