He was around from before I was born and will probably will survive the next Ice Age. All of my life he has been there in times of crisis and conquest. He has many births and a few fake deaths, yet no actor who has played him has yet to die, unless you count David Niven, and I don't. And he has the same first name as my late dad. My dad, like most dads, loved him, at least in Sean Connery form. My dads name was James, too. I've thought of my father when watching Bond, Connery's Bond anyway, since the dawn of time. I feel close to him now, through Connery especially, and so I dedicate this Father's Day Bond post to his memory. RIP, James.
Connery or no, Bond films have endured, following a handful of similar but deceptively elaborate plots that seem to bleed across each other making each particular film hard to remember, allowing for rewarding repeat viewing as we change from children to men our perceptions of the movies change, too, and new fissures of interest a sussed out. As kids the car chases are ripping, the girls hot; as adults the atomic bomb hijacking minutiae and intrigue is fascinating in ways that used to be boring. In THUNDERBALL (1965) for example it takes about five minutes of real cinematic time to throw a camouflage net over a sunken NATO bomber. Now that I'm an adult lost in a world of whiplash editing I dig that it takes its time and the advent of anamorphic makes the full picture easy to follow and get lost in as a bloody aquarium. Now I'm glad I know the whole process of how to camouflage a stolen RAF bomber. On pan and scan it was impossible to see who was wearing what color wetsuit, and the pan and scan muddying the water and cutting the action into blocks of meaningless bubbles and cut hoses.
The core of what makes Bond great is that we don't envy his living the good life because we know what it entails. He needs to know the good life because his senses are always on high alert so the good food, drink, and women are mandatory. Imagine if your taste buds were so heightened you couldn't even drink champagne unless it was perfectly chilled and just the right vintage and now it becomes clear. Bond risks his neck so we can stay asleep and dreaming at the movies. He gets to live large because each breath might be his last so why on earth would he save his money or worry about protocol? No kids, no future, no contingency plans. And his quarry are always super rich so he has to seem like something other than a peasant, it's for England, James!
If we don't have his luck, or way with the ladies, or cat-like reflexes, or perfect hair, we don't begrudge the man whose fearlessness and competence are tested daily. Where we would run away from danger he charges in deliberately, swimming up the river of fear on our behalf. It makes our middle class status easier to bear to think this, even if we know deep down it's not true. We'd just rather be alive and out of immediate danger. We can always watch the movies if we need to feel proxy danger, or luxury.
As not seen since later LICENSE TO KILL there's a very kinky edge to THUNDERBALL, with Largo beating the naked heaving backside of Domino (Claudine Auger) - I remember swooning over all that as a little masochistic freakazoid seven year-old. To me, that was Bond in the 70s, for the Moore Bonds weren't on TV yet. In the 80s, when sexual harassment was becoming a thing, we rented them all from the newly opened video stores at the mall (or from the back room of appliance stores) and saw them over and over, as reminders of the power we were once going to inherit as men. Gradually we learned to appreciate Connery over Moore. The TV game show handsomeness and self-reflexive winking of Moore was reassuring but he lacked the muscularity of Connery, and even Dalton and Lazenby, who all looked like they could handle themselves in a fight. More and more the films relied on fancy gadgets. His punches looked like they would hurt nothing but his own knuckles. My best buddy Alan and I saw them all (MOONRAKER the first one I actually saw in the theater) and when FOR YOUR EYES ONLY came to cable, we must have seen it 500 times. I can still quote it, still think in its rhythms.
In the 90s, my whole relationship to Bond changed when our friend Jen (not her real name) brought a rented copy of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE over to our loft one foreboding Friday night in 1997. I was so hungover from the night before it carried through the day and into the night - a blackout of shame and regret and paranoia and terror of the idea of going out again, into the night and the swankiness of another expensive bar (we were a hard-partying, very fancy bunch) was too much to bear. Once I saw the video rental bag in her hands, I knew it would all be OK. I absorbed the film fully, enraptured in ways I never would have been without Cassandra. It was a special event, one we tried to duplicate again and again after, but it never worked, not unlike the ecstasy we were so fond of. Brosnan came in (with GOLDENEYE) a perfect choice for the Metrosexual Age.
And so Bond became something to drink to, and who could make hangovers or sobriety disappear in equal measure. This was the era of the TNT Bond marathons, so important in staving off looming male impotence they were even cited by Kevin Spacey in AMERICAN BEAUTY. By then Roger Moore, our favorite Bond as kids, was far too old and safe to not be creepy when he gets it on with a girl young enough to be his daughter, or granddaughter. He didn't smoke and seldom even drank. What kind of Bond was that? And we developed a taste for Lazenby, considering him the last good Bond. Pierce Brosnan had taken over after a two film stint by Timothy Dalton, who at the time had some big shoes to fill and people weren't prepared for a Bond who could act, or had the physicality and grace to appear like he could actually do the stuff Bond did. We had to adjust.
By then the issue of sexism was too pronounced to ignore, so they cast Judi Dench as M, and made post-modern wisecracks about his dinosaur patriarchal cluelessness. But dismissing Bond movies as sexist is a bit like dismissing MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE as alarmist. The truth is that being a spy has always been about sex (NOTORIOUS, for example), about being a whore for your country, a master of using sex to convince vulnerable people to confide secrets, then leaving them to be killed while you pursue your quarry. And the survivor of the game is the one, male or female, who can keep their wits about them even while naked and astride some heart-melting hottie. So unless a man is super confident, irresistible to women, inordinately lucky, able to keep one hand on his trigger as well as hers even unto the point of orgasm, as well as a great shot and dogged in determination to chase down his man, even at the risk of massive destruction (all those trashed and probably uninsured third world villages), he doesn't stand a chance.
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| Save the jokes, Mr. Bond |
One thing I've been studying of late is the importance of tick-tockality or Hawksian/Carpenterian cohesive momentum, which is to say a minimum of time lapse edits and cross cutting to other players, a sense of immanent danger where time elapses normally and we stay with the same character rather than bouncing around all over a plot. The worst culprit of the latter in all Bond is probably GOLDENEYE, which is almost as much some Russian programmer's movie as we see her by herself almost as much as we see Bond. The best example of this Hawksian momentum is the first half of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, which never really leaves Bond's side and unfolds almost in real time from the moment he lands in Tokyo, moves up through a few contacts and code words, and eventually gets to Tanaka, the Japanese chief of the secret police who lets Bond know that his assistant in the mission will be a girl posing as his wife who "looks like a pig." He also notes that "in Japan, Mr. Bond-san, men come first, women second." It's probably the most sexist moment in Bond's entire career, and though his posing as a Japense fisherman is racist as hell, it's not really a disservice as the Japanese even peasants are revealed as highly erudite. Other great stretches of tick-tock momentum - almost the entirety of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY and THUNDERBALL.
CHRONOLOGY / ACIDEMIC GREATNESS RATING:
DR. NO
1962 - ****
Everything is new and fresh. There's no vocal to the opening theme song and Bond actually acts in a cumulative manner. Connery is super cool until around 3/4 of the way through when the stress of not knowing whom to trust and having so many attempts made on his life have left him stressed and jumpy. His only gadget is a new hand gun and he shoots and kills a man point blank who has an empty pistol, and nearly breaks a girl's arm for taking his picture. That's what I miss most, that Bond's kind of a cad.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
1963 - ****
These first four were filmed a year apart, capturing a very successful momentum marked by an adherence to tick-tockality of an almost Hawksian level and low stakes games (missile toppling, codex triple crosses, gold irradiation) that are more believable and therefore more engaging. Nothing like a sanely motivated super villain to feel, as the saying goes, possible, Mr. Bond,?
GOLDFINGER
1964 - ***
This movie used to annoy me because everyone talked about how it was the best Bond but I thought it was the most illogical. Goldfinger kills a mobster who wants to back out of the deal by crushing him up in a big Lincoln, along with a fortune in gold. Odd Job brings the crushed block back to the horse ranch and then needs to 'extract' his gold. Dude, talk about a waste of time and effort all just to show a car getting crushed into a block. Just shoot him! My dad loved that scene and talked about the 'great piece of music, horns blaring, I didn't think so, and thought Bond (even though I too was drinking mint juleps) a real snob in this, lecturing heads of MI6 on an the "indifferently blended" whiskey they serve him.
THUNDERBALL
1965 - ***1/2 (see above)
Even with the new anamorphic letting us appreciate the underwater stuff, it still stops the picture dead more than once, as does the dumb shit like the spine stretcher and jet pack. Nonetheless, still strong.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
1967 - ****
Second to DR. NO and the first film as far as tick-tockality -especially the entire first half which seems to unfold almost in real time, ramping up suspense in knowing who to trust and mixing up being on the look-out for enemy spies with spies of one's own side.
1969 ****
The idea to make George Lazenby's first appearance 'the one where he gets married' is a bit of a misstep. It makes him seem weak. But the whole downward chase from skis to one ski to cars, and ice rinks, is all so well done it achieves greatness.
1971 - ***
The song is over quick. The intro finds Bond tracking Blofeldt clones played by Charles RIDE WITH THE DEVIL Gray; Connery's back and looks great, rested, but the 70s has begun. Bond gets slugged from behind with the regularity of old Jim Rockford.
The two gay assassins are kind of, what is the word, antiquated in their villainous mincing? Jill St. John is a very sexy evil agent who after first seeing her on TV (one of the first movies my brother and I ever taped on our dad's new VHS) gave me a lifelong love of chokers above plunging necklines. The same Plenty O'Toole, a cooler for the casino owned by Willard White. There's a great car chase around Las Vegas, with some great stunt driving and real Vegas streets in this pre-CGI best of all possible worlds, great classic Bond music and once again Connery is in peak fighting condition and there's a certain Rat Pack swagger to the film, with good use of tick-tockality and Bond actually uses teamwork with the CIA. Still, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts, and John's voice grates.LIVE AND LET DIE
1973 - **1/2
One of the weakest climaxes ever, just voodoo, pirhanas, and Yaphet Koto inflating like a balloon, though before then there's a great boat chase my brother and I used to watch endlessly (the second thing we ever taped), and we still talk like the southern sheriff ("what are you some kinda doomsday machine, boy?")
MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN
1974 - * I've never really given this a full chance, too boring - I mean this rich killer constructs an elaborate funhouse just to chase Bond through so he can use a golden gun? A little effort, people! Christopher Lee is the only redeeming feature. Plays like a long episode of FANTASY ISLAND where some old tourist wants to play spy, rather than a real Bond movie.
SPY WHO LOVED ME
1977 - ***1/2
The producers realized they should take their time rather than deliver glorified TV movies, and the result is easily the best of the Moore Bonds. And as such (me being just eleven years old at the time, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME was a thorn in my side, as I wasn't allowed to see it by my parents, they all went on dates with their wives or others to see it and then came back and told the kids all about that underwater car and Jaws and how great it was, but we were too young to see it. It was the adult's STAR WARS. And hearing over and over about his great fall, I imagined Jaws with a monocle and a Prussian hat and black gloves (a bit like the one-armed prefect of police in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN). I was disappointed he just looked like a big dumb German farmer. I like too that it remembers Bond is a naval commander, as its a very naval adventure.
1979 - *1/2
Bond seems very old and tired in this gadgetry-mad edition. This man should be home watering his garden not being spun around in a G-force simulator or punching giants. It's even sad when he seduces willing ladies, almost like they're all expensive call girls hired by a lonely rich old man who likes to pretend he's a spy, following little clues his butler sets up around the mansion, but doesn't drink or smoke so it never quite comes off as cool. In DR. NO Bond has a bartender come up to his hotel to mix him a martini while he dresses! The drink poured, man exits. Cool is born. I mean, who thinks like that? Whoever did is long gone, alas. MOONRAKER has good tick-tockality and expensive architecture but is rather TV show in its lighting and blocking.
SPY WHO LOVED ME had been such a huge hit, so popular, the underwater sports car thing so cool no one could stop fantasizing about owning one, and fitting perfectly into the era of JAWS and STAR WARS but with some real moxy to it. So the follow-up brings back Richard Kiehl as Jaws, and ups the STAR WARS ante while keeping more or less the same plot, just moving things to space instead of the ocean. It's like a victory lap. The filmakers and Moore are coasting, mugging and presuming our laughter in all the right places. With his weird head and beard Drax is a dreadfully dull villain and any savvy spy should figure out what this guy is up to. The girls are all in that later 70s mode, wearing dowdy old peasant blouses, the old hippie fad that had finally crawled up to the Bond girl level but which hasn't aged well, especially with all the blouse buttons up to the neck like they're Victorian Puritans. And there a lot of them. Is this how it is when you are super rich? Is this where all the hot girls are? Or were? Waiting around for old rich dudes to just start making out with them after nary a hello? Dumb sight gags abound and repeat: an old, coughing man sees a floating coffin and throws his cigarette away, the gondola becomes a hovercraft and blazes through the square like a ridiculous peacock, a man at a cafe gazes ruefully at his wine bottle; the password to get into the secret lab is the notes from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. On and on it goes.
Thank god the 70s were almost over, and with it,all the variety show schtick that resurged from its watery Buster Keaton grave with LAUGH-IN would now descend once more. With cable there was no longer a need to appeal to a wide demographic that included the elderly, children, and everyone in between, as it is here, the sort of movie where we get a tour through a priceless antique glass exhibit and know eventually there's going to be a stick fight that trashes the place like goddamn Blake Edwards comedy. Some really inept assassins here. Jaws is like Wiley Coyote in a better mood. Bond doesn't even have a gun and only uses his dart watch to disarm those who do. Were they passing out Valium on set? Everyone seems zonked, except Richard Kiehl of course, who mugs for the cheap seats and survives everything like Wiley Coyote but has a whole range of exploding cigar-blackened emotions. Still there's one great moment: a slow Carnivale clown stalk that in its weird shambling silence recalls the previous year's HALLOWEEN and he later even gets a girlfriend! A big space station is literally half Death Star half the Jupiter Mission from 2001.
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
1981 - ***1/2
Return to basics! Smart move, Mr. Bond. A very welcome resurfacing of one of the lost Bond archetypes, the ultimately good-natured rogue with criminal connections who helps Bond against a bigger threat, here played with robustness by Topal.
OCTOPUSSY
1983 - *
Louis Jordan looks way too old and tired to be a convincing villain - he seems like he just wants a nap, not world domination. All the lessons of FOR YOUR EYES ONLY are forgotten. Maude Adams was hot in Playboy but dull as dishwater as the titular circus spymaster. Half the film is wandering around some Turkish harem, the other half tedious, hard-to-care about nonsense on a circus train with a cache of pilfered Russian baubles.
A VIEW TO A KILL
1985 - **
Long considered the worst Bond, I'd argue it's only the third worst - mainly since Christopher Walken is great as the bad guy, and aquamarine-eyed Tanya Roberts is in it, over whom I have always been delirious (I was of the right impressionable age when she had a Playboy cover spread with photos from BEASTMASTER in 1982, I kept that issue for years!)
1987 ***1/2
LICENSE TO KILL
1989 - ***
Timothy Dalton's Bond has been underrated but its time has come. DAYLIGHTS especially is a stripped down Bond, with real and strange escapes and KILL makes hilarious use of Wayne Newton as a New Age preacher using yoga as a kind of mind control for hottie chicks (like the Ark girls in MOONRAKER).
GOLDENEYE
1995 - ***1/2
After a lengthy six year absence, a new Bond for a new decade. Famke Janssen makes her mark though her dumb name 'Onnatop' demeans an otherwise furious and crazy (and aptly named) Russian assassin who gets off on machine gunning people, and crushing spines betwixt her legs. Pierce Brosnan makes his debut and he's devastatingly handsome, with mussed dark black hair that he inherited from his predecessor Dalton. We see the first 'hacker' in Bondland, after being used to Russians or SPECTRE agents at big NASA style missile toppling or highjacking controls. Now we've got lollipop sucking nerds as legitimate threats to national security - Alan Cummings no less - and use of EMPs - ElectroMagneticPulse, and Joe Don Baker is a believable CIA agent for a change, bringing grumpy crime drama resonance to where it belongs. Not a lot of forward tick-tockality though, more plot in other places - KGB undermining by the villainous general and his aide in high places, the girl wandering around a slaughtered space defence station. Has some actually witty lines ("That's close enough" Bond says after Onnatop jumps up and starts climbing on him - subtle... for a change, almost Groucho Marxian!) I dig that the bad guys are colorfully diverse, allowed to be human and witty rather than merely asleep, i.e. Drax.
1997 **1/2
This used to be one of my favorites, saw it in the theater with one of my aforementioned Faxy friends whilst getting sober, and when you're getting sober you really feel all the fights deep in your gut. But now I have misgivings. Jonathan Pryce--great in BRAZIL--is a colossal bore as a prissy coded gay stereotype media mogul ala Rupert Murdoch crafting a war with China for the nefarious purpose of filling a 24 hour news channel (which is why the paranoid amongst us know CNN cover the missing Beijing airliner so much because it was expensive to arrange). Pretty clever, but Pryce's way-too-pleased with himself delivery as he says awful things like "what kind of havoc shall we create with the world today?" and "I'm having fun with my headlines" is unbearable. At least he says, "Thank you," to his aides, while Dench's M deliver messy puns like "you always were cunning linguist, James," as if Moneypenny on her own wasn't bad enough (and Q so old and rheumy he should have retired 20 years ago), the puns are everywhere as is the clunky expository dialogue. For one thing, there's almost no female hotness: TV's Lois and Clark star Terri Hatcher is the first babe--the one who always dies early--as the way-too-fussed-over rich bitch lavender wife of Jonathan Pryce's hissy media mogul villain. She's sexy if you think Modern Bride is sexy, where all the beautiful hair is hidden behind gossamer white veils or pulled back into sharp buns, or in her case cut to shoulder length in a moussed-up tussle. Michelle Yeoh makes up for the damage in her English language debut (though we fans knew her already from SUPERCOP 2) as the second babe, but she's a lithe dancer-action star, not a buxom love machine; when she rubs noses with Pierce Brosnan, there's no question who spent the longest time in hair and makeup.
1999 ***
My problem with Brosnan in this one mainly is the hair, and the Panama suits, it being the 90s only excuses so much. I saw this opening weekend with my very first AA sponsor when I was counting days. I loved it! But if, after battling it out with thugs on a speeding train, your hair is still perfectly moussed, then I would suggest you avoid work that requires such regular proximity to open flames, Mr. Bond.
But this is also the one with Sophie Marceau as the deliciously evil villainess. Award two stars and an extra for her stylist, who is without peer. Playing a Turkish-Serbo-whatever national oil baroness, Marceau ably melds styles from the west, east, north, south, and middle into a fabulous modernist wardrobe, my favorite since Jane Birkin's in SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE! And I don't care, Denise Richards IS a believable atomic scientist. Who other than someone so very hot could understand fusion?
2002 - ***
Halle Berry tends to be fierce only in dramas, she's a mousy Storm and way too actorly to be a good Catwoman or Bond girl. Too much acting only gets in the way. But there's a good plot about genetic alterations that turn a North Korean army brat into a posh Brit using conflict diamonds and reflected sunlight in a bid to invade South Korea. There's a nice visit to the Ice Hotel, and a sword fight that tracks all around a posh British fencing club, such a nicely emblematic mix of class and destruction that not even Madonna's leaden presence, or the cliche'd use of the Clash's "London Calling" can detract from. And Miranda Frost looks great in fencing gear!
2006 - ****
I was blown away at first but this Bond--Craig is easily the best Bond and most believable killer since Connery, with those haunted sunken eyes and scowl, but as an 'origin' story it becomes harder to enjoy as years pass, the way it pains me to watch young teenagers make the same mistakes over and over (I can't save him myself). At least we learn why he would never trust a dame from now on (Eva Green redefines sultry as British treasury agent Vesper Lynde). "Does everyone have a tell." - Everyone has a tell - everyone except you, which is why you suck at poker, Erich, unless you're freshly dumped. This also has a bit of ball torture which delivers 50 years later or whenever on the threat of Goldfinger's space age gem-cutting laser and makes us fear for his future erections (did it leave him sterile which is why he never worries about protection?) Never trust a girl who doesn't have a tell.
2008 - **
This might have been a good Bond movie once, but some insecure editor whittled it down, shortening nearly every shot and cross-cutting like some coked-up Eisenstein between bullfights, races, post-modern operas, and Bond chasing around the bad guys. There's also some vile sexual assault undercurrents and political disillusionment very out of place for a Bond film (i.e. the CIA are run by bad guys here, in bed with SPECTRE or Quantum here, in ways that even the Russians in the 60s Bonds wouldn't stoop to). Disillusionment with the system and our hatred for sexual violence is why we turn to Bond! We don't need that shit! Disheartening. Don't ask me to pick between RIO BRAVO and THE SEARCHERS because it will be RIO BRAVO every time,
On the other hand, the whole 'who can you trust even after they show you the right code signs and trust levels and their id checks out' harkens back to the Connerys as does the idea that a pretty girl who invites you into her car might be CIA, SPECTRE, KGB or anyone else so don't presume anything even after you sleep with them. Lastly, the post-internet and cell phone age is well represented. I don't mind the ping pong around the globe bit because that's the way the internet age is - information flows so fast it's at the risk out outrunning our boy if he doesn't keep it at Jan De Bont levels. That said, part of the escapism of Bond is to imagine that actual smart, brave, good people are at the helm of our intelligence organization. Here both the British government and American CIA are hopelessly corrupt, in bed with 'Quantum' a world conglomerate of third world puppet topplers. But there is a lot of fire in the climax, and a great airplane through a canyon chase. This is the movie where I first fell in love with Gemma Arterton, even if she does have only five fingers on each hand (she was born with six!) but of course she gets three scenes before she's offed cruelly to make yet another harsh un-Bondian statement.
SKYFALL
2012 - ****
In SKYFALL there's not even enough time for a second, nonkilled Bond babe; M and Javier Bardem are the closest we come. It's a shrinking network. Try not to muck it up, 007. Things are looking good though with a new M and a new Q, both of whom seem well-suited to the post-cheeky age.
Non Salzman-Broccoli Bonds:
CASINO ROYALE - *
NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN *
One's a lame overdone 'everything but the chicken soup' disaster, the other a remake of THUNDERBALL with age and urine jokes, though Kim Basinger at peak lusciousness is shown in wet negligees and almost sold at auction to a slavering Arab. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring plays on the soundtrack and James Fox is a very cranky boss who only cares about budgets and reigning in Bond's drinking. Idiotic plotlines abound, but old Hammer startlet Valerie Leon is in it, somewhere. Too bad Klaus Brandauer, a fine actor in his own right, ranks with Louis Jordan as far as looking too old and generic for the part and the idea of putting video arcades in the swanky hotel is really ill-conceived. It's worth seeing though just to realize how many mistakes the general Salzman-Broccoli films avoid as they blast their way to boffo box office. Reign on, Cubby and Harry, and James. The future may be written on silicone, but we'll always need a real man to kill the rich.