Jane Seymour was so cute in LaLD. That whole movie has such a weird vibe but it's fun for sure. Especially the final scene on the train.

Read the book for some hilariously old-school racism.

Hadn't heard of this documentary. But since I'm sort of a documentary freak if it is a subject that I find interesting.....I'm probably gonna have to watch it....thanks for the heads up about it.

I would guess you probably already know this.....but there is also one out there that deals with just the "Bond Girls" of the franchise.

Lastly, if anybody has a favorite Bond Girl/Woman, I'd like to know who & why.

Ok reread Casino Royale for maybe the 6th or 7th time. Great read, cracks along at a fair pace, but there's one line that always makes me pause.

It's when Bond is reflecting on his love affair with Vesper, he thinks "the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape"...


Wow, "the sweet tang of rape"...that's a phrase to never use in company.

Goldfinger was named after the architect Erno Goldfinger. Everyone knows that, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern%C5%91_Goldfinger

Was it Grape Tang? Grape tang is the best.

Agreed. Octopussy wasn't half bad either.

Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

Damn, this is a great thriller. Yes, it's got some old fashion racism, but it's more the patronising kind than the degrading kind, and Fleming draws out the character of Mr Big as probably the most intelligent Bond villain after Blofeld. Read it, and you'll get a view on the African-American life from an Englishman from the last 1950s.

This is a terrific thriller, and the last 4 or 5 chapters are total pageturners to the end.

This is my favourite Bond novel, closely followed by the fantastic You Only Live Twice.

I did not know this.

Although Goldfinger is my favorite, From Russia With Love is definitely up there for me as well.

From the old movies Goldfinger is an amazing movie. Great villian, great plot, great women. Connery at his best. This is how a bond movie should feel like.

I actually like both Timothy Dalton movies even though his bond has less charisma then a rock.

Back in 1971 I was a 16-year-old orphan living in a Baptist Children's Home. I had seen a few of the Bond movies, (most notably "Thunderball"), and I thought they were great. I just loved this whole "secret agent" spy thing. I actually thought I would go to work for the CIA once I graduated from high school and become a spy just like James Bond. I really looked forward to all the beautiful women James Bond hung around with. (The prospect of constantly making love with smoking hot women appealed to my raging hormones. Ha! Ha!)

So around the fall of 1971 "Diamonds Are Forever" appears on the marquee of the local theater and, without thinking, I announce to my housemother - a frumpy overweight woman named Mrs. Weaver - that I'm going to go see the James Bond movie. She quickly nixes that idea informing me that James Bond is a "dirty movie" and I am forbidden to see it. I waited a few days and then lied and said I was going to see a high school basketball game. (I think I paid maybe 50 or 75 cents to see that movie - which was a lot of money back in 1971 before Nixon took us off the gold standard.)

I don't know if I have a "favorite" Bond movie, but I always loved the playful patter between Sean Connery and Lois Maxwell. I also got a kick out of the late Desmond Lewellyn (as "Q") and how James Bond was always driving him up the wall. The only thing that bothers me about Daniel Craig and the present day Bond movies, (the last one I saw was "Casino Royale") is that Bond movies nowadays seem to be one continuous unrelenting sequence of stunts and action shots. Of course, every Bond movie should have action sequences, but when you load a movie down with too much "action" it starts to get dull. Also, the poker scene in "Casino Royale" wasn't that realistic.

One really interesting thing about the Bond movies is how they have "evolved" over the years when it comes to how James Bond interacts and treats women. Back in the 1960's James Bond was a sexist. Sexist jokes and double entrendres were de riguer in movies of that period. (The epitome of this probably occurred in the 1967 movie "You Only Live Twice" when Bond and Tanaka - Japan's chief spy - are discussing which Japanese woman they will choose to sleep with. Mr. Tanaka congratulates Bond on his choice saying "Ah, she very sexiful!" Somehow, I doubt if a line like that would make it into a Bond movie nowadays.)

Sean Connery as James Bond was a typical 1960's male chauvinist pig. (A James Bond who slaps women on their derrierres would definitely not be "cool" today.) Contrast James Bond as played by Daniel Craig with Sean Connery's James Bond. In Casino Royale, Daniel Craig finds himself working for Vesper Lynd as portrayed by Eva Green. The sharp dialogue that goes on between the two of them on that train says, in unmistakable terms, that the days of sexist James Bond are over. When Vesper winds up giving her life to save Bond, you know there's a woman behind the camera making a lot of the key decisions about the "modern" James Bond. And of course, that woman is none other than Barbara Broccoli - Albert "Cubby" Broccoli's daughter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Broccoli

You can easily imagine, over the years, the discussions (arguments?) that must have gone on between father and daughter concerning how James Bond was going to have to change with the times. Considering how much money the Bond franchise has raked in, Barbara Broccoli has probably tweaked the formula just about right.

You are spot on, Bond is interesting to watch from its reflection of contemporary culture. It's easily the longest running mainstream movie franchise, so it would, wouldn't it.

Bond is a unique franchise, it has basically been a barometer of action movies, first setting the pace with the first 5-6 movies, then reflecting popular action genres in the first few Moores; Live and Let Die = Blaxploitation, Man With the Golden Gun = flirting with martial arts movies, and bless em, Moonraker trying to have a go at Star Wars. After this it tended to trail the field as action got more explicit and bloody. It found itself falling into a bland soup of self-reference and parody with the later Moore movies. They do "reboot" within the franchise quite frequently in terms of actor, where the change is usually to serious it up again. Moore's first, Live and Let Die, was an exception in that they just had a different type of Bond (which worked for his first few movies imo). Another exception was For Your Eyes Only, where they just tried to play it much more straight and serious after the silliness of Moonraker. But Bond does drift into silliness...a prime example is if you compare Brosnan's first GoldenEye with his last, Die Another Day (kite-flying a tsunami with PS2-style CGI...).

They tend to follow other action trends these days, Casino Royale owes a lot to Bourne, but when they get it right, man it still is a glorious experience to see a great Bond movie. Skyfall was spectacularly good imo, as being one of the few Bond films where there is emotion and a death matters (the other being OHMSS in terms of being impactful, but it's also present in Casino Royale, but doesn't work half as well imo...Craig and Eva Green just didn't sell it to me in that one)

I liked Skyfall the least of any of the Craig movies. There were just too many people doing too many really stupid things solely because the plot called for them to do so.

Yeah, I agree Skyfall had some truly ridiculous plotholes, not least that the villain needed the prescience of Muad'Dib, but hell it had Bond in Britain for a change. It had a terrific villain, and had interesting themes of death and renewal - in a ****ing James Bond movie!


Also, it used London and the Highlands really well.

You can't **** with our boy on his home ground and not get ****ed up. You don't fight Zeus in Olympus.

The Man With the Golden Gun

A bit of a step-down after the gloriously mad Live and Let Die, but more enjoyable than I remembered. I like Scaramanga and Nik-Nak, and Maud Adams is really gorgeous.

I like the idea of Bond, when threatened from afar, taking the fight to the master assassin, and there's some nonsense involving solar power that's okay, I guess.

Scaramanga has a cool base in the China seas, and the whole duel works for me, but it could have been directed to be much more exciting.

The car jump...spectacular, one of the great car stunts, but the stupid sound effect they add presages the silly musical interludes and sound effects that break the 4th wall that seemed to infect Moore's other Bond movies. I don't want to be reminded of Lawrence of Arabia when he's in a desert, or of the Man with No Name when Bond is being a cowboy, thank you very much.

Moore delivers his one-liners like the pro he is though.

68/100

Loving this, keep it up. I'm pretty young in terms of how long Bond has been around but I've watched every Bond movie growing up because my last name is actually Goldfinger and I love spy films anyway (Bourne and other thrillers).

Great thread though, makes me want to re-watch them all in the near future.

OK, I've just gotta ask ... If your last name really is "Goldfinger," how many times have you been asked during job interviews, cocktail parties, in restaurants, et cetera if your father was "Goldfinger" (the villian) in the James Bond movie? Have you ever strung people along telling them that Auric Goldfinger (the late actor Gert Frobe) was actually your father - and they believed it!? (Ever make up a phony "Hollywood story" just to entertain folks?) With such a famous last name, I figure you can have a lot of fun milking the James Bond cow. (Ha! Ha!)

Oh BTW, I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but back in 1990 Ted Turner commissioned a movie for his TNT cable channel entitled: "Spymaker - The Secret Life of Ian Fleming." (Ted Turner, the billionaire businessman, founder of CNN, and former husband of Jane Fonda, had a great personal interest in Ian Fleming.) Interestingly, the movie starred Jason Connery (Sean Connery's son) in the role of Ian Fleming. "Spymaker" has the usual amount of artistic license (after all it's a movie) but it does mirror several events in Ian Fleming's life including his trip to Russia in the 1930's where he covered Stalin's "show trials" for Rueters as well as Fleming's World War II exploits working for British intelligence. (I have a videotape of "Spymaker" which I'm watching right now.) If "Spymaker" is a reflection of reality, then the James Bond emphasis on beautiful women is no accident - Ian Fleming certainly had a reputation as quite the ladies man in real life.

Well, hello Mr Goldfinger. Do you expect me to talk?

"No, I expect you to die!"

Haha actually I've never been asked if Goldfinger was my dad. My 4th grade gym teacher sang the song every morning when I walked into class, he was a really nice guy though. I've heard the "do you expect me to talk" line a thousand times. When signing up for things or registering for things and people asked how to spell my last name, we all used to say "spelled just like the movie" but it's slowly losing relevance and familiarity since it came out 50 years ago. There's also a band called Goldfinger and they have a few good songs that I like. When I was younger I was able to convince a few of my friends that the movie was named after my family.

I don't mind the repetition at all and love when people start talking to me about Bond. Pretty cool last name to have.

Aye that's the coolest name. The closest I ever got was being called Mr Big.

Oh, one oversight (omission) which I feel terrible about failing to mention. Of course, I'm speaking about the music and John Barry's great musical score. Like so many other aspects of the Bond franchise, the distinctive music - including the opening sequence when Bond fires his pistol and blood flows down the screen ... when you heard that pistol shot and that music you knew it was a "Bond" movie. Also, nearly every one of the Bond movies has a theme song belted out by a popular artist. Most of them were female recording artists, (i.e. Shirley Bassey, Nancy Sinatra, Lulu, Carly Simon, Sheena Easton), but there were also some notable male singers such as Tom Jones belting out "Thunderball." I recall some groups who did the theme song - such as Duran Duran performing "A View To A Kill" and Paul McCartney doing "Live and Let Die" only a few years after the Beatles had broken up.

I remember the opening sequence of "The Spy Who Loved Me" when Roger Moore goes off the edge of that snow covered cliff, his skis go flying away from his snow boots and you're suddenly thinking "RIP James Bond." Just when it looks like curtains for Roger Moore, the Union Jack unfurls and the music to Carly Simon's song starts playing. I remember seeing "The Spy Who Loved Me" on the big screen in the theatre. Everybody was mesmerized by that song.

It's a great loss that John Barry recently passed away. The musical contributions he made certainly contributed to the overall success and appeal of the films.

Yep, John Barry's contribution to the first 20+ years of Bond is enormous. I felt that recently (pre-Skyfall) the music lost its way, and was pretty bad for the Brosnan era onwards (except The World is Not Enough - I think that's a good Bond song, but I am mostly alone in that opinion), and got quite dreadful for Craig's first two movies. Skyfall feels like a return to form - I really like the Adele song, which does hark back to the mournful, grand songs of Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice.

I also think the Moore/Dalton era usage of modern pop bands mostly worked - the best ones imo being Live and Let Die and The Living Daylights.

The real biggy for Bond though is the Bond theme - which was actually credited to a guy called Monty Norman, and I think that tune was actually in something else Monty wrote that was a musical written well before Doctor No was made.

The Spy Who Loved Me



A pretty grand one, and one I understand Cubby Brocolli threw everything he could get into after the commercial disappointment of The Man With the Golden Gun. It worked. This is a pretty damn good Bond movie. It's helped by a few things - great song, great set pieces, and a sense of the grandness that harks back to the like of Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice.


First thing that grabs you about the movie is its opening sequence (mentioned a few posts back) where Bond has a decent skiing action sequence (recalling the great skiing stunts in OHMSS) which culminates in probably the most memorable Bond stunt of them all - Bond skiing off the side of a mountain and after an interminable fall, pulling a chute that's a union jack. That had them cheering in the aisles in some places, I've heard.

Couple that with some other solid set pieces - the terrific car/helicopter/motorcycle chase, the fight with Jaws in the Egyptian ruins, and the fight with Jaws on the train, the fight in the fake tanker - and you have something that delivers on action (even though some of the larger scale action looks out of Thunderbirds).

The villain is bland as hell in this, but the main Henchman, Jaws is fun (in a 60s Batman kind of way) and when I saw this at the cinema - aged 12 - it seemed brilliant. Looking back 35 years+ on, it seems quaint, but I can forgive it as the film has great drive and energy.

Not much taken with the leading lady on this one - Barbara Bach doesn't have much charisma, and the has the look of a recovering anorexic to me (I have no idea if that's true). This film seems to me to be the start of a trend of quite unBond-like leading ladies.


Again Moore is cracking off one-liners like a pro.

When Bond and XXX are caught banging by a group of superiors:

"Bond! What do you think you're doing?"
"Keeping the British end up, sir."


77/100

The name's bitter. diebitter.