Okay, so I got myself the bluray set of James Bond, and rounded it out with blurays of the 1967 Casino Royale, and the non-eon Connery movie Never Say Never Again. I'm doing it in release date order, and currently up to OHMSS (1969)

Thought I'd regale you guys with my thoughts, and ask?

Favourite girl?
Favourite villain?
Favourite henchman?
Favourite scene?
Favourite song?
Favourite movie?
Second favourite Bond? (we all know the first)

Here's my notes so far:

Dr. No 73/100 First and pretty solid James Bond adventure. Connery nailed it.

From Russia With Love 76/100 A great Bond. The drama is so good, the end set pieces feel like the filler. The fight on the train may be the greatest Bond scene ever.

Goldfinger 74/100 The only Bond movie that really truly synthesises the more gritty elements with the campy feel that was to come, and makes it really entertaining. Damn, what a car.

Thunderball 61/100 Relatively weak Connery entry, that meanders too much, and suffers from villains that look the part, but are severely underwritten and lacks character. It also spends too much time in only 2 main locations and flaps about in them. And the underwater stuff goes on waaaaay too long.

Casino Royale ('67) 61/100 Colourful, with an abysmal storyline and some terrible scenes, lifted by funny stuff with Sellers and Allen, fantastic music, but made in the same spirit as Help! and the 60s Batman, with some great sets, costume design, really beautiful girls and even references to the gritty dark book it was named after. Psychedelic, man.

You Only Live Twice 75/100 terrific Bond movie of the camp, overblown part of the Bond spectrum, with hollow volcano, Dr Evil version of Blofeld, ninjas, and Little Nelly. Superlative song too. Best Bond soundtrack imo.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service 75/100 Really exciting and action packed, with probably the greatest Bond girl ever (Diana Rigg) and fantastic fights, chases, imagery and music. Top 5 Bond. Barry's best Bond score after You Only Live Twice, but it's close.




I'll write a lot more on each of the ones to follow

QFT...

let me put some thought into it.

I'm gonna love this thread!

Didn't we do this already?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/63...op-5s-1266235/

Have you ever seen them all or just reasoning them in order? I'm a huge Bond fan. Seen every one many times. I'm at work now, but I'd love to write my input on each one, and your questions.

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I have seen them all, but the Roger Moore ones after Moonraker are very hazy. Most of the others I've seen multiple times. I've also read all the books multiple times.

Nice. I've always wanted to read the books.

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A few years ago I read all the Ian Fleming 007 novels (didnt bother with the ones done by others). Made me realize how far the franchise had gotten away from the Bond envisioned by Fleming before Craig came along.

I have never considered this except for the fact that Bond onscreen versus Bond in the books is quite different. Now that you mention it, Craig does seem most like the Fleming vision of Bond. Craig is my number # 2 Bond. I also have a soft spot for Sir Roger Moore.

I think Dalton came the closest really, Craig seems a little introverted compared to Fleming's Bond. He's definitely closer to Fleming's Bond in Skyfall than he was in the other two. I almost feel like his character progression is targeting Connery in Dr No (a growth in a more extrovert and explicit confidence is what I'm talking about), which is marvellously circular.

Only 5 of the films are even close to the novels, and these are the first 6 EON movies, excepting You Only Live Twice. The rest is way off those stories, though you do get snippets from the novels in other movies (eg the bit where Bond is dragged through coral by a boat in whatever Moore film it was is out of the book Live and Let Die), or lifted from the Bond short stories (the start of The Living Daylights is pretty similar to the entire short story of the same name).

I always thought Dalton was a great Bond. The movies were not good, though. Brosnan is my least favorite. Prissy little nit.

I'll assume everyone itt is familiar with the Bond films and needn't worry about spoilers, so here's a nice bit of trivia:

The films, pre-Daniel Craig era, featured a different actor playing Felix Leiter, with one exception - David Hedison, who was in Live and Let Die and License To Kill. In the original novel LALD, Leiter is wounded badly by a shark attack. That part was not in the movie, but appeared as a plot element in LTK (which BTW was the first Bond movie not based on a Fleming book.)

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)



Connery came back after Lazenby's percieved failure (a poor Bond in a fantastic movie), and he's obviously older and paunchier, but if anything, he exudes more confidence than ever before - which is what we want in a Bond.

This isn't a great entry as it feels a little underfunded and cut-rate (his suits look more like off-the-rack than Saville Row), and the approach is a little slap-dash (check the issue they had when they realised the car-driving-sideways-up-the-alley had the car going in on one set of wheels, and comes out on the other set of wheels), but nonetheless, it has some good in it.

Charles Grey is kind of smooth as Blofeld, but nowhere near menacing enough, which is a shame as Grey can do menacing (check out his Mocata in The Devil Rides Out), but he's okay. He is a little Dr Evil, especially when he tries to dispose of Bond by doing stuff like putting him in a pipe to be buried, rather than just shoot him in the head. Eh, that's the form I guess.

This is a very American movie, and indeed a Vegas/desert movie, and I liked that side of it. The girls were good. I thought Jill St John has way more personality and charisma than most Bond girls, and Lana Wood as Plenty ("of course you are, my dear") is, in my opinion, one of the sexiest Bond girls ever, and in her very short screen time, is very memorable for not just her looks, but her personality. It was also fun to see Bond getting mostly beaten up by two women, Bambi and Thumper.

There's also a good car chase in this through Vegas, which looks to me like a template for the final chase in The Blues Brothers.

There's ridiculous stuff in it too. The moon buggy is ridiculous (especially when Bond runs across the moon set, the astronauts try and catch him in slow motion...lol), and some of the logic and plot points are ridiculous (Blofeld in a dress??? "My god, you just killed James Bond" spoken as if James Bond, a 'secret agent', is world-renown), but you know, Connery pulls all that stuff off. He delivers some good zingers, and whilst the climax on an oil rig is anticlimactic, I do like the final scene where he dispatches Wint and Kidd.

Oh, and great song.

67/100

In my book....James Bond = Sean Connery.

If I had to pick a #2 maybe it would be Craig.

I can't believe how many Roger Moore made. I'd rather watch paint dry than a Bond Film with Moore.....he is just not believable to me at all in a crucial area.....the physicality of James Bond.

He is just a little skinny guy that would have trouble with a toy poodle. And he was almost 60 when he did A View to a Kill. Connery was 32 in Dr. No.

You mentioned that you thought Thunderball was sorta weak (u always knew who the good & bad guys were because every bad guy had the same color wet suit and every good guy had the same color wet suit).....but I liked all the Connery ones except I don't think he should have made Never Say Never Again.

I think I read once where the guy who owned the rights to the Bond Films (Albert Broccoli) sorta screwed Connery in the amount he was paid for his Bond films (he made Broccoli a bundle) & Connery had more leverage in this last one & wanted a little payback or something like that.

But too much time had gone by....71 to 83 I think.

Also, maybe somebody has already mentioned this.....but Pu_sy Galore has got to take the cake for best name.

I prefer Never Say Never Again to Thunderball, to be honest. Largo is a much more interesting character, for one thing. And Max Von Sydow as Blofeld is all kinds of win.

Also, I think Roger Moore made at least two terrific Bond movies, and until I see them all again, I'm reserving judgement whether there are more than 2.

I made a mistake here, the first Craig movie Casino Royale is relatively similar to the book.

I just watched an official documentary about the franchise 'Everything or Nothing'

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2366308/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Interesting run through the franchise, covering some of its troubled history, and how it places itself during changes in world history, pretty interesting. There's an awful lot of stuff missing (no talking head with Connery for example), but most interesting was the talking heads interview snippets with Lazenby, Dalton and Brosnan that was pretty interesting. It confirmed my view that Dalton still remains the closest to the literary Bond than the rest, although I do think Craig is becoming that character too.

It also made me laugh a little the way they pretty much talked about Kevin McClory (a co-author of Thunderball who therefore retained rights for many years) like he was the Devil.

Definitely worth a watch if you like Bond.


My favourite bit was Roger Moore saying quite categorically Sean Connery was clearly the best Bond.

Disagree on this, imo Never Say Never Again is one of the weakest films. I thought it was weird to remake a prior film in the series using the same lead actor. The film seemed a little too close to self-parody (e.g. the portrayal of "M"). Also, Connery's age was clearly showing by then (although I think in his prime he fit the role best).

"Everything or Nothing" is streaming on Netflix. Was a great watch.

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Yes, it storms by - feels like 30 minutes, actually is 90 minutes.



Also, all this Bond talk has whetted my appetite to reread the books. Just started Casino Royale

"The Spy Who Loved Me" and "For Your Eyes Only" were both quite good.

Live and Let Die



I cannot begin to tell you how well this movie works for me on every level. Maybe it's because it was the first "new" Bond movie I ever saw, at 8 years old (I had seen others on the TV or on double-bills at the cinema, when cinemas used to bring back older movies during the summer), and let's face it, this movie and the Bonds of this era were really exciting for boys, and also the fact my mother took me to see it in the first week after its World premiere, at the cinema it had its world premiere, the Odeon Leicester Square (a great, great cinema back in the day) may have something to do with it.

This just works well for me. Even the henchmen have charisma (Teehee and Baron Samedi), and Yaphet Kotto was a pretty great villain as Kananga/Mr Big. I liked the trappings and locations, the Wings song is just spectacular, and the whole voodoo thing took Bond to a whole new level of exotic.

Okay, now I'm much older and a little wiser, I see it is probably more like a very high-budget blaxploitation movie with a white lead, but it at least treats the black villains with due respect - and there's absolutely no hint of racism in this movie (apart from at the expense of the implicit racism of the white Louisiana bayou cops) - unless the gentrification of the main black villains is implicit racism

Moore does a terrific job in his first outing, delivering zingers as well as Connery. And while he doesn't convey either the toughness or intelligence of Connery's Bond, he does have the same easy confidence. This Bond doesn't get by on strength and cunning, he gets by on easy luck - he's a luckbox that always gets lucky.


And the set pieces, wow! The bus under the low bridge, the flying school shenanegins, the crocodile farm, the boat chase through the bayou (and yes, I even liked the comedy sheriff!) and the whole voodoo ceremony - excellent. I'll even forgive the completely ridiculous death of Mr Big, because of the terrific fight on the train as the last scene. And that Baron Samedi guy was great!

This is my favourite Bond movie. It's also one of the really great books. Loved this one


85/100

IIRC, instead of outlining the entire boat chase the script simply said something like "the greatest chase scene in the history of cinema ensues."