Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Andy Bradford, Anthony Meyer, David Meyer, George MacDonald Fraser, John Glen, Kabir Bedi, Louis Jourdan, Maud Adams, MGM, Michael G. Wilson, Michaela Clavell, Robert Brown, Roger Moore
“I think this will suffice as my fee for the next film, Cubby.”
After twelve of these things, I finally come to a Bond film that’s exactly as old as I am. Feels strange to see it again from a recently re-educated perspective. Thanks to its pedigree this is was one of the first Bond films a lot of people in my generation saw as a child and I’m no different. Throughout, I catch myself…not watching it so much as…remembering it. And more importantly, remembering the color of the walls in the room where I watched it for the first five hundred times. I was…how old? That part I can’t remember. It’s lost. But that room is as clear and bright now as it was back then.
I can remember the poster for this film, which – being the child I was – immediately made me think of Ray Harryhausen’s six-armed Kali from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Young-me was nonplussed to discover Bond never fights a magically animated statue, not even once. However, the scene where Miss Sweden 1970, Kristina Wayborn, uses her sarong to escape a second floor balcony, literally unwrapping her way down the ground, more than made up Kali Ma’s absence.
I think this is what you humans call “nostalgia.” I hear you use it to ignore faults in things you liked when you were children. Things that give you a warm, comfortable feeling of remembrance and security. Believe it or not, I enjoy those feelings as much as any bloke. And because of that I enjoyed Octopussy more than I thought I would. As usual, this does not mean I’m going to go easy on it, but feel free to j’accuse me.
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Carole Bouquet, Desmond Llewelyn, Jack Hedley, John Glen, Julian Glover, Lois Maxwell, Lynn-Holly Johnson, MGM, Michael G. Wilson, Michael Gothard, Richard Maibaum, Roger Moore, Topol
“Given the way things are going, I can’t help but be concerned.”
After Moonraker pulled in more money than God the Bond producers could have pushed the envelope even further into self-parody and silliness. Thank your personal gods they didn’t and the Guy Hamilton/Lewis Gilbert aesthetic of tension-free action scenes, idiotic Bond girls and villains unworthy of their gorgeously sets/lairs finally checked out with the Carter Administration. It was so past time to go back to basics even the producers knew it. For a second, it looked as if they were going to go all out and hire a fourth actor for their iconic part on top of everything else.
Makes sense when you think about it. By this point, James Bond was a bonafide icon, and the movie-going world seems to like its icons young. Roger Moore was fifty-four at this point, over a decade older than the First Bond when he quit for the second time. Despite this, For Your Eyes Only is as heavy on the action as anything we’ve seen in this series. It’s also the first straight-up Cold War spy thriller we’ve seen since the From Russia with Love. No supervillains! No international extortion! No plots to start World War III! What the hell is going on here? Is this even a James Bond film? Continue reading
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Bernard Lee, Christopher Wood, Corinne Clery, Desmond Llewelyn, Lewis Gilbert, Lois Chiles, Lois Maxwell, MGM, Michael Lonsdale, Richard Kiel, Roger Moore, Toshiro Suga
We both know it’s going to be broken at some point, James. You might as well cut out the middle-henchmen.
For various reasons, I haven’t been feeling so well lately. And when I feel like shit I like to take it out on bad movies. So I am very glad to be reviewing a Bond film I honestly despise, considered by some people to be one of the worst James Bond movies ever made. Of course, things would be pretty boring if it weren’t also acclaimed by almost-as-many people as the quintessential representation of everything this series is, was, or should be. It’s the Bond movie parents think they can safely pass down to their children…especially if their children have a pre-existing interest in sci-fi films, like some of us.
Because of that, it’s the first James Bond movie (though not mine) a lot of people see, forever coloring their expectations of the franchise. I’ll admit I’m predisposed to enjoy some the elements you Normals may find the most ludicrous. But even for me, Moonraker goes right off the rails, abandoning any pretensions of being an intelligent spy-fi thriller made for people with functioning brains. In that, and one more area, it is the quintessential Bond movie: things start off well, but get steadily worse as they go on…and this movie does go on. At length. So at least it’s in good company, eh? Continue reading
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Bernard Lee, Clifton James, David Hedison, Earl Jolly Brown, Geoffrey Holder, Gloria Hendry, Guy Hamilton, Jane Seymour, Julius Harris, Lois Maxwell, MGM, Roger Moore, Roy Stewart, Yaphet Kotto
First, a salute to Baron Samedi:
Dig my grave some other day.
“Why yes, I *have* heard that particular bit of good news. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got international relations to…improve…yes.”
Great Tracy’s ghost, it’s finally here! The debut of Roger Moore, the Third and Longest-Lasting Bond (so far), who’ll carry the weight of these next seven films for a very long time. I feel like a kid at Christmas because the Moore Era contains some of the series best and worst, irrevocably cementing Bond’s place in modern cinema as a character who’d outlive his actors….for better or worse…
Where Connery feared the role would dominate his career, Moore came to it already “groomed” by eight years as TV’s The Saint. He seemed to embrace that….despite having to cut his hair and loose some weight for this part. He’d packed it on and let it grow out during the disastrous slow-motion train wreck of his TV show The Persuaders! (Yes, the exclamation point’s part of the title – whaddya expect? It was the 70s.) At that point, Moore could’ve helmed ten bad TV shows and people still would’ve flocked to their theaters to see him as James Bond in (a heavily altered facsimile of) Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die. Continue reading
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewelyn, Diana Rigg, Gabriele Frezetti, George Baker, George Lazenby, Ilse Steppat, Lois Maxwell, MGM, Peter Hunt, Richard Maibaum, Simon Raven, Telly Savalas
It’s never too late for a Playboy break.
Like I said,
To this day I wish Connery had stuck around for one last swan song. Bond fans could’ve avoided a whole lot of heartache…
But then again, maybe not. I like Connery, but not the bored, sick-of-it-all self-parody he became by the time he filmed You Only Live Twice. So I might as well confess: I’m one of those people who actually like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I won’t dare call it “the best Bond film ev-ahr” when we’ve still got sixteen of these damned things to go…but I will stick my neck out far enough to call it the best film since Goldfinger. Halfway through, I guessed they had to work through two films worth of same-y-feeling crap before anything good escaped the pipeline.
Turns out that’s truer than I’d like it to be. OHMSS (as it’s reverently known) was originally meant to follow Goldfinger. Returning series screenwriter Richard Maibaum stated pecking out the script, an adaption of Fleming’s tenth Bond novel, while the film rights to Thunderball were still up in the judicial air. After Thunderball hit, the warm Swiss summer of 1966 made most of OHMSS’ Big Ticket action sequences prohibitively expensive (if not outright life-threatening). Production relocated to Japan and re-purposed everything for You Only Live Twice. When that did even better than Thunderball, OHMSS finally saw daylight…after a two-year search for the Next James Bond. Continue reading
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Akiko Wakabayashi, Bernard Lee, Charles Gray, Desmond Llewelyn, Donald Pleasence, Harold Jack Bloom, Karin Dor, Lewis Gilbert, Lois Maxwell, MGM, Mie Hama, Roald Dahl, Ronald Rich, Sean Connery, Teru Shimada, Tetsurô Tanba
When in doubt, with a henchman knocked out at your feet, turn to booze. (This message brought to you by the booze council.)
And now we get to talk about Sequelitis. You’d expect the fifth Bond movie to bear some resemblance to its predecessors, but You Only Live Twice can’t seem to help but call attention to its heritage. Personally, I blame Roald Dahl. He should’ve turned this project down from the start. He and Ian Fleming were good friends but their writing styles couldn’t be further from each other if you placed them on opposites sides of the cosmos. He hated the novel that share’s this film’s title and, twenty-one years after the film premiered, Dahl flat-out admitted to Starlog magazine, “I didn’t know what the hell Bond was going to do.” Producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman answered with The Formula. As Dahl defined it:
“Bond has three women through the film: If I remember rightly, the first gets killed, the second gets killed and the third gets a fond embrace during the closing sequence. And that’s the formula. They found it’s cast-iron. So, you have to kill two of them off after he has screwed them a few times. And there is great emphasis on funny gadgets and love-making.”
With this information, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory became the author what is essentially Dr. No 2: In Japan. You can tell how many people actually bother to read Dahl’s work by whether or not they call this film “silly.” Sorry, Charlie, but compared to The Chocolate Factory (published the same year as this film’s eponymous novel) and especially compared to The Glass Elevator, this is Roald Dahl on horse tranquilizers. And he still managed to create one of the most influential films of the series, large portions of which have become fertile ground for parody, satire and knowing reference. So I come not to bury this fifth Bond film, but to lament what could have been…and argue that, as “silly” as things get in this picture, they could’ve stood to get a whole lot “sillier.” There might be more to recommend. Continue reading
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Adolfo Celi, Bernard Lee, Claudine Auger, Desmond Llewelyn, Guy Doleman, John Hopkins, Lois Maxwell, Luciana Paluzzi, MGM, Molly Peters, Richard Maibaum, Ricou Browning, Rik Van Nutter, Sean Connery, Terence Young
“Well…can’t win them all.”
With special guest star: Dr. Peyton Westlake! (I wish. Wouldn’t *that* crossover be awesome?)
Way back in my Halloween 4 review I half-joked that, in the vast multiverse of franchise films, only Star Trek and Godzilla have managed to field strong fourth entries. I was immediately “well, actually”-ed by friend of the site David Lee Ingersoll‘s contention that Thunderball “isn’t bad.” Shopping this critique around, I realized Thunderball divides quite a few Bond fans…though nowhere near as much as some Roger Moore movies I could, and will eventually, mention.
I should’ve expected this. Now that we’re on Film Number Four, we can see the full scope of Bond’s world. From this point on, we’ll have plenty of time to consider all its wonderfully disparate elements and decide which we’d prefer to see…as opposed to what we’re actually watching. Because what we’re watching will increasingly serve to remind us of other, better, James Bond films. And why shouldn’t it? Goldfinger made a ton of money, so why not give the people more of that? Making this film and knowing in their guts that it would be a hit must’ve felt like a license to supply heroin to William S. Burroughs. Especially since the bones of this script were already four years old by the time cameras rolled. Continue reading
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Bernard Lee, Cec Linder, Desmond Llewelyn, Gert Frobe, Guy Hamilton, Harold Sakata, Honor Blackman, Lois Maxwell, MGM, Paul Dehn, Richard Maibaum, Sean Connery, Shirley Eaton, Tania Mallet
“Sir, I’m aware of my shortcomings. But I’m prepared to continue this assignment in the manner you suggest…if I knew what it was about. Sir.“
“Now…what were you saying about ‘Napoleon Complexes’?”
And so we come to the production model: James Bond v. 3.0 Alpha. Current series producer Michael G. Wilson has said they start off every film trying to make the next From Russia with Love (only to end up, more often than not, with “the next Thunderball”), and while there’s truth to this, Bond’s second outing isn’t nearly as influential as his third. A more accurate assessment might read, “They start out each film trying to make the next Goldfinger” because Goldfinger carved the Bond Template in stone, no matter the producer’s frequent assurances that they’ve “updated” the character for each generation.
This is the first film that starts off with a “true” pre-credit sequence: Bond in Mexico, taking care of some heroin smugglers by bombing their supply of Nitro. (Every good drug kingpin knows its best keep the nitro within easy walking distance of the production facilities.) Back at the hotel, Bond’s girl of the night asks why he always carries a gun. Bond straight-up admits “I have a slight inferiority complex.” Only slight, James? You’re British and it’s the 60s – your country’s still recovering from WWII. Military bases the world over are either closing down or being taken over by those Ugly Americas with their machine guns. The sun’s setting on the British Empire for the first time in four hundred years, and you, Mr. Bond – a walking example of Hefnerian overcompensation – you’re talking about “slight” inferiority complexes? Continue reading
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Anthony Dawson, Bernard Lee, Daniela Bianchi, Desmond Llewelyn, Johanna Harwood, Lois Maxwell, Lotte Lenya, MGM, Pedro Armendáriz, Richard Maibaum, Robert Shaw, Sean Connery, Terence Young, Vladek Sheybal
The Parents Television Council began stalking Bond early on, fearing he might encourage children to become globe-trotting secret agents. Who SMOKE!
With Dr. No, Bond producers Harry Slatzman and Albert Brocoli turned one million dollars into sixty. The collision of good casting and good direction, along with enough sex appeal for most genders and orientations to get at least something out of the deal, created a sustained fusion reaction between the Cold War Era spy thriller and the kind of pulp adventures not seen (by self-conscious adults, scared their friends might think their entertainment “childish”) since before the Second World War made everyone so serious.
The studio that backed Dr. No, United Artists, called for a sequel by October, 1963, handling EON Productions a whopping two million dollars to get the job done. Is it any surprise From Russia with Love went with the Bigger Is Better and More is More philosophy that’s characterized Hollywood sequels from the very beginning? No. What’s surprising is that it worked so well, when conventional wisdom would have it sequels inherently suck. Yet this remains many people’s favorite James Bond films, including Sean Connery’s, Daniel Craig’s and Timothy Dalton’s. Who am I to snark at it?
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: David Zelag Goodman, Farrah Fawcett, Jenny Agutter, MGM, Michael Anderson, Michael Anderson Jr., Michael York, Peter Ustinov, Richard Jordan, Roscoe Lee Browne, Sci-Fi Dystopias
“You *will* like this film, damnit!”
The mid-70s were a stranger time for SF films than most of us realize. Nowadays we see that pre-Star Wars decade through a screen called 2001: A Space Odyssey, forgetting how much that film (like Star Wars after it) polarized opinion, only assumed the status of Unassailable Classic after the stoned teenagers who loved it became filmmakers themselves. Before that, the Big Name in successful sci-fi films from 1968 was Planet of the Apes. Which deserves to be examined in its own time. So let’s just skim over its superficial attributes real fast.
Apes is a big budget ($5 million went a lot further back then) Major Studio SF picture based on a novel few bothered to read with a well-known piece of beefcake in the lead role and supporting actors doing much better jobs. So I’m not surprised William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s novel got its own time in the limelight. Logan’s Run-the-book hit shelves in 1967…the same year our beefcake, Michael York, hit screens in The Taming of the Shrew. By the time he won the lead in this big budget ($9 million) Major Studio SF picture, he’d become internationally famous as D’Artagnan in both of Richard Lester’s Musketeers movies. As to the supporting cast…yep. We’re in the pipe, five by five. Continue reading
And You Thought It Was Safe(?) 