"My name is Bond. James Bond."
Left to right: Timothy Dalton, Roger Moore, Daniel Craig,
Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan, George Lazenby
No Time to Die, the 25th film in the James Bond franchise, was supposed to premiere today, April 8, 2020. (Notice the time that I posted this: 12:07 AM, or, in military time, 0007.) But, due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the desire to have a big splashy premiere in London without killing people, it's been pushed back: It will premiere in London on November 12, and in America on November 25.
There is some irony in this: The fiendish plots of the villains in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Moonraker both involved unleashing infectious diseases on the world.
This will be unlike any other ranking of the Bond films, because it admits the truth: Goldfinger is not Number 1. It's not even close.
Here is my ranking, after having seen them all again through adult eyes. And, of course, there will be spoilers.
24. Quantum of Solace, 2008. After the high of the Casino Royale reboot, we got the bottom of the (gun)barrel. At the end of the previous film, we're led to believe that Bond has had his origin story, and that he's ready to be the 007 that we know and love (even though we know that there are times when we shouldn't love him). Instead, he spends much of this movie making rookie mistakes.
What's more, it drags more than any other Bond film. It's 1 hour and 46 minutes long, but feels twice that. Quantum feels like a pale imitation of SPECTRE. (Indeed, as we find out 2 films later, it is merely a subsidiary of SPECTRE.)
Furthermore, this is the only film in which Bond doesn't have sex, despite coming into contact with women played by Gemma Arterton, Olga Kurylenko and Stana Katic. I know, he's still in mourning over Vesper Lynd, but being in mourning over Tracy Draco didn't stop him from getting it on with Tiffany Case in DAF. I know this is a new Bond, but, seriously.
This film is dirty, draggy, and presents Bond as un-Bond-like as we've ever seen him. It was bad enough to make 007 fans nostalgic for...
23. Die Another Day, 2002. You've got Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, scenes in Hong Kong and Cuba, and North Korea serves as a compelling enemy for the post-Soviet world. How can you go wrong? Here's how:
* You've got Bond captured by the North Koreans at the start of the film. They torture him for over a year. And we're expected to believe that a 48-year-old Brosnan -- never mind a 71-year-old man, as Sean Connery's Bond would have been -- survives this in reasonably good shape.
* You've got a theme song sung by Madonna. She can't sing. This also proves that Madonna does not have to act in a film to unduly affect its quality. (She did have a cameo in the fencing scene, but her acting was not one of the reasons the film stunk.)
* The identity-switching plot stretches the imagination, even by Bond film standards.
* M has to explain to Bond how much he has missed. Not only have the 9/11 attacks happened during his unavailability, but Q has died, with John Cleese, introduced as his assistant in TWINE, promoted into his post.
* The invisible Mercedes. As Charlie Brown would say, "Good grief!"
* The villain's father betrays him a little too easily, like General Korrd turning on his fellow Klingon Captain Klaa in Star Trek V -- not one of that series' better films.
* And, let's be honest: Brosnan pretty much phoned it in. We know he's a better actor than this, but it's like he knew this was it, and was in it only to fulfill the contract and take his check.
Regardless of whether James Bond was 48 years old or 71, it was time for this version of him to hang up his holster. It was time to reboot. That worked -- at first.
22. The World Is Not Enough, 1999. The title for TWINE comes from the Bond family motto, as seen in OHMSS: In Latin, "Orbis non sufficit." Allegedly, it was the epitaph on the tomb of Alexander the Great.
This was also the last film with Desmond Llewelyn as Q. Llewelyn died the month after its release -- not of anything connected to old age (he was 85), but in a car crash in Sussex. Which is ironic, given Q's propensity for telling Bond to take care of the equipment he provided. Llewelyn's 17 appearances are still the most of any actor in the Bond films.
The twist is that Elektra King, played by the fabulous Sophie Marceau, isn't the damsel in distress, she's the big bad. She remains, to this day, the only woman to be a Bond film's leading villain. That, alone, should have led to a great Bond film -- or, at least, a great Bond story.
This was not it. It was terrible. Having a corrupt businessperson, rather than a mad scientist or a dictator, be the main villain worked in TND, but not in AVTAK, and not here. And, seriously: Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist? Susan Sarandon may have won an Oscar for playing a nun, but some suspension of disbelief is just too far. The band performing the theme song was named Garbage, and while they were okay, this film was garbage as well, the 1st to be worse than...
21. The Man With the Golden Gun, 1974. Christopher Lee was an intelligence agent in the Royal Air Force during World War II, at the same time that Ian Fleming was a British intelligence agent. And they were related by marriage. It has been argued that Lee was one of the men on whom Fleming based the character of Bond.
In addition, Lee had already played such villains as Count Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, The Mummy, Dr. Fu Manchu, Grigori Rasputin, and the Devil himself; but also heroes like Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft. All this, before playing Count Dooku and Saruman.
Who better to play the titular character from Fleming's last full-length novel? Francisco Scaramanga was an anti-Bond, a man supremely talented at everything he did, but who did it for money rather than for Queen and Country, as did 007. In spite of, like Goldfinger, being titled after, and being about, the villain instead of the hero, this should have been one of the best Bond films.
But, dear God, it was, to that point, the worst! Maud Adams (in her 1st of 2 such films) played a half-decent Bond Girl as Scaramanga's girlfriend, Andrea Anders. But Britt Ekland was utterly hopeless as Bond's unwanted MI6 assistant, Mary Goodnight.
Again, there was a plot element borrowed from a current film fad, in this case martial arts movies, and it was ridiculous. And did they really have to add Sheriff J.W. Pepper again, this time running into Bond on vacation in Thailand? And Lee laid it on a bit too thick: Even as Dracula, he didn't chew this much scenery.
Roger Moore was in danger of becoming as big of a joke in the role as George Lazenby was. He and producer Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli (who soon bought out the half-share of his financially-troubled partner Harry Saltzman) were in danger of the franchise ending entirely -- and I'm not the only one who thinks so. They needed for the next Bond film to really be a good one. Fortunately, it was: The Spy Who Loved Me.
20. Diamonds Are Forever, 1971. A side note. A few years back, ABC showed all the old Bond films in sequence, on Sunday nights, from Dr. No through License to Kill. But, for a reason I've never learned, they skipped over On Her Majesty's Secret Service. They went from You Only Live Twice straight to Diamonds Are Forever.
This rendered DAF's opening sequence ridiculous. Bond is crazed over finding Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Okay, I get that Bond usually gets his man, and didn't get him at the end of YOLT. And I get that MI6 would probably make getting Blofeld a priority. But Bond is taking it way too personally for someone for whom OHMSS hasn't occurred. And, if this had been your introduction to Bond, you could be forgiven for thinking that OHMSS hadn't occurred, since Sean Connery is playing the role one more time, after George Lazenby was dumped.
But it did occur, so you can understand that he's avenging his wife. And, at DAF's start, it looks like he's gotten his revenge. Which makes no sense: Why would you put that at the start? (Never mind that For Your Eyes Only would reprise this.)
The Las Vegas-based adventure that follows, in which Bond finds out that Blofeld (now played by Charles Gray) is behind the plot about halfway through (plastic surgery strikes again, as the guy Bond killed at the beginning was a double), becomes ridiculous. Especially when you find out that the enigmatic Willard Whyte, the obvious Howard Hughes analogue that Blofeld is impersonating, is actually a fairly young man, played by country singer and sausage magnate Jimmy Dean (42 years old at the time, as opposed to Hughes then being still alive, and 65).
The movie closes with Blofeld appearing to have been killed, but we didn't see a dead body; and then with yet another "one last henchman to kill before Bond can screw the Bond Girl." In this case, two: The team of Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) and Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith), The Hays Code had fallen in 1968, so the inferences that they were not only gay, but a couple, could now be more overt.
Still, it was a bad stereotype, in a bad story, in a bad film. Connery should not have come back, and, this time, he left for good -- except for Never Say Never Again, which was not official. Goodbye, Mister Bond.
19. Thunderball, 1965. Sean Connery called this his favorite Bond film, but I can't see why. The long, wordless underwater sequences really make it drag, making me think that Lloyd Bridges could have made it an episode of Sea Hunt, and it would have been over in half an hour. Or an hour, if it had been an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Adolfo Celi made a credible villain as Emilio Largo, and Claudine Auger was lovely as Domino Derval. But this was not a good movie. Worse yet, because someone else got the rights to this film, it was remade in 1983, with a 52-year-old Connery giving it one more shot (and he'd had his six), in the horrendous Never Say Never Again.
18. A View to a Kill, 1985. Yes, Moore was 57 years old when it was filmed. Yes, Tanya Roberts' Stacey Sutton was not a compelling Bond Girl. Yes, Grace Jones' May Day was an attempt at an over-the-top henchman, a female equivalent of Richard Kiel's Jaws. Yes, merely trying to corner a market (in this case, computer technology) is a plot whose foiling is beneath Bond. (Heck, it's basically the Duke brothers of Trading Places, with more computers and less bigotry.)
And, no, the one thing that some people think saves this movie, having a villain played by Christopher Walken, does not help. The role of Max Zorin had initially been offered to David Bowie, who turned it down, saying, "I didn't want to spend five months watching my stunt double fall off cliffs." Another blond British rocker, Sting, was offered it next, but he also turned it down.
But it's not that bad. It doesn't drag like Thunderball. It's never as silly as DAF. It doesn't copy a current movie fad like TMWTGG. And the shots of San Francisco, including of the Golden Gate Bridge, are pretty good, if not as "exotic" as a Caribbean or Asian island, or an Amazon jungle, or a Winter resort.
Still, it was time for Moore to hang up the Walther PPK, and he did. This was also Lois Maxwell's final film as Miss Moneypenny.
17. On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 1969. Connery left, and Australian model George Lazenby was hired. He was 9 years younger, but that was his only advantage. He totally lacked much of what made Connery so effective in the role, including confidence and ruthlessness.
Would Connery's Bond have so easily fallen for Teresa Draco, a.k.a. Countess Tracy di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg)? No, not so easily, anyway. Then again, Lazenby's Bond appreciated her as a near-equal -- both in talent and in neuroses -- and Connery never would have have, even if Roger Moore occasionally did (as with Anya Amasova in TSWLM and Octopussy in the film named for her).
Director Peter Hunt was clearly influenced by a film released earlier that year, Midnight Cowboy, as his editing was dizzying, and might have induced seizures in some. Had he simply made OHMSS like previous Bond films, it would have been among the most visually arresting of them.
The Piz Gloria location, in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland in real life, did make for some spectacular shots. Telly Savalas did a good job taking over the role of Blofeld. And the ending is a gut-punch, especially for people who remembered Rigg as the heroic Emma Peel on The Avengers (the 1960s British spy TV series, not connected to the Marvel Comics stories). In other words, this could have been one of the best Bond movies. But it remains in the bottom half.
16. The Living Daylights, 1987. Timothy Dalton's introduction to the series is standard spy stuff, the West vs. the Soviet Union, except, this time, a Soviet spy is messing with his own country instead of the West, and MI6 and the KGB have to once again, reluctantly, work together.
In real life, the Soviets were still occupying Afghanistan, and this film puts the Mujahideen on the side of the good guys, which won't make sense to anyone watching this film after 2001. By Bond standards, this film is about average: Dalton helps himself a little, but he wasn't about to replace either Connery or Moore in anyone's eyes. Robert Brown remained as M, but Caroline Bliss took over as Miss Moneypenny for both of the Dalton films.
15. Goldfinger, 1964. Ian Fleming died on August 12, 1964, 4 months after visiting the set, so he didn't live to see its release on September 17. According to many Bondophiles, this is the one that, A, really set the tone for the series, especially with Q presenting 007 with the tricked-out Aston Martin DB5, and the love interest with the censor-testing name Pussy Galore; B, is the best Bond film of them all; and, C, proves that Sean Connery is the best Bond of them all.
A is wrong, because From Russia With Love did that. B is wrong, and so is C, and they're linked, as I'll explain:
* Bond's luck in this film is insane. It defies logic so much, it would give Mr. Spock a Vulcan headache. Seriously:
** Who sees an enemy coming, reflected in the eye of the woman he's kissing? Even Batman never pulled that off, with Catwoman or anyone else.
** Eponymous (and redundantly-named) villain Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) staying at the same hotel that Bond is? What a coinky-dink!
** And how did Bond get up to the top of that Kentucky cell that he was put in, and stay there, long enough for the henchman to be taken by surprise?
** And Bond escaped from it juuuust in time to hear Goldfinger explain Operation Grand Slam. Not one minute before, requiring him to wait around for some dumb henchman to not quite find him; and not one minute too late to have heard any of it.
** Pussy tells Bond, "You can save your charms. I'm immune." This was as close as the Hays Code would allow a film released in America in 1964 to have a character flat-out say, "I'm gay." Which Pussy explicitly was in the novel. Yet one literal romp in the hay with Bond, and she not only turns straight, but turns coat. Instead of wanting to kill him for it, because it was rape. (Which I'll get back to.)
** Bond gets captured, and stays captured, for more than half of the film. For all the tut-tutting about Raoul Silva's plan depending on getting captured in Skyfall, as was the Joker's in The Dark Knight and Loki's in The Avengers, at least those villains knew what they were doing. Bond is just lucking out the whole freakin' time.
** At the end, Goldfinger, who we're supposed to accept is an evil genius, doesn't know that you're not supposed to fire a gun on board a goddamned plane!
** Worst of all: How many chances did Goldfinger and his henchmen have to kill Bond, and fail to do so? These henchmen were so bad at shooting (How bad were they?), I'm convinced that at least one of these actors was hired to play a Stormtrooper in Star Wars.
** And how many times did they outright refuse to kill him when they had the chance?
*** The henchmen had Bond right where they wanted him in the Swiss forest, and took him alive.
*** Goldfinger tranquilized him, instead of using an actual bullet or, you know, the gold laser that was already inches away from him.
*** At Fort Knox, Oddjob (Harold Sakata) could have killed Bond by throwing his hat, but runs down to fight him instead, only throwing the hat afterward.
*** The cheesiest example: Bond's bluff to get out of the "gold-laser bris" works, and it shouldn't have: Even if Goldfinger thinks Bond knows what Operation Grand Slam is, he hasn't had a chance to tell anyone, and won't, if Goldfinger simply lets the laser take its course. Just finish him off, Auric!
Does it sound like I'm rooting for the bad guys here? Do I expect them to win? No, Mister Reader, I expect the film to make some damn sense! But I gotta admit: "Do you expect me to talk?" followed by "No, Mister Bond, I expect you to die!" is a great line, and Bond villains had so few of them, most of them being on the receiving end of Bond quips. Pretty much the only other good one was Drax's "See that some harm comes to him" in Moonraker.
* Bond isn't even the hero of the movie. He's almost incidental to it, much like Indiana Jones is in Raiders of the Lost Ark. At the end of the Fort Knox sequence, it's not Bond, but his CIA friend Felix Leiter (played here by Cec Linder), who stops the dirty bomb -- with 7 seconds to go, so that the timer reads "007."
* The editing is bad, from Bond's grappling hook at the beginning to the mountain-driving sequence, to the henchmen's car exploding as it starts to go over a cliff, to the Fort Knox soldiers being knocked out by the Goldfinger plane fleet's gas before the fleet is even overhead.
* I realize that Fröbe's English was so heavily accented that it needed dubbing. But they couldn't make a character who is specifically said to be British sound a bit less like a German war criminal who somehow got acquitted at Nuremberg? (Remember: The Nazis, too, hoarded gold.)
It makes Goldfinger the most cartoonish villain in the entire 24-film series, and that's saying something, since it also includes a Caribbean dictator obviously based on "Baby Doc" Duvalier (Dr. Kananga, played by Yaphet Kotto in Live and Let Die), a character played by Christopher Walken (Max Zorin in A View to a Kill), and a giant with steel teeth whose only name we ever get for him is "Jaws" (Richard Kiel in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker). When a character in the later TV spy spoof Get Smart was named "Bronzefinger" (a smuggler of bronze statues), it was less over-the-top.
Yes, this is the movie where Moore hides in a fake alligator. Connery had a fake bird on his head at the start of Goldfinger. Yes, this is the movie where Moore dresses as a clown, complete with makeup. He was trying to infiltrate a circus, so it was a good disguise. At least he wasn't wearing makeup to make himself look Japanese, as Connery did in YOLT.
11. Licence to Kill, 1989. Note the British spelling of the word Americans would spell "license." Bond and old friend Felix Leiter start by foiling a drug lord, then parachuting into Leiter's wedding. Leiter hadn't been seen since Live and Let Die, where he was played by David Hedison, who becomes the 1st actor to play that role twice.
But the drug lord gets his revenge, maiming Leiter and killing his bride, leaving him alive to know he's won. Bond, remembering how his own wife Tracy was killed on their wedding day (thus officially making Dalton's Bond the same man as Connery's, Lazenby's and Moore's), seeks his own revenge. M warns him against it, and revokes his license to kill, meaning he's on his own and subject to any country's laws.
Q defies M, and helps Bond. This movie was not based on any of Fleming's novels, yet Dalton's performance in it has been called the closest to the book version of Bond that had yet been seen. Due to production problems, it would be the last Bond film for 6 years, and Dalton's contract ran out, so, as Bond, he, pardon the choice of words, only lived twice.
10. Moonraker, 1979. Pick your jaw up off the floor. This movie gets a bum rap, due to 2 things: Moore being 52 years old, and thus considered too old for the part; and the laser-gun battle in space. For the 4th time in 12 years -- YOLT with the space program, LLD with blaxploitation, TMWTGG with kung fu, and now this with science fiction, 2 years after Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and with Star Trek: The Motion Picture soon to follow -- the Bond films decided to tie in with a current pop-culture phenomenon.
As for the age factor: These days, plenty of action-adventure films feature stars around that age, and even older. Antonio Banderas is 59. Tom Cruise is 57. Robert Downey Jr. is 55. Current Bond Daniel Craig, Jason Statham and Vin Diesel are all 52, the same age Moore was in Moonraker. Will Smith turns 52 in September. Ben Affleck and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson aren't far behind them at 47. And let's not forget: Cary Grant, one of the original candidates to play Bond, was 56 when he starred in North By Northwest.
As for the laser battle: Yes, it's so cheesy, mice get excited. But that's just 2 minutes. The rest of the film holds up very well. It's worth remembering that Moonraker was the highest-grossing Bond film ever, and remained so until GoldenEye, 16 years later. Maybe pandering to the Star Trek and Star Wars fans wasn't such a bad idea.
Venice (previously seen in FRWL, and seen again in Casino Royale) and Rio de Janeiro hit the "exotic location" buttons. The disease designed to wipe out all of humanity harkens back to OHMSS, and Michael Lonsdale is a credible villain as Sir Hugo Drax.
Jaws (Richard Kiel) becomes the 1st henchman to appear in a 2nd film, and also the 1st to turn coat and work with Bond and his Girl. Speaking of whom, Lois Chiles is good as the astronaut with the censor-shaking name, Dr. Holly Goodhead. (A much more believable scientist than Denise Richards' Dr. Christmas Jones.)
You'll notice that I have the film in which Moore goes into space ranking higher than the film in which Connery almost goes into space. I stand by that ranking. Moonraker is a good film.
9. Spectre, 2015. After finally obtaining the rights to the character of Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his organization SPECTRE from the estate of Kevin McClory in 2013 (McClory had died in 2006), Eon was ready to reboot Bond's classic nemesis as well.
Christoph Waltz, already the villain in Inglorious Basterds and Seth Rogen's horrible reboot of The Green Hornet, was a good choice to play him. And the idea of Bond causing the massive facial scar we saw on Donald Pleasence in YOLT (and going a step beyond that and costing Blofeld the use of that eye) was a good touch. So was having Blofeld be responsible for the villains of CR, QOS and Skyfall.
Monica Bellucci, at 50, became the oldest Bond "Girl" ever (breaking the record of Honor Blackman, 38 when she filmed Goldfinger), but you'd never know it: She was as fine as ever. And having Mr. White (Jesper Christiansen) turn coat and help Bond at the end of his life was fitting in a way.
But having Blofeld's father adopt Bond after he was orphaned as a boy, and thus making them step-brothers, and having Blofeld make his grievances against Bond personal for so long, was insane. There was no reason to have the 2 men be on a 30-year collision course. On the other hand, having Bond leave Blofeld captured, to face British justice, rather than killing him, showed growth in the character, even compared to previous Bonds' relationship to the villain.
And so, in a repaired Aston Martin, Bond and Mr. White's daughter, Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), ride off into the sunset, with Craig as yet unaware if there would be another Bond film with him. Of course, there is one more, No Time to Die, and Madeleine will be in it with him. But so will Blofeld, who is not advertised as the main villain. Time will tell about that film.
8. Live and Let Die, 1973. Bond is dead, long live Bond. Roger Moore, despite being 3 years older than Connery, takes over, and the stakes are less than stopping Blofeld or somebody else from destroying and/or taking over the world. It's just taking down a drug lord, played by Yaphet Kotto in the dual role of Dr. Kananga, dictator of a Caribbean island nation, and Mr. Big, the drug kingpin of Harlem.
This makes him the 1st black Bond villain, although Dr. No was the 1st nonwhite one. And Gloria Hendry, who had co-starred in Black Caesar earlier in the year, plays CIA Agent Rosie Carver, the 1st black woman to sleep with Bond (at least, onscreen).
This was a sendup of "blaxploitation" films, including Black Caesar, and there are some seriously cringeworthy moments. One that's not related to race was brought up by Moore years later: "Why would have have a man run across crocodiles while wearing crocodile shoes?" And Louisiana Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James, actually from Oregon) was pretty cringey, too.
But it's a good story, and Jane Seymour as Solitaire makes a good romantic lead, And Moore proves every bit Connery's equal. He's more stylish, every bit as good with the quips, and proved he was just as ruthless: When Rosie says they'll kill her if she tells who's compromised her, he says he'll kill her if she doesn't. She says, "But you wouldn't -- not after what we just did!" He says, "Well, I certainly wouldn't have killed you before."
7. Skyfall, 2012. The worst thing I can say about this one is that, at 2 hours and 23 minutes, it was too long. Having M die in spite of everything that Bond had tried to do made very little sense, but it showed that the spy game is always troublesome. Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) needing to get captured to make his plan work was a bit dippy. And suggesting that Bond was now possibly too old for this shit, when the previous movie was an extension of his origin story, was wrong. There should have been at least 2 movies in between, showing us Bond in his agent prime.
But Silva was still a chilling villain. Introducing Naomie Harris as (the finally first-named) Eve Moneypenny, making her a real field agent instead of just M's secretary, introducing Ben Whishaw as a surprisingly young Q, and introducing Ralph Fiennes as the new M all worked very well.
6. For Your Eyes Only, 1981. After the "Bond vs. Anti-Bond" confrontation of TMWTGG, the Cold War love story of TSWLM, and the Bond-in-space story of Moonraker, a Bond film that was, literally, down to Earth was not so much a letdown as a reprieve, especially for Connery fans who didn't like the sillier aspects of the films (ignoring just how silly those films could be, including Connery's own space-themed adventure, YOLT).
This one opens with Moore's Bond laying flowers at Tracy's grave, marked with the dates 1943-1969, thus proving that his character is the same one played by Connery and Lazenby. And then he's attacked by someone who, due to legal reasons, they couldn't say was Blofeld, but it was Blofeld, back after 10 years (and, apparently, paralyzed due to what Bond did to him at the end of DAF). After 2 films with Connery fighting him, and 1 with Lazenby, it is Roger Moore's version of James Bond who finally gives Ernst Stavro Blofeld the shaft. (Don't worry, the cat got away and lived.)
Ironically, given the opening scene, Bond has to return to the Alps, albeit to the Italian side rather than the Swiss side. Julian Glover plays Aris Kristatos, the 1st Bond villain to appear, at first, to have been an ally, which turns out to be a very effective twist -- repeated with similar effectiveness in TLD, and with considerably less in TWINE. All in all, a very good spy film, and another nail in the coffin of the prevailing opinion that Moore and his body of work weren't as good as Connery and his.
Bernard Lee was dying of cancer, and so this was the 1st Bond film not to feature the character of M.
5. GoldenEye, 1995. Perhaps the 1st reboot of the Bond series: It was pushing it to say that Timothy Dalton, 43 at the time of LTK, was playing the same man as Sean Connery, then 59, did from 1962 to 1971, but, canonically, he was.
For GE, Pierce Brosnan debuted as Bond, after initially being considered as Moore's replacement for TLD. It made sense: Moore had been considered due to being the suave international hero in a TV series, The Saint; while Brosnan had been a suave TV star on Remington Steele. But he couldn't get out of his NBC contract, so they turned to Dalton instead. Now, Brosnan was available.
With an opening sequence set in 1986, before Dalton took over, it's easier to say that Brosnan, 42 in 1995, was not the same man that was played by a then-65-year-old Connery. Twice, in GE and in TWINE, there oblique references to Tracy, but if you didn't know Bond's personal history, you wouldn't presume that this confirms he was ever married.
But is he the same man? The new M, Judi Dench, suggests that he is, by calling him "a relic of the Cold War." There's also a new actress playing Miss Moneypenny. Her name is Bond. Samantha Bond. She remains in the role through all the Brosnan films.
The Bond franchise needed a good one after the 6-year gap, and they got it. The transition of some Soviets (Famke Janssen's Xenia Onatopp was said to be Georgian, not Russian) to traditional capitalist gangsters was played up, so it was both a Cold War spy movie and a Mob movie, and Brosnan handled it as if he had been playing Bond in the 2 previous films. Eon Productions got it right. Unfortunately for Eon and Brosnan, it would never be so good again -- at least, not together.
4. Dr. No, 1962. This film started it all, for a very good reason: The original heads of Eon Productions, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli didn't know if turning Ian Fleming's novels into films would work, especially in America. If successful, they would make more money there than in the rest of the world. If unsuccessful in the U.S., it wouldn't matter how successful it was in the U.K. and elsewhere: They would be doomed. So they chose the Bond novel that they thought would be the cheapest to produce. It worked, and subsequent Bond films had bigger budgets.
Most of the familiar Bond tropes started here (with the analogues for this film in parentheses):
* The opening "gunbarrel sequence" and opening titles, both designed by Maurice Binder, who would continue to design opening titles until his death in 1991.
* The iconic theme song, composed by Monty Norman and performed by an orchestra conducted by John Barry.
* James Bond, Agent 007 of MI6, Britain's international security agency (played by Sean Connery), looking cool as hell, getting the girls, killing the bad guys, and dropping mad quips.
* Bond's boss, known only as M (Bernard Lee), approving of his results but not always his methods.
* Bond's playful banter with M's secretary, Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell, and the character doesn't get a first name, Eve, until Skyfall).
* Exotic locations (Jamaica, which had been granted independence by Britain after filming was completed, hence it was still a colony in the film).
* A spectacular lead "Bond Girl" (Ursula Andress as the revenge-minded Honey Rider).
* And an insidious villain (Joseph Wiseman as Dr. Julius No) with a nefarious plot (sabotaging an American space launch, so that the Soviet Union would get blamed, starting World War III, and allowing No's superiors in SPECTRE to take over what was left of the world).
Not yet in place: Q and his gadgets (the only new equipment Bond gets is a new sidearm, a .32-caliber Walther PPK), a tricked-out car, and a plot tying in with a current cultural phenomenon (which has been done a few times, and usually hasn't aged well).
If you can get past Bond's hyper-macho attitude, and the fact that the film views the world through a lens that is still tinted by the British Empire (which had, in real life, already given way to the British Commonwealth), the film is a good adventure with a satisfying conclusion.
3. Casino Royale, 2006. The reboot. A James Bond who is, for the 1st time, definitively not the man first seen in Dr. No. This is Bond Begins. The 1st onscreen origin story for Agent 007, although it's been suggested that he never needed one. The debut of Daniel Craig as Bond. It is also, aside from an American reworking on the CBS anthology series Climax! in 1954, and the unofficial spoof in 1967, the 1st depiction of the 1st of Ian Fleming's Bond novels, published in 1953.
To borrow an analogy from this film's Texas hold 'em poker theme (as opposed to the original's baccarat), Eon Productions went all in. For everyone involved, this had to be a good one.
It was. They totally nailed it. Although Craig was already 38 years old, he was a believable agent new to this level, making rookie mistakes, but figuring things out as he went along. The inclusion of a 1964 Aston Martin to become this Bond's car was a nice touch.
Judi Dench remained as M, even though she may not have been the same character as in the Brosnan films -- "God, I miss the bloody Cold War" was not a line the M she had been playing would have said. Eva Green was just right as the compromised Vesper Lynd. And Mads Mikkelsen was devilishly appropriate as Le Chiffre.
Everything was in place for the Craig Era to be a great one. And then they followed this triumph with Quantum of Solace.
2. From Russia With Love, 1963. For all the flak the Bond movies get for their sexism, this one had a plot that was ahead of its time: It recognized that, due to his promiscuity, Bond could be snared in a "honey trap," thus damaging the security of the NATO alliance, and of Britain in particular.
But, much more than its only predecessor, Dr. No, FRWL established the sense of both intrigue and romance that the Bond films became known for. And, despite being only 19, still the youngest Bond Girl, Daniela Bianchi made for a good foil as Tatiana Romanova.
This film also introduced Desmond Llewelyn as Q the quartermaster.
1. The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977. This is it: The best and defining James Bond film, and it stars Roger Moore, not Sean Connery.
Karl Stromberg (Curd Jürgens) is a pretty standard Bond villain, but his plot is pretty good, and requires an ingenious solution. Having Jaws (Richard Kiel) helps: He makes all previous large Bond-opposing hitmen (including Robert Shaw as Red Grant in FRWL and Harold Sakata as Oddjob in Goldfinger) look as small as Herve Villachaize as Nick Nack in TMWTGG.
Barbara Bach as Major Anya Amasova, Agent XXX (Triple-X), is the best Bond Girl. You can argue that another is more beautiful, or has a better body, although it would be a tough argument. But, more than any other, her character is a match for Bond, in intelligence (in both senses of the word), talent, determination and even wordplay -- the latter, no mean feat because she's an American actress, reading a script written by an American and an Englishman, playing a Russian character speaking English, mostly to an Englishman.
Egypt makes a fantastic "exotic location." A villain's base in the middle of the ocean makes a stiff challenge. (How does Jaws swim all the way back to land?) And the submersible Lotus Esprit is the best Bond car ever, ahead of the Aston Martin.
Sorry, Connery fans, you might find this positively shocking, but this is the best Bond film. Don't blow a fuse.
This film is dirty, draggy, and presents Bond as un-Bond-like as we've ever seen him. It was bad enough to make 007 fans nostalgic for...
23. Die Another Day, 2002. You've got Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, scenes in Hong Kong and Cuba, and North Korea serves as a compelling enemy for the post-Soviet world. How can you go wrong? Here's how:
* You've got Bond captured by the North Koreans at the start of the film. They torture him for over a year. And we're expected to believe that a 48-year-old Brosnan -- never mind a 71-year-old man, as Sean Connery's Bond would have been -- survives this in reasonably good shape.
* You've got a theme song sung by Madonna. She can't sing. This also proves that Madonna does not have to act in a film to unduly affect its quality. (She did have a cameo in the fencing scene, but her acting was not one of the reasons the film stunk.)
* The identity-switching plot stretches the imagination, even by Bond film standards.
* M has to explain to Bond how much he has missed. Not only have the 9/11 attacks happened during his unavailability, but Q has died, with John Cleese, introduced as his assistant in TWINE, promoted into his post.
* The invisible Mercedes. As Charlie Brown would say, "Good grief!"
* The villain's father betrays him a little too easily, like General Korrd turning on his fellow Klingon Captain Klaa in Star Trek V -- not one of that series' better films.
* And, let's be honest: Brosnan pretty much phoned it in. We know he's a better actor than this, but it's like he knew this was it, and was in it only to fulfill the contract and take his check.
Regardless of whether James Bond was 48 years old or 71, it was time for this version of him to hang up his holster. It was time to reboot. That worked -- at first.
22. The World Is Not Enough, 1999. The title for TWINE comes from the Bond family motto, as seen in OHMSS: In Latin, "Orbis non sufficit." Allegedly, it was the epitaph on the tomb of Alexander the Great.
This was also the last film with Desmond Llewelyn as Q. Llewelyn died the month after its release -- not of anything connected to old age (he was 85), but in a car crash in Sussex. Which is ironic, given Q's propensity for telling Bond to take care of the equipment he provided. Llewelyn's 17 appearances are still the most of any actor in the Bond films.
The twist is that Elektra King, played by the fabulous Sophie Marceau, isn't the damsel in distress, she's the big bad. She remains, to this day, the only woman to be a Bond film's leading villain. That, alone, should have led to a great Bond film -- or, at least, a great Bond story.
This was not it. It was terrible. Having a corrupt businessperson, rather than a mad scientist or a dictator, be the main villain worked in TND, but not in AVTAK, and not here. And, seriously: Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist? Susan Sarandon may have won an Oscar for playing a nun, but some suspension of disbelief is just too far. The band performing the theme song was named Garbage, and while they were okay, this film was garbage as well, the 1st to be worse than...
21. The Man With the Golden Gun, 1974. Christopher Lee was an intelligence agent in the Royal Air Force during World War II, at the same time that Ian Fleming was a British intelligence agent. And they were related by marriage. It has been argued that Lee was one of the men on whom Fleming based the character of Bond.
In addition, Lee had already played such villains as Count Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, The Mummy, Dr. Fu Manchu, Grigori Rasputin, and the Devil himself; but also heroes like Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft. All this, before playing Count Dooku and Saruman.
Who better to play the titular character from Fleming's last full-length novel? Francisco Scaramanga was an anti-Bond, a man supremely talented at everything he did, but who did it for money rather than for Queen and Country, as did 007. In spite of, like Goldfinger, being titled after, and being about, the villain instead of the hero, this should have been one of the best Bond films.
But, dear God, it was, to that point, the worst! Maud Adams (in her 1st of 2 such films) played a half-decent Bond Girl as Scaramanga's girlfriend, Andrea Anders. But Britt Ekland was utterly hopeless as Bond's unwanted MI6 assistant, Mary Goodnight.
Again, there was a plot element borrowed from a current film fad, in this case martial arts movies, and it was ridiculous. And did they really have to add Sheriff J.W. Pepper again, this time running into Bond on vacation in Thailand? And Lee laid it on a bit too thick: Even as Dracula, he didn't chew this much scenery.
Roger Moore was in danger of becoming as big of a joke in the role as George Lazenby was. He and producer Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli (who soon bought out the half-share of his financially-troubled partner Harry Saltzman) were in danger of the franchise ending entirely -- and I'm not the only one who thinks so. They needed for the next Bond film to really be a good one. Fortunately, it was: The Spy Who Loved Me.
20. Diamonds Are Forever, 1971. A side note. A few years back, ABC showed all the old Bond films in sequence, on Sunday nights, from Dr. No through License to Kill. But, for a reason I've never learned, they skipped over On Her Majesty's Secret Service. They went from You Only Live Twice straight to Diamonds Are Forever.
This rendered DAF's opening sequence ridiculous. Bond is crazed over finding Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Okay, I get that Bond usually gets his man, and didn't get him at the end of YOLT. And I get that MI6 would probably make getting Blofeld a priority. But Bond is taking it way too personally for someone for whom OHMSS hasn't occurred. And, if this had been your introduction to Bond, you could be forgiven for thinking that OHMSS hadn't occurred, since Sean Connery is playing the role one more time, after George Lazenby was dumped.
But it did occur, so you can understand that he's avenging his wife. And, at DAF's start, it looks like he's gotten his revenge. Which makes no sense: Why would you put that at the start? (Never mind that For Your Eyes Only would reprise this.)
The Las Vegas-based adventure that follows, in which Bond finds out that Blofeld (now played by Charles Gray) is behind the plot about halfway through (plastic surgery strikes again, as the guy Bond killed at the beginning was a double), becomes ridiculous. Especially when you find out that the enigmatic Willard Whyte, the obvious Howard Hughes analogue that Blofeld is impersonating, is actually a fairly young man, played by country singer and sausage magnate Jimmy Dean (42 years old at the time, as opposed to Hughes then being still alive, and 65).
The movie closes with Blofeld appearing to have been killed, but we didn't see a dead body; and then with yet another "one last henchman to kill before Bond can screw the Bond Girl." In this case, two: The team of Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) and Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith), The Hays Code had fallen in 1968, so the inferences that they were not only gay, but a couple, could now be more overt.
Still, it was a bad stereotype, in a bad story, in a bad film. Connery should not have come back, and, this time, he left for good -- except for Never Say Never Again, which was not official. Goodbye, Mister Bond.
19. Thunderball, 1965. Sean Connery called this his favorite Bond film, but I can't see why. The long, wordless underwater sequences really make it drag, making me think that Lloyd Bridges could have made it an episode of Sea Hunt, and it would have been over in half an hour. Or an hour, if it had been an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Adolfo Celi made a credible villain as Emilio Largo, and Claudine Auger was lovely as Domino Derval. But this was not a good movie. Worse yet, because someone else got the rights to this film, it was remade in 1983, with a 52-year-old Connery giving it one more shot (and he'd had his six), in the horrendous Never Say Never Again.
18. A View to a Kill, 1985. Yes, Moore was 57 years old when it was filmed. Yes, Tanya Roberts' Stacey Sutton was not a compelling Bond Girl. Yes, Grace Jones' May Day was an attempt at an over-the-top henchman, a female equivalent of Richard Kiel's Jaws. Yes, merely trying to corner a market (in this case, computer technology) is a plot whose foiling is beneath Bond. (Heck, it's basically the Duke brothers of Trading Places, with more computers and less bigotry.)
And, no, the one thing that some people think saves this movie, having a villain played by Christopher Walken, does not help. The role of Max Zorin had initially been offered to David Bowie, who turned it down, saying, "I didn't want to spend five months watching my stunt double fall off cliffs." Another blond British rocker, Sting, was offered it next, but he also turned it down.
But it's not that bad. It doesn't drag like Thunderball. It's never as silly as DAF. It doesn't copy a current movie fad like TMWTGG. And the shots of San Francisco, including of the Golden Gate Bridge, are pretty good, if not as "exotic" as a Caribbean or Asian island, or an Amazon jungle, or a Winter resort.
Still, it was time for Moore to hang up the Walther PPK, and he did. This was also Lois Maxwell's final film as Miss Moneypenny.
17. On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 1969. Connery left, and Australian model George Lazenby was hired. He was 9 years younger, but that was his only advantage. He totally lacked much of what made Connery so effective in the role, including confidence and ruthlessness.
Director Peter Hunt was clearly influenced by a film released earlier that year, Midnight Cowboy, as his editing was dizzying, and might have induced seizures in some. Had he simply made OHMSS like previous Bond films, it would have been among the most visually arresting of them.
The Piz Gloria location, in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland in real life, did make for some spectacular shots. Telly Savalas did a good job taking over the role of Blofeld. And the ending is a gut-punch, especially for people who remembered Rigg as the heroic Emma Peel on The Avengers (the 1960s British spy TV series, not connected to the Marvel Comics stories). In other words, this could have been one of the best Bond movies. But it remains in the bottom half.
16. The Living Daylights, 1987. Timothy Dalton's introduction to the series is standard spy stuff, the West vs. the Soviet Union, except, this time, a Soviet spy is messing with his own country instead of the West, and MI6 and the KGB have to once again, reluctantly, work together.
In real life, the Soviets were still occupying Afghanistan, and this film puts the Mujahideen on the side of the good guys, which won't make sense to anyone watching this film after 2001. By Bond standards, this film is about average: Dalton helps himself a little, but he wasn't about to replace either Connery or Moore in anyone's eyes. Robert Brown remained as M, but Caroline Bliss took over as Miss Moneypenny for both of the Dalton films.
15. Goldfinger, 1964. Ian Fleming died on August 12, 1964, 4 months after visiting the set, so he didn't live to see its release on September 17. According to many Bondophiles, this is the one that, A, really set the tone for the series, especially with Q presenting 007 with the tricked-out Aston Martin DB5, and the love interest with the censor-testing name Pussy Galore; B, is the best Bond film of them all; and, C, proves that Sean Connery is the best Bond of them all.
A is wrong, because From Russia With Love did that. B is wrong, and so is C, and they're linked, as I'll explain:
* Bond's luck in this film is insane. It defies logic so much, it would give Mr. Spock a Vulcan headache. Seriously:
** Who sees an enemy coming, reflected in the eye of the woman he's kissing? Even Batman never pulled that off, with Catwoman or anyone else.
** Eponymous (and redundantly-named) villain Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) staying at the same hotel that Bond is? What a coinky-dink!
** And how did Bond get up to the top of that Kentucky cell that he was put in, and stay there, long enough for the henchman to be taken by surprise?
** And Bond escaped from it juuuust in time to hear Goldfinger explain Operation Grand Slam. Not one minute before, requiring him to wait around for some dumb henchman to not quite find him; and not one minute too late to have heard any of it.
** Pussy tells Bond, "You can save your charms. I'm immune." This was as close as the Hays Code would allow a film released in America in 1964 to have a character flat-out say, "I'm gay." Which Pussy explicitly was in the novel. Yet one literal romp in the hay with Bond, and she not only turns straight, but turns coat. Instead of wanting to kill him for it, because it was rape. (Which I'll get back to.)
** Bond gets captured, and stays captured, for more than half of the film. For all the tut-tutting about Raoul Silva's plan depending on getting captured in Skyfall, as was the Joker's in The Dark Knight and Loki's in The Avengers, at least those villains knew what they were doing. Bond is just lucking out the whole freakin' time.
** At the end, Goldfinger, who we're supposed to accept is an evil genius, doesn't know that you're not supposed to fire a gun on board a goddamned plane!
** Worst of all: How many chances did Goldfinger and his henchmen have to kill Bond, and fail to do so? These henchmen were so bad at shooting (How bad were they?), I'm convinced that at least one of these actors was hired to play a Stormtrooper in Star Wars.
** And how many times did they outright refuse to kill him when they had the chance?
*** The henchmen had Bond right where they wanted him in the Swiss forest, and took him alive.
*** Goldfinger tranquilized him, instead of using an actual bullet or, you know, the gold laser that was already inches away from him.
*** At Fort Knox, Oddjob (Harold Sakata) could have killed Bond by throwing his hat, but runs down to fight him instead, only throwing the hat afterward.
*** The cheesiest example: Bond's bluff to get out of the "gold-laser bris" works, and it shouldn't have: Even if Goldfinger thinks Bond knows what Operation Grand Slam is, he hasn't had a chance to tell anyone, and won't, if Goldfinger simply lets the laser take its course. Just finish him off, Auric!
Does it sound like I'm rooting for the bad guys here? Do I expect them to win? No, Mister Reader, I expect the film to make some damn sense! But I gotta admit: "Do you expect me to talk?" followed by "No, Mister Bond, I expect you to die!" is a great line, and Bond villains had so few of them, most of them being on the receiving end of Bond quips. Pretty much the only other good one was Drax's "See that some harm comes to him" in Moonraker.
* Bond isn't even the hero of the movie. He's almost incidental to it, much like Indiana Jones is in Raiders of the Lost Ark. At the end of the Fort Knox sequence, it's not Bond, but his CIA friend Felix Leiter (played here by Cec Linder), who stops the dirty bomb -- with 7 seconds to go, so that the timer reads "007."
* The editing is bad, from Bond's grappling hook at the beginning to the mountain-driving sequence, to the henchmen's car exploding as it starts to go over a cliff, to the Fort Knox soldiers being knocked out by the Goldfinger plane fleet's gas before the fleet is even overhead.
* I realize that Fröbe's English was so heavily accented that it needed dubbing. But they couldn't make a character who is specifically said to be British sound a bit less like a German war criminal who somehow got acquitted at Nuremberg? (Remember: The Nazis, too, hoarded gold.)
It makes Goldfinger the most cartoonish villain in the entire 24-film series, and that's saying something, since it also includes a Caribbean dictator obviously based on "Baby Doc" Duvalier (Dr. Kananga, played by Yaphet Kotto in Live and Let Die), a character played by Christopher Walken (Max Zorin in A View to a Kill), and a giant with steel teeth whose only name we ever get for him is "Jaws" (Richard Kiel in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker). When a character in the later TV spy spoof Get Smart was named "Bronzefinger" (a smuggler of bronze statues), it was less over-the-top.
* Finally, this film wants us to root for James Bond. As the scene with Bond and Pussy in the hay suggests, they go on to have sex. And she is objecting the whole way. James Bond is a rapist. And this film is asking you to root for him. And the Hays Code didn't have a problem with it, so long as the editing cut directly from him kissing her, without any clothes having yet been taken off, to a scene of a propeller starting, which the Code keepers were too dumb to know was a metaphor for Bond's "engine starting."
So if you think Goldfinger is the best James Bond film, you're basing this on your feelings, not on the available facts. You can make it your favorite, but it is far from the best.
On the plus side, Shirley Bassey gives the most iconic performance of a Bond film theme song. And the Aston Martin is pretty cool. And Goldfinger does utter the 1st "Goodbye, Mr. Bond." And Eon showed a lot of guts in not only naming the film after the villain, but, really, making the film the villain's story more than the hero's. Unfortunately, that works both ways: Once the opening sequence is played, we never hear Bond's theme again: Only Goldfinger's theme is played throughout the film.
14. Octopussy, 1983. This? This movie? Ahead of Goldfinger? Blasphemy! No, it is not. It's my list. You don't like it, make your own damn list.
In 1983, Kevin McClory, who produced Thunderball and still had the rights to that story, and to the concepts of SPECTRE and Blofeld, wanted to remake the film, and did so as Never Say Never Again (which I'm not even going to count here, since it's unofficial), with a 52-year-old Connery. It was released on October 7, 4 months after Octopussy on June 6, and... made less money than Octopussy. That should have settled the Connery vs. Moore debate for all time, in Moore's favor.
So if you think Goldfinger is the best James Bond film, you're basing this on your feelings, not on the available facts. You can make it your favorite, but it is far from the best.
On the plus side, Shirley Bassey gives the most iconic performance of a Bond film theme song. And the Aston Martin is pretty cool. And Goldfinger does utter the 1st "Goodbye, Mr. Bond." And Eon showed a lot of guts in not only naming the film after the villain, but, really, making the film the villain's story more than the hero's. Unfortunately, that works both ways: Once the opening sequence is played, we never hear Bond's theme again: Only Goldfinger's theme is played throughout the film.
14. Octopussy, 1983. This? This movie? Ahead of Goldfinger? Blasphemy! No, it is not. It's my list. You don't like it, make your own damn list.
In 1983, Kevin McClory, who produced Thunderball and still had the rights to that story, and to the concepts of SPECTRE and Blofeld, wanted to remake the film, and did so as Never Say Never Again (which I'm not even going to count here, since it's unofficial), with a 52-year-old Connery. It was released on October 7, 4 months after Octopussy on June 6, and... made less money than Octopussy. That should have settled the Connery vs. Moore debate for all time, in Moore's favor.
I remember watching Siskel & Ebert At the Movies, and both Gene Siskel and Robert Ebert said that Connery was the better Bond. Ebert said, "Moore's too prissy. He's too afraid to get his white suit dirty." This was stupid: Moore wasn't afraid of anything, and coming away looking cleaner was part of his charm.
Yes, this is the movie where Moore hides in a fake alligator. Connery had a fake bird on his head at the start of Goldfinger. Yes, this is the movie where Moore dresses as a clown, complete with makeup. He was trying to infiltrate a circus, so it was a good disguise. At least he wasn't wearing makeup to make himself look Japanese, as Connery did in YOLT.
Robert Brown had played Admiral Hargreaves in TSWLM, and was cast as M for this film, replacing the late Bernard Lee. Although it's possible he was taking over in the character as well as in the office, it is more likely, given Lee's death, that Lee's M had died, and Hargreaves was promoted into the office.
Maud Adams returns, as the titular smuggling tycooness. Her real name is not mentioned in the film, but, in the book, it was Octavia Smythe -- "Octavia" to fit with the "octopus" theme, just as Spider-Man villain Doctor Octopus was named "Otto Octavius." It's a Batman-Catwoman relationship: They shouldn't be on the same side, but, eventually, they have to be.
Louis Jourdan, for once, is not the most suave man in the room. Octopussy has the best all-female private army seen onscreen until the Amazons of Wonder Woman in 2017. Q's Union Jack balloon is a hoot. And it is a good Cold War story.
But the best scene is Bond sliding down the banister with a machine gun, shooting the Newell post so it doesn't, as Steve Martin might say, grab him like a slab of meat with mittens.
13. You Only Live Twice, 1967. This is a decent adventure story, and it shows us "Tiger" Tanaka (Tetsurō Tamba), a Japanese man who is not a stereotype, but rather a very modern man, as a major official in a very modern nation. And we finally get to see Ernst Stavro Blofeld (played here by Donald Pleasence), after two films (or, considering this film, two and a half) where all we saw where his hands, his torso, and his cat.
On the other hand, the two Japanese women aiding Bond in his task, Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) and the unfortunately named Kissy Suzuki (Mir Hama), in spite of how capable they turn out to be, are caricatures. And the idea of making Bond become Japanese, or, to use a later metaphor, "Turning Japanese," is incredibly insensitive, even by 1960s standards.
At least they used actual Japanese actors, instead of Americans or Britons in "yellowface," a la Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's (and, to a lesser extent, Joseph Wiseman as the half-Chinese Dr. No). Still, this film could have been a lot better.
One of the main differences between the books and the movies is that, in the movies, this was the first time Bond and Blofeld came face-to-face, and Blofeld, while defeated, gets away; while, in the books, YOLT concludes a trilogy of books where Blofeld is the villain, and Bond kills him, avenging Tracy.
One more interesting note: Charles Gray, who went on to play Blofeld in DAF, here plays Bond's initial contact in Japan, Dick Henderson, who gets the martini order wrong: "Stirred, not shaken."
12. Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997. This was the 1st Bond film after the death of original producer Cubby Broccoli, and his daughter Barbara and stepson Michael G. Wilson, having been associate producers to that point, took over in full.
This film gets a bum rap: It did not begin the decline of the Brosnan Era. I have never liked Jonathan Pryce, going back to his awful commercials for Infiniti cars in the late 1980s. But, as a more interesting version of Rupert Murdoch, using a media empire to influence world events in his favor, he makes a great opponent for Bond.
Maud Adams returns, as the titular smuggling tycooness. Her real name is not mentioned in the film, but, in the book, it was Octavia Smythe -- "Octavia" to fit with the "octopus" theme, just as Spider-Man villain Doctor Octopus was named "Otto Octavius." It's a Batman-Catwoman relationship: They shouldn't be on the same side, but, eventually, they have to be.
Louis Jourdan, for once, is not the most suave man in the room. Octopussy has the best all-female private army seen onscreen until the Amazons of Wonder Woman in 2017. Q's Union Jack balloon is a hoot. And it is a good Cold War story.
But the best scene is Bond sliding down the banister with a machine gun, shooting the Newell post so it doesn't, as Steve Martin might say, grab him like a slab of meat with mittens.
13. You Only Live Twice, 1967. This is a decent adventure story, and it shows us "Tiger" Tanaka (Tetsurō Tamba), a Japanese man who is not a stereotype, but rather a very modern man, as a major official in a very modern nation. And we finally get to see Ernst Stavro Blofeld (played here by Donald Pleasence), after two films (or, considering this film, two and a half) where all we saw where his hands, his torso, and his cat.
On the other hand, the two Japanese women aiding Bond in his task, Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) and the unfortunately named Kissy Suzuki (Mir Hama), in spite of how capable they turn out to be, are caricatures. And the idea of making Bond become Japanese, or, to use a later metaphor, "Turning Japanese," is incredibly insensitive, even by 1960s standards.
At least they used actual Japanese actors, instead of Americans or Britons in "yellowface," a la Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's (and, to a lesser extent, Joseph Wiseman as the half-Chinese Dr. No). Still, this film could have been a lot better.
One of the main differences between the books and the movies is that, in the movies, this was the first time Bond and Blofeld came face-to-face, and Blofeld, while defeated, gets away; while, in the books, YOLT concludes a trilogy of books where Blofeld is the villain, and Bond kills him, avenging Tracy.
One more interesting note: Charles Gray, who went on to play Blofeld in DAF, here plays Bond's initial contact in Japan, Dick Henderson, who gets the martini order wrong: "Stirred, not shaken."
12. Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997. This was the 1st Bond film after the death of original producer Cubby Broccoli, and his daughter Barbara and stepson Michael G. Wilson, having been associate producers to that point, took over in full.
This film gets a bum rap: It did not begin the decline of the Brosnan Era. I have never liked Jonathan Pryce, going back to his awful commercials for Infiniti cars in the late 1980s. But, as a more interesting version of Rupert Murdoch, using a media empire to influence world events in his favor, he makes a great opponent for Bond.
This was also the 1st time that Bond, having previously teamed up with Russians, had to do so with a Chinese agent, Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh, a Malaysian actress of Chinese -- Cantonese -- ancestry). Like Anya Amasova in TSWLM, she was a good match for him. And, like many other movies with a scene in Vietnam, that sequence was actually filmed in Thailand. Oh yes, this film also had Teri Hatcher playing an ex-girlfriend of Bond's. She was still real, and still spectacular.
11. Licence to Kill, 1989. Note the British spelling of the word Americans would spell "license." Bond and old friend Felix Leiter start by foiling a drug lord, then parachuting into Leiter's wedding. Leiter hadn't been seen since Live and Let Die, where he was played by David Hedison, who becomes the 1st actor to play that role twice.
But the drug lord gets his revenge, maiming Leiter and killing his bride, leaving him alive to know he's won. Bond, remembering how his own wife Tracy was killed on their wedding day (thus officially making Dalton's Bond the same man as Connery's, Lazenby's and Moore's), seeks his own revenge. M warns him against it, and revokes his license to kill, meaning he's on his own and subject to any country's laws.
10. Moonraker, 1979. Pick your jaw up off the floor. This movie gets a bum rap, due to 2 things: Moore being 52 years old, and thus considered too old for the part; and the laser-gun battle in space. For the 4th time in 12 years -- YOLT with the space program, LLD with blaxploitation, TMWTGG with kung fu, and now this with science fiction, 2 years after Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and with Star Trek: The Motion Picture soon to follow -- the Bond films decided to tie in with a current pop-culture phenomenon.
As for the age factor: These days, plenty of action-adventure films feature stars around that age, and even older. Antonio Banderas is 59. Tom Cruise is 57. Robert Downey Jr. is 55. Current Bond Daniel Craig, Jason Statham and Vin Diesel are all 52, the same age Moore was in Moonraker. Will Smith turns 52 in September. Ben Affleck and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson aren't far behind them at 47. And let's not forget: Cary Grant, one of the original candidates to play Bond, was 56 when he starred in North By Northwest.
As for the laser battle: Yes, it's so cheesy, mice get excited. But that's just 2 minutes. The rest of the film holds up very well. It's worth remembering that Moonraker was the highest-grossing Bond film ever, and remained so until GoldenEye, 16 years later. Maybe pandering to the Star Trek and Star Wars fans wasn't such a bad idea.
Venice (previously seen in FRWL, and seen again in Casino Royale) and Rio de Janeiro hit the "exotic location" buttons. The disease designed to wipe out all of humanity harkens back to OHMSS, and Michael Lonsdale is a credible villain as Sir Hugo Drax.
Jaws (Richard Kiel) becomes the 1st henchman to appear in a 2nd film, and also the 1st to turn coat and work with Bond and his Girl. Speaking of whom, Lois Chiles is good as the astronaut with the censor-shaking name, Dr. Holly Goodhead. (A much more believable scientist than Denise Richards' Dr. Christmas Jones.)
You'll notice that I have the film in which Moore goes into space ranking higher than the film in which Connery almost goes into space. I stand by that ranking. Moonraker is a good film.
9. Spectre, 2015. After finally obtaining the rights to the character of Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his organization SPECTRE from the estate of Kevin McClory in 2013 (McClory had died in 2006), Eon was ready to reboot Bond's classic nemesis as well.
Christoph Waltz, already the villain in Inglorious Basterds and Seth Rogen's horrible reboot of The Green Hornet, was a good choice to play him. And the idea of Bond causing the massive facial scar we saw on Donald Pleasence in YOLT (and going a step beyond that and costing Blofeld the use of that eye) was a good touch. So was having Blofeld be responsible for the villains of CR, QOS and Skyfall.
Monica Bellucci, at 50, became the oldest Bond "Girl" ever (breaking the record of Honor Blackman, 38 when she filmed Goldfinger), but you'd never know it: She was as fine as ever. And having Mr. White (Jesper Christiansen) turn coat and help Bond at the end of his life was fitting in a way.
But having Blofeld's father adopt Bond after he was orphaned as a boy, and thus making them step-brothers, and having Blofeld make his grievances against Bond personal for so long, was insane. There was no reason to have the 2 men be on a 30-year collision course. On the other hand, having Bond leave Blofeld captured, to face British justice, rather than killing him, showed growth in the character, even compared to previous Bonds' relationship to the villain.
And so, in a repaired Aston Martin, Bond and Mr. White's daughter, Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), ride off into the sunset, with Craig as yet unaware if there would be another Bond film with him. Of course, there is one more, No Time to Die, and Madeleine will be in it with him. But so will Blofeld, who is not advertised as the main villain. Time will tell about that film.
8. Live and Let Die, 1973. Bond is dead, long live Bond. Roger Moore, despite being 3 years older than Connery, takes over, and the stakes are less than stopping Blofeld or somebody else from destroying and/or taking over the world. It's just taking down a drug lord, played by Yaphet Kotto in the dual role of Dr. Kananga, dictator of a Caribbean island nation, and Mr. Big, the drug kingpin of Harlem.
This makes him the 1st black Bond villain, although Dr. No was the 1st nonwhite one. And Gloria Hendry, who had co-starred in Black Caesar earlier in the year, plays CIA Agent Rosie Carver, the 1st black woman to sleep with Bond (at least, onscreen).
This was a sendup of "blaxploitation" films, including Black Caesar, and there are some seriously cringeworthy moments. One that's not related to race was brought up by Moore years later: "Why would have have a man run across crocodiles while wearing crocodile shoes?" And Louisiana Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James, actually from Oregon) was pretty cringey, too.
But it's a good story, and Jane Seymour as Solitaire makes a good romantic lead, And Moore proves every bit Connery's equal. He's more stylish, every bit as good with the quips, and proved he was just as ruthless: When Rosie says they'll kill her if she tells who's compromised her, he says he'll kill her if she doesn't. She says, "But you wouldn't -- not after what we just did!" He says, "Well, I certainly wouldn't have killed you before."
7. Skyfall, 2012. The worst thing I can say about this one is that, at 2 hours and 23 minutes, it was too long. Having M die in spite of everything that Bond had tried to do made very little sense, but it showed that the spy game is always troublesome. Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) needing to get captured to make his plan work was a bit dippy. And suggesting that Bond was now possibly too old for this shit, when the previous movie was an extension of his origin story, was wrong. There should have been at least 2 movies in between, showing us Bond in his agent prime.
But Silva was still a chilling villain. Introducing Naomie Harris as (the finally first-named) Eve Moneypenny, making her a real field agent instead of just M's secretary, introducing Ben Whishaw as a surprisingly young Q, and introducing Ralph Fiennes as the new M all worked very well.
6. For Your Eyes Only, 1981. After the "Bond vs. Anti-Bond" confrontation of TMWTGG, the Cold War love story of TSWLM, and the Bond-in-space story of Moonraker, a Bond film that was, literally, down to Earth was not so much a letdown as a reprieve, especially for Connery fans who didn't like the sillier aspects of the films (ignoring just how silly those films could be, including Connery's own space-themed adventure, YOLT).
This one opens with Moore's Bond laying flowers at Tracy's grave, marked with the dates 1943-1969, thus proving that his character is the same one played by Connery and Lazenby. And then he's attacked by someone who, due to legal reasons, they couldn't say was Blofeld, but it was Blofeld, back after 10 years (and, apparently, paralyzed due to what Bond did to him at the end of DAF). After 2 films with Connery fighting him, and 1 with Lazenby, it is Roger Moore's version of James Bond who finally gives Ernst Stavro Blofeld the shaft. (Don't worry, the cat got away and lived.)
Ironically, given the opening scene, Bond has to return to the Alps, albeit to the Italian side rather than the Swiss side. Julian Glover plays Aris Kristatos, the 1st Bond villain to appear, at first, to have been an ally, which turns out to be a very effective twist -- repeated with similar effectiveness in TLD, and with considerably less in TWINE. All in all, a very good spy film, and another nail in the coffin of the prevailing opinion that Moore and his body of work weren't as good as Connery and his.
Bernard Lee was dying of cancer, and so this was the 1st Bond film not to feature the character of M.
5. GoldenEye, 1995. Perhaps the 1st reboot of the Bond series: It was pushing it to say that Timothy Dalton, 43 at the time of LTK, was playing the same man as Sean Connery, then 59, did from 1962 to 1971, but, canonically, he was.
For GE, Pierce Brosnan debuted as Bond, after initially being considered as Moore's replacement for TLD. It made sense: Moore had been considered due to being the suave international hero in a TV series, The Saint; while Brosnan had been a suave TV star on Remington Steele. But he couldn't get out of his NBC contract, so they turned to Dalton instead. Now, Brosnan was available.
But is he the same man? The new M, Judi Dench, suggests that he is, by calling him "a relic of the Cold War." There's also a new actress playing Miss Moneypenny. Her name is Bond. Samantha Bond. She remains in the role through all the Brosnan films.
The Bond franchise needed a good one after the 6-year gap, and they got it. The transition of some Soviets (Famke Janssen's Xenia Onatopp was said to be Georgian, not Russian) to traditional capitalist gangsters was played up, so it was both a Cold War spy movie and a Mob movie, and Brosnan handled it as if he had been playing Bond in the 2 previous films. Eon Productions got it right. Unfortunately for Eon and Brosnan, it would never be so good again -- at least, not together.
4. Dr. No, 1962. This film started it all, for a very good reason: The original heads of Eon Productions, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli didn't know if turning Ian Fleming's novels into films would work, especially in America. If successful, they would make more money there than in the rest of the world. If unsuccessful in the U.S., it wouldn't matter how successful it was in the U.K. and elsewhere: They would be doomed. So they chose the Bond novel that they thought would be the cheapest to produce. It worked, and subsequent Bond films had bigger budgets.
Most of the familiar Bond tropes started here (with the analogues for this film in parentheses):
* The opening "gunbarrel sequence" and opening titles, both designed by Maurice Binder, who would continue to design opening titles until his death in 1991.
* The iconic theme song, composed by Monty Norman and performed by an orchestra conducted by John Barry.
* James Bond, Agent 007 of MI6, Britain's international security agency (played by Sean Connery), looking cool as hell, getting the girls, killing the bad guys, and dropping mad quips.
* Bond's boss, known only as M (Bernard Lee), approving of his results but not always his methods.
* Bond's playful banter with M's secretary, Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell, and the character doesn't get a first name, Eve, until Skyfall).
* Exotic locations (Jamaica, which had been granted independence by Britain after filming was completed, hence it was still a colony in the film).
* A spectacular lead "Bond Girl" (Ursula Andress as the revenge-minded Honey Rider).
* And an insidious villain (Joseph Wiseman as Dr. Julius No) with a nefarious plot (sabotaging an American space launch, so that the Soviet Union would get blamed, starting World War III, and allowing No's superiors in SPECTRE to take over what was left of the world).
Not yet in place: Q and his gadgets (the only new equipment Bond gets is a new sidearm, a .32-caliber Walther PPK), a tricked-out car, and a plot tying in with a current cultural phenomenon (which has been done a few times, and usually hasn't aged well).
If you can get past Bond's hyper-macho attitude, and the fact that the film views the world through a lens that is still tinted by the British Empire (which had, in real life, already given way to the British Commonwealth), the film is a good adventure with a satisfying conclusion.
3. Casino Royale, 2006. The reboot. A James Bond who is, for the 1st time, definitively not the man first seen in Dr. No. This is Bond Begins. The 1st onscreen origin story for Agent 007, although it's been suggested that he never needed one. The debut of Daniel Craig as Bond. It is also, aside from an American reworking on the CBS anthology series Climax! in 1954, and the unofficial spoof in 1967, the 1st depiction of the 1st of Ian Fleming's Bond novels, published in 1953.
To borrow an analogy from this film's Texas hold 'em poker theme (as opposed to the original's baccarat), Eon Productions went all in. For everyone involved, this had to be a good one.
It was. They totally nailed it. Although Craig was already 38 years old, he was a believable agent new to this level, making rookie mistakes, but figuring things out as he went along. The inclusion of a 1964 Aston Martin to become this Bond's car was a nice touch.
Everything was in place for the Craig Era to be a great one. And then they followed this triumph with Quantum of Solace.
2. From Russia With Love, 1963. For all the flak the Bond movies get for their sexism, this one had a plot that was ahead of its time: It recognized that, due to his promiscuity, Bond could be snared in a "honey trap," thus damaging the security of the NATO alliance, and of Britain in particular.
This film also introduced Desmond Llewelyn as Q the quartermaster.
1. The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977. This is it: The best and defining James Bond film, and it stars Roger Moore, not Sean Connery.
Barbara Bach as Major Anya Amasova, Agent XXX (Triple-X), is the best Bond Girl. You can argue that another is more beautiful, or has a better body, although it would be a tough argument. But, more than any other, her character is a match for Bond, in intelligence (in both senses of the word), talent, determination and even wordplay -- the latter, no mean feat because she's an American actress, reading a script written by an American and an Englishman, playing a Russian character speaking English, mostly to an Englishman.
Egypt makes a fantastic "exotic location." A villain's base in the middle of the ocean makes a stiff challenge. (How does Jaws swim all the way back to land?) And the submersible Lotus Esprit is the best Bond car ever, ahead of the Aston Martin.
Sorry, Connery fans, you might find this positively shocking, but this is the best Bond film. Don't blow a fuse.
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