Wade’s James Bond Page

Ranking All Things Bond

Wade’s Ranking	Bond Film	Fleming Book	Teaser	Final Girl	Song
#1	Moonraker	Goldfinger	Moonraker	Jane Seymour (Solitaire)	For Your Eyes Only (Sheena Easton)
#2	Goldfinger	From Russia with Love	For Your Eyes Only	Jill St John (Tiffany Case)	Nobody Does It Better (Carly Simon)
#3	For Your Eyes Only	Moonraker	Octopussy	Tanya Roberts (Stacey Sutton)	You Only Live Twice (Nancy Sinatra)
#4	Thunderball	Dr No	The Living Daylights	Halle Berry (Jinx)	All Time High (Rita Coolidge)
#5	The Spy Who Loved Me	Live and Let Die	Tomorrow Never Dies	Kim Basinger (Domino Petachi)	Live and Let Die (Paul McCartney & Wings)
#6	GoldenEye	On Her Majesty’s Secret Service	License to Kill	Lois Chiles (Holly Goodhead)	Die Another Day (Madonna)
#7	The Living Daylights	Casino Royale	A View to a Kill	Daniela Bianchi (Tatiana Romanova)	Goldfinger (Shirley Bassey)
#8	The Man with the Golden Gun	The Man with the Golden Gun	Thunderball	Ursula Andress (Honey Ryder)	Moonraker (Shirley Bassey)
#9	Tomorrow Never Dies	Diamonds Are Forever	From Russia with Love	Barbara Bach (Anya Amasova)	A View to a Kill (Duran Duran)
#10	From Russia with Love	Thunderball	The Spy Who Loved Me	Denise Richards (Christmas Jones)	The Man with the Golden Gun (Lulu)
#11	Octopussy	You Only Live Twice	Goldfinger	Claudine Auger (Domino Derval)	Thunderball (Tom Jones)
#12	You Only Live Twice	The Spy Who Loved Me	Goldeneye	Britt Ekland (Mary Goodnight)	From Russia with Love (Matt Munro)
#13	Never Say Never Again	For Your Eyes Only	The World Is Not Enough	Diana Rigg (Tracy Bond)	Diamonds Are Forever (Shirley Bassey)
#14	A View to a Kill		Die Another Day	Michelle Yeoh (Wai Lin)	Never Say Never Again (Lani Hall)
#15	Diamonds Are Forever		Diamonds Are Forever	Izabella Scorupco (Natalya Simonova)	Goldeneye (Tina Turner)
#16	Quantum of Solace		You Only Live Twice	Carey Lowell (Pam Bouvier)	The Living Daylights (A-Ha)
#17	Dr No		On Her Majesty’s Secret Service	Carole Bouquet (Melina Havelock)	We Have All the Time in the World (Louis Armstrong)
#18	License to Kill		The Man with the Golden Gun	Maud Adams (Octopussy)	License to Kill (Gladys Knight)
#19	Casino Royale		Live and Let Die	Maryam d’Abo (Kara Milovy)	Tomorrow Never Dies (Sheryl Crow)
#20	Live and Let Die		Dr No	Mie Hama (Kissy Suzuki)	The World Is Not Enough (Garbage)
#21	The World Is Not Enough			Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore)
#22	On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
#23	Die Another Day

Cultural Importance
Actors
Connery vs Moore
SMERSH, SPECTRE, Leiter, the Double-O Corps, & Fleming
Notes on Each Film

Cultural Importance

The influence of the James Bond film series on the evolution of the film industry cannot be underestimated. The Bond series is the longest, continuous film series in terms of timespan (1962-2008) and quantity (24 films, 22 by EON Productions). With a total gross of $4.8 billion, the Bond series is the second-most succesful film series ever, and, at $11 billion, is easily the most succesful when adjusted for inflation. It has spawned countless imitators. Among the more succesful of these are Get Smart (two TV series & two films), The Man from UNCLE, Mission: Impossible (two TV series & three films), The Wild, Wild West (one TV series & one film), The Avengers (two TV series & one film), The Saint (one TV series & one film), I Spy (one TV series & one film), four Matt Helm films starring Dean Martin, two Derek Flint films starring James Coburn, five Harry Palmer films starring Michael Caine, three Austin Powers films, & five Pink Panther films. Although The Avengers & The Saint predated Dr No’s release, the series both became increasingly Bond-like as the shows progressed. So much so that The Avengers’ stars Diana Rigg, Honor Blackman, & Patrick MacNee each appeared in a Bond film & Roger Moore, star of The Saint, became Bond.

The modern action film, which began with 1968’s Bullitt & the Dirty Harry & French Connection series (which both began in 1971), owes its creation to the Bond film franchise. Moreover, the martial arts genre is a direct descendent of You Only Live Twice. In addition, Spielberg & Lucas cite James Bond (as well as the adventure serials of the 1930s & 40s) as the inspiration behind the Indiana Jones series.

Actors

Sean Connery was the first cinematic Bond & ultimately performed in six EON Bond films, seven in all. George Lazenby played Bond in a single EON film to generally poor reviews. Roger Moore next acquired the mantle & turned in a total of seven EON productions, more than anyone else to date. Timothy Dalton was Bond in two films of the late 1980s. Pierce Brosnan has four EON Bond titles to his credit, & Daniel Craig, the current Bond, has turned in two performances so far.

I will confine specific critiques of individual performances to the sections dealing with individual films, but will make a few general statements, first about Pierce Brosnan, next about the Connery-Moore rivalry.

A Remington Steele fan, I looked forward to Brosnan’s portrayal of Bond eagerly. I was, however, initially disappointed with his performance in GoldenEye. Upon later reflection, I am generally satisfied with his portrayal in his four films. I think I mostly was expecting Brosnan to bring the humor to Bond that he had brought to Steele, & it just wasn’t there. Even when he joked, he seemed to be serious. I think he (or his director) was so afraid of being labelled the new “Roger Moore” that he strove unnecessarily for gravity in the part. Which brings me to my next point...

Connery vs Moore

This was a serious point of contention in the 70s & 80s, but now is probably nothing more than a footnote that only illuminates my age. Nevertheless...the pro-Connery camp continually complained that Moore was not serious enough, that he was a clown, that the Bond series had degenerated into a series of farcical fantasy-comedies about a cartoonish super-hero, & that every vestige of the serious espionage series of the Connery era was gone.

This is sheer hogwash!

James Bond was never a “serious espionage” series, not even in the Fleming novels. Although 007 often works under cover & sometimes gathers intelligence, his ultimate mission is always to terminate a person, organization, or an operation undertaken by one of the former two. He is therefore, an assassin (as the “license to kill” emphasizes) or a commando. It is no accident that Bond is referred to as a “superspy.” Just as the spy genre & the super-hero genre were both born in Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, it was inevitable that the greatest fictional spy would be very similar to Sir Percy Blakeney, a hero with nearly superhuman traits & a need to conceal his identity. James Bond in the Fleming novels was always a flamboyant, larger-than-life hero, & these are things that real-life spies are not. A spy who is noticed is dead. And a spy who relies on his gunplay prowess is equally dead. Real-life espionage is very boring & usually not suitable material for the cinema, particularly not the target audience of 17-to-25-year-old males. A spy may have to be very brave to do his job, but one who relies on martial arts & high-tech gadgets to escape when his cover is blown would not have a multi-film career.

Secret agents spy on foreign governments. Spies do not have over-the-top arch-nemeses who lead international criminal organizations & employ deathtraps as their primary method to eliminate enemies. Indeed, when I was young, I noticed the similarity between Bond & Batman. Nevertheless, these were hallmarks of Fleming’s fiction 10 years before the first film. These are more properly referred to as spy adventure or spy romance than espionage fiction. Furthermore, spies do not have machine gun-equipped automobiles, jetpacks, or cigarette-fired rockets. Yet these were hallmarks of the Connery films. And it was a Connery film, You Only Live Twice, that was the first to part ways with Fleming’s novels so that the end product bore almost no resemblance to the original. In Diamonds Are Forever, even Tiffany Case, a small-time diamond smuggler, is familiar with James Bond (by name, if not appearance), & no wonder since he does such things as drive around Vegas with his car tilted on two wheels. And Connery was just as quick with a flip one-liner as Moore. In fact, these qualities of the films have more to do with the film producers than the actors & probably reflect the box-office performance of previous films & the tastes of the fans. Anyway, someone who claims that the Connery films were straight-laced, realistic espionage films should do some more research. (Besides, we all know that in the real world, Bond would have been fired for sexual harassment long ago...)

Creation

The following novels were the literary precedents of Ian Fleming’s 1953 creation—Commander James Bond 007: Cooper’s The Spy, Kipling’s Kim, Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Buchan’s Hannay novels, & Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora—a sauve British agent who predates Bond by two years. Fleming published 12 novels in all & two short story anthologies.

The success of Alfred Hitchock’s 1959 spy thriller North by Northwest is most likely responsible for Bond’s cinematic rebirth at the hands of Albert Broccoli & Harry Saltzman.

The Connery era & SMERSH

Due to the political atmosphere of the 1960s, the film producers chose SPECTRE rather than SMERSH as 007’s primary antagonist. (Indeed, Fleming himself abandoned SMERSH as Bond’s nemesis in 1960.) In four of the first seven of Fleming’s Bond novels, the villains are agents of SMERSH. The villains in two of the remaining three novels (Drax & Dr No) are Soviet-backed without specific reference to SMERSH. Only one of 007’s first seven literary encounters involves non-Soviet adversaries—the Spangled Mob in Diamonds Are Forever.

On the other hand, Blofeld & SPECTRE only appear in three Fleming novels, whereas Blofeld appears in six EON Bond films, while SPECTRE appears in five.

In fact, Blofeld is the main villain in three films of the Connery-Lazenby era, & the behind-the-scenes ringleader in two more.

Bizarrely, SMERSH shows up again in Timothy Dalton’s first foray as MI6’s premiere agent, The Living Daylights, in 1987—fully 28 years since the organization’s last hurrah in Fleming & 24 since its only mention in an EON film.

All of this adds to the strange effect, from the standpoint of someone who’s read the books, anyway, that Bond ages backwards. Because at the outset of his film career, he faces an adversary that he does not encounter until the end of his literary career. And, contrariwise, Bond meets SMERSH, his primary nemesis early in his literary exploits, late in his cinematic adventures.

Perhaps this explains why 007 doesn’t appear to age...

The Moore era & SPECTRE/Blofeld

When Moore stepped into the role in 1973, the producers made a few major changes to the enduring series, & one of these changes was the elimination of SPECTRE from any future Bond films, & the near-elimination of Blofeld. Blofeld makes a single appearance in the Moore era, as the uncredited villain in the pre-title teaser of For Your Eyes Only. The main reason for Blofeld’s unceremonious termination from the series is a 1971 court decision awarding Kevin McClory (who co-authored Thunderball) the rights to Blofeld & SPECTRE. McClory had previously sued Fleming for publishing Thunderball without giving McClory proper credit & won a court decision entitling him to, among other things, the film rights to Thunderball. McClory ended up making a deal with EON to produce Thunderball in 1965. One stipulation of this agreement was that McClory could remake Thunderball in 10 years. McClory did this in 1983, with the result being Connery’s seventh Bond picture, the non-EON Never Say Never Again.

Some speculate that For Your Eyes Only killed off Blofeld to announce to fans that the character would not play any further role in the Bond mythos. Other more cynical folks claim that the sequence is way of expressing to McClory in a rather mean-spirited way that James Bond (and EON Productions) did not need Blofeld to continue making films. Either way, it is one of the best teasers of the series.

Felix through the Years

CIA agent Felix Leiter, Bond’s best friend & frequent comrade throughout Fleming’s series, from his introduction in Casino Royale to The Man with the Golden Gun (Fleming’s final novel), is another aspect of the Bond mythos curiously absent in the Roger Moore era. Leiter appears in six of the 12 novels in all. Leiter features in four of the seven Bond films of the Connery era. Then he appears in Moore’s first outing—Live & Let Die—never to be seen subsequently in a Roger Moore film. Leiter doesn’t even appear in the film version of The Man with the Golden Gun (starring Moore), despite the character’s appearance in the novel.

Then, following Moore’s departure, Leiter appears in both subsequent Timothy Dalton films—only to vanish again for all four of Brosnan’s portrayals.

Perhaps the best-known actors to play Leiter were Jack Lord (Steve McGarrett in the television series Hawaii Five-O) & David Hedison (Captain Lee Crane of the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea). Hedison was the first actor (of two) to play Leiter twice—in Live & Let Die & License to Kill. Hedison also had a role in the Roger Moore film ffolkes.

The Double-O Corps

The 00 Section of MI6 are the elite agents of the British secret service—with a licence to kill in the field.

Fleming’s third novel, Moonraker, establishes that Bond is one of three Double-O agents, 0011 & 008—named “Bill”—being the other two. In passing, Bond thinks about 008 again in Goldfinger. Thunderball mentions 009, but nothing about him, & On Her Majesty’s Secret Service mentions 006, an ex-Royal Marine Commando. Bond never sees, meets, nor speaks to these agents during the course of the narrative of these novels.

The EON films, however, show, name, & mention many more 00 agents. M threatens to replace Bond with 008 in both Goldfinger & The Living Daylights. Moreover, Bond tells Goldfinger that, should he die, 008 will replace him. In Thunderball, “every Double-O man in Europe” receives a briefing on SPECTRE’s activity & demands. In a wide-angle view, the film depicts a large room with nine chairs, each chair occupied, when Bond enters the room & seats himself in the seventh chair. This implies that MI6 employs nine 00 agents, 001-009, although the qualifier “in Europe” is a potential obscuration in determining the extent of the 00 Section. Nevertheless, none of these agents receives a close-up, & the viewer cannot be certain what any of their numbers is. The rest of the Connery era passed without further mention of other 00 agents.

Moore’s second film, The Man with the Golden Gun, features the first Double-O (besides Commander Bond) to be mentioned by name. In Beirut prior to the action of the film, Scaramanga killed Bill Fairbanks 002 in the arms of a belly dancer named Saida. The next three Moore films passed without reference to other 00s. Then, three consecutive mid-eighties Bond films featured other Double-Os prominently. In the first scene after the title sequence of Octopussy, 009, dressed as a clown, delivers a Faberge egg to the British embassy in East Berlin. 009 then collapses with a knife in his back, killed by circus knife-thrower twins, Mischka & Grischka. In the pre-title teaser of A View to a Kill, Bond recovers a special microchip from the body of 003 in Siberia.

Then The Living Daylights, Timothy Dalton’s first outing, mentions three Double-O agents—more than any film to date (with the possible, dubious exception of Thunderball) —giving two of the agents, 002 & 004, dialogue, close-ups, & protracted action sequences (but not names) in the pre-title teaser. One of the villains kills 004 during the scene. Later in the film, as previously mentioned, M threatens to replace Bond with 008.

Several years later, in Brosnan’s first outing as Bond, GoldenEye, Alec Trevelyan is 006, Bond’s friend who is his comrade in a raid on a Russian chemical weapons plant in the teaser. 006 appears to die in that raid, but turns up years later as one of the main villains of the film with a plot to hurl Great Britain into economic chaos. In The World Is Not Enough, M reveals that 009 put the bullet in Renard’s brain, the bullet that will kill him eventually but will continue to make him stronger until it does so.

To date, the tradition-destroying Daniel Craig reboot has not mentioned other Double-O agents.

#1

Moonraker

At the time of its release, 1979, Moonraker was the most successful Bond film ever.
Moonraker was directed by Lewis Gilbert who also directed You Only Live Twice & The Spy Who Loved Me.
Moonraker was the 11th EON Bond film & Moore’s fourth outing as the top MI6 agent with a license to kill.

Nevertheless, Moonraker bears as much criticism as any Bond film, with some branding it the worst of the series. The scene in which Bond indiscreetly drives his gondola through a crowded Ventetian square in broad daylight as well as the far-fetched science fiction plot are the elements most commonly attacked. As mentioned above, the trend toward Bond’s lack of secrecy began early in the Connery era, & the plots of You Only Live Twice & Diamonds Are Forever are equally far-fetched (and of poorer quality). LASER weapons have been a Bond staple since Goldfinger—Bond’s (and Connery’s) third outing.

Humor & action are well balanced. The pre-title teaser is the best of the series, & the centrifuge trainer sequence is among the most powerful deathtraps.

The theme song, performed by Shirley Bassey, is an homage to the Connery era. Bassey sang the theme songs of both Goldfinger & Diamonds Are Forever.

The Jaws & Drax villain combination delivers adequate finesse, style, danger, & humor.

Dr Goodhead, appealingly portrayed by Lois Chiles, provides one of the most compelling yet competent Bond women of the series.

Moonraker was Bernard Lee’s last film.

I don’t understand why Bond usually stops using equipment given him by Q-branch in subsequent adventures. The wrist dart gun would’ve been handy in later films.

Apart from the name “Hugo Drax” & Drax’s general plan to kill a lot of people by an aerial attack, Moonraker does not use any material from the Fleming novel of the same name.

Moonraker is, to some extent, a rehash of The Spy Who Loved Me. The villain in The Spy Who Loved Me (Stromberg) plans to destroy humanity & repopulate the world by spreading civilization beneath the oceans. Drax has a similar plan to erradicate mankind using outer space as his base of operations. Furthermore, both films feature Jaws as the villain’s strongman. Hijaking of government vessels (although not to the extent witnessed in The Spy Who Loved Me, You Only Live Twice, & Tomorrow Never Dies) also takes place, & Bond’s love interest is a brunette secret agent from a competing super-power.

I didn’t care for the pigeon double-take.

#2

Goldfinger

Released in 1964, Goldfinger, the third EON Bond film, was the first to incorporate all of the classic cinematic Bond elements—the gunbarrel sequence, pre-title teaser, title/theme song sequence, redemption of the bad girl, Aston Martin, & over-the-top heavies & evil plan.

Goldfinger & Oddjob are the perfect villain combination, & Pussy Galore is one of the most memorable Bond girls.

Why does Goldfinger explain his plan to all of the gangsters before gassing them? Why doesn’t he just kill them? And why does he allow Solo to leave only to have him killed separately? Why not gas them all at the same time & save the expense of a bullet, not to mention a car? Answer: to allow Bond (and the audience) to hear the plan & to eat up screentime. It would’ve made more sense for Goldfinger to have told Bond his scheme directly.

Differences from the novel are minimal. In the book, Goldfinger plans to saw Bond in twain with an actual circular saw rather than a LASER, & he plots actually to steal the gold from Fort Knox rather than irradiate it.

Guy Hamilton directed Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, & The Man with the Golden Gun.

Goldfinger stands as one of the best of Bond’s silver screen epics.

Top
James Bond Page II—For Your Eyes Only, Thunderball, & The Spy Who Loved Me
James Bond Page III—GoldenEye, The Living Daylights, The Man with the Golden Gun, Tomorrow Never Dies, & From Russia with Love
James Bond Page IV—Octopussy, You Only Live Twice, Never Say Never Again, A View to a Kill, Quantum of Solace, & On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

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