Amph 60+ Years of James Bond 007

Should we do another run at the films? @Havac @Rogue1-and-a-half @EHT - hosted discussion on a film by film basis, EON only?

 

My hot take wrt to Dalton is that he had two very good entries that both could've been great if they weren't weighed down by John Glen's pedestrian direction.

 

Glen was, though, the series best editor. Peter Hunt taught him well.

 

He should have stayed an editor.

 

Sure but there's something admirable about how the Broccolis promoted from within. Hunt went from editor to director (OHMSS). Glen went from assistant editor to editor to director. They also brought Ken Adam's assistant, Syd Cain, to take over design duties when Adam was busy designing other films.

 

I’d be down to run through them again.

 

Lousy music? That's a great score. The pyramids at night section is great. And dull villains? Jaws is dull? I don't know what you're talking about.

As to going through the films again, I'm always up for a hosted discussion on something I'm moderately conversant on.

 

What about that disco swill that accompanied the ski chase? And Jaws? That Oddjob-reject lost his menace after the pyramids sequence.

 

But it reaches a fantastic crescendo just as he's approaching the precipice .

 

Alllllrighty then, I'll start up a Dr No post shortly.

 

Yeah, I missed the last 007 marathon. Keen on joining for this one as I now have all the films on blu-ray.

 

Don't think I've ever finished a Bond marathon before.

 

Might as well get this started, so I'll kick things off with Dr. No. If you guys want to do the next movies, we can take turns.



Dr. No (1962) (based on 1958 Fleming novel)

James Bond is sent to Jamaica to investigate what is causing interference with American space launches on the island of Crab Key. Bond and adventuress Honey Ryder find the answer to the mystery and come face to face with the diabolical Dr. No.

 

yeah sorry have been stupidly busy of late.

Dr No is a really great entry to the Bond canon because it's so remarkably low budget but it only feels low budget relative to the rest of the series. On its own, it's a taut thriller that managed to establish the cinematic Bond instantly.

There's the Dent scene, where he shoots the unarmed (effectively) Dent without emotion. Probably one of the most instructive Bond moments in cinema history. But it pales next to the greatest introduction in cinema history:



The story does differ from the book, but mostly towards the end when Bond has to run a "maze of death" to get to Dr No, before literally drowning him in poo. I'm not kidding.

Pacing wise, it's slower but that's not atypical of the era in which it was released. Relative to the Brosnan/Craig era it crawls, but that actually gives the locations and characters chance to breathe a bit more.

I would give Dr No a 004.5/007.

 

I think we have to recognise how much of a game changer Dr. No was , there really wasn't a movie like it before , the decadence , the colour , the enjoyment of going abroad , having sex with exotic women , killing foreigners and having a laugh .
It sounds like I'm being ironic but I am and I'm not .

 

A Top 5 entry.

Bond - 10/10: Connery is in top form, playing Bond as a human being: virile and controlled in some scenes, battered and even unnerved in others.
Villain - 9.5/10: Wiseman is the best of the series' subdued antagonists, radiating an icy perfection that has eluded other actors.
Girl - 6/10: Middle of the road. Andress is beautiful and suitably exotic, but not interesting enough to belong in the pantheon.
Narrative - 9/10: A leisurely, compelling detective story that transmutes into a disquieting journey through a mad scientist's underworld. Both parts complement each other far better than they had a right to.

Average Score: 9.5/10

Highlights: The casino. The inspection of the hotel room. The spider. The seduction of Taro and killing of Dent (the most provocative glimpse into Bond's character until Dalton came along). The dinner with No. The torturous crawl through the shaft. Magnificent stuff.

Aside: So Bond had spent six months in a hospital, due to a gun-mishap? Now there's a bit of verisimilitude that would be lost with Goldfinger! I want to know that story!

 

That story is actually From Russia, With Love. Bond's Beretta 418 get's caught in his trouser band as he's going to shoot Rosa Klebb, and she kicks him with the poisoned toe cap shoes she's famous for.

In the novels, the 5th one is FRWL and the 6th, Dr No...

 

Ah, thank you, Ender!

More qualities I love about Dr. No...

-Bond is genuinely rattled by Quarrel's demise. The moment the latter gets scorched, Bond disengages, and even attempts to backtrack to the corpse.
-The humor is meager and mordant, as it should be. "They were on their way to a funeral" and "That's a Smith and Wesson...and you've had your six" is all there is. And they're all the more effective for it.
-Watch Bond's body language as he's given a "tour" of the Crab Key complex. Very tentative. You realize: He's never seen an elaborate lair before! Again, a wonderful novelty, as opposed to future lairs, which are more ornamental than anything.
-Bond gets the tar beaten out of him in this, something we wouldn't see again until, what, the climax to License to Kill?
-I love how all of the henchmen immediately hightail-it once the reactor reaches critical, leaving only the incensed villain to contend with Bond.

 

The Smith & Wesson comment about having had his six isn't intended as humour; it's saying you've had your six shots. They originally filmed Bond firing 7 shots into Dent (thus, echoing the comment by emptying his clip as Dent did), but it was deemed too violent.

 

I love Dr No. Connery has the character down right from the off and while Joseph Wiseman has very limited screen time, he more than makes up for it with his cold and menacing performance. Still the best Bond villain in my opinion. The story is more low key than the later films, but the central mystery is engaging and the situations Bond finds himself in are more believable than a lot of what came later, which adds to the suspense. It also has one of my favourite Bond one liners: "Sergeant, make sure he doesn't get away".
It has some flaws though. Ursula Andress might be absolutely gorgeous, but her character adds nothing to the story other than to sleep with Bond at the end. I think the score by Monty Norman is perfectly decent on it's own, but doesn't suit a Bond film very well. The climax is also very rushed (particularly the fight between Bond and Doctor No), which makes it feel very underwhelming.

Regardless, it's still a cracking thriller and a great start to the series.
8/10

 

I've already done my long-form reviews earlier in the thread, so I'll just say that, having just rewatched it, it really is a great film. It looks tremendous, full of wonderful location shooting and great light, plus those amazing sets on Crab Key. There's also some great character stuff, great detail, like Bond inspecting his hotel room or the way he's genuinely freaked out by the tarantula incident -- a more vulnerable and human Bond than we usually see. Bond is, as he's called by No, a "policeman," a detective unraveling a mystery, and it makes for a great story, deliberately paced as Bond works his way to No through investigative spycraft. It loses a little steam on Crab Key with the narratively pointless introduction of Honey and the silly dragon business, but not too much, and it picks up again as soon as Bond's taken to No's lair for some great mindgames. I love the way the experience seesaws back and forth between fake civility and hostility -- hotel-room treatment followed by drugged coffee followed by a polite invitation to dinner as if nothing happened. Bond and No banter back and forth, they have this supposedly civilized interchange about leaving the girl out of it -- and then No implies he's going to have Honey raped by his guards (uncomfortable detail I noticed -- the next time we see Honey, she's missing the trousers she was wearing), Bond lunges to her defense, he's restrained, and then immediately he's back to faux-polite dinner chat. The climax is lacking, ending as it does with Bond wandering into No's lab, casually inducing a nuclear meltdown, and then scuffling briefly with No, all while both of them wear ridiculous protective gear that completely obscures them. It's not perfect, but it's a really great movie, a gorgeous thriller that works on every level completely independent of the fact that it's a James Bond movie.

I'll be ranking these as I go along, without reference to my previous watch-through rankings, just to see how they compare.

1. Dr. No

 

Regarding Bond's vulnerability: One of the aspects I love about DN and FRWL is that they present a universe in which Bond merely exists alongside the other eccentrics--the prospects of his survival/triumph are consequently up for grabs. For the most part, he sweats and suffers through his trials. In later installments, Bond ascends the hierarchy--becoming the apex predator, as it were--and his triumph preordained, thereby stripping the proceedings of suspense and urgency.

 

Yeah, Dr. No isn't in my personal top five if I'm ranking based on artistic quality; if you want me to rank on cultural impact, obviously, it's way up there.

Everybody talks about the Dent scene and with good reason; it really is the best scene in the film and it holds up as genuinely disturbing even in its edited form. This is Bond as a genuinely dark character and I love it. I find the titular character pretty lacking. I'm just not that interested in him and that final climax, already mentioned, which features a very lackadaisical shoving match between a couple of guys wearing hilariously bulky protective gear, is almost certainly the worst villain death in the franchise.

But that score . . . wow. I like the low key pre-credits bit; the film is surprisingly intense at showing bullet impacts. And then it just rolls right into that amazing theme. In all seriousness, without that music, Dr. No might have been a one-off.

Rating on a scale of 000 to 007 (ye gods, thanks a lot for that complete mind****, Ender), I guess I give this one . . . 003? Worth a watch, pretty flawed.

 

Let's move on to #2 - From Russia, With Love (1963)


(Couldn't resist)

Dr No had proved to be a bona fide hit when it debuted in 1962. The suave yet ruthless British agent had already been causing noise in his literary format, and now on screen he was generating attention. Also, if you want to see how America is a cultural outlier; in Britain and the Commonwealth, Bond's critics were mostly (though not uniformly) on the left and criticised Bond as an agent of imperialist aggression. In America, the critics were on the right and fretted over the sex and violence.

The book From Russia, With Love is up there as one of Fleming's best, but it precedes Dr No which made it an interesting choice to film. The reasoning behind this story was simple - US President JFK had listed this as one of his top 10 books in a Life magazine article, and so the story was a hot property. United Artists doubled the budget and away they went. John Barry took over on scoring duties, and Syd Cain picked up the duties Ken Adam would have held had some small time British director not asked him to come design sets for his Peter Sellers-lead war satire... and of course uncredited hero Johanna Harwood did most of the scripting duties.

The plot of the film is reasonably close to that of the book, with the Russian SMERSH (Smiert Sphionem) organisation replaced with SPECTRE. It depoliticised the story enough that the audience got its escapism without being reminded of the tense events of the day. SPECTRE, in retaliation for the death of its agent Dr No, devises a plan to have 007 steal a LEKTOR machine (SPEKTOR in the novel) from the Russians before he is humiliated in a honey trap and killed, thus handing the LEKTOR over to SPECTRE to sell to the highest bidder. What makes it work is the slow burn pace - the audience knows Bond is being set up, Bond suspects it, but he triggers the trap anyway just to beat it.

The film is reportedly Connery's favourite and you can see why. It's a real thriller, and well acted from all parties. The fight with the Daniel Craig-esque Robert Shaw, on the train, is still brutal and tough and there hasn't really been a henchman quite like Red Grant since. (He's also slightly less strange than the novel, where the full moon made him kill for thrills).

Daniella Bianchi, who played the honeytrap Tatiana Romanova, is not given a lot to work with but she at least reminds engaging and not just shrieking uselessly as most of the Moore Bond Girls would later be.

I watched the film recently and it's actually a hugely rewarding experience. So I'm giving it a 006

 

This is the original Bond's grasp at a reasonable level of plausibility. It's one of the few Bond films that I think legitimately fits in the "spy" genre as opposed to the "action" or *sigh* "comedy" genres. This is genuinely an espionage thriller and it really, really works for me. It's got the slower pacing of the early Bond films, but whereas in Dr. No, the pacing was kind of soporific, here it's tense and suspenseful. Connery is great in this one; he nails the "blunt instrument" side of Bond like he really doesn't anywhere else. Robert Shaw is a pitch perfect villain and that fight on the train remains justly revered. One of the only good things in Spectre was essentially an homage to FRWL's train scene . . . and over fifty years later and with a genuine body-building athlete involved, the Spectre scene still pales in comparison.

A few disconnected thoughts: Lotte Lenya is a lot of fun as (the closeted?) Rosa Klebb. Pedro Armendariz is great as Karim Bey (sadly, he was in the last stages of inoperable cancer during filming) and I like Bey's significant role in a couple of scenes where he's even allowed to be the driving force instead of Bond. There's a scene where Bey snipes a guy and Bond is essentially there for moral support; nothing quite like that happens again for a very long time in the franchise. But Bey feels like an actual character as do Red Grant and Rosa Klebb. There's something approximating actual characterization here, as opposed to the broad types of later films. And John Barry's score is fantastic. Also . . . is this the only Bond film where the theme song is actually heard diegetically in the film? Feels like it.

Anyway, this is Connery's Bond at his most serious and complex and, yeah, that means it's far and away my favorite Connery, frankly the only one I give a perfect score. Yes, that's right; I give this one a full 007.

1. From Russia With Love
2. Dr. No

EDIT: Also, I had totally forgotten Walter Gotell was in this. Didn't remember that he played anyone other than Gogol in the franchise. Interesting bit of trivia.