The Big Whatsit

‘It’s all right. It’s quite all right, really. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry, you see. We have all the time in the world.’

On her Majesty’s Secret Service is an oddity in the Bond franchise. It almost bisects the Connery and Moore eras (’almost’ because Connery had another turn - or even two - as 007 left in him), and it plays like a return to the early days with its lack of gadgetry and spectacle. Then there’s its star. George Lazenby. The Australian model who just wasn’t Sean Connery, no matter how good the performance or material he was working with. OHMSS enjoyed respectable box office yet didn’t make the kind of fortune of the previous outings, which did for Lazenby whose ‘fall’ has attached a stigma to the movie ever since.

Over the years, Lazenby has become a byword for bad casting. So rubbished is his reputation that I expected to watch OHMSS and find myself cringing at his hamminess, wondering if my dining table was more or less wooden than his acting. Maybe directors warn their young actors to watch out or they’ll end up like George Lazenby. And so it came as some surprise that he wasn’t terrible at all. He could act. He had range, and most importantly for this role he had some degree of presence. In fact, he was pretty good, all told. His take on the part certainly demanded something different than what Connery had tackled previously.

In the film, Bond is expected to reveal his vulnerability more than once. There’s a scene where he is being pursued by Blofeld’s stooges through a Swiss village. He’s spent a good while eluding and tussling with them all the way down from SPECTRE’s mountaintop retreat and they’re closing in. Utterly drained, Bond has little left in him other than to pull his collars up, sit on a bench and look anonymous. Lazenby portrays the defeat and fear coursing through his body really well. It’s hard to imagine Connery pulling it off so convincingly. Even when his Bond was chased through a street carnival in Thunderball, Connery never looked as though he was in any real danger. But then, that was 007 as superhero. Lazenby’s brief is to play him as a human being and he’s up to the challenge. Sure, he was no Connery, but then imagine how everyone’s favourite Bond might have rough-housed his way through the climactic scene in OHMSS and be thankful that he didn’t. In Lazenby’s hands, Bond has to despair, and he does. More than once. And maybe it was this that sealed his fate; after all, the franchise became the juggernaut it did on the back of its star winking cheekily at death. Did punters queue up at the theatres to see 007 cry?

All that’s in the past, and the exploration of those complex emotions turning Daniel’s Craig blunt weapon into the cold-hearted killer he is in Casino Royale has lent a degree of revision to Lazenby’s turn. It’s after the depthless Roger Moore years that we can feel a sense of regret that the one-off didn’t get more chances to get to grips with his character, exposing the vulnerability of 007 yet further within a world that expects him to show little remorse. We got hints of his Bond in the character played by Timothy Dalton, and it’s little surprise that the complicated agent from The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill has turned out to be an artistic high point for the franchise, albeit one that didn’t mix too well with the public and forced it to revert to type with the safe Pierce Brosnan.

In the meantime, this one’s well worth another look. Diana Rigg, her career at its zenith, had the privilege of featuring throughout the film. The leading lady’s early appearance and co-starring role offered Rigg a rare opportunity to give her character - the Countessa Terasa Di Vincenzo, or just Tracy - almost as much depth as Lazenby’s 007, and she didn’t waste it. The pair have great chemistry, making their mutual attraction on the screen and subsequent engagement quite believable. Indeed, the only negative in her performance is the moment when she lulls Blofeld (Telly Savalas) into a false sense of security by reciting poetry to him as Bond and her father’s men close in on the villain’s headquarters. It’s a scene that just doesn’t work, suggesting Blofeld is a poor sucker for womanly wiles after he has spent the majority of the picture manipulating innocent females.

Elsewhere, Savalas adds a triumphant edge to the part of the main baddie. If Donald Pleasance suggested Blofeld as a twisted, deformed gnome, here he’s an action man, as prone to ski chases and bobsled pursuits as he is hatching fresh plans for world domination. As it is, Pleasance might sound closer to the mark, yet Savalas pulls it off through sheer charisma. His meetings with Bond - following those involving Pleasance and Connery in You Only Live Twice - provide an early instance of the Bond adventures not following a linear path. If the pair crossed paths previously, then why doesn’t Blofeld recognise 007 instantly, instead just about falling for his disguise as heraldry expert, Sir Hilary Bray?

Throw in a dramatic location at the very peak of the Alps, a favouring of brains over Q’s toys, and one of the best John Barry scores ever linked with a Bond film (it’s certainly on a par with You Only Live Twice), and you have the makings of an instant classic. But OHMSS has more up its perfectly tailored sleeve than that. The first half of the story tracks Bond’s attempts to discover and infiltrate Blofeld’s headquarters. This he does via Tracy, whose father (Gabrielle Ferzetti) has information that leads to where the evildoer is hiding. Along the way, he falls for the frosty girl, and the feelings become mutual as she succumbs to his lengthy courtship, sheer tenacity and charm. Once Blofeld imprisons Bond, the movie takes a turn for the exciting. The fun begins with a pursuit down a seemingly endless mountainside on skis. It’s a thrilling ride, made sublime by the work of Willy Bogner Jr, the former Alpine ski racer who shot reams of footage with the camera strapped to his chest, offering a skier’s eye view of the action. John Jordan filmed further scenes whilst sitting in a cradle that was suspended from a helicopter, allowing him to get unique shots of the stuntwork. Ever committed to carrying out the camera duties that others wouldn’t dare take on, Jordan had already lost a leg after an accident during the shooting of You Only Live Twice, and was to die a year later when another mishap whilst filming from a helicopter caused him to be sucked out and sent plummeting to his death. Scenes like those shot here are a testament to his amazing craft and single-minded commitment to getting the best footage possible. Added to the riveting ski scenes are a stock car race on ice, an avalanche that was provoked by planting strategically placed bombs in the snow, and a bobsled chase down Piz Gloria. It’s exhilerating stuff, never letting up, and only the most emotionally devastating pay-off could ever top it.

This we get with the last few minutes of the film. Having left Blofeld hanging from a tree trunk by his neck, seemingly paralysed, Bond marries Tracy, inviting all his Secret Service mates and even listening to some friendly advice from Q. As James and Tracy drive off in the flower-lined car, everything feels too perfect, and of course it is. The couple indulge in some verbal foreplay as they drive along mountain roads, and then stop to remove the flowers from their car. Blofeld and hench(wo)man Irma Bunt (Ilse Steppat) drive past and abruptly shower them with bullets. Bond survives, hurling himself behind the car, but as he’s about to set off in pursuit, he realises with a start that Tracy has been shot, point blank, in the head. Stunned, he cradles her body, tells a passing policeman not to hurry with help because there’s all the time in the world, and drops his head into hers with a lasting sob. The moment, shocking in its quiet tragedy after all the prior action, is weighted sublimely. Lazenby nails it, coming across as neither too bluff or hysterical. It’s something Connery simply couldn’t - or wouldn’t - have managed as well. Perhaps this is because, as film critic Danny Peary noted, the original Bond was more self-assured and virile. He commanded any scene in which he appeared, whilst Lazenby was not so confident and on occasion more vulnerable. Connery’s agent would never have allowed himself to fall in love with one woman, maybe aware that life was too short and easily lost to make it work. In Lazenby’s hands, Bond dares to lose his heart, gets married and pays the ultimate price.

The frequent mentions of Connery in this piece gives a good impression of why the Australian had just one Bond film in him. Knowing Broccoli and Saltzman were casting for a new 007, Lazenby went to Connery’s barber and asked for a similar haircut, and then solicited his tailor for an identical suit. Thus armed, he hung around outside Saltzman’s offices until his secretary was distracted, and then promptly introduced himself to the producer as the new Bond. The stunt worked, but in the end Lazenby didn’t. Rumours that he was difficult to work with slipped from the production to the press, and it seems he struggled to identify with the newfound attention he was enjoying. Yet what really made his stay a short one was the unavoidable crime of not being Sean Connery. When the film didn’t enjoy the box office success of its predecessors (though it went on to be the biggest grossing movie of 1969), something had to change, and Lazenby became the scapegoat. Director Peter Hunt saw this as a pity, and perhaps it was. It’s left On her Majesty’s Secret Service as the franchise’s curiousity piece, an experiment in staying closer to Ian Fleming’s novel than in previous pictures, introducing a softer-edged Bond and trying a different actor in the role. There’s very little that’s wrong with it, including the magnificent credits sequence, one of Maurice Binder’s finest with its montage of previous 007 adventures and thumping John Barry theme tune. Soon enough however, Connery was back on board and returned to the larger than life antics reminiscent of his former outings in Diamonds are Forever. It was business as usual, with no mention of Tracy, as though this entry had never happened at all, and it was no better for that omission.

‘Darling, I give you very best duck.‘

In You Only Live Twice, SPECTRE have their headquarters in a hollowed out volcano, complete with a retractable fake lake. The scheme involves playing off the Russians and Americans against each other in the space race by pretending to be ‘the other side’ and sending a shuttle off into the heavens to literally swallow satellites that are already out there. Watching it all happen, I was left thinking about how much their subversive antics would have cost and concluding that surely the money was better spent elsewhere. Come to think of it, if Blofeld aka #1 saw James Bond as such a threat, why didn’t he just divert a few million into some account that would pay for endless assassins, and keep hiring them until the job was done? After all, even 007 must sleep sometimes. They’d get him, if they really tried.

But then, looking beneath YOLT to find any sense of what’s going on is virtually impossible. By now, the Bond movie franchise had moved so far from its literary roots that very little beside the book titles remained of Ian Fleming’s source material. 007 himself was less a spy and more a kind of superhero, strolling out of danger with his suit uncreased and hair in place, an appropriate quip about the only acknowledgement he’d make that anything had in fact happened. In other words, it’s pure fantasy, comic book fare. Roald Dahl was given two rules before he went off to write the screenplay - (i) it has to be set in Japan (ii) SPECTRE’s base has to be inside a volcano, and the resulting script is a wild and crazy thing. Dahl truly lets rip on the narrative, including helicopters equipped with enormous magnets that can lift a car off the ground and Bond being disguised as a Japanese peasant for almost no reason at all.

For me, the movie is a guilty pleasure. I know that YOLT is a load of hogwash. I know that it probably should have suffered for Sean Connery’s half-hearted playing of the title role, let alone the flat disappointment of Donald Pleasance’s turn as Blofeld (previously an anonymous figure who was never seen by the audience). I know that this entry more than any other Bond film provided the material for Mike Myers’s Austin Powers trilogy. But I love it. Accepting YOLT for what it is, and ignoring the fact that the genuinely brilliant From Russia with Love was just three movies ago, it soon becomes clear that the producers wanted their audiences to have nothing more than good, knockabout fun with what was taking place on the screen and I think it achieves that.

The first big plus point comes with John Barry’s score. I haven’t discussed Barry’s work in too much detail when covering the previous Bond films. There’s a reason for that, and it is the sheer bodacity he brings to this movie. In places, YOLT’s score is like a mix of all the best bits from the previous outings. The Bond theme itself makes a welcome return as 007 fights enemy helicopters. Elsewhere, Barry comes up with an Orient-inspired title song, which features the beautiful tones of Nancy Sinatra, and then there’s ‘Capsule in Space,’ a rather gorgeous concoction of wonder and terror that accompanies shots of American and Russian satellites being swallowed up by SPECTRE vessels.

It’s widely believed that Lewis Gilbert made a fairly pedestrian fist at directing YOLT. Fortunately, he had Oscar-winning cinematographer, Freddie Young, on his staff, which means the film never looks less than gorgeous. You see Young’s hand in some of the early scenes, indulgent, expansive shots of Japan at sunset with orange skies framing the vista. Lovely stuff. Equally ravishing are the scenes where Bond flies over the countryside in Little Nellie. Below, Japan’s volcanic regions are lusciously framed and worthy of any travelogue. Elsewhere, the blistering script and high production values mean that all Gilbert really has to do is point the camera and shoot. YOLT is no director’s picture. Rarely is a great deal of imagination put into its composition, though there’s one effective shot where Bond is racing across a roof, pursued by many baddies, and the camera simply pans back to take a passive, bird’s eye view of the action.

In terms of its story, YOLT is forgettable; indeed the plot seems to have been set up to string together grand set pieces. At no point is it the most coherent piece of work, beginning with the pre-credits moment where Bond is ‘killed’ so that SPECTRE will stop pursuing him and thus allow him to infiltrate their plans undetected. Are there no other agents who could do this? Besides which, 007 doesn’t waste any time in getting himself noticed once he sets foot in Japan (after being fired out of a frickin’ submarine in the general direction of the Japanese coast, presumably somewhere near Tokyo because that’s where he pops up next), so what was the point exactly? Similar craziness comes later in the infamous scene where Bond is disguised as a Japanese peasant. Naturally, he leaves what is made out to be a lengthy process of prosthetic application (performed by girls wearing bikinis!) looking pretty much exactly the same as before, nor does there turn out to be any good reason for the work in the first place. By the time he’s made his way into SPECTRE’s volcanic HQ, the disguise mysteriously disappears, maybe out of sheer embarassment. In any event, this hasn’t stopped the scene from being lampooned to death, most effectively in Team America.

For all the criticism, once YOLT reveals its grandest effect - Blofeld’s hollowed out volcano, which cost anything over $1m to build at Pinewood studios - all is forgiven. It’s a superb set, produced on a vast scale, and demonstrated the producers’ commitment to spectacle over gritty realism. They had a point. The takings for Thunderball were such that audiences clearly wanted to see things to make their jaws drop and the sheer imagination that went into designing SPECTRE’s headquarters must have done just that. What made it even more gripping was knowing that the whole thing would be destroyed, Bond living to fight another day.

Only in this instance, Bond would indeed live but in a different guise. Connery made it clear during production that this would be his last turn as the spy, and even though the sentiment turned out to be premature, it made the hype surrounding YOLT all the more frenetic. What drove him to hang up the Walther PPK remains something of a mystery. The official line was the sheer level of hounding that Connery suffered at the hands of the media whenever he was filming as Bond. By all accounts, he enjoyed little to no privacy, though further causes could have been the way the character was changing into an invulnerable superhero, the lack of effort he had to put in as an actor when people turned up to see the sets, effects and locations, coupled with sheer boredom. There was certainly a point where this argument was concerned. By now, the franchise was developing into a circus attraction, a visually impressive fantasy ahead of such secondary elements as plot and character development. And ironically, YOLT turned out to be nothing like the box office bonanza that Thunderball had produced. With a new Bond came a fresh approach to the material, a back to basics effort that would turn the agent back into a human being. Of sorts.

‘Dear girl, don’t flatter yourself. What I did this evening was for Queen and country. You don’t think it gave me any pleasure, do you?’

Thunderball remains the most successful of all Bond movies at the box office. Adjusted for inflation, its take (at 2008 prices) was a formidable $966.4m. Neither is it hard to see why the film did so well. All the right elements were in place - Connery, Young, Barry, Binder, etc - along with the things that we now traditionally associate with the franchise. Much of the action takes place in the Bahamas, which have rarely looked more like a paradise location. Bond gets various glamorous women to play with, not to mention an array of enemies and the uncovering of a dastardly SPECTRE plot.

Scratch beneath the surface, however, and the cracks appear. After an extravagant pre-credits sequence in which Bond breaks just about anything worth breaking during a fight before escaping with the help of a rather unecessary jet pack, we get to meet this episode’s baddie. Enter Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), also SPECTRE #2, a figure of sufficient portent to make gendarmes shy away from issuing him with a parket ticket yet in reality a hired hand to the still anonymous #1. A heavy he is, whether being effortlessly duped by 007 or letting the agent work under his nose for much of the movie’s duration. Largo has so many opportunities to see off Bond yet fails entirely to do so, instead allowing the agent to give him the slip again and again, not to mention making off with his ‘kept’ girl, Domino (Claudine Auger).

That wouldn’t be so bad, but much of Bond’s detective work takes place underwater. Thunderball’s producers clearly spent an awful lot of money on their acquatic scenes, enough to ensure we watch stuff happening beneath the waves again and again. The film scored a first for the detail and clarity of its underwater footage and for that feat alone it deserves some kudos. But the troubles with acquatic filming soon become apparent. One is that it is by definition slower and more sluggish than normal action. The second is that it isn’t often obvious who’s who; the protagonists wear swimming masks and that makes it difficult to pick people out, indeed in one action sequence the only way you can tell who’s Bond is from the fact that he alone is wearing shorts. The sheer number of underwater scenes doesn’t quite turn the film into ‘Thunderbore’ but it doesn’t fall too far short.

Things bode far from well during Bond’s stay on a health farm. His near death on a back stretching machine - followed by his vengenance involving a steam tub and a strategically positioned broom - along with his interminably slow uncovering of a SPECTRE plot is bad enough, but worse comes with his treatment of Nurse Molly (Patricia Fearing). 007 has his usual eye for the lady, but this is the first time in the series that his advances are more lecherous than charming; his wooing of her via an opportunistic bit of blackmail is uncomfortable, certainly from a twenty first century perspective, and has an unfortunate whiff of ‘Carry on Bond’ about it. I remember a time when the agent could win a girl’s heart with his winning smile and boyish quips; this is just seedy.

Of course, being a Terence Young movie Thunderball is never really bad. What irks is it’s nod to excess. It was felt quite clearly that high concept action is what audiences wanted, hence Thunderball’s budget being far greater than that lavished on any of the previous outings. Money was sunk into the replica model of the hijacked nuclear jet. A cool $500k went on Largo’s yacht, Disco Valante. Unfortunately, it seems this where much of the creative effort went also, leaving us with a good looking piece yet a drama that plods too often. It picks up whenever Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) is on the screen, so much so that you can almost forgive the film for its bland lead villain. Fiona is SPECTRE’s femme fatale. Like any decent Bond bad girl (see also Xenia Onatopp (groan!) in Goldeneye), she’s instantly more attractive than the heroine and uses this as a weapon. When not luring the luckless Derval (Paul Stassino) to his doom, she’s bedding Bond himself, via the slaying of his assistant Paula (an underused Martine Beswick). Later, she very nearly sees off the agent, or at least puts him in a state of some peril, which is more than can be said for the fairly rubbish Largo. His weapon of choice - a lampoon-friendly shark-infested pool - can’t match Fiona’s deadly, desirable charms.

Fiona introduces herself to the movie with a seduction scene. She keeps Derval occupied before he goes off to test pilot a British Vulcan bomber, which just happens to be armed with two nuclear warheads. In anticipation of this, SPECTRE have spent two years training a doppelganger, who thanks also to plastic surgery looks and acts exactly like Derval, all the better for impersonating him. The double, Angelo Palazzi (also Stassino) kills the original and then naturally demands more money for carrying out his sabotage work on the plane. I like this bit, as much as I enjoy the scene where #1 kills a henchman for embezzlement (using a frickin’ electric chair, no less). It seems that SPECTRE, an organisation made up of crooks and thieves, occasionally has to deal with people from within who are trying to steal from it, which is entirely credible.

Thunderball runs for 130 minutes, which makes it the lengthiest of the Bond movies to date and also noticeably the flabbiest. Too often the action is cut short with scenes of Largo and 007 talking, and these bits are just weird. After all, Bond’s opposition to the eyepatch wearing villain is pretty much established from their first meeting and yet they maintain a strange semblance of feigned friendliness in their conversation. Certainly, Largo is blase enough to let Bond carry on with Domino. We’re supposed to believe that she helps James because she’s Derval’s sister and the agent recruits her to the cause by telling her of his fate. By this late point, however, she’s fallen for him already, indeed there’s no question she’s his from the moment he pulls her flipper from a coral in their opening seconds together. Auger certainly makes for a comely Domino, but she’s no match for Fiona in terms of sex appeal and simperingly messes up the one favour Bond asks of her. This leads to one of Thunderball’s most unintentionally comic moments. Largo advances on her, wielding what looks like a cigarette and some ice cubes and explaining that ‘This for heat, these for cold, applied scientifically and slowly’ will lead to untold levels of pain. No please, make it stop! Then she’s rescued by a scientist who has hardly appeared in the film up to this point, no doubt a character whose scenes have nearly all been cut. It’s a bit of a mess, in truth, and just as bad as the film’s conclusion, which involves Largo’s boat heading at top speed towards a reef, which is rather clumsily represented by the outside footage being played quickly through the yacht windows.

The special edition DVD features an excellent documentary on the Bond phenomenom, which of course it was by this stage. A mixture of audience favour and sheer momentum (they were releasing one film per year, putting it on a par with the rolling hype garnered by the Lord of the Rings trilogy) meant that by the time Thunderball was due for release over the Christmas holiday in 1965, you could buy just about anything featuring the 007 brand. The marketing and anticipation surrounding the movie meant it couldn’t fail, and it didn’t. Regardless of its ‘by the numbers’ direction and working to strict formula, the public lapped it up, greenlighting the direction into which the franchise was heading. Following its initial run at the theatres, Thunderball was rereleased as a double bill. One trailer on the DVD blends scenes from the movie with others off From Russia with Love, the films being shown on one ticket, and already there appears a gulf in class and imagination between the pictures. This wasn’t too gapingly apparent yet. Connery was still on board and the franchise retained enough ideas to keep Bond fresh. Yet Thunderball offered an early glimpse of what happened to the series when money and spectacle were chosen ahead of characterisation and plot development. It’s just okay, and that isn’t good enough for this secret agent.

‘You’re a woman of many parts, Pussy’.

During Goldfinger, James Bond (Sean Connery) spends much of his time in custody. A guest/prisoner of the eponymous villain, Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), 007 alternates his stay by being in a cell, sharing quips with his nemesis and getting involved with Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). In the meantime, Goldfinger puts his plan of blowing up Fort Knox into action, dispatching those who are present to help and hinder him with equal abandon whilst rather inexplicably keeping alive the one person who can possibly stop him. Rarely have I felt so much like echoing the words of Scott Evil and crying ‘Why don’t you just kill him?’

Goldfinger was the Bond outing that truly defined the series. Dr. No offered an introduction to the adventures of a glamorous secret agent and From Russia with Love embellished it, yet it’s only with his third entry that we get the template for the next two decades’ output. That is both its blessing and its curse. Goldfinger is of course really god fun. Connery makes for an agreeable and charismatic lead, whilst Fröbe’s playing of Goldfinger sets the tone for all megalomaniac, ever so slightly unhinged villains to follow. The action rarely lets up even though it becomes obvious early in the film that Bond is going to walk away with barely a scratch. He’s hardly a spy by now and more like a superhero, seemingly impervious to bullets, aware of every pitfall before him and armed with a ready supply of quips to sum up all happenings in a pithy one liner. Speaking of arms, Q (Desmond Llewellyn) is now fully formed and a regular member of MI6. Already irritated by 007 thanks to the agent’s offhand way of losing and breaking his gadgets, he nevertheless creates for him a souped up Aston Martin that contains a dazzling array of gizmoes. So many of these are there that the film doesn’t even have enough time to show them all off. We are left to imagine just what else Bond’s car can actually do - fly? Make him an espresso? Give him a short back and sides?

The hard-bitten 007 of the first two films has gone. Here, he’s fighting someone who is rich enough to retire from his life of crime yet aims to bring the west to financial ruin all the same. The reason, presumably, is just because he can and it’s at this point that it doesn’t do to think about what’s happening in Goldfinger too hard. Once you do, the plot collapses like the fantasy it so clearly is. As possible as it was to understand the motives of SPECTRE in the first two movies, why Goldfinger bothers putting together an elaborate plot is less easy to fathom, as are his reasons for keeping Bond alive once he’s in his grip. I lost track of the number of occasions when 007 was at his mercy, beginning with the early scene where Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) is suffocated by having her entire body covered in gold paint whilst our hero is simply knocked unconscious. I can only guess that Goldfinger likes to play dangerously, that it pleases him to dangle Bond until he’s had enough, or possibly that he just needs to impress someone with expansive plans that few people will ever hear about.

At the bad guy’s side is the first in a series of larger than life henchmen. Oddjob (Harold Sakata) is Goldfinger’s mute, Korean bodyguard, a figure of incredible strength who tops off his prowess with a steel-rimmed hat that he can throw with deadly accuracy, as Tilly Masterson (Tania Mallet) learns to her doom. Behind Oddjob is a small Korean army of servants, the sort that can be offed with some ease and keep coming back for more. Finally, there’s Pussy and her circus of formation pilots who also double as glamour models. I think they were last seen dropping millions of footballs onto London as part of an advertising campaign for The Sun.

John Barry is on hand once more to provide the score, one of the better known in the Bond canon thanks to its fantastic signature tune, which is belted out by Shirley Bassey. That it lacks any of the subtlety of From Russia with Love kind of suits the extravaganza unfolding on the screen. The film is directed by Guy Hamilton, supposedly with a tongue lodged firmly in his cheek. Hamilton would go on to direct three more Bond epics, along with Funeral in Berlin once the Harry Palmer series took a turn for the sillier. This is his best work. He’s more than capable of shooting large-scale action sequences and maintaining a blistering pace. The slow burning tension that marked Bond’s relationship with Red Grant is a thing of the past. Instead, we get 007 and Goldfinger exchanging memorable quips and beneath the ideological differences actually appearing to admire each other, indeed it’s possible to imagine a slightly less Alpha Male Bond ditching Pussy for a life of amused antagonism with the villain. Besides, there’s little chemistry between him and Ms Galore. Maybe this is why she doesn’t appear until the movie’s halfway point, which gives viewers time to forget his brief yet far steamier affair with the lovely, tragic Jill.

Perhaps the absurdity of Goldfinger is best illustrated in a single scene. Having assembled the cream of America’s crime world in his lair, Auric outlines his plans for detonating Fort Knox. However, instead of using an overhead projector for his presentation, the mastermind has a scale model of the base located beneath the floor of his games room, accessible via some switches on a console that happens to be on the underside of a pool table. Clearly this was the pre-PowerPoint era, though it seems an overly decadent means of explaining his scheme and particularly to a group of men that he has every intention of killing. The film teases us by letting the one mobster who doesn’t want any part of Goldfinger’s plan walk out alive whilst the remaining audience is gassed. But this doesn’t last very long. The appropriately named Solo (Martin Benson) is driven towards the airport by Oddjob who then shoots him and leaves him in a car that is finally crushed into a cube.

It’s all done with elan, affection and a sheer willingness to entertain. At no point does Goldfinger even attempt to suggest that the world of an agent is really like this; nor should it. Cinemagoers loved Goldfinger and even now the film is seen routinely as the definitive Bond adventure. But its success carried a sting in the tail. Saltzman and Broccoli naturally saw the film’s massive box office as the direction the franchise needed to take, leading to a succession of copycat follow-ups that recycled its composite parts, grew more fantastical and grandiose in their efforts to outdo previous movies, and ultimately bored Sean Connery into quitting.

Hidden in with all the other reasons for Albert R Broccoli and Harry Saltzman choosing From Russia with Love as their next James Bond adaptation (apart from the fact it’s one of Ian Fleming’s best novels) is the fact that it was a favourite read of one John F Kennedy. By tragic irony, it is also credited as the last movie the President watched before his assassination. In a nod to Kennedy’s averting of the Cuban missile crisis and thawing of the Cold War, the villains in the story were amended. Fleming’s version has Bond battling covert Sovet organisation, SMERSH, whilst in the film both 007 and the Russians turn out to be pawns in the plans of international terrorism ring, SPECTRE. Indeed, such were the renewed feelings of warmth towards the USSR that in the movie it’s best represented by glamorous defector, Tatiana ‘Tanya’ Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), possibly the most adorable Bond girl of the lot thanks to being given enough screen time to work her charms both on Bond and the audience.

FRWL underwent a fraught production process. Costs rose ridiculously, expensive stunts were botched and director Terence Young relied more and more on the creative editing of Peter Hunt to pull the shambolic movie into a cohesive whole. Its problems were encapsulated by Pedro Armendàriz, who was hired for the pivotal role of Bond’s Turkish liaison, Ali Kerim Bey. It’s widely accepted that Armendàriz gives a charismatic, winning performance, yet in reality the actor discovered halfway through shooting that his previously undiagnosed cancer was already in its advanced stages. Refusing to give in to the disease whilst simultaneously getting weaker by the day, Armendàriz’s scenes were brought forward in the shooting schedule. At times, he had to be propped up as he delivered his lines. Within two weeks of completing his work on the film, Armendàriz was dead, shooting himself rather than allowing his body to waste away. The loss was felt by the entire cast and crew, though it’s impossible to see any of the actor’s suffering within his memorable playing on the final piece. A dedicated professional who carried out his duties through sheer force of personality, Armendàriz is indeed one of the best things about the movie.

And what a movie! Though Goldfinger is considered to be perhaps the definitive Bond, FRWL is the franchise at its finest. Despite the problems everyone experienced in making it, the finished product is a treat, not just a fantastic 007 film but excellent also as a single body of work. Part of this no doubt has to do with everyone involved having experienced Dr. No and being more comfortable in their roles, whilst having the drive and ambition to make something even better. Fortunately, ‘better’ did not necessarily mean bigger in this instance. Though Q’s gadgetry makes its introduction here, what Bond receives isn’t some impossible toy straight out of the realms of science fiction but rather a briefcase featuring a few subtle refinements. The villain isn’t based in an incredible underwater lair and, as in Dr. No, 007 needs to rely on his own skills to prevail.

It’s fair to suggest that as his tensure progressed, Sean Connery’s boredom with the role of Bond was beginning to show. But that was later. Here, Connery was comfortable in the shoes of his secret agent protagonist and thriving. There are many moments in FRWL where he is compromised or uncertain of himself. His is a 007 who could fail or die and that enriches his character, as does the disappointment glimpsed on his face when he learns someone is betraying him. He is nearly matched by the richy played pair of baddies. Lotte Lenya plays Rosa Klebbe, SPECTRE Number Three whose advances towards Tanya hint at the sort of character depth that’s unusual for the franchise.

And then there’s Red Grant (Robert Shaw), the assassin who tracks Bond through Istanbul. For the majority of the film, he is 007’s silent shadow, a malevolent presence who leaves a trail of corpses whilst never quite keeping the agent out of his sight. As we learn in the teasing opener, Grant is a fearsome killer and more than a match for Bond, who clearly knows it also. The scenes between the pair on the Orient Express are charged, Bond coming across Grant as a friend and then slowly finding out that he isn’t at all what he appears. Grant leaves clues for his foe, ordering red wine with fish, which pricks at 007’s gentlemanly sensibilities almost as much as being irritatingly referred to as ‘old man.’ When the pair inevitably fight in a confined train carriage, it’s a visceral, ‘to the death’ affair. Had it been filmed now, it would no doubt have featured the jump cuts that speed up the action to confusing dimensions in an effort to be more grittily realistic. But Young keeps everything coherent and spares us not one single blow.

Perhaps even more sizzling than the fight is the banter between Bond and Grant. Cornered and vulnerable, 007 tries every trick in the book to buy time for himself and it’s only when he offers Grant money that we find a chink in the assassin’s armour. When it comes down to it, for all the relentless tracking he’s done the killer is a petty criminal at heart who risks it all for a belt of sovereigns. Before this point, he seems utterly unstoppable, indeed he goes down as one of the scariest Bond villains. Silent until his meeting with the agent, his face more or less an impassive mask, he cuts a sinister foe, never more so than when Bond is pacing outside the Orient Express waiting for his contact to arrive whilst on the train Grant follows him, the spectre of death floating from window to window and never taking his eyes off his prey.

The scenes containing Grant are so electric that his exit leaves a vacuum, one the film tries to fill with the kind of expensive, set-piece action sequences that 007 would become so famous for. It works, largely because of the previous lack of excess. Bond and Tanya are pursued by a SPECTRE helicopter as they flee through the Croatian countryside (Argyll substitutes for a part of the world that was behind the Iron Curtain), whilst a later attempt by the agent to sail to Venice leads to an ambush on the Adriatic. This is good exciting stuff, if slightly undermining the slow burning narrative developments that took place beforehand. It also gives a hint of the direction the series would take. Whereas one might have hoped for further labyrinthine plots as served up here, what we got were elaborate stunts, grand explosions and the suggestion that money was being thrown at the screen instead of relying on imaginative scripting and giving the performers time and space to act.

But that, of course, is what makes this instalment so special. According to the DVD’s ‘Making Of’ documentary the producers were concerned viewers would be put off by the dense plotting that underpinned the movie, the ‘cat and mouse’ game SPECTRE plays with both Bond and the Soviets. They needn’t have worried. FRWL is all the better for its intelligent story and for making its star look at times like a human being capable of feeling and even the occasional sign of vulnerability. It’s the closest Bond will ever get to being a ’spy’ movie, with all the espionage and undercover machinations this implies. The next episode, Goldfinger, would take the series down an entirely new route, that of the action hero, a point from which it would never quite return. FRWL is simply as good as it gets and even contains some of the most memorable music that John Barry contributed to the franchise.

‘That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve had your six’

Dr. No might seem a little tame by today’s standards. The famous gadgetry is notable by its absence (as is its inventor, Q) and the villain’s lair isn’t based inside a vast, hollowed out volcano or similar. 007 doesn’t drive the flashiest of sports cars, neither does he jet to a series of glamorous locations. But make no mistake - Dr. No rightly establishes a template for everything that is to follow. And it’s better for its lack of gimmicks. Bond has to rely on his wits or brute force in order to prevail and the concept thrives as a result.

On its release in 1962, Dr. No was an enormous international success. It isn’t hard to see why. Setting a movie in Jamaica adds a sheen of gloss that must have figured rarely in the output of the time. Instead of using a studio backlot or thinly disguising some English location as a foreign clime, the action really does take place in the Caribbean and that must have mattered a lot to the hard-up, working class audiences who wouldn’t get to see such sights otherwise. It’s also clear that rather a lot of money was plunged into the movie. Set explosions take place on a large scale. Dr. No uses a decadent, imposing dome as an interview room and that’s before we get to see the monstrous scale of his headquarters.

But it’s no real secret to suggest that the true heart of Dr. No’s success is its star, Sean Connery. Previously a little known jobbing actor, Connery was selected for the part ahead of the likes of Cary Grant, which turned out to be a masterstroke. In Grant’s capable hands, Dr. No would have been a vehicle for its star. Instead, Connery is Bond. Emerging fully formed and enjoying one of the most accomplished introductions ever lent to a movie character, Connery simply enjoys himself, playing (as ever) a variation of his own personality to great effect. It helps that the agent can appeal to both sides of the gender divide. Bond’s dress sense, impeccable taste and utter coldness in the field must have appealed to male viewers, whilst women got to see a leading man who was all man and incredibly handsome to boot. The series of ladies he beds in the film, not to mention all the others who lust after him unrequitedly, are as in thrall to him as at any other time in the series, but in Dr. No it’s made clear he has charm as well as raw charisma. Women don’t just melt at his feet. Bond has to put in a bit of work himself, but he’s always up to the task. In short, it’s never been truer that his is a character that men want to be and that women want to be with.

In his co-star, Connery got a similar unknown whose introduction to the film is every bit as iconic as his. Ursula Andress plays Honey Ryder (sparking off a succession of Bond girls with deliciously risque names), a local shell collector who gets involved in Dr No’s machinations by complete accident. The image of her emerging from the sea is the stuff of poster legend, equal to the famous shot of Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. True, her lines were dubbed (by Nikki van der Zyl) but she has enough presence and natural beauty to shine next to 007.

A number of actors were considered for the role of the evil Doctor. By all accounts, Christopher Lee was a name in the mix, as were those of Max von Sydow and Noel Coward, the latter responding to the offer with a telegram that pithily read ‘No, no, no.’ Joseph Wiseman took the part of the German-Chinese nemesis and gives a splendid performance, albeit one that has been mimicked by Bond baddie after baddie over the years. Unlike most larger than life movie villains, No doesn’t start cackling at his own schemes; he doesn’t even go nuts when his plans turn to naught. Instead, his is a wholly understated turn, one of almost unnatural calm even as Bond goads him over dinner. The only ‘cartoon’ aspect of his character are his hands, but these don’t define him, a point that gets sadly missed all too often in other 007 films.

Terence Young directs with a real sense of pace, if not momentum. The action sequence-exposition-action sequence-exposition successionism of the plot might seem obvious to twenty first century eyes, but it holds together and Young ensures that the movie’s muscular 110-minute running time never lags. Quite simply, Dr. No doesn’t have time to get dull. Too much is going on for the action to sag and there is even a sense that Bond is in danger from time to time, something that doesn’t always happen elsewhere, when the agent is virtually invulnerable. Helping the movie along is Monty Norman’s score. The crucial element of John Barry isn’t quite in place yet, though he was consulted over various aspects of the music, including the world famous Bond theme. Talking of which, that particular series of notes appears often, accompanying almost every shot of 007 during the first half of the movie and it’s every bit as impressive as it is intended to be. Elsewhere, we get ‘Under the Mango Tree,’ especially written for the movie, whilst during the opening credits there’s an extended bongo drum sequence, which films in the sixties were clearly obsessed with.

007 would return, and with better results, but Dr. No is a fine start to the series and contains scenes that even now are fairly shocking, such as the rather merciless slaying of Professor Dent, who is shot in the back for his villainy. Bond barely twitches, an insight into the man with a license to kill and the cold bloodedness to carry it out. It’s a teasing hint at character depth, unfortunately one that would be developed only occasionally as 007 is transformed from a movie secret agent into a cinema icon.