This article should be assumed to contain spoilers.
My husband Dan is not a particular Bond fan, but he is a guy, so getting him the complete collection for Christmas was kind of a no-brainer. It was on sale! With Prime shipping! There was just one problem, which became apparent when he opened it:
“You and I can watch all of these together!”
On December 26, 2,920 minutes stood between me and getting my life back.
Dr. No (1962)
Sean Connery’s Bond rarely does normal spy things like go undercover, tap phones, or decrypt documents. In most films he faffs around with women (who throw themselves at him with literally no preamble), has some kind of menacing dinner or baccarat game with the bad guy, and then gets captured. Like, always — he doesn’t even try to avoid it. (This is a secret agent whose signature catchphrase is his own real name.)
After he’s caught, Bond lounges around in the villain’s super-lair getting the entire plot expositioned at him until someone else, usually an American, rescues him. If he’s lucky he’s given one or two token fight scenes so that a henchman can end up fed to a shark. Most of the early James Bond movies aren’t spy stories as much as superhero films, with gadgets and implausible stunts standing in for powers, and he’s not even a great superhero to boot. Dr. No establishes a lot of these canonical Bond tropes, particularly the part about waiting around the evil lair with a notable lack of urgency, though it’s not really until Goldfinger that you could watch an Austin Powers movie and get all the jokes.
“She picked up his hand and Bond felt the cold mess of beans being poured into it.” — Dr. No (Fleming, 1958)
From Russia With Love (1963)
This was my favorite of the early films, in part because it fit my (mis)conception that these were Cold War spy movies, but also because it’s pretty good. There are female characters who resemble human beings, and a claustrophobic fight scene on a train is well-choreographed and has actual menace. There’s a weird lesbian subplot — much more disturbing and explicit in the books — and for some reason we’re expected to believe that a scene filmed in Scotland is totally the Greek isles. But other than that, pretty solid.
“She looked like the oldest and ugliest whore in the world.”
— From Russia With Love (Fleming, 1957)
Goldfinger (1964)
This is a fan favorite, and I enjoyed it too, but it doesn’t really put our hero in the best light. Bond is pretty useless here. First he plays golf. Then he’s captured, like, halfway through. Other than an admittedly great fight with Oddjob, Bond fails to do much of anything besides a dubious scene where he coerces Pussy Galore into sleeping with him. (From the novel: “Bond liked the look of her. He felt the sexual challenge all beautiful Lesbians have for men.”) The CIA does all the hard work of shooting people and storming Ft. Knox and disarming the nuclear weapon after Bond flails helplessly at it.
There’s a scene in which Goldfinger stages an elaborate Powerpoint presentation to a roomful of henchmen, and then immediately gasses them all to death. As someone who has to give a lot of public talks, I found this progression of events curiously appealing.
I also liked the bit where Oddjob decapitates garden statuary.
The Spy Who Dubbed Me
Goldfinger features one of the most famous lines in the series:
Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!
That line is not spoken by Gert Fröbe, who played Goldfinger, but British actor Michael Collins, who doesn’t even get the dignity of a credit. Though the practice is baffling to modern audiences, it was relatively common to dub actors whose accents were considered unsuitable. The Bond films dub with abandon, especially actresses: nearly every woman in Dr. No was voiced by the same person. An entire semester of modernist criticism could be derived from the conceit that Bond girls weren’t allowed to speak for themselves. Mostly though, it was just that audiences didn’t notice or care. The villain of Thunderball was dubbed by someone who went on to dub a different villain in You Only Live Twice. It’s kind of refreshing, really — there was a time when not all actors spoke English! But it’s also weird. Was there some kind of actor shortage?
Thunderball (1965)
How do you pull off a stunt where the hero flies off in a jetpack without computer graphics? You use an actual jetpack.
After this promising opener it’s a bit downhill. Sure, henchmen are eaten by sharks again, but the scuba action sequences are literally interminable, and sure enough everyone is rescued by the Americans.
“It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than thirst.”
— Thunderball (Fleming, 1961)
You Only Live Twice (1967)
“Somehow the whole illusion falls apart and what we’re left with is a million-dollar playpen in which everything works but nothing does anything.” — Roger Ebert (1967)
Largely remembered as “James Bond in yellowface.”
This film is terrible, but it does have the best villain’s lair: a volcano. When I grow up I am totally going to live in a volcano. Also there are ninjas.
Do not be fooled by these things, or that screenwriting credit is given to Roald Dahl. This is a bad dumb racist movie.
“It was three thirty. Only two more hours to go before his next drink!”
— You Only Live Twice (Fleming, 1964)
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
It was time to replace Connery — for proof, see Diamonds are Forever — but many people regarded it as an unforgivable sin. Because George Lazenby was a one-off Bond, Secret Service is in a kind of canon limbo — later films reference the events here, but its tone is jarringly out of step with a franchise that is getting more, not less, light-hearted. Even today, a lot of people skip over it, but they shouldn’t. It’s one of the best Bond films.
For one thing, it’s really pretty weird. Also, come on, that cast. Diana Rigg! Telly Savalas! James Bond has emotions and feels threatened and sometimes looks like he’s afraid he might die! Lazenby couldn’t pull this material off, and audiences weren’t ready for it; Secret Service has taken some time to slowly claw its way up to being appreciated. Think of it as a prequel to the Craig films, but do see it.
“I’ve taught you to love chickens. To love their flesh, their voice.”
Diamonds are Forever (1971)
Where to start? The car chase through tired, sad, ‘70s Vegas? The fight scene with two women in bikinis named Bambi and Thumper? The moon buggy escape? Bond kicking a cat? The repellent pair of assassins who are also a gay couple, apparently because that should make us more repelled by them?
for reals!
Connery looks old here, though he was only 41 at the time. Actors are not forever. Moore was 45 when he started the role, though, so go figure.
Also, this is the second movie in which a killer is unmasked as a result of his poor understanding of wine.
Live and Let Die (1973)
in any way.
“Do you get the same notion I do, that after nine of these we’ve just about had enough?” — Roger Ebert (1973)
This script seems to have been written on a dare: come up with a screenplay that manages to offend both black people and racist white people. Truly genius.
James Bond battles a variety of stereotypical adults of African descent. In his defense, he also sleeps with one. The film springs from the moral panic of crime-filled cities dominated by black gangs and afros. The bad guy, who naturally drives a pimpmobile, doesn’t want to nuke the planet or fire rockets at the sun — he wants to give away a lot of heroin. This makes him as menacing as Denmark.
Even though this is one of a series of bland mid-period Bond movies set in America, Bond does manage to do does exotic things, like make espresso in a monogrammed robe.
Roger Moore is not a bad Bond, he’s just in a lot of bad Bond movies. By all accounts, the actor is a lovely man.
Also, for avoidance of doubt, I do like the McCartney title song.
“My name’s Bond. James Bond.”
“Names is for tombstones, baby. Waste him.”
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
This movie has some killer sets: The secret MI6 headquarters inside a half-sunken, permanently askew luxury liner. The mountainous Thai islands of the villain Scaramanga’s lair. The trippy funhouse. Good stuff.
There’s also plot point here in which Q must outfit Bond with a fake third nipple. I didn’t use that for my screencap. You’re welcome.
The novel this movie is not particularly based on was Ian Fleming’s last. It’s pretty weird. James Bond gets amnesia, thinks he’s a fisherman, is brainwashed by the KGB, and attempts to assassinate M.
That’s in the prologue.
“The best drink in the day is just before the first one.”
— The Man with the Golden Gun (Fleming, 1965)
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
I bring you 1977.
This movie is pretty decent! It tries to give Bond a relationship with a minuscule amount of emotional depth! It might actually be a good film if Barbara Bach, the titular lady spy, could act, but alas. Instead, we’re introduced to Jaws, an acceptable tradeoff.
Summary: if you are going to watch a Roger Moore James Bond movie, watch this Roger Moore James Bond movie.
Also you probably think the Carly Simon title song Nobody Does it Better is crap, but you’re wrong. My husband Dan has proof.
Moonraker (1979)
“Our age may be losing its faith in technology, but James Bond sure hasn’t.” — Roger Ebert (1979)
You probably remember this one the way I did: “James Bond in space.” There’s actually not that much space in it, and most of those scenes are in the trailer. There is Jaws, again, and he even gets a girlfriend? Bond drives a gondola? At this point they’re kind of running out of vehicles for him to operate (OR SO I THOUGHT). For some reason, they go to Rio, where it’s Carnivale, because it’s always Carnivale when a movie shoots in Rio. Bond fights a snake?
I dunno, nobody actually tries to defend this one. The only thing I can say is that I didn’t think it was the worst.
Diet another day
Moonraker is only the third novel, which naturally means that space shuttles do not make much of an appearance; the film is only loosely based on it. I only skimmed it, but managed to hit on the following scene:
Bond is having dinner with his boss, M. M places the following order, after scoffing at the idea that he should read the menu:
Caviar. Devilled kidneys. Bacon. Peas. New potatoes. Strawberries in kirsch. The waiter recommends that M follow the strawberries with some bone marrow. (You know, dessert.) He agrees. He summons a half-bottle of red wine and a carafe (!) of vodka.
Bond’s order: Smoked salmon (“it had the glutinous texture only achieved by Highland curers”). Lamb cutlets. Peas and new potatoes. Asparagus with Bearnaise. A slice of pineapple. A bottle of Dom Perignon ‘46.
A minute later, someone delivers a package of powdered amphetamine to the table, which Bond cheerfully pours into his Champagne. “It’s what I shall need if I’m going to keep my wits about me tonight,” he explains.
M smiled at him indulgently. “It’s your funeral,” he said. “How were the cutlets?”
For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Dan calls this “part 3 of the 4-part Ballad Theme Song series.” I looked up the plot on Wikipedia as a reminder and it may as well have been a movie I’d never seen. When we watched the lackluster direct-to-video trailer, it elicited a lot of sighs and comments like, “Oh it’s this one?”
One of those moments of familiar dread involved “fake Blofeld,” a scene inspired by the creative juggernaut that is intellectual property dispute. As if to remind us that this is a Bond film, there are both sharks and a ski chase.
Moore is getting old here, so when two women in their early twenties throw themselves at a man who was, by now, 54, you start hoping for a new actor, no matter how nice the previous guy was.
Octopussy (1983)
I’m pretty sure this is the first James Bond movie I ever saw. It was on 1985-era HBO circa more or less around the clock. Octopussy had a chance at being OK: it’s actually about Russians, and there’s a train chase, and India is potentially a good location for a Bond film. There was even a trailer that looked like a movie made by a real studio with an expectation of revenue. And an unreleased video game!
Unfortunately it will forever be remembered as “James Bond dresses up like a clown,” though this is unfair, as he also dresses up as a gorilla.
A View to a Kill (1985)
Grace Jones and Christopher Walken (specifically, Christopher Walken as genetically engineered by Nazis) attempt to destroy Silicon Valley using a zeppelin. Score by Duran Duran.
And yet it is dreadfully boring. That is somehow a spectacular accomplishment. How is it possible that this is not the best Bond film, if not, in fact, the best film ever made? Film students surely analyze this as a cautionary tale.
Grace Jones is not a very good actor. Moore is now 58 years old and completely beyond believability in the role. The movie is weirdly violent — Walken machine-guns a bunch of henchmen for no reason in a really jarring way.
This movie is crying out for a remake. Keep the cast entirely the same, except for Bond. In fact, eliminate Bond. Steampunk setting. Or at least everyone wears this hat. I mean, look at this woman. She’s 68 years old here! At this point who cares if she can act; she is awesome.
It’s too bad this movie sucks, because it’s the last Roger Moore, and he deserved better. So does Grace Jones.
The Living Daylights (1987)
“The usual stuff.” — Roger Ebert (1987)
Timothy Dalton was brought on as a more serious Bond, one who was at least a tiny bit conflicted about his seemingly eternal career as a contract killer. It’s a real spy movie — the Berlin Wall had a few more years left in it — so a new actor and a new outlook plus KGB defectors should add up to a winner. But the film looks cheap, with flat lighting and boring staging, indistinguishable from 80's television. It drains the life out of every scene.
The climactic sequence is almost unwatchable now, as Bond joins forces with a merry band of Afghani “freedom fighters” attempting to oust the Soviet occupiers. We all know how well that turned out.
Licence to Kill (1989)
✓Sharks
✓Tuxedo
✓Creepy dinner with villain
✓Unnecessarily complex killing mechanisms
It’s the 80's, this is set in Florida, and it’s about drug dealers, so it logically follows that the villains are Hispanic. On the bright side, that gives us Sexy Anonymous Henchman Benicio del Toro.
On the other hand, we get 80's Florida decor.
GoldenEye (1995)
The longest gap between Bond movies yet, due to more delightful legal disputes. It’s surprising how much this one prefigures the Craig era; even though I saw this in the theater I hadn’t remembered that Judi Dench started as M so early, or that Bond was openly accused of being a misogynistic Cold War relic.
The “computer hacking” stuff is dumb, of course, but the movie could be forgiven in assuming that 1995 audiences wouldn’t know better. (M has to patiently explain what “Global Positioning System” means.) There’s also an awkward scene where the U.S. Army cheerfully invites Bond for a “debriefing” at Guantanamo, and it’s not a threat. In a lot of ways GoldenEye feels more of the past than any other Bond film.
Sean Bean dies.
But it’s a decent movie, certainly the best of the Brosnans. It has the production values of a modern film, reversing the slide into TV movie aesthetics, and there’s a plot that’s complicated without being incomprehensible. We enjoyed it.
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
where i am lol
A transparent attempt to ride the mid-90s popularity of Hong Kong action cinema by casting Michelle Yeoh. She’s completely underused.
Jonathan Pryce, an actor I otherwise adore, is … overused. I assume after production ceased there was no reason to dismantle the sets, as Pryce had so thoroughly chewed through them.
The worst casting abuse is Ricky Jay. Who puts Ricky Jay in a movie and then doesn’t pull a heist? He does no magic of any kind. This is a tragedy.
The plot makes very little sense. Brosnan apparently said, with polite understatement, “We had a script that was not functioning in certain areas.” I’ll be charitable and say that like many Bond films, it reflects a particular anxiety of its time — that media is in the hands of a few megalomaniacs and everything we do is monitored and tracked. Ahead of its time, even. But after the promise of GoldenEye, a disappointment.
The World Is Not Enough (1999)
do the sciencing
For some reason this was directed by the otherwise respectable Michael Apted (of the documentary series Up). There’s a good conceit with the villain — he’s slowly dying of a brain injury that renders him impervious to pain — but the movie barely explores it. And there’s some nice ethical ambiguity involving M and the femme fatale. But it’s all pretty much ruined by Sexy Scientist Denise Richards, who somehow manages to be worse than quite a number of terrible Bond actresses. Maybe they should’ve brought back dubbing.
It’s got John Cleese though, so it’s not a total loss.
Die Another Day (2002)
Words don’t do this justice, so let’s go with screenshots. You can see that we’re already deep into orange and teal cinematography here.
In the opening scene, Bond surfs to North Korea. This is actually the better of the two surfing scenes in the film.
He’s captured by the North Koreans and held for, like, a seriously long time. Instead of providing some insightful commentary on post-9/11 paranoia and military overreach, we get this:
There’s, uh, this guy?
Who changes brains or something with him?
Madonna is a fencing teacher?
and what
no
And then James Bond parasurfs down a glacier.
Exit Pierce Brosnan.
Casino Royale (2006)
Hooray! I liked the movie a lot when I saw it in the theater like a normal person, but now that I’m a reluctant Bond expert it has added resonance.
It’s the 21st century and honey badger don’t care about strict world-building, but if you deconstruct this reboot it’s pretty bonkers. This is James Bond’s first mission as 007, which suggests a new universe, but Judi Dench is still M, which suggests continuity. (Perhaps the last 007 died in a tragic parasurfing accident.) This also raises the question of where Bond got his vintage Goldfinger Aston-Martin in Skyfall, since Mr. Craig was age -4 last time it was seen in operation. On the other hand, recursive continuity has always been a thing here: Fleming’s Bond wasn’t Scottish until Connery was cast, after which his Scottishness was retconned into the subsequent novels.
After several near-misses of falling asleep during the last third of many Bond films (the late Connery era was particularly soporific), I was surprised to learn this was the longest movie to date. I’d even watch it again! Amazing.
Quantum of Solace (2008)
This works best if you think of it as the necessarily slumpy middle bit of a trilogy rather than a standalone movie. The action sequences are over-edited, with the hyperkinetic flash cuts that I thought had gone out of style by now. Otherwise Quantum is a reasonable bridge between two better films.
Like Skyfall, it exists in a weird time bubble: Bond expressly orders Kina Lillet in his cocktail, but the last time he could’ve had a proper Vesper was in A View to a Kill; the product was discontinued in 1986. (Cocchi Americano is a better substitute than modern Lillet Blanc. We have both in our fridge; can’t be too cautious.)
This is the only movie in which Bond does not get laid. It’s also the only one in which he is not captured. Draw your own conclusions.
Skyfall (2012)
Part of me wishes that this was the last Craig movie, not because he isn’t great, but just because a trilogy is a tidy story arc. The rest of me is like, what the hell is wrong with you? (He’s signed for two more films.)
Skyfall manages to pull off the same difficult trick that the Star Trek reboot did: it’s entertaining for normals but offers references just for fans. It’s part of book canon that Bond is a Scottish orphan, a fact that hadn’t been referenced in the movies yet and so feels unique to the reboot. Everyone recognizes that the souped-up Aston Martin is a “Bond” car; only fans know it’s literally the same one as in Goldfinger. (The car that explodes in the movie was a 3D-printed replica, which is more Q than Q.)
It’s not a perfect film: I thought the villain was unnecessarily high-strung for this humanist series. The femme fatale deserved a less gratuitous send-off. The Komodo dragon bit was an embarrassing relic from the Moore era. But it’s otherwise excellent, and the closing scene, a nod to the classic set design of the original movies, felt like a perfect way to wrap up my 2,920 minutes.
If I had one wish for the series, it’s to see a truly faithful rendition of a Bond novel. Not because they’re good (they aren’t), but because they’re so alien. I’m not that young, but even I fall for propaganda about how coarse and violent the modern world is compared to the Golden Era of the 1940s-early 1960s.
The Fleming novels can read like raw, unfiltered id: things your sweet old grandparents probably thought in their day that you’d rather never know about. Dr. No devotes several paragraphs to the problem of mixed-race Jamaican “Chigroes.” (“They’ve got some of the intelligence of the Chinese and most of the vices of the black man.”) In Goldfinger, Oddjob is rewarded for his service with his favorite food, cat. In turn, Bond is surprised that someone named “Goldfinger” isn’t a Jew.
There’s a scene on a ship in For Your Eyes Only in which Bond overhears a woman screaming, but when he realizes she’s in her cabin with her husband, he declines to intervene. “What was it to do with him? They were man and wife.” If she can’t be bothered to kill or leave him, he reflects, why should he care? Bond goes back to his own room, annoyed that her continued screams disturb his sleep. “How could a girl have so little guts?”
The film Casino Royale toys with this idea a bit. Bond is betrayed by the love of his life. Daniel Craig says, grimly, “The bitch is dead.” Spoken by a contemporary hero, the line is shocking, but we understand that he’s wounded and distraught and has all the feels that men are allowed to have these days. It’s also a line taken directly from the novel, but in that context, it hardly registers. Fleming’s Bond talks like that all the time, even about women he likes. “Poor little bitch,” he says sympathetically in Dr. No. “She’s in this because of me.” In my imaginary movie, he does the same, and we just have to deal with it.
I’m not suggesting this in a mean-spirited way. Despite all the snark above, I genuinely enjoyed watching these movies (in aggregate, not necessarily every stultifying scuba-fight moment). Bond is a cultural legacy, and we should confront its origins head-on. We should be made uncomfortable by the colonialism, by the ubiquitous racism, by the endless expendable women, most of whom die (the “traditional” ending where Bond floats away with the pretty girl is an invention of the films). And as in the books, it should be wrapped up in a rousing adventure story — with disguises and quips and forty cigarettes a day. Because that’s who James Bond was meant to be.
