Saturday, November 16, 2019

Weekend Post

You know we're fast approaching the holiday season when James Bond marathons begin popping up on every cable network except HGTV. Caught one I hadn’t seen in years – THUNDERBALL from 1965. I saw it originally at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on the big BIG screen. I remember loving it at the time. From the stirring THUNDERBALL theme sung by Tom Jones I was hooked. So I wondered, did it hold up after all these years?

Well, the theme song sure does. And there’s no question that Sean Connery was the best Bond. There is just a level of insouciance in Connery’s Bond that none of his successors had – even light-comedy master Roger Moore never had that twinkle. Connery’s Bond enjoyed the gig, and why not? He sure got laid more than the later Bonds. Too bad it was in the 60s though and most of these women had helmet hair and raccoon make-up.

Note to PLAYBOY magazine: NEVER do another layout showing Bond girls as they are today. No one wants to see Octapussy as octogenarian.

The dialogue, which seemed so sparkling at the time, now comes off as cringeworthy.

Bond Girl: What sharp eyes you’ve got.
Bond: Wait til’ you get to my teeth.

Yikes! Since when did Bob Hope become a British Secret Agent?

And the sensibility was soooo sexist. Women were objects, easy, submissive, disposable, or evil. In the world of James Bond, Gloria Steinem is as much a super villain as Ernst Blowfeld.

The chief baddie in THUNDERBALL is Emilio Largo (these guys never have names like Mike or Skip) and you know he’s evil because he has a black patch over one eye. In typical Bond fashion, when he’s not trying to kill 007 he’s inviting him to lunch (women always refer to him as “James”, super villains call him “Mr. Bond”, M always uses “007”, and U.S. military officers call him “Jimbo”.). When I say they try to kill Bond, that of course means through some elaborate contraption only Wile E. Coyote would purchase instead of just taking out a gun and shooting his sorry ass.

As a kid I never let plot holes get in the way of a good James Bond yarn. I remember first seeing THUNDERBALL and having no idea what the hell was going on? Now someone is trying to kill him in his hotel room, now he’s taking pictures of a boat and dodging hand grenades, now he’s in a car chase and the evil Spectre woman blows up the car that’s trying to off him, now he eludes four gunmen during a big Junkanoo celebration and the next morning just strolls through town unnoticed, now he’s in a tuxedo, now he’s in an underwater battle, now he’s shot and the next day he’s completely healed. What the fuck??!!

A plane on a routine training mission has two atomic bombs on board and takes off from a NATO base conveniently located right next door to the health spa where James just happens to be staying at the time. The plane is hijacked and lands in the shallow water outside of Nassau. It can land in water without giant pieces splintering off? Really? There’s no radar to track this? And no one in Nassau sees or hears a fighter plane land in the ocean just off the coast? Now scuba divers move the bombs. On the side of one hydrogen bomb it says (and this is absolutely true, you can see for yourself) “handle like eggs”.

But I didn’t care.

Other minor story points didn’t bother me either like how do super villains amass large armies and trained scuba divers? How clueless are the British Intelligence and CIA that they have no knowledge of 200 henchmen being recruited? And where do all these people sleep? How do secret compounds with launch facilities large enough accommodate Gemini rockets get built incognito? If Spectre is a secret society why do their agents wear rings that have its logo?

These issues didn’t concern me then and they still don’t. In later movies he goes to the moon and shit and that crossed a line but a yacht carrying one of the atomic bombs crashes into the shore and explodes and doesn’t set off a nuclear explosion that wipes out three million people – sure, why quibble?

THUNDERBALL did hold up in the sense that it was still fun to watch and now because of all the cheese there were way more laughs then when I first saw it in 1965.

38 comments :

Pat Reeder said...

Years ago on "SNL," I seem to recall there was a sketch where Dana Carvey played a Bond villain who was trying to deal with 007 while going through constant problems with his contractor and union henchmen in his extinct volcano lair.

blinky said...

Only after rematching a movie like Thunderbolt do you realize the Austin Powers movies were a pretty accurate look back at the 60's.

Pilot Joe said...

Diamonds are forever does it for me, Jill St John just chews up her time on screen and when they throw Lana Woods as Plenty O’ Tool off the balcony, “I didn’t know there was a pool down there,” just classic
Pilot Joe

iamr4man said...

My dad took me to see Thunderball at Grauman's when I was a teenager. I thought it was great. I still think it has the most beautiful women of all the Bond pictures. My dad hated it. I asked him why and he complained about the bad guys enormous payroll and why were all those people so willing to die for him? Back in the 90's someone I knew complained that in the movie Bond rapes the woman spa worker. I thought that absurd but then watched the film again. The woman resists Bond's charms until she mistakenly thinks something she did will cause her to get fired if Bond reports her. Bond uses this to get her to sleep with him (of course, we all knew she really wanted to anyway).
Funny though that although the early Bond films are racist and sexist by today's standards I've never heard a call to have them withdrawn. Why is it only Disney films for which there are call for censorship (Dumbo and Song of the South in particular)?

blinky said...

Dr No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger were the perfect trilogy. They should have stopped there but just like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars they just had to keep going even though they just kept doing the same thing over and over.
Thunderball was the Rogue One of Bond movies.
And for my money Dr No was the best by far of all Bond movies. It had the essential plot line that most would follow to infinity and beyond: Super Villain destroying the World, Bond, James Bond and a beautiful but dangerous girl. Plus it was the only Bond movie that he cold bloodedly exercised his license to kill when he shot and killed the woman photographer.

Anonymous said...

Gotta love Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond in Casino Royale!Janice B.

Anonymous said...

You gotta watch "Operation Kid Brother"/"Operation Double 007". Largo is in it, M, and Moneypenney.
Starring Connery's brother. MSTK did it and it's just brilliant!

DBenson said...

Remember being taken to several of the movies as a kid, starting with "From Russia With Love". My parents were somehow okay with sex and violence on a fantasy level, although I do remember my siblings and me being hustled out of a few non-Bond films.

The Bond moment that really freaked me out was the opening of "You Only Live Twice", where a space-walking astronaut is cut loose from a Gemini capsule. Less traumatic but still thought-provoking was the bit in "Thunderball" where Largo's yacht splits into a speedy escape hydrofoil and a sort of husk. The husk still has henchmen on it, pathetically shooting back at what looks like an entire navy until a torpedo hits. This wasn't in their employee orientation.

James Bond toys were of course huge, and nobody seemed to question all this kid-oriented marketing on what were really borderline R movies. FRWL introduced the attache case, a standard item for upscale business types that suddenly became a spy movie cliche. I was the kid who always carried a briefcase, but dreamed of having the toy James Bond attache and later dreamed of carrying a real attache to impress beautiful women. I stuck to briefcases because you could stuff more stuff into them, and food items in the attache just seemed wrong. Maybe if I carried an attache in my coat-and-tie period things would have been Different.

It was a strange moment in early puberty, dealing with the different but overlapping feelings aroused by such dateables as Hayley Mills and Annette, and the 100% available Bond girls.

Betty said...

I confess I prefer the Sean Connery remake, "Never Say Never Again."

Matt said...

I am a child of the 70s, but I have really enjoyed Daniel Craig as James Bond. His Casino Royalle is my favorite.

My least favorite Bond is Roger Moore. Nobody could believe he could win a fight.

Jeff Boice said...

I think Dr. No was the best. Hey, Jack Lord's in it! And you're right- if the movie provides enough fun and thrills you can ignore the plot holes.

I also like the fact that Patrick Macnee and Patrick McGoohan developed their TV characters based on their mutual dislike of the Bond series' treatment of women. John Steed and Emma Peel were equals, and John Drake/The Prisoner never seduced a woman.

Loosehead said...

Attractive woman: "Hi, I'm Plenty"
Bond (staring at her cleavage): "But of course you are"
Woman: "Plenty O'Toole"
Bond: "Named after your father?"

They just don't write dialogue like that anymore. Not even you, Ken.

Angry Gamer said...

egads

First off, a plane landing under control could land intact, happened many times in commercial air travel (hello miracle on the hudson?)

There was not world wide radar coverage in 1950s or even 1960s what coverage there was was concentrated in Continental US and Moscow

Also the air craft in the movie was the Vulcan which was notorious for disappearing from radar... due to well stealth technology that was not really invented yet but the Vulcan due to it's shape (like a B2 get it?) was able to be stealthy

Ian Fleming is WRITING the future here. As a spy he would probably have known about the Vulcan's capabilities but wrote about it in an oblique way.

given that "commander bond" was also in Her Majesty's military it's a sure bet that he would be sent to a MILITARY hospital just like a pilot would the UK is known for having special hospitals for Peers and Military outside of their public health system. So it's not a stretch to say they both would be a Military hospital or a hospital that handles military patients.

Ian Fleming WAS a real spy. Many Many of his plots revolved around REAL events and REAL spy craft.

I know it's hard to conceive of a world where technology is ahead of you by 15-20 years (where our Spy Agencies try to be constantly) .... but many things hold up.

Just in the past few years we have given PHOTO Studio quality cameras in just a tenth of the smartphone real estate.

What might spies have had for the last 20 years?

Still Angry

Angry Gamer

D McEwan said...

Well, I was 16 when Thunderball opened, and I had no trouble following it. Of course, I had the advantage of having read the novel first. (This was back when Bond films were actually based on Fleming's novels and used recognizable versions of his plots.)

I saw Dr No the day after my 13th birthday. The next day I bought a copy of the novel and read it. It was so much better than the movie. Bond fights Dr. No's pet giant squid, I'm not joking, hand-to-tentacle, with only a small knife and a long, stiff wire. Reading that chapter at age 13, I was all "Why wasn't THIS in the movie? This is GREAT!" I did not understand yet about movie budgets, nor know that Dr. No was a relatively low-budget film. So I read the rest of the books. By the time From Russia With Love was released I'd read the entire series.


And hey, you want sexism, racism and snobbery? The novels are FULL of them. The books are great reads. I still reread the ones I like best. The novel of You Only Live Twice, which bears no resemblance to the movie of that title whatever, is a wonderfully weird book. Blofeld, retired, lives in a Japanese castle surrounded by an extensive garden where every plant and tree is lethal. Japan has a high suicide rate, and Blofeld's garden is designed to attract suicides, so Blofeld can get off on people killing themselves in his yard every day. Bond kills Blofeld by strangling him to death with his hands. I love that book.) The attitudes towards minorities and women are appalling (Live and Let Die in particular is an incredibly, massively racist book), but Fleming's prose sweeps you along, his plots are fun, his pacing is terrific, in short, as entertainments, they hold up even though their social attitudes, those of "The Greatest Generation" (Bond is a WWII vet in the books), are just hideous.

Thunderball's biggest flaw is that the climax is set underwater, and fast-paced action scenes are damned hard to do underwater. (That and the fact that the women in it look so similar they can be hard to tell apart. The water makes the action sluggish. But Connery spends more time only half-dressed in it than in any of the others, so I had it on VHS, and nowadays have it on DVD. And as a teen watching it, I could never dream that one day co-star Martine Beswick and I would become good friends.

(Martine loves to tell of how, once hired for the film, they sent her to Jamaica with orders to get tan. Though she was born in Jamaica, she'd been living in London and had what she called a "London Pallor." So for two weeks she was paid to sunbathe in Jamaica. Nice work if you can get it.)

iamr4man said...
Back in the 90's someone I knew complained that in the movie Bond rapes the woman spa worker."


Yup. He does. And in Goldfinger he rapes Lesbian Pussy Galore, causing her to turn straight, join the good guys, and call the feds on her boss. If you actually rape a lesbian, they are not going to fall in love with you. They are more likely to kill you than help you after you rape them. But that's straight out of the novel, Fleming's weird idea of how women's minds work. There's a line exchange in the novel missing from the movie.

Bond, "Pussy, they told me you didn't like men."
Pussy, "I never met a man before!"

" Anonymous said...
Gotta love Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond in Casino Royale!Janice B."


No I don't. The 1966 Casino Royale is one of the worst movies ever made!

YEKIMI said...

I remember seeing "Goldfinger" as a kid and the sex stuff went over my head. I was more into the science-fictiony aspects of it. I guess my favorite character was Oddjob or Handjob or whatever his name was and I was thinking how cool it would be to have a hat like his that you could throw and it would just chops it's way through anything that got in its way.....sorta like a Ron Popeil slicer/dicer invention before its time!

Brian said...

Connery always looked kind of old to me (like Morgan Freeman). Old Grandpa doing stuff to hot women.

His Bond was made fun of nicely here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RRhhewFqyw

The one with the suave look was Brosnan. But sadly aged quickly.

Frank Beans said...

" No one wants to see Octapussy as an octogenarian"

Hey, speak for yourself.

In all seriousness, that would probably not really be my cup o' tea, but people's tastes change as they get older. I hope I live long enough to the point where a young 80-ish lady turns my crank.

And while I'm philosophomazising, I think the Bond series did a lot to explain the (heterosexual) human libido, and how it shapes our perceptions of physical attraction, much like Playboy magazine did for generations on.

Unknown said...

One of my favorite Christmas gifts was a James Bond pistol that fired real plastic bullets. Hoo boy, that would *never* fly today. But my brothers and I managed to survive with a few bumps and bruises... glad we never shot our eye out!

Kirk said...

Seems like a different actor played CIA pal Felix Leiter in every film. Early in Thunderball you see a mysterious man tailing Bond. He shows up at Bond's hotel room. Bond punches him in the stomach. At first you think, ah, Bond took care of the bad guy. Except Bond then holds up his finger to his mouth, motioning the man to be quiet, after which he takes care of the REAL bad guy in the next room. Afterward, Bond says: "Sorry, Felix" Because I recognized the name Felix, I laughed out loud at that. What's ironic about that is I wouldn't have laughed if had been Jack Lord as Felix, because I would have already known it was Felix. I've often wondered if they cast different Felixes just so they could pull off little jokes like that.

Frederic Alden said...

As far as the nuclear bomb not going off and killing three million people, that, at least, is not far-fetched. These things are designed not to go nuclear in such a case, although the high explosive certainly may make a pretty good bang. Bombs have accidentally been dropped from high altitude and no nuclear detonations have ever resulted.

Anonymous said...

D McEwan: Thanks for your critique of everyone's comments, but I kinda like Casino Royale! I am a big fan of David Niven, Peter Sellers et al (not that I have to explain to you) and I never miss it when it airs. I'm sure there are a lot of movies on your list that I consider the worst but who cares? It's all subjective!Janice B.

D McEwan said...

"Brian said...
Connery always looked kind of old to me (like Morgan Freeman). Old Grandpa doing stuff to hot women.
"

OLD??? Connery is 31 in Dr. No, 32 in From Russia With Love, 33 in Goldfinger and an elderly geezer of 34 in Thunderball.

MikeN said...

>a yacht carrying one of the atomic bombs crashes into the shore and explodes and d
doesn’t set off a nuclear explosion that wipes out three million people

That's not enough to set off a nuke, particularly a hydrogen bomb.


DJ McEwan, while we're on Bond, the start of On Her Majesty's Secret Service does not have an explicit breaking of the fourth wall as you said before. I saw it recently, and Bond does not turn towards the camera. The camera comes to him.

D McEwan said...

"Anonymous MikeN said...
DJ McEwan, while we're on Bond, the start of On Her Majesty's Secret Service does not have an explicit breaking of the fourth wall as you said before.
"

In this entire thread, I have not until right here even mentioned On Her Majesty's Secret Service" You're refuting something I never wrote. Also, there no "J" in my name. My middle initial is "K".

However, now that you bring it up, Lazenby most certainly DOES break the fourth wall when he says to the audience, there being no one else conscious there at the time, while looking directly into the camera lens, "This never happened to the other guy." That is breaking the fourth wall, and it denies the movie's reality of him being the same guy as in the previous movies just for a cheap laugh. On a Red Skelton TV sketch, that would be fine, but it has no place in a spy movie.

As it happens I like OHMSS very much. If it had starred Connery, it would be one of the very best Bond films. It has the best Bond Girl, in Dame Diana Rigg. (And Joanne Lumley pops up briefly in the movie also.) And the action editing in it is amazing.

D McEwan said...

"Anonymous said...
D McEwan: Thanks for your critique of everyone's comments, but I kinda like Casino Royale! I am a big fan of David Niven, Peter Sellers et al (not that I have to explain to you) and I never miss it when it airs.
"

I didn't critique "everyone's comments," only those of two people. Do you consider yourself to be "everyone"?

Do you have the right to enjoy it somehow? Sure. But you said we HAD to like it. You issued an order to us to like what is a godawful botch of a movie. I was forced to disobey your orders, as liking it is impossible.

The 1967 Casino Royale mind-bogglingly bad. It's really about four of five short movies, made by different 6 directors (Only five are credited, but there were 6) in different styles, all spliced together to try and make a coherent movie out of the mess, but never succeeds. It's like a patchwork quilt made by blind quilters. (And starring Claire Quilty!) I would have a hard time finding a movie that is worse.

I love David Niven also. Who doesn't? I'm deeply embarrassed for him in that botch. I also find the performance that the great, beloved Deborah Kerr is forced to give in that cinematic abortion to be humiliating for her. I find seeing her debasing herself in that monstrous thing horribly unpleasant viewing. The director of that portion of the movie (The usually great John Huston) should have been flogged for what he made Kerr do.

Peter Sellers was a great comic actor, though a very toxic human being, who was corrosive to everyone he knew or every worked with, or who had the misfortune to be related to him. I love many of his earlier movies. He and Niven are certainly wonderful together in The Pink Panther, a movie I never tire of. But Sellers went nuts. He was genuinely mentally ill, and starting in 1965, sabotaged every movie he was in from then on, with the sole exception of Being There. Sellers's biography is a horror story.

Casino Royale was one of the first of his films that he sabotaged. He got paranoid about Orson Welles, and refused to be on the set when Welles was there. So their big scene together, the central scene from the novel and almost the only trace of the novel in that wretched movie, never actually has both of them in it at the same time. The reason Sellers just vanishes from the movie with no explanation whatever is because Sellers walked out on the movie midway through. Just left and refused ever to come back, so they had to scramble to try and save the movie. They certainly failed to save it.

There is one aspect of that movie I like: the Burt Bacharach score. When Dusty Springfield is singing "The Look of Love," I can close my eyes, listen to the sublime singing, and pretend it's a decent movie.

I actually have the DVD of it, but solely for the 1954 TV "Casino Royale" with Peter Lorre as the first-ever Bond villain, which is a bonus on the disc.

Anonymous said...

Never gets mentioned:

the villains in From Russia With Love - Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill's wife (and mentioned in a lyric of his Mack the Knife by Bobby Darin)

and one of the great underrated actors, Robert Shaw, best known of rbeing eaten by a shark. He was also a playwright, The Man in the Glass Booth.

Mike Doran said...

Fun Things From Here And There:

- No particular reason for all the Felix Leiters, beyond the fact that Cubby Broccoli just wasn't interested in the character - at least not enough to keep one actor on hold for movies that only got made every couple of years.

- Sean Connery was a Scotsman - and Scotsmen always look older, even when they're young.
According to Ian Fleming, James Bond was a Scotsman, which might explain why Connery was best at it.

- Funny true story (if irrelevant):
When Broccoli did the press push for The Spy Who Loved Me, he recruited Richard Kiel ("Jaws") for a monster press conference.
At the time, nobody was aware that Kiel was articulate and ad-lib funny.
One smart-ass reporter asked Kiel which Bond actor he thought was best (meaning either Connery or Roger Moore).
Kiel thought for a second, then answered: "I always kind of liked George Lazenby …"
… and from there, Richard Kiel became a fave on talk and game shows (and who ever heard of the smart-ass reporter?).

- Villains:
In Diamonds Are Forever, one of the thugs is Bruce Glover - Crispin Glover's father (they share the middle name Hellion).

- I'm a Fifties Kid.
My first awareness of James Bond came from seeing Signet paperbacks on spinner racks in Kresge's and Walgreen's and Woolworth's, with a cover price of 35 to 50 cents, and cover illos that were downright risque - in 1960, at any rate.
Signet had been Mickey Spillane's publisher; when Spillane slowed down his output, Signet picked up the Bond books as an attempt to keep the sex&violence market.
When JFK let it be known that he liked the Bond books, it was a classic case of perfect timing; combined with the Broccoli movie deal, pluperfect timing.
And 60+ years on …
… we're all filling in the rest.

thomas tucker said...

D McEwan is right- the Fleming novels are very well written and can be enjoyed repeatedly because of that. I always wished that the movies followed the books more closely in their plots. I re-read them annually. In fact, I'm reading From Russia With Love now.
Loosehead: what about " My name is Pussy. Pussy Galore." Bond: "I must be dreaming."
The movies were wonderfully escapist fare for kids in the 60's and 70's. I lost interest after Live and let Die. But my God, for a kid watching Bond films back in the day- the fights and guns, the exotic locales, the dinner jackets and casinos, the martinis, the cleavage. It was wonderful.

gottacook said...

D McEwan: I'm familiar with the 1967 Casino Royale (and also a lifelong Bacharach fan). How exactly do you know that a particular segment was directed by John Huston? Is there a source somewhere that lists the director of every sequence?

D McEwan said...

"gottacook said...
D McEwan: I'm familiar with the 1967 Casino Royale (and also a lifelong Bacharach fan). How exactly do you know that a particular segment was directed by John Huston? Is there a source somewhere that lists the director of every sequence?
"

Click on "See Full Cast and Crew" on Casino Royale's IMDb page. It is VERY specific about who directed which parts.

D McEwan said...

"Mike Doran said...
- Sean Connery was a Scotsman - and Scotsmen always look older, even when they're young.
"

Oh great. No wonder people have always thought I was older than I am my whole life, even in grade school. I've always said I was born old. And I'm reaching the years where the only "Older" age than mine is "dead."

I mean, "Douglas McEwan." Hard to think of a more Scottish name, short of "Angus MacBeth." My great-grandfather, like Connery, was born in Edinburgh. And there is a "Douglas McEwan" in Edinburgh now (Possible a relative) who is, I'm not joking, a "Professional Sean Connery Impersonator." Unfortunately, he looks just like Connery now, not back in his Bond days.

MikeN said...

D McEwan, you said it on another post some time before.
Bond picks up the shoes, then you see her drive off, then the camera comes back to him.
He never turns towards the camera to speak. He does turn right before they cut to the song.

McAlvie said...

The Bond movies were a lot of fun to watch when I was a kid. I just loved the great action scenes, and when you're a kid you can swallow improbable a lot more easily.

Much later in life I actually read one of Flemings books, and I have to say that it was a case of the movie being much, MUCH better than the book. Bond was angsty, not cool, and kinda dumb since the bad guys kept getting him. Plus he fell for the girl who was in on it which I saw coming from the beginning. How did this drivel end up inspiring the action packed, uber hero, gadget galore movies?

Brian said...

One conceit, which is not in this movie, but can be found in others, is the part where the villain delineates their evil plan and the protagonist, or someone on the side of good says, "That'll never work!" or "You're insane!". I guess it's there for the audience to agree, but maaaaybe it's there in the hopes that the villain will say, "Jeepers, you're right! What was I thinking? OK everyone, shut it down! We won't need the death machine or the 2,500 trained mice!"

To D. McEwan: I haven't read Peter Sellers' biography, but from documentaries I've seen/heard, he was as close to being sane when he was on the Goon Show radio program, with his military buddies, but when he left the relatively safe cocoon of that environment, he didn't trust many people. I'm not excusing his actions, just adding a little context.

Also, you mentioned the novel "Live and Let Die" being racist. I'll defer to your judgment, but the movie is no picnic either ("Names is fo' tombstones, baby!"), yet I still have a soft spot for the film as it was the first Bond I saw in a movie theater, back in 1973. I still remember the audience applauding and cheering when he escapes the crocodiles.

D McEwan said...

"Anonymous MikeN said...
D McEwan, you said it on another post some time before.
Bond picks up the shoes, then you see her drive off, then the camera comes back to him.
He never turns towards the camera to speak. He does turn right before they cut to the song.
"

Yes, I know when it occurs, and it IS breaking the fourth wall. He's speaking directly to the movie audience. So I stand by whenever I posted that. (Do you keep a file of my old posts?)

"McAlvie said...
Much later in life I actually read one of Flemings books, and I have to say that it was a case of the movie being much, MUCH better than the book. Bond was angsty, not cool, and kinda dumb since the bad guys kept getting him. Plus he fell for the girl who was in on it which I saw coming from the beginning. How did this drivel end up inspiring the action packed, uber hero, gadget galore movies?"


So you read ONE book in the series and feel you can judge the entire book series based on one? That's like judging the entire movie series based only on seeing Octopussy. Some of the books are not too good: Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever, The Man With the Golden Gun are all pretty poor, and The Spy Who Loved Me was the absolute nadir of the series, a really dreadful book. Before you judge the book series, read a few of the good ones, like Casino Royale, From Russia With Love, Dr. No, Goldfinger, and the Blofeld trilogy, Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. If you can't see how good those books are, the fault lies with you, not those books. The best books are far superior to even the best of the films.

""Brian said...
To D. McEwan: I haven't read Peter Sellers' biography, but from documentaries I've seen/heard, he was as close to being sane when he was on the Goon Show radio program, with his military buddies, but when he left the relatively safe cocoon of that environment, he didn't trust many people. I'm not excusing his actions, just adding a little context.
"

I have read Roger Lewis's bio of Sellers, which is drenched in "context," hundreds of pages of "context." Basically, around 1965 Sellers's lifelong paranoia blossomed into full-tilt toxic insanity. It went far beyond merely not trusting many people. He became a horrible human being who harmed everyone he could, with his family getting it the worst. I recommend reading Lewis's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. The story of Peter Sellers is a terrible and terrifying tragedy of an incredibly talented man who went careening off the rails into the darkness. His is a sad life. The book won't bore you.

Oh yes, the movie of Live and Let Die is pretty damn racist all right, but the book is far, far worse. Fleming, like most posh Englishmen of his generation, was very comfortable in looking down on darker races. That was a society that had no problem whatever with Agatha Christie publishing a (damn fine) novel titled - ah - "Ten Little N-Words."

Of course, for me, Roger Moore was NEVER James Bond! He was never that guy in the books. Give me Connery and Craig. That apartment Bond lives in for that inappropriate bedroom-farce scene in LALD with all the funny gadgets? The Bond of the books would never have lived there. He hated gadgets. I loathe all the Roger Moore Bond films.

Charles Bryan said...

When I see Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk building their own spaceships, I understand how those Bond villains funded their private armies and volcano lairs.

Artie in Sin City said...

And CRAP...there's NO Santa...Thanks for ruining my lifelong dreams...

Chris Lopes said...

Of course Bond is breaking the 4th wall with that line. Whether he's looking at the camera or not, the line references something that reminds you that you are watching a movie. There is no reason for Bond to even think that line, let alone say it. So yeah, it's directed at the audience.