So far we’ve had 27 James Bond films, 25 by Eon Productions, and two others. I’ve seen many of them in theaters, perhaps even a majority, but certainly not all of them. Amazon has gathered the 25 Eon films together so we can conveniently binge them in chronological order or in whatever order we choose. In the past few weeks I’ve watched through them all, more or less in order.
When I started watching them I had no intention of publishing remarks about any of them, much less something about the lot of them. But then, as sometimes happens, I decided that perhaps I should write something. It happened like this:
I started watching from the beginning, with Dr. No (1962). This introduced much of the Bond nexus, such as the gun-barrel credit-opener, the women, the suits, the martini, the physical prowess, though not the gadget fetishism, which came two films later. It also introduced SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) as a nebulous international criminal enterprise dedicated to enriching itself through elaborate schemes.
Then I watched the second one, From Russian with Love (1963). SPECTRE continues, and we get to see Robert Shaw as an athletic villain (13 years later he played Quint in Jaws). It became a smash success and was, and still is, regarded as one of the best Bond films. I read that judgment in the film’s Wikipedia entry, which I read after I saw the film (something I do regularly), and I concur. There’s minimal gadgetry and none of the big-tech nonsense which infested some of the Roger Moore films (I’m thinking of Moonraker in particular).
Next we have Goldfinger (1964). This may be the first Bond I saw in the theater, or was it From Russian with Love? I don’t recall, but whichever it was, the theater was packed. Auric Goldfinger, a dealer in gold bullion, is the villain. He’s a freelancer unaffiliated with any organization. This film introduced the first of the gadget tricked-out cars, the iconic Aston Martin DB5. Goldfinger also has an extensive pre-credit sequence which is unconnected with the rest of the film. That’s one of the features I had in mind when I started on this Bond orgy.
I was under the impression that that had become a feature of all the Bond films. Not quite. Most, perhaps all, later Bond films do have a long pre-credit sequence, but those sequences aren’t necessarily as disconnected from the plot as this one is. I suppose I should have been keeping notes on this, but I wasn’t, alas. In any event, this feature interests me because it’s characteristic of the Indiana Jones films and, in the case of The Temple of Doom, the precredit sequence is better than the film itself. The disconnected pre-credit sequence is also a feature of the delightful True Lies, which is somewhat of a parody of the spy-adventure film, perhaps even a comic critique of it.
That’s the first three Bond films, all with Sean Connery as Bond. He established Bond as a film character and was its best incarnation. If you’ve never seen any of the Bond films, watch these three, perhaps starting with From Russia with Love. After that I suggest you watch one of the Daniel Craig films (Skyfall, but I’m not sure it makes much difference), the most recent incarnation of Bond, and one of the Pierce Brosnan films (GoldenEye?), the penultimate Bond. After that, watch as you please. Roger Moore played Bond in seven films, more than any other. Some of the films were OK (perhaps Live and Let Die, with its Paul McCartney theme song), some were awful. He was the fourth Bond. Timothy Dalton played Bond in two films; he was the third Bond. George Lazenby was the second Bond, and had only one film.
It was a minor feature of that one film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), that gave me the idea of writing something about Bond. The great Louis Armstrong shows up on the soundtrack singing a love ballad, “We Have All the Time in the World,” that was written for the film. It serves as the backdrop for Bond's courtship of the woman he rescues from suicide (Diana Rigg) in the opening segment. The song also appears over the end credits of the most recent (and likely the last) Bond film (he dies at the end), No Time to Die. There’s more to the film than Satchmo on the soundtrack and recent opinion ranks it as one of the best Bond films. I concur.
That leaves me with a last set of remarks. Bond kills a lot of people in these films, and he does it well. Others kill people too and many of them are expert at it. That is, it’s not just the killing, it’s the expertise in the craft. Why? I don’t think it’s sufficient to point out that, after all, death is a signal feature of human existence, one that’s the source of a great deal of anxiety and grief. How do we get from that fact to the appearance of death in so many of our stories?
And Bond, he’s not only expert in killing. He’s also a womanizer. Is that combination a mere contingency or is it central to the franchise’s appeal?