I will start a James Bond thread now , despite just having read Henry's comments in the Spidey thread regarding his boyhood acquisition of a complete set of thepaperbacks 2nd-hand .
This month's VANITY FAIR has a cover-blurbed article about the 50th anniversary of the movies , so...........
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Whatta ya mean "despite"? I'm always up for "007" discussion! : )
...Well , the thought that I should put it there !!!!!!!!!!!
I'm not sure why, but recently people at work have been having "Who's the Best James Bond" discussions. Have there been contests or blogs asking about this recently?
I thought we had already covered this territory when Pierce Brosen vacated the role.
I must say though, that I preferred a movie with a very memorable them song... whether it's GoldGinger, Diamonds are Forever, You Only Live Twice or Live and Let Die.
Now that I've got that off my chest, has anyone seen that recent movie (1980s or 1990s) called "The Secret Life of Ian Flemming"? I understand that it's an account of Ian Flemming's intellegence operation during the war or post war period, and has a lot of shared names with the 007 world... Moneypenny, M, Goldeneye, etc. Can anyone give a critique of it?
There were actually 2 different movies, both purporting to be biolgraphies of Ian Fleming. The 1st (I think) was called GOLDENEYE. (Not the Pierce brosanan film!! I'm not kidding.) The other was THE SECRET LIFE OF IAN FLEMING.
GOLDENEYE is split almost 50-50 between Fleming's time in British Intelligence and afterward, while SECRET LIFE, if memory serves, is entirely focused on British Intelligence. "Chronologically", it seems one could watch GOLDENEYE 2nd, as it covers more of his later life, but SECRET LIFE is a slicker film, better-made. Without looking it up, I believe Joss Acklund plays the Nazi villain in the film, who (allegedly) could be seen as the inspiration for Blofeld, and is responsible (indrectly, unintentionally) for the death of the woman Fleming loved who also worked for the service, in the offices. The idea seems to be that the one real love of Fleming's life was killed, which is why his actual later marriage was never all that happy. Fleming essentially ate, drank & smnoked himself to death, and the prolonged LAWSUIT over the THUNDERBALL property no doubt sped up his early demise. It seems the height of irony that he died JUST before GOLDFINGER hit theatres. It was the 3rd film, but like THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, the momentum had been building, and the 3rd fgilm was when it exploded wide open. James Bond became a HUGE world-wide phenomena, with tons of merchandising up the wazoo... and his creator totally missed it all by just a few months.
There were quite a few memorable theme songs in those films. Like when I first got into buying Beatles albums, I kept being surprised when first watching the Bond movies, "Hey, I KNOW this song!" (from the radio).
I'm not sure why, but recently people at work have been having "Who's the Best James Bond" discussions. Have there been contests or blogs asking about this recently?
I imagine it's come up because it's the 50th anniversary and Bond was such a big icon in the Olympic's Opening Ceremony, which probably made him more visible, given that there's no movie out there right now.
Needless to say, Sean Connery was my favorite, but I like the idea that "James Bond" is a name that goes with the 007 license and is held by a sequence of agents. Kind of like Doctor Who. The current one never fought Goldfinger, but the fight did take place.
My favorites are ones with catchy theme songs, hot Bond girls (ie, ones I like) and a plausible plot. World conquerors working out of extinct volcanoes with a staff of 10,000 in jump suits is tough to suspend disbelief for, even for a guy who's read a lot of SA comics. I can turn off my brain and just go with it, but it has to be done with tongue in cheek, and James Bond is better when the drama parts matter.
Of course, a Golden Age helps. My favorites were Dr. No, Goldfinger and Thunderball, but I was the right age to be enthralled by those. The later ones wanted to just up the ante and get more goofy.
-- MSA
It's easy to miss it if you blink, but I had to see YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE a few times before I realized what they were up to and why. The Red Chinese paid SPECTRE to start a war between America & Russia. Then, SPECTRE doubled the payment demanded ("This is blackmail!" "Blackmail is my business..."). So, SPECTRE wasn't really out to take over the world... Red China was. But like I said, the scene is so brief, it can get lost if you're not paying attention.
In both of the remakes-- THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and MOONRAKER-- the villains were out to destroy the world, then take over what was left. Stromberg wanted to start a war, while Hugo Drax wanted to simply kill everyone on the planet with poison, so his genetically-engineerd "supermen" could take over.
MOONRAKER was always one of my favorite novels in the series. It's so straightforward, it's almost a shame they didn't use it as the basis for the FIRST movie. They could have saved on overseas location filming and put the money into a rocket launch set-up. Hugo Drax (my pick for casting would have been Howard Marion Crawford-- look him up!) was an industrialist making big waves about a British space program. But really, he was an escaped Nazi war criminal, who wanted to launch a missile with an atomic warhead to destroy London, and finish the job Hitler started. What a great plot! On re-reading the story in the comic-strip version, I was also reminded my pick for Gala Brand (the undercover police woman) would have been Honor Blackman. In that book, Bond doesn't get the girl... at the very end, he finds out she's already engaged!
I liked Moonraker, both film and original book. Read it recently in newspaper strip form, and enjoyed it again. I thought parts of the book were written almost visually for a film or television... especially the rock fall, the steam jets, and the radio/TV newscommentator voice over of the sub surfacing. (Coincidentially, I thought of the rockfall scene when John Byrne had Wanda drop the large rock cliff on Simon in Avengers:West Coast around the time of Darker than Scarlet... remember?
Another short straight forward book was the extremely thin "The Spy Who Loved Me"...
In some ways, it reads like a short story from the point of view of another bond girl...
and given the relatively short duration of the main action, it would only fit an hour television episode, I would think.
I liked her immediate recognition that Bond at the door is British from his use of puncture and boot (and later on...use if 'the torch')...
I have two funny memories of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"...
First, it was the last day of school at the Junior High School where I attended. Only seventh and eighth grades were together, with the last four grades reserved for the new high school building that had been built on the edge of town.
Since we had been told to remove the contents of our school lockers, many kids had left tons of loose leaf pages, notebooks and hand-outs all over the floors of the three story Junior high school. The carpet of papers flowed over and down the main staircase from third to second to first floors in the worst mess I have ever seen.
Books were being kicked around in this mess, and among them was a paperback book that I rescued and tucked into my back-pack. It was a white book with bold black block lettering on the cover..."On Her Majesty's Secret Service". I had no idea that the title was a James Bond story... until I got it home and started reading it. I don't recall if I had seen a James Bond double or tripple feature at the drive-in or main theatre in our town yet, but I caught right away that this took place after the events of Thunderball, and had seen that one, so I enjoyed it. That started me reading all the Ian Fleming books.
That was about the late spring of 1969 or 70.
Second-----SPOILER ALERT>>>>>>>>>>>>>
About that time, I also had heard a rumor that local 'bad girl' Sarah Conley had gone to the theatre and watched the film version of OHMSS...and in the critical ski chase scene where Bond jumps an open trench where a snowblower on the front of a train is clearing deep powdery snow from the train tracks,, one or two of the henchmen jumps in pursuit of Bond...and eventually one doesn't make it,. He falls back and is pulled into the whirling blades. The jet of blown snow turns from white to red as the gore is shot out... and Sarah Conley shouted out, "THERE GOES HIS MEAT!" Rumor had it that she was drunk at the time, but everyone heard the story and I still remember it to this day. I wonder if she's ever lived that down?!
...You're referring to the british newspaper strip version of James Bond , which ran for many years in the UK (and Continental countries as well , perhaps in comic book reprint form only - with some new material ?????????) , starting with very lengthy adaptations of the actual Fleming book and continuing into new stories , yes , Kirk ?????????
( Geessh - talk about 'cher expositional dialogeey :-) !!!!! )
Kirk G said:
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