Bond, James Bond

Who was the best Bond?

  • Total voters
    8
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Corpsey said:
Did you enjoy the Bond films before you became aware of their historical context, Craner?
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Well they're quite violent, are often shot in beautiful locations, and tend to feature a lot of very classy, fit, well-dressed birds with a wide assortment of accents, so...
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
My grandmother took me to see View to a Kill in the cinema, and I thought it was wicked. I enjoy watching the Roger Moore ones in the same way I enjoy watching Smokey and the Bandit.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
The Italian ones are better, though, like I say, because they take all the attractive and repulsive elements of the Bond originals and dial them up.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Last year (or the year before) I read Casino Royale in Cyprus and found it perfect poolside fodder.

Also it portrayed Bond as a sadistic, misanthropic, misogynistic psycho.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Here's the autograph story, btw:

"As a seven-year-old in about 1983, in the days before First Class Lounges at airports, I was with my grandad in Nice Airport and saw Roger Moore sitting at the departure gate, reading a paper. I told my granddad I'd just seen James Bond and asked if we could go over so I could get his autograph. My grandad had no idea who James Bond or Roger Moore were, so we walked over and he popped me in front of Roger Moore, with the words "my grandson says you're famous. Can you sign this?"


As charming as you'd expect, Roger asks my name and duly signs the back of my plane ticket, a fulsome note full of best wishes. I'm ecstatic, but as we head back to our seats, I glance down at the signature. It's hard to decipher it but it definitely doesn't say 'James Bond'. My grandad looks at it, half figures out it says 'Roger Moore' - I have absolutely no idea who that is, and my hearts sinks. I tell my grandad he's signed it wrong, that he's put someone else's name - so my grandad heads back to Roger Moore, holding the ticket which he's only just signed.
I remember staying by our seats and my grandad saying "he says you've signed the wrong name. He says your name is James Bond." Roger Moore's face crinkled up with realisation and he beckoned me over. When I was by his knee, he leant over, looked from side to side, raised an eyebrow and in a hushed voice said to me, "I have to sign my name as 'Roger Moore' because otherwise...Blofeld might find out I was here." He asked me not to tell anyone that I'd just seen James Bond, and he thanked me for keeping his secret. I went back to our seats, my nerves absolutely jangling with delight. My grandad asked me if he'd signed 'James Bond.' No, I said. I'd got it wrong. I was working with James Bond now.


Many, many years later, I was working as a scriptwriter on a recording that involved UNICEF, and Roger Moore was doing a piece to camera as an ambassador. He was completely lovely and while the cameramen were setting up, I told him in passing the story of when I met him in Nice Airport. He was happy to hear it, and he had a chuckle and said "Well, I don't remember but I'm glad you got to meet James Bond." So that was lovely.
And then he did something so brilliant. After the filming, he walked past me in the corridor, heading out to his car - but as he got level, he paused, looked both ways, raised an eyebrow and in a hushed voice said, "Of course I remember our meeting in Nice. But I didn't say anything in there, because those cameramen - any one of them could be working for Blofeld."
I was as delighted at 30 as I had been at 7. What a man. What a tremendous man."
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craner

craner

Beast of Burden
craner said:
The Italian ones are better, though, like I say, because they take all the attractive and repulsive elements of the Bond originals and dial them up.
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e.g.

I watched Secret Agent Fireball, aka The Spies Kill in Beirut, an early, tawdry Italian Eurospy entry directed by Luciano Martino and written by giallo-meister Ernesto Gastaldi. This is a passable piece of 1965 rubbish distinguished by three things:

1) Richard Harrison’s Agent 077 (Robert Fleming), a truly repellent individual with lizard eyes and mean, thin lips; a cheap pick-pocket, lecherous slob, probable rapist; an uncultivated, nihilistic, White Trash thug whose one-liners make James Bond look like Noel Coward. He’s such a toxic character you keep hoping the comical Russian spies slip some polonium into his Scotch before he sexually violates poor Dominique Boschero.

2) The movie gets markedly more interesting when it relocates to Beirut as, by all evidence (for example, Fleming’s arrival at the real Beirut Airport) this was shot on location. In other words, you get a lot of fascinating footage of Lebanon in the 1960s, a more civilized time in the region when Beirut was still just about clinging onto its status as the Paris of the Middle East. The landscapes, incidental details and exotic cultural marginalia almost immediately start to overshadow the film going on all around.

3) Wandisa Guida’s turn as a deadpan, lethal Soviet blonde in black leather and/or various mink and cashmere combinations, is terrific. Guida is one of those Italian genre actresses who was cast in a bunch of Peplum films and costume epics and just about survived in into the Eurospy cycle without going any further. You cannot imagine her in the lurid, extreme world of the gialli at all.
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Is this a recurring theme in all Bond films are just the latest - the homoerotic relationship between Bond and the arch villain?

 
luka

luka

Well-known member
they teach subtext and queer theory in film school now I guess.
 
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craner

craner

Beast of Burden
Have you watched the Piers Brosnan ones lately? It's amazing that these films were hailed at the time as being a return to the "good" Bond films of the 1960s because they are probably the worst films ever made. I can only put it down to that ludicrous, cocaine-fueled overconfidence and narcissism of the mid/late 1990s British pop culture. It's like the inferiority complex of the Connery films further congealed, transforming into toxic slime.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Isn't Goldeneye quite good?

They got worse and worse and the last one with Halle Barrie in it was possibly the nadir of Western Civilization.
 
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