Tag: James Bond

I saw my first movie in a theater since late 2019 last night. The reviews were decent enough and the Covid numbers here falling fast enough that I felt comfortable going to see No Time To Die with my brother-in-law. Four other people had the same idea, so we had plenty of room to ourselves and felt perfectly safe.

I don’t think I’ve seen a James Bond movie in a theater since some time in the Pierce Brosnan days. Daniel Craig’s final appearance as Bond seemed like a good reason to break that run.

Bond movies can never be evaluated like normal films. There are certain boxes that have to be checked, certain allowances that are granted for the quality of the story, and certain expectations that need to be met in order for a Bond movie to be considered a success.

No Time To Die meets a lot of those requirements.

Before I dive deeper, this is your official spoiler alert. I’m not going to go into great detail about the movie, but I am going to mention one very important moment in the film, one of the most shocking and controversial in the entire James Bond franchise. If you plan on seeing the movie, it might be better to bookmark this until later if you’ve not had that moment spoiled for you already.

In fact, let’s get right to it: the ending blew me away. No pun intended. I had, somehow, managed to avoid hearing how the movie concluded. I’m glad that was the case, because I think the impact would have been greatly reduced had I known it was coming.

So, spoiler, James Bond dies. Unable to get off a disputed island before a missile strike he called in arrives, our final view of him is being engulfed in fire and smoke as the weapons rain down upon him. I was not expecting this! I’ve read a few reviews since I watched the movie and people seem very torn about that scene. I thought it was great, mostly because it was completely shocking to me. Bond movies have never made me emotional. But I was speechless and open-mouthed as I realized that James Bond had died.

I think that could be a hugely freeing moment for whatever comes next in the series. It gives future writers and directors a chance to completely reset the franchise however they want with whoever is the next Bond. (Why not go back in time to the Cold War days, for example? Or begin with an origin story of his days in the Navy?) And since the Daniel Craig era ended up having strong plot connections through each movie (or at least four of them), they can look at the next X movies as an opportunity to tell an extended story with one actor. They don’t have to kill off the next Bond when his time ends. But it does give them the opportunity, if they want it, to think more about that smaller pocket of 3–5 movies than worrying about how they are honoring the previous 25.

In general, I think NTTD looked good. The cinematography was gorgeous, although the lighting seemed a little off on our screen which was distracting. There was plenty of action. The opening scene in Italy, which concludes with Bond and Madeleine in an absolutely ridiculous car chase in his Aston Martin DB5 was so good it kind of ruined the later chase scenes. That was one of the best chase scenes ever in a Bond film.

Speaking of Aston Martin, the DB5 is an all-time classic movie car. But I was also a huge fan of them bringing back the V8 Vantage, which Timothy Dalton also drove in The Living Daylights. That’s a dope-ass car.

Another of the best scenes in the movie was when Bond was fighting his way to the control tour of the submarine base to open up the missile doors. The segment when he is in the stairwell, shooting at and being shot at by guys mere feet away, was super intense. There was a 60–90 second sequence that was shot and edited so tightly it felt a little like a single-shot scene. The entire Craig era has been defined by attempting to match the level of action found in the Jason Bourne series. The opening construction site scene in Casino Royale was perhaps the strongest counter to the Bourne movies. This was a fine, final, close combat scene for the Craig era.

Rami Malek’s villain Lyutsifer Safin was not one of my favorites. He seemed a little flat and lacked menace. His submarine base was a call back to classics like Dr. No and You Only Live Twice. Shame his character didn’t match the creepy villains of those older movies.

Safin using a biological agent to attempt to kill a large chunk of the world’s population was a little extra creepy, though, in the age of Covid, though.

A common complaint of the Craig era is how dour it has been. Traditionalists argue that the way he played Bond was far closer to how Ian Fleming wrote the character than what it became on film. I loved Daniel Craig, but I could have used some more levity. My prediction is that whoever the next Bond is, and whatever direction they take the series, there will be more cheekiness than in the Craig years.

That said, Ana de Armas’ Paloma was a shot of brightness this movie needed. Almost everything she did made me laugh. It’s a shame she was only in about 10 minutes of the film.

Her role also showed another way the franchise has grown to match the broader cinema world. de Armas looked GREAT. But it was totally believable that she was absolutely kicking ass. It wasn’t cartoony the way, say, Grace Jones was in A View to a Kill, but rather closer to something you would expect from Charlize Theron.

I’m sure some people are all worked up about Bond’s in-movie replacement as 007 being a Black woman. I’m guessing some of those arguments go along the lines of “She could never really do that.” Well, you know what? Daniel Craig could never do most of things he’s doing as James Bond, either, without the help of editing, stunt men, and CGI. It’s fiction, folks.

The other controversial moment was the reveal that Bond has a child. That didn’t bother me. I mean, “James Bond” has had a lot of sex over the past 60-ish years. Odds are he has a kid here and there. Plus it was part of the mechanics needed to set up Bond’s final decision of the movie, so I thought it worked.

One review I read, by a writer who is a year older than me, pointed out this is the last time James Bond will be older than people our age. Oh, snap! That sucks! Daniel Craig does give hope to us in our early 50s that if we put the work in, our bodies don’t have to fall apart.

I thought the movie was a little long. I went in knowing that I would be in the theater for nearly three hours once the previews were added in. The movie seemed to move pretty well, but there were a few lag points that could have been tightened up to cut 10–15 minutes from the final run time. It didn’t help that the theater we went to did not have the most comfortable or adjustable seats I’ve ever sat in.

I would give No Time To Die a solid 3.5 stars. I do wonder if it is a movie that will improve on multiple viewings, especially when you can split those viewings up into shorter segments. My rating suffers a little because Daniel Craig made two of the best Bond films ever in Casino Royale and Skyfall, movies that will be tough for any future Bond to match. NTTD was also not an embarrassment like Roger Moore’s and Pierce Brosnan’s final installments in the series. Maybe not all the chances taken worked, but most of them did. And that sets this apart from so many movies in a series that too often follows the same checklist just with different names and places attached to it.

NTTD also locks in Craig as, at worst, the second best Bond ever. And I think he has a strong argument for being the best Bond. It’s tough to compare him to Sean Connery both because both their styles and the times they acted in were so different. However, none of the other actors who have played James Bond made the role theirs as successfully as Connery and Craig did.

Finally! I not only watched a Bond movie for the first time in ages, but I knocked out the most recent one. The same movie I nearly saw in the theaters upon its initial release 18 months ago. The same movie I nearly bought the day it was released on disk. The same movie that has been in my Netflix queue for months.

Better late than never, right?

I forget how I did these in the past, so forgive me if I’ve strayed from the format I’ve used before, or if it’s extra disjointed. I’m out of practice.

So to quickly reset, Daniel Craig took over the role in Casino Royale and, as the kids say, ripped shit up. It was a stunning introduction to the newest Bond. Craig’s next movie, Quantum Of Solace suffered due to a writers strike, but wasn’t terrible.

From moment one of Skyfall, we’re reminded of exactly how Craig has made Bond his own. He strides into a room, jaw clenched, pistol ready, menace radiating from his body. That continues throughout. Never, for a moment, is there any confusion as to which Bond we are seeing. And even now, in his third movie, it is remarkable.

A persistent theme of Skyfall is age. People grow older, skills diminish, old ways are found to be inefficient. Technology, meanwhile, advances, making the impossible accessible; easy, even. That theme is addressed directly at times, notably in how Bond isn’t getting any younger.

But I especially enjoyed the subtle comparison to the old days in the moments when MI6 and Q are able to track Bond’s every movement in real-time. Long gone are the days when Bond flies off to some tropical locale for a mission while the higher ups in London sit back and hope for the best until word of success or failure arrives. Now, he is never off the grid. Unless he turns back the clock and chooses to be, of course…

I remember hearing, when Skyfall was released, how it wasn’t just a great Bond movie, but it was flat out a great movie. It’s certainly not Best Film Oscar material, but that assessment fits. It isn’t just about the story or acting, though. This is a wonderfully directed movie. It is gorgeous to watch. Sam Mendes takes the innate colors of the cities the story rolls through and makes them integral to the picture. Dreary, gray (or grey in this case) London is suddenly made cool by sexy black cars and stylish, athletic people dressed in blueish hues. Shanghai is lit up in glorious Asian pastels. There is a thickness to the scenes shot in the London Underground.

It’s not just color that makes this movie look gorgeous, though. Two scenes in particular, both on trains coincidentally, are fantastically shot. In the opening battle on top of a train, the cameras are kept away from the action. We view the fight through trees and passing landscape. Rarely are the fighters in clear, high definition view, adding to the drama. When Bond is pursuing Silva through a London tube train, the view is compact and crowded, mimicking the feel of being on a rush hour train. These are simple things, but both well done.

Villain

Javier Bardem as Raoul Silva

Sometimes Bond villains are so silly you can’t take them seriously. This one, though, is spot on, as a Brit would say. There is the perfect motivation for his evil. He has the perfect plan of attack, a clever, technology-based thrust aimed right at MI6 and M rather than at the broader world. And Bardem is fantastic. Silva is an odd fucking duck, to put it crudely. But not in a cartoony way. You can sense both his original brilliance and his current madness in every scene. He’s an unsettling man to watch. And his entry speech is one of the better introductions to a Bond villain in the series’ history.

Bond Girls

Bérénice Marlohe as Sévérine.

A thoroughly delightful companion for Silva. Creepy and odd, but crazy sexy at the same time. I approve.

Naomie Harris as Eve Moneypenny.

Nothing wrong with a British sister kicking some ass. And that accent! Whoo! A bit underused, but it all comes together at the end. She’s Moneypenny! While the original Moneypenny could never have been a field agent, it’s fun to think that her competency and strength were born in field duty rather than just good, old fashioned British fortitude. A lovely way to set up the next few movies. Oh, and that shaving scene was special.

Theme

Choosing Adele to sing the title song for a Bond movie made in 2012 was a no-brainer. Like using Sheena Easton in 1981, it was perfect for the time. The song? Not bad. Not bad at all. But given her ubiquity in the two-plus years leading up to the movie, I don’t know that the song is particularly memorable.

Quotes

Several good quotes I jotted down.

“Gun and radio…”
“Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don’t really go for that anymore.”

A nice bit in the first encounter between Bond and the new, shockingly young, Q. Another sign that these are better movies that those of the past eras. They don’t need gimmick weapons to grab your interest.

“What makes you think this is my first time?”

Brilliant line by Bond when Silva caresses him in a rather suggestive, sexual manner. What made it brilliant wasn’t that you couldn’t imagine Connery or Moore saying it. Times were different, and if they said it, they would be sure to say so with a grin just to make sure everyone knew they had never even thought about having a gay experience. But Craig says it so matter-of-factly that, given the rest of his Bond’s personality, you think, “Yeah, I can see him doing that if it meant success in a mission.”

“That’s a waste of good scotch”

Bond after Silva kills Sévérine when attempting to shoot a shot glass of scotch off her head. A weeeeee bit tasteless, but also shows the cold heartedness of this Bond perfectly.

“How safe do you feel?”

M to the parliament council questioning her. A very interesting, if subtle, point made during our Age of Intelligence Gathering, for lack of a better phrase. Do you want MI6 (and the NSA) snooping, or do you want another 9/11 seems to be her argument. A question that will continue to be addressed for a long time.

Other Tidbits

Lovely to see the Aston-Martin DB5 return. That is a dead sexy car. And perfect placement, as Bond and M go off-the-grid, and leave behind the modern trappings. A terrific little retro-Bond music as they cruise away from London. And then the subtle dig by M, “It’s not very comfortable, is it?”

Speaking of M, I like that they killed off Judi Dench’s M rather than just brought in a new M, unexplained, in the next movie. And the introduction of Ralph Fiennes as the new M was perfect. He begins as a know-nothing, bureaucratic antagonist, proves himself in the line of fire – with a combat record to boot – and then slides as the new M. Well done one both ends.

People were right. This is a fantastic movie. It is Bond for smart people. Yes, there is violence and action. But there’s also an intelligent story that limits the ridiculous, completely implausible twists. Other than the standard hero beating the odds stuff, most of the movie you think, “That could happen…”

The story is less about brute force than about learning to combine old tools and new to solve cases before too many people are harmed. It’s almost a techno-thriller And rather than the old “ends justify the means” attitude, it addresses the times we live in and how we operate spy programs when we’re not sure who the bad guys are.

And they finish it off with a glorious orgy of ridiculous, over-the-top, military violence. Hey, it’s not perfect.

But it is very good. Certainly one of the Best Bond movies ever.

Bond is back! After a long, long break, I finally dove into Pierce Brosnan’s first turn as Bond, GoldenEye, Tuesday night. Strangely, as I got deeper and deeper into the flick, I realized that I had never seen the entire movie. I’ve seen the beginning many times, and parts of the rest, but there were parts I’m sure I never saw. Weird, because I remember being pretty excited about the new era of Bond back in 1995.

After a lengthy delay due to various legal issues, Timothy Dalton jumped ship before serving as Bond for the third time. Which gave the production team a chance to finally get the man they’d coveted for 15 years, Brosnan. Fair or not, the failure to get Brosnan when Roger Moore retired doomed Dalton’s run before it began. So it’s safe to say there was a fair amount of pressure on Brosnan to deliver. For the most part, he did.

We open in the Soviet Union, in the mid-80s. Bond fearlessly runs across the top of a massive dam, hooks a line to the railing, and leaps over the side. Soon he is crawling around the interior of a chemical weapons plant, where he meets up with his partner, 006. They are placing explosives to blow the joint when they are discovered. 006 is murdered but 007, of course, makes a daring escape. On his way out, he chases a runaway aircraft, which hurtles over a cliff into the massive valley below. He leaps, somehow catches up, pulls himself in, takes the stick, and pulls the plane up at the last second.

We’re in good Bond territory here, with three levels of unrealism going on. 1) His single-handed escape from a heavily armed weapons plant. 2) The whole catching/saving the plane thing. 3) How he manages to get home safely from deep inside the Soviet Union in just a single propellor plane. Which is all fine. It feels like home again.

Brosnan isn’t the only big change, though. Soon we meet the new M, Judi Dench. She’s not just a new actor in the role, M has been redefined for the age. Where the old M came from the world of spooks, the new M is an accountant and pours through the numbers to justify missions. As with baseball today, the British intelligence service was split between the numbers people and the tools people in 1995. Maybe that’s where Michael Lewis got the inspiration for Moneyball!

Good old Q is still around and Bond drives a gorgeous Aston Martin DB5 early on. Joe Don Baker, who was evil guy Brad Whitaker in The Living Daylights, returns as CIA agent Jake Wade this time. I like him better as a good guy than a bad guy, unless he’s being Chief Karlin. So we’ve got some solid connections to the past as well.

Bond is off to France and then St. Petersburg, chasing the bad guys, unwrapping the mystery, and eventually saving the day. As well as Brosnan does as Bond, the movie as a whole feels uneven. There are a few high points, but through much of the movie, I was wondering how the hell the pieces were supposed to fit together.

Sean Bean is forgettable as Alec Trevelyan/006. For all the areas where this movie pushes the franchise forward, it got a pretty boring villain.

Bond Girls

Izabella Scorupco as Natalya Simonova. We need more computer programers like her. Beautiful, modern, and fearless. A solid addition to the Bond Girl world.

Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp. From the Wikipedia: “A sadist, she enjoys torturing her enemies between her strong thights.” Awwww yeah! Onatopp is just the latest update on the psycho villain Bond Girl archetype. As our culture was beginning to become hyper-sexualized with the rise of the Internet, Onatopp is a perfect woman for the times. Her overt sexuality and brutality is way beyond what we’ve ever seen from an evil Bond girl in the past. For that alone, she’s one of the most memorable ones in the franchise’s history.

And for that, she deserved a better ending. Her demise is far too quick and easy.

Also a cameo by an about-to-breakout Minnie Driver as a singer in a St. Petersburg strip club. I hate to be that guy, but I was disappointed she kept her top on for the scene.

So what did I think about the movie? I like Brosnan as Bond quite a bit. He certainly looks the part and has a nice blend of suave sophistication and believability as a physical actor. That said, his performance feels a little forced at times. Not as in it being a stretch for him, but more than he’s playing the shit out of Bond to make up for lost time.

The supporting cast is mostly good. But there are a few gaps in the movie that distract quite a bit. The most notable is that explanation for how 006 made it from 1986 to 1995. There are other smaller ones though that kept making me think, “Wait, what?”

When the problems with the movie are in the story rather than the actor, that’s progress for the series though. Dalton tried hard but just wasn’t right for the job. Brosnan was the perfect man.

A couple other things:

There are two notable references to other movies. When Bond tells 006 that he’s nothing more than a common thief, that’s a straight pull from Die Hard. And the scene where 006 and 007 hang from the antenna support in Cuba is clearly cribbed from The Empire Strikes Back.

How many Bond movies have ended with an evil lair in flames? A lot, I bet.

There were a couple mentions of the Internet, which I bet a lot of people still knew nothing about in 1995.

Surely an evil genius computer programmer would use passwords more difficult to crack than “knackers” and “seat” for his most important programs, right?

Finally, remember when you could talk about Guantanamo Bay and it meant safety and freedom?

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I suppose it says volumes of the Timothy Dalton era that it’s taken me nearly three months to watch his two movies. In my defense the holidays, and the Christmas movie season, were right in the middle of that stretch. And the copy of The Living Daylights our library has is scratched so badly the disk does not play after 45 minutes. But still, there was not much enthusiasm about getting through these two films.

A quick refresher on how we got here. Roger Moore finally retired, even though EON wanted him back for two more (!) Bond films. I’m not sure what the hell they were thinking.

Eventually Welsh actor Timothy Dalton was selected to take over the role. The same man who turned down the part in 1967 because he felt he was too young to play Bond, and again in the late 70s because he didn’t like the direction the series had taken. Dalton was the first choice to replace Moore again in 1987, but turned it down a third time because of previous commitments. That led EON to Pierce Brosnan, who accepted the role, only to have to renege after NBC refused to let him out of his contract. By the time the Brosnan drama had played out, Dalton was free of his obligations, and finally accepted the role of 007.

Whew. Now on to the movies.

The Living Daylights

The producers took pains to drive home the point that Bond was still Bond as Timothy Dalton took the reins. He parachuted. He skied. He rode horses. He flew planes. I’m not sure how they didn’t get him into the water, but that would come soon enough.

What struck me most about Dalton’s first effort was how he was indeed taking Bond a new direction. Gone was the easy, eye-winking humor of the Moore era. It was not, though, replaced with a return to the brutal masculinity of the Connery era. He was still a secret agent, licensed to kill. But he seemed more vulnerable. And, in contrast to Daniel Craig’s Bond who is also vulnerable but hard and dangerous as well, Dalton comes across as soft. He stares, doe-eyed at his love interest. When he is angry or direct with others, it feels forced. I think Dalton was probably too nice a guy to play a cold-blooded killer like Bond.

The only truly memorable scene is late in the movie, as Bond fights bad guys on a Soviet cargo plane flying over Afghanistan. When he and nemesis Necros are hanging out the back on a cargo net, it’s pretty spectacular. But that’s kind of it.

Bond Girls

Maryam d’Abo as Kara Milovy. If you’re going to pin the Bond Girl hopes on one actress, she better be a doozy. In all ways. D’Abo is pretty, intelligent, and I’m sure a fine actress and person. She lacks the chops, though, to carry the tradition of the greats who came before her. Trivia: her cousin, Olivia d’Abo played Karen Arnold on The Wonder Years.

It wasn’t the worst of the series, but in The Living Daylights, Dalton does not offer much hope that he’s going to return it to its glory days.

License to Kill

OH NOOOOEEESSSS! James Bond has gone rogue!

Or so they want us to think. After buddy Felix Leiter is horribly maimed, and Leiter’s new wife murdered, by a Latin drug lord, James Bond has his 00-status yanked as he refuses orders and instead marches off to bring Franz Sanchez to justice.

Ugh. It’s one thing for a Bond movie to miss because of a bad story. It’s another when the whole thing feels half-assed. And that’s the case here. The acting from most of the secondary actors is horrendous. The plot feels ripped from an episode of Miami Vice, which was well past its prime by the time this came out. The stunts stray far into unbelievable territory. There are hackneyed moments, as when a bunch of locals just happen to be walking down the road when Bond and the bad guys come barreling down the hill. They might even have the fakest looking stunt shark in the history of stunt sharks.

It was so bad that I began questioning every part of the movie.

Why the hell is Bond Felix Leiter’s best man? Aren’t they just professional acquaintances?
Would they really divert from the wedding to help catch a drug dealer rather than let the DEA take care of it?
Would a drug dealer really flew from authorities in a plane that could be caught by a Coast Guard helicopter?
Would a factory containing a highly volatile mix of cocaine and gasoline be be constructed so a single match in a laboratory would send the whole thing up in flames?
Would someone really shoot a Stinger missile at a plane that was ten feet away and hope to survive?

Oh, and we get submarines and underwater action!

It’s a train wreck.

Perhaps no other actor looked the part of a Latin drug kingpin more than Robert Davi, so kudos for bringing him in.

A young Benicio Del Toro exudes menace as Davi’s main enforcer.

Any Wayne Fucking Newton as a televangelist! I admit, that was inspired.

But everything else about this movie sucks.

Here’s the other thing I found odd. There is a graphic shark attack. A man’s head explodes on camera. Another drops into a pulverizing machine, spraying Bond with a bloody mist. And somehow this only got a PG-13 rating. In 1989. I bet if they showed some tits, though, it would have been slapped with an R. Because breasts are way more damaging to people than violence.

Bond Girls

Carey Lowell as Pam Bouvier. And now we’re back to the Bond Girls who can kick some ass on their own. Bouvier was an army pilot and can handle a weapon. She also has has very long legs. Which we get to see often. Kudos.

Talisa Soto as Lupe Lamora. Lloyd Cole & The Commotions have a song called “Perfect Skin” I believe it was written for Soto.

A solid 1-2 punch on the girl side of things.

Trivia: this movie was originally titled License Revoked, but producers worried that Americans didn’t know what revoked meant. I’m not sure I buy that, but that’s the story.

Dalton was contracted for two more movies, but because of various delays, he was able to escape from his contract after License. Which is probably a good thing. I don’t think you can say his run was a disaster, a la George Lazenby’s. There are moments in The Living Daylights that work. But Dalton seemed ill-suited for the role, despite his physical appearance. He did have his moment in the sun, though.

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There are times in every man’s life when he must undertake a specific challenge: watch all the Bond movies. Some men are even more ambitious, endeavoring to read all the Bond novels as well.

Friends, it is time for me to climb this mountain.

This is not my first attempt at Mt. Bond. I believe it was the summer of 1986, the summer in which I turned 15 and still relied on my parents for transportation, that I acquired a stack of Bond books at a used bookstore and spent hours on our deck reading them in the Midwestern heat and humidity. The movies were tougher to catch back then, but I would scan the TV section of the paper each Sunday to see if ABC or TBS would be showing any over the coming week.

But, like most summer plans, this one fell apart in the dog days of August and when school began in the fall, i was off to other things.

A couple years later, when we had more movie channels and you could expect to grab a few Bonds movies a month with your VCR, I built a small stack of VHS tapes with several of the movies. But, again, it was not a project I could complete.

In time, my interest in Bond waned. I caught a couple of the new movies in theaters, but when I ran across the old ones on cable, I would watch for a minute or two, chuckle at their primitiveness, and move on.

Still, it was like a childhood scar that sometimes itched, and when I scratched it the memories of those past immersions poured forth.

What caused this latest flareup of the old itch? Partially it was completing >The Wire and wanting to move on to another viewing project. Also, the hosts of a technology podcast I listen to have been watching and reviewing a Bond movie each week. Listening to them discuss the details of the classic early films set me on my path.

The big dilemma, as I began, was how to handle the books/films split. The movies were not produced in the same order as Ian Fleming’s novels. Should I read the novels in order, to get the proper exposure to Bond’s backstory? Or should I read them in concert with the films? I chose the latter path, mostly because it seems like if you’re going to undertake a Bond project, you really need to begin with “Dr. No” and not “Casino Royale” since it was the movies that made Bond a world phenomenon.

That long-winded intro leads us to what I did last week: read “Dr. No” Monday through Wednesday, then watched the movie Wednesday night.

I thoroughly enjoyed both. I’ve read the book before, and who knows how many times I’ve seen the movie, so everything was familiar. Yet there were enough details that had faded over time that it was still enjoyable to rediscover them.

I won’t write detailed reviews of the series as I go through it, but I do want to offer a few observations of each movie and each Bond girl.¹

When you watch the oldest of the Bond movies, the production value is easy to laugh at. The sets look cheap and basic. The car chases cheesy, with the projection of the trailing vehicle on a screen behind an image of Bond filmed in a studio. The overdubbed voices of many characters. Night scenes clearly shot during the day with heavy filters over the camera lens.

The sexism and racism I write off to very different times. These movies were never trying to make social statements, but rather reflective of how much of the world operated at the time. Thank goodness we have evolved a little since then.

That said, few things in movie history have been cooler than Sean Connery as Agent 007, of course. He was a baaaaaaad man. The cinema Bond was a far more confident man than the one of the books. In the novels, there are always moments of self-doubt, when Bond questions whether he’s made the right choice and if he can extricate himself from his predicament. Not of that doubt is present in the movies.

As for the Bond girls, Ursula Andress, as Honey Ryder, emerging from the sea is the enduring image of the movie and perhaps the most iconic image of the series. She was a baaaaaaaad woman, setting a difficult bar for later Bond girls to reach. Somewhat lost in Andress’ glow are two other impressive Bond women. Zena Marshall plays the exotic Miss Taro. And Eunice Gayson plays the glamorous and aggressive Sylvia Trench, who after battling Bond at the baccarat table, seeks more games. We’ll hear from her again. A promising start for horndogs everywhere.

Dr. No is a fine kickoff for the Bond franchise. The story lags a bit at points, and there is some era-based silliness in the writing and production. But all-in-all, it’s an entertaining flick.

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