Yesh Mish Monaypennay

Over on the podcast. Co-host Ghoul Mike and I have been watching through the James Bond films. I honestly didn’t mean for this to become a James Bond website, but between the podcast regularly revisiting the movies, and covering a ton of the old video games during this past Action Adventure April, it has become pretty James Bond heavy. Which is funny because, honestly, I don’t care that much about the series. It exists. I’ve watched through the series before (and I’m now watching it a second time). But I don’t feel the need very often to go back and revisit the films, especially not the older editions.

It’s a struggle for me because to get through the whole series you have to watch the Sean Connery era and, for good and for bad, Connery’s films pretty well set the template for the series. They are the standard, the formula upon which much of what was to come was built. When people complain about the films of the Roger Moore era, or how bad some of the Brosnan movies got, all I have to do is point over at the Sean Connery films and say, “and you think these are better? They’re not.”

Not that every Connery film is bad, mind you. It’s just that the whole of his era – which consists of five main movies, and then one return film, and then an unofficial reboot of one of his own films starring him again – is pretty darn uneven. The highs of his series are great, but there are some pretty low lows that drag the whole sequence down.

Things start well enough in Dr. No, which is about two-thirds of a good film. Bond is called in because a British agent in Jamaica is killed, and they need 007 to investigate. He heads in, does some light espionage, drinks, sleeps with a couple of women, and then discovers there’s a hidden island base where the nefarious Dr. No is doing nuclear research. Dr. No works for SPECTRE, and, as we learn, SPECTRE is bad, thus Dr. No is bad. Bond infiltrates the base, has a couple of near-miss deaths, defeats the bad guys, and gets to ride off into the sunset with a hot chick on his shoulder. It’s pure, male escapism, but packaged with a half-decent story and few of the pacing issues that would follow in the series.

With that said, the film is not without its flaws. Bond is a raging misogynist, which doesn’t play as poorly here as it will in later films but, still, the gender politics are clearly on display. He doesn’t care about the women he’s with, he just uses them to get his jollies in between action sequences. The action sequences themselves are just fine, largely hampered by an action, Connery, who wasn’t a great stunt performer alongside an over-reliance on rear projection screens to try and paper over shoddy action work. And all of this leads to a last act that completely falls apart, becomes its own parody right when it should have been getting good. Dr. No could be much better… but because it’s the first film you assume the series will learn from the mistakes here and do better after. And yet, not so much.

The next film was a real dog. From Russia with Love is a film that weirdly sets us a new formula for the series: slapping Bond into films where the plot would n naturally resolve itself without him regardless. Bond is called in to work with a double-agent from the Russian side, Tatiana Romanova, so the two can steal a Lekter cryptography device from the Russian consulate in Istanbul. But, little do they both realize this is all a SPECTRE plot to get MI6 to steal the Lekter so SPECTRE can then steal it from Bond, kill Bond in the process, and have the Lekter while blaming it all on MI6. It’s a fine idea for a plot, but it absolutely falls apart in execution.

The big issue is that Bond really doesn’t have any connection to the story. He’s called into a plot that’s already actively going on, with the Istanbul section chief, Ali Kerim Bey, already having a solid handle on the matter. Bond effectively comes in to play “white savior” while the Middle East guys do all the heavy lifting, sitting around, drinking, ogling girls, and sleeping with the Russian agent just because he can. He only steps in when Ali is killed by the SPECTRE agent, Grant, near the end of the film, finally forced to take matters into his own hands.

Honestly, if you didn’t add Bond into this film, From Russian with Love would be about British agent Ali Kerim Bey handling a matter of national security in Istanbul while SPECTRE tried to steal something that didn’t belong to them. Without Bond around, BNey would probably survive the film, and he’d be hailed as a hero. Everything would work out, and none of the machinations the film has to twist itself into would occur. It’s a James Bond film that doesn’t need the titular secret agent at the center of it all. That’s not a very good adventure.

Things take a lovely upswing, though, when we hit what is easily the best film of the Connery era… and, depending on who you ask, one of the best James Bond films ever. Goldfinger marks an absolute high point for the franchise in large part because it sidesteps so many of the series’ conventions that had already begun to solidify after just two films. It’s fresh and different and actually uses Bond’s skills as a secret agent to further the plotline, all while the agent plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with the villain. If only more films in the series could have this solid a handle on the character, setting, and story.

Bond is assigned to the case of Auric Goldfinger, a wealthy industrialist that MI6 suspects may be up to no good. From minute one, Bond and Goldfinger begin circling each other, taking potshots and playing games with the other all to see who has the great hand. Bond eventually is captured by Goldfinger (after watching not one but two Bond girls die in the process), taken to Goldfinger’s estate in Kentucky, and is forced to watch from the sidelines as the villain plots a scheme at Fort Knox. It’s only by turning one of Goldfinger’s own agents, Pussy Galore, that Bond is able to gain the upper hand and bring the whole scheme down.

Goldfinger is everything that From Russia with Love isn’t. It’s tight, it’s well plotted, and it moves at a solid clip. It uses Bond as the central character, and gives him plenty to do, all while pitting him against a villain that really seems capable. And, as a bonus, there’s absolutely no mention of SPECTRE, not even once. This film shows what you can do with the character when you put him on a mission and let him act like a spy. Who knew? It’s such a good film that, even all these decades later, it still largely holds up.

Unfortunately we then run aground after this as the series gives us a few more stinkers for Connery that never seem to let him rise to the occasion. We start with Thunderball, which is another SPECTRE story. Bond has to go up against a SPECTRE agent, Emilio Largo, who has stolen two nuclear warheads and plans to hold the world hostage with them. Largo is clearly molded to be another Goldfinger, a rich industrialist that can play a game of cat-and-mouse with Bond, but the story never gets there. It meanders, it wanders, and it lacks any sense of pace or momentum.

Largo has the bombs and just… sits around for days on end while Bond steadily moves in, takes away his girl, Domino, and then finds a way to ruin the whole plan. The movie simply doesn’t work because it can’t be both a SPECTRE movie and another Goldfinger, so it fails on both fronts. If Largo were a more interesting villain maybe that could have helped, but the fact is that the writers really didn’t have a grasp on why Goldfinger worked, they tried to copy their own notes, and then wrote something objectively worse in all respects. It leads to a real stinker of a film.

And yet, Thunderball is still better than the next movie in the series, You Only Live Twice, which seems to be a film where the writers said, “let’s make From Russian with Love except also more racist.” The film puts Bond in Japan to stop an evil SPECTRE scheme, run by SPECTRE’s top man, Blofeld, after SPECTRE manages to steal both a U.S. spacecraft and a Soviet one while they’re both in space, running missions. And then… war? The plot never really resolves itself, which is only half its issues.

This is a story where Bond doesn’t need to be in the film. He shows up to a plotline already in action, with a section chief, Tiger Tanaka, already working the operation. He has manpower, agents, and a whole team ready to go. Bond is just there to watch, sleep with women and, awkwardly, wear yellowface. And then the plot resolves itself in a way that really didn’t require Bond at all. He’s literally a third wheel in his own case, which indicates how little he was really needed at all.

The best part of this film is Donald Pleasance as Blofeld, as he gives a very hammy, scenery-chewing performance that I love. But even that isn’t enough to save a film that actively doesn’t care about its lead character, its story, or anything that’s going on. This is a rough watch, by any measure, and could easily be considered one of the worst films not just of the Connery era but for the James Bond series in general.

After You Only Live Twice, Connery retired from the role. EON Productions found a new actor to play Bond, George Lazenby, and by all accounts the plan was to have the actor play the role for a whole series of films. But Lazenby stepped away from the role after just a single movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (which we’ll discuss more in its own era retrospective), and instead of searching for yet another actor to play the main character, United Artists threw a bunch of money at Connery to lure him back one more time.

And that’s how we ended up with Diamonds Are Forever, a film that very awkwardly connects to what came before. The film itself isn’t terrible, as Bond is called in to thwart a diamond heist. It lets him play characters, sleep with a Bond girl (Tiffany Case), and do a decent bit of action and adventure. I’d actually say that the first half of the movie is honestly legitimately great. The problems start at about the halfway mark when the villain of the film is revealed to be Blofeld, who was supposedly killed at the start of the movie, and the film has to twist itself up to become a SPECTRE film when it was honestly doing pretty solid work as a heist movie. And it all runs out of gas before the final climax, ruining what started off as a great bit of fun.

But it’s when you take this film in the context of the whole series that it feels really awkward. This film came after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, wherein Lazenby’s Bond met a girl, Tracy, who he fell in love with and married only to watch her get gunned down by Blofeld in the last seconds of the film. Bond here, in Diamonds are Forever, doesn’t seem any the worse for the wear after the events of that movie. It’s just another Connery adventure, with everyone treating it as such. You would think Bond would still be carrying some baggage around after he watched the love of his life die, but Connery’s Bond doesn’t seem to care at all. It’s like that film never happened.

I don’t think Diamonds Are Forever would top anyone’s list of the best James Bond movies, but in the context of the whole series, where we’re supposed to take all the films into account, this film just doesn’t work. You either have to ignore On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as if it came from a different film series entirely, or you have to twist Bond himself around to be an unfeeling cad who really didn’t love Tracy at all. Neither option really works, and it drags this film down.

Oh, and there’s Never Say Never Again, which is literally a worse version of Thunderball. One of the writers on that film retained the rights to the story, and thus the connected characters, and he somehow got enough money together to remake the film and, even weirder, he lured Connery back one more time to play Bond in a remake of his own film. Never Say Never Again is a bad remake that’s only noteworthy because Connery, for some reason, returned to make it. Otherwise it rates as a worse version of Thunderball and, rightly, can be ignored.

So that makes one really solid film, one or two okay movies, and a lot of not very watchable dross. This is why it’s so hard to get into the series: you have to start with a lot of crap just to eventually (and we do mean eventually as you also have to dig through a lot of crap in the Roger Moore era) get to some pretty good films down the road. We can’t blame anyone for skipping this era, and many of the others, and treating Daniel Craig’s soft reboot as their starting point. Connery’s era is a tough watch.

But hey, we have five more eras to go. Things absolutely will get better from here, and in short order when we have the quickest era of them all, but in a way also the most tragic one as well…

Ranking Connery’s Films (Best to Worst):

1. Goldfinger
2. Dr. No
3. Diamonds Are Forever
4. Thunderball / Never Say Never Again
5. From Russia with Love
6. You Only Live Twice