Everything or Nothing: 007 from Worst to Best

Ranking the Bond movies is naturally a hazardous and completely subjective process. Some entries that I see as terrible are other viewers’ catnip, and vice versa. There are various articles on the web that involve some lucky dude eating fifty hours’ of their life working through the lot and feeding back, and the lists are never the same, which of course is a good thing. If we all felt the same, etc. But just to offer some context to this list, the aspects influencing my decision were:

1. Datedness
Cinematic 007 has a history stretching back more than fifty years, with literary traditions covering a further decade. 1953, the year Casino Royale was published, was a very different time to ours, featuring attitudes that we would rightly view as belonging with the dinosaurs, and some of this translated to Bond’s earlier cinematic outings. I’m not talking here about effects work. Most often, though notably not always, the technical craft behind even the earliest entries is top notch and deserves to be celebrated, and I feel a sense of affection for moments that perhaps show their age now. More problematic is the misogyny, racism and outright homophobia that raise their head – the idea, posited in Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever, that gay people are evil unless they can somehow be ‘converted’ to the light side by Bond’s administrations, is very worrying. The treatment of women, particularly during the long Moore years, reaches uncomfortable levels that bely any affection one might feel for the series. To some, all this may come across as a charming anachronism – it’s of its time, don’t let political correctness go mad, etc. Sorry, I don’t agree. I watch these films to be entertained, not to squirm.

2. Fantasy versus Spycraft
That these films often leave any credibility behind and lurch into entertaining tripe is a given; personally, I don’t think there’s any point in tackling this project if you judge these films on their realism, because often there isn’t any – that Smiley’s People set is for you. Goldfinger established Connery’s 007 as more or less a superhero, emerging from perils that would crush 99.9% of the viewers with a smile on his face and the toupee in beautiful order, and I think you need to accept the number of liberties these movies take, otherwise it just collapses. Some of the loopier episodes – You Only Live Twice being a prime example – have emerged as guilty favourites because their internal logic embraces the fantasy from the start and takes you along with it. That aside, it’s surely impossible to hate a film that is filmed so lovingly, which serves up shots dripping with Far Eastern loveliness to go with one of the more luscious John Barry scores (which is really saying something). Where I do quail, however, is in those films that attempt a certain level of realism only to take left turns on a whim. One or the other, guys. Don’t mess us around and while you’re at it, there’s never a point when gondolas that convert into a hydrofoil is okay!

3. Gadgetry
The concoctions of Q Branch are a celebratory part of the Bond series. The idea that Desmond Llewellyn heads a department creating impossible things – items that often enough come with a staggering foreshadowing of helping Bond out at the optimum moment – is part of the fun and I’m fine with that. I personally prefer films where 007 relies on his skills, but I can accept part of that skill-set is the resourcefulness of knowing when to use his special toys. Where I have a greater problem is when there’s no need for Bond to be talented because his reliance on the gadgets is complete, their status as a Deus Ex Machina overriding his abilities. The other thing is that whilst I can accept a lot in terms of what Q produces, when the gizmos begin jumping the shark I start to feel insulted. Cars that come equipped with missiles and protective shields = more or less okay. Cars with the capacity to turn invisible = stupid. Let’s face it, when you can produce items of this calibre then what need do you have for 007 at all?

I hold an affection for these movies that lingers long beyond their actual worth as cinematic art. They’re a lot of fun on the whole, and the effort to maintain a certain level of production quality is praiseworthy. Bond films were never made on the cheap. Even the more economical entries came with high values, meaning the poverty row funding that blighted certain other franchises was never an issue. There’s an earnestness when it comes to pleasing the viewers that I find rather adorable, and it only ever started to fail when trends within the industry and audience preferences for certain other tropes influenced its direction. I think the Bond brand is its own special thing, quite apart from whatever else is going on in the celluloid industry, and so an increased level of hard-edged violence that seemed a reaction to the success of Die Hard in the 1980s, or a 1970s entry that riffed on the wave of popularity for Blaxpolitation cinema, or the infamous cash-in on the Star Wars craze, sits uneasily with me. Sure, don’t be left behind. The more recent elements creeping into the series, for instance the episodic continuity that makes each of the Daniel Craig films flow into each other, with recurring characters and Bond affected by past events, is welcome. At the same time, they’re sitting on a rich tradition that’s entirely self-perpetuated. It’s for 007 to set the trend, not follow it, and when the latter happens I automatically lose interest.

In order to keep the word count to a reasonable level, I’m only including ‘canon’ movies here – no 1967 Casino Royale, which is no great loss to me, nor any reference to 1983’s Never Say Never Again, apart from in passing. I rather like the Connery starring remake of Thunderball, despite some of its more dated elements, but it isn’t part of the official series therefore out it goes.

And so, with a dry martini in hand and licence revoked (because I know what the word bloody means!), it’s time to pay attention, attempt re-entry and aim for poor Miss Moneypenny’s ever hopeful hatstand…

24. Die Another Day
Year: 2002
Star (his age): Pierce Brosnan (49)
Lass (her age): Halle Berry (36)
Evil Doer: Toby Stephens
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $544m (13)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘I think I broke her heart’
Title Song Performer: Madonna
Glamorous Locale: Iceland, Andalucia (doubling as Cuba)
Gadget: Invisible Aston Martin, glass shattering ring

I have been known to keep my tip up

Bond films live or die depending on each viewer’s willingness to accept the levels of fantasy on display. If, for instance, you can’t square the sight of Bond performing some incredible stunt in public while simultaneously operating as a secret agent, then most of these films aren’t realistically for you. Where do you draw the line? Little Nellie? The gondola-hovercraft gliding across a crowded St Mark’s Square? The frankly ludicrous Xenia Onatopp? 007 in space? How about the sheer number of special skills Bond possesses – you can swallow him being a great skier, even enough of an extreme sports enthusiast to be capable of handling high dives, bungee jumps, etc. And yet his instant capability when handling any vehicle he commandeers is asking a lot; people train to be fighter pilots for years, but he can prevail in aerial combat like a master. Seriously? And then there are films like Die Another Day, which transform our hero into such an indestructible superhero that any whiff of credibility is gone. I think you can take certain liberties with Bond viewers, but once you have him surfing a CGI tsunami you’re simply taking the piss out of them.

It’s for this, for the invisible car, for the look of lust a nurse sends Bond’s way after he has assaulted her workmates, for various other elements, that make this the series nadir. Die Another Day is an expensive film. Production quality levels are high and by this point Pierce Brosnan is in his fourth outing, surely as at ease as he’s ever going to be and neither looking as decrepit as Roger Moore or jaded like Sean Connery became. Everything should be fine. The film even has the cheek to start really well, when Bond is imprisoned and tortured for fourteen months, adrift in North Korea and with no hope of escape. We are shown images of what he goes through – water torture, being stung by scorpions and then kept alive by receiving the anti-toxins, gaolers who seem to take pleasure in hurting him again and again. His hair and beard grow. His clothes become rags. Bond suffers, clearly broken by the treatment by the time he’s traded, and you get a glimpse of the movie this might have been – a fatally damaged, mentally compromised Bond, bent on vengeance and plagued by memories of what’s been done to him. There’s even a scene when M castigates him because she believes he must have cracked under pressure, hardly the hero’s welcome he might have expected. Instead it takes a left swerve, our hero getting over his privations and M’s distrust within seconds to go after the villains, apparently undamaged and ready for a couple of hours’ spectacle. Okay…

To provide the ultimate Bond girl they produce Halle Berry, fresh from Oscar winning glory and playing an American agent who’s Bond’s equal and with whom he teams up. And that’s the character. Like 007 himself there’s no development, no emotional depth. At one point her character drowns before Bond revives her (because of course he does), and there’s no sense of PTSD, just getting back into the groove. The villain is played by Toby Stephens. His character, Gustav Graves, is actually a North Korean terrorist who’s genetically altered himself into an Englishman in order to realise his plans for destroying the West. Stephens sneers his way through the film, at one point telling 007 he looks this way as a parody of Bond himself, because that’s how he perceives him. The potential for some great character development is there, the withering view of Western decadence, the suggestion that Graves has nailed the underlying pomposity of Bond and his type – does he even have a point? But its forgotten because (i) Bond’s the hero (ii) the film is seen to be needing another high concept action scene so enough with the socio-political philosophising.

The film’s best bit comes when Bond fights Graves with swords. Despite costing thousands of pounds’ damage to the club they casually destroy during their duel, the scene has real weight and teases out the growing personal dislike between combatants; it already exists within Graves, whereas Bond realises he’s up against someone who’s out to get him and therefore has to fight for his life. It isn’t even ruined by the fencing instructor, performed by Madonna in the kind of poorly acted, grandstanding cameo that might as well have a bubble on the screen declaring ‘Look kids! Madonna!’ to drill home the point. Elsewhere, take your pick of set pieces – the car chase/fight between Bond and Rick Yune’s villainous Zao, both vehicles rigged with a ridiculous array of gadgets and weapons; Bond being pursued by a laser beam that is powered by the sun’s rays; escaping from a crashing plane in a helicopter; the whole hovercraft sequence. 007’s Aston Martin can be rendered invisible, and even remembering that in the past he’s been given cars capable of doing all manner of crazy things it’s a step into the utter bizarre. And did I mention that Bond can now surf his way out of danger, riding a massive wave, all of it rendered using CGI that even at the time didn’t measure up and now just looks cheap and tacky?

Some further notes – Samantha Bonds’ Moneypenny (up to this point, a decent and disparaging replacement for Lois Maxwell) using Q’s virtual reality machine for shagging 007 is a mighty ruination of her entire character and the years of friendly flirtation between them for the sake of a stilted and not very funny moment. Q, now played by John Cleese, is an inflated arse, written and performed as though wanting viewers to miss Desmond Llewelyn. There’s an evil henchman who’s actually called Mr Kill. Berry gets some of the most terrible dialogue ever committed within the series. Madonna not only appears in the film, she provides the title song as well, and it’s awful and especially poor is the ‘stuttered editing’ on her vocals that was fashionable for a mercifully brief time back then.

Die Another Day was the sixth highest grossing picture of 2002, and in a year that contained Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter movies that’s no mean feat. And yet, like Moonraker in 1979, the sense that the line had been crossed is impossible to ignore. Where do you go from this? Back to basics is where, indeed the recasting of Bond as Daniel Craig gave EON the opportunity to reboot their franchise, return to the pages of Fleming and tell of 007’s origins. This remains a complete mess of a film, virtually a joke entry, difficult not to laugh at and so ludicrous that it actually becomes quite tiresome long before the close. Given this was Brosnan’s last appearance it would be easy to blame him, but it isn’t his fault. He deserved better in the role, capable of providing depth and dramatic heft in those rare moments when it was demanded of him. Berry’s made her fair share of stinkers, but again this isn’t her responsibility, while the co-starring role offered to a young Rosamund Pike remains one of the series’ more blatant wastes of talent. Everyone involved just dropped the ball this time, not least the script writers for inserting awful puns at every opportunity, as though they had previously watched Arnold Schwarzenegger’s endless ice-related quips in Batman and Robin and thought that was the right direction to take.

23. A View to a Kill
Year: 1985
Star (his age): Roger Moore (57)
Lass (her age): Tanya Roberts (29)
Evil Doer: Christopher Walken
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $321m (23)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘Anyone else want to drop out?’
Title Song Performer: Duran Duran
Glamorous Locale: Paris, San Francisco
Gadget: Submarine disguised as an iceberg, bug-finder posing as an electric razor, x-ray sunglasses, ring camera, ‘Q Dog’

I’ve been known to dabble

The 1980s were a difficult time for James Bond. Audiences were mainly looking elsewhere or waiting for the film to release on video, leading to the bottom four entries in 007’s box office figures coming from this decade. Star Roger Moore was patently too old by the time he made A View to a Kill, the credibility of him playing a man of action stretched to breaking point when he discovered he was older than his co-star’s – Tanya Roberts – mother. Like the main man, there’s an air of exhaustion about the picture. No one seems to know how to breathe anything fresh into the franchise so they don’t even try. The plot of Goldfinger is rehashed, even down to the villain discussing his scheme to destroy a major American financial hub with the use of an expensive visual display. Lots of it makes little sense. Why, for instance, does Bond steal a fire engine to escape the police and then spend time during the pursuit farting around the rig? Surely for a better reason than the possibility it might have made for a fun scene… Roberts is a terrible Bond girl; she plays a damsel in distress, the sort of screeching moll who makes viewers miss the days of Anya Amasova and Holly Goodhead, capable women who were easily Bond’s equal. It’s also a surprisingly boring film, and that’s something 007 – even at its most fantastical – should never allow to happen. Once the ‘action’ moves to Zorin’s stables it stays there for a very long time and slows down horribly.

That it isn’t a total dead loss is mainly down to the presence of Christopher Walken as the movie’s psychotic villain, Max Zorin. He seems to know he has to rescue the film and so dials up the eccentricity of his performance to magnificent levels, killing with glee even when firing on his own men. He’s great value, in Top Trumps the magic card in terms of outright madness levels. Grace Jones, a performer who could only have emerged from the eighties, makes for a unique sidekick to Zorin – no one looks like her, and no one could have as effectively combined hard-edged beauty with muscular action like she does here. Between them, Walken and Jones make a brave stab at saving A View to a Kill, but it’s tired stuff elsewhere, never more so than in the shape of its star, nearly 60 and looking it. Moore’s age adds an unwished for sleazy quality to his trysts with Roberts, signifying that something had to change. And it did.

22. Octopussy
Year: 1983
Star (his age): Roger Moore (55)
Lass (her age): Maud Adams (38)
Evil Doer: Louis Jourdan, Steven Berkoff
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $426m (21)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘Game, set and match’
Title Song Performer: Rita Coolidge
Glamorous Locale: India, Germany
Gadget: Acrostar Micro-jet, Acid pen, Homing device within watch, Alligator boat

Sounds like a load of bull

Of all the classic (i.e. pre-Brosnan) Bonds, Octopussy is by some distance the one I’ve watched the fewest times. The reason, simply enough, is that I don’t like it very much, and whilst I’ve discovered positives about many of the other ‘lesser’ titles during this re-watch my opinion of this one hasn’t changed. It feels like a film lacking in confidence, one emblematic of a business that was running scared because at the time it had an ‘unofficial’ rival in the box office – Never Say Never Again – that forced it to play safe and go back to the tried and tested winning recipe they had successfully pulled back from with For Your Eyes Only. Whereas Roger Moore’s previous outing suggested a new and more realistic direction for the gentleman spy, Octopussy returned by and large to high concept thrills, a fantastical extravaganza, albeit with certain elements present to show what it might have been. In the end, it did enough to win the battle of the Bonds, despite the draw of Sean Connery in Warners’ retread of Thunderball (Connery’s pretty good but the film is nothing special, proof if you like that the world wasn’t desperate to see Thunderball again, and that’s understandable), but in relative terms audiences were looking elsewhere and the film falls well short of 007 at his best.

A visible ageing Moore (returning to the role after other actors, notably James Brolin, were screen-tested before EON decided a sense of continuity was required) gets to show glimpses of the harder-boiled Bond he’d played in For Your Eyes Only. He displays real anger to Steven Berkoff’s warmongering Russian general, a nice moment of the film showing its sensibilities during a period when the real Cold War was regaining some of its 1950s tension, albeit against the backdrop of a world tired of hostilities, represented by Walter Gotell’s far more reasonable and realistic Soviet high-ranker. Racing against time to defuse a bomb that will go off and reignite East-West military action, Bond rushes across West Germany only to come across problems – cars refusing to stop and give him a lift, stealing a vehicle and being pursued by the police – that create some much needed tension. There’s some fine acting from Moore, a sense of desperation and harshness that the character would show in these moments. Elsewhere, the early appearance of a slain 009 shows that MI6 secret agents can in fact die in the field, teasing at the peril to come.

But these are snatches of the picture Octopussy might have been. The Cold War plotline fights for space amidst a tale set mainly in India, involving Faberge eggs, a harem of women and Louis Jourdan’s smooth villain. Jourdan effortlessly out-suaves Moore and has a delicious way of enunciating the word ‘Octopussy’, but he’s an under-cooked bad guy who’s solely present because the film needs to have one. A key scene in which he leads a great hunt against the escaped Bond should have suspense levels reminiscent of The Most Dangerous Game, but it’s spoiled because it’s played for comedy – 007 pulls a ‘Barbara Woodhouse’ and orders a tiger to sit (it does), barks ‘hiss off!’ at a snake and then swings through the trees, pulling a Tarzan cry presumably to… no, I can’t think of a single reason for it. A chase through the crowded streets of India should be thrilling but is far too high concept, twisting on the presence of tennis pro Vijay Amritraj who at one point uses his handy racket, a joke that could only work with people who knew what his day job was.

Churls are welcome to argue that it’s just meant to be entertainment, that the sight of Bond turning up to the villain’s headquarters in a hot air balloon emblazoned with an enormous Union Jack is nothing more than the daft, knockabout fun they were aiming for. For me, it isn’t quite at the bottom of the barrel but it’s close, that lack of any real credibility undermining the moments intended to ratchet up the tension.

21. The Man with the Golden Gun
Year: 1974
Star (his age): Roger Moore (47)
Lass (her age): Britt Ekland (32), Maud Adams (29)
Evil Doer: Christopher Lee
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $448m (19)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘Flat on his coup de grâce’
Title Song Performer: Lulu
Glamorous Locale: Hong Kong, Thailand
Gadget: Next to nothing for Bond, but Scaramanga’s car-plane takes some beating

You’re that Secret Agent! That English secret agent! From England!

Christopher Lee must have been the most off-the-shelf Bond villain imaginable. Related to Ian Fleming, it was speculated that Lee might even have played 007 himself, but it was only when Jack Palance turned down the role of Scaramanga that he was approached to play Bond’s arch-enemy in The Man with the Golden Gun. On paper, it’s a mouth-watering part. Francisco Scaramanga is the world’s best assassin, taking jobs at a cost of $1 million per hit. No one knows his face, and he lives in seclusion on a paradise island. The prospects for a tale in which he and Bond face each other is tantalising indeed, the stuff of a splendidly taut two hours.

Instead, the opportunity is squandered within a weak and rushed entry, an attempt to cash in on the success of Live and Let Die by dashing it out. The production values are typically high, so the shortfall comes in the scripting, a lazy mish-mash of tropes that are present because they’re what people expect to see. Car chase? Tick. Beddable women? Two of ’em. Extended scene in which the villain explains his plan in exhaustive detail to Bond? Of course there is, a boring several minutes of twaddle involving a solar something-or-other, when what we really want to get to is the duel between the pair. Lee is walking charisma, but his character – with all the potential that comes with playing a cold-hearted killer – is soft-boiled and gadget-dependent, which dilutes the personal threat level he ought to possess.

Maud Adams in a femme fatale role is pretty good, hard as it is to believe that after Bond tortures her for information she later falls effortlessly for him. The other female presence, Britt Ekland, is horrifically short changed, eclipsing even Jill St John for incompetence. The script’s aim for Ekland appears to stop at getting her to run around in a bikini; she inevitably ends up in bed with Bond, in spite of the fact she knows his reputation, is trapped in a wardrobe while he shags Maud Adams, and is shown nothing but scorn by him for much of the picture. The reason? ‘I’m weak,’ she tells 007; weakly scripted, more like. Other moments of potential brilliance are casually wasted or cheapened. A fine stunt depicting a car doing a 360 degree spin over a broken bridge is shot for laughs by playing a slide whistle over the action, and it’s made considerably worse by shoehorning Clifton James’s pot-bellied, racist Sheriff into the car alongside Bond. There’s no reason for this, save for heavy-handed comic effect. And don’t get me started on Herve Villechaize, Scaramanga’s midget sidekick whose deadliness is no match for an open suitcase.

All told a real misfire; even within Roger Moore’s aegis it’s an entry best forgotten, which is a shame. I’m not a fan of Lulu’s title track, but John Barry’s score drips with loveliness. Much of the photography, particularly the climax at Ao Phang-Nga National Park, is glorious. An inspired little touch comes when Bond enters MI6’s Hong Kong headquarters, based within the wreck of the RMS Queen Elizabeth, corridors and offices set amidst odd-angled walls. These are glimpses of a much better film, but glimpses are all we get.

20. The World is Not Enough
Year: 1999
Star (his age): Pierce Brosnan (46)
Lass (her age): Sophie Marceau (33), Denise Richards (28)
Evil Doer: Robert Carlyle
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $492m (16)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘See you back at the lodge’
Title Song Performer: Garbage
Glamorous Locale: Turkey
Gadget: Q Boat, Visa card disguising a lock pick, ski jacket, x-ray glasses

I thought Christmas only comes once a year

The World is Not Enough is an apt title for this entry given that it wants everything – dramatic weight, character development, the usual spectacle and thrills. The result is a very mixed bag; a convoluted plot that is far more labyrinthine than it needs to be, stunts that are present for the sake of showing them. The speedboat chase along the Thames showcases the series’ increasing reliance on CGI, belongs firmly in the realm of fantasy and leads to nothing. It’s present because there hasn’t been an action scene for a bit. Similarly with the set-piece on skis; no real reason for it. There’s little weight because it’s obvious Bond will emerge unscathed. One of the characters, Denise Richards playing the unlikeliest nuclear physicist imaginable, is completely unnecessary to the main sweep of the plot. Richards favours the standard scientific uniform of dressing like Lara Croft (Tomb Raider was big at the time) and is called Christmas Jones, for no better reason than to produce the film’s lascivious closing pun.

And it looked so promising too. The narrative has Bond protecting Elektra King (Marceau) against her former captor, Renard (Carlyle). But there’s a twist! Elektra and Renard are lovers. He’s going to help her oil pipeline to monopolise supplies by blowing up Istanbul, and while 007 – who of course is already courting her by this point – suspects a trap, his suspicions are ignored by M (Judi Dench) who was close friends with Elektra’s father and is blind to her treachery. Good, hard-boiled stuff, almost approaching Noir territory as Bond comes to realise he’s been duped along with everyone else, his face hardening with the revelation, Pierce Brosnan having to act his character’s feelings of betrayal. It helps that Marceau is good at conveying the reasons why everyone is suckered in by her act, and Carlyle does his best at playing a man who feels nothing and yet does it all for love.

The plotting is strictly by the numbers stuff, following expositional moments with action, giving Bond x-ray specs so that he can do the obvious with them, spoiling the last, genuinely poignant appearance of Desmond Llewelyn’s Q by replacing him with a buffoonish John Cleese, making a strangely weak villain of Robert Carlyle, giving us helicopters armed with giant chainsaws for the hell of it, and worst of all turning out to be a bit boring. At least Dench gets more to do as M, as though director Michael Apted scrabbled around for ideas and suddenly realised they had one of the most gifted actors of her generation to work with. Forgettable, and it shouldn’t have been.

19. Diamonds are Forever
Year: 1971
Star (his age): Sean Connery (41)
Lass (her age): Jill St John (31)
Evil Doer: Charles Gray
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $649m (10)
(Not) Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘Your problems are all behind you now’
Title Song Performer: Shirley Bassey (second appearance)
Glamorous Locale: Amsterdam, Nevada
Gadget: Fake fingerprint, voice algorithm recorder, water transport ball

As long as the collar and cuffs match

At one stage it was felt that Diamonds are Forever would be an immediate sequel to On her Majesty’s Secret Service. Bond, devastated over the slaying of Tracy and out for vengeance, would become a killing machine as he ruthlessly fought his way to the upper echelons of SPECTRE and ultimately Blofeld himself. George Lazenby was once again slated to star, before he resigned and the figures for his single episode were not as fulsome as was hoped. It wasn’t a financial failure, but neither was it a blockbuster hit in the region of previous entries and something had to change. Thoughts then turned to rehashing Goldfinger, a defining instalment in the series, with Gert Frobe sounded out about playing his character’s own brother. Bond himself was to be Americanised, John Gavin signing up for the part and in the end being paid off for doing no work when United Artists offered a king’s ransom to coax Sean Connery back for one more spin as 007. Connery’s return meant that the ambitious new directions being dreamed up for Bond could be shelved, the departure already witnessed in Lazenby’s film quietly pushed into the background.

The results are mixed. After a glimpse of what 007 could have been, Diamonds are Forever returns to the realm of Bond as superhero, breezing through the action, by happy chance stumbling on the villain’s diabolical schemes and much of it played for laughs. This is definitely one of the series’ bawdier entries. Tom Mankiewicz’s script conjures dialogue that borders on the obscene, while Blofeld is reimagined as a highly camp bad guy, Charles Gray at one point appearing in drag (impossible to believe the shadowy SPECTRE head from the earlier movies allowing this to happen). Despite the usual generous budget, there’s something oddly cheap looking about this one, and a definite tiredness and lack of dynamism creeps in, as though everyone’s given up and is simply going through the motions – thank you, here’s the product, now give us your money please.

All the same, there’s a fair amount to enjoy. Gray’s Blofeld aside, the main villains are henchmen Mr Kidd and Mr Wynt, played by Putter Smith and Bruce Glover as gay lovers who are also assassins. Allowing for the traditional worries over homosexuality doubling as evil-doing, they’re good value, treating their work lightly and coming up with imaginative ways to dispatch Bond, albeit unsuccessfully (the bit where they aim to do away with him by leaving him in a pipe beggars belief – just shoot him!). Even a Connery in his fifth decade, the midriff thickening and toupee more and more obvious, is still Connery playing James Bond (incidentally looking a lot like Cary Grant, the actor originally considered for the role), which translates into instant charisma and action man heroics. Director Guy Hamilton shoots a fistfight between 007 and Peter Franks (Joe Hamilton) in a cramped Amsterdam elevator, the claustrophobic confines and two 6′ 2″ men trading blows making for a thrilling and surprisingly brutal bout to the death. A shame they didn’t do Jill St John’s character any favours. She starts as an assiduous diamond smuggler and ends a hapless damsel waiting around to be rescued. Maybe that’s how Bond likes his women, but it doesn’t play well.

18. Moonraker
Year: 1979
Star (his age): Roger Moore (51)
Lass (her age): Lois Chiles (32)
Evil Doer: Michael Lonsdale
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $656m (9)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘Play it again, Sam’
Title Song Performer: Shirley Bassey (third appearance)
Glamorous Locale: Venice, Brazil, Argentina
Gadget: Wrist dart gun (standard issue!), 007 camera, ridiculously souped-up gondola, watch containing explosives

James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season

Where to begin with Moonraker? Over the years it’s become the Bond film it’s okay to loathe, for many the moment the series truly lurched into self-parody, indulgence and outright silliness. Famously, the aim was to follow The Spy Who Loved Me with For Your Eyes Only, but then Star Wars happened and science fiction cinema became catnip for audiences, prompting Cubby Broccoli to order 007 in space. Belying its subsequent reactions, Moonraker was respectfully reviewed upon its release and did great business with viewers, but are there problems? Undoubtedly yes. The movie makes next to no attempt to be a credible spy thriller. Roger Moore’s Bond has become a figure of fantasy, reliant on a succession of improbable toys whilst also as indestructible is Richard Kiel’s Jaws, who inexplicably defies endless horrible deaths to remain in constant – and increasingly incompetent – pursuit, prior to (draws breath before typing) turning good when he finds love.

Strangely enough, the central storyline that pits Bond into the heavens (one that at no point appears in Fleming’s novel) makes the most narrative sense. It’s hokum, depicting technology that nearly forty years since its release still does not exist in reality, but the idea of Michael Lonsdale’s Drax killing all human life on Earth in order to restart the species from space is a fascinating and chillingly realised one. Try and forget that it’s a virtual retread of Stromberg’s megalomaniac scheme in The Spy Who Loved Me. Lonsdale plays a terrific villain, figuring more heavily in the plot than Jurgens’s arch-enemy, and issuing orders to kill with cold psychopathic finality. His dispatching of Corinne Dufour is the stuff of nightmares, as she’s hunted down and eaten by dogs. The madness of Drax’s vision is beautifully brought out by Ken Adam’s grandiose set designs, notably his control centre, all screens and black lines assembled in crazily angled towers.

An enormous budget was thrown at the film in order to make it as lavishly realised as possible. Ignore low-key. The action moves breathlessly from its French base to scenes set in Venice, Rio de Janeiro and the Igazu National Park, all eye-catchingly shot and coming before the space-based finale upon which Moonraker was sold. The stunt work is simply stunning. The film opens with a fight over control of a parachute by men in free fall, thrillingly filmed, a naked attempt to one-up the set-piece filmed at the start of The Spy Who Loved Me, and it’s a testament to the daring and craft of the crew and performers involved that it somehow all works and looks great. But here the problems start. The sequence is ultimately played for laughs; Jaws’s parachute fails and leaves him attempting to flap his arms while dropping to the earth. A chase scene that takes place along the canals of Venice spins on Bond’s gondola having a motor, and if that wasn’t daft enough it then converts into a hydrofoil so that he can mount the streets and escape his pursuers. Again this is supposed to be funny. As 007 laughs in the face of his character’s own clandestine status by floating across a packed St Mark’s Square, we see a pigeon do a double-take and Victor Tourjansky glance worriedly at his wine bottle.

These moments come with zany musical cues to advise viewers of their comic value. Later, Bond dons a poncho and goes on a horse ride while the theme from The Magnificent Seven plays, for no other reason than heavy-handed entertainment. In contrast, Bond’s fight to the death against Toshira Suga’s henchman comes across as surprisingly vicious and authentic, even if it causes the destruction of numerous priceless Venetian glass artefacts. The scene features some of Moore’s best acting, the look of hatred on his face as he trades blows appearing heartfelt and real. This is more than can be said for his relationship with Lois Chiles, the love interest developed as a reprisal of the winning ‘love among equals’ affair built with Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me. Chiles isn’t terrible and there’s always something to be said for the Bond girl being more than a simpering female, but their romance lacks the edge of Agent Triple X’s dilemma over whether to kill or kiss Bond and appears to happen purely because he can, and she can, and that’s enough. Also, it’s at this stage the age differential between Moore and his female co-stars begins to tell.

To an extent it’s fine innocent fun, and I don’t think Moonraker was intended to be viewed in any other spirit. But the shark was well and truly vaulted, and it’s easy to see the reasons for its high concept thrills being reined in for the series’ subsequent entry. The silliness is juxtaposed with some of finest work John Barry committed to his collaboration with 007, special effects for the space sequences painstakingly realised if primitive to modern screenings. The sight of Drax’s space station emerging in the face of the rising sun counts amongst the best money shots ever seen in Bond, the cast and music both suitably awestruck at the sheer ambition being displayed.

17. Tomorrow Never Dies
Year: 1997
Star (his age): Pierce Brosnan (44)
Lass (her age): Michelle Yeoh (35), Teri Hatcher (33)
Evil Doer: Jonathan Pryce
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $479m (18)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘They’ll print anything these days’
Title Song Performer: Sheryl Crow
Glamorous Locale: Hamburg, Bangkok
Gadget: Remote controlled BMW, cell phone that doubles as a remote control

Another Carver building. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he developed an edifice complex

With certain entries in the series my feelings about them adjust with every viewing. Such is Tomorrow Never Dies, a film I reviewed rather harshly on these pages a couple of years ago, but which I enjoyed this time around. Perhaps it’s within the context of watching Bond after Bond in order and knowing there are worse movies. I would never argue that it’s very good, that it is in fact anything more than an entertaining watch, one pockmarked with flaws and the problems inherent of the Brosnan era – complete invulnerability, ceaseless self-referencing, naked product placement – present and correct. There’s a nagging sense of it going through the motions, never really attempting anything new for fear of upsetting the all-important demographic, but ultimately it’s 007 and that signifies an intent to please.

The problem seems to be Brosnan himself. Not that there’s anything wrong with the actor, surely born for this role, but rather what he’s given to do. Despite being the main character the focus is rarely on him – we get lots of Michelle Yeoh’s martial arts heroine, Wai Lin, and much is made of Q’s latest gizmo, a BMW that can be driven by remote control. In contrast Brosnan recedes into the background, as much a part of the scenery as the delights of Thailand, there because it’s titularly about him, though the interest is never in him. At moments, Brosnan gets to act. Teri Hatcher plays a former flame who briefly reignites before being killed, and Bond is visibly upset over her death. It’s effective; for a few seconds, you see the consequence of the sort of life he leads, the feeling that he can’t form attachments because they are destined never to last. But then it’s over as another high concept action scene kicks in and dramatically the film returns to the ‘light as air’ weight that is its preferred modus operandi. It’s a great pity that we don’t see more of that side of 007, an aspect of his personality teased out to greater effect in the Dalton and Craig years.

Despite that flaw, and it’s rather a fatal one really, Tomorrow Never Dies is two hours of explosive fun. Yeoh brings fantastic energy to her breakout role in cinema beyond China, almost balletic in her fighting skills and pitched as the equal to Bond. When working together the pair have some great scenes, notably the motorbike chase along the packed streets of Bangkok where they are handcuffed together and she has to keep changing positions while they’re hurtling down narrow paths. There’s a nice juxtaposition in the pair’s fighting styles, Bond becoming a blunt instrument against her graceful combat work. Against them, Jonathan Pryce’s media mogul villain is a considerable step down from the personal nemesis represented by Sean Bean in GoldenEye. While the idea of a Rupert Murdoch figure being the film’s bad guy is a fascinating one, Pryce generating international crises in order to get the scoop on them, he turns out to be a bit of a non-entity, present because the film needs a dastardly enemy and responding with a comic book performance. Gotz Otto as the inevitable henchman, Stamper, is similarly wasted. Both characters’ demises are strictly ‘by the numbers’ stuff. They happen because they have to, within the movie’s last ten minutes, and no better reason than that is ever offered.

By all accounts, Tomorrow Never Dies had considerable problems in production and perhaps it’s for this reason that the end result has such an uneven and, in places, a ‘forced’ feel about it. That it isn’t terrible is something to be thankful for, but given the money spent on it, a cool $110 million, a grateful insistence on stunts being performed rather than digitally inserted in post-production, and a frankly superb Bond girl, it could and perhaps should have been a lot better.

16. Thunderball
Year: 1965
Star (his age): Sean Connery (35)
Lass (her age): Claudine Auger (24)
Evil Doer: Adolfo Celi
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $1,015m (2)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘I think he got the point’
Title Song Performer: Tom Jones
Glamorous Locale: Bahamas
Gadget: Underwater camera, Geiger counter disguised as a wristwatch, breathing apparatus

My dear girl, don’t flatter yourself. What I did this evening was for Queen and country. You don’t think it gave me any pleasure, do you?

Imagine a celluloid world before Marvel, before Star Wars, before all those franchises that dominate today’s cinema were conceived, and you have mid-1960s 007, at the absolute height of its success, where every new picture was an event in itself, when the actual movie was almost an afterthought within an ever spiralling cash cow of merchandising and publicity. The original idea was to make one film per year. You can picture a situation similar to that surrounding the Lord of the Rings films in the last decade, when each release picked up the momentum left by the previous entry. Watching the early Bonds now, fifty-plus years later and all that hype consigned to history, and we really only have the movies to consider; in reality they were part of the endless marketing machine surrounding Sean Connery’s gentleman spy.

Credit to the producers that they didn’t just churn out any old rubbish. Whatever you think of Thunderball, you have to agree the quality controls were set to high and the film retains an eagerness to produce spectacle, and not just that but actively seek new backdrops for the action. Production returned to the Caribbean, the agreeable setting for Dr No that made the film look as though it all took place in paradise, yet everything important happens beneath the waves. Considerable investment went into underwater filming, developing the lighting for a clear image, and the results work. Thunderball looks excellent. Terence Young from the first two films returned to direct this one so of course it’s beautifully done, but there was a commitment to technical finery also and it pays off.

Thunderball went on to slay the box office and remains the series’ second highest grosser of all time, but seen now and much of it is a snorer. It breaks the two hour barrier and feels longer, the biggest culprit being the aqua-action because it moves as slowly as scenes filmed underwater obviously would, but the film perseveres and it goes on and on. I was bored two-thirds of the way through, and I shouldn’t have been. This is 007, after all! Connery is showing his first signs of being long in the tooth, the tedium that would punctuate his later appearances as the lead. The ravishing Claudine Auger makes for a weak leading lady; better value comes from Luciana Paluzzi’s enemy assassin, who has the sex appeal to match her deadliness. In contrast watching Auger at 24 in an early English speaking role is like listening to Coldplay – pretty enough, but completely without substance. Worse still, Adolfo Celi’s nemesis, SPECTRE’s number two no less, is just plain dull. Bond goes on this mission at the head of a team. Rik Van Nutter appears as Felix Leiter and the always interesting Martine Beswick is peripheral as 007’s assistant, Paula. I would have liked to see more of them, to find how Bond operated as the boss of other agents. It doesn’t happen.

15. GoldenEye
Year: 1995
Star (his age): Pierce Brosnan (42)
Lass (her age): Izabella Scorupco (25)
Evil Doer: Sean Bean
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $530m (14)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘She always did enjoy a good squeeze’
Title Song Performer: Tina Turner
Glamorous Locale: Saint Petersburg, Puerto Rico
Gadget: Laser equipped wristwatch, explosive pen

What’s the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?

After a six year hiatus, GoldenEye marked several changes in the series. Cubby Broccoli had handed production duties over to his daughter, Barbara, who in partnership with Michael G Wilson would produce every subsequent release to date. There was a new Bond, Pierce Brosnan, and in a sign of Hollywood bowing to equal rights his bosses no longer represented a boys club. Bernard Lee passed away after Moonraker, but M remained male until Judi Dench took over for this one and made the Lee tenure appear a cosy pushover by comparison. Even Moneypenny stopped longing for 007’s attentions and began pulling him up for his attitude. As for the action, in the 1990s post-Glasnost world much of GoldenEye was shot in Russia, with emphasis placed on the uneasily optimistic climate, iconography from the Communist past stored in a statues’ graveyard and Bond himself wrestling with the realities of being a Cold Warrior and a potential relic.

The Timothy Dalton era led to some of the lowest box office returns of the series and it was probably logical that GoldenEye would hark back to the fantastical spectacles of earlier. This is both good and bad. Brosnan seems an ideal fit for the lead role, famously almost taking it a decade earlier but looking instantly at ease ordering a vodka martini. The plot pits him against Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), a onetime Double-Oh operative who emerges as a megalomaniac villain and represents an enemy with exactly the same skill set as Bond himself. Trevelyan is assisted by Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp, an outright psychopath who climaxes through violence and has the ability to literally kill using her thighs. Go with it… The film moves at a lightning quick pace, contains a number of blistering, sometimes logic-defying action set-pieces and Brosnan plays 007 as though he’s having the time of his life. It’s a lot of fun. There isn’t a lot about it to dislike, especially where established fans are concerned.

On the downside, GoldenEye marks the beginning of Bond done as pastiche, as a homage and send-up of its previous glories. In its writing, there’s a sense of elements being included by checklist, because they’ve always been there and the public want to see them. You can almost imagine the process – scene where Bond banters with Q: check… Villain’s base is an elaborate and costly hideaway: tick… Obligatory casino scene: done, etc. The tank chase through the streets of Saint Petersburg is thrilling and brilliantly mounted, but stop and think about it and it makes very little sense. It’s there for the sake of it, and that’s fine because it’s being done in the name of exciting film making and yet narratively it’s just bizarre. Similarly, this is one of those entries where absolutely everyone apart from 007 is a completely inept shot – you can only have so many scenes where he survives a hail of bullets before it loses any credibility. Eric Serra’s score, the only one he contributed to the series, is largely terrible. Viewers can’t be blamed for counting down to the hiring of David Arnold and music made to replicate the spirit of John Barry.

Still, it’s a highly entertaining couple of hours, and it comes dramatically to life whenever Brosnan and Bean share the screen, such moments when it seems too small for the pair of them.

14. Live and Let Die
Year: 1973
Star (his age): Roger Moore (45)
Lass (her age): Jane Seymour (22)
Evil Doer: Yaphet Kotto
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $825m (5)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘He always did have an inflated opinion of himself’
Title Song Performer: Paul McCartney and Wings
Glamorous Locale: Jamaica, Louisiana, New York
Gadget: Trinket-heavy wristwatch

Names is for tombstones, baby! Y’all take this honky out and waste him! Now!

There’s a dated quality about Live and Let Die that’s difficult to shake off. Made during the Blaxploitation craze, it’s stuffed with references and comments that are tough to watch now, and it’s at this point I wonder whether to ignore my twenty first century sensibilities and just enjoy the movie for what it is. As an introduction to the Roger Moore years, it shows just about everything that was good and bad about his time in the role – the ironically cocked eyebrow, the age difference between ‘Rog’ and his female co-star (he was twice the age of Jane Seymour), the distaste for killing, the way he had only to look at a lady for her clothes to fall off… You either love this stuff or hate it. In truth, Moore brought subtle differences to the character owned by Sean Connery – changing Bond’s dress sense, his favourite tipple, even the weapon he uses. I like his approach to violence, that unlike Connery he didn’t especially like resorting to it, though when pushed he could be deadly, and it’s at these brief moments that he shows the ‘other side’ of 007, the easy charm that slips away to reveal the killing machine lurking beneath.

The other gap in the picture is a John Barry shaped one. The usual composer was unavailable for this one, so in a film for Bond’s new era they instead called on Paul McCartney to write the theme tune, as it turns out an especially good rock song. In a cost saving measure (Macca was expensive) Beatles producer George Martin wrote the rest of the score, one that riffs ceaselessly on the title track.

Live and Let Die was a constant highlight on TV when I was young. I loved it, and though recent viewings have shown up its weaknesses I confess I was riveted when watching it again for this write-up. It might be miles away from the low key thrills of From Russia with Love, but it never slows down and refuses point-blank to be boring. Yaphet Kotto is a fantastic villain with an equally lurid cast of henchmen, including the memorable Julius Harris’s steel-armed Tee Hee. Seymour does an excellent job of conveying her character’s blend of sexuality and virginal purity, and she was just a knock-out. It’s a great looking film too. Bond’s appearance in Harlem, standing out garishly in his smart suit and not caring about it for a moment, is very funny, but once the action moves to the Caribbean and later the Bayou it’s all shot rather gorgeously. It’s so much fun that the fact barely any of it makes sense never really matters. Why represent Louisiana’s finest with a pot-bellied redneck, played expansively by Clifton James? How is it that the voodoo scene features Bond shooting a dude, only to find it’s a clay model that he’s fired upon? Why does Geoffrey Holder meet his end in a coffin filled with snakes, but then appears again at the film’s close? Who knows? And for that matter who cares, when the film moves at roller-coaster speed and piles thrill upon thrill in the name of sheer entertainment?

13. Quantum of Solace
Year: 2008
Star (his age): Daniel Craig (40)
Lass (her age): Olga Kurylenko (28), Gemma Arterton (22)
Evil Doer: Mathieu Almaric
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $622m (11)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘Got pulled into a meeting’
Title Song Performer: Jack White and Alicia Keys
Glamorous Locale: Austria, Italy, Chile
Gadget: Too tough for gadgets

It’d be a pretty cold bastard who didn’t want revenge for the death of someone he loved

I now have three confirmed viewings of Quantum of Solace and I think I get now. Daniel Craig’s second outing has always divided people, from viewers who think it stinks to those who believe it’s misunderstood. There are problems within it, sure, and I have an issue with any film that takes several goes before it works, but I am now in the latter camp.

Any Bond flick starring Craig is worth something because the actor brings so much to the part and is never dull. In Quantum of Solace, it’s possible to see the character he’s trying to essay, the tortured hero aiming to do a professional job while beneath the surface his boiling personal vendetta and rage against the world continues. This is best brought out in his scenes with M (Judi Dench). You can tell from her questions and the way she regards Bond that she knows exactly what’s going on with him, and he knows that she knows, but they have enough respect for each other to let the story play out. It’s great acting from the pair and no doubt led to the decision to give them significantly more time together in Skyfall. The film’s a direct sequel to Casino Royale, a first for the series in which the stories are normally self-contained, yet it’s faithful to Ian Fleming’s narrative in which actions most definitely had consequences for future instalments. That realisation leads to the fascinating premise that Craig’s spy is the same man who was so recently betrayed by Vesper Lind, and so goes on a spree of vengeance beginning with the capture of the mysterious Mr White (Jesper Christiansen). However, as teased in the previous film and made more explicit here, there’s the steady uncovering of some large and shadowy criminal organisation to deal with, one that had Casino Royale’s Le Chiffre terrified for his life and for which Mr White works also. Seasoned Bond viewers will know where this is leading to and may also be aware that the rights for making it explicit were not yet EON’s so for the time being we have this slow reveal, which makes the film one link within a longer chain. Thought of like that, and the actions of Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) make a lot more sense. Even Greene, whose scheme is to monopolise – and potentially withhold – Bolivia’s water supply, is only a middle man, a cog within a bigger picture.

The main problem with Quantum of Solace lies in its script, which fell victim to the writers strike. Craig and director Marc Forster were issuing rewrites during the shoot, and what we’re left with is certainly under-cooked and just about coherent. There’s a suggestion that the film is little more than a bare-bones plot stringing together the action scenes, and unfortunately it’s hard to deny that entirely, though in part that’s because Forster directs the set pieces so frenetically and with such an expert hand that the rest tends to pale. Forster goes for the flash cutting, snap editing style that came in for a lot of criticism at the time, complaints that it was too fast to follow what was going on. For my part, car chases taking place at such impossible speeds should be shot this way; because everything’s happening so quickly the sense of near-chaos ought to be present in the editing. And in truth the film’s at its best in other moments. The Tosca scene is gorgeous, the opera taking place on a surreal set designed on a grand scale, members of the Quantum organisation present in order to communicate as the audience’s focus is on the stage, while Bond watches from a vantage point and eventually intervenes. When he and Greene confront each other, the subsequent action scene, with its shower of bullets, is cut from the soundtrack and the music takes over, making the chase almost balletic. It’s really well done.

Forster wanted to make a tighter, less bloated Bond film, and Quantum of Solace is by some distance the series’ most expedient entry, well short of the usual running time that was routine by this stage. Perhaps it’s for this reason that everything feels a bit compressed, as though some of its key plot points fall victim to the desire to wrap it up. This might also do for Almaric, who stands as one of the franchise’s weaker villains and too easy to defeat, although thought of in the context as a ‘middle man’ (which isn’t made clear when watching the film, but becomes so with subsequent entries) he’s a more credible operator. Other traditions fall by the wayside. There are no gadgets for Bond to use, which is hardly a bad thing given how ubiquitous and ‘Deus Ex’ they could be at times. Romance is in short supply. Gemma Arterton’s Agent Fields is present to play an innocent consumed by the dangerous game in which Bond is involved, but her appearance is all too brief. More screen time is given to Olga Kurylenko, playing a Bolivian agent with her own reasons for investigating Quantum. It’s a fine, ballsy part, but the spark between her and Bond never really lights and it’s with the unrequited kiss he gives her at the close that you find neither of them are really interested in each other beyond getting the job done, while the shadow of Vesper continues to loom large.

If the film’s a failure, then it isn’t because it’s boring. Missing something, certainly, and not without its issues, but it’s hardly car crash cinema and watched within the context of a wider narrative there’s much to enjoy here. Not least is David Arnold’s score, a wonderfully epic piece of work. The title song, initially intended to be performed by Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse before legal issues denied that possibility (can you imagine a better ‘Bondian’ vocal than that of Miss Winehouse? What a pity), from a collaboration by Jack White and Alicia Keys, is rather less satisfying, something of a muddle of the two talents played over the decidedly strange animated mess of a credits sequence. Bring back Maurice Binder’s leaping ladies…

12. For Your Eyes Only
Year: 1981
Star (his age): Roger Moore (53)
Lass (her age): Carole Bouquet (23)
Evil Doer: *Spoiler – it’s a twist!*
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $487m (17)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘He had no head for heights’
Title Song Performer: Sheena Easton
Glamorous Locale: Greece
Gadget: Q’s Identograph, with its Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy graphics

You get your clothes on, and I’ll buy you an ice cream

For Your Eyes Only is a good but flawed film. Its origins lay in the decision over where to take 007 after the excesses of Moonraker. They could have gone for a further extravaganza and counted the cash, and it’s to EON’s credit that they understood there was nowhere beyond space and called for a stripped-back spy story, back to basics, back to the pages of Fleming, from which this one was culled. It was the first to be directed by John Glen, who would go on to helm Bond’s run throughout the 1980s. Roger Moore stayed on, no doubt relishing the chance to play a more mature title character that for once depended on his abilities as an actor.

Far from world dominating megalomaniacs, the story concerns Bond’s efforts to retrieve a lost nuclear decoder before it’s stolen by smugglers and sold to Soviet Russia. The pre-credits sequence begins with 007 laying flowers at the grave of Tracy Bond, the kind of sombre attempt at continuity that shows the film’s serious intentions. Later, the flash Lotus is destroyed so that the film’s key car chase involves Bond hurtling along hairpin Greek roads at the wheel of a Citroen 2CV, and there’s no reliance on gadgetry (beyond Q’s Identograph), just our hero’s abilities and smarts. His relationship with the vengeance obsessed Melina (Carole Bouquet) has a developing, organic quality, the sense they take the time to get to know each other and understand the mutual benefits of their partnership. The plot even has that most unusual of narrative devices in 007’s world – a twist! It’s at the point that Julian Glover and Topol’s characters aren’t what they appear to be you realise just what a treat this is; normally a villain is introduced and it’s clear from the beginning that’s what he is. Not the case here. Both actors are fantastic, indeed there’s a fine array of players on show, from Michael Gothard’s professional killer (and amongst his team a cameo for a young Charles Dance), through to Walter Gotell reprising his role as a humanistic Russian general and Cassandra Harris’s sexy, doomed Countess.

The action scenes are perfectly fine – the ski chase is blisteringly paced and well shot, and the scaling of a sheer rock face to reach the villains’ lair takes the time to illustrate the moment’s sense of sheer peril. In previous entries you can picture Bond using some improbable device to help him get to the top in seconds, but here you just have the man and his climbing abilities, the danger exacerbated by Moore’s palpable fear of heights. A water torture scene, lifted straight from the pages of the novel Live and Let Die, is so nicely put together that it seems a crime they didn’t use it for that movie. Elsewhere, Lynn-Holly Johnson’s ingenue skating champ is inserted into the plot mainly to emphasise 007’s newfound sense of maturity. A spirited teenager who latches onto him, Bond rejects her advances, offering to buy her an ice-cream when she turns up naked in his bed, only to discover she intends him to be nothing more than a conquest – good, subversive stuff for a series that had tended to show the ageing agent as irresistible.

However, it is flawed. Too many moments played for cheap laughs indicate a picture that is never fully confident in the story and mood it’s attempting to convey. An appearance by Janet Brown as Mrs Thatcher is cloying. The bit where Bond’s defeat of some menacing ice hockey players to the musical cues of the scoreboard feels strained and unnecessary. And the early defeat of a familiar, bald, cat-toting figure is cheap, the scene put together as a two-fingered salute to SPECTRE rights owner Kevin McClory. None of this is enough to ruin For Your Eyes Only, which is a bold and fine introduction to Bond’s eighties tenure, but it does show the unease with which this new direction was ushered in.

11. Spectre
Year: 2015
Star (his age): Daniel Craig (47)
Lass (her age): Monica Bellucci (51), Lea Seydoux (30)
Evil Doer: Christoph Waltz
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $881m (4)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘What do we do now?’
Title Song Performer: Sam Smith
Glamorous Locale: Mexico, Italy, Austria, Morocco
Gadget: Wristwatch containing built-in explosive

You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr Bond

Spectre is the first of the rebooted Bonds to tell a classic 007 story, a high concept epic of megalomaniac villains, deadly henchmen, far fetched action scenes and beautiful women for our hero to jump along the way. After the more realistic, hard-edged approach of the previous Daniel Craig entries, there’s an argument for suggesting it’s all a bit of a climb-down, that those films are locked in the past and cinema has moved on, so why return to them? Throw in some much-publicised ennui from the star, a sense of the boredom that crept into and finally undid Sean Connery’s tenure, and the impression you’re left with is of a franchise reaching crisis point once again.

That’s one take, certainly. It isn’t mine, at least not entirely. While I don’t think it quite reaches the heights of Skyfall, let alone Casino Royale, I find Spectre to be a blast. There’s the bravura opening scene, smartly filmed as though one long take that tracks Bond wearing a skull mask from the streets of Mexico City, where the Festival of the Dead takes place, to the roof of his hotel and an assassination attempt. It’s wonderfully done, with its 1,500 extras, pulsating drum-heavy score, Craig and girlfriend moving smoothly through the action as though simultaneously part of it and following their own contrasting plotline. The sequence screams of excess; it’s filmed the way it is at the behest of director Sam Mendes, following a vogue for long take cinema and opening the movie with one just because he can, because it’s possible and finally because it’s so good for generating suspense. Most importantly, it sets the tone for everything that follows, an effort from all concerned to transform Spectre into the kind of thrill ride that underpinned some of the best in the series. It proves there is life still in this old dog.

Talking of whom, Craig continues to provide a muscular Bond, hard acting with a refusal to simply go through the motions. While the film insists on shoehorning references to the previous stories in, to make Spectre something of a culmination, even including Skyfall (Silva was in on it, apparently), 007 carries less of the emotional baggage that punctuated his earlier appearances. By now that makes some sense, not quite resetting the character in the mode of ‘classic Bond’ but realigning him as fresh and ready for dealing with the episode’s challenges. The tension with his paymasters remains intact. Ralph Fiennes’s newly installed M is irritated with his loose cannon tendencies, and for once it’s nice to see why he gives a hard time to this man who dispatches Enemy Number One time after time. There’s affection between the pair also. M trusts Bond implicitly when it comes to the pair having to deal with an enemy within, Andrew Scott’s oily C who is on a mission to replace the ’00’ programme with a global data sharing network. The mention of C getting such a top job as a consequence of judicious contacts within the government is a lovely reference to Conservative cronyism, a slap in the face to the likes of M and Bond who have got to where they are through merit and battle scars. This storyline also gives Q and Moneypenny things to do, far more than the cameo appearances they used to enjoy and developing a sense of teamwork between the characters.

The narrative contrives to pitch Bond on his own against the machinations of Blofeld, here played by current rentabaddie of choice, Christoph Waltz. Almost born for the role, Waltz has the just the right mixture of charisma, playful dialogue and the sense it’s all a grand game to make for an absorbing arch-villain. The briefly discussed plot point of Blofeld and Bond sharing some family history adds to the intrigue, though blink and you’ll miss it, and in reality there’s a feeling of simply winding Waltz up and letting him go off on his trademark schtick. His first appearance – heavily prominent in the film’s trailers – is the best, Blofeld cast as the shadowy, all-powerful head of a cabal of global villainy, capable of dealing out death and judgement with a whispered word to his aides. Once his relationship with Bond becomes more personal and the pair share time together, his inscrutable headship of SPECTRE begins to lose some of its impact, and considering the build-up he’s far too easily dealt with. For all that, the torture scene that depicts Blofeld literally boring into Bond’s head is a gruelling nightmare, less visceral than Casino Royale’s Le Chiffre’s old school methods perhaps, but in line with the character’s sophistication levels. You can imagine him spending hours on coming up with a device that will really hurt Bond, creating the machine that will do the job, and the glee with which he wields it is all too palpable.

Old problems that pockmarked the series are visible in Spectre. Dave Bautista plays Blofeld’s wrecking ball henchman; he has a fight scene with Bond that destroys half a train, losing some of From Russia with Love‘s claustrophobia by simply having the characters crash through furniture that should confine them, and after such an experience our hero emerges without a scratch. Really? All right, so Roger Moore was never shown to be battered and bruised as a consequence of his adventures, but surely we’re past that by now… Lea Seydoux as the heroine is a return to the ‘damsel in distress’ Bond girl, existing to be captured and then saved. This is buried beneath character development, which at least gives Seydoux some emotional range, but it’s there and the key bargain between Bond and her that compels the former to spare Blofeld’s life never really suggests this will be anything more than her one appearance in the series. A nice try at creating a love interest to at last replace Vesper and let 007 move on, yet lacking much of the dramatic weight you’d expect from the Craig era.

The feeling that the producers have given up on all the careful restart of the series to give us a more human and credible hero for the sake of telling an old-fashioned Bond story is difficult to avoid. It undermines Spectre, even though we’re a long way from the grotesque excesses of Die Another Day and it’s all played with more respect for its audience, and itself for that matter. Flawed, yes, but worth it? Spectre gets away with it in the end. It’s very well made and crucially is its own thing rather than following trends set by other movies, something that too often blighted the series in the past. The worry is that the retooled franchise is already running out of steam, and that’s a problem.

10. The Spy Who Loved Me
Year: 1977
Star (his age): Roger Moore (49)
Lass (her age): Barbara Bach (29)
Evil Doer: Curd Jurgens
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $693m (7)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘All those feathers and he still can’t fly’
Title Song Performer: Carly Simon
Glamorous Locale: Egypt, Sardinia
Gadget: Lotus Esprit possessing submarine facilities and underwater weaponry, wristwatch with ticker tape, ‘Wet Nellie’ (water motorcycle that can be assembled, presumably in the same family as Little Nellie – see You Only Live Twice)

In our business, Anya, people get killed. We both know that. So did he. It was either him or me. The answer to the question is yes. I did kill him

The mid-1970s found 007 in crisis. The Man with the Golden Gun had been a (relative) box office failure. Harry Saltzman’s financial problems led to a dissolvement of the Broccoli-Saltzman production partnership that had fuelled the series to this point. Kevin McClory remained a spectral (do you see?) presence on the periphery, forever threatening legal action over what he considered to be his intellectual property. The Spy Who Loved Me was the riposte, a big budget, no-holds barred extravaganza that would hark back to what was already perceived to be a golden age. After going initially with Guy Hamilton and then considering a young Steven Spielberg, they eventually chose Lewis Gilbert to direct, a decision that perhaps makes this one the closest to You Only Live Twice, his previous instalment at the helm, though in truth the film feels like a Greatest Hits of the 1960s entries with elements from Dr No, Goldfinger and Thunderball all discernible.

The movie’s wild card is the insertion of Anya Asamova aka Agent Triple X, a Russian spy played by Barbara Bach. It’s as much Asamova’s story as it is Bond’s, the pair teaming up in the spirit of Detente to foil Curd Jurgen’s megalomaniac, but with the added edge that she becomes aware he previously killed her lover in the line of duty, meaning once the mission is over she has vowed to do for him. For the most part she is entirely Bond’s equal, getting the better of him several times and certainly taking advantage of his way with the ladies, which is shown up to be as much about perception as reality. The team works, especially as they have to take on Jaws (Richard Kiel), the towering henchman whose best scene is when he battles the pair in a railway carriage, the cramped surroundings playing to his size advantage. Jaws is a lot of fun and rightly the focus is on his constant tussles with the agents, which places Jurgens’s Stromberg in the background. Blofeld in all but name (legal issues again), Stromberg’s scheme is to destroy the world and reset the human race beneath the sea. A wacky, high concept villainous scheme that involves the capture of nuclear submarines and triggering their missiles at the usual major cities, and all the better because there’s no ransom involved and therefore no reasoning with the man.

A silly story no doubt, but it’s breathlessly told in the finest tradition. The shoot takes advantage of the naturally beautiful locations of Egypt and Sardinia to produce some breathtaking imagery, the former knowingly riffing on Lawrence of Arabia, so transparently in fact that I had to check whether Freddie Young had been recruited to reprise some of his award winning cinematography from that film. Christopher Wood’s script realigned Bond to be less like Connery, and more the smooth English gentleman spy that would define Roger Moore’s approach. Criticisms of Bach’s acting abilities seem a little churlish. She’s fine, composed and regal, and almost impossibly gorgeous; the issue is more that by the film’s close the character reverts to ‘damsel in distress’ status, which short-changes the highly capable agent she has been carefully developed into up to this point. Ken Adam’s cavernous submarine hangar is another design classic, and the crew pulled a great trick in building a 65-foot scale model of Stromberg’s tanker, all so they could reproduce the sea wake that would add to the prop’s authenticity. The first use of IT in 007 finds Bond sitting down at a computer console and referring to the instruction manual in intercepting the rogue submarines; this could only have been made better had he first retrieved his ‘readers’.

The Spy Who Loved Me isn’t without its problems, notably Marvin Hamlisch’s disco-influenced score that automatically dates the film. Bond’s Lotus Esprit, a prototype vehicle that converts into a miniature submarine, is perhaps a step too far into the realm of fantasy. The car helps him to evade a pursuing helicopter piloted by Caroline Munro, but the moment it emerges from the sea onto a crowded beach makes you wonder where he was when the ‘secret’ part of secret agent training took place, especially as he casually opens his window to toss a fish out. Pass the wine bottle, Victor. Then again, considering this film as anything other than broad entertainment is folly. The tone is set as early as the opening scene, where Bond skis off the side of Mount Asgard on Baffin Island, free falls for what seems like ages and then unfurls a Union Jack parachute at the last moment. This stunt was filmed for real, a winning act of daring and craft that would doubtlessly be done using CGI now. Little wonder that it earned applause in theatres, and helped the film to become a favourite with the public.

9. Licence to Kill
Year: 1989
Star (his age): Timothy Dalton (43)
Lass (her age): Cary Lowell (28), Talisa Soto (22)
Evil Doer: Robert Davi
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $285m (24)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘Looks like he came to a dead end’
Title Song Performer: Gladys Knight
Glamorous Locale: Florida, Mexico
Gadget: Signature gun

Watch the birdy, you bastard

In terms of money, Licence to Kill is the least successful of all the Bonds, a white elephant that very nearly killed the series off altogether. It was the first to earn a ‘PG-13/15’ certificate, the comic book violence of previous entries giving way to some real gore in places, the influence of Die Hard creeping in to what could be shown. It turned out, EON found, that what audiences wanted was the likeable fantasy of the Roger Moore years, not the harder-edged killer represented by Timothy Dalton’s tenure, and as a consequence it did for the lead actor, took Bond off the screen for six years and reverted back to type when it eventually returned. Years later and able to enjoy the film on its own merits, there’s a reason why many viewers see it as in fact one of the best.

After a conventional opening, Licence to Kill sails into uncharted territory when Bond is compelled to ‘go rogue’, refusing to serve when he isn’t allowed to pursue his personal vendetta against Robert Davi’s drugs baron, Frank Sanchez. The possibilities of where this takes the agent are compelling. Suddenly, this highly capable and dangerous man is off the leash, free to pursue the villain in his own way, and Licence to Kill is at its most interesting when 007 infiltrates his way into Sanchez’s operation, effectively retelling Yojimbo with Bond implying treachery where it doesn’t necessarily exist. Dalton takes the character into new territory, visibly angry over the assault on his friend, giving a real sense of consequence to Bond, while emerging battered and bruised from confrontations in a way that didn’t happen to the other fellows. A scene of him in bed, his upper body criss-crossed with scars and bullet wounds, shows the effects of a life spent in deadly game playing, all those experiences shaping Bond into the living weapon he has been honed and sharpened into.

The film is a refreshing change from type, the endless recycling of the same basic plot that Bond had followed over the years. Dalton makes for a credible hero and isn’t especially likeable, while Sanchez’s motivation – to make as much money as possible from drugs – feels contemporary and believable. No attempts at world domination; it’s all about the green, and it roots Sanchez as a wholly 1980s villain. Some of the stunt work is breathtaking. It culminates with an extended set piece involving a fleet of tankers driving along dangerous Mexican roads (so dangerous, in fact, that the roads had been closed to the public by this point) and it’s incredible, high octane stuff that is up there with some of the series’ best work, particularly because – unlike, for instance, some of the more fantastical skiing sequences – it all looks so real.

Licence to Kill includes a most welcome extended supporting part for Desmond Llewellyn’s Q. The female co-stars are uneven. Cary Lowell’s gutsy CIA operative who allies with Bond is good fun, but Talisa Soto as Sanchez’s moll suffers from some ‘all over the place’ plotting and is frankly not well performed. Davi is great and effortlessly charismatic as Sanchez however; it probably isn’t an accident that he emerges as a more enjoyable character than Bond. There’s also an early appearance for Benicio Del Toro as one of his henchmen. Overall a fine entry, wholly undeserving of its ‘black sheep’ status within the Bond family, and the possibility of what might have happened to the franchise had it been a success was sadly never realised.

8. You Only Live Twice
Year: 1967
Star (his age): Sean Connery (36)
Lass (her age): Akiko Wakabayashi (25)
Evil Doer: Donald Pleasence
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $757m (6)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘Just a drop in the ocean’
Title Song Performer: Nancy Sinatra
Glamorous Locale: Japan
Gadget: Little Nellie, the flat-pack helicopter

Darling, I give you very best duck

Bond films walk a tightrope between serious-minded spy thrillers (From Russia with Love, The Living Daylights) and light-hearted fantasy romps (the majority of the Moore and Brosnan eras). My feeling is that either is fine as long as that’s what it purports to be – the only problem is when a film made for fun starts taking itself seriously, a problem that turned Thunderball into a plodder. You Only Live Twice is every step a daft fantasy – it aims to do nothing more than entertain, to punch the viewer in the arm and laugh over what a great lark all this nonsense is. Once it transpires the villains have constructed their secret base from a hollowed out, extinct volcano, not only doing this in total secrecy but also sending their own satellites, undetected by anybody, into space for the purposes of ‘eating’ American and Russian spacecraft, then you realise Bond has finally jumped a shark the size of Megadon and kissed goodbye to any semblance of credibility. If you are prepared to accept that from your 007 then the film works wonderfully. For me, it’s a wholehearted guilty pleasure, the sort of picture that offers a complete escape from reality. Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Not that it’s a perfect film. You Only Live Twice underwent a difficult production process, in particular Sean Connery’s declaration that this would be his last outing as Bond. In hindsight a rash thing to come out with, but it sent the franchise into a tailspin, suggesting at one stage that without its star there could be no more 007. The lethargy that Connery started showing in Thunderball develops into full-on boredom here and, in fairness, there’s just about enough spectacle in virtually every cell that it nullifies seeing the main man sleepwalking through his performance. Little of Fleming’s novel remains, and for that matter you only know the screenplay was by Roald Dahl because it’s credited to him. There are various continuity problems and other bits that make no sense, even within this film’s loose grasp on logic e.g. the car being picked up by a helicopter wielding an enormous magnet is a fun, throwaway scene, dreamed up during production, but Bond watches the action on a little screen, despite no one being present to actually film it for him. An aerial cameraman lost his foot during a grisly accident while shooting the chopper fight, and then Japanese authorities refused to let the crew fire rockets over its volcanic terrain, meaning these scenes were moved to Spain. There are mixed reactions to Donald Pleasance’s appearance as Blofeld (a late casting change, scenes featuring the original actor already in the can, which led to costly re-shoots), the first time we see SPECTRE’s chief – personally, I think he’s a weak villain. And at the end of it all, this is the Bond that remains most open to parody, the Austin Powers movies and Team America sharing out bits of the picture to poke fun at.

For all that, there’s really very little to dislike. The piss-takers have a certain redundancy because You Only Live Twice is pretty much a parody of itself to begin with. There’s a point with the volcanic base when you just need to go with it; if nothing else then admire the human effort that went into designing and constructing the enormous set, which of course was physically put together, has actual helicopters taking off from inside it, and those are real stuntmen abseiling down from its ceiling. Ken Adam’s creation cost more than the entire production of Dr No and at the time there was nothing quite like it. I defy anyone to despise Little Nellie, the pint sized chopper Bond pilots to scout locations for SPECTRE’s lair, the fact it comes flat-packed in suitcases and carries the kind of weaponry that can see off a squad of pursuers. The apparently unreconstructed attitudes in Japan – where, we’re told ‘men come first’, women come second‘ – are so bizarre as to add to the sense of unreality, let alone the frequent bastardisations of the Japanese language and the frankly surreal scene where Bond is made to look like a local, which he doesn’t and the point of all this never emerges. You might as well criticise Dr Seuss for his books’ lack of reality – there isn’t any and the film tells us it doesn’t matter.

And besides, it’s stands as one of the most beautifully shot and scored movies in the series. Freddie Young, the Oscar winning cinematographer lent his talents to turning Japan into a place of almost alien gorgeousness – all sunset vistas, Tokyo lit by neon, and countryside that looks like the surface of the moon but with vegetation. John Barry submitted another ravishing musical accompaniment, tinged with Oriental influences, while the title song, featuring the vocal talents of Nancy Sinatra, remains one of my favourites. Lewis Gilbert, in the first of his directorial assignments, made some really interesting choices, notably the rooftop fight scene, filmed from a distance to remove the moment’s visceral qualities (fights in Bond films were always shot in close-up) and therefore any feeling that real damage was being done.

7. The Living Daylights
Year: 1987
Star (his age): Timothy Dalton (41)
Lass (her age): Maryam d’Abo (26)
Evil Doer: Jeroen Krabbe, Joe Don Baker
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $381m (22)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘He met his Waterloo’
Title Song Performer: A-Ha
Glamorous Locale: Vienna, Morocco
Gadget: Keyring with many special features, Aston Martin with ‘a few optional extras installed’

Tell M what you want. If he fires me, I’ll thank him for it.

You wonder whether Timothy Dalton views Daniel Craig’s success in the role of James Bond with disdain, after all the agent in his current guise is close to the character he essayed back in the late 1980s. Too soon? The world didn’t seem ready for a take on 007 that aligned him with the source material and added a harder edge that had become entirely absent during the Roger Moore years. Critics honed in on the lack of humour, the grumpiness, the expunging of the fun factor. Dalton himself added to the problem by refusing to play along with the bandwagon, demanding the sort of privacy that was routinely denied the man who would be Bond.

A pity. The Living Daylights is a terrific movie, a vital injection of energy and a serious minded central character who breathed life into this tired franchise. Dalton came with a stronger acting pedigree than any of his forebears in the role and it shows. Tiny glimpses, the look of shame when he pulls his gun on a terrified child, the rush of irritation when Kara (Maryam d’Abo) wants to return to her flat for the cello, the set jaw when he resolves to go after the assassin in the film’s prologue, offer ample evidence of an actor not merely reading his lines in a manly way but constantly questioning Bond’s motivation. He’s the heart of the picture and he’s riveting to watch.

The Living Daylights is the last opportunity the series had to cover the world of the Cold War, and it’s probably the best section of the movie. This is the other side of the Iron Curtain, the one from a hundred spy thrillers, all muted colours and suspicious eyes, and strangely enough it’s the one in which Bond seems most at ease, light-hearted in his dealings with the nervous Saunders (Thomas Wheatley) and confident in his defection plan. It shows 007 as a consummate Cold Warrior, rather less sure of himself back in Britain where the perceived lack of danger leaves him restless.

The villains aren’t great, though Andreas Wisniewski as the strongman, at one stage wielding grenades disguised as milk bottles, is good value. D’Abo as the Bond girl gets some decent characterisation and has fine chemistry with Dalton that is allowed to build organically. Best of all perhaps is the score, John Barry’s last for the series and a really enjoyable piece of work. I think that sums up the film, like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service an underrated entry that deserves a kinder retrospective.

6. Goldfinger
Year: 1964
Star (his age): Sean Connery (34)
Lass (her age): Honor Blackman (39)
Evil Doer: Gert Frobe
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $912m (3)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘He blew a fuse’
Title Song Performer: Shirley Bassey
Glamorous Locale: Swiss Alps
Gadget: Aston Martin DB5

You’re a woman of many parts, Pussy

After two movies that established James Bond and introduced his world, Goldfinger defined the series’ direction by ditching the more serious, earthy aspects and focusing on high concept thrills. With a box office return that intimated overwhelmingly this is exactly what people wanted, the die was cast, 007 reimagined as a virtually indomitable superhero, showing few of the vulnerabilities his character underwent previously in favour of swapping playful barbs with the villain. There’s something innately pleasing about the fantasy. Bond drives along hairpin Alpine roads in a beautiful car rigged with special ‘modifications’ courtesy of Q Branch, living a life that no viewer could ever come close to experiencing, one that pays lip service to real world problems because there’s some improbable megalomaniac to deal with and gorgeous women to seduce. It’s impossible to dislike, and Goldfinger does this better than subsequent entries because Sean Connery was in his prime, still interested in his work, effortlessly charismatic, looking as though he’s having as much fun as the people watching him on the screen. Gert Frobe makes for a fine bad guy, ruled by a love of gold to the extent his first name is a play on the Latin word for the precious metal, while Olympic wrestler Harold Sakata is the last word in memorable henchmen thanks to a steel rimed bowler hat, brute strength and virtually mute performance.

The movie has shortcomings that only become really apparent after several viewings because it’s film making as a thrill ride – you’re having too much fun to care that (i) Goldfinger lavishes millions on a playroom that converts into schematics of his plan to destroy Fort Knox, and then he wastes the men for whom he designed the room in the first place (ii) he keeps Bond alive and under capture for reasons that never truly matter, naturally allowing the one man who can foil his schemes to stick around (iii) Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore, the first in a long line of euphemistically named females, is a (strongly implied) lesbian and a villain, who is made good after Bond beds her and presumably shows her what she’s been missing in her life i.e. a good man. The latter point aside, a worrying note of intolerance that would endure in the series, these elements are all part of the roller coaster experience this film happens to be. It clearly had a lot of money spent on it (ignoring the back projected Miami scenes that show up all the more obviously when watched in HD) and it’s wonderfully shot, particularly in the film’s Alpine scenes. Barry’s score is amongst his most iconic, the arrangement for the title track lingering long after Goldfinger’s closing credits have rolled. The sets are beginning to show their large scale glory that Ken Adams would become renowned for. Most notable is the interior of Fort Knox, an imagined chamber of hoarded gold and steel floors. It’s here the thrilling denouement takes place, Bond shackled to a ticking (ticking!) atomic bomb and having to deal with Sakata’s lumbering death machine. If what happens appears hackneyed, then it’s worth remembering Goldfinger did this first and it’s been copied many times, not least by the people who produced it and returned again and again to the winning formula.

5. Skyfall
Year: 2012
Star (his age): Daniel Craig (44)
Lass (her age): Judi Dench (77), Naomie Harris (36), Berenice Marlohe (33)
Evil Doer: Javier Bardem
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $1,109m (1)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘Last rat standing’
Title Song Performer: Adele
Glamorous Locale: Turkey, London, Scotland
Gadget: Radio tracker

I always did hate this house

To celebrate 40 years of Bond movies they gave us Die Another Day. Thanks for that. For the 50th anniversary we got Skyfall, a vastly improved product from a studio with much to prove after the loss of momentum that came with Quantum of Solace. A lot of money was spent on it. An Oscar winning British director, Sam Mendes, was recruited, and with him came top cinematographer, Roger Deakins. The multi-nominated Thomas Newman became the ninth composer hired for the score. Adele, possibly the biggest name they could recruit, performed the title track. Marquee names like Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney and Naomie Harris were added to an already strong cast list of regulars. Little was left to chance, and audiences responded by transforming it into the series’ biggest financial success, while the critical reaction was broadly very positive.

A triumph then, and it isn’t hard to see why when Skyfall pulls off the tricky balancing act of blending Daniel Craig’s battle scarred, enigmatic hero with a plot more rooted in traditional Bondage. Q’s back, played by Ben Whishaw as a wet behind the ears IT expert. Moneypenny also makes a return, albeit via an unusual route. In a story that stands alone rather than playing as part of a wider arc, Bond’s mission puts him into contact with Javier Bardem’s rogue MI6 agent, another instance of 007 fighting someone who’s virtually his equal, albeit with the extravagant flourish of classic franchise villains. Best of all, everyone finally realises that having Judi Dench on contract means that an expanded role for M is a good idea, and the Dame more or less becomes the film’s Bond girl as the story harries both she and Craig to an explosive climax at the agent’s ancestral home in the Scottish Highlands.

With Deakins on board, Skyfall is possibly the best looking Bond picture since You Only Live Twice, a gloriously shot extravaganza whether photographing the rooftops of Istanbul, rain-soaked London or a misty, rural Scotland locked in some endless yesteryear. Under Mendes’s guidance, the action scenes are edited less frantically than in Quantum of Solace, and there are relatively few of them, the film having enough confidence to spend time settling in with its characters and expanding their personalities. This suits Craig’s Bond, who is shot and lost for dead in the exciting prologue and lies low for a time, losing weight and taking on a pinched, wolfish look, haunted by just about every demon imaginable. When he returns to the fold, it’s clear that he’s older, not necessarily wiser, physically unfit for duty and only recommissioned by M out of a deep-rooted sense of trust. It sets him up for a great clash with Bardem’s Silva, harbouring similar feelings of resentment to his former masters and hoping to find in 007 a kindred spirit. Bardem’s entrance is one of the best in just about any film, shot in a single long take as he monologues to Bond, moving steadily and gracefully into the frame’s foreground. Then he seems to try it on, though his orientation is never made clear and more likely is his inclination to provoke, to see where his advances take him. It all serves to add nuance and depth.

Skyfall is far from the perfect Bond experience. Silva has too many opportunities to take M out for her longevity to have anything besides plotting convenience going for it. The finale at ‘Skyfall’ makes little sense, again ending up there because the story wants it to rather than via narrative logic, though there’s much to enjoy in the action that takes place there. The contrivances stand out a little more here than in other entries, perhaps because so much of Skyfall screams of its own quality and so the weaknesses are starker. The question is whether the film has built enough goodwill with its viewers to let these things go, and the answer should be a resounding yes. It’s a cracking episode, if a long one, and if it falls short of the series’ absolute heights then it still wins in so many areas. I love Newman’s music, Adele’s song, Deakin’s photography, the performances, the sense of celebration surrounding the film that is present but never writ large, allowing audiences to enjoy Skyfall on its own merits.

4. Dr No
Year: 1962
Star (his age): Sean Connery (32)
Lass (her age): Ursula Andress (26)
Evil Doer: Joseph Wiseman
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $441m (20)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘I think they were on their way to a funeral’
Title Song Performer: Monty Norman, performing Under the Mango Tree
Glamorous Locale: Jamaica
Gadget: His wits, dear boy!

That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve had your six

Watching Dr No now is fascinating. All the series elements aren’t yet in place (the title song doesn’t play over the opening credits, there’s no Q, therefore no gadgetry) and the plot sometimes runs parallel to Fleming’s novel whereas most veer off spectacularly, retaining little more than the title. The penchant for investing heavily in moving the production to glamorous places is present and correct however – you can imagine contemporary audiences falling for the delights of Jamaica easily enough. And at the centre of it all is Sean Connery, in his first starring role and quickly establishing himself as a living, breathing gentleman spy. Handsome, groomed, spry, pithy – picture this film with Cary Grant in the leading role (he was considered) and you get a Cary Grant movie. Instead, Connery is Bond, carrying no preconceptions of what you expect from a Connery picture. It’s a great job of work from the Scot, at ease in the part and enjoying a love affair with the camera that makes scenes as superfluous as 007 checking his hotel room for bugs attractive and watchable.

The film’s lack of gadgets and souped up cars turns into one of its biggest strengths. Without his ‘Deus Ex Machina’ props, Bond has to rely on his wits and talents. Not only does this lend credibility to the character, it also leads to moments when he has to be vulnerable and out of his depth. The invulnerable superhero he would become in later entries isn’t yet here and that’s a positive. Despite this, we’re clearly watching a fun fantasy flick without serious nods to the world of spycraft. Henchmen who appear periodically to offer moments of action and die just as quickly are here. Joseph Wiseman’s megalomaniac villain, complete with a lavishly appointed and staffed lair, turns up for the climax. The beautiful Bond girl (Ursula Andress, her Swiss vocals dubbed by Nikki Van der Zyl) is an impossibly gorgeous creature, emerging from the waves wearing a white bikini in the film’s iconic shot. It’s a heady mix of stylised violence, photographed in places of real beauty that would be inaccessible to the average viewer, all costing a hefty amount to bring to the screen and looking it too. Dr No found instant favour with audiences and guaranteed further episodes. As the kick-off for a franchise that would run and run, it’s a fine entry and in Connery introduced a star who would endure as its finest exponent.

3. Casino Royale
Year: 2006
Star (his age): Daniel Craig (38)
Lass (her age): Eva Green (26)
Evil Doer: Mads Mikkelsen
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $670m (8)
(Almost) Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘That last hand nearly killed me’
Title Song Performer: Chris Cornell
Glamorous Locale: Bahamas, Italy, Czech Republic
Gadget: Aston Martin containing a field medical kit

I’ve got a little itch, down there. Would you mind?

Looking back it’s probably difficult to imagine the risk they were taking with Casino Royale. A new actor as Bond, one who had already been dismissed by many disgruntled and web savvy critics. The series rebooted, taking the character back to his roots, to the early days of his Double-Oh status. A return to the source novels with a fairly straight retelling of Ian Fleming’s first Bond yarn. And most critically, a conscious decision to reprise the mood and tone of the Timothy Dalton movies, recasting the hero as a dangerous weapon, shorn of the winning charm some of his previous guises had exhibited, memories of films that were the series’ least profitable no doubt writ large in the producers’ minds.

Of course, the celluloid world in the mid-2000s was a very different place from the eighties. Matt Damon’s adventures as Jason Bourne were both critically acclaimed and adored by audiences, suggesting it was possible for the protagonist to be an inscrutable killing machine and people would still love him. Bourne’s shadow looms over Casino Royale. Daniel Craig’s take on Bond reveals little of his past, peels away his emotional layers deliberately and leaves us with a man of action, a deadly and blunt instrument, the last person with whom you’d want to pick a fight. In the role, Craig is toughness personified. The accent, posture, fine tailoring, appreciation for a good vintage – they’re all present, but the Bond he essays gives the impression of being schooled in these elements and in fact the actor he most resembles is Robert Shaw’s Red Grant in From Russia with Love, low-born and dirty, handy in a scrap, happy to get his hands dirty. That he makes Bond an empathetic character is little short of a miracle. I think it’s because Craig performs the character well and is given the time and space to do so. Alongside Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, he shows tenderness and caring. There isn’t the necessity to jump her bones within two minutes of meeting her; Moore would have had her in the sack with one raised eyebrow, but here the relationship develops organically and when ‘love’ blossoms between them it’s as a consequence of their shared experiences.

Director Martin Campbell deserves a lot of credit for eking suspense from a card game. What could have been tedious turns out to make for some of the film’s most tense scenes, all those meaningful glances between Bond and Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre, Vesper staring disapprovingly on. The action, of which there is surprisingly little, is electrically filmed, in particular the free running chase that juxtaposes the pursuant’s graceful parkour with 007’s bull in a china shop. Mikkelsen is a fine villain, a less ambitious character than the standard megalomaniac and all the better because he’s given some motivation, a desperation to win the card game as his life is on the line. Once Bond triumphs, he resorts to violent measures and the visceral ‘chair scene’, strong stuff for a 12/PG-13 release and surprisingly for the series one that has visible consequences as our hero needs time to convalesce. Perhaps best of all, at this point there’d traditionally be a fade, 007 having won and got the girl, only it keeps going and you know that it can’t be for reasons that will end happily. Getting to that stage is gut wrenching, Bond apparently finding peace only for a final, tragic twist to unfold. The film’s aim is to establish why he becomes the man he is, and it succeeds.

Casino Royale is a muscular and confident entry, successfully resetting the series, giving us a hero for modern times and closing the curtain on the increasing anachronism he had been turning into before that point. Is there really anyone who still thinks Daniel Craig is not Bond?

2. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Year: 1969
Star (his age): George Lazenby (30)
Lass (her age): Diana Rigg (31)
Evil Doer: Telly Savalas
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $506m (15)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘He had a lot of guts’
Title Song Performer: None (Louis Armstrong performing We Have All The Time In The World takes place during the film, not over the titles)
Glamorous Locale: Switzerland
Gadget: Just what’s underneath the kilt

It’s all right. It’s quite all right, really. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry, you see. We have all the time in the world

For two thirds of its running time, On her Majesty’s Secret Service is that strangest of things within the Bond series – a low-key spy thriller. With Sean Connery’s departure, the producers made a conscious decision to return to the spirit of Ian Fleming’s secret agent – out went the gadgets, the high concept action, the thrills and spills. In came a 007 who carefully infiltrates the villain’s lair using an assumed identity, pieces together his opponent’s plan via clues and the things he discovers, even gives us glimpses into his private life, in which he meets a girl and – gasp! – falls in love with her. It’s a different Bond for a franchise that must have felt it was pushing the limits of what the character could do before leaving any semblance of reality in its wake. Audiences responded positively on the whole. The film turned a healthy profit, though the returns weren’t as staggering as they had been and that pretty much did for its reputation. For years, On her Majesty’s Secret Service became the curio of the series, an oddity that almost neatly bisected the Connery and Moore years.

For sure, there’s a Connery-sized hole in there. George Lazenby, the Australian model who through a combination of bluff and looks won a single bite at the cherry, is still seen by many as a weak Bond – not tough enough, can’t act especially well, a vacuum where the charisma normally goes. Once it became clear he was only going to star in one film Lazenby became a vilified figure – stories of his inflated ego on the set abounded, tales in which the ‘discovery’ pissed everyone off. In reality, he plays a different character to what came before. Connery’s Bond could never feature in the film because it wasn’t made for him. It called for a more sensitive portrayal, more human, less certain of himself at every turn. There’s a bit in the film where Bond just sits down, defeated, his enemies closing in and he’s run out of ways to foil them. That wouldn’t happen to ‘the other fellow’ and it adds layers of humanity to the character that suddenly make him seem more empathetic, more the reaction you or I would have under similar circumstances.

As such, it helps to make this one of the best entries in the series, and even if you aren’t convinced by Lazenby there’s so much else to enjoy. The film has a sizzling Alpine setting, the Piz Gloria Revolving Restaurant at the summit of the Schilthorn doubling as Blofeld’s headquarters making for the most dramatic of locations. It leads to some thrilling ski-based action sequences, wonderfully shot by professional skier Willy Bogner. Telly Savalas excels as a more dynamic and charming arch-villain, while Diana Rigg plays the love interest to fine effect, a neurotic death-lover who’s saved by Bond just as she gives him roots. John Barry produces some of his best work for this one, a score so finely tuned that its title track plays over the credits without a singing accompaniment, though his love song ‘We have all the time in the world’ appears during the film, performed with emotional resonance by Louis Armstrong. The revisionists have it right. On her Majesty’s Secret Service is top drawer Bondage.

A note on continuity, which I raise because in the film Bond and Blofeld meet each other as though for the first time, despite having traded barbs previously in You Only Live Twice. There is a feeling of the series being rebooted for On her Majesty’s Secret Service, long before ‘rebooting’ became a Hollywood staple, though it’s worth pointing out that this film was considered ‘the next one’ since Goldfinger was in the can – Thunderball eventually came next due to rights issues and then seasonal shooting schedules put You Only Live Twice on the agenda for Bond’s fifth outing. The fan theory, which has developed over time, goes that ‘James Bond’ – as much as 007 – is a label rather than the character’s actual name. Bond becomes the moniker given to whoever is promoted to the position, which allows for the different actors taking the role on. Perhaps that explains why Bond happily drops his name to all and sundry, despite being a supposedly secret agent. Theory, speculation, or a grain of truth? The decision is up to the individual viewer.

1. From Russia with Love
Year: 1963
Star (his age): Sean Connery (33)
Lass (her age): Daniela Bianchi (21)
Evil Doer: Lotte Lenya, Robert Shaw
Inflation-Adjusted Gross (Series Ranking): $576m (12)
Post-Death Quipmanship: ‘She had her kicks’
Title Song Performer: Matt Monro
Glamorous Locale: Istanbul
Gadget: Gizmo-laden briefcase

You may know the right wines, but you’re the one on your knees

From Russia with Love is set mainly in Istanbul, that gorgeous Bosphorean capital where ruins and memories of the Byzantine Empire linger on every corner and the streets reek of centuries old history. It was on the front line of the Cold War, a strange atmosphere of agents on both side of the Curtain trailing each other, almost through duty and with a sense of near affection creeping in to their activities. In this post-Cuba climate, hostilities between America and the USSR had thawed to such an extent that the latter are never portrayed as villains. That status is reserved for SPECTRE, the criminal organisation that aims to play both sides off against each other as a pre-cursor to assuming world domination. Bond is targeted to get embroiled in a tangled plot that will lead to his demise at the hands of Red Grant (Shaw), a onetime petty thief who under SPECTRE’s tutelage has been transformed into a deadly assassin, in many ways 007’s equal.

We’re still in the brief age of Bond before Goldfinger, before the hero as ‘superhero’ was established. While Connery’s agent is highly capable and moves with an almost catlike grace, in this film he’s far from impervious and at certain stages, notably when his friend, Kerim Bey (Pedro Armendariz), has been killed and he’s on his own, works on a palpable nervous tension. It’s great acting from Connery, who by now was comfortable in the role and relished playing the sense of vulnerability that would rub off on audiences, especially as we’re well aware that he’s being tracked, every step of the way, by Grant. The confrontation between the pair is nicely filmed in a train compartment, lending a claustrophobic element to their tussle, Bond only getting an upper hand after minutes of desperately appealing to Grant and finally offering him money. Lenya plays Rosa Klebb, a Soviet officer secretly in SPECTRE’s service, and there’s a great cameo from Vladek Sheybal as a Chess grandmaster who’s tasked with using his strategic talents to formulate the organisation’s labyrinthine plan.

Despite the complicated plot, the film’s a beautifully scripted winner. Istanbul looks glorious. Daniela Bianchi is one of the more memorable Bond girls because she’s intrinsically involved in the narrative and spends some quality time with Bond, winning us over with her sheer adorable qualities. The action moves quickly, is driven by Bond’s adventures rather than stringing together the set pieces, and John Barry’s score is just smashing, sparking a love affair between the series and his music that made the two synonymous. It’s such virtuous and gripping stuff that the fixing of the template that took place in the following film seems a real shame.

Marnie (1964)

When it’s on: Saturday, 8 October (12.30 am, Sunday)
Channel: BBC2
IMDb Link

By no means all Hitchcock films were box office hits, and some at the time found little critical favour also, though retrospective reviews have often discovered the genius their contemporaries failed to identify. Marnie is something of an oddity in that regard – a decent commercial return upon its 1964 release, a largely positive body of comments, a real Marmite movie for today’s viewers. It’s a title I’ve always had trouble getting to grips with. Perhaps that isn’t a surprise – Marnie followed a string of four outright classics, two of which – Vertigo and North by Northwest – remain perhaps the best film I’ve ever seen and the most entertaining respectively, also Psycho and The Birds, both close to masterpiece territory (and if they aren’t, then that’s only because I don’t want to use that word loosely and they certainly fit the bill where many other people are concerned). But on its own merits it isn’t an easy title to take to readily. Marnie runs for 130 minutes and often very little happens in it. The signature moments of suspense are few and far between, though understated and gripping when they occur. And on the surface it seems a simple premise – Tippi Hedren plays the psychologically damaged Marnie, a serial thief ‘rescued’ by Sean Connery’s beneficent and endlessly patient Philadelphia rich kid who seeks to get to the root of her malaise, to essentially save her from herself. It lives or dies depending on how much you engage with Hedren’s performance. Marnie isn’t a very likeable character, but there are reasons for this – how well is all this conveyed? Do you believe in her? Is any of it compelling?

The major criticism of this film is that with a better female lead it might have been more compelling – you imagine it being made in the 1970s starring Faye Dunaway or Meryl Streep and gaining Oscar approval. Hitchcock wanted Grace Kelly for the part, attempting to coax her out of retirement and finding her reaction to be a positive one before the combination of problems within Monaco and Prince Rainier’s unhappiness with his royal wife taking on such a negative role forced her to withdraw. In the meantime, the director’s ‘groomed’ star, Tippi Hedren, had impressed in The Birds to such an extent that he could turn to her as an off the shelf alternative, though by the time Marnie was being shot Hitchcock and his star were barely on speaking terms anymore.

How much of this was down to the lurid stories concerning Hitch’s personal relationship with Hedren is for you to decide. Personally, I never wanted to believe too much of it – the gifts, the affection, the long, long meetings between the pair, the rumours of his ultimately rebuffed sexual advances towards her. I confess this is entirely down to not wanting it to be true, because I love his work and by extension the man himself, though admittedly over time I’ve come to realise there must have been something to all the tales. Hedren was hardly the first lovely lady he attached himself to but perhaps she was the one in whom he felt he’d invested enough time and effort to feel a sense of almost ownership, as though she was his to do with as he pleased. I don’t know. These are just feelings, impressions based on events no one beyond the two people at the centre of it all can claim to know everything about, although Hedren’s own testimonies and the weight of history do suggest a degree of darkness to Hitchcock’s efforts to find the perfect blonde (for his movies).

The other way of looking at it is to imply that by cold shouldering Hedren on set, Hitchcock put her in the perfect place to coax such a performance of alienation and resentment. Because on the viewing for this write-up I was pretty much hooked on her work; far from seeing weak acting that was unable to cope with the demands of the role, I found her entirely convincing and magnetic. It’s a difficult part to play. Not only do you have to buy into her internal psychological damage, she has to make you believe that she’s worth being pursued by Mark Rutland (Connery), that despite her efforts to brush him off, not to mention her sexual frigidity, he persists until the film ends on a cautiously optimistic note. Fortunately, it’s beautifully done, Hedren’s character going through the emotional wringer until at the end her make-up has run, she looks as though she hasn’t slept properly for weeks and she’s reduced to speaking in a little girl’s voice to explain the childhood incident that scarred her for life. The result, Marnie’s repression and attempts to steal and then move on, all fits together so successfully that the use of the red filter as a psychological trigger whenever she sees the colour (no prizes for guessing what that symbolises) is a redundant gimmick.

The film opens with Marnie up to what we must consider to be her old tricks, having taken a position of employment, wormed her way into the boss’s confidence, breaking into and robbing his safe, and moving on to a new city, to the next trick. By a sorry coincidence, the target of her burglary is an associate of Rutland’s, and he’s the very man she ends up working for next. Again, she steals from her employer and does one, only Rutland’s wise to her ways and catches up with her. He then marries her as a pretext to helping her confront the demons that have forced her into this sad existence, a losing game apparently as Marnie is far from ready to give up her secrets.

The other motive behind Rutland’s decision to wed Marnie is his apparent lust for her, depicted in the infamous ‘rape’ scene, a soft take on the act by any modern filmed standards but clearly depicted all the same. This moment appeared in Winston Graham’s source novel and Hitchcock considered it to be uncuttable, despite the protestations of the original screen writer, Evan Hunter, who believed it would rob Rutland of any audience sympathy. The consequence was Hunter’s instant dismissal from the project and the decision to hire Jay Presson Allen, whose script for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was a draft at this stage. Allen appreciated working with Hitchcock, felt that she was never discriminated against for being a woman and believed he was pleased to have a writer who would give the Marnie character a true female perspective, something he was incapable of providing. As for the scene, it remains relatively hard hitting, especially given Rutland’s careful development as a relatively good man, and it’s possible to feel the rape – or at least, the non-consensual act, if you really insist on softening it – jars with the character’s motivations. I think the aim was to add flesh to Rutland, to show that among the good intentions and willingness to help Marnie he’s still a red-blooded male and can only take the lack of sex during his honeymoon so far. In saying that, I’m not trying to excuse his actions, just looking for reasons why he did it.

Rutland was played by Sean Connery, at the time just beginning his run as James Bond with Dr No finding success and a string of annual 007 outings in the pipeline. Looking for a younger version of his proto-masculine hero, Cary Grant, Hitchcock lucked out in getting Connery, who certainly brings all his charisma and presence to the role, albeit one demanding little of the physical performance that would define his time as Bond. While the complete refusal/inability of the actor to adapt his accent to the character was already in place when he made Marnie, Connery’s is undoubtedly good casting, a strong co-star for Hedren and someone in whom you believe entirely to get to the bottom of his wife’s mysteries once he’s resolved to do so. Of the rest of the cast, Diane Baker excels as Lil, Rutland’s sister-in-law who obviously sees herself as a future Mrs Rutland and makes malevolent efforts to undermine Marnie, sort of a less benevolent take on the Midge character in Vertigo. Marnie’s mother is played by Louise Latham, who deglamourised herself to excellent effect as a rather pathetic woman who both loves her daughter and does all she can to push her away, all because of unfortunate past events.

At the time Marnie was released, it was criticised heavily for ‘old Hollywood’ techniques that just looked out place in the 1960s – rear-screen projection and painted backdrops; check out the exterior set used for Marnie’s mother’s house for a glaring example. But was all this done deliberately? After all, it becomes clear that Marnie lives in a made-up world, so does it not follow to suggest her surroundings have a degree of artifice, that to flood her in harsh reality would only serve to highlight the character’s contrivances and diminish the power of her story? I guess it’s up to the individual viewer to decide, but as the film progressed it made more sense to me to think of it in this way.

Far from seeing this as a relatively weak entry within Hitchcock’s body of work, I’ve now come to really appreciate it, and of course there’s the parting of ways it also represented – the final collaboration between the director and Bernard Herrmann; his last with Robert Burks, the long-time cinematographer of Hitch classics. Truly things would never be the same again, and not in a good way given (largely) what followed. I certainly have no hesitation in recommending Marnie. Like Vertigo, it’s quite unlike anything else he made and if nothing better then it’s certainly an absorbing experiment in the subject matter he chose. I imagine those who psycho-analyse Hitchcock’s films for signs of the man’s profile having a field day with this one, which indeed you can do and often with dark and unpalatable results. That’s there if you’re looking for it, but take his extra-curricular motivations away and what you’re left with is a fine and unique film, one that definitely deserves its retrospective.

Marnie: ****

The Man Who Would be King (1975)

When it’s on: Sunday, 18 October (2.10 pm)
Channel: BBC2
IMDb Link

A fantastic decision from the BBC to schedule a proper matinee flick in its early afternoon BBC2 slot. The Man Who Would be King is proper boys’ own stuff, reminiscent in some ways of the oft-screened North-West Frontier and I think a lot more fun. What elevates it is the genius casting of Michael Caine and Sean Connery in its two starring roles, placing the two great Britons together and constantly sparring off each other verbally. They’re great value, so much so that you end up wondering why more people didn’t do this. It isn’t the only film in which the pair share the bill, but unlike A Bridge Too Far, with its massive ensemble cast, this entry has Connery and Caine partnered as two roguish, former British army men, out for adventure and spoils. It’s an almost effortlessly winning combination.

Of course, it wasn’t without a great deal of effort to put this Rudyard Kipling story onto the screen. John Huston had been sitting on the script for decades, eager to make something along the lines of the 1939 classic, Gunga Din, and originally intending to offer the two leads to Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. The pair passed away within a few years of each other, and Huston kept offering the roles to the great A-listers of their day, ending up with Robert Redford and Paul Newman in an attempt to riff on the chemistry they’d achieved together on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was Newman who suggested Connery and Caine, using British actors in British parts, which led to the eventual and inspired casting choices.

Caine plays Peachy Carnehan, a former Colour Sergeant based in India, who stays on to seek his fortune and turns to pickpocketing when the need calls for it. A chance encounter puts him face to face with Rudyard Kipling himself (Christopher Plummer), then a journalist with the Northern Star newspaper. Peachy’s friend, Danny Dravot (Connery), is introduced, and the pair explain to Kipling their biggest grift yet – they’re to journey through Afghanistan and cross the Hindu Kush into Kafiristan, a remote land of petty tribes, where they will use their superior technology (rifles) and bluff to set themselves up as kings. Despite Kipling’s misgivings, they set off, encountering bandits on their epic journey as well as the perilous mountain ranges, which nearly claim their lives. Making it into Kafirstan, they find it exactly as they expect to and quickly establish themselves as leaders, winning battle after battle thanks to their military nous. But events take a turn when Danny is shot with an arrow during one skirmish. Unharmed, because the arrow struck a bandolier concealed beneath his uniform, he’s seen as a god by the people and is subsequently hailed as the Son of Sikander, the divine reincarnation of Alexander the Great, the last foreigner to take over these lands. Alexander’s overflowing treasury is made available to the pair, and whilst Peachy views this moment as an opportunity to take their share of the loot and make a run for it, the power goes to Danny’s head and he takes to being worshipped as a deity. The only other person in on the caper is Billy Fish (Saeed Jaffrey), an English speaking Gurkha who made it into Kafiristan when a previous map-making expedition was consumed by an avalanche. It can’t last forever, especially when the populace realises that Danny is in fact a mortal man, and when that happens there’ll be hell to pay.

There’s loads to enjoy here, in Huston’s most purely entertaining film since The African Queen. Whereas his 1951 effort succeeded on the romantic chemistry Bogart and Katharine Hepburn established, this one is more of a Bromance, the friendship between Peachy and Danny the only solid and committed thing they have as everything around them is prey to their immoral gambling. It’s a surprisingly touching relationship. When Danny falls prey to ‘snowblindness’ in the mountains, Peachy refuses to leave him behind, and if they are to die then they resolve it will be together, better that than having to face the future alone. It’s this endearing quality that turns them into unlikely heroes. Their brotherly sense of love aside, they’re both despicable chancers, utterly self-serving, and this aspect becomes more central as the story unfolds and it turns into one of colonial avarice, ignorance of native tradition in foreign lands. In the end it’s this that becomes their undoing. Danny wants to marry a beautiful local girl who just happens to be named Roxanne (the same as Alexander’s Eastern princess) and determines to marry her, even though she’s made it clear she isn’t interested as she fears coupling with a god will kill her. Roxanne’s played by Shakira Caine, the real life wife of Michael Caine.

Caine himself remained a big fan of the film and a great admirer of Huston’s shooting style. He praised the director’s ability to know exactly what he wanted from each shot, which helped to make the time on the set at Pinewood, or on location in France and Morocco, an enjoyable one. There’s certainly something very Kiplingesque about The Man Who Would be King. It rattles along in the grand manner, never dwelling too long on a particular scene or overworking the moral points it wishes to make, so that it can be enjoyed as an adventure tale as well as taking on board the more serious underlying themes. At its heart are the two stars, both at the top of their game, giving every impression of enjoying the time they share on screen and reflecting this in their performances. Trading jokes and laughing heartily at each other’s jokes, it seems a great shame that their natural charisma is undermined by their characters’ greed, but then who doesn’t love a rogue? As for the photography, the film plays like an epic, ravishing matte paintings that fill in for the ancient religious city and thousands of extras giving it a real big screen sweep. It looks amazing.

The Man Who Would be King: ****

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

When it’s on: Saturday, 18 July (10.15 am)
Channel: More4
IMDb Link

I once read a Tom Clancy novel, back when his works were seen as the quintessential fiction for men. It was a struggle. I’d never known that it was possible to talk about the features of some military hardware for several pages, but Clancy did it, loads, and the book, Clear and Present Danger, could not be finished too quickly.

It’s therefore fortunate that the film adaptations, all five Jack Ryan stories, have thrown out much of the ‘technoporn’ and focused instead on the thriller element of these tales. The first, 1990’s The Hunt for Red October, may be the best of the bunch, a taut yarn about Cold War politics that drips with tension and handles swathes of plot and characterisation deftly.

The film was directed by John McTiernan, at the time coming off two considerable successes in Predator and Die Hard, the latter considered a high watermark in high concept action cinema. One of the things that made it work so well was that McTiernan took time to develop its story, introducing the characters and giving them motivation, before letting the gun play, stunts and fighting take over, making us care about what was happening and appreciating the stakes involved. It was fine grounding for The Hunt for Red October, a film that depends upon considerable amounts of setting up.

It stars Alec Baldwin as Ryan, a young CIA analyst who, in 1984, unconvers the significance of a newly developed Russian nuclear submarine, that it can move through the oceans more or less silently and therefore has the capacity to ‘sneak up’ on America. Handily, Ryan also knows all about the boat’s captain, Marko Ramius, a longstanding and respected seaman within the Soviet hierarchy who he believes is about to defect rather than attack. He’s right. The plot focus on his efforts to communicate with Ramius before the presence of Red October in a threatening position pre-empts hostilities between the superpowers.

Ramius is played by Sean Connery, by now the Academy Award winning actor who was entering a potentially interesting phase in his career playing older characters. Connery was famous enough to not even attempt a Russian accent, playing the only Scottish Lithuanian in celluloid history whilst the likes of Sam Neill as members of his crew work on their Slavic. Even if he had no time for perfecting dialects, Connery got by on sheer charisma, effortlessly essaying Ramius as a great captain audacious enough to pull off his desperate defection. He even let the Soviet High Command know of his intentions, prompting a sea chase across the North Atlantic in which every available Russian vessel attempts to smoke out the Red October.

Also in the mix is the Dallas, an American submarine commanded by Scott Glenn that realises something is happening and pursues what turns out to Red October, making it the unlikely place for Ryan to join in his efforts to reach out to Ramius. The main threat comes from Stellan Skarsgard’s Russian sub, the Konovalov, which also gives chase and does most of the firing.

The one thing that really lets the film down are the underwater action scenes. Murky shots of submarines floating through the depths appear as gloomy submerged turds, whilst the missiles and countermeasures deployed make use of early CGI, which these days appears to be rather primitive. These scenes are mercifully sparing. More time is spent on the decks, especially Ramius’s, a wonderland of dials and flashing lights that is apparently far more interesting than what these things really look like. At the centre of it all is Connery, spouting the wisdom of his many years in service and outwitting his adversaries. There are a couple of great moments when Red October is being fired upon, the closeness of the torpedoes defined by beeping that gets intermittently more frequent as it approaches, while Ramius uses his experience and wiliness to overcome them.

Both Connery and Baldwin play characters who think laterally, beating those around them in terms of their ingenuity and resourcefulness. For long swathes of red October, Ryan is on the right track about Ramius and nobody believes him, because the way he sees things is completely unprecedented but the idea is that only he and the Russian think so far outside the box and are therefore kindred spirits of a sort. Both are at their best in the cramped surroundings of their submarines, thin corridors and claustrophobia adding to the suspense of their situation. Their story is only marginally better than the fun diplomacy conducted in Washington, Richard Jordan and Joss Ackland’s Russian attache exchanging witty barbs as they attempt to get the better of each other and demonstrating the sort of edgy affection that you’d get from old adversaries. And then there’s James Earl Jones as Ryan’s superior, Admiral Greer. Baldwin only starred in one Jack Ryan film but Jones’s services were retained, that deep sonorous voice matched by a wry, larger than life presence that strikes a note of authenticity within the corridors of supreme military personnel.

A Cold War film made in 1990 might sound like it’s missed the boat somewhat, with Glasnost in the air and the relations between America and Russia changed forever. And really, a movie that features few action scenes and runs for longer than two hours sounds a bit of a stretch. But it’s tense, really tense, the stakes high and escalating all along as everyone involved knows and makes clear what’s involved and the potential consequences if they misstep. I like the bits where Red October is damaged, the consequence of a saboteur being on board; at these moments, the essential fragility of being deep beneath the ocean inside a tin can is palpable.

I don’t really know which of the two great submarine-based thrillers of the 1990s I prefer – this, or Crimson Tide, which came out five years down the line. Both feature great supporting casts and two excellent lead actors. I certainly can’t recall Baldwin being better than he is here, a great star making turn hinting at the sort of future greatness that he never quite realised. I also really like Neill’s character, the very loyal second in command who obeys Ramius slavishly, defends him to other crew members when the captain appears to be defying all logic, and getting a great scene when he reveals to Ramius that he’s looking forward to living in Montana. It features some lovely cinematography from future director Jan de Bont, who keeps his camera tilted to film the characters at askew angles and emphasise the tension, also the sense of being closed in. Good stuff.

The Hunt for Red October: ****

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

When it’s on: Monday, 3 September (9.00 pm)
Channel: 5*
IMDb Link

Let’s get it out of the way then – that song, that bloody song. Readers of a younger persuasion may not recall the summer of 1991, when Bryan Adams squatted atop the hit parade for months with the insipid Everything I Do. I was at University at the time, which meant long breaks from June until September and an entire calendar season to wonder at how this bland splat of MOR was number one for so long. Who was still buying the thing?

It wasn’t even as though the film from which it spun, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was amazing, either on an artistic or technically blistering level. Essentially a vehicle for Kevin Costner, who for a delirious few years in the early 1990s was the heartthrob of choice, the latest Hood yarn was a piece straight from committee-driven Hollywood, a fairly naked attempt to churn out something as crowd pleasing and generic as possible. It’s not that it’s a bad film really, more it just kind of happens, one performance aside about as unadventurous as these things get in the effort to maximise all potential profits. The Prince of Thieves made lots of money. Everyone walked away happy, having taken from the poor. But in the canon of work about the good-hearted outlaw, it pales when set alongside Michael Curtiz’s 1938 effort The Adventures of Robin Hood. Robin and Marian carries off the character’s heart. I would argue that the HTV TV series from the eighties, Robin of Sherwood, contained all the charm and mysticism this film routinely avoids.

The story is strictly by the numbers. Costner is Robin, an English noble who goes from the Crusades back to Blighty, only to learn his father, Lord Locksley (Brian Blessed) has been murdered by the Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman) and his lands and titles deferred to the authorities. Alongside his Moorish hetero life partner, Azeem (Morgan Freeman), Rob vows revenge and begins assembling a forest-based gang of outlaws from the disaffected to cleanse the land. And that’s about it. Costner makes for a decent, bland lead, and is surrounded by the usual English supporting cast, spending unfeasibly large amounts of time setting up their Sherwood hideout. Christian Slater turns up as Will Scarlett, undoing much of his previous good work in teen movies by channelling Will as an angry young American in eleventh century England. Marian is played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and she’s forgettable.

Weirdly for a Robin Hood film, the Americans use their own accents – hardly a crime, but still odd. Less forgiveable is the lack of any sense of scale of Britain’s size. Robin and Azeem step off the boat by, obviously, the White Cliffs, and in the next reel are approaching Hadrian’s Wall. The underlying sentiment seems to be to shoehorn in as many tourist landmarks as possible. It sucks.

The one bit of truly creative casting is in handing the Sheriff’s role to Rickman. Possibly best known Stateside at the time for his oily Gruber in Die Hard, Rickman plays the film’s baddie as a pantomime villain, hamming to within an inch of his life, all wild hair and flouncing around in too-big shirts. He’s great fun and he looks as though he’s having it also, though the question over whether he makes the show worthwhile is there and, otherwise, there’s a prevailing air of going through the motions.

The rest is stunt casting. Mike McShane, better known in Britain at the time for his frequent appearances on Whose Line Is It Anyway? shows up as a boisterous, life-loving Friar Tuck, and even Sean Connery gets in on the act, earning his usual small fortune to play King Richard at the very end and marry Robin to Marian. It’s a knowing wink of a scene, and whilst there’s nothing wrong with it you’re left asking if this is really the best they could come up with.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: **

Never Say Never Again (1983)

When it’s on: Saturday, 1 September (3.35 pm)
Channel: ITV1
IMDb Link

Never Say Never Again should be terrible. It’s a remake of Thunderball, nobody’s idea of the best of Bond though it remained an obsession of Kevin McClory’s, the copyright holder who’d won the right to make an independent James Bond film featuring SPECTRE as the villains. Why anyone would take a second rate adventure like Thunderball and feel people needed to see it again is anybody’s guess, but into the works it went, after a string of legal delays setting itself up for a head to head clash with the ‘official’ Octopussy in 1983. Sure enough, by the end of the year Broccoli and Wilson could claim victory, with Roger Moore’s India based nonsense winning the war of the box office. The challenger came off a not too distant second, though both films made little dent on the success of Return of the Jedi, which walked away with the year’s takings.

That it isn’t a disaster is largely down to the presence of Sean Connery in the lead. Never Say Never Again had various working titles before the Edinburgh actor accepted a disproportionate salary to play Bond once more, the film’s name coming from a jokey reference by Connery’s wife to his famous vow to never again star in a Bond picture. Perhaps it’s weeks of sub-par Moore entries that provoke this sentiment, but Connery as 007 just feels right, like he fits the superspy in a way no one else quite manages. The script even makes frequent references to his age, Bond’s retort of ‘It’s still in pretty good shape’ coming across as entirely welcome after watching the increasingly creaky Roger Moore fart around in yarns that cry out for someone twenty years his junior.

Other moments chime with Connery’s Bond, such as the often messy methods of dispatching baddies, his reading of the character as essentially fatalistic and his natural charisma when it comes to the opposite sex. The differences are obvious enough – Connery is Bond, whilst Moore is a debonair actor who’s clearly playing a tongue in cheek character. Most appealing is the lack of musical cues, awful gags and impossible stunts. Connery may very well have defined Bond as a virtual superhuman, but during the Moore years it became a running joke that he could get out of any scrape with barely a hair out of place. Ironically, whilst the screenplay demands a spy who’s long in the tooth, this Bond feels less tired and out of steam.

In some instances, the film plays with the usual cast of characters, giving them new tropes and dimensions. Q has turned into a Cockney geezer named Algy (Alec McGowan) who replaces Desmond Llewellyn’s weary barbs with banter. M (Edward Fox) is younger and clearly dismissive of Bond’s old school methods. As usual, Moneypenny (Pamela Salem) is mishandled and given next to nothing to do. Max von Sydow makes for a charismatic Blofeld, whilst Klaus Maria Brandauer knocks memories of Adolfo Celi out of the park as Largo, giving the film’s villain a psychologically rich study of megalomania and inferiority that makes him strangely vulnerable. Kim Basinger is lovely as Domino, but like Claudine Auger is there to get captured and scream.

The most controversial bit of casting has former Playboy centrefold Barbara Carrera taking the part of Fatima Blush, SPECTRE’s femme fatale as essayed by Luciana Paluzzi in Thunderball. Carrera plays her as a ball of sexual energy, Bond’s equal in ability and determined to turn their contest into a personal battle. Unfortunately, this leads to various instances of overdoing it, hamming shamelessly, with an undercurrent of instability that appears to be what she was going for. At the heart of her unhinged performance is a need to be the best, as evidenced in her climactic scenes with Bond where she makes him write a note confessing her as his most talented lover. I prefer Paluzzi in this instance, if for no other reason than she knew how to project menace whilst staying perfectly still, but both are performances of their respective times.

The action scenes vary wildly, from the good – any scenes with the motorbike – to the Thunderball referencing underwater fights, which don’t take up so much time but are as insipid as ever. Director Irvin Kershner seems more comfortable with the moments when nothing much happens, the lower key times like the computer game duel between Bond and Largo, which somehow elicits tension from an arcade machine. Michael Legrand’s jazzy score, whilst an intentional departure from John Barry, is about as bad as these things ever get. It’s awful, as is the main song, elements that really make you miss those melancholic Barry overtures. Rowan Atkinson’s needless cameo is poor, but Legrand ensures it isn’t the worst thing about Never Say Never Again.

Never Say Never Again: ***

Diamonds are Forever (1971)

When it’s on: Saturday, 7 July (2.55 pm)
Channel: ITV1
IMDb Link

The original plan for Diamonds are Forever was to make it a direct sequel to On her Majesty’s Secret Service. George Lazenby was slated to star, with Peter Yates again behind the camera and opening the film with the murder of Tracy. The story would then revolve around a revenge mission by Bond against Blofeld. But fate intervened. OHMSS clawed its way towards making a profit and Lazenby had tendered his resignation before the picture premiered. Used to producing financial juggernauts, Broccoli and Saltzman were in a dilemma. Where next to take 007?

Their initial answer lay in the series’s success in the States. Pandering to their biggest audience, the producers planned for an American Bond and, after scouting the usual raft of names, agreed a contract with Psycho actor, John Gavin. But then the unlikeliest coup of all took place when Sean Connery was persuaded to don the tuxedo again. He didn’t come cheap, commanding an exorbitant $1.25 million salary and the funds to star in and produce two further films for United Artists, yet it didn’t matter. With Connery back on board, the franchise could get back to doing what it (thought it) did best and effectively remake Goldfinger. Yates was out, and instead Guy Hamilton was hired with the express order to repeat his earlier success. Gert Frobe was proposed to play the brother of Auric Goldfinger, but Tom Mankiewicz’s rewritten script (from Richard Maibaum’s original) instead went for Blofeld, this time with Charles Gray in the role. Gavin was paid to walk away from the project and, determined to retain an American flavour, Diamonds are Forever took Las Vegas as its dominant setting.

If OHMSS can be considered a reboot of the format, then Diamonds is definitely a regressive step. Jettisoning the heartful Bond played by Lazenby, the character is essentially reset with Connery back in the part. After paying lip service to its predecessor by having Bond swathe a vengeful trail in search of Blofeld, the credits roll and, sure enough, it’s back to pre-Majesty’s business as usual. The message to viewers is clear – forget that aberration of a flick; this is the real Bond.

Only the real thing doesn’t feel half as good. With all the substance of a henchman who happens to be standing between Bond and his prey, Diamonds goes for a light-hearted approach, trying out the near-pastiche that would define the Roger Moore years to come. It’s played mainly for laughs, the plot acting as window dressing for expensively mounted stunts and heavy handed gags. Connery looks as though he’s trying to maintain his dignity, but like the film he appears tired and saggy around the midriff, whilst Jill St John, as the lead Bond girl, ticks the glamour boxes and obligingly wears very little but lacks all credibility once she no longer needs to play the part of a hard-nosed diamond smuggler and becomes the archetypal simpering female. As for the villain, one wonders what SPECTRE’s Number One did to deserve such a rubbish reading of his character. The camp villainy Grey projects is such a far cry from the shadowy leader of From Russia with Love that it’s simply impossible to take him seriously. Blofeld’s brief appearance in drag is simply the icing on this particularly mouldy cake.

The Las Vegas location looks almost appropriately tacky. The shoot had an almost free run of many of the city’s casinos thanks to the patronage of reclusive fan, Howard Hughes, and as thanks the story was adapted to shoehorn in a Hughes type character, played by Jimmy Dean who naturally turns into Bond’s ally. And the less said about the moon buggy business, or the botched stunt involving the car driven on its two right wheels, the better.

Diamonds isn’t entirely worthless. The confined space in which a fight between Bond and Peter Franks takes place lends the scene a degree of inescapable brutality. Two of the villains, a pair of gay assassins are interesting enough to command far more screen time than they eventually get. Another bit of action, in which Bond climbs up a Vegas skyscraper, is dizzyingly well filmed, especially as it suggests he does this kind of thing all the time, the sort of vertiginous stunt that any audience member in their right mind wouldn’t even consider. Supporting everything is a really fine score by house composer, John Barry, topped off with Shirley Bassey’s eminently memorable theme song.

And viewers responded, turning the film into another £100 million+ bonanza at the box office and proving the producers right all along. Perhaps silly thrills and the presence of Connery were all that was ever needed in the end. But with hindsight, it’s clear this was a picture made by people who’d effectively run out of ideas and were happy enough to go through the motions.

Diamonds are Forever: **

Robin and Marian (1976)

When it’s on: Tuesday, 26 June (1.10 pm)
Channel: Channel 4
IMDb Link

Hammer’s faltering Sword of Sherwood Forest was screened on Sunday, but two Robin Hood yarns in one week is certainly one too many, and Robin and Marian is without doubt the stronger choice.

The film started life as a concept handed to Richard Lester, one of many scrawled on a series of index cards. Flushed with success from The Three Musketeers and given his pick of projects, the director plumped eagerly for the idea of an ageing Robin Hood returning home after years soldiering in the Holy Land and France for King Richard. James Goldman, who penned The Lion in Winter, was duly commissioned to produce a script, rooted firmly in the same medieval England as his Henry II play. Imagining Robin as a bit of a grumpy old man, the casting of Sean Connery was an absolute masterstroke, whilst Audrey Hepburn was persuaded out of her lengthy sojourn raising her family to play Marian. The world of Robin and Marian reintroduced many characters from the legend, only now they were middle-aged and wiser, or at least more cynical. The ‘merrie men’ now comprised Nicol Williamson (Little John), Denholm Elliott (Will Scarlett) and Ronnie Barker as Friar Tuck. Robert Shaw was called on to provide an altogether darker-minded and more serious Sheriff than audiences were used to.

The action opens in France. Robin and John are twenty years in ‘Good’ King Richard’s service, only he isn’t quite so virtuous. The Lionheart (Richard Harris) has abandoned the Crusade and now campaigns closer to home, ever seeking riches. He’s dispatched our heroes to a castle that they’re to take, after hearing it contains a gold statue. It turns out there’s just a one-eyed old man left to protect the women and children. Robin’s ready to leave it, but the king insists on the attack, which compels the old man to throw an arrow into his neck. The wound’s mortal. Richard, dying, relieves Robin and forgives him for his disobedience. Thoroughly disillusioned, the former Hood and John head for Sherwood Forest (actually Pamplona) to find things changed yet strangely the same. Will and Tuck continue to live in the trees, though they’re the only ones left from the original gang. The Sheriff lurks inside Nottingham Castle as though waiting for the moment of Robin’s return. And Marian has been the abbess of a nearby priory for 18 years.

Seemingly within minutes of his return, Robin’s turned back the clock. Rescuing Marian from the clutches of the Sheriff, who is supposed to arrest her on religious grounds, they’re in their old forest hideout once more and planning further antics. The Sheriff, along with King John’s man, Sir Ranulf (Kenneth Haigh), plots his downfall, delivering the chilling lines ‘I know him. He’s a little bit in love with death. He flirts. He teases. I can wait.’ In the meantime, Robin and Marian fall in love all over again. It becomes clear that she was always his, the departure he made to follow King Richard all those years ago prompting her to attempt suicide before giving herself to God.

The depiction of Robin is entirely pleasing. After watching Connery go through the motions recently in his Bond films, it’s a real treat to see him putting his all into a character in which he truly appeared to believe. Best of all, Connery makes no attempt to mask Robin’s advancing years. Balding and grey, every effort he makes comes with a grunt or a grimace. In one scene, he and John are cornered by the Sheriff and compelled to climb a keep wall in order to escape, and there’s a lovely yet horrible moment when both outlaws realise a physical feat they may once have completed with ease is now sapping their energy. Shaw’s playing of the Sheriff gives him an opportunity to reprise the duel he once partook with Connery in From Russia with Love. Thirteen years on and Shaw’s cut form from the earlier film has given way to middle-aged spread and turned their swordfight into a tussle between exhausted men who can give no quarter. Despite the actor’s charisma and apparent affection over coming across Robin once again, there’s a terrible undercurrent of loathing about his Sheriff. It seems he’s stayed alive for the chance to best Robin, just once. In the end, nothing else matters to him. The almost casual way Robin clearly overcame him in the past (we’re supposed to imagine a more mythic, lyrical era, perhaps the Hood as depicted in the Errol Flynn starring The Adventures of Robin Hood) obviously rankles, leaving unfinished business.

But maybe better than both – and that’s saying something – is Audrey Hepburn. I’ve read elsewhere that she delivers a subdued performance, but for me it’s all about the eyes, the efforts she makes to dismiss the ageing but no wiser Robin who clearly still fancies himself as he once was, yet the longing in those enormous eyes betrays her true feelings. It’s a fantastically written role and delivered with real heart. She recalls with the feeling of someone haunted by memories their old dwelling in the roots of a tree, the way his body was in the old days and the many battle scars that have destroyed his perfection. It’s the role of someone who wholly welcomed playing a mature woman, one with an almost tangible passion.

Lester reins in his usual comic shtick. Though there are funny moments in the film, it’s an altogether tightly told affair, stuffed with fine performances from a starry cast in a dirty Middle Ages England. The attention to detail is just wonderful. At one point, the outlaws make their way to Nottingham and pass a man working the field who has just one arm. Is he supposed to be a war veteran or has he at some point incurred the wrath of the authorities? In a speech that doubles as his mission statement, Robin tells Sir Ranulf that he’ll always defend England from nobles like him who do what they want without consequence, which suggests the one-armed man was punished with mutilation, perhaps for thieving in desperate times. Who knows? It’s one tiny moment within a film set in a dangerous realm where people fear God but have more cause to be terrified of the Sheriff, a land, in other words, that has missed its Robin Hood.

Robin and Marian: ****

You Only Live Twice (1967)

When it’s on: Saturday, 23 June (3.10 pm)
Channel: ITV1
IMDb Link

…and ‘Twice’ is the only way to live!

You Only Live Twice is one of my favourite Bond movies, and for the life of me I’m not sure why. It’s a crazy film, utterly preposterous in many, many places, with the central character by now so far from the human spy of the early entries and attaining superhero status that it lacks all credibility. Some bits make no sense, such as the scene where a chopper wielding a giant magnet lifts a car that’s pursuing Bond into the air, then dumps it into the sea. Bond watches the ‘drop’ from a video feed, but who’s filming it? There’s the infamous surgical procedure that disguises 007 as a Japanese man, not to mention the jaw-dropping pronouncement that in Japan, men come first, women second. Sean Connery’s clearly disinterested performance should send the entire affair crashing over the edge, whilst the final unveiling of Ernst Stavro Blofeld dishes up Donald Pleasance, more slightly creepy than the globe-striding megalomaniac who’s been lurking in the shadows for four movies. All told, it’s sheer hogwash.

But good hogwash. Several elements really ramp up the quality, beginning with John Barry’s score. An obvious choice he may be, but Barry’s a composer whose  music I’ll always listen to, and this is one of his finest pieces of work. Inspired by the Far East, his score for You Only Live Twice is as luxurious as thick chocolate, in love with the film’s Japanese setting and its sense of both wonder and action. Ken Adams was once again in charge of production design, and for this served up one of his finest creations, a hollowed out volcano that doubled as SPECTRE’s lair. It’s incredible to think that the cavernous set really looked that big. It had to, people running along the floor like insects, ninjas dropping in from quite a height. Visually, it just beats everything that came before out of sight. Bond spends quite a sizeable portion of the film searching for Blofeld’s base, and the message when he stumbles across it appears to be that whatever you could imagine, no matter the scale, what’s filmed will always be bigger and more spectacular.

After the aquatic (lack of) fun dished up in Thunderball, the volcano must have been an amazing feast for 1960s eyes and chimes perfectly with the film’s determination to pile up the visual treats. It’s all helped along by Freddie Young’s cinematography. The award winning Director of Photography (Young came to You Only Live Twice with Oscars for his contribution to Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, two epics shot on an enormous canvas) is behind all those gorgeous shots of volcanic landscapes, the expansive Japanese vistas at sunset, orange rays spilling over Bond as he arrives on the shore.

Roald Dahl’s screenplay job involved just two demands – the Japanese location and hollowed out volcano base. The rest was up to him, and Dahl just went for it, stuffing his script with spectacle and thrills. As daft as the magnet-wielding helicopter is, it’s certainly off the scale of what people might imagine. Little Nellie, Bond’s flatpack chopper, looks like great fun to pilot. SPECTRE’s plan to play the superpowers off against each other by sending a rocket into space that ‘eats’ their own vessels is just mental. There must come a point, even for an evil organisation, when they start wondering why they bother with all this – surely the cost of building the base and developing ships into orbit is so prohibitive that there’s just no point. Why not  spend a fraction of the cash on a limitless supply of assassins to do away with Bond? Or just invest the money wisely and live off the profits?

But so what, right? Where would the fun be in such a prissy evil plan, not when there are dead volcanoes in a rural part of Japan just waiting to be developed into domains of black-hearted deeds? There are better Bond films than You Only Live Twice, but few come with such high production values, such an aim to please and similar levels of guilty wit. It’s nothing more or less than splendid nonsense.

You Only Live Twice: ****

Thunderball (1965)

When it’s on: Saturday, 16 June (3.15 pm)
Channel: ITV1
IMDb Link

Bond is back! After making way for ITV’s coverage of the tennis, the gentleman spy returns in Thunderball.

Dollar for dollar, Thunderball remains the series’ biggest commercial success. The formula of releasing one film per year had increased the momentum to feverish levels by the time Sean Connery donned 007’s hairpiece for the fourth time. The actor was perpetually hounded by fans and press alike, whilst you could buy his image on just about any item of merchandise imaginable. The pressure to ‘up the ante’ with each release must have been enormous. Treating Ian Fleming’s source material as a mere prop, the aim was to make a film with more thrills, bigger explosions, better looking girls and ever greater levels of peril. There was also the attempt to package it with fresh locations and backdrops. Dr No had its Jamaican paradise. From Russia with Love took place in Istanbul and on a train, and Goldfinger really pushed boundaries with its Fort Knox set. Where could the series possibly go next? The answer turned out to be in the sea, leading to the technical excellence of the underwater photography, all beautifully lit, that we get in Thunderball.

Elsewhere, all the principals charged with making 007 the blockbuster it was returned to duty – Terence Young behind the camera, John Barry scoring, Maurice Binder’s credit sequence, the luxuriant set design of Ken Adams and, of course, Connery himself. Sicilian actor Adolfo Celi was hired to play the villain, SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo. Claudine Auger swapped Paris for the Bahamas as love interest, Domino, whilst SPECTRE’s femme fatale, Fiona, was played by Rome’s Luciana Paluzzi. There were also roles for Martine Beswick, as Bond’s assistant (and required to dazzle in a bikini), and Molly Peters playing his health club squeeze, Patricia.

The plot involves SPECTRE up to its old tricks, Largo as the organisation’s No. 2 stealing a pair of nuclear warheads and holding the world to ransom. As heads of state sweat over meeting SPECTRE’s demands ($100 million, or similar nonsense) the Double Ohs are dispatched to recover the weapons, our man inevitably jumping right into the thick of the action.

Even discussing the plot of Thunderball is a tongue in cheek exercise. All the key events you need to know are covered in the first half hour, when SPECTRE pinch the warheads by the rather ingenious device of using plastic surgery and two year’s training in mimicry to plant their own man in the place of a NATO pilot who’s due to join the test flight of a plane loaded with two nuclear bombs. The doppelgänger kills the pilots, hijacks the plane and lands it in the Atlantic ocean, at which point the warheads are lifted. It’s a great set-up, though here the story more or less runs out of steam as Bond enters the fray and goes through the usual motions of infiltrating Largo’s lair – a luxury yacht – and putting things to rights.

Much of Thunderball takes place underwater, lengthy aquatic scenes that are shot to visual perfection. An early shot gives an impression of the inky darkness we’d normally have to put up with, before the back lighting is deployed to bring it all to brilliant life. Brilliant, but deadly dull in places, as scenes involving underwater fighting are, by natural order, slower than action above the surface, not to mention difficult for viewers to work out who’s who. These bits of the film go on and on. Clearly, a lot of money was spent on them and the production team had every right to be proud of its technical achievement, but thrilling viewing it does not make.

As it turns out, what happens out of the water is no more exciting. Domino is one of those rubbish, simpering Bond girls, ravishing to look at but given very little to do. She’s effortlessly outclassed by the vampish Fiona, who deploys sex and death to equally devastating effect. There’s a cracking scene where she’s shot Bond and injured him. He escapes into a carnival and Fiona pursues with her henchmen, following the trail of blood. For a moment, he seems in actual danger, meeting his match in this deadly female agent who’s just as virile and potent as he is. But then the threat just kind of ends, Fiona being offed in a really casual and unlikely way, as though Richard Maibaum’s script didn’t call for such a good performer taking the role and failing to give Paluzzi the kind of send-off she deserved.

There’s the overall impression of many good elements in the film wasted, 007 clichés falling neatly into place (Largo’s pet sharks; Q turning up to bicker with Bond over this film’s set of gadgets, and so on) and even the agent’s charms with the opposite sex slipping into outright lechery as he blackmails a girl into bed. Such business might have counted as fair game in the 1960s; now it seems wrong, especially when he later gives her the brush off just as casually. Connery shows increasing signs of the boredom he developed over the course of the franchise. And why wouldn’t he? The combination of constant intrusion and doing the same gig over and over surely took its toll.

Still, whilst Thunderball slips out of the ranks of Bond’s best, it’s never really a bad film, particularly if brain-disengaged action is the day’s order. A glimpse of what’s to come is offered in the pre-credits sequence, where Bond gets into a fight in a château filled with ornaments, all of which are routinely destroyed in the course of the scrap, before getting away with the use of a jetpack and his trusty, gadget-rigged Aston Martin. Nothing wrong with any of that, though the sense that mindless thrills have overcome hard-boiled tension can’t really be concealed.

Thunderball: ***