Filmmaker and special effects guru Douglas Trumbull died earlier this month. His body of work is not large, but its influence is gigantic. For filmgoers of a certain age and a certain disposition to genre–say, 50ish and inclined to fantasy and science fiction–Trumbull’s work is likely as big an influence on how such stories are visualized as George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic.
Trumbull was instrumental in the look and feel of such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and, probably the granddaddy of them all in terms of lasting influence, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull also dabbled in directing, with a number of short films and two features, Silent Running (a rather dour environmental allegory that actually makes you care about some robots) and Brainstorm, the infamous sci-fi thriller about a scientist who invents a way to plug memories and images directly into the brain. Brainstorm isn’t a bad film, nor is it a great one, but it certainly deserves better than to be chiefly remembered as the film Natalie Wood was almost done making when she drowned.
Trumbull’s experience on Brainstorm led to him never directing a feature film again, and it’s not hard to see why, given the tragic death of Wood and the subsequent attempts by MGM to kill the production entirely. I can’t assess Trumbull’s directorial skill on the basis of just two movies, but I do know that he was a huge part of the visualization of science fiction at the time I was being shaped most strongly by it. Trumbull’s work tended to be on the less action-oriented side of the genre; he wasn’t much for the “Explodey Spaceshippy Goodness” side of things, but rather he was an excellent visionary at creating futures that were plausible and beautiful. Even in the case of Blade Runner, a noir thriller that takes place in a rain-soaked Los Angeles of seemingly unending darkness, Trumbull infused the bleak cityscape with a type of beauty.
Trumbull’s work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind is particularly legendary, in the way he uses bright bursts of colored light throughout to suggest the UFOs until the film’s climax, when he gives us the Mothership in all its glory:
I can look at this image and fill in the exact chord from the John Williams score at this moment….
You can watch this scene here. Remember that none of the actors had any idea what they were reacting to, so it was up to Trumbull to make their reactions worth it. Obviously, he nailed it.
And then there is his now-legendary work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a film whose reception was mixed at the time (and remains so to this day), a film whose transition from planned teevee series to feature film was no doubt pushed along by the wild success of Star Wars two years before. But ST:TMP was a different kind of movie than Star Wars, a film in which there’s no “pew pew” action, and in which the main developments are all conceptual. Trumbull’s effects work had to carry a disproportionate amount of the film’s emotional heft, and for me, they rose to the occasion. One sequence that occasionally gets cited as an example of the film’s visual excess is the long fly-by of the Enterprise, but I have never been one of that sequence’s detractors. Here’s a video where Trumbull discusses his approach to that scene, as well as the lighting of the Enterprise itself:
That is fascinating stuff: Trumbull discusses the technical aspects of the shot, but also the thinking that went into it, the nature of the sequence in terms of the film’s storytelling, and he even singles out Jerry Goldsmith’s amazing contribution.
Douglas Trumbull’s innovations and achievements may seem a bit quaint in this day of computers being able to shape just about any scene a human can imagine, but they were innovations. Before 2001: A Space Odyssey, the idea of a film showing a starfield that actually looks like what you see when you go outside on a cloudless night and look up, and then being able to pan across that starfield, was unheard of. Every Star Wars movie’s opening pan across the stars, after the opening crawl, is owed to Douglas Trumbull.
When I started looking up Trumbull’s career information for this post, I remembered his body of work being larger than it was. That shows just how big the man’s influence was. You really can’t tell the story of science fiction and fantasy filmmaking of the last sixty years without giving Douglas Trumbull a big credit for how things look and feel. His reach will endure. I know this because it already does.
Finally, I note that films to which Trumbull was attached, either as director or visual effects supervisor, always seemed to boast great filmscores. I leave with two examples.
I’ve written many times in the years I’ve been blogging about John Williams’s influence on my creative world. He has been a central figure in the cinematic stories that shaped my life and stamped their print on my storytelling soul, all the way back to when I was five years old. Williams is, of course, best known for his many filmscores to some of the most prominent movie franchises of the last fifty years: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, and more. The Winter Olympics are going on right now, so I’m sure we’re hearing a steady dose of his Olympic Fanfare on the telecasts. He is absolutely a gigantic part of the sonic character of our time.
In addition to being very prolific, Williams is also versatile. He has scored intimate character studies, historical epics, and psychological thrillers. He has done horror as well as escapist fun…and he has also written a good deal of music for the concert stage. Pretty impressive lifetime of work for a guy who was once “Johnny Williams”, a session musician in 1950s Hollywood who did things like play the piano part on the theme to Peter Gunn.
Thank you, John Williams! Here are some selections, which I tried to draw from his “deeper cuts”–i.e., trying to stay away from the Big Hits. John Williams’s body of work really rewards a deeper look, even beyond the “usual suspects”.
George Lazenby as James Bond 007. Note that of all the Bonds, he’s the only one who goes to his knee in the gunbarrel sequence.
And at last, here we are: the top five James Bond movies. I like that my top five has quite a bit of variety: it spans more than 40 years of films, and five of the six men who have played James Bond are here. I’ve always considered it a point of personal pride that my Bond fandom does not center on one or two particular actors; you’ll never find me offering up an opinion of who the best Bond was, or the worst. I find such discussions limiting and honestly downright boring, and not just in terms of James Bond. When you have a fictional character who has had lots of portrayals, arguing over who is “definitive” or “the best” as that character leads to too easy a dismissal of what anybody who isn’t our personal “definitive” incarnation of that character might bring to the table with their portrayal. This is as true of James Bond as it is of any character, be it Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood or when opera lovers debate who the best Siegfried was. Leave me out of those discussions, please. All the James Bonds are great. Every single damn one of them.
This might be my least favorite poster for a James Bond movie EVER. You’re bringing in a new Bond, so you make him tiny, in the distance, and holding a very weird pose? Ugh. I *hate* this poster.
An interesting trend emerges as I look over my Top Five Bond Movies: Four of them represent instances in which the Bond series had to “pull back” to more realistic storytelling after things got a bit too outlandish, and three of them introduce us to new actors playing Agent 007. It’s almost as if each time a new actor steps in, the producers and writers think, “Wow, we gotta bring our A-game!” Notice how close GoldenEye was to making it to this height, too.
After A View To A Kill, Roger Moore finally surrendered his Walther PPK and stepped aside. Also, View was one of the more out-there movies in terms of plot and action, so the producers once again pushed for a much more grounded adventure, resulting in a low-key espionage caper that fits right in with the era of Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, and John Le Carre. They also went with an obviously younger actor for Bond, one who would tone down the more light-hearted and elegant approach of Roger Moore for a Bond who was more physical, more lethal, and more reflective of the character as written by Ian Fleming thirty years earlier.
Enter Timothy Dalton, who had flirted with 007 at least twice previously (Moore’s last three films were all one-time deals) before finally getting the part. The result is a very well-made espionage thriller and spy story, replete with Cold War subtext and spy games galore. The Living Daylights finally brings in one of Fleming’s bigger tropes in his early novels, “Smiert spionam”, which is Russian for “Death to spies”. In Fleming’s hands, that slogan reduces to SMERSH, the Russian organization that was the main villain force early on in his books. Here, it’s a red herring being used to make the British think that the new head of the KGB has unleashed some kind of scheme to murder their agents. The idea here is to goad the British into assassinating that new KGB head, because he’s onto what the villains are really up to.
There isn’t just one main Bad Guy here, which is nice; we get a trio of murderous villains, all working together to execute a series of swindles that will leave them incredibly wealthy. There is Koskov, the Russian General who has faked his defection to the West; Whitaker, an American arms dealer who sells illegal arms to paramilitary and terrorist groups all over the world; and there is Nekros, a brutal assassin. I love their scheme, hinging as it does on illegal arms sales and diamond smuggling and the opium trade. Oddly, this movie showed up as Iran-Contra was breaking open, and I remember reading an interview with Richard Maibaum in which he expressed bemusement that the headlines seemed ripped from the movie he was already making.
The Living Daylights is a beautiful film, and it also boasts one of the better scores from the latter half of John Barry’s tenure. The songs are good, though maybe not the best ever; a-ha and The Pretenders do yeoman duty. Maryam d’Abo as Kara, a naive cellist plunged into Bondian danger, is one of my favorite Bond heroines; she is much like Izabella Scorupco’s Natalya of GoldenEye, nine years later, in that she doesn’t shrink in terror from the danger she faces. (That Kara was written this way is no doubt a reaction to criticism of poor Tanya Roberts’s character from A View To A Kill.)
4. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
I noted above that many of my favorite Bonds are “course correction” movies, both intended to introduce new Bond actors and dial back the outlandish plot elements and story goofiness. For Your Eyes Only does the latter, but not the former–though I have recently learned that it might very well have done both, had Roger Moore not decided to return to Bond after all. The opening scene, where James Bond visits the grave of his deceased wife Tracy, was actually intended to possibly introduce our new Bond. Instead, it’s Moore paying respects.
Everything I wrote about The Living Daylights‘s grounded espionage story? Well, repeat most of that here. This movie has the fewest gadgets since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, putting Bond in situation after situation where he has to use his brain and his physical skills to get out of trouble. Sometimes this leads to comedy, such as when Bond is forced to do a high-speed car chase driving some goofy Citroen car; other times it leads to some very high tension, as late in the film when Bond is scaling a vertical rock face to infiltrate the villain’s lair.
For Your Eyes Only also does something interesting in keeping us in the dark until almost the third act as to who the villain even is. I absolutely love that! Bond has to do real spy work, real investigating, in this movie. The plot is pretty simple: there’s a device that the British use to transmit orders to submarines that is suddenly available to be grabbed by the Soviets, and it’s a race to get the machine first. This leads to some of the most satisfying espionage-spy game stuff ever in a Bond movie. Yes, there’s some goofiness along the way (a barely-out-of-her-teens figure skater develops a raging crush on Bond, the scenes of which are not the most comfortable viewing), but for the most part, For Your Eyes Only is a wonderful thriller.
And the cast is perfect: Carole Bouquet’s Melina Havelock is a Bond heroine who is in over her head, but she’s not gonna let that stop her; Topol as a Greek mobster is an absolute delight, even moreso than a year before when he’d been Dr. Hans Zarkov in Flash Gordon. Julian Glover as villain Kristatos is cunning and slimy. (Glover had quite the decade in the 80s! He started in 1980 as Imperial General Veers in The Empire Strikes Back, then he was in For Your Eyes Only, and finally in 1989 he was Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, making him possibly the only actor to have been a villain in Star Wars, James Bond, and Indiana Jones!)
And let’s talk Roger Moore here. The narrative on Moore seems to be that his Bond is elegant, prissier, less willing to get his hands dirty than Connery’s. I tend to blame Moore’s scripts for that, though there is a degree to which the writers write for the guy they know is in the part. For Your Eyes Only gives Moore some real hard stuff to do, including one of the most brutal Bond moments ever, when Moore confronts an assassin whose car is teetering on the edge of a cliff. That moment sizzles. Moore was apparently very hesitant to film it as written, but he relented, and I’m eternally glad that he did.
Sheena Easton’s song is one of my absolute favorites, a pure early-80s ballad, and Bill Conti’s score is…well, I like it, but I can absolutely see how lots of people don’t. His brassy 80s just-this-side-of-disco sound holds up for me a lot better than Marvin Hamlisch’s work on The Spy Who Loved Me.
3. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
For folks who argue that Sean Connery was the best James Bond, From Russia With Love provides them with their strongest argument. This is Connery’s best Bond film, by a big margin. It’s also one of the best pure spy thrillers in the entire series. It’s taut and exciting, with interesting locations, a fantastic rogue’s gallery of villains, memorable allies for James Bond, one of the better Bond heroines, pretty decent action, and a fight scene that ranks to this day as one of the most effective and brutal fights in any Bond movie.
It continues to amaze me that the Bond films of the 1960s stayed as far away from Cold War subtext as possible; Ian Fleming’s novel From Russia With Love actually had the Soviets plotting to embarrass MI6 by setting a trap for James Bond. The movie gives this plot to SPECTRE, and thus gives us the first example of villains playing the British and the KGB against each other. It’s very effective.
Even as From Russia With Love gives us the only Cold War-reflective plot in the Connery run, it has a different feel. As Kerim Bey, the head of MI6’s presence in Istanbul, tells Bond: “You’re in the Balkans now. The game with the Russians is played a little differently here.” Thus From Russia With Love has its own feel, being again a smaller-scaled film with villains who aren’t plotting their Final Victory or any such thing: this is a true spy thriller with layers of scheming and constant threats lurking in the background.
For one of the shorter Bond movies (and the one exception to my general feel that Bond films under two hours tend to be lacking), From Russia With Love is loaded with memorable characters and the screenplay has a lot of wit (“Red wine with fish. Well, that should have told me something.”). Our heroine, Tatiana Romanova, is a pretty good one, and the most memorable villain here is Robert Shaw’s assassin Donovan Grant. From Russia With Love also introduces Desmond Llewelyn as Q. Llewelyn would remain in the role, failing to appear only in Live and Let Die, all the way up to his retirement from the role in The World Is Not Enough.
From Russia With Love has a pleasant song, performed by Matt Monro, and a typically engaging John Barry score that reuses several cues from Dr. No.
2. CASINO ROYALE
God, what a bolt between the eyes this movie was. In 2006 it was hard even for me to think that James Bond could be fresh and new again, and then this movie hit the screens.
After Die Another Day and its colossal excesses (seriously, Bond parasailing away from a collapsing glacier is one of the least good things to ever happen in one of these movies), the need was clear for yet another course-correction for James Bond. This time, though, the producers didn’t just mandate a more realistic approach to Bond. This time they decided to reboot the entire series, something which was already being done in the superhero film world, as the then-in-production Batman Begins was starting over and ignoring anything that happened in extant films involving that character.
It made sense for the Bond series to “reboot” with Casino Royale, which had actually been Ian Fleming’s very first James Bond novel way back in the 50s. Eon Productions had started its film series with Dr. No because they didn’t have the rights to Casino, and they wouldn’t get those rights until 1999, when–get this–Sony traded those rights to MGM for the rights to Spider-Man! Can you believe that? Anyway, Casino Royale finally got the official Eon Productions treatment, and what a treatment it is.
As a reboot, we don’t see “Young Bond at school” or some such thing. Bond is a newly-minted Double-O agent, freshly promoted and something of a hot head who tends to act without entirely thinking it all through. His early escapades anger M something fierce, and there’s a memorable exchange:
M: I knew it was too early to promote you.
BOND: Well, I understand Double-Os have a very short life expectancy, so your mistake will be short-lived.
It’s a fascinating exercise, seeing a James Bond who isn’t quite of the stature we know him…yet. He’s still learning, still feeling his way. He’s vulnerable in a way that he tries to hide, that he fights–and when he finally gives into it rather than burying it, as he might when he’s older, it almost leads to ruin. Craig does something deeply fascinating here, and it’s something he does to all of his films: he makes Bond a genuine human being.
I also have to note Craig’s work in the action sequences, especially the famous parkour chase that is the movie’s first major action setpiece. Bond is chasing a guy through a construction site, but the guy is apparently a parkour champion while Bond is just fiercely determined and intelligent. We see Craig throughout, showing a Bond who is constantly taking stock of his surroundings, planning his next move in real time.
Casino Royale also features a stunning cast, the most visible being Eva Green as Vesper Lynd, the first real love of Bond’s life, and a love that would end as tragically as the other great love in Bond’s life. (Well…now the movies have given us three great Bondian loves…or, depending on how you count them, four. But anyway….) CR‘s whip-smart script makes Vesper Lynd a brilliant woman who can see through all of James Bond’s bluster, making them equals who frequently clash, even if Lynd is by no means Bond’s equal at all the more dangerous aspects of spycraft. The initial meeting between Bond and Vesper Lynd, in the dining car on the Orient Express, is a magnificent scene; it’s on my list of things I hope to equal in my writing one day.
VESPER: You think of women as disposable pleasures, rather than meaningful pursuits. So as charming as you are, Mr. Bond, I will be keep my eye on our government’s money, and off your prefectly-formed arse.
BOND: You noticed!
VESPER: Even accountants have imagination. How was the lamb?
BOND: Skewered. One sympathizes.
Casino Royale is very nearly a perfect James Bond movie. It presses each and every one of my Bond buttons: dangerous villains, real stakes, genuine peril, wonderful locations, great characters, and it shows James Bond as a person with a genuine emotional life in the midst of all his adventures. This James Bond has real skin in the game, and when he’s hurt, he’s hurt. And at the very end of the film, when he looks down at a bad guy he’s tracked down for interrogation, he earns the introduction that we have long since known and loved:
MR WHITE: [into phone] Who is this?
A shot rings out, and Mr. White, hit in the knee, crumples to the ground. He is pulling himself across the driveway when a shadow falls on him. He looks up to see BOND, staring down at him, a rifle in his hand.
BOND: The name’s Bond. James Bond.
Casino Royale has a great score by David Arnold, one of his best, and the song, a straight-up rocker by Chris Cornell, is one of my favorites. I remember sitting in the theater, thinking to myself as Casino Royale ended, “My God, they can take James Bond in so many new directions now!” And for the balance of Daniel Craig’s run, they tried to do just that, and mostly succeeded. Casino Royale probably would be my favorite James Bond movie of all time, if not for…
1. ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE
As I’ve said, there’s never been any doubt that this was my landing point, was there? We all knew. I suppose it’s possible that a Bond movie will come along that I love as much as I do OHMSS, but at this point I think it’s extremely unlikely. This movie is simply too much a part of my DNA at this point. OHMSS is in my heart like Star Wars, Casablanca, My Fair Lady, Singin’ in the Rain, and Princess Mononoke are. For a breakdown of exactly why I adore OHMSS the way I do, I refer you to this essay of mine; every word stands.
When I was a kid, maybe eleven or twelve, the beginnings of my personal music collection consisted almost entirely of movie soundtrack albums, and I would gravitate to that section every time I was in a record store. My parents didn’t quite understand this, but it was OK. There was one record store, I think it was in a mall near Rochester, that not only had a really good soundtrack section, but they also went to the trouble of separating their albums by movie with labeled dividers with each movie title on them. There was an entire section of James Bond soundtracks, and I remember digging through these with delight, looking at all the score albums (vinyl! The CD was still seven or eight years away) to Bond movies, most of which at that point I hadn’t seen. This was 1982 or so. I knew that there were two Bonds: Roger Moore, the one who had introduced me, and Sean Connery, who had been the first Bond.
But then I flipped to a record for a movie I hadn’t heard of: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And on the cover: “George Lazenby as James Bond 007!” It looked “official” enough, not a parody, so I made a mental note of this and later I asked my mother about it, since she’d seen all the Bond movies and would watch them with me on the ABC Sunday Night Movie when they’d air a Bond every three months or so. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Oh, that. Yeah, he only did one. Apparently it was a bomb and nobody liked it.” I was crestfallen at the idea of a bad James Bond, but still…when it showed up on ABC within a year, we watched it. Mom hadn’t seen it when it was out, so watch it we did. And during a commercial break about halfway through, she said something like, “You know, this guy isn’t really half-bad!”
I agreed. I thought he was fine.
The next time OHMSS ran on ABC, we had a VCR, so I taped it. (Remember taping movies off network teevee? Trying to hit ‘pause’ to stop the commercials from recording?) I’d read a few books about Bond movies and I knew by this time that OHMSS had a small but devoted following, so I started watching the movie through those eyes…and I’ve never seen it any other way, ever since. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service remains for me the single most captivating, most exciting, most emotionally involving (and ultimately shattering), experience in a Bond film. It’s also extremely well made, it has great actors and a crisp script with great dialog, thrilling action sequences, John Barry’s best ever Bond score, a gorgeous song by Louis Armstrong, and…James Bond falls in love.
And I don’t care what anybody says about George Lazenby. I believe every minute of his portrayal of James Bond. Period. I believe that he’s a bit tired and weary of the whole thing. I believe that he’s afraid for his life at points. I believe that he’s determined to find his arch-enemy. And I believe, I absolutely believe, that he’s in love with Teresa–Tracy–di Vicenzo.
What’s more, I do not believe, contra the insistences of many a Bond film, that “Ohhh, if only they could have had Sean Connery in this movie!” I’m supposed to believe that the Connery who smirked and almost sleep-walked through Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, and who did Diamonds Are Forever after this one with a performance that screams “I’m doing this for the paycheck,” was somehow going to sell the emotions needed for this script?
Plus, had Connery been on board, Diana Rigg would not have been. She was cast because the new actor playing Bond had no experience and would need help in those scenes.
I don’t say these things to throw rocks at Sean Connery, because I do love his movies, even though I tend to rank them lower than most other fans do. But I also don’t apologize for this: the heart loves what it loves, and that’s just the way it is. But I also refuse to grant the premise that George Lazenby’s performance represents a serious flaw in what many folks would claim is “otherwise” a fine Bond movie. I reject that premise completely.
In fact, I would say the opposite: For me, George Lazenby is the best James Bond. How can he not be? Surely the guy who plays Bond in the Bond film I consider the best Bond film ever made gets to be considered the best Bond, right? When I think “James Bond”, I tend to picture George Lazenby first.
I know that Lazenby let the Bond role slip through his fingers, largely because, from what I’ve read, he was naive and he had a complete dolt as an agent. There’s a postscript to my appreciation of George Lazenby that happened much later, in the 1990s. For a while, NBC had a Saturday night feature that they called “Saturday Thrillogy”: three hour-long action-adventure drama shows, one of which was called The Pretender. In this show, a guy named Jarod, played by an actor named Michael T. Weiss (not to be confused with the figure skater with a similar name), was a genius who could insinuate himself into any walk of life he wanted. He had escaped from a shadowy organization with nefarious goals for Jarod that were never quite explained, but they weren’t good, and Jarod went around the country doing good deeds and righting wrongs while trying to find out what ever happened to his real family.
Well, at some point during Season One, I remember thinking suddenly, “Huh, Michael T. Weiss looks a little bit like George Lazenby!” They had similar faces, similar jawlines, and similar smiles. Mr. Weiss just reminded me a little of Mr. Lazenby.
So, in The Pretender‘s third (or was it the fourth?) season, they had Jarod finally manage to track down his father, his real father. And who did the producers cast as Jarod’s dad?
George Lazenby.
I wanted to stand up and cheer in my living room when Mr. Lazenby showed up on that show. Because I knew.
I plan to watch On Her Majesty’s Secret Service again soon, hopefully followed immediately by No Time To Die, which is absolutely loaded with references to the earlier film. I’m looking forward to it, though I know that as the end approaches, when Bond and Tracy exchange their vows and head off on honeymoon, I’ll hope it turns out differently, just this once. I’ll hope that they keep on driving, that they don’t encounter that other car, the one with Blofeld in it. I’ll hope there’s no hail of bullets, and that they really will have all the time in the world.
Wow, I wasn’t planning to write that much about OHMSS again, but here we are. And why not? After all, what’s a favorite movie for, if not to give you something to write long Internet essays about?
And there we have it: the Correct and Official Rankings of the James Bond films…at least for now. As noted, I still have to watch No Time To Die another time or two (at least), and we’ll never really be done, will we? I mean, as every single James Bond movie ever made has promised us:
And when he does, like M, we’ll say, “Ahh, there you are, 007.”
With lists like this, the ones at the top probably end up as vexing as the ones at the bottom, especially if one is deviating wildly from accepted orthodoxy. As someone who really doesn’t think Goldfinger is anywhere near the classic it’s held out to be, I expect that to be the case here. So let’s get to it!
10. OCTOPUSSY
Judging by the proportions in this poster, Bond could play in the NBA if the “superspy” thing doesn’t work out.
Here’s another Bond movie that routinely gets ripped–it’s almost always in the bottom third of lists like this–and yet I love it. The “British Colonialism” style of racism is hard to overlook, and the chase scene through the streets of Delhi, which I found wildly fun and entertaining as a kid, is pretty cringey. But beneath the somewhat icky nature of Octopussy‘s depiction of India is an espionage thriller that I really enjoy on story grounds. I wrote in depth about Octopussy some years back, and those thoughts still stand, so I’ll just link that and mostly have done here.
But I do want to note something about the Bond films of the 80s, which is to note that the Bond series is often reflective of something else in the zeitgeist. The Connery-and-Lazenby run is, for the most part, devoted to fairly faithful adaptations of the Fleming source novels, You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever aside. Adapting Fleming fell by the wayside for good, for the most part, when Roger Moore came aboard, because the films’ order did not echo the order of the novels, and because by that point they were running out of novels to adapt. By the back half of Roger Moore’s run the filmmakers were relying on short stories for plot material, and mostly for background stuff. That’s the case with Octopussy. When Bond and Octopussy first meet, Octopussy asks Bond about a mission he once had to track down a British officer who had turned criminal. Bond had found him and given him 24 hours to clear up his affairs before taking him into custody, and instead the officer committed suicide. Octopussy wants to thank Bond for giving the officer, her father, an honorable alternative. That’s straight out of a Fleming story.
So, once the focus was off adapting Fleming novels, the producers started looking elsewhere for plot material. That’s why you had a Blaxploitation Bond film (Live and Let Die), a movie about the energy crisis (The Man With the Golden Gun), and, most weirdly, a post-Star Wars Bond-in-space-with-lasers film (Moonraker).
With the 80s, the Bond films drew a lot of inspiration from the Cold War. It’s interesting, when you think about it, that the Bond films started in 1962, and yet until 1981’s For Your Eyes Only they are almost entirely devoid of Cold War subtext. And along with the Cold War subtext came a new set of influences: the spy and espionage fiction of the time, which relied on globetrotting adventures through labyrinthine, sometimes almost impenetrable, storylines. When you watch an Octopussy or a For Your Eyes Only or a A View To a Kill, it’s easy to think along the lines of, “Wait, how did we get from 009 being killed with a fake Faberge egg in his hand to a scheme by a rogue Soviet general to smuggle an atomic bomb onto a USAF base in Germany?”
This is my point: this kind of plot was all the rage in the espionage genre of the time, and Bond was following suit. I spent a big chunk of these years reading the novels authors like Robert Ludlum and Nelson DeMille, and if you read any of those (I still recommend The Parsifal Mosaic, which I just reread last year!), you’ll see the DNA of the 80s Bond films writ large.
Meanwhile, as for Octopussy, I still love this movie, Indian cringe aside. Maud Adams is fantastic, and how wonderful to have a “Bond girl” who is not too young and who has a very real life of her own! And while whitewashing is never a great look–surely there are hundreds of Indian actors who could have played Kamal Khan–Louis Jourdan is always worth watching, as is Steven Berkoff as General Orlov (“We invade through Czech-o-slo-VAKIA!!!”). The back half of the movie, with Bond’s race against time to get to the bomb before it goes off, is riveting. John Barry’s score is a lot of fun, and I think the title song is underrated.
Also, on nostalgic grounds, Octopussy is the second Bond movie I ever saw in theaters, but it’s the first one that I went to see by myself, buying my own ticket with my allowance.
9. NO TIME TO DIE
There’s something really…troubling in Daniel Craig’s eyes here.
This is a pretty provisional ranking, and of all the films, given this one’s freshness, this one is most likely to move up or down pending a rewatch. Also, I plan to write a longer post about this movie once I’ve had a chance to watch it again and really internalize my thoughts, so we’ll just do a capsule thing here:
No Time To Die is, at first glance, almost tailor-made to press each and every one of my personal buttons as a Bond fan. I was emotionally hooked in the first minutes, after the flashback sequence, when Daniel Craig looks at Lea Seydoux and says, “We have all the time in the world.” And the film never let me go, once it had me.
More to come on No Time To Die at some point in the future. For now, here it is.
The posters for Timothy Dalton’s films weren’t very good, were they?
Another movie that’s generally disliked that ranks high on my list! Which illustrates something about my Bond tastes: as much as I love a good formulaic Bond flick, I really love the films that break the formula, the “outlier” films that do something different. I especially love the ones that acknowledge that James Bond really, truly does have an emotional life of his own and that he gets personally invested sometimes.
This was the last film co-written by Richard Maibaum, whose credits with the series go all the way back to the beginnings. Stylistically, Licence to Kill (note the British spelling of “Licence”!) is probably the biggest outlier in the entire series, at least until the Daniel Craig run comes along seventeen years later. Virtually nothing of the usual Bond formula is observed in this movie, though a lot of the familiar ingredients are here; they’re just mixed up a bit. The precredit sequence isn’t a separate adventure; it sets up the entire movie and establishes the main conflict and introduces the main villain. Q does show up with gadgets, but not until later in the film than usual, and then he sticks around helping Bond in the field. And while we’ve seen Bond infiltrate the bad guy’s forces before, we’ve never seen anything quite like in Licence, where Bond goes so far as to befriend the guy while working to dismantle his operation.
Licence gets ripped a lot for being heavily influenced by the pop culture of the 80s, and I get that, but Bond has always reflected the world around it. I’ve made mention of how the Bond films of the early 80s strongly reflect the styles of the entire spy genre of the time, and in the 70s we had Disco Bond and Star Wars Bond and Blaxploitation Bond and Energy Crisis Bond. This is nothing new, and yet sometimes when people discuss Licence to Kill they act as if for Bond to do anything reflective of real world time-and-place stuff is just awful. The drug trade was a gigantic issue in the late 80s, and to expect Bond to just ignore that would be really weird. It’s not as if Bond was alone in bringing that stuff to the spy genre: Tom Clancy would have his Jack Ryan involved in a drug caper as well, in his novel Clear and Present Danger that came out the very same year.
I’ve also seen people cite the scene in the rough-and-tumble bar as being ripped from the Swayze flick Road House, which is impossible since that film opened less than a month before Licence, so it’s hard to see how the Bond folks could have been influenced by the Swayze flick.
Robert Davi is one of my favorite Bond villains, too: he’s smarmy and charming and he operates with his own personal code, and Davi brings a lot of unique menace to the role of Sanchez. He also doesn’t really have any particular scheme to speak of, other than coming up with new ways to smuggle heroin around (or is it cocaine? I don’t remember), and he’s stolen a few Stinger missiles just so he can blackmail US authorities into backing off from his operations. He’s just a bad guy who just wants to rule his own little fiefdom by doing bad things, and on that score, Licence‘s smaller scale is kind of refreshing. (One criticism that does hold is that at the end, when we’re wrapping things up, Felix Leiter probably shouldn’t be smiling and talking about fishing trips, seeing as how in the first act of this movie he was maimed for life and his new wife was murdered.)
I enjoy Licence precisely because it does interesting and different things with James Bond. To this point we haven’t seen him go “rogue” much at all, nor have we seen him acknowledge his own humanity a whole lot. Licence may be too violent, but even that doesn’t bother me in the context of James Bond. I love what this movie does, I love that it does it after years and years of The Formula, I love the way it looks (that truck chase at the end! Wow! That’s the best truck chase since Raiders of the Lost Ark!), and…well, basically, Licence to Kill grafts Bond into an 80s action movie, and I honestly love that, being a fan of that particular subgenre. This movie blends the DNA of Bond with that of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and others.
On that last point: the connective tissue is made even stronger by the use of Michael Kamen as the composer. Kamen’s score works very well for me. I don’t think the lush string sound of late-80s John Barry would have served this story quite so well; Kamen’s guitar-heavy punch was what this story needed. Gladys Knight’s title song is terrific, with its Goldfinger-influenced brass, and the movie ends with the first hearing of a song called “If You Asked Me To” (performed by Patti LaBelle), which would become a much bigger hit when a Canadian vocalist named Celine Dion recorded it a few years later.
One final note about Licence to Kill, which I never tire of pointing out because it’s such a great character moment that lots of folks miss (I’ve listened to a number of Bond fan podcasts that never bring this up when discussing this movie): You know how a long-running complaint of Q’s is that Bond never returns his equipment in good order? Well, near the climax of Licence, Q is posing as a Mexican farmer on the side of the road so he can let Bond know when Sanchez, our villain, drives by. Q speaks into a radio he’s mounted to the handle of the broom he’s holding, saying something like “Sanchez is on his way, 007!”, and then, job done, Q just tosses the broom aside and walks away. I always laugh at that.
7. GOLDENEYE
Now HERE is a good poster!
After Licence to Kill the Bond films went into a period of legal hell, so Bond didn’t return until 1995, when Pierce Brosnan–famously cast back in 1987, only to have NBC screw him so they could force him to do another half-season of Remington Steele–finally got his shot. And he was terrific, right off the bat! GoldenEye is an excellent movie, wonderfully made, loaded with great ideas, brilliantly cast, and just a lot of fun. Honestly, my only quibbles with this film are the first-act pacing (a bit of Thunderball-like longwinded convolution) and what is easily the worst score of any Bond movie.
You may recall from earlier in this series how I voiced my view that the Brosnan run of Bond films was marked by great ideas that weren’t executed very well. In GoldenEye, we get a great idea that is executed well: What if the villain is a former Double-O agent who has fallen from grace? That’s great stuff, and it’s executed pretty well with Sean Bean as Alec Trevelyan, former Agent 006, thought killed in a mission that only 007 survived. The film isn’t entirely clear how Trevelyan survived that–I mean, it’s obvious that General Orumov fakes shooting him–but it really isn’t clarified why Orumov would have done so in that situation, unless 006 was bent all the way back then. No matter, though! GoldenEye opens with a wonderful precredit sequence that has Bond doing some insane stunt work, showing some wit, and establishing some things about this version of the character. I’m not sure about the plausibility of Bond being able to catch up to a plummeting airplane in the space he had to do so, but…we’ll let that slide.
One thing about the Alec Trevelyan character: he is kept offscreen for way too long in this movie. By withholding the reveal that he’s not only alive but now he’s gone evil until as late in the film as it does, GoldenEye cheats itself out of what could have been a fascinating cat-and-mouse tale as James Bond squares off against a villain who is literally his equal. You can feel the disconnect in the story, since as soon as Bond knows that Trevelyan is alive and the main villain, General Orumov becomes superfluous and is dispatched pretty quickly thereafter.
GoldenEye does suffer a bit from pacing issues. The opening act drags quite a bit as villains are slowly introduced and a plot slowly forms. I wonder if the writers, Bruce Feirstein and Jeffrey Caine, felt like they had to get as many Bond tropes into the movie as possible; there’s a weird car chase/flirtation scene between Bond and Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp (a pretty fine attempt at a Fleming-esque name for a femme fatale), which is followed by a tuxedoed Bond in a casino where he beats Onatopp at baccarat. We have a side mission where Onatopp is plotting to steal a helicopter, and Bond is unable to thwart this; then we’re at a snow-bound military base in Russia where the movie’s plot finally starts to kick in: there’s a satellite called the “GoldenEye” that will release an electro-magnetic pulse in space, frying the microchips in everything on the ground beneath. (One wonders what ever became of the prototype microchips from A View To A Kill, which were designed to resist this exact problem, but carrying on.) Someone attacks the Russian base, stealing the ability to control the GoldenEye satellites, and it’s up to Bond to figure out who. This he does, with the help of the Russian base’s sole survivor, a computer geek named Natalia Simonova.
Brosnan’s Bond falls somewhere between Roger Moore’s elegance and Sean Connery’s guy-who-works-for-a-living. I actually think maybe it was a good thing that NBC screwed up Brosnan’s potential Bond casting eight years earlier, because that bit of aging is perfect; it gives his Bond enough heft to justify the world-weariness that the script suggests. Bond in GoldenEye is, as Judi Dench’s M says, “a dinosaur” and “a relic of the Cold War”. I remember that these parts of the script troubled Roger Ebert, who didn’t think that Bond should ever be “in on the joke”, but I like that they try to acknowledge that yes, time has passed, and a spy franchise that’s been going on for over three decades probably needs to bend with the times now and again.
Special mention of Izabella Scorupco as Natalya, Brosnan’s first “Bond girl”. Natalya is not a field agent in any way, but she is competent and smart and occasionally quite blunt. Even when she’s captured by the bad guys, she’s never content to simply be a damsel-in-distress, and she turns out to be a boon to Bond during the film’s climax several times. For some reason Natalya Simonova seems underrated to me as a Bond heroine, but she’s one of my favorites.
Oh, the music. It’s terrible. I don’t even like the song, and I hate saying that because it’s Tine Freakin’ Turner singing it. Eric Serra might be a decent composer (I’ve heard nothing else by him except this score), but the unmelodic electronica that forms the basis of much of this film’s score is often unmemorable and sometimes downright unpleasant. Some other music was written by composer John Altman, which is uncredited; I think this is what’s heard during the chase scene in St. Petersburg and during the movie’s climax. This music is better, but still, GoldenEye is probably the most forgettable Bond movie in terms of music in the entire franchise. (Never Say Never Again‘s terrible score is neck-and-neck with this one, but that film isn’t actually in the franchise, even though I include it on this ranked list.)
6. SKYFALL
I love the kinetic feel of this poster.
Truth to tell, I almost had this one even higher, but this feels right to me. I thought Skyfall pretty much hit on all cylinders, in a lot of ways. It might be the most “nontraditional” Bond film of all: it starts with a failed mission that leaves Bond almost dead, and then it forces him to return even though he’s probably not up to it because M is in serious trouble herself.
Here you can see the biggest example of writers Neil Purvis and Robert Wade (along with John Logan) returning to ideas that they had flirted with, to unsatisfactory results, during Pierce Brosnan’s run, particularly in The World Is Not Enough, which gave us a Bond who was damaged goods when a previous mission went south, and which gave us M dealing with results of some mess that she had made. As much as I do admire the earlier film, Skyfall takes those elements and really elevates them to something pretty amazing.
Skyfall is also the most beautiful Bond film ever made, and this is a series that has had some gorgeous visual stuff along the way. There’s that astonishing fight in Shanghai, with swirling LED signs in the background; there’s Bond on the boat into the Macao casino. The Istanbul pre-credits sequence is one of the best action sequences in any Bond movie, and the London and Scotland sequences are beautiful in their gray marble and windswept-moor coldness.
Much has been written about villain Silva and the degree to which his scheme is remotely plausible (or even comprehensible, as somehow this plan years in the making depends on London’s Underground trains being on time), but this movie has enough charisma and sweep that I barely care. Nor do I really hold it against the film that even though Silva dies, he actually achieves his goal, alone among all Bond villains.
Skyfall pushes James Bond into the category of brooding heroes, which may or may not be overdone these days, but I’m fine with it here; again, I value a Bond story where we get actual glimpse into James Bond’s character and his emotional life. It interests me that as Skyfall ends, it appears as if we’ve finally got Daniel Craig’s Bond era back to a point where he can finally engage The Formula: Get a briefing, get a few gadgets, and strike out on a mission. It didn’t work out that way, but…it could have. (And maybe that is why, while I like the movie, I still ranked Spectre relatively low on this list.)
Adele’s song is one of the very best, and while Thomas Newman’s score isn’t my favorite, it’s still pretty good.
With this entry, we move from my bottom half of the Bond rankings into the top half. It’s worth remembering that this is all relative: there’s only one movie, Live and Let Die, that I find basically unwatchable. Every one of these movies entertains me on some level, so when I throw rocks at a particular movie, one shouldn’t assume I’m throwing particularly large or hard rocks, or that my aim is very good.
By way of refresher, here’s my ranking as we enter this post (nos. 21-26 here, nos. 16-20 here):
26. LIVE AND LET DIE
25. DIE ANOTHER DAY
24. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
23. GOLDFINGER
22. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
21. A VIEW TO A KILL
20. TOMORROW NEVER DIES
19. QUANTUM OF SOLACE
18. THUNDERBALL
17. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
16. SPECTRE
Moving on, to numbers 15 through 11! These aren’t quite my “favorite” movies in the series, but they’re movies I like more than I dislike, if that makes sense.
15. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN
There’s a lot wrong with this movie, but I really do end up liking it, because it’s pretty fun, it boasts some gorgeous cinematography, and it has a few fantastic scenes. Christopher Lee is one of those actors whose presence automatically elevates anything he’s in, and that’s the case here; he’s one of those wonderful Bond villains who genuinely seems to like James Bond and on some level probably finds it a bummer that he’s going to have to kill Bond at some point. The scene where Bond and Scaramanga meet at the martial-arts match is an outstanding scene in the annals of Bond-meets-the-bad-guy scenes, as is the subsequent scene where they meet over a nice meal before going off to do their gun duel.
And that gun duel: I honestly love that sequence. Many think Scaramanga’s “fun house” maze that he uses for duels is dumb, but I find it trippy and interesting, especially in light of how Scaramanga uses it to keep his skills up: he has Nick Nack, his servant, bring assassins to the island for a big payday if they can kill Scaramanga. Of course, this has never happened, but it’s a fun conceit, and that we see the fun house in the pre-credit sequence and then not again until Bond enters it–already knowing that among the mannequins of great criminals and shooters and killers, Scaramanga’s fun house centers on a mannequin of Bond himself–there’s some real tension. I love how this entire sequence plays out. It reminds me of the famous short story “The Most Dangerous Game”.
What’s not to love? Well, the movie is rather racist again–not quite as badly as in You Only Live Twice, but it still looks down on East Asians with a kind of “Awwww, aren’t they cute” colonial condescension, and that’s before we get to Sheriff JW Pepper, who has for some reason decided to take vacation in Thailand, so he can be annoyingly racist during one of the film’s chases. And then later on Sheriff Pepper happens to be in the car that Bond steals from a dealership so he can go on another high-speed chase! What the hell is Sheriff Pepper doing looking at cars in a dealership when he’s on vacation in Thailand? Who knows!
And that chase leads to a stunning stunt: Bond leaps a canal in that car, in a way that the car executes a barrel roll as it jumps. That’s awesome to behold, one of the great stunts in movie history, but the producers decided that the stunt actually needed sonic accompaniment by a slide whistle. It’s one of the great WTF moments in Bond history.
The less said about Britt Ekland’s Mary Goodnight, the better; she’s an incredibly uninteresting character who stands alongside later gems like A VIEW TO A KILL‘s Stacy Sutton. Ekland does what she can, but the part as written doesn’t do much. Soon Teck Oh is excellent as the Hong Kong intelligence officer who helps Bond; I always like him when I see him in things. And Herve Villechaize as Nick Nack? He gets some grief from fans, but I really like him in this movie. After a bunch of Bond henchmen who are big super-strong guys, a little person is more interesting, and he has his own agenda (if he gets Scaramanga killed in the fun house he inherits the entire island). I like him. Finally there’s Maud Adams as Scaramanga’s lover, who is the one who sends the bullet with 007 engraved on it to MI6, in hopes of getting Bond on the case against Scaramanga so she can be free of him.
And let’s be honest: Roger Moore gets a lot of grief, mostly undeserved, for the campy turn the series took as he entered the role, but he’s really quite good in this movie and he even has several moments of ruthlessness you expect from a James Bond.
Finally, there’s some really good dialog in this movie. We get to hear a frustrated M, annoyed at how badly things are going, snap “Oh, Q, shut up!”, and when Scaramanga kills the rich industrialist who has outlived his usefulness, Scaramanga says to one of the guy’s servants, referring to the elaborate tomb that the industrialist has been building: “He always did like that mausoleum. Put him in it.” The movie does try to give Scaramanga a “Bond villain scheme”, but it’s a weird plot that is meant to tie into early-70s era energy crisis fears, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, and all it does is give the movie a Maguffin in the “solex agitator”. What’s that? Fuhgeddaboudit!
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN has a lot of cheesy 70s-era stuff in it that hasn’t aged at all well, but parts of it are just fine and very watchable. Just…not JW Pepper. Sheesh. John Barry’s score is typically excellent, and the song is…well, it’s not great but it’s short and a fun listen when it comes up on a Bond playlist.
14. NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN
This might be the weirdest Bond movie. It’s an “unofficial” movie, not made by Eon Productions, but it ended up existing because the legal wrangling regarding the ownership of Bond and the story that became Thunderball basically resulted in producer Kevin McClory being given the legal right to make his very own Bond movie, as long as it told this story, and no other. All he could do was literally remake Thunderball, so remake Thunderball he did, bringing Sean Connery out of James Bond retirement to play an aging, a little-out-of-practice version of the character. This is a movie that ends up getting mostly ignored and seems to not be regarded highly by fans.
Thing is…I think this movie tells the Thunderball story better than Thunderball does. It’s got better dialog, better pacing, better casting. It is the exact same story: Bond, while at a health clinic, stumbles on some shady shit that turns out to be the beginnings of a SPECTRE plot to steal two nuclear bombs, with which it blackmails NATO. Off Bond goes to try and figure out the plot, based on what he saw at the clinic (a USAF pilot, having been made into a heroin addict, being trained to use his surgically-implanted false eye to fool the retina scanner into thinking he’s the President of the United States, thus allowing him to change the course of the missiles). Where Thunderball got to the Bahamas and stayed there, NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN globetrots nicely, and there’s relatively little slow-motion underwater ballet of the kind that made Thunderball‘s running time feel so bloated.
Also, Never Say Never Again has some great set pieces! In Thunderball, Bond and Largo meet over a game of Baccarat, while here Bond and Largo meet over a gonzo video game that delivers electric shocks to the players when they mess up. Later, Bond and Domino dance a pretty impressive tango, and the final confrontation between Bond and assassin Fiona is one of the better such scenes in any Bond movie.
Kim Basinger’s Domino isn’t the most memorable Bond heroine, but she does well enough, and Klaus Maria Brandauer as Largo is charmingly sinister, just walking the edge of madness. (I’ve no idea why he gives Domino a pendant with a map of the location of his main scheme embedded in it, but we don’t ask these kinds of questions.) Bernie Casey is the first black Felix Leiter and he’s terrific. Really, about the only thing I genuinely dislike in this movie is the score, which is honestly terrible. And in a blink-and-you-miss-it scene, you even get to note that Sean Connery managed to look good in a pair of overalls!
13. THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH
In the last post, when discussing Tomorrow Never Dies, I mentioned how the Pierce Brosnan era was afflicted by good ideas that were poorly executed, mostly because of the insistence of keeping the films focused on The Bond Formula, even if the Formula undermined something interesting. That’s absolutely the case with The World Is Not Enough, which is a frankly maddening film to behold. There is a lot of great stuff here, but if you watch it now, you might well be struck instead by ideas and plot devices that were later repeated in the Daniel Craig run, to much greater effect.
Bond is physically hobbled in this movie by an injury suffered in the precredits sequence, which would happen to Craig. The plot involves shadowy misdeeds in M’s past, which would be revisited in the Craig films. And in the best of all the ideas in this movie, our writers (the team of Purvis and Wade, in their first Bond script) uncork a beautiful notion: What if the “Bond Girl” and the “Bond Villain” are the same person?
Oh my God, they had that opportunity in the palm of their hands! It was right there! And it was on the screen the entire time, because the chemistry between Brosnan and Sophie Marceau as Electra King absolutely crackles. But then you can just feel the writers backing away, almost in fear, so in comes Denise Richards as nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones. They had to have the traditional formula beats with Bond and “the girl”, right down to the final love-making scene with terrible double entendres (“Christmas comes once a year!”) It’s so bad that in the few scenes where Brosnan, Marceau, and Richards are all present, poor Richards gets blown off the screen.
And that’s not Denise Richards’s fault. Not at all. Every bit of the script’s emotional investment is between Bond and Electra, so Richards falls into the category of Bond actresses who get blamed for doing the best she could with material that Meryl Streep in her prime couldn’t have elevated. It’s…just…maddening.
Like I said, there’s a lot of great stuff in The World Is Not Enough. You can sense Purvis and Wade chafing against the constraints of the Bond Formula, forcing their story into a mold that it just doesn’t fit. The oil pipeline stuff is an interesting plot, as is the nuclear sub/dirty bomb scheme. The scene where Bond and Electra ski to the remote location of the pipeline is a stunning one, with an amazing score cue that was inexplicably left off the soundtrack album (and then reprised at the end of Die Another Day, oddly enough). Sadly that great scene is immediately followed by a pretty lackluster ski chase. And M is given a lot to do here, which is nice. But still…I can’t help thinking that Purvis and Wade kept this story in the back of their heads when the series got rebooted.
David Arnold’s score is quite good, and the song by Garbage is actually one of my favorites. Robert Carlyle is outstanding as Renard, the movie’s other main villain. I’m not in love with Michael Apted’s direction during the action sequences, some of which are hard to follow, but…ooooh, this movie is so close to being top-notch. As I say, it’s maddening!!!
12. DR. NO
And here’s where it all started. There’s no formula at all here, and parts of this movie seem almost quaint. There’s no Q and no gadgets, just Bond and his new gun, off to find out what’s happened to an agent in Jamaica who has disappeared. Sean Connery is almost at his youthful best here, focused and ruthless (there are few scenes more blunt than when he kills Professor Dent).
Dr. No does suffer from pacing issues; you can really tell that nobody really had any idea what exactly they were doing in making this movie. Some of the action sequences, including an early car chase, are hampered by godawful direction and special effects; nobody told Connery that randomly whipping the steering wheel back and forth wasn’t very convincing. The score really overuses the Barry/ Monty Normal James Bond Theme, but you really can’t hold that against the film, can you?
Look, I could quibble a lot about Dr. No, because there’s stuff that just seems weird from the distance of sixty years (the “dragon” on Crab Key? Quarrel couldn’t recognize a big truck painted to look like a dragon?), but last time I watched it I found it surprisingly more watchable than I remembered it. Had it failed, we wouldn’t have this series of movies to base all these posts on!
11. MOONRAKER
At long last the campy 70s era in Bond came to an end with Moonraker, the campiest Bond movie of all. After Star Wars, I suppose sending James Bond to space was the obvious move. And this movie is full of campy weirdness: Jaws the henchman returns, and finds love in a tiny blond girl! A pigeon does a double-take! There’s a space battle with lasers! Much of Moonraker is downright silly, and the plot is another villain who wants to kill the world and repopulate it with his own people, which is what the guy in the last movie, The Spy Who Loved Me, wanted to do. Moonraker is absolutely one of the silliest of Bond movies (despite some brutal sequences like when villain Drax kills a woman who has failed him by siccing his hunting dogs on her), and it’s a good example of a Bond movie getting so “far out” that the next movie had to rein things in with a more limited, human story.
So why do I rank Moonraker as highly as I do? Well, it’s still fun! Lots of globetrotting, some genuine wit in the script, and yes, spaceships and lasers! And for me, this is where it started. Moonraker is the first James Bond movie I ever saw. My Bond fandom started here, in 1979. So I bring a lot of sentimental affection to this film, despite its obvious flaws (which are also its obvious charms). It’s always good to remember, when talking about the Bond movies, that it’s probably the case that every one of these is some Bond fan’s virginal Bond experience. I even count the song, sung by Shirley Bassey in her third Bond song, as one of my favorites, and John Barry’s score is lush and gorgeous. (Weirdly, the soundtrack album is the only Bond score album to not feature the James Bond Theme at all.)
Moonraker is one of the Bonds that I often here ridiculed by fans, but I cannot hate it. I just can’t.
Continuing my Official And Correct Ranking of the James Bond films! This time we will go from Number 20 to Number 16. Our first entry contained the one Bond film I outright dislike, followed by several that just don’t do a whole lot for me and which are almost never my flick of choice when I decide I want to watch a Bond movie. With this list, we start getting into “Not my favorite, but watchable and sometimes I’ll turn it on for fun” territory.
Here’s the ranking thus far:
26. LIVE AND LET DIE
25. DIE ANOTHER DAY
24. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
23. GOLDFINGER
22. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
21. A VIEW TO A KILL
And now, we move on!
20. TOMORROW NEVER DIES
Some years ago a blogger named Snell had a James Bond blog that he updated for major Bond events (new films, news of new films, that sort of thing). Sadly Snell died about a year ago, so he never got to see No Time To Die, but he did cite me in his review of Tomorrow Never Dies, when I had previously referred to that movie as “a film I like as an action movie, but not so much as a Bond movie.” I stand by this assessment to this day. Tomorrow Never Dies would, I think, be frankly better if it was simply redone for some other action hero. It took me a long time to really figure out why I always have such a weird relationship with this movie, and I finally figured it out: TND is the least subtle Bond movie ever. This movie doesn’t have a single ounce of subtlety in it. And that’s my problem with it.
You may be thinking, “Bond? Subtle?” Well, yes! The Bond series won’t ever be in the Subtlety Hall of Fame, but these movies do tend to deploy subtlety in enough doses to be effective. TND, though, is just blunt-force trauma from start to finish. The precredit sequence is a thrilling mini-action movie on its own, yes–and it ends with Bond apparently being able to include “flying a modern jet fighter with more skill than trained pilots” in his skill set. Bond can apparently use the touch-screen controls on his 90s-era phone to drive his new car with as much precision as he’s ever driven anything else. This gives us another very nice action sequence (the action in this movie is some of the best-filmed action in any Bond movie), but again, a disconnect: He can drive like this with a remote control he’s never touched? And he’s laughing with delight as he does so, minutes after he saw a former lover murdered?
On that last point: my general take on the Brosnan films is that they are full of great ideas that are executed poorly, for one reason or another. This is why a lot of ideas from Brosnan’s films showed up again in the Daniel Craig run: it’s as if Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, writers of Brosnan’s last two movies, were set free by the jettisoning of the Bond Formula that came with the series reboot, and thus were able to put their ideas to better use. Note that Purvis and Wade did not write TND, so they’re blameless here, but TND has two great ideas, and only one is done well. The one they nail is the media mogul villain who is manipulating events for his own profit. Yes, we’ve seen this in You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker and A View To A Kill, but Jonathan Pryce’s Elliot Carver is a particularly nasty and believable piece of work, coming as he does in the late 90s, when we were just starting to become aware of giant media conglomerates starting to consolidate their power.
The other great idea in TND, though? The one handled badly? That’s Paris Carver, the Teri Hatcher character.
Think about James Bond, and all the ex-girlfriends he has all over the world! Think how many times he’s had the break-up speech. Yes, some of those were undoubtedly mutual; I’m sure Octopussy was fine with it, because she was a mature woman with her own doings in life. Others, though, were probably less thrilled to get dumped by Bond. And here comes TND, which puts Bond in the position of having to contact one of his former lovers from an old adventure of his! That is a great idea! I loved this idea. The previous Brosnan flick, GoldenEye, had Bond squaring off against a former Double-O, and now this one has him with a former lover. But the character is wasted, just becoming another in the long line of Bond Girls Who Die At The End Of Act One. Bond and Paris have a conversation (“Tell me, James, do you still sleep with a gun under your pillow?”) that is immediately eavesdropped on by our boy Elliot, who is instantly aware of his wife’s possible faulty loyalty. So we know her fate barely a minute after she’s introduced onscreen.
Lack of subtlety? How about the film’s briefing scene? It takes place not in M’s office but in a car speeding to the airport, and it serves less as a briefing and more as a series of sexual puns using the word “pump” (“Contact Mrs. Carver, your former lover, and pump her for information. You may have to do a lot of pumping. Pump away, 007.”) And the Michelle Yeoh character? Yeoh is terrific! I totally believe that she’s pretty much Bond’s equal, though once again we get a Female Bond who ends up in a pickle while Bond does the world-saving all by himself. We don’t get much about her as a character, unfortunately–the movie has to spend its first act on Paris Carver, so that we feel bad when she’s killed, and by this time the plot is whisking along so there’s no more time for any character stuff, so Wai Lin is shorted in the character department. She and Brosnan do have chemistry, but so did Brosnan and Hatcher, so this movie wastes two potentially good female characters.
Joe Don Baker’s not-Felix Leiter character? I liked him a lot and I wish he’d been around for more of these. Alas.
Oh, and TND saw the arrival of new Bond composer David Arnold, who did terrific work here, weaving in snatches of references to older themes and alluding to John Barry’s style while doing his own thing. The title song by Sheryl Crow isn’t a favorite of mine, while the kd lang song that closes out the film is a terrific ballad in Bond tradition. Arnold’s score actually incorporates the kd lang song’s tune, so I assume that was meant to be the title song before someone higher up the food chain at Eon Productions or MGM mandated using Crow. Anyway….
19. QUANTUM OF SOLACE
OK, after the big word-dump on TND, I’ll try to rein it in a bit on Quantum. We’ll start with the Rule of Bondian Time, a law I’m just now positing: Beware a Bond film that ends in under two hours.
I’m serious. I’ve just looked it up, and there are, to this writing, five Bond movies with run times less than two hours, and four of those are in the bottom half of my rankings. (One of them does make it into my Top Five, but every rule has an exception, no?) Bond stories need time to unfold. They tend to be fairly complex, plot-wise, and each one needs to establish a new set of characters. When these movies get short, it’s almost always to the detriment of story, character, or both. Can Bond movies be too long? I suppose, though I tend to default to Roger Ebert’s formulation: “No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough.”
As of this writing, Quantum of Solace is the shortest Bond movie ever made, at 1 hour, 46 minutes. This comes after Casino Royale‘s 2 hours, 24 minutes, so Quantum feels like a bit of whiplash, especially when Quantum does a first for a Bond movie: it starts literally minutes after the last one ended. I’ve come to think that this may have been a mistaken choice in terms of narrative, because Quantum asks us to (a) follow Bond’s relentless quest for the nefarious organization behind the scheme that ended up costing Bond the first great love of his life, Vesper Lynd, and (b) acknowledge Bond’s grief at the disastrous end of his first true love affair. Quantum ends up being slightly more convincing on the former score and less so on the latter, partly because it compresses all of this into basically a few days of story time, and because it passes by so relentlessly quickly that none of the story elements really come together. Shame, that.
Quantum was partially hampered by a writer’s strike that sent the movie into production before the script was really ready, and stories abound of Daniel Craig spending his time not in front of the camera hastily scrawling script pages off to the side. Also, the movie looks strange for a Bond movie: washed out and even garish at times, and the action sequences are famously terrible, with quick-cut speed substituting for establishing shots so at times we’re not even sure what the hell even happened. Quantum is worth watching, but it’s ultimately a frustrating misfire.
David Arnold returned to score, but I have no real opinion of his work here. I should give the album another listen at some point. The song is not my cup of tea. I’ll leave it there.
18. THUNDERBALL
After talking about two movies that whip along and give their stories too little breathing room, here’s one that gives its story too much breathing room. There’s a lot of good stuff in Thunderball, but it all comes in the second act; the first act is 40 minutes or so of plot set-up, and the last act feels like 40 minutes of slow-motion underwater ballet “action”.
Thunderball is that odd duck of a film, the one that made the James Bond films a legal mess for decades, owing to some literary partnership between Ian Fleming and Kevin McCrory. I won’t go into that here, but there are legal reasons why Blofeld and SPECTRE disappeared completely from the James Bond mythos after Diamonds are Forever, and why McCrory was able to make his very own Bond movie 18 years later, called Never Say Never Again and starring Sean Connery, featuring the exact same story as this one.
The villain’s plot is very straightforward here, and there’s something kind of refreshing about the Bond films where you get the villain’s scheme in the first act. SPECTRE steals two atomic bombs and threatens to detonate them someplace unless they get paid a pile of money. That’s it. Again, it’s refreshing! It sets the movie up as a race against time. How odd, then, that a movie whose plot is a race against time has some of the worst pacing of any Bond movie.
The first act, as noted, is all set-up: Bond is at a health clinic, where some other guy is recovering from surgery to be made to look like an RAF officer. Bond notices weird shit going on but isn’t sure what to make of any of it, but he somehow angers some dude to the point of tit-for-tat injurious pranks, and there’s a very uncomfortable “seduction” scene that is frankly rape. Meanwhile the surgery guy turns out to be a SPECTRE guy who is standing in for an RAF guy on a plane that’s carrying two atomic bombs. He takes over, poisons, the crew, and crashes the plane in a specific spot in the Bahamas so the main villain, a SPECTRE guy named Largo, can steal the bombs. And he kills the RAF officer body double, who has already been killed, and who is the brother of Largo’s girlfriend.
Yes, Thunderball gives us all that convolution in the first act, before we ever get to Bond getting briefed by M.
Once we finally get Bond to the Bahamas (sent there instead of Canada because Bond just happened to find the RAF guy’s dead body at the health clinic even though the RAF guy was seen boarding–that’s our body double!), Thunderball gets more interesting, though it remains pretty convoluted. Bond pisses off Largo by beating him at cards, and then Bond seduces Largo’s assassin, and then Bond seduces Domino once he figures out that Largo has the bombs. Finally we get to our climax, which as noted, is a really long underwater chase-and-battle sequence, followed by ships, followed finally by a fight on the bridge of an out-of-control speedboat.
Thunderball is a gorgeous film to look at, and there are some iconic moments in it. But it just feels slow and bloated every time I watch it, and I also think this is when Sean Connery started seeming a bit less invested in the part. John Barry’s score is outstanding, and of course there’s that gonzo song crooned by Tom Jones, with its ridiculous lyrics (“And he strikes…like Thunderball!”) and his apparent death from self-inflicted asphyxiation on that last high note.
17. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
I loved You Only Live Twice as a kid, but I’ve liked it less and less as time has gone on. Another simple villain plot, this time involving outer space: SPECTRE is swiping American, and later Russian, space capsules right out of the sky, hoping to trigger a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, apparently at the behest of China. The British, seeing some weak indication that maybe the kidnapped ships came down somewhere near Japan, send James Bond to check it out.
YOLT is another example of an under-two-hour Bond film not being as good as it should be, but in this case, I don’t think the issue is pacing. The issue here is that the 1960s-era sexism and racism is just impossible to ignore. This movie has so many moments of pure cringe that it casts a pall over the entire thing (“In Japan, men always come first and women come second!” Bond is told, to which he responds, “I just may retire here!”). Also this movie makes a very odd narrative choice regarding the “Bond girl”: it keeps the first one around almost to Act Three, and then she’s killed off. So we actually have some investment in her character, and the one that’s brought in minutes later to finish out the movie is almost literally a stand-in. Her name is “Kissy Suzuki”, which we only know because the credits tell us this.
Donald Pleasance is on board as Blofeld, and this time we finally get to see his face, which has an odd scar on his right eye. I’ve never been able to decide if I like Pleasance’s take on Blofeld or if I hate it. He does seem creepy and evil at times, but at others he seems almost whiny. He’s weird. There’s a beautiful woman assassin who is way less interesting than Thunderball‘s Fiona (one of the series’s best femme fatales), and there are many moments that just defy disbelief (how are they watching video footage of the helicopter seizing the car of goons? And is dropping cars full of goons into the ocean to drown really a thing?).
YOLT is another of the “Under Two Hours” Bond films that I tend to rank lowly, but of it’s one of those that I don’t think really suffers much for its relatively short running time. All the story is there. I just find the movie more and more uncomfortable to watch as the years go by. (This is also not surprising given that the film was scripted by Roald Dahl, who in addition to being a wonderful writer, was a wildly problematic guy.)
On the plus side, YOLT is quite beautiful to look at! There are a lot of very nice Japanese vistas, and there’s a distinctive early shot where some American and Russian officials are meeting to discuss the alarming events the kick the movie into motion. I particularly love a particular fight scene on the Kobe docks, when Bond is running across the roof of a warehouse, evading goons as he goes. This is actually an aerial shot, which is unique even for this series. There are some painful special effects along the way (artifacts of the time, but still, yeesh–did they have to do rear projection with Connery in a boat? Could they really not get that shot for real?), and for a short movie, the pacing isn’t what damages it. I even like the song, sung by Nancy Sinatra, with its lyrical hook.
16. SPECTRE
Ohhh, poor Spectre. This movie has taken quite a beating since it came out, and not all of it has been undeserved. It really is a wildly convoluted movie, story-wise, and it probably does go too far in trying to suddenly tie the previous three Craig films into a single story entity. Personally, I would have been fine with bringing Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace into the “single narrative” fold, but Skyfall was a bit too much for me, as that movie really stands on its own in a singular way. But other aspects of Spectre that have led most fans to pushing this one farther down than I do? I’m fine with them. Once again, we see how wildly divergent opinions among die-hard Bond fans can be!
So, what of Spectre? Well…I really do like it quite a bit. In fact, writing this I’m wondering if I should bump it up even higher on my rankings…but maybe not. It feels a bit like an attempt to recreate the magic and mood of Skyfall, likely because the same director returned for it (despite his previously having said that he was a “one and done” Bond director). A lot of the mood, the film’s visual look, the framing of shots–a whole lot of Spectre is obviously reflective of Skyfall, which is OK for the most part. And some of what happens in this movie is downright amazing! Of course, the opening tracking shot in Mexico City; and I love the Alps setting and the train through the desert.
Storywise is where things get a bit dicier for Spectre, though again, I like this movie more than most. After Skyfall, the legal quagmire that had dogged the Bond franchise for decades finally got resolved, so at long last, Eon Productions was once again allowed to use Blofeld and SPECTRE. I’ve always wondered if they had a script in progress when this legal gift came in the mail, and rather than wait a movie or two to get back to Bond’s version of Moriarty, they grafted Blofeld and SPECTRE (renamed in the new film to no longer be an acronym) onto their existing story. There’s a feeling of disjoint here between the schemes of Blofeld and those of C (Andrew Scott), the new head of MI6 who is developing a super-duper rights-violating surveillance system. Blofeld is behind all of it, but we don’t really get that much of a sense of it, do we?
And then there’s the whole business of Blofeld being “the author of Bond’s pain”. Most fans seem to take this as meaning Blofeld has been specifically plotting against James Bond for his entire life, inserting himself into every single bad thing that’s ever happened to him, but I don’t take it that way. I think he’s rather run his own life and his own schemes, and when things have happened in such a way that James Bond has been on his radar, he’s acted to screw Bond as hard as he can. That I can see, and that I have no problem with, in all honesty.
People also hate the idea that Blofeld was actually Bond’s foster-brother way back when, and honestly, I don’t hate this, either. Not in this context. There’s a theme running through all of Daniel Craig’s Bond films, distinct from any other actor’s run, of Bond confronting the sins of the past, whether it be Vesper Lynd’s past, M’s past, or, eventually, his own. Throughout these movies Bond is constantly having to deal with the fallout from other peoples’ various bargains with the devil, so I honestly have no problem at all with all of this eventually boiling down to what his parents did, or what happened in his youth.
What does bother me in Spectre is that a lot of this whips past, sometimes in the middle of actual action sequences or very quick conversations, so the film can’t actually set any of this stuff in the context where I think it makes sense. Bond calls Q at one point and says something like, “Look up Franz Oberhauser!” The moment is gone too quickly, so the script doesn’t really give us any reason why Bond is asking about some guy with a German-sounding name. Likewise, the opening Mexico City scene: Great scene, but apparently it was Bond acting on his own. When we find out why he went there to kill that one guy, it turns out that it’s M, the old M, Judi Dench’s M, telling Bond via posthumous video: “Find this guy, kill him, and then attend his funeral.” Why? She doesn’t say. How did she have this information, and what was she doing with it? She doesn’t say. This is what bothers me about Spectre: not the what of what happens, but the fact that an awful lot of it doesn’t seem to rise naturally in story terms. Things happen in this movie because…this is where something happens in this movie.
Take the fight on the train. That’s a hell of a fight! One of the best fight sequences in Bond movie history, if I’m being honest! But…it happens hours after they board, so what was Hinx waiting for? And don’t all those other people on the train notice something like a couple of secret-agent types destroying almost three entire train cars’ worth of stuff? How did Bond win that fight and then get allowed to stay on the train until their stop? That whole sequence is strange…but it’s there because “this is where something happens in this movie.”
Spectre has a nice score by Thomas Newman (following up his work on Skyfall), and while the song–“Writing’s On the Wall” by Sam Smith–seems to be fairly unpopular with fans, I actually quite liked it.
Next time: Numbers 15 through 11! We enter the top half of my ranking! Huzzah!! Taking stock, here’s how many films we have left, by Bond actor:
It’s only natural that with the arrival of a new James Bond movie, the eternal cottage industry of ranking all of the movies up to that point revs up production again. I’ve seen a whole lot of these articles popping up the last month or two, and as I start writing this I’m listening to a podcast that is generating a ranked list of the Bond films via a “draft” like a sports draft. That particular podcast is taking its sweet time: two episodes, each of which is more than four hours long! So we have a group of people taking around three or four entire Bond movies’ worth of time to rank all the Bond movies. This is serious stuff, folks!
Now, every ranking out there is going to feel deeply, deeply wrong to most other Bond fans, so it’s never worth ripping them too much…but there was one that I ran across that I’m not going to link here, but I did link it on Facebook with a “Wow, get a load of how awful this Bond ranking is!” comment, because if there’s one thing Facebook is good for, it’s ranting to a small pre-selected audience about the stuff that you, and only you, care about. But of course in the comments there, someone asked me the very obvious question:
“Well, Kelly, where’s YOUR official ranking of the Bond movies, for comparison?”
And wouldn’t you know it, I had no response. I wrote about all of the Bond movies way back in the early days of Byzantium’s Shores (it was one of the first things I did that got me any traffic), but I don’t recall ever actually generating a full ranking of all the movies. If I did, it was a while ago, and anyway, such rankings are sure to change as new movies arrive and as old ones either rise or fall depending on evolving tastes. So if there IS an old ranking that I did someplace, ignore it. This is the one.
For now.
The thing with James Bond is that he’s been around forever. They’ve been making these movies for nearly sixty years now, and the character predates the movies by a full decade. Bond has shifted with the times, many times over, and in this series of 25 movies (plus one–more on that later), we’ve seen vastly different styles of story, of storytelling, and even of genre, when the stories have not just veered close to the line of science fiction but actually crossed over it. This also explains why the rankings are always so wildly different: That many movies made over that many years are going to hit individual tastes in individual ways.
Nevertheless, my ranking is Right and Correct and will stand for all time. Until I revise it. And if you disagree, well…I’m sure you’ve been wrong before!
So, thus we begin with a full ranking of all of the official James Bond movies, plus the one unofficial film, 1983’s Never Say Never Again. I include this one because its existence is interesting to me. I do not include the 1967 Casino Royale spoof/parody/pastiche film, because I haven’t seen it and I don’t really plan to do so any time soon. This will probably span a number of posts, because this will get long-winded. I mean, we’re THIS far in and I haven’t actually ranked a single movie yet!
Also, some movies will get a longer capsule review in this series than others, because of factors like how I feel about certain films, what time of day I write these posts, and so on.
Before we get going, if anyone wants to know my personal history with James Bond, I wrote about that a bit here. Short version: I first encountered James Bond via Moonraker when it came out in 1979; I was 7 going on 8 and I have been a fan ever since. While I missed For Your Eyes Only in the theaters, starting with Octopussy I have seen every single Bond film since in the original theatrical run. Anyone passingly familiar with opinions I’ve shared online many times over the years won’t find my final destination in this series a surprise; I will basically corner strangers on the street to wax poetic about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But I hope there are a few surprises in getting to that point!
And one more proviso: with exactly one exception, I really do like each James Bond movie ever, on some level. Every one of them is watchable, I’ve seen every one of them multiple times (some of them dozens of times), and I’m likely to watch them all a few times more as the years continue marching by. Movies ranked toward the bottom are movies that I am unlikely to choose when I say “I’m in the mood for a James Bond movie”, or they’re movies I’m as likely as not to skip if I happen across them while clicking the remote. If it sounds like I’m ripping on some particular films, well…
Every Bond movie is almost certainly someone’s favorite, and every Bond movie is someone’s virginal Bond, the one they saw that made them a fan. So if I cast aspersions on your particular First Bond, well…I’m sure you’ll have things to say about mine.
Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) listens to “As Time Goes By”
We watched Casablanca last night, and I remain as entranced by the film as I ever was. This close-up is one of the most affecting parts of the movie. The camera holds Ilsa’s face as she listens to Sam playing “As Time Goes By”, and she’s remembering everything that she knows she’s about to have to confront.
To this day, Casablanca remains that film that would be my favorite of all time, if not for Star Wars.
Last week was the 40th anniversary of the initial theatrical release of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Raiders arrived in the summer that my family uprooted from Hillsboro, OR, for Allegany, NY, all the way across the country. I was still three months shy of turning ten, and this would be my sixth cross-country move in that time. (Fortunately it was the final such move.) Raiders was the big movie that summer, and when it came out I knew nothing about it at all, save for that it starred my favorite actor at the time, Harrison Ford. I also knew from the ads that the creative team behind it was Steven Spielberg, the director of Jaws (which I hadn’t seen) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which I had), and George Lucas, with whom I was quite familiar indeed. Ford’s presence was the bigger factor in my wanting to see Raiders, after the previous summer’s The Empire Strikes Back had left his onscreen fate unresolved, frozen in that block of carbonite.
I’m not sure when in the course of all our moving and unpacking Raiders arrived, but we didn’t see it until we got to our new town. The theater where we saw it, the Palace Theater in downtown Olean, NY, was probably a wonderful place back in the day, but by 1981, it was…very much not. It was a rundown dump, to be honest, and it would close sometime in the next ten years before being finally demolished in 1998 so a cookie-cutter Rite-Aid could be built on the lot. Oh well. The Palace had a giant marquee and an enormous auditorium with a big screen and a balcony, and it must have been something to see years ago. By the time we were there, the chairs were beat up and torn and uncomfortable, the “concessions” consisted of a coin-operated popcorn machine, the sound was lousy, and it was just a terrible place to see a movie. I think that Raiders hadn’t been out that long when we got there, because the theater was mostly empty. The movie got a lot bigger as the summer went on, and it eventually screened at each of Olean’s three (at the time) movie places.
As the lights went down and the movie started, I still had no idea what this thing was about. What was the “Lost Ark”? Was this a movie about looking for Noah’s boat? It opened in…South America? In 1936? Who were these people tromping around a jungle? Why was that one guy going to shoot the leader? Wait—the guy with the leather jacket and the hat just defeated a guy with a gun with a bullwhip? And they’re searching a trap-filled old tomb for some golden statue? Betrayals? Bottomless pits? Guys getting impaled on spikes? Giant boulders?
And then our hero (I guess this is our hero) gets through all that only to have some clean-cut French asshole steal the treasure from him? But he escapes in a waiting seaplane? And he’s afraid of snakes?
What the hell was I watching?!
Just as with Star Wars four years earlier, I had no frame of reference for this movie, but by the time that plane disappeared into the sky, whisking our hero Indiana Jones away (albeit having failed), I was settling in for what was clearly going to be a thrill ride of a movie. Thankfully by this time I had some movie-going under my belt, and I was able to come to Raiders on its own terms. Poor Star Wars, four years before, had been sufficiently alien to me that I didn’t even like it at first and it took my sister’s raging enthusiasm to bring me over to it.
Raiders was the first time I ever heard of the Ark of the Covenant, and the film’s Egyptology content was appealing. There were hissable villains (some open and some skulking about in the shadows), a plucky heroine who apparently could outdrink fat Sherpas, and there was even a cool twist on the treasure map idea: the map wasn’t one you could fold up and carry around with you. It was a scale model and you could only make “X” mark the spot if you had an amulet with a crystal in the middle of it that rested atop a stick of a certain height, so that the morning sun would make a beam that would tell you where the secret vault was located that apparently contained the Ark.
There was also a wonderful device to show our hero’s globetrotting in pursuit of the magical ark, in which footage of his plane is superimposed over a map with a red line showing his progress:
And the action sequences! Fistfights in Nepalese taverns! Chases through the Cairo marketplace! A fight atop and below a cargo plane whose propellers were whirling! And, most spectacularly, a chase through the desert roads of Egypt in which our hero is on a horse and he’s chasing after a Nazi convoy of various vehicles including a big truck.
Raiders of the Lost Ark rocked my world in 1981, just as surely as Star Wars had in 1977, Superman and the animated The Hobbit had in 1978, and Moonraker did in 1979. In terms of the big formative influences on my inner world as a story lover and a storyteller, it’s probably the case that by the time Raiders was out, I only had one more world-rocking encounter in store (which would be the middle-grade Gothic horror novels of John Bellairs). I love stories about quests for ancient artifacts, and mysterious treasure maps and sinister traps laid for those who do the questing. I love that in each Indiana Jones movie, the villain is ultimately undone by his or her own terrible failure to actually understand the nature of the thing of power they are pursuing. And I love when the hero is just plugging along, refusing to give up, and sometimes surviving just by sheer luck and escaping bad situations not through pure brawn or might or fighting skill, but by being observant and instantly sizing up an opportunity to gain just a second or two of advantage.
Next time you watch Raiders, or really any of the Indiana Jones movies, pay attention in the chases or the fight scenes, and you’ll see Indy looking around, processing what’s going on around him, noting other developments in the periphery. You’ll see him about to get skewered by a guy with a sword, so he ducks aside just as the guy starts plunging the sword forward so it’s the bad guy behind Indy who gets run through. Or you’ll see him realize that the airplane’s propeller is about to do his dirty work for him. Or that…well, you get the picture.
Ten years or so ago–probably more, actually–we watched Raiders for the first time with our daughter, and it was a delight watching her reactions as the movie drew her in as it had me. She tensed up in all the right places, including a fun tease-moment when the torture-minded Nazi goon shows up and pulls out a chain-and-rod thing that initially looks like a torture gizmo, but then turns out to just be a hangar for his coat; she laughed at all the right moments, like when a dazzling swordsman is dazzlingly brandishing his deadly cutlass in front of Indy, clearly intending to dazzlingly cut Indy into pieces with the deadly cutlass–until Indy just casually shoots him with his deadly pistol. (One of the two great moments of improvisatory movie magic by Harrison Ford, who suggested just shooting the guy instead of doing the big fight scene that was planned for that spot in the movie, because Ford was suffering from dysentery that day; Ford’s other iconic bit of improv was suggesting “I know” as Han Solo’s response to Leia’s “I love you” in The Empire Strikes Back.)
Is Raiders perfect? Of course not! The logic of the whole basket chase doesn’t hold up (Why would the bad guys have switched the baskets? How would they have planned for that?), and the movie’s climax simply doesn’t quite work, an opinion I’ve always had, though it took me many years to figure out just why. For one thing, how Indy knows not to look on the magic of the Ark comes out of the blue; in the novel there’s a line or two in the scene where the wise man is translating the inscription on the Headpiece, which says something like “The power of the Ark will destroy any who look upon it”. I don’t know is that was in the script and cut, or if it was just an addition by the novelist who thought the film’s ending lacked proper set-up. And in all honesty, there really is something just slightly unsatisfying about watching a movie in which the hero fights, chases, escapes, his way through everything, only to be a passive observer in the climax.
Not one bit of that is remotely damaging to the movie, though. Raiders of the Lost Ark remains a thrilling experience to behold, each time I watch it, and Indiana Jones remains one of the great recurring movie heroes. He was clearly intended to be a kind of James Bond character, having lots of completely different adventures from one unrelated movie to the next, and while I’m glad that Indy never became as ubiquitous as Bond (with a movie ever two years for a long time), I do wish we’d had more than the small number of adventures that we had. We had Raiders and Temple in the first three years, but then it took five years before Last Crusade arrived, and then Indy sat on the back burner for almost two decades before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull showed up, with mixed results. And as I write this, a fifth film (whose title is as yet unrevealed) is in production, now that Harrison Ford is in his late 70s. I’m not sure how I feel about this.
The tone of the serials that Indiana Jones was originally intended to reflect is from a time in storytelling when certain tropes were less cringeworthy than they are seen now. Temple of Doom especially suffers in this regard; it requires a lot of mental calibration to watch it without getting that feeling of “Geez, we really did, and in many ways still do, think that we white Westerners are the civilized beings bringing wisdom to the brown heathen savages of the world, don’t we?” (And as I watched Temple just last night, I’m pretty up-to-the-minute in this realization.) Crystal Skull was partially intended to bring Indy into the realm of Cold War-influenced 50s sci-fi, which was a great idea that wasn’t totally executed well in that movie. Maybe Indiana Jones never should have become a franchise at all. Movie producers in 1939 were perfectly happy to let Errol Flynn be done with Robin Hood, after all. Raiders is an adventure classic; Temple might be as well, with reservations. Last Crusade doesn’t hold up for me as well as its two predecessors, and Crystal Skull is just OK. We’ll see what happens with this fifth movie in a franchise that is somehow going to extend longer than 40 years with the same guy playing the same adventuring character.
Meanwhile, we’ll always have Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like Star Wars four years earlier, Raiders ended up being an enormous temporary influence on pop culture, as Hollywood suddenly figured that the film’s success indicated an unknown appetite in audiences for period adventures. Thus came a bunch of copycat kinds of movies, like two featuring Richard Chamberlain as H. Rider Haggard’s adventurer Allan Quatermain and a forgettable pirate movie called Nate and Hayes. Tom Selleck, who was originally to have played Indiana Jones in Raiders until his teevee contract for Magnum PI forced him to drop out of the project, got a consolation prize in a somewhat sleepy adventure flick about a biplane pilot called High Road to China (and Selleck would eventually get to actually dress up as an Indiana Jones look-alike in a Raiders spoof episode of Magnum). On television, ABC had a show called Tales of the Gold Monkey about a seaplane-flying pilot in the 1930s South Pacific, and CBS had Bring ‘Em Back Alive, a one-season adventure show featuring Bruce Boxleitner as hunter/naturalist Frank Buck in Singapore. Comics got in on the act as well; Marvel had an anthology series called Amazing High Adventure that it sporadically published for a few years in the 80s. Eventually Hollywood seems to have decided that Raiders hadn’t been a wild success because of some deep appetite for period adventure, but because it was simply a great film, made well. Funny how that works. Not even George Lucas’s attempt to bring Indiana Jones to the small screen, in a series called The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, succeeded particularly well. This style of adventure tale wouldn’t really have another big hit until 1998’s The Mummy, which, like Raiders, likely became a big hit by virtue of being a really good adventure movie, well-made. Again, funny how that works.
For me, Raiders of the Lost Ark‘s appeal and influence wasn’t on a specific character or time period in history (though I do confess that for a time in 1981 I said “archaeologist!” when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up–it was nice to have a real-world thing to aspire to be from the current geek obsession movie, since one couldn’t exactly want to be “Starship Captain” or “space smuggler” or “Jedi knight”). It was more a style and approach to adventure storytelling: an attentiveness to pace and to carefully setting up everything that is to come later, and it’s about giving each character a definite motivation for what they’re pursuing. It’s about the idea that hero and villain can want the exact same thing, for completely different reasons, and it’s about a hero who keeps going, who doesn’t give up, and whose intelligence allows them to make it up as they go.
Actor Ned Beatty has died at the age of 83. Beatty had a long and wonderful and varied career, and he played a wide variety of characters. I suppose he’s seen more as a “character actor” than as a lead, but…I don’t know, surely there should be something between a character actor and a proper lead, right? Beatty was always recognizable, but he never seemed the same, if that makes any sense. Every time I saw him in something he managed to create something all new. My first exposure to him was in Superman: The Movie, which remains my favorite superhero movie to this day, even after everything the MCU has done, and he showed up pretty reliably over the years. Even if the movie I was seeing was a total stinker–the Richard Pryor movie The Toy leaps to mind, and it’s mindboggling that a movie that bad could result despite the presence of Pryor, Jackie Gleason, and Ned Beatty–there was always a total professionalism to Beatty’s work.
My favorite of Ned Beatty’s movies is Hear My Song, a comedy from 1991, which is not at all well-known. I take every opportunity that comes along to beat the drum for this movie, because it’s just a warm-hearted joyful romp through the world of beloved Irish tenors, old seaside villages, skeevy concert promoters, and angry tax cops. I wrote about Hear My Song some years ago, and I repost that review below. I’m only sorry to note that I don’t actually single out Mr. Beatty’s performance in the movie for special mention, because the movie wouldn’t work if he wasn’t absolutely fantastic.
Please watch Hear My Song, if you can! It’s available to rent on YouTube (and as I write this, the entire thing is actually available for free via some user I don’t know, but who knows how long it will take the copyright folks to shut that down). You won’t regret it, I promise.
Thanks for the movies, Ned Beatty! You were one of the greats.
Hear My Song (1991)
Years ago, when we’d been dating a year or so, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) rented a movie for us to watch. It was a British comedy that I’d never heard of, called Hear My Song. We both absolutely loved it, and it’s been one of those movies that I’ve wanted to watch again ever since, even though it’s been really hard to locate a copy, to the point where it then became one of those movies of which I have greatly fond memories that maybe I don’t want to revisit, on the off chance that my memories of it are more nostalgic than accurate. Or, to put it another way, I was afraid that maybe this movie had been visited by the Suck Fairy.
Well, Hear My Song is, as of this writing, available for streaming on Netflix, which proved to be a temptation too great. So I watched it, and…absolutely loved it again.
Adrian Dunbar (who co-wrote the movie, and who would later secure semi-immortality in Star Wars lore by playing Senator Bail Organa in The Phantom Menace, only to see his scenes cut entirely from the film and the role recast with Jimmy Smits in the subsequent Prequels) plays Mickey O’Neill, a young man who runs a dinner club and musical revue. The place isn’t making great money (in the first scene, Mickey has to take the stage himself) and he isn’t popular with his landlords, who decide to evict after a scheme to let word of mouth sell tickets for a crappy singer named Franc Cinatra results in bad blood. His next money-making effort is to book Irish tenor Joseph Locke, who is legendary in this town but has lived in Ireland for more than thirty years because he’s wanted for tax evasion.
Locke is the Maguffin of the movie. First, no one is sure if the guy claiming to be Locke is really Locke or not, and second, Locke didn’t just evade taxes as much as he literally ran out of town, avoiding arrest by inches (and by pushing a cop off the boat on which he was fleeing) and running out on the affair he was having with a local beauty queen. This beauty queen turns out, later on, to be Mickey’s girlfriend’s mother, and after she has a late-night tryst with the man claiming to be Joseph Locke, she loudly announces that he is not. Ouch. Mickey loses the theater, his girlfriend, everything…unless he can get to Ireland and bring back the real Joseph Locke.
There’s nothing in this movie that’s really all that surprising at all, at least until the end, when things turn in a way that is reminiscent of endings like The Shawshank Redemption‘s, in that elements that have been in place the entire way suddenly turn out to be relevant in surprising and deeply pleasing ways. I don’t want to spell it out, but this movie has one of my favorite endings, ever.
But an ending can’t work as well as this one does by being clever; it also has to have the emotional heft to it, and this one does. This is a movie about likable people who have, occasionally in their lives, done unlikable things, but in most cases they are trying to atone for them, or recognize their misdeeds when they come back to haunt them. There isn’t a single unflawed character in this film, all the way to Mickey himself, who seems emotionally stunted in some ways, and whose main skill in life seems to be a gift for bullshit. (One of his favorite tricks is to appeal to the older generation, who lived through World War II, by giving a speech that starts off with “I grew up in peacetime.”
With comedies like this, it’s easy to describe them in such a way that makes them sound like serious dramas. Hear My Song is most definitely a comedy; in fact, it ranks high on my personal list of funniest movies I’ve seen. A scene involving a bar full of Irishmen trying to assist one of their brethren with a dental problem is hysterical, and the best gag involves our two drunken heroes and their curiosity as to the depth of a particular well. More than that I must not say.
Hear My Song is, for me, so good that I don’t understand how it’s managed to fall so completely off the radar. It has a wonderfully witty script full of memorable characters, it’s photographed beautifully, the music is fantastic, and the cast is tremendous, led by Dunbar and by Ned Beatty as Joseph Locke (the real one). And if you’ve ever watched Star Wars: A New Hopeand wondered just how good an actor William Hootkins really was (he sadly died a few years back), well, Hear My Songwill give you an answer.
