Everything Bond...James Bond!

[22lcidw]

All of you are familiar with the Bond movies. Who was the best and worst of Bond Actors, Villains, Bond Women, Films, Recurring Character Actors and anything else. For me to start I do not like the last few Bond films as much as preceeding ones. Any washed out color filming brings doom.

 

[Billy_Kinetta]

I have never seen a Bond film that lacked Sean Connery.

Short bursts of others were enough to convince me ... nahhhh.

 

[Canon Shooter]

I'd like to see Connery do a Bond film now.

Pierce Brosnan wasn't bad.

I like Daniel Craig, but his Bond is a much darker character than, say, Connery or Roger Moore...

 

[JackOfNoTrades]

All of you are familiar with the Bond movies. Who was the best and worst of Bond Actors, Villains, Bond Women, Films, Recurring Character Actors and anything else. For me to start I do not like the last few Bond films as much as preceeding ones. Any washed out color filming brings doom.

Best Bond => Tie between Sean Connery and Daniel Craig (they were both relevant and good for their era)
Best Bond Women => Honor Blackman and Michelle Yeoh (who was more of a partner than "girl")
Best Bond Movie => I'll take that by Bond (since that's the only fair way---and yeah George Lazenby had one film..but it was pretty good)
Connery => Goldfinger
Lazenby => On Her Majesty's Secret Service
Moore => The Spy Who Loved Me (although I have to admit, Octopussy is a favorite and he does kick Russian ass in the last 15 minutes)
Dalton => The Living Daylights
Brosnan => Goldeneye
Craig => Skyfall

 

[Bob Blaylock]

Of all the actors who ever played the role, I think that Timothy Dalton was my least favorite, but ironically, License to Kill, was, I think, one of the very best movies.

In his other film, The Living Daylights, I had a very strong impression that he couldn't make up his mind whether he was playing Sean Connery or Roger Moore, and that he kept slipping back and forth between rather poor impressions of both.

In License to Kill, he finally seemed to get it. He wasn't playing Sean Connery. He wasn't playing Roger Moore. He was playing James Bond. I think, perhaps, it helped greatly that in this movie, the story put the James Bond character in a very different situation than in previous movies, so Dalton really couldn't look back to see how his predecessors played such a role, he had to play it his own way. Not the cool, cold professional, just doing his job, but an angry, vengeful, intense James Bond, out for revenge against the drug lord who was responsible for an attack that left his best friend alive, but mutilated, and the friend's new wife brutally murdered. The one thing that I think they could have done to improve on it would have been to better reference On His Majesty's Secret Service, which ends with James Bond (played by George Lazenby, is his only time in the role) himself getting married to Emma Peel, only for her to be murdered a very short time later. That's an emotionally wrenching scene to see, even when you know what's coming, and License to Kill could have gained a lot of emotional impact if it could have tapped into that, shown us James Bond having his greatest old trauma reopened by seeing a similar trauma inflicted upon his best friend. The movie would have been much harder hitting, if we understood it as James Bond, not really fully satisfied with what direct revenge he finally got by dumping Blofeld down a huge chimney, to his death, driven to utterly destroy Franz Sanchez, not just directly as revenge for the murder of his friend's new wife, and the maiming of his friend, but also, by proxy, for the murder of his own wife, many movies ago.


Of all the actors who played the role, I think Pierce Brosnan was the one most suited to it, but alas, his time in the role came when they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with good stories on which to base James Bond movies; having some time ago run out of genuine Ian Fleming stories that were readily adaptable to movies. I was a fan of Brosnan's show, Remington Steele, and disappointed when the end of the show was announced. I was pleased to hear of him having been tapped as the next actor to play James Bond. It made perfect sense to me, as he seemed much more to me like the James Bond I had read about in Ian Flemings' novels, than any of the previous actors did who played that character.

The Daniel Craig series, of course, is a reboot. To me, it seems like a worthwhile series in its own right, but something to be seen as separate from the rest of the James Bond franchise. I have yet to see No Time to Die, of course, but I don't see what point there really can be to it. The four movies from Casino Royale to Spectre seem to me to tell a complete story, covering Jame Bond's entire career as a 00 from earning his 00, to reaching a point where it only makes sense for him to retire and settle down with the woman he finally is in love with. There could have been a lot more movies in the middle, but after Specter, there really doesn't seem to be any good reason to tell any story past it.


And, of course, there are a few other bits and pieces,not quite part of the main franchise.

There was a one-hour made-for-TV show, I think from the 1950s, based on the Casino Royale story. Oddly, in this version, Jimmy Bond was depicted as American, and his friend, Felix Leiter (who had a different name in this version) was British. I found, particularly worthwhile, that this show contained a basic primer on the variation of Baccarat that James Bond is fond of playing. In most of the movies, this is depicted as his favorite casino game, and after having seen this, the sequences in other movies where he is playing this game make more sense to me, now.

Then, there the nineteen-sixty-something Casino Royale, which is really a very bad spoof of the James Bond franchise. Imagine David Niven, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen as James Bond. Yes, all three of them. It's a terrible mess of a movie. The actual Casino Royale plot is just a few minutes in it, surrounded by a huge haystack of incoherent material that doesn't seem to form any meaningful plot. I understand that somewhere during the making of this movie, Peter Sellers got pissed off and quit, well before all his scenes had been filmed, and that some of the broken plot is a result of trying to work around his absence; though really, from what came out in the finished product, it's difficult too imagine what he could have further contributed to make it any less of an incoherent mess than it was.

And finally, there's Never Say Never Again. Some other bunch managed to obtain the rights to Thunderball, dusted it off, modernized it, and made a movie of their own. They even got Sean Connery, retired from the main franchise, to come back to play an older James Bond, coming back from retirement.

 

[Rambunctious]

Connery was my favorite but I also liked Pierce Brosnan.....honorable mention for the funniest Bond goes to Rodger Moore.....

 

[22lcidw]

Dr. No was made for about a million dollars. It needed extra money for the ending. If you watch it you will see longer stretches of time in one segment or another. Supposedly the underwater fish in the Doctor's lair were goldfish. That movie was successful and launched the rest of the series.