Monday Bond

I stumbled across a mini-James Bond marathon on the
USA Network (Monday, July 13^th) consisting of On Her
Majesty’s Secret Service, Diamonds are Forever , You
Only Live Twice and For Your Eyes Only. I assume these
movies were bundled together because they comprise the
quartet of Bond movies featuring 007’s arch enemy Ernst
Stavro Blofeld (Blofeld also appears in Never Say Never
Again, a jackleg remake of Thunderball, but NSNA is not
officially a part of the James Bond canon).

USA showed the movies in the order I have listed above,
but I wish they had been shown in the order they were
made. Although Blofeld makes his first appearance in From
Russia With Love, only his hands and the back of his head
is shown. Thunderball marks his second appearance, but
we only see his hands stroking his trademark white Persian
cat. You Only Live Twice (1967) marks the first occasion
we get to see Blofeld’s face and we are party to virtual Blofeld/
Bond passion play in this and the two movies that follow it.
Bond thwarts Blofeld’s best chance for world domination in
YOLT; Blofeld gains a measure of revenge by killing Bond’s
wife in OHMSS; and Bond exacts vengeance by killing Blofeld
not once, not twice but four times in Diamonds Are Forever
(1971). Then, because Bond didn’t get it right in DAF despite
drowning Blofeld in a tub of mud, tossing him in a vat of acid,
shooting him in the head and blowing him up on an oil rig –
he has to dispatch the feline-loving fiend one last time during
the opening credits of For Your Eyes Only.

The Blofeld angle is fine but I have a different relationship to
three of the four movies shown. On Her Majesty’s Secret
Service (1969) was the first Bond movie I ever saw. Now,
when the first movie you see of any franchise is the “runt”
of the litter, it tends to skew your perspective. I have a good
friend who still claims Godfather 3 is the best of the God-
father movies. Now, maybe I’m the one who has been riding
the bloody crazy train but choosing Godfather 3 as the best
Godfather movie is like choosing Larry as the funniest of the
Three Stooges. I mean, sure Larry was amusing with his
Bozo the Clown hair and his perpetual hangdog demeanor
(like he had actually read the terrible contracts the Stooges
signed with Columbia), but funnier than Moe and Curly? I
don’t think so. But I understand where my friend was coming
from.

George Lazenby was my first Bond and I have a lingering
affection for his performance. I was thirteen years old when
I saw OHNSS. A sheltered child who had lived in a sheltered
world, my eyes got big watching OHNSS. I still remember
the quip Lazenby made when a henchman on skis got churned
up by a huge snow blower: “He sure had a lot of guts.” Man,
does it get better than that?

I suddenly had a huge Bond jones but this was 1969, before
both VHS tapes and DVDs, so I went straight to the Ian Fleming
novels, which I read one after another, in sequence. I first saw
the pre- OHNSS movies on network television before subse-
quently viewing them on tape and early pay television. I
discovered Sean Connery’s performance in Dr. No (the first,
and, IMHO, still the best Bond film) and demoted Lazenby
accordingly.

You Only Live Twice is, hands down, my favorite Bond
movie (You Only Live Twice is also my favorite Bond novel).
As an unrepentant Nipponophile, I love the score, I love the
locales, I love the paper walls, I love the fashions, I love the
bowing, I love the taking off of shoes, I love the women and
I love the action set pieces. Also, as written by Roald Dahl,
YOLT has a breezy urbane sophistication that many of the
Bond movies strive for but few obtain. With current viewing it
is easy to find YOLT highly misogynic but, in the context of a
Bond film, I found it quaint and sweet. Everything about YOLT,
from the opening “murder” in HongKong to the Ninja invasion
at the movie’s end, is just pitch perfect.

On previous viewings I had seen little to recommend Diamonds
Are Forever besides the great Shirley Bassey rendition of the
title song, but on Monday I saw the movie with new eyes. With
DAF you can already see the Bond franchise taking on the 70’s
bloat of the Roger Moore era, with pointless stunts and lots of
product placement.

DAF was my first opportunity to see the original Bond in action
as Sean Connery returns to save the franchise from the brutal
backlash after OHMSS. I was less than impressed. Although
he was only 41 years-old at the time (Moore is 46 when he begins
the role), he is already looking a little long in the tooth. Still, DAF
has lots of grace notes. For one thing, the merry henchmen, Mr.
Kidd and Mr. Windt, as portrayed by character actor Bruce
Glover (father of Crispin) and jazz bassist Putter Smith, are as
droll as they are vicious. Further, I was probably too young to
appreciate Jill St. John’s grown woman performance as jewel
thief Tiffany Case when I first saw it but, dayum!, I sho nuff
get it now.

Last but not least, however, is seeing DAF, in the reflection of
Mike Meyers’ Austin Powers movies. When Bond shoots the
wrong Blofeld doppelganger in the head, the real Blofeld, who
has a gun in his hand, does not take the opportunity to shoot
Bond dead but instead orders him into an elevator where he
is gassed unconscious then placed into the drunk of a car by
the erstwhile Mr. Kidd and Mr. Windt before being driven out
to an oil field where his body is dumped inside a length of pipe-
line that is then buried underground the next morning where
Bond wakes up to find himself about to be run over by a
mechanical pipe cleaner. I found myself channeling Seth
Green’s Scott Evil and shouting an exasperated “Just shoot
him!” at the television screen.

But then again, perhaps I just don’t get it.