The Bond Movies

OK, they are mostly quite bad. But they were helpful to a sick, sad kid, once. Me.

Just some weird-ola CD my library had. Image from Jamaica Recording Studio via discogs.com. Fair use.

The Entire Dang Bond Franchise (1956/1962-????). Grade: Eh

To help with the grading here, how about a handy chart!

Green is for the flags of Welsh and Irish Bond actors in the mix! Light blue’s kinda-sorta for alternate Australian flags. And red/blue is for the other Bonds, who were all Czech.

So why even post an overview/review of these mostly bad movies? Because they meant a lot to me as a kid. In the same way cheesy sci-fi movies and TV shows did; just pure escapism. I didn’t consider plot logic a whole lot as a kid!

I had frequent asthma attacks when I was little. They mysteriously diasappeared once my Dad started to spend more time in mental hospitals or practically immobile in bed; he didn’t like us kids much and was a pretty mean guy when he wasn’t incapacitated.

One series of really bad attacks happened in fourth or fifth grade. My Mom, who probably got where the asthma came from, picked up a couple of Bond films from the library. On video disc! A cover looked like this:

From the bay of E, here’s the link, fair use.

Inside that hard-plastic cover was a vinyl disc that stored both picture and sound. You put the cover in the player, and the player removed the disc for you, playing it wih a physical needle like the kind record players use. They were cheaper than VCRs, and we were kinda poor. Plus, whatever failing business my dad was invested in at the time sold those machines.

I didn’t have to think about that stuff, watching these. I was into the escapism. It wasn’t our home.

I was immediately fascinated by From Russia With Love, although the opening scene confused me — that guy on the cover gets killed! Oh, but then he’s not, it’s a mask that looks like him. (Which Mission Impossible movies would steal later, and Bond films steal Mission Impossible plots right back.)

What I loved most was the adventure and the world-hopping. For a sickly kid, the idea of being able to go anywhere was very awesome; and Bond, while he isn’t as strong as the biggest of the baddies, always defeats them. The sexy ladies? Well, what do you think I thought of those at age 11? The same thing I thought of them in Bogart movies. Enough with the kissing, more trains and shootouts, please!

I think I watched all the movies up to Diamonds are Forever (skipping the George Lazenby one because who the heck was that guy?). But around that time, which was sixth grade, was about when Dad moved from “everyone dress nice for church on Sunday” to hardcore fundamentalism. (And the number of failed business ventures he’d had, and the mental illness he suffered, probably contributed to this extremism.)

So Dad insisted that the Bond movies (which he’d seen and enjoyed with Mom when they were in theaters) were deeply sinful. All that sexy lady stuff. I even remember Mom arguing with him over this; “he’s 12, he doesn’t care about the girls, he likes the gadgets!” And having a mediation with my parents and my sixth-grade school counselor, which didn’t resolve anything. I was starting, in a timid, tepid way, to stick up for myself a little. I didn’t win, but I was determined not to give up. Later, that fight would extend to a whole lot more movies; basically, anything that didn’t have Patriotism or God as the subject was worldy and sinful.

Mom became my semi-secret ally in this, all through junior high and high school. By then, Dad had a job with the Post Office, working second shift. He’d get home at 12:20 AM, almost on the nose. He’d pull up on that Ford’s emergency brake, and we’d hear it, and quickly turn off whatever naughty thing we were watching on TV, so I could run for bed. The few times we got caught, we’d explain it away by saying we were looking for a weather report or something.

The naughty stuff we watched? Johnny Carson. Star Trek. Sometimes Nightline wih Ted Koppel. Yup, center-right Koppel was too much of a godless liberal for Dad.

And the Bond movies, whenever those were on. I made it a mission to see all of them. One lucky resource was a lady I’d fish-sit for whenever she was out of town. (Fish-sit means sprinkling fish food once a day, a pre-teen can handle this task.) She’d nicely let me hang out at her place as much as I wanted when fish-sitting; and she had the holy of holies, pay cable channels. So I sometimes got to see Bond movies. And odder things, too! That lady introduced me to Phantom of the Paradise, which I certainly didn’t get but found very exciting. And Brazil, which I got a little better (I was a little older by then).

I remember one day going to school and finding a huge ad Mom had clipped out of the newspaper in my Pee-Chee folder; it was the ad for A View to a Kill. I couldn’t go see it at the theater, of course, but just seeing the ad made me dream for weeks about what wonders that movie must have had. Um… not many! But that’s me as a grownup speaking. The song is pretty good.

Oh, and speaking of songs…

Before Dad banned the Bonds, I’d saved up my bottle refund money ($.05 a can, $.10 a bottle, and dumpster-diving source of Oregon kid cash in the 1980s). I bought a Bond theme music album. Here it is in full 1982 glory:

EMI/Capitol Records, again via discogs.com. Fair use.

Note the generic Sean Lazenmoore face! And note the picture selection — two girls, three explosions, six chase scenes. I considered this a very correct ratio.

Naturally, I loved that cool theme music, which kinda reminded me of “Sixteen Tons” — spooky and ominous-sounding. (That’s the arrangement by John Barry; most of the other Monty Norman-penned stuff for Dr. No did nothing for me.) Actually, I loved all the Barry stuff, and still do! Maybe it’s kinda silly to have very honky orchestra strings in Zulu or Out of Africa, but I don’t mind. I was really confused by how all over the place McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” was, and still kind of think it’s all over the place, in a fun way. And didn’t care for the Marvin Hamlisch instrumental track, although “Nobody Does It Better” is probably my favorite Bond song today. (Thank you, Carly Simon and Carole Bayer Sager… and apologies to the super-talented Shirley Bassey and those excellent Herb Alpert/Tijuana Brass horns on Casino Royale.)

Thom Yorke of Radiohead once said that “Nobody” was “the sexiest song ever written,” and apparently Radiohead would cover this a lot in concert. Which is odd, because while Radiohead has many wonderful talents, “sexy” is not one I generally think of. And their version kinda sounds like the whiny voice from “Creep” all over again.

Ah, yes, sexy Bond songs. Would you like to know which one I did for my sixth grade talent show? Tom Jones’s “Thunderball.” Did my 12-year-old voice crack horribly during the last high note? It sure did! Which got the entire school gymnasium absolutely howling with laughter. What humiliation! Although it probably was pretty funny. And my poor kid brother did “From Russia With Love”! He might not ever forgive me for that one.

Getting back to Casino Royale… that’s why I put the starting dates for Bond films as 1956 up top. Because there was a 1956 television version of that book. Broadcast in color, rare for 1956, surviving in B&W today. With the great Peter Lorre as the baddie. You can watch it on YouTube, if you’re a completist about such things. It’s not bad. It’s arguably less ridiculous than the Jason Bourne-style fight scenes in the 2006 version. (Although that version has one great scene, where some rich doofus assumes Bond’s the valet, so Bond just steals the car and smashes it. My kid self would approve.)

And there’s a 1967 version of Casino Royale, which had about 100 writers and directors attached to it (including Howard Hawks and Leigh Brackett at one point!), and it ended up a convoluted mess of a comedy/parody of Bond films. You can’t really parody a thing that’s already parodying itself, and by that point the Bond films had embraced the ridiculous pretty hard. Lorenzo Semple (of Batman and Flash Gordon campiness) was approached to write a draft, and refused because the Bond character was just too ridiculous. He’d later write Never Say Never Again, which was the second version of Thunderball, because of a complicated lawsuit situation involving money and authorship credit.

Ah, yes again — the authors. You can look up as much as you like about Ian Fleming, but he strikes me as being a pretty boring guy who wrote trash books for money and liked all the class snobbery stuff an Englishman living in Jamaica would like. And at least he knew they were trash books. He claimed to never have rewritten one word of ‘em; just plow straight through and churn another hackwork out.

Which seems to have been the attitude of most Bond screenwriters, too. Tom Manckiewicz — son of All About Eve director Joe, nephew of Citizen Kane writer Herman, cousin of political strategist Frank — wrote a few of the movies. He said in 1984: “When things are going well, you can get lazy with the best of intentions … If you can make a very good living writing James Bond and God knows there's nothing wrong with it, people love the pictures and the money is good – then when somebody asks if you want to do another one, the easy thing to do is to take it. When I started out, I sort of thought of myself as an enormously sensitive young writer who wanted to do these deeply personal films. I don't know how many years ago that was. But I still intend to be.”

He never, really, was. But he died richer than me. That’s nice for his heirs! I’d gladly write crap for money for my family if anybody paid me to. Which they won’t.

Richard Maibaum wrote or co-wrote 13 of these things. (And previously wrote a 1958 war movie titled No Time To Die — coincidentally, the title of the most recent Bond movie, which I disliked, and David Mitchell did, too.) Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have written seven of them, and at least five are terrible. Roald Dahl, that weirdo, wrote You Only Live Twice the way Shane Black used to write action screenplays; just to see how much of the studio’s money you can get away with spending on dumb junk.

And, Lord, are the Bond movies, very much, mostly dumb junk. I don’t know that any of them is really good at all, as a film. Pretentious hack director Sam Mendes has a decent eye, and made some of Skyfall look cool — or, really, Roger Deakins did. The earliest Bond films directed by Guy Hamilton and Terence Young move along at a decent pace. Ken Adam, who designed the famous Dr. Strangelove War Room set, did similarly impressive-looking Evil Lairs up through Moonraker. Maurice Binder’s credits are dumb fun, and show a lot of skin for their time/PG ratings. Often, the stunt work is spectacular, although you wonder how many Swiss ski bums were mangled in the chase scenes for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And Barry’s scores are still great, bringing those stirring strings to Afghanistan, as well!

And there’s been the actors, who are often a hoot. Most of the ones playing Bond have had some acting chops; Lazenby kinda didn’t, but had a wry, almost wise perspective on his whole Bond experience in the fine 2017 documentary Becoming Bond. Pierce Brosnan had the worst luck in terms of timing and awful scripts… but he was great playing a nasty anti-Bond in The Tailor of Panama. There’s been a bunch of fun baddies, and ladies mostly chosen for being easy on the eyes — and Ringo Starr, the “ugly Beatle,” happily married one of them!

Really, though, this franchise should have died decades ago. Not because of the outdated sexism, or the ridiculous notion that England still has a glorious empire (or that empires are glorious things to have in the first place). They should have died because the formula is so tired. All that adventure and world-hopping which thrilled me as a kid was almost strictly rote and repetitive pretty early on in the series. Without these signature traits, you might as well not make a Bond movie; and with them, almost every concievable variation has already been tried. (Bond in space, Bond in invisible car, Bond getting S&M whipped in the nuts, etc…..)

Will they go on? Probably. It’s what Hollywood calls “intellectual property,” now — a familiar label everyone knows. Just recently it was announced that longtime producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson have farmed out the film rights to Bezos Prime (so, a baldheaded supervillian can finance sequels featuring baldheaded supervillians). No doubt, like their ridiculous Lord of the Rings prequels, the studio will just repeat this formula until everyone’s completely sick of it. The few who aren’t already sick of it.

But, once upon a time, 40 years ago, the Bond movies were a shared little treasure between a worried, caring mom and her nervous, timid son. I’ll always remember the happiness of finding that View to a Kill ad in my school folder. And probably the embarassment of butchering “Thunderball,” too — that’s the curse and blessing of memory!

Oh, and if you must know — that ska album I have a picture of up top is pretty fun! In the way old ska tunes are usually fun. If I had to pick one tune? I think I’d go with the Goldfinger one by Lee Perry and the Wailers (yup, those Wailers). Because you can’t do a longish Bond post without reference to at least one ridiculous Ian Fleming character name: