The Best Bond Movie: The Others

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But the Fleming novels were almost never about the gadgets.

Quatermass wrote:

That's true, but maybe I forgot to mention that I don't actually like the novels. Neither (I think) do the majority of the movie-going "teeenie" public.

If the novels were what the public wanted, then surely somewhere in the first 19 or so movies, they'd have successfully copied the formula.

IMHO, Casino Royale's look and feel wasn't driven as much by a desire to return to the books roots as a desire to emulate the success of the recent Jason Bourne films.

Look at From Russia With Love, OHMSS, The Living Daylights, For Your Eyes Only, Licence to Kill. Those are the more Fleming-esque movies.

I've only recently (last 8 years or so) gained an appreciation for "From Russia With Love". It's interesting, but by no means a favourite.

No matter what I do, I can't seem to really enjoy OHMSS.

I never liked The Living Daylights - I felt that it was a really weak start to Timothy Dalton's era and is probably the reason he didn't take off.

I'm not a big fan of For your Eyes only but it's ok... a little different and in some places boring - same goes for Octopussy.

I do really like License to Kill though.

My top 5 Favorites are;

1. Goldeneye
2. The Spy who Loved Me
3. The World is not Enough
4. Thunderball
5. The Man with the Golden Gun

Hmph. My top 5 are:

1. Casino Royale (2006)

2. Tomorrow Never Dies

3. Goldfinger

4. Licence to Kill

5. For Your Eyes Only

With You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die, GoldenEye, The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day being next in line in no particular order.

While I loved the Bourne movies it doesn't hold a candle to James Bond.

And my previous comments probably shed a bad light on what I think about the James Bond Movies. I quite like them all. Sure each one had stuff that could have been better, or a script that could have been done in a slightly different way for greater effect. What it is about Bond is the persona.

Aristotle's age old characterisation of art is the idealisation of life.

Whether it be with gadgets James Bond always fought for King and Country (or Queen and Country). For truth and justice. And always ended up with the girl. With some notable exceptions but the premise was always there. It told you that if you train hard enough, you can outwit even the most fiendish villains and end up with a beautiful woman.

That is what James Bond is. I admit I have not read the books. But James Bond is the only movie franchise to repeatedly and consistently deliver that formula to the movie going public. Of course it missed a couple of points here and there, but it is the underlying theme that comes through the entire series.

James Bond is the idealised version of Jason Bourne. Bourne just kicks arse. While he survived, he never truly won. He still lost his love and his identity and for all his heroics he ends up largely anonymous and unknown. So while Jason Bourne might have better fight sequences, he'll always be a pale second compared to the romantic aura cast my Bond.

Anyway....


The Living Daylights takes its title, and a sequence, from a short story by Ian Fleming, where Bond must prevent an assassin from killing a defector. However, the script is almost otherwise completely original. The "Smiert Shpionam" organisation was Ian Fleming's main villains in the Bond novels until SPECTRE came along, although officially, SMERSH was disbanded after WWII.

anyways...

Kudos to you quatermass... I am thoroughly enjoying all this information. Don't think i've seen any trivia about my favourite bond film yet... but I'm sure to be waiting

Casino Royale {2006}

Marc Forster {The Kite Runner, Stranger than Fiction} will direct the next Bond movie.
Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis will return as the screenwriters.
Because of the writer's strike, production will begin after the New Year at
Pinewood Studios in London with a $100 million budget projected.

i was never a bond fan, i always felt the films were cheesy and corny, not so much the connery films though, heh.

i went to see casino royale because it was getting very good reviews and there was nothing else to see that weekend, still i had no expectations. i was blown away by it to say the least.

Licence to Kill was originally called Licence Revoked, but was changed supposedly because the American audience would not know what 'revoked' meant.

The scene where Felix Leiter is fed to a shark and comes out of it alive, if mutilated, is a direct lift from the novel Live and Let Die, as well as using the sealife within a warehouse as a means to smuggle contraband.

Milton Krest's demise is one of the bloodiest in the Bond films, and is usually edited for most releases.

The film-makers acknowledge the fact that the film has elements of Yojimbo.

This film marks one of the first roles for Benicio del Toro, now a noted director, and having noted roles in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Sin City as the ill-fated dirty cop 'Jackie Boy'.

Casino Royale is not the first adaptation of that Bond novel. A TV movie was made in the '50's, Americanising it, and a spoof version starring David Niven (ironically, Fleming's first choice for Bond) was made in the '60's.

Surprisingly, many elements from the novel made it in, although many details and setpieces were changed. In the novel, Le Chiffre and Bond play baccarat, or rather chemin de fer. Leiter is introduced to Bond earlier. Vesper Lynd is the secretary of the Station of MI6 relating to the USSR, and Le Chiffre is one of the foreign treasurers for the USSR. His name is given a background, as he was found in a concentration camp (although whether he was maybe a collaborator or a prisoner was never established), and had only a number on a passport. So his aliases became variations on 'number' or 'cipher'.

Le Chiffre is financing the left-wing unions in France, but invested the money in a chain of brothels and porno theaters, only to have the French Government enact 'la Loi Marthe Richard', which effectively closes him down and loses his money.

The main villains are the Russian counteritelligence group SMERSH (Smiert Shpionam, or 'death to spies'), here portrayed as a death-squad against Russian enemies. IRL, SMERSH had been absorbed into various intelligence agencies after WWII, and was all but disbanded not long after Fleming wrote this. In the movie, SMERSH is replaced by an unnamed terrorist organisation, which has been rumoured to be a new version of SPECTRE.

In the book, instead of being poisoned by digitalis, Bond is threatened by one of Le Chiffre's cronies with a gun concealed in a walking stick. The beating Le Chiffre gives to Bond is with a bamboo carpet beater (basically an oversized flyswat), and is in a villa. Finally, in the novel, Vesper kills herself with an overdose of pills after spotting an assassing with an eyepatch, Gettler.

OK, I will let this run overnight (my time, so for the next 10 hours or so from this post) and then lock the threads. A final thread will be posted with a final poll.

This poll is a toughie for me. I think Dalton's portrayal of Bond in The Living Daylights was the closest we've seen so far to the Bond of Fleming's books. I'm thinking of the scene when his mate Saunders gets killed by the glass door. Bond chases the assassin through the fair and ambushes him with his gun drawn, only to find he's aiming at a little kid. It was that look of rage and frustration on his face, you can practically see his finger tightening on the trigger anyway. *That* was the Bond of the books.

But Daniel Craig... I thoroughly expected to hate him in the role and Casino Royale as a film, but both blew me away. This is a reinvention of the franchise, like the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Bond 2.0, I'm almost reluctant to classify it as a traditional Bond movie.

OHMSS was a very brave movie and I admire it tremendously, I just don't like it overly much.

License to Kill; what the hell happened there ? You could rename the characters, James Bond becomes Sonny Crockett and Leiter becomes Tubbs, and you've got yourself a feature length episode of Miami Vice scene for scene. Bah! My least favourite "Bond" movie ever.