BlogalongaBond- YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE Review

This is at least as funny as looks.

After the soggy escapades of Thunderball, this fifth outing for James Bond goes back to basics. This would be a good thing, if it weren't for the fact that it goes back to basics by lifting plot points out of From Russia With Love wholesale. And so You Only Live Twice is where the Connery era finally slumps into an unyielding formula.

As in From Russia With Love, we open with the sight of Bond being assassinated. Once again, he's not really dead, but this time, it's in order to restore Bond's effectiveness as a secret agent by faking his death and convincing his enemies that he's no longer a threat. This allows him to operate with the Japanese secret service as they investigate the inflammatory actions of SPECTRE that has led to a diplomatic crisis between America and Russia.

More than most of the James Bond films I've watched so far, You Only Live Twice is a film that is entirely of its time. It's infused with both the technological optimism of the 1960s, and the general anxiety that came out of the Cuban missile crisis. The film presents a battle bolstered by the progress of technology, and simultaneously made into a political minefield as SPECTRE makes efforts to escalate the space race into an outright conflict.

Without vivid memories of the subsequent instalments, I'm also going to guess that this is the last time the filmmakers could really get away with representing Great Britain as a superpower in the way they do this time around. With no signs of the nation's post-war decline in sight, the United Kingdom is portrayed as the rational mediator in a petulant feud between America and Russia, America being more prepared to push the button and go for all-out war than the UK was in From Russia With Love.

Also privileged on the political side of things is Japan, in which the film's interest is more than enough to match Thunderball's fervour for all things aquatic. It's Japanese intelligence agents who are Bond's main allies, but unknowingly, a rogue Japanese element serve as SPECTRE's clients, engineering the war between the rival superpowers for reasons that are only inferred. Largely though, it's more of a fascination with Japan's heritage and culture that plays out in the gorgeous aerial establishing shots and loving cinematography.

There's a less savoury part of privileging the rationality of the UK over Japan's division of loyalties within the narrative, and it naturally involves some cringeworthy and outdated racial attitudes. Bond's very first line in the film has him muse over why Chinese girls taste different to all other girls. What a charmer, eh? Although the quintessentially British 007 appears to take on the best part of Japanese values later on in the film, the best part as portrayed here is the men's values. But then all the women are under-developed in this one, even by the standards of the series so far.

That's quite enough political analysis for this review- it's a James Bond film, fer cryin' out loud. That does mean that there is nothing uniquely Roald Dahl in the Roald Dahl-penned screenplay, with the producers preaching the tried-and-tested formula as a guideline. Dahl had already written a Bond villain by that point, in the guise of Willy Wonka. In the elaborate death trap stakes, "accidentally" disposing of unspeakably bratty children on a tour of an eccentrically designed chocolate factory is second only to Blofeld's collapsing bridge over a pool of ravenous piranha.

Speaking of whom, You Only Live Twice is arguably best remembered for the moment in which the face of SPECTRE's Number One is finally revealed. Granted, it's Donald Pleasence's only outing in the role of Bond's arch-nemesis, who then regenerated in every single film thereafter, and he's only in it for about ten minutes overall. And for those ten minutes, there's no real banter between him and Connery- Bond just seems bored. Still, it's worth it for the stunning hero shot Pleasence gets as ninjas bust through the roof of his headquarters to wreck his shit. It's an expression that subtly screams "Ninjas. Damn!", which was nice, given how that was approximately how I reacted too.

The silliness of the Ninjacademy, which Bond attends for about a week before emerging as an apparently valmorphanised Japanese ninja, is just par for the course in this series by now. The film feels surprisingly padded out, with the entire turning Japanese sequence being eminently cuttable. This is mostly because it's stressed that ninjas are masters of stealth and subterfuge, and that's why Bond needs to learn their ways too. At right about the time we cut to Pleasence's great reaction shot, Bond and the ninja army have crashed into the complex with all the stealth of a drunk coming home from a night out.

You Only Live Twice is better than Thunderball, by the virtue of being more interesting and having some truly outstanding action sequences. But across the first five films alone, the basis for every joke in the Austin Powers series has already been entirely laid out. No matter how repetitive you think Mike Myers got by the time of Goldmember, the series was already repeating bits from its second film at this early point. It has an appreciable affection for all things Japanese and an inherently whistle-able title tune, but at this stage in the 007 marathon, I think some kind of change is needed...

#5- A valmorphanised "Japanese" Sean Connery looks awfully like a Vulcan Sean Connery. Live long and proshper!

For a full list of everyone's work on BlogalongaBond so far, click here.

The Mad Prophet Will Return, With On Her Majesty's Secret Service... in June.

BlogalongaBond- THUNDERBALL Review

Objects may be less exciting than they appear in image...

As penance for being all contrarian about the larger-than-life elements of Goldfinger last month, I was fixed up with Thunderball, which is so down to Earth that it's underwater. A lot. And not a lot of it is hugely interesting. That's right, folks- my crusade through BlogalongaBond has hit its first bum note.

SPECTRE return after an absence of one film, and they hijack a couple of atomic bombs and hold the UK and the USA to ransom, threatening to annihilate one of their cities each, unless the governments pay up within a week. MI6 dispatch all of their 00 agents around the globe in search of the stolen nukes, and typically, James Bond ends up in Nassau, rather than his originally assigned destination in Canada.

It's only in researching Thunderball after viewing that I noticed the first four Bond films were released annually between 1962 and 1965, but it's only in Thunderball that the strain begins to show. This adaptation was intended to be the first Bond outing back when Eon Productions got to work on the character, but they decided to hold it back for budgetary reasons. And then when it was released, it was delayed three months from September to December 1965, because it would otherwise be impossible to edit the film to an acceptable standard. I'd argue that the delay didn't help.

The single biggest annoyance in the film is the editing. It's no surprise to me that this was editor Ernest Hosler's only Bond film, because he made a total pig's ear of it. First off, about 90% of all the transitions are wipes. Wipes here, wipes there, wipes up and down, and even splitting up a scene at one point. You know when you try to wipe something up and it just spreads it around? That's all Hosler's wipes do, as the film reaches out beyond the two hour mark.

And the added length is especially annoying given how all of the scenes seem to be cut within an inch of their usefulness to the narrative. It doesn't quicken the pace, it just makes it look sloppy, and the slop is then wiped around. By a fucking wipe. Terence Young, who also worked on the first two Bonds, seems just as worn out as everything else about the film- the brutality and effectiveness of Bond vs. Grant in From Russia With Love now seems like a distant memory compared to the cartoonish Benny Hill-style speeding-up.

On a more positive note, I found it interesting to see the character of Fiona Volpe directly call out 007 on his routine seduction of women towards the side of right and virtue, which was so questionable with Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. She marks herself as a more driven Bond girl than most, and of course, she's the first redhead. This meant I liked her a lot, until I remembered that her single-mindedness, coupled with the fact she has tits, made her destined to be a human shield for everybody's favourite philandering bastard. Then he turns Domino, the villain's mistress, onto the side of right and virtue instead.

I've been quite harsh to Bond himself in the last couple of months, but I'm finding it difficult to get into the swing of identifying with him. Sean Connery continues to ooze charisma in the role, which makes it easier. As does the fact that the villain is shite in this one. Emilio "Number Two" Largo's plan all seems so elementary for SPECTRE- the obscured Blofeld's endorsement of the plan in the beginning seems almost like a parent sticking their kid's dribbly watercolour daubings up on the fridge. And by comparison to the histrionics of Auric Goldfinger, he just looks like a eye-patched twazzock, which he kind of is.

I can at least dish out a bit more praise on a technical level. They've got the ability to film underwater in this one, and golly, do they let you know about it. I didn't find the then-groundbreaking underwater fight scene at the end particularly exciting, but then let's never undervalue the great music of John Barry. There are a couple of repeated cues here and there, but the music enlivens the climax considerably. Just try and keep track of where Bond actually is, in between close-ups of a scuba-diving Connery looking urgent.

Thunderball is largely bilge- rushed through production with terrible editing to prove it, taking far too large a portion of its running time to get going and ultimately failing to excite. The production design looks good, but it's not exciting. The plot follows the same steps as previous outings, but it's not exciting. Hell, it begins and ends with the most outrageously brilliant bits of hyper-real gadgetry that you can imagine, but I never, ever found it exciting. Here's hoping the series will soon find a more palatable balance between over-the-top and... well, this.

#4- Death by spine-stretching table would be the most humiliating fate imaginable. Not only would you die in a spa, but images of your final moments would make for a great GIF-based LOL.

For a full list of everyone's work on BlogalongaBond so far, click here.

The Mad Prophet Will Return, With You Only Live Twice... in May.

BlogalongaBond- GOLDFINGER Review

In many ways, this is the biggie. The really, properly iconic film of the Bond series, which has garnered the most intertextual hat-tippings in popular culture and marks a pivotal turning point for the entire franchise. It's a move away from the political intrigue and relatively grounded approach of the previous films, and it's called Goldfinger.

Auric Goldfinger is an unscrupulous gold magnate obsessed with both the precious metal for which he's named, and winning in his every pursuit. Somehow, he has difficulty with killing James Bond, the most obstinate obstacle to his success, when our hero is assigned to observe him and eventually, to stop his audacious plans for Fort Knox, the home of the largest US gold supply in the world.

I've already declared that during BlogalongaBond, I'm coming to most of these films pretty much fresh. The major exception, of the films released before 2000 anyway, is this one. Because this is such a seminal Bond film, so famous for its fixing of the series' tropes, it's the one that I've seen more than any of the other 21 films to date. The familiarity of it all makes it quite jarring after the recent double bill of Dr. No and From Russia With Love.

You can't watch more than five minutes of Goldfinger without hitting a famous first for the series. Gert Fröbe's performance in the title role, dubbed by Michael Collins, gives us the first full-on supervillain of the series. Goldfinger has absolutely nothing to do with SPECTRE, which increases the distance between this and the first two films, and he's a villain who is arguably more interesting than Bond. What makes him super is the definition of supervillain as we have it in The Incredibles- he just won't shut up and kill Bond.

You can argue that's because Bond intrigues him, despite getting under his feet for literally the entire duration of the film, but it's difficult to see why. As you'd suspect from Sean Connery, after playing him for two movies, he's settled into a groove as Bond. He's not really as interesting to watch, and even the most tentative pursuit of a broader family audience turns him into something entirely different from the man who shot Professor Dent in Dr. No. Even the very first stagey skirmish in the film compares unfavourably to the masterfully executed brawl at the back end of From Russia With Love, so fresh in my memory.

Bond's not an unflappable super-spy just yet. He's still more cheeky to M than he is insubordinate, having to give up his Bentley at the behest of his employer. Yeah, instead M demands that he drives a really uncool Aston Martin with ejector seat and revolving number plates, which would go on to become the series' most iconic vehicle. Damn you, M, you unfeeling bastard! Also on the good guys' side of things, I noticed that Felix Leiter has regenerated from being Jack Lord into Cec Linder. Changing actors at the drop of a hat can be jarring- hope that doesn't happen again.

On a technical level, the ante is upped considerably. This film apparently cost more than the combined budget of Dr. No and From Russia With Love, and it looks rather good on it. I don't happen to think that Guy Hamilton is as good at directing fight scenes as his immediate predecessor at the helm, Terence Fisher, but I can't deny it's a handsome film. Gold figures in the colour palette just as much as you would expect, but what really brings it all to life is John Barry's score, a vast improvement on the overuse of the theme tune in the previous instalment.

We also get one of the series' most interesting Bond girls in Honor Blackman. She's tough, sexy and has the acting chops to boot... and she plays a character called Pussy Galore. I know I'm in trouble later on if I'm even cringing at this, but everytime Connery called her "Pussy", it was painful to watch. The Masterson sisters are as underserved as any of Bond's temporary fillies (think of Bernard Black's "summer girls", but with a higher mortality rate), but then this is adapted from a novel in which Pussy Galore is a lesbian and Bond seems to "cure" this with his cock. Sigh.

But what is Goldfinger without Oddjob? The best of all the myriad henchmen we'll see in this series, Harold Sakata plays the hat-flinging Korean giant with an almost gleeful presence. It's not that he's not scary just by the sheer size and power that he possesses, but the bastard keeps giving it a cheeky smile, whether he's hatting people to death or doing other nasty things to them until they expire, in agony. He's unerringly loyal to Goldfinger, and Sakata makes the most of a performance in which he doesn't get to utter a single word.

Goldfinger is a treasure trove of what you'd call golden moments in the Bond series, but although it's a turning point for the series, that doesn't necessarily mean it turned in the right direction. If I'm complaining about a Bond movie being misogynistic, maybe this isn't for me, but I think Blackman's doing the best job here by far, Oddjob excepted, and she's called Pussy fucking Galore. I could never call it bad, but while it might be a contrarian position, the familiarity of it all lessens the impact for me.

#3- Sometimes the adventure that plays out pre-credits is more interesting than the film itself. Heroin-flavoured bananas! Imagine how the monkeys would react!

For a full list of everyone's work on BlogalongaBond so far, click here.

The Mad Prophet Will Return, With Thunderball... in April.

BlogalongaBond- FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE Review

It hasn't been a month already, but I thought I'd get in a little earlier this month than I did in January and move right onto From Russia With Love. Of the Bond films I've seen recently enough to remember before taking on this blogging challenge, this second James Bond film is my favourite of all of them, and I wasn't disappointed by another viewing.

Built upon the admittedly flimsy premise of a Russian consulate worker having fallen in love with his photograph, Bond heads out to Istanbul with the hopes of getting a Lektor cryptographic machine for the Brits. Little does he realise that the beautiful Tatiana is a pawn of SPECTRE, and that both she and the Lektor are parts of a larger game orchestrated to turn the British and the Russians against one another.

In the model that would later be popularised by the likes of The Empire Strikes Back and The Wrath of Khan, this first Bond sequel has something of a revenge theme to it. SPECTRE take it as a slight to their efficiency and intellectual supremacy that Bond killed Dr. No in the last film, which is as explicit a callback to the previous film as we get in any Bond film until Quantum of Solace. It's interesting to see a Bond film in which the first movement of the film is about the villains' plans, a point more frequently reserved for times when they have Bond at their mercy and they can't stop blathering.

Chess grandmaster and cool-as-nuts henchman Kronsteen claims that the British will see their obvious trap as a challenge, and he turns out to be absolutely right, but it's a good thing that SPECTRE's ultimate goal is more substantial. There's a lovely visual metaphor involving the fish in the mysterious Number One's office, and it sets out the terms on which our villains will proceed right from the start. We know what's going on with Tatiana all the way through even if Bond doesn't, which leads to a particularly great moment later on as Robert Shaw's Red Grant confronts Bond and savours his realisation of "what a bloody fool he's been." If memory serves, this is the most collected we will ever see them, even if they are getting their ideas from fish.

Never mind though, it's time to give more praise to Robert Shaw, who's just about my favourite Bond villain ever. Moreso than any other attempt in later films, his Grant serves as an entirely serviceable counterpart to 007. He's just as resourceful and cunning and ruthless and he's working for the other team. Sean Bean would later serve a similar purpose, but he's no Robert Shaw. Shaw is one of my favourite actors of all time, and it's terrific to see him at work here. He ramps up the tension in the sustained sequence on-board the Orient Express that takes us to the end of the second act.

As mentioned, I also really enjoy Kronsteen, mostly for the cult value my brother and I attached to him while playing the multiplayer FPS mode of the Playstation 2 game based on From Russia With Love. And Rosa Klebb would later be immortalised in parody as Frau in the Austin Powers films- another villain who makes one appearance in the series and yet makes the biggest impression. Like Batman, Bond is most often overpowered in my eyes by how interesting his adversaries are, and this one has some of the best.

That whole aforementioned Orient Express scene is really the crux of the film, even if it goes on for another 20 minutes or so afterwards. By this point, the elements are all in place, and as soon as Grant makes contact, you start to actually wonder how Bond can actually get out of this situation. All Grant's really done at this point is kill some extras and a man dressed as Bond, and yet his menace is thoroughly established by then. As it turns out, Bond's only really saved by the first proper gadget of the series- a handy briefcase created by Q. Superior opponents and life-saving gizmos would both be inflated to ridiculous levels as the series progressed.

For his part, Sean Connery is still on top form as Bond. I think this is the last film where we see him making quips that don't quite land, which I like to think of as a learning curve before the likes of "Shocking" and "I think he got the point" in films to come. It's as close to character development as we get with him, although his relationship with Tatiana is admittedly more tender than with Honey Ryder in Dr. No. Still sexy, mind, and the first scene between Connery and Daniela Bianchi has gone down in history as the one that every subsequent Bond has enacted in their screen test for the role.

You can see more tropes of the James Bond series begin to emerge in From Russia With Love. Notably, the producers seemed to become fixated on helicopters in a big way after the climax of this one. It's not without flaws, but with the consummate attention to the villains and the peerless execution of sequences like the journey on the Orient Express, all bound up with a romance that's actually quite interesting for once, there's more than enough to declare it my favourite film of BlogalongaBond so far. And I doubt that's going to change for a good few months yet...

#2- You can start running a bath in a Turkish bridal suite and then leave it when you find a gorgeous woman in your bed. You won't flood the hotel and it'll never be mentioned again.

For a full list of everyone's work on BlogalongaBond so far, click here.

The Mad Prophet Will Return, With Goldfinger... in March

BlogalongaBond- DR. NO Review

If you're unfamiliar with the idea of BlogalongaBond, and thought it was actually the name of some Bizarro villain from the Bond series like my frequent collaborator Rob Simpson, head over The Incredible Suit for his explanation of the rather clever idea. Essentially, there are 22 months from now until the release of the 23rd James Bond film, so I'm joining in with reviewing the other 22 films, one per month, between now and then.

First up is Dr. No, in which we meet our hero, James Bond, as played by Sean Connery. He works for MI6, he shags a lot of women, and if you're quite earnestly following this obligatory explanation of who the character is, then it's probable that you have never heard of the cinema before now. In his first adventure, a fellow agent has been murdered while working abroad. Bond goes to Jamaica to puzzle it out and ends up locking horns with the titular doctor on his island base.

Full disclosure- I'm not the world's biggest James Bond fan. Although I've enjoyed Charlie Higson's Young Bond spin-off novels, my participation in BlogalongaBond will mark the first time I've watched most of these films since an ITV marathon when I was 10. And even then, I missed Octopussy entirely. I've always kind of preferred Michael Caine's Harry Palmer, even though I refuse to watch any of the myriad sequels to The Ipcress File. Put it this way- at present, I still count Connery's greatest role to be Henry Jones Sr, and my favourite Bond is Timothy Dalton, so we'll see how that changes in the next two years or so.

What interested me most about Dr. No was how different it is to the following instalments. It doesn't end with the traditional "James Bond Will Return" title card, suggesting to me that perhaps it was never intended to become a huge continuing series as it did.* Don't get me wrong, it sets up many of the hallmarks that would define the series, including M, Moneypenny, the gunbarrel opening, the theme tune, the sexy lady silhouettes in the title sequence, the deformed villain, the deformed villain's numerous arbitrary henchmen and the deformed villain's underground lair when every bit of evil equipment is helpfully annotated with its function.

It seems like a lot on the surface of it, but it still feels different to subsequent instalments. As I remember it, the films get bawdier and more like family adventures even before Connery vacated the role, but this feels much darker than I had remembered. Take the classic scene in which Bond kills Professor Dent, for instance. "That's a Smith and Wesson, and you've had your six" is clearly one of the best putdowns the character has ever had, and he shoots his unarmed would-be assassin dead right after. Imagine if George Lucas got his hands on that? Dent would probably manage to fire an empty gun and miss before Bond killed him, just to take the edge off.

And it's got to be that edge that makes Connery so great in this role. His Bond is practically unstoppable- determined, stubborn and always able to get out of those "You're going to die anyway, so I might as well tell you my plan" situations as easily as he got into them. And the man just oozes cool. Sexual politics may become prickly for me later on, but the three implicit shags he gets in this one seem completely natural. Bond is cool, women sleep with him. Cause, effect.

The most memorable of those three ladies is always going to be Honey Ryder, played by Ursula Andress, whose exit from the sea and arrival on the beach at Crab Key is the single most iconic moment in the entire history of the series. However, of her actual character, there's little to be said. There are vague hints of Pygmalion in there, but as far as I can remember, there's only one woman in these films who Bond doesn't seem to want to fuck, and it's certainly not Honey.

The most memorable villains in this series seem to get their respective films named after them (The Man With The Golden Gun totally doesn't count) and Dr. No is no exception. The trouble is, that while his menacing aura and his fearsome reputation and his nasty prosthetic hands make him memorable, I still can't exactly pinpoint why his evil plan was so... well, evil. Disrupting a space program just seems like a minor inconvenience. I fully expect more histrionic plans for world domination in the following 21 films, but the plan, which does more to set up the looming SPECTRE than add to the character, disappoints when attached to such an interesting villain.

Although much of the series furniture is present, Dr. No's deviation from what I remembered of it makes the start of BlogalongaBond feel like an adventure. Come back as I experience all of these films, at least up to the 1990s, for pretty much the first time. Like most beginnings, the lack of focus on the villain is compensated for by a thorough introduction to James Bond on the screen, with Connery giving a strong performance and prematurely playing the defining role of his career.

* Pure conjecture there- I'm reviewing without doing a lot of research, simply because critiques of this film outdate this review by almost 50 years, so the less influenced I am by other sources, the better.

And now for the first instalment of a regular feature I'm going to call Things I Learned From BlogalongaBond...

#1- There is a man who everybody always calls Pussfeller. It remains to be seen whether or not he actually likes that name.

For a full list of everyone's work on BlogalongaBond so far, click here.

The Mad Prophet Will Return, With From Russia With Love... in February.