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They did it with the Peter Franks lift fight as well,i always wondered how Franks fell over the balcony etc ,and when i finally saw the fight properly it made sense,and is now one my favourite ConneryBond fights because of it.
No,thats a very good point,they DIDNT cut them then,it just seems more and more PC ethics are creeping into everything .
The 9pm watershed is there for a reason...after that time just let the films flow naturally and uncut or just dont bother with the watershed at all !!
Funnily enough, he seems far more threatening and subtle here than he does in TB when he gloats about "the Spectre of defeat" to Largo at the gambling table. I always felt he slipped a little into full on smug in that scene - especially as he mentions Spectre three times.
and yes I agree with you about Halle too. St. John may be over-the-top (I admit I do laugh at her expressions) but she's not as flat out irritating as bloody Jinx, who seems to think its her film and always seems to be trying to upstage Brosnan.
I like that fight, but you can kind of tell that most of it was done on a soundstage.
1. Die Another Day: An assault on the senses, reason, and good taste. There's a TRON suit. The satellite. CGI cars. Some of the worst one-liners of all time. A vaguely offensive ending/
2. Spectre: A bizarre, suspense-free storm of cliches. Dramatic typing. A nonsensical twist. Bond shoots down a helicopter with a pistol. Then he...doesn't shoot Blofeld.
3. Diamonds are Forever: Tiffany Case has an IQ in the single digits, Blofeld's "death" is horribly anticlimactic, and the special effects of the satellite are horrendous, but the helicopter attack is decent.
4. Tomorrow Never Dies: Easily the least bad, since there are no direct assaults on logic and good sense. The gunplay is excessive, but everything is logically structured and could be explained to someone who asks.
Probably this. Though I agree with the likes of @bondsum who say that the Wint/Kidd fight partially makes up for the otherwise dull oil rig climax.
I'd argue that it's so bad that it's actually awesome, in a cult-like manner. It's the only Bond film that seems to have been written and directed under the influence. LOL (And yes, Barry's score is awesome too)
As for the worst third: My vote is for DAD. SP is a close second.
The SP final for me just kind of drags and isn't as exciting as it seems to think it is.
It's one of the best scores, and such a range and variety of styles.
I love the ending. It might feel a little lackluster but I like it.
The first half to me is just one of those films where it all seems to be coming together. It's nothing really new sure but it's really fun and has a couple of cool ideas (evil rupert murdoch, Bond running into an old flame, remote control car). It's formulaic Bond but it's formulaic Bond done pretty much perfectly. The only issue I have with the first half is the theme somf. But then after the HALO jump (which is an underrated stunt) it all goes downhill imo. I think the escape from Carver's building is cool and I like bits of the bike chase but it really doesn't live up to its potential, especially once we reach the finale.
I put TND in the same boat as LALD. Solid mid table Bond film, really fun and watchable and is on the verge of being top ten, but they both fall just short of being one of my favourites. Which in a way makes them more frustrating to watch than the films I outright dislike, because they come so close to being really good.
And I agree on the car chase. It gets more and more OTT as it goes on (a rocket launcher in a car park?) but it's just a fun idea done really well and Arnold's score and the fun Brosnan seems to be having playing it makes it really fun to watch.
Exactly. When it comes to stylistic variety, DAF's score blows all the others away.
So while DAF might be my least favourite third act - the oil rig sequence is arduous to watch - it has the glorious insanity of Wint and Kidd finale that I look forward to.
I think SP hurts the most because I actually like the first half of the film. It also is where the writers seem to make every wrong choice - it is devoid of action (something Mendes doesn't seem to be able to do with any consistency) and awful character choices for Swann and Blofeld. I'm not a SP hater - it disappoints me because it has so much potential which a film like TND doesn't have from the beginning. And DAF and DAD are goofy and cheesy from early on in the peice.
I also feel that Jill St John is only doing what Guy Hamilton demanded of her. If she goes from an acerbic and sassy chippie to a dumb redhead over the course of the movie, then the fault squarely lies with the script changes and Hamilton’s direction and not her. Admittedly, St John was mostly cast as “window dressing” in the majority of her previous movies - The Liquidator, Tony Rome, The Lost World - but that’s more to do with how pretty, young women were written in Hollywood movies of that period, rather than the actress herself. I actually like her performance in the first act of the movie quite a lot, even up to some of those early Las Vegas moments where she’s still in the same acerbic character. Everything seems to go off-piste about the moment that strange woman turns into a gorilla in the weird Vegas sideshow, and St John coincidentally metamorphoses into a bimbo. This is a shame, as the first half showed great promise and a much-missed freshness for Bond’s leading ladies at the time, with the exception of Diana Rigg. (Whereas Rigg benefits from a better script, and in a better movie, that’s not directed by Hamilton.)
As for the issues of Connery being slightly overweight (and as I’ve also pointed out elsewhere on these forums) so was Roger Moore back in 71, so it’s all a tad pedantic. Of course Moore benefited from a longer lead-up time before LALD commenced shooting, unlike Connery for DAF, who was a last-minute replacement for John Gavin, so didn’t have enough time to get in better shape for his role. That said, Connery is still the governor, and a little bit of flab only upsets the fitness fashionistas that like to see everyone nowadays sculpted like Michelangelo's David. As a young kid who saw the movie in the theaters in 71, and again later in 76 at a re-release, it didn’t bother me one jot. And it still doesn’t.
Re DAF I admit I do enjoy the first part of the film more now than I did before. It's got character and wit, even if the story isn't all that exciting.
It's the second half that I still continue to struggle with to this day. Yes it's got some great dialogue from Connery and Charles Gray (he in particular is great) but it just drags for me and I'm usually tempted to skip it if possible to the Wint and Kidd fight.
I appreciate we are coming from very different periods in Bond's history. I obviously didn't see DAF until much later in the 1990s so maybe don't have the fondness for it that you did.
I think the Blofeld stuff is bad and it also just constantly reminds you of OHMSS, which makes it seem worse because Tracy isn't even mentioned and Bond and Blofeld seem to enjoy facing off against eachother. Plus Blofeld was overused at this point anyway, I think three films in a row is too much and they never did anything interesting with him. They just seemed to wheel him out as an excuse to avoid writing an interesting villain because everyone knows "oh, guy with white cat, yeah he's evil", so there's no effort required from the writers.
DAF would be so much better if it was just a standalone film about Bond battling diamond smugglers imo. Make the PTS a really cool little mini movie ala GF to reintroduce Connery, make Willard Whyte the main villain (I think the idea of Hugh Hefner as a Bond villain has legs) and ditch the space lazer, and you'd have a really fun Bond film. There was probably no point doing a proper OHMSS follow up without Lazenby but then why feature Blofeld at all if they didn't want to do that.
Agreed completely. Everything else they did with Blofeld was also stupid — his clones and their deaths within five minutes of appearing, the drag, etc. The only interesting thing they had was his impersonating of Willard Whyte, and that's not enough to redeem the forced return of the character. I didn't mind Charles Gray as the villain, but by this point Blofeld was such a far cry from the character he was when he was introduced 8 years prior.
Really, really good points here. They half-a**ed the whole Blofeld character and didn't want to remind the audience of OHMSS anyway, so why do it?
If we had to have Blofeld, I still think a reprise by Savalas would have been better than Gray. And I just sense that Savalas would also play well opposite St. John.
Clearly, modern fans who have grown up on a staple diet of VHS and constant televised Bond repeats would rather now have seen a continuation of OHMSS; but that wasn’t what the studio boss David Picker wanted, neither Broccoli for that matter, nor even cinema audiences back in 71. One also needs to understand the cinematic landscape of the period and what other movies Bond was competing against at that time, plus the overall drop in cinema attendances that preferred their color TV sets at home as opposed to going out.
DAF is very much a movie of its time and was a reaction, rightly or wrongly, against OHMSS, hence why Peter Hunt wasn’t invited back. I’m sure if Hunt had been involved, the script would’ve been in keeping with its predecessor. Sadly, Hunt had put Picker’s nose out of joint, fighting against the movie’s running time, casting decisions, protracted photography and overall tone of the movie. Let’s not forget the original OHMSS script post-Thunderball featured a submersible Aston Martin, which goes to show how far removed it was from the 1970 version.
PS, incidentally, Willard Whyte was based more on Howard Hughes, not so much Hugh Hefner.
1) Spectre
2)DAD
3)TND
A critical moment for Bond. I think this is one situation where we must be grateful for the studio stepping in and bringing back Connery. DAF could have been so much better and it's always going to be a loss that Laz didn't come back to do OHMSS properly but had Gavin been cast would Bond have survived. Sean kept the show on the road and then they cast Rog, who was thankfully British but also acceptable to a an American audience.