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OK, I'm popping in here just because I found this article and thought I'd share it here. Some of you may have already read it. It was rather interesting for me: https://literary007.com/2016/03/26/the-hidden-gems-in-diamonds-are-forever/
Back later; have fun B-)
What's that you say? April Fools' Day was on Friday? Oh. Nevermind...
The CGI looks aweful in places.
Doomsday is a complete failure.
It is. We are still here.
Having already had one stroke, and with his second one on the way, Ian Fleming was clearly feeling his own mortality when it came time for him to write OHMSS. Tellingly, Fleming responded to these life-threatening events by depicted James Bond at his most vulnerable point -- and at his most sympathetic for the plight of the ordinary human being. The mundane has never really held any interest for Bond -- until now, with his creator about to let loose his grasp on life itself.
Most Bond books concern themselves largely with the extraordinary: an extraordinary hero (as much as Fleming has proclaimed Bond to be a rather dull sort, his talents and tastes prove him otherwise) with extraordinary foes pursuing outlandish aims, whose plots take place in exotic settings and are spiced at regular intervals by the appearance of exceptionally beautiful women. A surprising focus for this book, then, are the women being “treated” at Blofeld’s allergy clinic atop Piz Gloria. Certainly they are all described as being attractive, and certainly Bond has a field day romancing them…but for the first time in my memory, he feels a significant guilt at the deception involved in the dalliances that serve as cover for his intelligence gathering.
(Can we assume here that everyone reading this review is familiar with the plot of this story, from watching the movie if not from reading the book itself? Bond meets Tracy, the prototypical “beautiful woman with one wing down” that Fleming finds so eternally appealing, saves her from a self-induced scandal at the casino, and through this event meets her father, Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Union Corse, a major league real-world criminal organization. Draco gives Bond a lead on the whereabouts of Blofeld, who has been in hiding since the events detailed in Thunderball. Blofeld is now scheming to have himself proclaimed a Count, and a contact at the College of Arms gives Bond leave to portray himself as Sir Hillary Bray, a member of that institution with the power to grant or thwart that scheme. Bond/Sir Hillary visits Blofeld at his “clinic” atop a Swiss Alp, discovers that Blofeld’s latest plan involves hypnotizing a flock of young beauties and using them as unwitting foot soldiers in a biological war against all of English agriculture. Skiing down the Alp to escape Blofeld’s stronghold, Bond is at his weakest ebb when he is found and aided by Tracy. Draco’s men help Bond destroy the Spectre stronghold atop Piz Gloria and foil Blofeld’s plot. And oh yes, Bond falls in love with Tracy and marries her. They have all the time in the world……..*)
While this is a fairly imaginative and entertaining Bond thriller, what I find most interesting about this novel is Bond’s (or perhaps Fleming’s) unusual sympathy for the rather ordinary people that are (unusually) peppered throughout this book. Sir Hillary Bray and the allergy-suffering young ladies who are to become Blofeld’s angels of death are the real players here, and the common curse of snobbery is the Achilles’ Heel which lays Blofeld low. Sheep-herding, cattle-breeding, and vegetable growing are Blofeld’s weapons of choice. It is as if, while his creator is clinging to life with a desperation he had never before known, Fleming’s main character finds himself intoxicated by the concerns of the common man and woman he had never really appreciated before. This passage, from near the end of the novel, is a good indication of the unusual state of Fleming‘s mind at this point: “And it was that way that the evening passed and Bond‘s head reeled with all the practical feminine problems she raised, in high seriousness, but he was surprised to find that all this nest-building gave him a curious pleasure, a feeling that he had now come to rest and that life would now be fuller, have more meaning, for having someone to share it with. Togetherness! What a curiously valid cliché it was!”
“What a curiously valid cliché.” How utterly unusual, how totally Fleming! This novel is not without its false notes -- the restaurant that is open to the public, mere yards away from Blofeld’s top secret hideout, caused a mild mental double-take on my part -- but what the heck, “it is very popular and brings in much money.” It also allows Fleming to name-drop Ursula Andress. At least Fleming still has his priorities straight, even while he's staring Death in the face...
As I explain in the appreciation thread on Kubrick, I fell in to this movie during the "Dawn of Man"-sequence while switching channels as a 16 year old, and was instantly fascinated with everything that I saw on the screen. Only after it had finished did I grab the TV-guide to see what I had just watched.
2001 changed my life in giving me the experience of cinema as an art form, offering so much more than entertainment. In the case of 2001, offering many questions as to the meaning of things, which makes every new showing a great experience.
First up, would be OHMSS which I saw in late 1969. It was my first James Bond movie, having just missed out on Connery's previous outing in YOLT. Regardless, loved it and it got me hooked on Bond and more adult movies thereafter. It was also my first proper glimpse at an adult movie.
Next would be Beneath The Planet of the Apes. It was my first big sci-fi experience in the cinema, and it would kickstart a fascination for nihilistic futuristic movies that had the capacity to thrill and scare me equally. This was immediately followed by The Omega Man, another game changer for me. There were quite a lot of good sci-fi movies made throughout the 70s (Dark Star, Silent Running, Logan's Run) but it would take till 79 before I saw the greatest of them all - Alien, to remind me what kind of sci-fi I really liked. Basically, a fusion of horror and the future.
Finally, Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. Sadly, I didn't get to see this in the cinema, but when it was first shown on BBC1 for the first time back in the early 70's. From that day on, I made it my duty to see every Eastwood movie in the cinema, whether they be Double Bills or first time releases. Which brings me to my favourite western of all time, The Outlaw Josey Wales. Saw this back in 76 on the big screen and was enthralled by the beauty and brutality of this epic western.
As for horror movies, I've always been left disappointed by them. My first experiences were the old B&W Universal Monster movies, followed by the Amicus's portmanteau horror The Tales From the Crypt (probably the best of them all) and the Hammer horrors. The Exorcist (1974), though I think a brilliantly made movie for the time, didn't scare me half as much as I had thought it would. Frankly, I found Tales From the Crypt (1972) and The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) more unsettling than The Exorcist. However, I still hunger for a great horror movie that will scare me, even to this day. I'd probably go so far as to say, the last truly great horror was either Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974), The Wicker Man (1973) or John Carpenter's Halloween (1978).
All these movies I've mentioned have had an impact on me in one way or another.
It's a shame your family skipped OHMSS, though it might have been a hard pill to swallow watching a new Bond for the very first time, especially after seeing Connery do his thing. It was after seeing OHMSS that I finally got to see all the original Connery movies in repeat showings at various cinemas around town, long before they were shown on TV. Of course, I think Connery is the best, but I have a real affection for OHMSS that has never diminished.
I don't know about you, @Birdleson, but the 70's was the best cinematic period for me. So many great movies, which I could never begin to list here.
What was it like when Connery resigned after YOLT and a complete unknown in Lazenby took over for '69? What was the reaction there, and the reaction when Connery came back for Diamonds Are Forever? Was Lazenby forgotten for a long time after '69?
And what was the change like in the 70's, when Connery resigned again and Moore took over? What did the new era feel like? Were comparisons between the two often made?
@ForYourEyesOnly, I think a lot of your questions are answered by the "originals" here further back in these posts. It'll require you wading through lots of earlier comments, but the answers are here and well documented.
Personally speaking, I didn't have the Connery problem when Lazenby took over as he was my first Bond. However, I did see DAF on its original release date and was totally aware that it was his final movie for Eon. Of course, I was concerned at the time about who would take over, but the safe money was always on Roger Moore. It was just a matter of time until he was confirmed. Being a Bond fan back then wasn't like it is today, there was no social media with instant feedback. I think it's fair to say that most young boys were fans of Bond back then. And yes, it was mostly a boy thing. Being a fan of Bond meant reading the dailies and buying movie magazines for tidbits. There was a Bond magazine called Bondage which I used to buy, but apart from that there wasn't an awful lot. You have to look at the post effect of Star Wars (1977) to see the major change in how mechandise became a prerequisite for the studios. There was some stuff about in the Sixties, but apart from the Dinky Aston Martin toy, most of these had become obsolete. Though I do recall Dinky/Corgi producing a toy car range for every Bond movie from YOLT up to and including FYEO. I can't say I really looked much beyond this point.
The only other mechandise I can recall was bubblegum trading cards. I had some from OHMSS but recall there being some others for DAF, TSWLM and MR. There might have been more, but I don't really know.
Watching this slick, fast paced action adventure as a 10-year old was my first real introduction to the world of James Bond. It all seemed so...glamorous and exciting. I wore out my VHS copy after about 10 years and in that time managed to memorise all the dialogue and all the scenes. Since then, Bond has become one of my major personal interests as well as a defining aspect about me as a person. In fact, someone I saw a few months back for the first time in 15 years asked me if "I was still obsessed with James Bond". Maybe in hindsight that's a little worrying, however it shows what an impact Goldeneye had on me at a tender age...and it's a reason I still feel nostalgic and protective towards it.
Brosnan himself may be disliked by a lot of hardcore fans, but at THAT time he just WAS Bond to me - in the same way Roger Moore was for people growing up in the 70s.
I was genuinely quite upset when I saw he was disliked by so many people online.
I've come to realise that Brosnan too (let's face it) isn't the greatest of actors (just look at that clip of him fighting a tree).
I guess the Moore era has the same influence. Moore fit the times perfectly, but the seventies have become very distinct and dated. That's not a bad thing for an era, but it does influence the way we look back upon these films.
As a Bond fan I would never have thought to abandon the series simply because I prefered Connery or Lazenby over Moore. Though, I can understand why others might have done so. I can only talk for myself here, but I prefered Moore's 007 take in LALD and TMWTGG more than I did in his later movies. I know that some people here feel that Moore was still trying to find his feet in those two early movies and only found his voice in TSWLM. But to be honest, I felt it was from 1977 onwards that Bond became perhaps too cartoonish for his own good. Without wanting to sound like I'm contradicting myself, but I'd say TSWLM falls between two stools, and it's the start of the sillier Bonds, though it gets a pass because it has tons of cool stuff in it, too. Again, not wanting to create a debate here, but I'd say Connery was more grounded in DAF even though the movie itself was rather offbeat. I guess, what I mean is, the stories could be outlandish but it was never at the expense of the character.
The strange thing is when I look back on Moore's early work as Bond, I like what I see more so now than perhaps I did back then.
PS. I do recall one kid in class having the 007 toy attache case. However, I never owned one myself.
PART I: My first introduction to the character of James Bond came in a rather unusual form: a toy commercial on Saturday morning TV circa 1963, interspersed with ads for breakfast cereal and dolls that could talk or wet themselves. At the advanced age of 9 I had already learned to generally ignore commercials for the most part. I was there to watch the cartoons -- Mighty Mouse perhaps, or maybe even Popeye. But here, in the middle of an advertisement for (of all the outlandish things!) a briefcase with a sniper rifle hidden inside it, a case that spouted gas into your face if you didn’t open it just so…here was a brief snippet from a current movie, featuring a hero that had Mighty Mouse beat all hollow! The lead character was named James Bond, the movie that I was glimpsing ever-so-tantalizingly was From Russia With Love, and to say that I was fascinated by the dramatically more sophisticated world I had just caught a glimpse of would be to significantly understate the case. Who was this Bond fellow and how was I to find out more about him?
Before long, transistor radios throughout the neighborhood provided my next clue, as Shirley Bassey’s bombastic rendition of the title song to Goldfinger poured through the airwaves. James Bond was suddenly huge news, as seemingly EVERYBODY thronged to the theatres to catch his latest adventure. Everybody except my parents, that is. True homebodies they were, satisfied to watch whatever showed up on their black & white TV screen, as one network or another provided unchallenging filmic fare with Saturday Night at the Movies. Following their lead, I had to learn to be satisfied with whatever showed up on the Sunday night Disney TV show. It seemed as if I was going to have to wait a long, long time for James Bond to make the leap onto the small screen.
Finally, late in the first-run release of Thunderball, an opportunity arose that was just too tempting to resist. Understand: I had been gorging myself on every magazine article, newspaper review, and bubble-gum card I could find that revealed information on the Bond phenomenon. I was already hooked without having seen a single Bond movie. And then, a local theatre ran a newspaper advertisement offering a one-day-only special triple-bill: Thunderball, Goldfinger, and Dr. No. Back-to-back, for the price of a single admission, an entire afternoon’s worth of immersion into the spectacular world of James Bond. I begged, I pleaded, I cajoled; and finally my parents capitulated. “What the heck,” I suppose they figured, “it’s a cheap way to get him out of our hair on the weekend.”
So I went, I saw, and I emerged a full-fledged James Bond fan. Even at the tender age of 12 I was beginning to form some critical sensibilities. I decided that Goldfinger was the best of the bunch; that some of the editing on Thunderball had been a bit jumpy, especially in the bit with the jet-pack before the theme song, and that the ending of Dr. No seemed terribly rushed, as if the film-makers had decided once Bond escaped from his cell, “Hey, we’re almost out of money and we’ve still got this island to blow up -- let’s hurry up & get this sucker in the can!” But these minor imperfections in no way marred my appreciation of the series as a whole. Bond fans are Forever Looking to Nit-Pick the Franchise.
PART II: Alas, I did not get to see You Only Live Twice in its first theatrical release. Too many other things were going on for me in 1967 I suppose. Please understand: I was born in 1954 and in 1967 I turned 13, advancing to Junior High School. Additionally, to address Sir Henry’s question: I have lived most of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area, near (or sometimes in) Berkeley CA, home of the University of California’s fabled Berkeley campus. Those of you who remember the ‘60s in detail will understand what that means…Protests, People’s Park, the flowering of the Haight-Ashbury. The “Summer of Love,” the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the commencement of the counter-culture…call it what you will and judge it however you like, for me it was happening just a few miles away and to people just a few years older than I. My sound-track for the late sixties and early seventies was supplied by the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, not by Monty Norman or John Barry.
Additionally: it is my considered opinion that there were three overwhelming pop culture phenomena in the decade of the ’60s, besides which all else paled: Bond, the Beatles, and Batman. “The 3 Bs” if you will. Obviously, I was and remain a fan of Bond or I wouldn’t be here. You can easily guess from my forum handle that I was and remain a fan of the Beatles. If you were to assume (from my bringing up the topic if nothing else) that I am a long-time fan of the Batman, you’d be “batting” 3 for 3. My life-long interest in heroic fiction spurred on by the uber-popular Batman TV show, I quickly became a devotee of the entire genre of comic book super-heroes. At that time, there was a LOT of fabulous work being done in that much-maligned field. Not only were the Caped Crusader and all of his costumed comrades in the Justice League of America at the height of their popularity…but across town, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and their cohorts in Marvel Comics’ legendary Bullpen were revolutionizing the genre with the creation of Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers and many more…including Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Yes, I was an U.N.C.L.E. fan, too!) Suffice it to say, there were a LOT of claims on my attention…
So: I missed YOLT in its original theatrical release. Thunderball and Goldfinger had both run forever, it seemed; and I assumed there would always be another weekend to fit in a viewing of YOLT. Suddenly, one day, it just wasn’t there anymore. Vanished from the theatres far sooner, I felt, than had its predecessors. Suddenly, there was another Bond film coming…and this one (heresy!) without Sean Connery filling out the famous tuxedo. Reviews…were not kind. This new Bond was greeted by the media with suspicion, even hostility…and before the film even premiered, reports were out that he would not be returning to the role for any subsequent films. The Bond franchise was shaken, not stirred. I didn’t even think about attending a theatrical showing of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in its initial release. What can I say? I was young and foolish; I had sex and drugs and rock’n’roll clouding my mind. James Bond seemed old-fashioned at a time when The Times, They Were A Changing and I was changing, too, as quickly as could be managed.
Nonetheless, on Christmas Eve of 1971, when a friend showed up at my door urging “C’mon, let’s get out of here! Let’s go see Diamonds Are Forever! It’s got the REAL James Bond in it, you know!” I made hasty excuses to my assembled parents and grand-parents. We piled into his older brother’s rattle-trap of a car, and tooled off to the local drive-in to see the REAL James Bond one more time. However…we didn’t actually DRIVE into the drive-in. Instead, we parked the car on the street just past the theatre’s exit…and as the “coming attractions” played, we crouched down and snuck in through the exit that was barricaded against cars trying to come through without paying…but of no use against a silent band of agents on foot! The half-full field of cars filled with paying customers took no note of us, and we were crouched too low to be seen by drive-in personnel. We hunkered down in the loose gravel of an unclaimed parking space, grabbed a few tinny-sounding speakers and brought them as close as could be managed…and proceeded to watch the movie, bundled up against the cool of the California winter night. It was my one and only covert operation with the mission of A View to a Free James Bond movie…and it was a complete success!
Do I regret my youthful indiscretion now, from the perspective of an older and supposedly wiser man? Well…not really. It was an adventure I’ll always remember, one that I like to think Bond himself might have undertaken in similar circumstances. Would I make reparations if I could? Possibly…but the drive-in itself has long ago closed, and Eon Productions has seen its fair share of my hard-earned money in the years since. Does it excuse me that I was unaware that my friend and his brother had not informed me of the caper’s plan until we were actually parked behind the theatre, and my only other option was to wait in the car alone until they returned? It doesn’t really matter; what happened, happened; I took part in it and lived to tell the tale. There was no champagne and no girl to kiss at the end of the adventure…but the next day I opened my Christmas presents safely surrounded by my family. And the greatest Christmas gift I received that year was a story I can tell today.
PART III: I suppose I was still resisting the very idea of another actor playing James Bond; any rate, I did not see Live and Let Die in its initial release. Soon enough, though, my resistance wore thin and I attended a double-billed showing of LALD and The Man With the Golden Gun. While Roger Moore was never my favorite Bond I still accepted him in the part quite easily. His was a very different Bond from Connery’s, heavier on the “suave man of the world” element but never quite believable to my eyes as a dangerous man with a license to kill. “Action” in the Moore era was more likely to consist of a car chase or a boat chase or a ski chase or a lady chase than any physical combat. Still, he was Bond officially and for longer than I expect anybody else to serve in the role ever again. Now that I was actually working, earning my own money, and driving my own car, I never missed another Bond film in its initial run in the theatres.
Still had a bit of catching up to do, though. Sometime in the mid-‘70s the ABC network offered the television premiere of OHMSS…spread out over two nights. No matter, I was there! Curiously, the film was substantially edited for this presentation: it OPENED with Bond’s ski escape from Blofeld’s mountain fortress…and hop-scotched, willy-nilly, through the official movie’s continuity, jumping back and forth through time in an attempt to…what? Keep the audience interested in one film split between two nights? Did Eon charge so much for the rights to this movie that ABC felt the need to spread the cost between both Saturday AND Sunday nights? Did they further decide that the only way to keep an audience interested would be to totally bamboozle us regarding the amount of gratuitous sex and violence they had eliminated from the actual film they were presenting? It was confusing, but I managed to figure it all out without too much trouble. I’d already read the book after all…
Then, finally, some time in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, a small repertory theatre house in Berkeley held a Bond retrospective, showing all of the films on…well, if not the BIG screen, at least the medium-sized one. Over the course of several weeks, in no particular order, each Bond film was available for my perusal…and while I may not have gone back for a repeat viewing of some of my lesser favorites on nights when they weren’t showing one of the few I’d missed the first time around, I did finally manage to see OHMSS in its correct sequence…as well as the two Connery offerings I’d missed: You Only Live Twice and (finally! at long last!!) From Russia With Love. My quest was complete -- I’d seen all of the James Bond films and read all of the Ian Fleming novels and short stories involving the character.
And yet: James Bond Will Return, and so will his many fans. Via VCRs and DVDs, through Netflix and YouTube and technology I’d never even considered when I was first introduced to the character, we can now watch Bond marathons of several day durations on cable TV; we can own the entire series to watch for ourselves at any time we darn well please, we can nit-pick and analyze and drain every ounce of what was once special completely out of this series we so cherish. While the socio-political changes of the ‘60s and ‘70s up through today were never quite able to kill this vibrant character, will trolls and demographically-based marketing imperil him now? I just hope Quantum is the most dastardly menace 007 has to face in the future…but one way or another I’ll be showing up at the theatre to find out!