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I sort of agree but I don't think there should have been a comedic Blofeld.
I love TB but never understood what the cat was doing there except for the meta reason that Blofeld needed to be identified. I guess some CEOs bring their dogs at work (it has been the case in my current job and my last one) so why not a cat. In OHMSS he seriously was wasted. In SP it's just a really nice nod.
ooo, now this I can't agree on.
I always find the fire engine scene in AVTAK painful. Moore groans as he's hanging on the back of that ladder has to be his lowest point as Bond.
I always enjoy the GE tank chase.
I actually really don't like the way they interact. There's barely any animosity at all, they're more like friendly rivals when (even ignoring that he murdered his wife in the last film) he's supposed to be Bond's arch enemy. And it's part of what makes the whole finale feel really low stakes to me imo. There's no sense of danger there whatsoever.
I think they misunderstood whole polite/gentlemanly thing between Bond and the villain. It's meant to be sort of a front hiding how much they actually want to get the other imo. I think the Moore movies did this very well, and so did most of the Connerys. But in DAF it genuinely seems like it's just a nice friendly competition between them. Also doesn't help that the "why doesn't he just shoot him" factor is at an all time high in that film.
Still, despite this I quite like the back and forth between them. It is an almost tepid rivalry as you note, but it's in tune with the tone of the film, which is overall quite camp.
If one views DAF with a memory of OHMSS, then I can appreciate that it's going to be very disappointing.
The PTS and the rest of DAF seem to be two completely different movie. In one Bond is out for revenge, relentless determined, then in the other he's like back from a long holiday.
Bond thought he'd killed Blofeld in the PTS anyway, and that allowed him (and the film makers) to reset and move forward after that. When he finds out he's alive later enough time has passed so that even though it's still personal, it's not so emotional.
That doesn't really work though. "So the international terrorist who murdered my bride and one true love on our wedding day escaped death again and fooled me at the same time, making my whole hunt for him for personal vendetta pointless? Well, can't help it, can't help it. And what have you been up to Blofeld you old bastard?"
I've never been bothered by it all that much because I recognize the tone they were going for. Blofeld was about to be retired permanently on account of pre-existing copyright arrangements anyway, so I can't imagine they cared too much about him & how his character may have been perceived. The key perhaps was to have a tonally consistent film, which they succeeded in delivering. It's a lesson the current team should heed.
It's too silly for any Bond movie. It's the most evil of necessary evils.
They didn't know that in 1970. Otherwise they would have definitely killed him off in DAF. Let's face it, it's sloppy filmmaking how they treated Tracy/Bond/Blofeld. They clearly wanted to move on from OHMSS but did it in a bungling way.
There is a quote from Peter Hunt somewhere that his initial vision for OHMSS was to have Bond and Tracy drive off into the sunset in OHMSS, and then bring her only back to be killed in the PTS of DAF. This would have avoided the "downer ending" curse.
It seems to me that Eon did the first part at the end of SP and were planning to do the second in Bond 25 prior to Boyle's involvement.
CR did it slightly differently...they gave Bond the downer ending with Vesper but allowed him to triumph in the final scene with White.
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Where has Blofeld been? In court, mired in copyright litigation. The character originated in Longitude 78, a 1959 screenplay by Bond author Ian Fleming and screenwriter Kevin McClory. That script was intended to be the first 007 film, until producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman chose to shoot Dr. No. But Fleming liked Blofeld so much, he decided to turn Longitude 78 into a novel, retitled Thunderball. That's when McClory started filing lawsuits. In 1963, he settled with Fleming and the Bond producers for £35,000 ($1.02 million today) in damages and a producing credit on the Thunderball film. The deal also stipulated that rights to Thunderball and its characters would revert fully to McClory after 10 years, which is how he produced Warner Bros.' Never Say Never Again, 1983's veritable scene-for-scene remake of Thunderball, and nearly launched a competing 007 franchise with Sony in the 1990s until a court stopped them.
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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/legal-battle-behind-bonds-blofeld-755734
I've read many times about how people wish that DAF had been a proper sequel to OHMSS with George and of course that would have been fantastic. But it's only just struck me that we could still have had this just with Sean instead.
How do we think this would have turned out? Was the reason the box office for OHMSS was (relatively) lower due to the serious tone or Laz? Was the reason they shied away from going serious because after GF, TB and YOLT they thought the public preferred wisecracking Sean to shooting Professor Dent Sean and wouldn't want a return to a DN or FRWL?
That's a good question. Connery pretty much sold DAF all by himself.With the same tone AND Lazenby you still exasperate the audience.
http://www.scriptmag.com/features/interviews-features/masters-of-screenwriting-interview-tom-mankiewicz-part-1-of-2 I think that to Mankiewicz making the franchise young again meant dropping the seriousness, because the pretense of seriousness that had worked so well and sustained the 60s films (Connery's "laughing with me instead of at me") was exactly what was keeping it 'old' to the counter-culture.
How Cubby and Harry decided on this course correction is anyone's guess. Maybe they really took to heart Lazenby's attitude of Bond being a square who was on his way out. There was no real reason to expect the franchise was going to last 50+ years.
It makes sense in a larger scheme, culturally and film-wise. Bond was born in the swinging sixties, but there were two phases to that: the first, 'clean-shaven, cool' phase (which Bond came out of), and the second, 'shaggy hair, no shoes' phase. See the Beatles evolution, etc. I think by the latter part of the decade 'young' films came to mean the likes of EASY RIDER and THE GRADUATE and BONNIE AND CLYDE, films that were reacting to classic Hollywood form. Mankiewicz did the same thing, only he wrote something that was a reaction to the Bond form.
Also from later in that interview:
He was young. He wanted to look clever. Could he have achieved his same objective by being entirely serious instead of not serious at all? Possibly. But that might have been a nasty film. It's almost like he made a choice to make fun of the character over condemning him outright. I think it also has something to do with the appeal of camp at the time and everybody deciding sincerity made you look naive.
At any rate what he gave us did keep the franchise going. I don't think it was just down to Connery.
Good point. It's not like the seventies audiences would be unfamiliar with grittier cinema, or what? Then again, the following Bond films were coloured by the popular genres of that decade, LALD, TMWTGG and MR most of all.
I almost vomited my recently consumed snack all over the carefully curated carpet. No sir, I would say it's almost entirely the opposite. Though in this case even the Americans wrote terrible Americans. DAF is filled with the most farcically caricatured Yanks. It never fails to make me laugh.
One thing Tom Mankiewicz mastered was clever dialog, in a sub-par Bond film that's still something to relish.