It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
(as to @Birdleson ,@BeatlesSansEarmuffs , @delfloria ..)
As they were children of the depression, my parents were never very big on going out to the movies. I think they saw them as an unnecessary expense. Any films they watched were seen at home, for free, on television. In my early childhood, I managed to wheedle them into letting me see an occasional Disney film on the big screen -- re-releases of Pinocchio, Snow White, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Always, my parents would drive me to the theater, leave me with the funds for my entry and a bag of popcorn, and arrange to pick me up when the movie was over.
As I got a little older and developed my musical tastes I managed a double-feature showing of Help! and A Hard Day's Night. But when it came to seeing the Bond films, I suspected at first that these might seem a little "mature" for my pre-teen self, and I shied away from asking for this largess. Finally, though, when I was about 12...late in the original run of Thunderball... a local theater held a one-day only triple feature: a showing of Dr. No, Goldfinger, AND Thunderball! All in one afternoon -- for the low price of one simple admission! Cheap enough that I couldn't say (Doctor) No -- and neither could my parents! So I went & spent one Saturday afternoon absolutely immersed in the Bond experience! Even at the time, my critical senses were fully engaged. I thought TB's editing was a little fast & rough... the final battle between Bond & Dr. No should have been drawn out a little longer... but Goldfinger; ah, Goldfinger was just perfect! At that point I had seen 3 of the existing 4 Bond films and thought myself quite the connoisseur of 007 filmography.
But the future had much, much more Bond ahead! I spent the time waiting for the next Bond flick reading as many of Ian Fleming's 007 novels as could be found at my local library. Some of them were quite surprising -- like "The Spy Who Loved Me." Or that torture scene in Fleming's "Casino Royale" -- how could THAT ever be adapted for the screen, my 13 year old mind wondered! 1967's Casino Royale film was obviously not a REAL James Bond movie, so I could safely ignore it... but when You Only Live Twice came out, just a little later that year, I was (perhaps foolishly) inclined to hold out for the perfect Bond movie experience. Dammitall, I wanted a double bill of YOLT and the one Bond movie I hadn't yet seen, From Russia With Love! So I held on. Waiting...and waiting...and waiting some more, until without warning... *POOF!* You Only Live Twice disappeared from my local movie screens -- soon to be replaced by a Bond movie that didn't even star Sean Connery as James Bond! Well, nertz! What's a discriminating Bond fan supposed to do now?
(To Be Continued! BeatlesSansEarmuffs will return, with the same old blowhard in the title role...)
There's a fair amount of "current culture critique" circa 1967-69 in the next episode. Don't miss it!
Thanks for giving me a reason to post THIS then:
Now please remember: I was born in 1954, and my attitudes and concerns were very much those of most anyone else of my age. In 1964 I was 10 years old. Both Bond and the Beatles were cool. By 1966 I was 12 years of age... and as the saying would have it, "The Golden Age of Comics" is when you are 12. Additional, most anything you liked at the age of 10 is terribly passe' by the time you reach the ripe old age of 13. So while Bond and the spy craze was starting to run out of steam (fads tend to run very hot for a very brief time -- then cool off even faster than they originally caught fire) there was a new type of colorful adventurer capturing the collective zeitgeist of the time... heroes who wore costumes, capes, and cowls. If it had been just Batman ruling the cultural roost for a few years, I suspect the comics craze would have worn out around 1968... but there was something else, something fresh and new and really exciting, shooting off fireworks every week at our local newsstands.
That something else was the ground-breaking work of artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, yoked to the storytelling sensibilities of scripter/editor Stan Lee. That something else was the Marvel Comics Group...and if you have any appreciation for the movies being put out by Marvel Studios now, please understand that the 12 cent miracles appearing on the newsstands from 1961-1968 were their precursors. The X-Men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four...Spider-Man, the Hulk, Dr. Strange... all these and more were available routinely -- heady, inexpensive, and obvious classics-in-the-making. I must admit, I was willing to push James Bond into a secondary space in my consciousness for awhile, as long as I had Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. appearing every month -- particularly when he was being written and drawn by the incomparable Jim Steranko.
(More to come shortly... BSE)
Just to give you a taste of the music of 1969: from Woodstock, here's Jefferson Airplane's song about a free concert in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park -- "Won't You Try (Saturday Afternoon)"
BeatlesSansEarmuffs will return soon... with Sean Connery in tow!
BeatlesSansEarmuffs will return to the '70s someday soon...
My Dad (now 76 and still with us) is a first generation Bond fan--he saw Dr. No in the theater when it was first released--and he regularly re-watched Bond films on TV and VHS when I was growing up, so there was never a time when I didn't know of 007. Back when I was 8 years old we were staying at a hotel on a family vacation--in Switzerland of all places!--and while channel-surfing I came across the end of marriage scene from OHMSS. "Oh," groaned Dad, "it's that other guy who came after Connery. This is the one where he gets married and his wife dies. You can change the channel. Just look at that guy, he's terrible." I was so interested by the weirdness of Bond being married that I kept watching, though Mom and Dad occasionally poured further scorn on Lazenby.
That was back in 1989, so even 20 years after OHMSS's release many members of the public continued to view Lazenby and his film as a shameful failed experiment, a one-off freak, fit to suppressed and rarely spoken of.
Play whatever you like. As a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay area I have a fondness for the SF bands, especially the lesser-known entities like Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, and It's a Beautiful Day. In fact, here's IABD's initial album in its entirety. Don't say I never did you any favors...
ABC did do a good job televising OHMSS pretty regularly throughout the 80s. I caught it on a Friday night in March 1980 where I fell in love with it and in the summer of '82 I taped it on a Beta VCR during another airing and I know if was played the next year too. Critic Gene Siskel summed up the attitude toward Lazenby at the time on the Siskel and Ebert Bond special in '83 by calling him the answer to a trivia question.
In 1971, (the year that DAF was released, if you may recall) a fellow named Abbie Hoffman wrote and managed to get published a tome with the unlikely title of "Steal This Book." Abbie was already famous as a political radical, member of the Chicago 8 (soon to become the Chicago 7) and general gadfly of the American political & cultural scene. If you've never heard of him, well, the internet is your friend. Use it. But you don't really need to know more than this: a friend of mine had a copy of the book, and he didn't actually, y'know, PAY for it. I read his copy, then gave it back. Supposedly the book was a best seller, but I don't really know how that could have been: NOBODY I knew went out & bought a copy. Nonetheless, a lot of copies of that book were suddenly all around circa 1971. I suppose I ought to make clear that the basic point of the book was: here's how to get and do a lot of stuff without actually paying money for it. And this was, surprise-surprise, a fairly popular position to take among certain segments of "the youth culture" in 1971. Free concerts were just the beginning for us at that time...
All of which is intended to give a context to the following admission: when some friends and I took in a Christmas Eve 1971 showing of Diamonds Are Forever at the local Drive-In theater, we didn't actually pay any money for our admissions. Nor, for that matter, did we drive in. Instead, we parked our car on the street outside the theater, and just walked in the unguarded Exit near the screen itself (gate locked to prevent cars from entering surreptitiously but nothing to prevent stealthy pedestrians) .... found an unoccupied space not far from that screen (there were several available) ... stretched two or three sound speakers as close to us as could be managed, and turned the sound to the maximum for each of those speakers. Then we hunkered down in the space that we had claimed, and pulled out our various forms of refreshment, liquid and/or otherwise. And we enjoyed the latest 007 film, that last one to feature "the REAL James Bond" in the role that had made him famous. California winters can be pretty mild...and while I don't remember being particularly uncomfortable for the next couple of hours, I DO recall watching that movie with the secret thrill of a teenager getting away with something that he or she really ought not be doing.
So all that aside Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play? Well, I wasn't really all that pleased with the humorous direction the series was obviously taking at that point... and certain aspects of the film-makers' art were clearly not being observed very closely. Why did Plenty O'Toole suddenly show up dead in Tiffany Case's pool? And what the heck is going on with that car stunt where the left-side wheels are off the ground at one point, only for them to become right-side wheels OTG a moment later? Even in my befuddled state from my less-than-optimal viewpoint at that time, I could tell that there were some significant problems with this particular Bond film. Still, it was Connery as Bond...and all things considered, we got more than got our money's worth. Nonetheless, the '70s were clearly not going to just be the '60s ten years later. Could James Bond 007 survive in the Brave New World That's Coming?
BeatlesSanEarmuffs will return soon with a REAL Beatle in tow!
One thing I do remember from those halcyon days is an absolutely scathing review of TMWTGG that saw print in one of Marvel Comics' martial-arts based B&W comics magazines, scribed by the future comic book adapter (for Topps Comics) of the Goldeneye film. Mr. McGregor was working for Marvel at the time, and was evidently even less enamored of the Bond series' turn towards camp humor than I was. To put it bluntly, his review did not give me any reason to want to rush out and see the then-current Bond film. I was more impressed by the Neal Adams cover for that issue of Marvel's Deadly Hands of Kung Fu -- depicting Bond at Hi Fat's martial arts school -- than I was by anything I'd learned about the movie itself in that magazine. I certainly don't remember if the review even mentioned Sheriff J.W. Pepper, a character whose existence I was blissfully ignorant of at that time...
https://pencilink.blogspot.com/2018/10/deadly-hands-of-kung-fu-12-neal-adams.html
Bond or the Freak Brothers? In the early '70s, who do YOU suppose was more interesting to the twenty-year old BSE?
So one afternoon shortly thereafter, I found a local theater that was showing a double-bill of LALD and TMWTGG -- and took the plunge into what was then Roger Moore's entire tenure as James Bond. To my mind, it was a mixed bag. I still didn't care for the humorous direction the series had taken... Moore was the exact opposite of George Lazenby, entirely appropriate for scenes as the suave, sophisticated British agent but less than convincing when it came to throwing a punch. Mr. Big's plastic face was pretty lame, but his line-up of henchmen was fun... and J.W. Pepper was completely at home in the Louisiana bayou but entirely out of place in Thailand. And so it went throughout the course of the afternoon: for every really cool element of the films in question (the relationship between Scaramanga and Nick Nack) there was a poor one (Bond needing to be rescued by the Kung Fu schoolgirls? Really??? I left the theater reconciled to the idea that Roger Moore was now James Bond... but only just barely.
BeatlesSansEarmuffs will return to the exotic '70s ... someday. Never say never!
I never really liked TSWLM (even though that stunt is amazing), but I'm starting to see the role the film must've played for those who were losing interest.