Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

5. CASINO ROYALE (1967)

By 1967, the James Bond franchise was so fully entrenched as an iconic series that it was begging for a smart, funny satire to deflate its growing gasbaggery. Unfortunately, Casino Royale wasn’t it. The best Bond spoof of the era was on television, in the form of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s terrific Get Smart series, while Casino Royale – a one-off production of dubious legal status – proved to be a sprawling, unfunny mess. It’s too bad, too; it wasted one of the best 007 novels (the first, in fact), with a great villain and some excellent set-pieces, and worse than that, it wasted a fantastic cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, William Holden, Deborah Kerr and John Huston. What’s the problem? The direction is a total mess which tries to cram far too much plot (and far too many jokes that don’t work) into far too small a space. The script, likewise, just isn’t funny enough – the rapid pace of the gags can’t conceal the fact that they mostly don’t work, and none of the great actors are given much of a role to chew on. It’s fortunate that the Daniel Craig era of 007 did so much to rehabilitate the Casino Royale name; for nearly forty years, it had been associated with one of the crummiest Bond films ever made.

4. GOLDENEYE (1985)

Here was a (pardon the pun) golden opportunity to re-invent the James Bond series: a new leading man (Pierce Brosnan, succeeding the poorly received Timothy Dalton) and a new era (following the collapse of the Soviet Union) should have added up to a new 007 ready to take on the 21st century. It was not to be. GoldenEye is about as rote as the series gets, plodding joylessly through all the usual Stations of the Cross. If not for the presence of Famke Janssen at maximum hottitude as femme fatale Xenia Onatopp, it would easily be the dullest of all Bonds. Certainly Sean Bean, as a fellow MI6 agent turned traitor, is the most boring Bond villain ever. The only real innovation is the casting of Judi Dench as M, but aside from one throwaway line about Bond being a misogynist and a Cold War relic, the potential sparks never fly. The movie's highlight is the obligatory Q scene, which plays like a Get Smart outtake. Not a good sign.

3. LIVE & LET DIE (1974)

In a series that has spanned more than three decades, a big part of the trick of keeping the Bond franchise alive has been finding the right balance between stubbornly maintaining its own identity and incorporating enough elements from a changing world to keep Bond from seeming like an anachronism. Never did the series lose its footing more disastrously than in the first installment starring Roger Moore. For a start, it was the first Bond movie to feature a theme song by an out-and-out rock band instead of a jazz singer or lounge crooner -- and make no mistake, if the song itself is no great highlight of Paul McCartney's career, better him than Duran Duran or A-Ha. But at a deeper level, it's the "blacksploitation" Bond movie, a real historical artifact and a pretty embarrassing one. First-time viewers who had barely begun to start adjusting to the new, male-mannequin Bond of the Roger Moore era were subjected to the sight of this smarmy British cracker sauntering into a Harlem restaurant called "Fillet of Soul" and mixing it up with the confused-looking brothers inside, who might have thought they were waiting for John Shaft. Yaphet Kotto, as great an actor as ever got assigned the job of trying to think up an amusing death for 007, got stuck with the lamest super-villain role in the series to date: his name ("Mr. Big"), his mission (to dominate...not the world, but the heroin trade), and his death scene, which is reminiscent of the time that the Pink Panther balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade ran amok, all are pitifully unworthy of him. The movie, which is set in a world where every black person in North America (including Gloria Hendry as the first black Bond girl) seems to be in on Mr. Big's conspiracy to blanket the cities with horse, and in which these wretched lost souls are kept in line by their primitive susceptibility to voodoo, tries to balance things out by including a stereotypical big-bellied Loozianna sheriff (Clifton James) who co-stars in an endless back country car chase that would have been beneath the dignity of Hal Needham.

2. MOONRAKER (1979)

This post-Star Wars meld of Bond with sci-fi space opera finds the series sunk deep in its decadent phase. The film cost a reported $34 million, twenty million more than its predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me, and while the investment paid off at the box office, the strain shows. No other Bond film surpasses it in terms of the number of exotic locations, huge sets, and beautiful women for Bond to beat off, but it's short on energy and wit, which were once the defining qualities of the series -- and which the producers, and maybe audiences hooked on the formula, now judged to be superfluous. Most of the cast, including Moore, Lois Chiles as the heroine, and Michel Lonsdale as the supervillain Drax, look ready to join a crowd scene in a George Romero zombie movie; the movie's only charm comes from Richard Kiel, reprising his role as a lovesick Jaws before being consigned to join Sheriff J. W. Pepper in Recurring Character Limbo.

1. A VIEW TO A KILL (1985)

Considering how easy it is to get fans to start arguing about most aspects of the Bond series, the general consensus that this is without a doubt the sorriest Bond movie of all time is so solidly formed that it's almost uncanny. Aside from the fact that, at 57, Roger Moore looked readier than ever to be put out to pasture, it didn't necessarily look doomed on paper. The title theme by Duran Duran is so howlingly, garishly wrong that it's kind of right, it was sweet of them to give John Steed, i.e. Patrick McNee, a role as one of Bond's doomed helpmates, and whose ears didn't perk up at the suggestion of Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? Walken, his hair artificially lemon-flavored, plays a psychopathic ex-KGB agent who was created by a Nazi mad scientist; now rich as the owner of a microchip-manufacturing company, he is meant to be such a cool killer as to be devoid of human emotions -- which turns out to be not such a hot idea, because when Walken applies all his considerable Method intensity to being devoid of emotion, he's da void, all right. Also not helping out are Grace Jones, who packs surprisingly little personality inside her outre exterior but whose bedroom clinches with either Moore or Walken can still give you nightmares, and, as the heroine, Tanya Roberts, who actually does less for this movie than she did for her starring gig the year before as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Joanna Lumley Remembers: When Edina Met James Bond

Phil Nugent — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It turns out that Joanna Lumley has a peculiar habit of dropping in on long-running spy-adventure franchises at strange moments in their histories. She stood in for Diana Rigg/Honor Blackman/Linda Thorson in the mid-1970s TV series The New Avengers, a retread of the classic 1960s show that also featured an extra, young male cast member (Gareth Hunt) so that he could handle any chores that might tax Patrick McNee's delicate heart rate. And in 1969, when she was 22, she appeared in the first James Bond film not starring Sean Connery, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. For those of you who may have trouble keeping one movie's world-domination plot straight from another's, that's the one where Blofeld, played by Telly Savalas with his earlobes pinned back, takes over a clinic in the Swiss alps and "cures" a bunch of girls of their allergies by hypnosis. In the process, he also turns them into unwitting time-release bombs in a biological-terrorism scheme as part of his plot to force the world's powers to grant him amnesty for all his past crimes and the right to be addressed as "Comte Balthazar de Bleuchamp" by anyone who can get the words out with a straight face. Lumley played one of these girls. "I was sent to meet Harry Saltzman, the American who co-produced the Bond films with Cubby Broccoli, in South Audley Street," she recalls. "It was a very hot day. The lift had broken. He arrived in his Rolls-Royce, after lunch, and since his office was on the top floor, I had to follow him up the stairs. At the top, he was so out of breath he was almost speechless. He just managed to say, 'Ya have da part'. I said thank you, and went away again. I often wondered why he hadn’t told me in the lobby downstairs."

Lumley's role was not large; her character is called simply "The English Girl", and she only has a couple of lines, one of them being the immortal "Oh goody, egg nog on Christmas Eve, just like we have at home.” ("I said quietly that we don’t have an eggnog tradition in Britain, but it was an American film so I had to say the line anyway. I felt like a traitor.") She didn't even get to go to bed with Bond, which is just as well, since the actress who did had to deliver a breathless post-coital monologue on the bother of having an allegery to chickens when your family operates a chicken farm. (Has it never occurred to you, Elspeth dear, that your allergy is your body's way of telling you something? Damn it, you're a beautiful girl, now kick the dust of that chicken farm off your penny loafers and get out into the big wide world and enjoy life! Sorry, where was I?) Still, Lumley is proud to be associated with On Her Majesty's Secret Service, because "the Bond film aficionados put it in the top three ever made, if not at the very top." Just because Lumley knows some off-the-wall Bond aficionados does not make their judgement incorrect. On Her Majesty's has most of the elements of a superior Bond movie, including thrilling wintry chase scenes (the film was directed by Peter R. Hunt, whose whiplash action editing was an essential part of the first wave of Bond films), an unusually classy romantic soundtrack number performed by Louis Armstrong, and a top-flight supporting cast that includes Diana Rigg as the woman who would (briefly) be Mrs. Bond, Gabriele Ferzetti as her way-cool gangster dad (who gets to punch her out before delivering the line, "Hey, you spare-a da rod and you spoil-a da child!"), and Ilse Steppat as Blofeld's female-tank sidekick. If the movie is actually underrated a bit, it's because of the presence, or rather the lack of same, of George Lazenby, the colorless Australian male model who got to stand in for Connery while he was in the bathroom for four years. According to Lumley, there were also "grim garlic-related stories" of the difficulties between Rigg and Lazenby, and I'd love to know whether this is supposed to be a veiled accusation that one of the leads is a vampire or just an indirect way of hinting that somebody's breath was not ideally suited to the kissing scenes. There's also an adorable recollection of how producer "Cubby Broccoli would come on set and say 'Is everybody happy? Is anything going wrong?' He often had his little daughter with him, who used to talk during filming but no one was allowed to say 'shush'. That was Barbara Broccoli, who now runs the film franchise." My guess is that today she could strip and do interpretive dance just out of camera range and nobody would say shit, either.

Related Stories: The Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs

The Screengrab : patrick mcnee

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Two)

Joanna Lumley Remembers: When Edina Met James Bond