Recently, I have been watching James Bond films. I once wrote a very rambling piece about how the Daniel Craig flicks are terrible, so to put things into perspective, I thought I'd write more rambling wank about the whole series, and what better place to start than at the beginning? Live and Let Die, that's where.
 |
| DAS RITE. |
Instead of watching them in order, I started with Roger Moore and only went back to the Connery era later, which has the effect of making the changes in the series seem less gradual and starker. While consensus among plebeians is that the Connery era consisted of srs bsns spy films and the Moore era of high camp comedies, a reordered viewing shows the films in a somewhat different light. What is evident to me in light of this most recent viewing is that the Moore films (and in fact Diamonds are Forever) and the Austin Powers series of parody flicks merely surface the humour that was latent in the original Connery run. For example, in From Russia With Love, SPECTRE No. 3 Rosa Klebb arrives on SPECTRE Island (yes) and walks past a series of agents doing combat training, during which she is informed they use live targets.
This is obviously funny, and we recognise this type of scene from any number of Naked Gun style parodies, but because it is delivered straight, without ever breaking character or winking at the audience, the humour is sublimated and becomes something altogether more interesting: surreal. The best way to look at the Connery films is literally as a dream.
 |
| If you think about it, this famous image is very strange indeed. |
At the start of Doctor No, James Bond is up at 3am in a casino where he meets Sylvia Trench. He's then called in to MI6 headquarters where he hits on Miss Moneypenny, gets a new gun and is sent immediately to Jamaica, stopping only briefly at his place to pack some things and plow Sylvia's trench. This late night ambience is never really touched on in any subsequent Bonds, but there's something effectively disorienting about it, and that sensation never quite goes away throughout the first five films.
 |
| How did she even get in there? |
At a later point, Bond falls asleep on an island and wakes up (or does he lol) to find Honey Ryder walking up out of the sea, singing a song he heard earlier on the radio. Intentionally or not, we're being telegraphed dream vibes. Do all the women you meet have sexually suggestive names? In fact, in Goldfinger, when waking (or is he lol) to find a woman literally named Pussy Galore tending to him, Bond says "I must be dreaming". Need I remind you that, as Doctor MILFi from The Sopranos says, dreams are wishes?
Of course Bond and Ryder are captured by the eponymous villain who, I'm reliably informed, was at one stage set to be revealed to be a monkey. He lives in an elaborate and beautiful Ken Adam set with an aquarium, Die Hard vents and a large control room from which he topples missiles to "compensate for having no hands". This script is so Freudian it might as well be from a Hitchcock flick. No is also clearly a prototype for the cinematic Blofeld who would appear in the next film: at first shot only from the waist down and severely dressed, in keeping with his sterile futurist aesthetic.
 |
| SPECTRE may have been completely useless, but they remain unmatched for style. |
In the end he drowns because his metal prop hands can't climb up a slippery framework, which is much better than the book in which he's killed by fucking guano, because Ian Fleming had the sense of humour of an eight year old. In the book Bond fights a fucking octopus too, so whenever someone busts out the "but it's more like the boooks" defence of the Craig shitflicks, you can use this to laugh in their delinquent physiognomies.
 |
| Bond fan vs Craig/Fleming fan (2019, decolourised) |
One change from the book for the worse, however, is that Bond randomly shoots some dude he could have usefully interrogated, or at least brought in for questioning. This is bad from a logic point of view (plenty more of that later), but it does establish something interesting about Bond's character, which has been another point of contention among retards forever: Bond is a psychopath. This is actually pretty realistic for a government assassin, and consistent with his behaviour throughout the series, except maybe for the Lazenby, Dalton and Brosnan iterations. Bond forms shallow attachments, is charming but manipulative, can mimic empathy but actually has none, is happy to treat anyone and everyone as disposable and rough them up whenever he deems necessary, feels little to no fear and is obsessed with status symbols such as alcoholic vintages, sharp suits and douchebag cars. These are all psychopathic traits and it's intriguing to think Bond is basically Hannibal Lecter except putting his pathology to more constructive use.
