Tag Archives: Sean Connery

Skyfall Countdown Day 10: Never Say Never Again

“Mr. Bean, at your service.”

It’s difficult to present a review of the most famous “non-Bond Bond movie” without delving first into the tangled history of how this one-off came to be.  As terms of the legal settlement that allowed Thunderball to be filmed in 1965, Kevin McClory agreed to refrain from producing a competing Bond movie for at least ten years.  At the time, this must have seemed like a good way to dissuade him permanently, for back then, no one could have conceived the potential of a single film franchise running much beyond that.  But as Bond went on, McClory (who once referred to the situation as “the greatest act of piracy in motion picture history”) merely bided his time, and in the early 70’s began putting together his own brand new 007 screenplay with the assistance of Sean Connery himself, to be called either James Bond of the Secret Service or Warhead.  McClory filed suit against Albert R. Broccoli and Eon Productions to prevent them from using Blofeld and SPECTRE in The Spy Who Loved Me.  Countersuits from Broccoli’s people ultimately prevented McClory from producing an original Bond story – he was permitted only to remake Thunderball, absent familiar elements like the gunbarrel opening and iconic James Bond theme which were intellectual properties of Eon.  And so, despite it being almost 20 years later and excepting a few surface aesthetic touches, that’s all Never Say Never Again is:  Thunderball Redux.

After failing a training exercise, a semi-retired James Bond (Connery) is sent by the penny-pinching M (Edward Fox) to the Shrublands health clinic to recuperate, where by coincidence, American air force pilot Jack Petachi (Gavan O’Herlihy) is recovering from surgery to replace his right eye with a copy of that of the President of the United States, in a plot by SPECTRE agents led by Maximilian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) to steal two nuclear bombs and hold the world hostage.  Petachi’s sister Domino (Kim Basinger), who happens to be Largo’s girlfriend, is unaware of her brother’s complicity in the plan and ultimately teams up with Bond to recover the bombs before it’s too late.  Because they were restricted to the basic Thunderball plot, the filmmakers attempted to refresh the tale by acknowledging Bond’s age, having Q’s department short on funds, making Felix Leiter African-American and throwing in, for comic relief, Rowan Atkinson as snivelling bureaucrat Nigel Small-Fawcett.  They also update the original showdown between Bond and Largo from the baccarat table to a video game that gives its players electric shocks when they lose points.  But one thing nags at you throughout the entire affair – if Kevin McClory had fought so long and so hard to be able to make his own Bond movie, why does the result seem so incredibly half-assed?  It was his chance to prove to those who considered him a bitter also-ran choking on sour grapes that he’d been right all along, that he knew how to make Bond sizzle, and instead, he completely blew it – whether it was in the personnel he hired to carry out production, or whether from simply being misguided, we’ll never know.  But that is inside Hollywood dish, and what matters to us is what we the audience are left with, which is a very boring movie.

Despite heavyweights in the cast like Brandauer and Max von Sydow (as Blofeld), no one seems to be giving it their all, with one major exception – Barbara Carrera as Fatima Blush, this movie’s equivalent of Thunderball’s Fiona Volpe, only twice as scorching and about twenty times as insane.  Carrera, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance here, is gorgeous, playful, bewitching and thoroughly, remorselessly evil, whether she’s tossing a lethal snake into Petachi’s car, planting a bomb on Bond’s air tanks, dancing through a lobby after having drowned a girl in the bath or reclining stylishly poolside as she dynamites Bond’s hotel room.  She is way over the top, certainly, but when everyone else is playing it so dour and humourless, it’s like a jolt of electricity crosses the screen every time she appears.  In the time-honoured tradition of Bond baddies, Fatima is undone by her own ego, insisting that Bond write a confession naming her as the greatest lover he’s ever had, and unwittingly giving him the chance to blow her up with an explosive pen, leaving behind – in homage to The Wizard of Oz – nothing but her high heels.  The trouble is she’s killed off much too early, and the movie then goes on for another hour and a half with little else to hold our interest.  The miscast Basinger in particular seems like she doesn’t want to be in the movie at all, and the acclaimed Brandauer has never been more unengaging.  Connery is trying, at least, to get everyone to live up to his standard, but one can’t help but thinking even he finds it all terribly familiar; like the audience, he too grows bored once Carrera is gone.

Ultimately, Never Say Never Again is burdened, like Thunderball, with having many of its scenes set underwater, and it seems that nothing has been learned in the ensuing twenty years of how to tighten the pace of those sequences.  Director Irvin Kershner, who made the best Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back, seems curiously out of his depth here, unable to marry crisp action and strong character the way he did just three years previously.  The cinematography and editing is so sloppy it borders on incompetent, and the whole movie has a faded look that makes it look cheap, despite the obvious robust expenditure on actors, sets and locations.  And quick – can you hum the theme song to Never Say Never Again?  I’ll wait.  Music has always been a critical component of the James Bond movies and composer Michel Legrand drops the ball here.  As dull as “All Time High,” the theme to Octopussy was, it at least had a melody that could be carried through the rest of the film as leitmotif; I’m not entirely sure what Legrand is up to with his disorganized collection of random notes that sparsely populate the movie’s running time.  It, like so many other elements of Never Say Never Again, is a wasted opportunity.

Sean Connery has alleged with his trademark Scots frustration that after the movie’s credited producer Jack Schwartzman abandoned the project, it was left to him and the assistant director to produce the final movie.  Never Say Never Again is something of a textbook example of what a movie would look like if nobody really cared about making it – if it succeeds at any level it’s only because of Connery’s charisma and Carrera’s wildly sexy villainess.  One is forced to speculate if, for Kevin McClory, the enterprise wasn’t so much about producing a quality feature but simply sticking it to Cubby Broccoli, and that the actual grunt work of production was never that interesting to him.  McClory would try again in the 1990’s, with rumours swirling of a rival Bond movie called Warhead 2000 A.D. starring Timothy Dalton to go up against the Broccoli family and Pierce Brosnan.  But it wouldn’t happen, and Never Say Never Again would remain McClory’s singular contribution, this oddity in the history of the cinematic James Bond that was born of lawsuits and animosity and never, it seems based on the finished product, the desire to entertain.

Tomorrow:  The review I’ve been dreading for fourteen days.

Skyfall Countdown Day 11: Octopussy

“The script says we kiss here.”





Tomorrow:  Connery comes back to say never again, again.

Skyfall Countdown Day 15: The Man with the Golden Gun

Britt Ekland, considering firing her agent.

Art, like life, is in making choices.  The Man with the Golden Gun is a movie full of bad ones.  Rushed into production following the release of Live and Let Die, it is a pedestrian effort that reeks of exhaustion and a lack of inspiration on the part of the major creative team, despite some game efforts from those working beneath them.  The movie should work – it has exotic locations, impressive stunts (including one of the most amazing car jumps ever seen on film up to that point) beautiful women and a complex and fascinating villain performed by a legendary actor.  That it doesn’t is just proof that even with the best intentions and the best people, things can still go spectacularly wrong.

At the height of the 1973 energy crisis, and with a solar power expert who holds the key to resolving it missing, a mysterious golden bullet etched with “007” sent to London puts James Bond on the trail of famed assassin Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee), the titular man with the golden gun who charges $1 million per hit.  Bond travels to the Far East, assisted and hindered the bumbling Mary Goodnight (Peter Sellers’ ex-wife Britt Ekland), and finds that the bullet was sent by the villain’s mistress Andrea Anders (Maud Adams), longing to be free of her sadistic partner and believing that Bond is destined to be her liberator.  When the missing solar expert, Gibson, winds up on the receiving end of one of Scaramanga’s golden bullets, Bond discovers the assassin’s collusion with a leading Chinese industrialist to use Gibson’s invention, the “Solex Agitator,” to secure a world monopoly on solar power, and the stage is set for a final confrontation between Bond and Scaramanga on the villain’s private island – a winner-take-all shootout inside Scaramanga’s house of mirrors and wax recreations.

Christopher Lee, who has more screen credits than anyone else in history, was Ian Fleming’s cousin and transformed the thuggish character from what is considered to be Fleming’s weakest Bond book into a cultured, erudite man of wit and refinement who kills for money, playing him as the morally ambiguous, dark side of James Bond (the cultured, erudite man of wit and refinement who kills for queen and country), in an extension of the theme of the social confrontation between good and evil we saw in the last movie.  Lee is incredibly charming in the part, even eliciting our sympathy when he tells Bond the touching tale of how his best friend as a child was a circus elephant who was murdered in front of him, and never, somewhat to the detriment of the story, lets his freak flag fly.  Indeed, Scaramanga’s “diabolical” plan to spread solar power franchises across the world doesn’t sound like one that needs to be foiled, particularly in the modern era where we’ve seen countless innocent thousands die in wars for oil.  One wonders if things would be better if Bond were to simply leave him alone, rather than saving the status quo for Halliburton and Exxon.  Furthermore, Bond’s characterization in this movie is off; he is inexplicably angry throughout much of the film, snapping frequently at Mary Goodnight, threatening to blow the genitals off an uncooperative bullet maker and slapping the put-upon kept woman Andrea around like a rag doll.  Even though great care was taken in the previous movie to separate Moore’s portrayal of Bond from that of Connery, here he’s like Connery’s little brother on amphetamines.  With our hero acting so unpleasantly out of sorts (even M is in a more-than-usual bad mood in this movie, telling Q to shut up every chance he gets) and the bad guy’s ambitions seemingly in the better interest of humanity, we end up rooting for the wrong person.

The supporting characters are a mixed bag.  For better or worse, you keep expecting Herve Villechaize as Scaramanga’s manservant Nick Nack to yell about “de plane, boss, de plane!”  Soon-Teck Oh lends some dignity to the proceedings as Bond’s Hong Kong police contact Lt. Hip, welcome since the portrayal of the Asians in the rest of the movie verges on Charlie Chan-esque buffoonery, as interpreted by condescending British patricians bitter about the loss of the Empire.  Bond tries to communicate with a family in Macau by speaking slower.  The Chinese industrialist plotting with Scaramanga is named “Hai Fat” (in the original script he was to have a brother named Lo Fat, ha ha).  A naked swimming beauty is named “Chu Me.”  Bond defeats an evil sumo wrestler by giving him an atomic wedgie, while a truly stupid sequence in which Lt. Hip’s two nieces force Bond to stand aside as they make kung fu chop suey out of a gang of pyjama-wearing ruffians has to end with the last guy pulling a stupid face as he gets kicked in the groin.  If that weren’t enough, we also have J.W. Pepper to cringe at again, this time on vacation in Thailand in one of the biggest story contrivances in the history of motion pictures, calling everyone “pointy-heads” – at this point all you need to complete the gamut of cultural insensitivities is to have someone order “flied lice.”

Served atop this rather unappetizing concoction is a healthy helping of blond bimbo.  It’s been a while since I read the book, but I recall Mary Goodnight being considerably more capable as Bond’s assistant in Fleming’s pages than in the personage of Britt Ekland’s screen version.  Whether she’s getting stuffed in a closet, locked in the boot of a car, almost frying Bond with a laser beam by accidentally backing her bum into a control panel or inadvertently causing a solar power plant to blow sky high, she makes you wish she were the one who gets hoisted atop the mast of Scaramanga’s junk rather than Nick Nack at the end of the movie.  Clearly a lesson was learned here, for this would be the last time a female character in a 007 movie would be written so inanely – as audiences decided they don’t like a hero dragging a screaming nincompoop along on his adventures (a lesson apparently lost on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas when they were making Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.)  Andrea Anders is much more dour and human, and her story is worth exploring, but she gets killed off halfway through the movie.  Maud Adams made an impression on the producers however, and would get the chance to survive to the end a decade later in Octopussy.

John Barry came back for this entry, but needn’t have bothered – his work here is dull, the title song performed by Lulu as a bad Shirley Bassey impression is uninspired, and Barry has since apologized for choosing to include the sound of a slide whistle over the amazing barrel roll jump that takes place in the middle of the movie (hint hint, makers of the remastered edition!), taking all the drama and suspense out of a spectacular feat – of course, the script doesn’t help by having Bond quip “Ever heard of Evel Knievel?” before hitting the gas.  The peculiar islands of Phuket in Thailand are a striking backdrop for the movie’s finale, but Ken Adam’s touch is sorely missed in the production design department, and the funhouse setting of the final showdown reminds one of Berthold Brecht in its extremely spare, minimalist approach – and not in a good way, as it just looks like the production ran out of money.  The movie sort of lurches and wheezes to its conclusion, shepherded at each stage it seems by a director rather bored with the entire endeavour and eager to finish the day’s shooting so he can get out on the golf course.  Much as you may be able to detect how I feel in writing this review of it.

James Bond would need a three-year rest after this movie to “go away and dream it all up again,” to cite U2’s Bono.  It would be the last film for a couple of major Bond veterans, including director Guy Hamilton, and producer Harry Saltzman, who was forced to sell his half of the James Bond rights back to the studio following some unsuccessful side ventures.  In a way, it was just as well that these two called it quits, if The Man with the Golden Gun was to be typical of their contributions going forward.  Bond could not survive another affair so listless and so lacking in the panache that had first made him so special to the world.

Tomorrow:  7/7/77 is a lucky number for James Bond.

Skyfall Countdown Day 16: Live and Let Die










Skyfall Countdown Day 18: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service








Tomorrow:  Diamonds are Forever, but Sean Connery is not.

Skyfall Countdown Day 20: You Only Live Twice

Not Sean Connery’s Japanese love interest.

James Bond in space!  Well, not quite yet, but almost.  The story behind this one is that following Thunderball, the original intent was to film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but since that movie involved a significant amount of skiing and they missed out on winter, plans were quickly modified to shoot a script that didn’t involve snow; namely, Ian Fleming’s rather odd story of Bond journeying to Japan, battling archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld in a weird “garden of death,” losing his memory and thinking he’s a Japanese fisherman.  In the novel, Blofeld, in the alias of “Dr. Shatterhand,” lives in a medieval Japanese castle on the edge of the sea, which for producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman turns out to be a flight of the late Ian Fleming’s imagination.  Initial location scouting trips reveal that the Japanese never build their castles on the seashore because of Japan’s tendency to be smacked around by earthquakes and typhoons.  What’s the answer then?  Keep Blofeld and the Japanese setting but toss the story completely in favour of a brand new screenplay by the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Makes perfect sense, right?

And so, from the pen of Roald Dahl comes a tale where a mysterious rocket is gobbling up American and Soviet capsules in outer space, forcing the superpowers to the edge of nuclear war.  Apparently one of Harry Saltzman’s favourite gimmicks was surprising the audience by killing Bond off in the teaser, and since it worked so well in From Russia with Love, the movie opens with Bond apparently being gunned down in the bed of a Chinese dalliance and given a funeral at sea, only to revive unharmed aboard a British submarine for his mission briefing.  Aided in Tokyo by local intelligence czar Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba) and comely spy Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi), Bond finds a connection to the missing spaceships through industrialist Osato (Teru Shimada) and is disguised as a Japanese fisherman in order to get close to the volcano where they suspect the interceptor spacecraft is being housed.  After Aki’s tragic murder, Bond is wed to another of Tiger’s agents, Kissy (Mie Hama) who accompanies him into the volcano, which turns out to be the cavernous lair of the notorious Nehru-jacketed Blofeld, his face revealed for the first time in the personage of actor Donald Pleasence (in an interesting aside, Pleasence was a last-minute replacement after it was concluded that the first actor looked too much like Santa Claus to be believable as a supervillain, hence Blofeld also acquiring his signature facial scar to double down on his evilness).  It’s up to Bond and a squad of ninja allies to stop Blofeld before a third spaceship can be captured, thus igniting World War III.

The plot is Dr. Strangelove territory and a clear step in the direction of science fiction given what’s come before, but the direction is solid and the film’s aesthetic choices keep it a surprising ride, my sole complaint the overly lengthy Japanese wedding scene.  Only in Bond can you have an enemy vehicle disposed of by a helicopter with a giant magnet, or a henchman vaulted into a pool of ravenous piranha.  The movie feels enormous, successfully managing to re-up the ante every time you think you’ve seen everything, and spending every spare penny on spectacle and showmanship.  As a result, Sean Connery, blasé, perhaps, towards the ever-expanding set pieces, doesn’t seem quite so engaged in the proceedings this time around.  This is in fact, the only movie in which James Bond doesn’t get behind the wheel of a car, and the image of Connery driven around wildly by someone else is an unfortunate yet timely representation of what he must have felt Bond was becoming.  But he still manages to project his usual charm, even stuck playacting in front of a rear-projection screen for the sequence involving Little Nellie, Bond’s miniature helicopter able to take out a group of enemy Hueys with its arsenal of rockets, flamethrowers and aerial mines.

In an era when a lot of Hollywood productions were still casting white people in bad makeup jobs as Asians (Connery’s mid-movie Japanese makeover included), it’s refreshing to see such positive use of native Japanese actors in major roles, even if most of them are dubbed (Tanaka was voiced by the same actor who did Largo in Thunderball, so they sound identical.)  And the extensive location shooting showcases both cityscapes and landscapes of Japan in a way that reinforces the international flavour without becoming a tedious travelogue.  Of course, the most amazing location is Ken Adam’s set of SPECTRE’s hollowed-out volcano, built at good old Pinewood Studios back in England.  This visually sublime creation, built at three times the cost of the entire budget of Dr. No and so enormous in scope that no soundstage at the time could house it, remains impressive even after repeat viewings (one does wonder how, in the Bond universe, SPECTRE could have engaged on such a major construction project without outside notice).  Nowadays, where almost every major set is digital bluescreen fakery, it stands as a testament to the true art of the production designer, and something that the recent Bond films have lost.  Nancy Sinatra sings the lush title track with its sweeping strings (recognizable to fans of Robbie Williams’ song “Millennium”), another change of tone from the brassy stylings and blow-the-roof-off vocalizations that had characterized the last two entries.  John Barry’s score both enhances the Japanese flavour and provides a stirring, suspenseful theme for the outer space scenes, one that would be borrowed, sampled and remixed decades later, most notably by his spiritual successor as 007’s composer-in-residence, David Arnold.

The Japanese press were merciless hounds toward Sean Connery while the movie was in production, photographing him in the bathroom and printing articles with out of context quotes suggesting that Connery didn’t find Japanese women attractive, souring the notoriously hot-blooded Scot on the idea of being forced to be Bond off-camera as well.  Enough was enough, and he announced finally that he would be stepping away from the role after filming finished.  You Only Live Twice would turn out to be, however, the end of only the infancy of the James Bond film series, and awkward puberty was soon to follow, with new actors and creative personnel struggling to redefine a man who was very much a 60’s hero for the changing decades to come.

Tomorrow:  The first, ill-advised crack at Casino Royale.

Skyfall Countdown Day 21: Thunderball

Sean Connery suffering another hard day at the office.

My contrarian instincts tend to show when it comes to Thunderball, because for me, it has always been the bête noire of the “official” Sean Connery Bond films.  In terms of sheer box office power it was the most popular of the movies he ever made.  It’s also rumoured that it was Connery’s personal favourite of his Bond appearances.  But the long and tortured history it took to get to the screen resulted in what, on reflection, is an overlong, uneven and rather pedestrian entry, which is all the more disappointing given the production values and the presence of arguably the most jaw-droppingly stunning woman ever to star as James Bond’s leading lady.

Had history unfolded differently, Thunderball would have been the first James Bond movie, and it would have hit screens several years prior to Dr. No.  Ian Fleming had initially worked with producer Kevin McClory and playwright Jack Whittingham to develop a 007 screenplay – when nothing came it, Fleming went ahead and adapted the work into his novel Thunderball and was subsequently whacked with a plagiarism lawsuit from his aggrieved former partners – the stress of which certainly contributed to the author’s failing health.  Claiming rights to Thunderball, McClory was later prepared to go ahead and produce his own James Bond film in competition with the Broccoli-Saltzman series until all parties agreed upon a truce – McClory would produce Thunderball in collaboration with Broccoli and Saltzman, Connery would star, and in return, McClory would agree not to make another Bond movie for at least ten years.  That would subsequently not turn out to be that, with McClory fighting a losing battle for the rights to James Bond for the rest of his life (he passed away in 2006).  More on that when we get to Never Say Never Again in a few weeks.

Anyway, despite its turbulent pregnancy, the movie is serviceable, if deeply flawed for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.  Agents of SPECTRE, coordinated by the eyepatch-wearing Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), hijack a NATO bomber with two nuclear weapons aboard, hiding it in the Bahamas and demanding 100 million pounds in diamonds as a ransom.  James Bond happens to be recuperating at a health clinic where the operation is being coordinated and requests assignment to Nassau to locate the bombs before they can be deployed against the United States.  He’s aided in his search by Largo’s beautiful girlfriend Domino (Claudine Auger), the sister of the NATO pilot who was murdered during the theft of the bombs, and challenged by sizzling femme fatale Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi), who rides a motorbike equipped with rocket launchers.  A large portion of the movie takes place underwater, with the climactic battle unfolding between legions of scuba divers having at each other with knives and spearguns beneath the waves.

Unfortunately, the screenplay, so key to the success of Goldfinger, is not equal to the visual spectacle this time around.  A fundamental narrative mistake mars the plot in that the audience is always ahead of Bond; this is not always a bad thing (eg. From Russia with Love) but here the experience is frustrating.  We have seen exactly where the bombs are hidden in the first act – in a sequence of exhausting detail – yet are subjected to repeated scenes of Bond wandering around looking for them, in some cases literally flying over water peering down with binoculars, exchanging bland exposition with Felix Leiter (Rik van Nutter).  The main antagonist, Largo, is a paper-thin bad guy with no motivation other than as a required mechanism to move the plot along – he is SPECTRE’s muscle for this operation, nothing more, and accordingly receives no character development, giving us little interest in watching him be brought down.  His social interactions with Bond are awkward and unmemorable, and have nowhere near the electricity of Bond’s encounters with Auric Goldfinger.

It’s perhaps unintentionally ironic that “largo” in musical terms means a very slow tempo, for this movie unfolds at such a lethargic pace (even with the looming threat of nuclear destruction) that there never seems to be any great urgency by anyone to do anything.  The underwater scenes were likely a revelation in 1965 but they drag the film down – one gets the sense that so much money was spent in staging and shooting them that the producers did not want to waste a single frame of footage, however, a few minutes removed strategically here and there could have tightened the pace.  Even John Barry’s usually brilliant scoring work gets repetitive as he’s forced to bolster these lengthy servings of underwater action.  The temptation to push fast forward is regrettable for any movie, and you can skip whole sections of Thunderball and still follow the story.

So what remains to recommend this water-logged James Bond tale?  Well, Claudine Auger, the first of many otherworldly French Bond girls, is a spectacular sight (even though her deeper continental accent was dubbed by a higher-pitched actress), garbed to keep the best of her natural assets on display as much as possible, and usually just out of the water.  Even if her acting is not always up to par, her beauty alone makes her a compelling screen presence.  Luciana Paluzzi has some fun also with the first substantial “sexy bad girl” role in a Bond movie but never pushes things into the arena of camp villainy (villainessy?), ensuring that her character maintains a sliver of menace.  (There’s a fun scene where she mocks the convention established by Goldfinger where Bond’s sexual prowess can seemingly turn any evil woman to the side of the angels.)  The Nassau locations would have been suitably exotic to a 1965 audience even if they seem a bit tourist-trappy to the jaded eyes of today, and the scene where a wounded Bond attempts to lose his pursuers through the chaos of the Junkanoo parade is well-staged.  But overall the movie is bloated, lacks focus and is too enamoured of the technical prowess of its underwater scenes to make for a viewing experience one is terribly eager to repeat.

Tomorrow:  Ian Fleming gets the heave-ho in You Only Live Twice.

Skyfall Countdown Day 22: Goldfinger









Tomorrow:  Thunderball gets water-logged.

Skyfall Countdown Day 23: From Russia with Love

“I think my mouth is too big.”

24 days.  24 reviews.  The James Bond saga continues.







Tomorrow:  Goldfinger and all that glitters.

Skyfall Countdown Day 24: Dr. No

“Bond… James Bond.”






Tomorrow:  From Russia with Love raises the bar.