Double O Spies, Both Classic and Coming

Although the actual 60th anniversary of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, debuting in London, England, won’t come until October of this year, you can expect to see plenty of advance publicity.

Managing editor Bill Koenig of The Spy Command, for instance, recently posted a six-part series looking back at that earliest entry in what has since become a highly profitable big-screen movie franchise. Part I focuses on “odd couple” business partners Albert R. Broccoli, an American, and Canadian Harry Saltzman, who collaborated in establishing the series. Part II recalls how Terence Young snared the job of directing Dr. No, and then went on to direct two more of the first four 007 flicks. In Part III, Koenig tells how Scottish actor Sean Connery (“an uncut diamond at the time”) wound up playing Ian Fleming’s suave secret agent, while Part IV sings the praises of Ursula Andress, the franchise’s first “Bond girl.” Part V explains how the movie’s production designer, Ken Adam, established the look of Dr. No. Finally, Part VI assesses that first movie’s legacy, six decades on.

Just for future reference, Dr. No premiered in the United Kingdom on October 5, 1962. It’s U.S. debut wasn’t until May 8, 1963.

* * *

Speaking of 007 and his world, there’s some fresh news regarding that trilogy of modern-day thrillers English author Kim Sherwood has contracted to compose for Ian Fleming Publications and HarperCollins. The Book Bond blog says the first of those three novels (all of which will build around Double O agents other than Mr. Bond himself) is to be titled Double or Nothing, and should reach booksellers by September 1 of this year. Here’s a teaser offering a few plot specifics and the names of Sherwood’s new espionage agents:

James Bond is missing ...
007 has been captured, perhaps even killed, by a sinister private military company. His whereabouts are unknown.

Meet the new generation of spies ...
Johanna Harwood, 003. Joseph Dryden, 004. Sid Bashir, 009. Together, they represent the very best and brightest of MI6. Skilled, determined and with a licence to kill, they will do anything to protect their country.

The fate of the world rests in their hands ...
Tech billionaire Sir Bertram Paradise claims he can reverse the climate crisis and save the planet. But can he really? The new spies must uncover the truth, because the future of humanity hangs in the balance.

Time is running out.

The Web site MI6 notes that “Kim Sherwood makes a nice nod to a fellow female writer in the James Bond sphere with the name of her new agent 003, Johanna Harwood, who in real life worked on the screenplays for Dr. No and From Russia With Love.”

Bullet Points: Cyber Monday Edition

• If you could pick 12 debut novels that “changed crime fiction,” would they include Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Colin Dexter’s Last Bus to Woodstock, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Maybe not, but those works are among the “famous firsts” recently championed by Crime Fiction Lover. Unfortunately, the site errs when it includes Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, which wasn’t actually his first novel; that honor belongs instead to 1955’s The Dark Arena.

• “Some of the most brilliant speech in novels can be found in this genre,” The Guardian says of crime fiction. The paper goes on to cite 10 examples of the best dialogue in this genre, from authors including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Highsmith, and Martin Amis.

• I’m not convinced we need another film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, but it appears we’re going to get one anyway, this time with Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot.

• Jason Whiton of Spy Vibe interviews Fergus Fleming, the nephew of James Bond creator Ian Fleming and the author of The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters (Bloomsbury). Their exchange opens with Whiton asking “to hear about your own and the family’s perception of Ian as a man. What was he like in person and as an uncle?” Fleming responds:

I have no personal recollection of Ian--he died when I was five--but I believe he was much liked in the family. Those who knew him remember his sense of fun, his kindness (apparently he was very good with children) and the glamour of seeing a Ford Thunderbird parked outside their house. But above all, they recall his generosity. If you were down on your luck Ian would give you his last penny.

All the same, I’m not sure my father thought much of Ian’s books at the time. He made my mother wrap The Spy Who Loved Me in brown paper lest she be seen reading such a scurrilous tract in public. Ian was so delighted when he heard of this that he used her name, Charmian, for Bond’s aunt.

• Elsewhere on the same site, Whiton chats with Alan Hayes, a “pop-culture scholar,” authority on the 1960s British TV spy series The Avengers, and author of the new book Two Against the Underworld, which looks back at the debut season of The Avengers and examines both its unproduced and missing episodes.

• The fall 2015 issue of Mysterical-E has been posted, with contents that include short stories by Phillip Thompson and Cathi Stoler, columns by Gerald So (on autumn television debuts) and C.A. Verstraete (on holiday mysteries), and interviews with Mars Preston (Writing Your First Mystery) and Virgil Alexander (The Baleful Owl).

• Being an enthusiastic reader of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Cool/Donald Lam private-eye series (which he wrote under the nom de plume A.A. Fair), I’m pleased to see the blog Crime and Spy Fiction from Poe Up to 1950 reviewing the first of those books, 1939’s The Bigger They Come. (I reviewed that very same novel here.)

• During an excellent conversation with Helen Barlow of the New Zealand Herald, English actor Michael Caine says that after a decades-long career of notable performances, “the film he holds dearest is the Len Deighton thriller, The Ipcress File [1965]. ‘It was the first time [my name] ever went over the title,’ he pronounces proudly. He was a bespectacled Cockney James Bond, I recall. ‘They called me James Bond three and a half!’ Caine quips of Harry Palmer, the spy he went on to play in four subsequent movies.”

• Other recent interviews worth reading: MysteryPeople talks with both Bavo Dhooge (Styx) and Eric Beetner (Rumrunners); Pop.Edit.Lit. goes one on one with Ben Sanders, the New Zealand author of American Blood; Crimespree Magazine’s Elise Cooper questions David Baldacci on the subject of The Guilty; S.W. Lauden “interrogates” both Dana King (The Man in the Window) and 2016’s Left Coast Crime guest of honor, Chantelle Aimée Osman; Crime Thriller Girl chats with Tom Wood about his latest thriller, The Darkest Day; and Saskatchewan mysteries authority Bill Selnes asks Gail Bowen some questions about her long-running Joanne Kilbourn series.

• Chanukah will begin this coming Sunday, December 6, and run for eight days. During that time, you might think about picking up one of the holiday-appropriate mystery novels on Janet Rudolph’s list.

• In Hardboiled Wonderland, Jedidiah Ayres pays tribute to some of “The Terrible, Short-Lived TV Shows of the ’80s/’90s That Shaped Me.” Among that bunch are the buddy cop show Hardball, the 21 Jump Street spin-off Booker, Misfits of Science (which I watched primarily to see a young Courtney Cox), and the cringe-worthy Cop Rock. His cohort, Terrence McCauley, chimes in with Rod Taylor’s Masquerade, Stingray, and the sometimes-fun Matt Houston. Enhancing these reminiscences are the shows’ main title sequences.

• In the 31 years since its original publication, back in 1984, Jay McInerney’s second-person New York novel, Bright Lights, Big City has taken its fare share of knocks. However, Reading Matters’ Kim Forrester praises it as “essentially a black comedy--and one that felt very close to my heart.” She concludes her review with this comment: “There are a lot of painful realizations in Bright Lights, Big City, all rounded out by a redemptive, satisfying ending. I’ve read a lot of great novels this year, but this one has to be up there with the best.” McInerney’s book was the first one I read from Gary Fisketjon’s Vintage Contemporaries series of trade paperbacks, and it led me to enjoy almost three dozen later entries. I wonder if I’d still like Bright Lights as much now as I did when I read it in my 20s …

• Speaking of reassessments … Critical Mass, “the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors,” has recently been rolling out a series it calls “Second Thoughts.” The idea is for NBCC members to remark on “a work that had a big impact on you long ago, and how it seemed when you re-encountered it later in life.” Few of the pieces have been about crime or mystery novels, but Mark Sarvas did write about To Russia with Love, by Ian Fleming, and Sam Sacks offered a reconsideration of Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s outstanding 1866 yarn. I don’t know how long this series will run, but you can keep up with its latest entries here.

• Here’s a serious hole in my education: I’ve never read any of John P. Marquand’s half-dozen novels featuring Japanese secret agent/detective Mr. Moto. Yet Vintage Pop Fictions says they’re “extremely good.” It goes on to call the second book in that series, Thank You, Mr. Moto, “a very entertaining and intelligent spy thriller and a worthy successor to Marquand’s first Moto novel, Your Turn, Mr. Moto, but it’s a bit more than that. It’s also a perceptive exploration of the mindset of the European expatriate in the Far East and it even touches on the merits of differing philosophies of life--not just the differences between European and Asian attitudes towards life but also between those who believe it is possible to control one’s destiny and those who believe that such a thing is futile and impossible. This is certainly a book that is slightly more intelligent and ambitious than the average thriller.” Perhaps I owe it to myself to sample I.A. Moto’s adventures soon, rather than putting it off for another year.

• Mystery Scene’s Oline H. Cogdill has a few gift suggestions for the crime-fiction fans on your holiday list, including the DVD set Foyle’s War: The Complete Saga and editor Sarah Weinman’s Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & ’50s.

• Another possible Christmas present, this one from the folks at ThugLit. Cruel Yule: Holiday Tales of Crime for People on the Naughty List features contributions from Hilary Davidson, Todd Robinson, Jen Conley, Ed Kurtz, and seven others.

• In this 2013 Los Angeles Review of Books essay, English professor Rohan Maitzen studies the women’s roles in Dick Francis’ novels and concludes that “Even three decades after women writers including Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky set new standards for the genre’s gender politics, introducing heroines who are tough, smart, and unapologetic, Francis unexpectedly holds his own.”

• Although I wrote back in 2010 about the 15th anniversary of Pierce Brosnan’s introduction as British agent James Bond, in GoldenEye, I neglected to highlight that picture’s 20th anniversary earlier this month. As Wikipedia notes, the 17th Bond flick had a limited release on November 13, 1995, but (per IMDb) its general U.S. debut was on November 17. Making up for my negligence, Bill Koenig’s The Spy Command delivered this piece about the 20th anniversary.

• While we’re on the subject of Bond (and doesn’t it seem that we often are?), let me mention a few other links that you might find interesting: Edward Biddulph, author of the blog James Bond Memes, writes here about the controversial use of the term “Bond girl”; David Cranmer, in Criminal Element, considers the place of Colonel Sun--Kingsley Amis’ 1968 Bond pastiche--in the Bond canon, declaring it “one of the finest” additions to that series of novels; even as Spectre still revels in the glow of its recent debut, The Spy Command looks ahead to the next, 25th 007 film; and Koenig’s blog offers this post celebrating the 50th anniversary of NBC-TV’s hour-long, 1965 special, The Incredible World of James Bond.

• Matt Taibi has a funny but depressing piece in Rolling Stone about the “clown car” of Republicans hoping to take over the Oval Office after President Barack Obama vacates it in 2017. “Conventional wisdom says that with the primaries and caucuses rapidly approaching, front-running nuts Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson must soon give way to the ‘real’ candidates,” writes Taibi. “But behind Trump and Carson is just more abyss. As I found out on a recent trip to New Hampshire, the rest of the field is either just as crazy or as dangerous as the current poll leaders, or too bumbling to win.”

• Do we really need a Lost in Space TV reboot?

• And we are now several days past Thanksgiving in the States, but I’m still seeing new posts themed to that occasion. In this piece, Read Me Deadly contributor “Sister Mary Murderous” (which has all the hallmarks of being a pseudonym) uses the 12 letters of Thanksgiving’s name to count down her favorite things about mystery fiction.

All That Glitters

I mentioned in my news wrap-up of September 17 that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the worldwide release of Goldfinger, the third of Sean Connery’s James Bond films. Adapted from Ian Fleming’s 1959 novel of the same name, Goldfinger turned Agent 007 from a diverting big-screen curiosity into a box-office phenomenon. “Of all the Bonds,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert in 1999, “Goldfinger is the best, and can stand as a surrogate for the others. If it is not a great film, it is a great entertainment, and contains all the elements of the Bond formula that would work again and again.”

In my brand-new column for Kirkus Reviews, I look back at the release of that movie, but more importantly, at the book on which it was based. As I write in the article,

Goldfinger, with its wildly implausible plot so dependent on coincidences, doesn’t always rank among readers’ favorites from the Bond canon; Moonraker (1955), From Russia With Love (1957), Casino Royale (1953) and Thunderball (1961) typically score higher. Yet this 1959 thriller is a splendid companion to the Connery picture, offering a great deal of interesting background to the action taking place on-screen. We’re also given a deeper understanding, in the book, of Auric Goldfinger and the adversarial relationship with 007 than the film, for all its strengths, portrayed.

Click here to read my whole Kirkus piece.

READ MORE: “Goldfinger: When James Bond Movies Truly Became JAMES BOND Movies,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts); “Goldfinger’s 50th Anniversary: The Golden Touch,” by Bill Koenig (The HMSS Weblog); “11 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About James Bond,” by Charlie Jane Anders and Amanda Yesilbas (io9); “The Big (James Bond) Quiz,” by Rick29 (Classic Film and TV Café); “22 Ridiculously Amazing 007 Posters for James Bond Films,” by Mike Flacy (The Checkout).

Bullet Points: Pre-Scotland Vote Edition

• Today marks 50 years since the London debut of Goldfinger, the third big-screen action film starring Sean Connery as Ian Fleming’s British super-spy, James Bond. As I noted in a previous post--complete with the motion picture’s opening title sequence--“the American release of Goldfinger didn’t come until December 22, 1964.” The HMSS Weblog has a bit more to say about Goldfinger here.

• 2014 year marked the first time contenders for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger in the Library award were selected by readers on the Web. With the nomination process having now concluded, here’s the longlist of writers who are vying for that prize (plus the names of their usual publishers):

-- M.C. Beaton (Constable & Robinson)
-- Tony Black (Black and White Publishing)
-- Sharon Bolton (Transworld Publishers)
-- Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
-- Mari Hannah (Pan)
-- James Oswald (Michael Joseph)
-- Phil Rickman (Corvus)
-- Leigh Russell (No Exit Press)
-- Mel Sherratt (Thomas & Mercer)
-- Neil White (Sphere)

The CWA explains that “Unlike most other literary prizes, the Dagger in the Library honours an author’s whole body of work to date, rather than a single title.” A shortlist of nominees will be announced on November 3, with the winner slated to be revealed during an event at Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road, London, in late November. (Hat tip to the Euro Crime Blog.)

• Steve Aldous, who in July contributed an interesting and important piece to The Rap Sheet about Ernest Tidyman and the “ghost writers” he employed to create his seven novels about black New York City gumshoe John Shaft, directs our attention toward this interview with David F. Walker. Walker has been hired to write Dynamite Entertainment’s new line of Shaft comic books. “Some good news,” Aldous says, “in that Walker is a fan of the books and [is] using them as the basis for his writing. He is effectively doing an origins story, setting the [Dynamite] series a year before Tidyman’s novel.” The first Shaft comic produced by Walker and artist Bilquis Evely is due out in December, with a cover by Denys Cowan and Bill Sienkiewicz that you can preview right here. Walker has promised to post updates about his Shaft efforts in his own blog.

• Actress Julia McKenzie will return this coming Sunday evening as Agatha Christie’s popular spinster sleuth in the first of three new episodes of Miss Marple, all set to be broadcast over two weekends as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series.

• Scott Adlerberg has a nice piece in the blog Hardboiled Wonderland about the film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novels.

• News from publisher New Pulp Press:

Starting January 1, 2015, Jon Bassoff, [the company’s] founder, will be handing over control and ownership of the award-winning press to Jonathan Woods and Shirrel Rhoades of Key West, Florida. While Jon Bassoff will still be associated with New Pulp Press in an advisory role, Jonathan Woods will be in charge of acquisitions and editorial matters. Shirrel Rhoades will take the lead on business, marketing and distribution.

Jonathan Woods, as a writer, has been associated with New Pulp Press since its early days. New Pulp Press has published three of his books, including the groundbreaking Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem. ‘Jonathan shares the same warped sensibilities that I do,” said Jon Bassoff. “I look forward to seeing where he takes this rowdy little press next.”

Shirrel Rhoades has had a long and distinguished career in publishing, including a stint as EVP and Publisher of Marvel Comics. He currently owns and manages an eBook publishing business called Absolutely Amazing eBooks that publishes a broad range of titles from horror to humor, non-fiction to mystery. “Shirrel’s marketing expertise and his existing publishing business will competitively enhance New Pulp Press and bring its writers to a wider audience,” said Bassoff.

• If you haven’t yet noticed, Criminal Element contributor Jake Hinkson has spent early September celebrating the four classic films in which Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall appeared together. Here are the links: To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948).

• Speaking of the late Ms. Bacall, the blog Down These Mean Streets offers a link to an episode of the Lux Radio Theatre from 1946 in which she and Bogie give voice to a “wireless” adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.

• I admit, I haven’t watched the USA Network crime drama White Collar lately, and probably not since the delightful Hilarie Burton bowed out of her recurring role on that show as insurance company investigator Sara Ellis. So I was surprised to learn, from Crimespree Magazine’s blog, that the series’ sixth and concluding season will begin on Thursday, November 6. Wow, it seems like only yesterday that White Collar had its premiere …

• Happy fourth birthday to The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog!

• Interviews worth reading: Libby Fischer Hellmann (Nobody’s Child) answers questions from Omnimystery News; Benjamin Whitmer (Cry Father) chats with MysteryPeople; Reed Farrel Coleman (Robert B. Parker’s Blind Spot) goes a round with Crimespree; and Chelsea Cain (One Kick) responds to queries fielded by Lit Reactor.

• Crime Fiction Lover continues its “Classics in September” series with remarks on Adam Hall’s The Quiller Memorandum, Ngaio Marsh’s best books, and a critic’s selection of the “20 Greatest Crime Movies of All Time.” Links to the whole series are being collected here.

• The Blogger software has finally forced our list of new crime fiction, due out between now and December 31, off of The Rap Sheet’s front page. (It apparently doesn’t like lengthy posts stacking up for too long.) However, you can still study that catalogue of more than 275 titles here. Prepare to expand your to-be-read pile!

• Is this Nero Wolfe’s old Manhattan brownstone?

• We’d heard that new publisher Brash Books would be reprinting W.L. Ripley’s original three novels featuring football player turned troubleshooter Wyatt Storme (who debuted in 1993’s Dreamsicle). But now Brash reports that it will also bring out a brand-new Storme tale, Storme Warning. All four are due in bookstores in early 2015.

• Registration for ThrillerFest 2015, to be held (as usual) in New York City from July 7 to 11 of next year, is now open. Next year’s ThrillerMaster will be Nelson DeMille.

• Patti Abbott’s 2015 debut as a novelist (with Concrete Angel) will be abetted by a very fine-looking book cover.

• Critics At Large writer Nick Coccoma isn’t thrilled with Dennis Lehane’s new big-screen movie. “The Drop has some of the finer performances of American society’s white urban underclass we’ve seen in a long time,” he writes, “maybe even since Brando and his crew. In the end, it adds up to a frustrating, wasteful nothing.” UPDATE: Michael Carlson is much fonder of Lehane’s book version.

• The Chill remains one of my favorite Ross Macdonald novels.

• And this sounds mildly intriguing. In Reference to Murder reports that “Shondaland productions and Person of Interest co-executive producer David Slack are teaming up for an ensemble [TV] cop drama titled Protect and Survive that centers on the last LAPD precinct fighting to hang on in Los Angeles after a massive disaster.”

Bullet Points: Pre-Holiday Edition

• Today marks 10 years since the premiere of Die Another Day, the 20th James Bond picture and the last of four to star Pierce Brosnan as Ian Fleming’s Agent 007. The HMSS Weblog reminds me that “Die Another Day contained numerous references to the 007 series, including a sequence where Brosnan-Bond and Q (John Cleese) are in a storage area of gadgets, including the Thunderball jet pack. Q gives Bond a watch with a laser beam (Bond’s 20th watch, we’re told). Halle Berry as Jinx, a U.S. operative, made an entrance in a bikini, modeled after Ursula Andress’s first appearance in Dr. No.” Although it received some mixed reviews, The HMSS Weblog

notes that Die Another Day was a financial hit, “with almost $432 million in worldwide ticket sales, a 19 percent jump from 1999’s The World Is Not Enough.”

• Most Rap Sheet readers have probably never read the stories of Oklahoma-born detective novelist (George) Todd Downing (1902-1974), who composed a series of books--set mostly in Mexico--about a U.S. customs inspector named Hugh Rennert. However, Curt Evans knows that fictionist’s work very well indeed. Evans is the author of Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery (which I wrote about recently in Kirkus Reviews), and he has a book devoted to Downing’s tales, Clues and Corpses, due for publication in December. What’s more, he penned an introduction for reprints of six Downing novels released this month by Coachwhip Publications. I confess to having never read any of Downing’s books, but with all of this attention being lavished upon him, maybe I’d better try a couple.

• Another reprint worth finding, this one in e-book form: Unfaithful Wives, by Orrie Hitt, originally published in 1956.

• Roberta Alexander’s review of The Bones and the Book, a historical mystery by Jane Isenberg, was posted this morning in January Magazine. You can read it here.

• So much for widespread rumors that Christopher Fowler’s series about Arthur Bryant and John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit had reached its end after 10 installments. As Fowler reports in his blog, “Bryant & May have been given the go-ahead in the U.S. for a further two novels! ... First up will be Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart, in which the decrepit detectives investigate the case of a man found dead in a cemetery. I’ll rephrase that. A man thought dead, then found alive, then dead because--hell, you’ll just have to wait and see how Bryant & May deal with what appears to be the return of Resurrectionists in London graveyards.”

• I haven’t really heard much about the 2013 heist film Now You See Me. Its been described as a thriller about an elite FBI squad “pitted in a game of cat and mouse against ‘The Four Horsemen,’ a super-team of the world’s greatest illusionists, who pull off a series of daring heists against corrupt business leaders during their performances, showering the stolen profits on their audiences while staying one step ahead of the law.” But the trailer--spotlighted in Omnimystery News--does a good job of getting me interested in that big-screen flick, which stars Jesse Eisenberg and Mark Ruffalo.

• Author Sophie Littlefield (A Bad Day for Mercy) is the featured interviewee on the 90th episode of Jeff Rutherford’s Reading & Writing podcast. Listen to their exchange here.

• A sad end to what was once a technological icon.

• “The 40 Most Gruesome Deaths in Literature.” Now, there’s a headline you cannot slide by without at least giving a quick look at the piece beneath. Among the mortal endings included in this Shortlist.com compilation are several from crime, mystery, and thriller works, among them Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

• Here’s a short video from the recent Bouchercon in Cleveland, showing Max Allan Collins receiving The Hammer for his Nate Heller private-eye series. The Hammer--named in honor of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer--is given out by the Private Eye Writers of America. Click here to learn more about Collins and this prize.

• And if all goes as planned, tomorrow will bring the concluding entry in Win Scott Eckert’s series of blog posts featuring 11 covers from paperback editions of Honey West novels. Today’s photographic front from Honey on Her Tail is rather disappointing in relation to those that have come before. But we’ll see what Eckert can come up with for Wednesday. You should find his whole series of posts here.

Licensed to Thrill

The film trailer for Dr. No

Like millions of other people, you probably missed the memo, but today happens to be Global James Bond Day. It was 50 years ago, on October 5, 1962, that the film Dr. No--the first big-screen Bond movie, and the earliest of Sean Connery’s seven Agent 007 pictures--commenced showing at the London Pavilion. That thriller went on to debut in other theaters around England over the next several days, before finally reaching American movie houses in May 1963.

READ MORE: “50 Classic James Bond Moments,” by Natalie
Bochenski (Stuff.co.nz); “Best James Bond Opening Sequences,” by Kevin Fallon (The Daily Beast); and don’t miss The HMSS Weblog’s six-part series about this Dr. No anniversary.

James Bond: 1962 to 2012

This October will mark 50 years since the well-publicized release of the first James Bond spy film, Dr. No, starring Sean Connery. No doubt, the Web (and The Rap Sheet) will host plenty of anniversary commemorations between now and then.

But there are two celebratory videos worth seeing now. The first is this 50th anniversary trailer, which compiles clips from the 22 Bond films available thus far. (The 23rd, Skyfall, is scheduled to premiere in Britain on October 26 of this year.) Meanwhile, this video parody gives some all-too-honest lyrics to the familiar Bond movie theme written by Monty Norman. The latter video is probably not one you want to be screening during work hours.

“The Biggest Bond of All!”

That was the hype line for Thunderball, the controversial fourth James Bond spy movie starring Sean Connery, which premiered in the United States on December 21, 1965--45 years ago today. As The HMSS Weblog observed last month, this is “a bittersweet anniversary for 007 fans. Bondmania hit its peak with Thunderball for the general public and it would never make it back to those levels. Obviously the series has remained popular, generating 18 installments over the next 43 years. But it wouldn’t be the entertainment phenomenon it was in 1964 and 1965.”

As Wikipedia recalls,

The film follows Bond’s mission to find two NATO atomic bombs stolen by SPECTRE, which holds the world ransom for £100 million in diamonds, in exchange for not destroying an unspecified major city in either England or the United States (later revealed to be Miami). The search leads Bond to the Bahamas, where he encounters Emilio Largo, the card-playing, eye-patch wearing SPECTRE Number Two. Backed by the CIA and Largo’s mistress, Bond’s search culminates in an underwater battle with Largo’s henchmen. The film had a complex production, with four different units and about a quarter of the film consisting of underwater scenes.

It’s been a while since I watched Thunderball. All I really remember from the film are Bond’s jet pack (a travel innovation for the near future, viewers were led to assume back then), that underwater fight scene, and the lovely French actress Claudine Auger, who played Bond girl Domino Derval. But I dug up the original trailer on YouTube today:

For more on Thunderball, check out The HMSS Weblog’s terrific six-part series of posts, available here, here, here, here, here, and here.

“You Were Expecting Someone Else?”

It was 15 years ago today, on November 17, 1995, that GoldenEye--the 17th James Bond spy film, but the first to feature ex-Remington Steele star Pierce Brosnan--had its general U.S. release. That movie’s appearance came after what had seemed like a long period of decline for the franchise, including legal fights and low box-office numbers for 1989’s Licence to Kill, actor Timothy Dalton’s second Bond picture.

“So,” explains The HMSS Weblog, “in November 1995, when GoldenEye made its debut, Bond’s cinema survival wasn’t considered a sure thing. It had a new Bond in Pierce Brosnan (originally cast for The Living Daylights but forced to yield the prized role when NBC renewed Remington Steele), a new director to the series in Martin Campbell as well as writers who’d never worked on a 007 film before. It was a new era because Albert Broccoli’s health problems* caused him to yield the producing duties to Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.

“The result was a financial hit, ensuring new installments.”

GoldenEye doesn’t find a place on everybody’s list of favorite Bond films, but I remember being delighted by its high level of action and pyrotechnics, its latest offering of “Bond Babes” (especially sweet-smiling

Swedish-Polish actress Izabella Scorupco as Russian weapons technician Natalya Simonova), its introduction of Judi Dench as intelligence chief M, and Irish actor Brosnan’s turn as Agent 007. Brosnan had shown a wide range of talents in Remington Steele, including sharp comic timing, and many of those same skills were on display in GoldenEye. Although Sean Connery remains the seminal Bond, Brosnan is my second favorite performer in the part, with his combination of polish and physicality, and his lightly ironic perspective of his situation as a spy.

As IFC.com points out, GoldenEye benefited not only from these other elements, but from its bang-up film trailer (embedded above):

As the opening strains of the classic theme music become audible, on-screen text highlights the word “new” before Pierce Brosnan waltzes out in typical black-on-white profile, shoots up the letters to reveal “007” (for added value, count the number of shots this takes) and then walks forward to reveal his face. “You were expecting someone else?” he playfully taunts.

It’s a virtual come-hither line that thrusts the trailer into a blistering montage of machine-gun fire, explosions, ugly villain profiles (Gottfried John’s face was made for such espionage endeavors) and Famke Janssen tossing her head back with devilish eroticism, all of it only interrupted so Brosnan can dish out a trademark bon-mot (shirtless and gun-outstretched: “No more foreplay”) and his obligatory intro, which like the trailer--and the film itself--hits a perfect suave-and-cheeky Bond note.

Recently, GoldenEye seems to be all over my TV screen. I don’t know if these rebroadcasts relate to this anniversary, or if it’s simple coincidence. But I like it. Even a decade and a half after its debut, GoldenEye (the first Bond film made after the fall of the Soviet Union) still packs a punch--not to mention a few car chases, death-defying acrobatics, clever gadgets, episodes of romance and sadomasochistic sex, and enough impossible feats to remind you that Bond is about nothing if not adult fantasy.

* Broccoli died of heart failure in 1996, just seven months after GoldenEye’s premiere.

Bondiversary!

It was 10 years ago today that The World Is Not Enough--the 19th James Bond film and the last one of the 20th century--debuted in movie theaters. Although World is probably not counted among the series’ best pictures, The HMSS Weblog has a whole list of reasons why it was a significant installment.

My own two favorite things about The World Is Not Enough were the absolutely fantastic boat chase through London’s waterways (plus the onshore excitement that followed), and the “Bond girl” appearance by French actress Sophie Marceau (who--despite being a criminal sadist--was soooo much hotter here than Denise Richards).

Just for fun, I’ve embedded one of this movie’s trailers above. The line in it that makes me chuckle every time comes from Michael Kitchen: “His only goal is chaos.” Given the pyrotechnics in this and other Bond features, I can’t help wondering whether he’s describing Bond’s adversaries ... or Agent 007 himself.

READ MORE: “Dig That Gold,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

Dig That Gold

I can’t help it. Every time I hear the theme song to Goldfinger (1964), I think of the alternative lyrics cooked up for a 1972 TV advertisement for Butterfinger candy bars. I must have watched that rip-off commercial dozens of times during my television-obsessed boyhood, so firmly imprinted is it upon my brain. However, this isn’t the time for nostalgia of that sort. It’s the occasion, instead, for a different but related sort of nostalgia. For today, you see, marks 45 years since the release, in Great Britain, of the third action film featuring Scottish actor Sean Connery as Ian Fleming’s dashing but deadly super spy, Agent 007 himself, James Bond. (The American release of Goldfinger didn’t come until December 22, 1964.)

Some of the best writing about this anniversary for Goldfinger--“the first mega-007 hit”--has come from that Bond-obsessed site, The HMSS Weblog. Over the last month, contributors have remarked on singer Shirley Bassey’s rendition of the movie theme, “10 major decisions that helped shape the movie,” the golf match pitting Bond against antagonist Auric Goldfinger, the Aston Martin DB 5 with which 007 has become so closely identified, how composer John Barry’s now-celebrated Goldfinger theme was almost deep-sixed (apparently, co-producer Harry Saltzman hated it), and the film’s legacy.

To read The HMSS Weblog’s whole series, click here.

READ MORE: “Bond Goes for the Gold,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(Kirkus Reviews).