Dr. Maybe

I'm not a James Bond fan but I kind of want to be a James Bond fan. I really like Sean Connery and, in this world of psy-ops and algorithms, it seems potentially comforting to know there's a guy who sees this treacherous world as an endless forest of beautiful women to sleep with. So I watched Dr. No again recently. I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

Dr. No mainly just feels like a pleasant vacation for a profoundly lonely man. No-one he meets can be trusted, especially not the women, except Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), who's sexy but hardly has any chemistry with him. She seems so dim, it's hard to imagine them having a real conversation.

I wonder if Ursula Andress took lessons to suck in her gut like that all the time.

Connery never needed to do that. I imagine if he had a gut he'd probably just let it hang out. That is one of the pleasures of watching him, just seeing how extraordinarily at ease with himself he is, and how his eyebrows transmit every tiny nuance of his ease.

I know part of the fun of the James Bond movies is supposed to be how ridiculous they are, how far from reality they are. But I want to get a sense of real danger. I guess that's why From Russia with Love is the only one I can really enjoy. But I still think I'm better off watching Notorious, To Catch a Thief, or North by Northwest.

Breaking the Bonds of Bond

Despite its name, 2021's No Time to Die features a lot of people dying. In Daniel Craig's final turn as his particularly grim and dour James Bond, he manages to have a little fun in an otherwise unremarkable outing.

I'm not an especially big James Bond fan and the only one of the Daniel Craig movies I'd seen was Casino Royale. But I figured, all the James Bond movies are meant to be stand-alone anyway. Well, turns out they used to be, now it's an ongoing serial and this one starts with Bond in a settled relationship with Madeleine (Lea Seydoux). Since a lot of the film's superior first two thirds involve his struggle with whether or not he can trust her, I wondered if she was named after Madeleine in Vertigo.

That relationship paranoia is good, and plays well with the somber Billie Eilish tune that plays over the credits, but the best part of the movie by far is the Cuba sequence.

Here the film seems to take a brief detour into a completely different, much more old fashioned, Bond movie. Ana de Armas is gorgeous in an impossible dress, every bit the classic Bond girl otherwise absent from the film.

I laughed when I saw the article a few days ago about the guys suing a studio because de Armas had been cut out of another film. But now I kind of get it. And in this one scene, her character is more vividly established than in the entirety of her previous collaboration with Craig, Knives Out.

Bond himself, now divested of his patronising humour and other character flaws, is just a generic Action Guy, and this is a significant aspect of the final act's lack of lustre. Remi Malik as the villain spins some philosophy about how people long for oblivion and Bond is presented as a counterpoint, neatly summed up by M (Ralph Fiennes) with a quote from Jack London:

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Sure, that's a good message, but it doesn't really come from any argument organic to the film. Oblivion has no advocates, we don't get the sense Bond is ever truly tempted to just sit and watch the wheels go round.

Lashana Lynch is introduced as Nomi, the new 007. If the idea was to float her as a potential replacement protagonist in a spin-off series of films, No Time to Die makes surprisingly little effort to sell her to the audience. Even Jeffrey Wright, in a small role as a CIA agent, is given more interesting things to do. Nomi doesn't get one badass moment, not one clever line, no eyebrow raising punctuation of a scene. The only mystery around her is about what she's doing in this movie.

Craig still has that nice sense of brutality that made him so good in Casino Royale despite some impression of him sleepwalking in the role. Whoever really does replace him, I hope they don't seem quite so mature, and I'm not talking about age.

Love on the Train from Istanbul

Why is Sean Connery's delight so appealing? Why is it that when I see he's happy, I'm happy too? He's not just handsome--his face is very expressive with the huge eyebrows, huge eyes, big mouth, and the deep lines on his cheek that emphasise every smile. These are the qualities that make his Bond films superior. It'd been several years since I watched one, though, but then I saw a beautifully restored version of From Russia with Love was available for free to Amazon Prime subscribers. Not all the Bond movies are--Goldfinger isn't. I remember there used to be a division between people who thought Goldfinger was the best Bond film and the people who thought From Russia with Love was. I was always in the latter camp so this was a win for me.

Though I haven't been much in the mood for James Bond for years. I haven't seen any of the newest movies since the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale, a movie I enjoyed but thought borrowed a lot from Spielberg. At its best, even in the Connery era, I always thought the Bond movies were pale imitations of Alfred Hitchcock and I still think that's true but there's a kind of simple pleasure to be taken in From Russia with Love.

Certainly none of the women Bond runs into are as complex as the ones in Hitchcock films but Bond himself isn't that complex, either. The love scenes are almost like billboard advertisements with Bond's trademark corny jokes being like slogans. The difference is entirely in the actor--Connery's face can't seem to help expressing ten times more than whoever he's with. The only woman who really compares is Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny whose mixture of bemusement, mischievous reproach, lust, and envy make her a surrogate for the viewing audience.

But From Russia with Love does have some moments of real tension. There are two climaxes--first there's the showdown between Bond and the SPECTRE agent played by a surprisingly soft looking Robert Shaw and then there's the impressive speedboat chase.

At a time when such action scenes would typically have been filmed with rear projection it must have been amazing for audiences to watch this scene where Connery and actress Daniela Bianchi were clearly actually in the boat with an array of pursuers behind them. But the real climax for me is at the beginning of Bond's showdown with Shaw's character.

That's when Connery's performance shows why Bond earns big bucks from MI6. It all hinges on the trick exploding briefcase provided by Q. Shaw has a gun on him and Bond has to act in such a way that he makes Shaw want to open the case himself rather than force Bond to do it. Connery does it with just the right kind of hesitation and furtive glance before opening the case. The tension in his manner could mean a lot of things, Bond needs it to mean a specific thing--he wants Shaw to feel like he's perceiving a feeling Bond is attempting to suppress; "Don't let him see I want to open the case myself." It's entirely Connery's performance that communicates all these layers in one simple moment.

The film also has some amazing location work in Istanbul and a wonderfully silly Gypsy cat fight. I can definitely say I'm in the mood for Bond again.