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Bond Films
"Pay attention!"

Hugely successful franchise that it is and obviously appealing to a veritable smorgasbord of a global audience, we've noticed before that people who really, really like Bond films (to the extent that they collect all of them on VHS with matching covers and things) often tend to be a lot like the neighbour of Creamguide (Films)'s Uncle Ian in that they are middle aged men more than a little embittered with life. Whether this means that with repeated viewings of the films they're living the dream through the exploits of the intrepid Commander or just getting all slavery at the sight of Bambi and Thumper we wouldn't like to speculate upon. But for a genre that stars men who are supposed to be amongst the most suave and desirable on the planet, there don't seem to be an awful lot of female obsessives out there.

Which is best, which isn't and which ones do you forget entirely when you're trying to remember them all in an effort to prove your film-fan smart arse credentials at Christmas dinner. It's all (mostly) here. We're not going to go for a complicated points system this time, largely because on this side of the Filmguide fireplace we can't count, and no finely balanced categories this time either as we'll confine ourselves instead to a parade of tiresome conceits through which we can best dissemble the assembled Fleming(esque) oeuvre.

DEFINITION:
To keep the Bond wonks happy we'll avoid including any of the non-Broccoli variations, especially the magisterial CASINO ROYALE which would just walk it anyway since it's so brilliant. We're also not going to include any old black and white doings that might have starred the likes of Valentine Dyall in 1924, or whatever, that completists like to trot out to prove how a) knowledgeable and/or b) intensely annoying they are. So we're staying bang in the centre of the mainstream here but without including any of the recent Brosnan ones. And we'll probably draw a discreet veil over the Dalton years as well. Well, obviously.

BEST BADDIE WHO ISN'T BLOFELD
Ernst Stavro Blofeld is the best baddie in Bond films - FACT. So it'd be pointless just having a category for Best Baddie, 'cos Ernst would stroll it. But there have been others that have done their bit to kill Commander Bond and/or take over the world in the process. From the first effort comes the eponymous Dr No, who on the plus side has a silly name and a menacing hand but on the down side doesn't ever seem to scale the heights of ludicrously extrovert mania or casual lunacy that the best of the rest do. THUNDERBALL bad guy Largo, played by Adolfo 'Borgias' Celi has a bigger picture in mind when he threatens the world with nukes he's nabbed (on Blofeld's orders, natch) but his main schtick is troubling visitors to his attractive seafront property with sharks which is a bit half- arsed in the intimidation stakes, especially if you don't go in the water. In LIVE AND LET DIE Yaphet 'Blue Collar' Kotto does his best as Mr Big/Katanga, but doesn't have any over-the-top schtick to hand that really convinces. Scaramanga, Christopher 'no point, no point at all' Lee's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, is a bit better with both a gun fashioned from an old Ronson lighter and a pen that looks like the type your grandad always had coupled with a then-topical plot device to take over the world (which your grandad may not have had). And Max Zorin, the baddie of A VIEW TO A KILL, played by Christopher Walken, is just too, too scary to be enjoyable.

So in the end we're going to court controversy here and plump for end of term effort OCTOPUSSY and the Roger Whittaker-suited smoothie Kamal Khan played by Louis Jourdan. Yes, yes, we know; what about Auric Goldfinger? Well, what about him? From our point of view his ambition just isn't deranged enough and Operation Grand Slam just not, well, Grand enough either. Besides, we've seen the device of spraying troops with gas done better in a Fu Manchu film anyway (it wasn't fake gas that time; Fu Manchu doesn't make that kind of mistake, oh no). Jourdan's pre-eminence for us is based on mostly on his eating sheep's eyes for dinner it has to be said but also because he does things a proper Bond villain should do; he goes to a casino and threatens our hero in a low voice when he loses to him, he's posh (all proper villains are posh), he wears daft suits, he hunts Bond on the back of an elephant, he has a giant menacing manservant (we're going to be using the adjective 'menacing' a lot in the course of this) and he lives in a big silly palace. The fact that he's played by Jourdan just clinches it for us. It's probably fair to say that OCTOPUSSY is really just a retread of GOLDFINGER but the general uselessness of the film doesn't detract from Louis' performance. So we're saying at this stage, that's one to OCTOPUSSY. Whatever next?

WORST BADDIE
Well, rather inevitably, this is next actually. It has to be said that some of the main protagonists in these things just don't cut the mustard. And even when they do demonstrate an attractive willingness to both dominate the planet and be thwarted with suitable brio how they go about this just turns out all wrong. The prime contenders here are from the late-period Moore numbers THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and MOONRAKER, both of them as daft as brushes. They have their plus points it has to be said, though. The former has some fantastic set design and a couple of genuinely thrilling set pieces. But Curt Jurgens never really convinces as Carl Stromberg even though we're still puzzled by what the crunchy stuff he was feeding to his fish and eating at the same time in one scene was. Apart from anything else you hardly see him and besides, his method of offing unwelcome guests (torpedo gun thing you can hear coming down at you under the table like the Northern Line) is just a whimsy too tiresome for our liking. Still, he gets pipped to the post by Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax, the scene-chewing loon of uncertain accent from MOONRAKER and a baddie with an obsession for space shuttles probably surpassed only by him off of Newsround. Hugo Drax it is.

BEST LUDICROUS SET
In latter years - specifically the idiosyncratic *ahem* Moore period - great big fuck-off sets became rather an integral part of the whole Bond thing. Off the top of our heads we can think of the particularly stupid rotating-for-no-apparent-purpose Soviet conference room (replete with living Spitting Image type Commies) in OCTOPUSSY, the massive, and massively daft, submarine pens in THE FLY WHO BUGGED ME and the huge, well, 'thing' is as good a term as any, at the end of the slightly earlier THE MAN WITH GOLDEN GUN. The hands-down winner though is the brilliant and famed (round these parts anyway) Ken Adams too-many-monitors effort from MOONRAKER, which constituted the control room of the space station nonsense at the end and which was the only thing worth looking at in an otherwise crappy film.

BEST THEME TUNE
Now we wander into definite controversial territory and first lay down the rule that says that Shirley Bassey Bond themes are all rubbish. All of them. That said, the worst of the rest is easy to identify, namely the grating, screeching and just plain shite Lulu 'effort' for THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, which is absolutely bloody awful and the only Bond theme never to chart, fact fans (although Easton-trilled FOR YOUR EYES ONLY runs it pretty damned close). Maud Adams number 'All Time High' from OCTOPUSSY is pleasingly non-threatening and some of the poptastic later entries (Duran Duran's View To A Kill', A-ha's 'Living Daylights' from the eponymous films) are none too bad. But it's really just a slug out between Nancy Sinatra's epic signature tune for YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE and Carly Simon's entry for THE SPY WHO LOVED ME at the end of the day, isn't it? For ourselves, we normally plump for the former but you can't help loving the latter and how it sneaks that title in at the end. Could it be a draw on this one? Sod it, why not.

BEST COMEDY PAY-OFF
For a film as unremittingly bad as MOONRAKER it troubles us that we keep turning up little bits of business that we really like. So it proves to be the case in this category as the whole 'Bond is attempting re-entry' gag at the end (and we're sure we don't have to spell out the background to that humorous skit, do we?) is one of the better ones, even though the competition is a little threadbare to say the least. In fact, the only other one worth bothering about that we can think of is that at the closing of THE SPY WHO LOVED ME with Bond talking to a Marigolded-up June/Faith Brown Thatch in her Downing St. kitchen, which seemed hilarious at the time. Especially since Moore was precisely the sort of celeb you could imagine probably did chat to the PM at home in real life.

WORST BADDIE ACCENT
Well, we better just get stuck right in here and say that with, yes, a "tiresome iwweveitibility" Hugo Drax from MOONRAKER makes another appearance. It's not that Michael Lonsdale can't do accents - 'cos he very clearly can - so much as he can't decide on which one to use here and in fact he changes his mind noticeably in this, sometimes mid-line. Besides that, the next worst offender has to be Adolfo Celi as Emilio Largo in THUNDERBALL, the SPECTRE stooge as described above. Of course, the sad thing about this is that Adolfo doesn't even put on an accent and uses his own but, like Gene Pitney in a way, even his own voice just doesn't sound right.

BEST GADGETS
Of course, so-called 'critics' still complain endlessly that Bond films have been hijacked by Q and his crew and the silly gizmos and things that they produce in film after film and which have latterly not only become a staple of the franchise but which also, they say, cheapen the essential drama and plot of the films in a way that didn't happen in DR NO for instance (whilst obviously choosing not to bring to mind tank things done up to look like giant fire- breathing crabs) as if people watch DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER for a glimpse of the essential truth of universe. Back in the real world though, everyone thinks the sequences where Desmond 'Follyfoot' Llewelyn shows off his latest wheezes are often the best bits of the film and there can hardly be too many of them, we would contend. OCTOPUSSY probably has the largest gadget quotient with a scene which starts with Roger Moore driving through a poster in a wall (which is immediately replaced by another one! Cunning as a horse!) only to be ushered into the mystic presence of Major Boothroyd and all manner of lunatic Indian stereotype items, from a spring-loaded fakir to a machine-gunning snake charmer. Class.

Meanwhile, back in LIVE AND LET DIE, is the plot-finishing watch/gun thing which darts cause the victim to inflate before bursting. In fact, the Moore years held within them all the best stupid non- serious toys. But the best overall find their origins to Connery-era Bond and in second place the ejector seat from GOLDFINGER. Which is as nutty as a fruitcake when you think about it. Besides that the top of the hit parade here has to be the excellent Voice Imitator Thing from best non-serious Bond DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER of which both Blofeld ("Willard Whyte speakin'!") and Bond ("Burt Saxby here,") have one. Although just stealing the march (did you see what we did there, Bond fanatics?) Blofeld's is festooned with a typeface co- ordinated to his menacing lift, natch.

BEST RECURRING CHARACTER
Well, it has to be Blofeld really doesn't it ('cos Felix Leiter's actually rubbish, isn't he? And M and the Minister don't do a heck of a lot, truth be told)? Q is always fun but we've really dealt with him already and Miss Moneypenny is just tiresome beyond belief. So the real question should be, who is the best Blofeld? There's been a few, right from Telly 'If' Savalas in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, to Donald 'perfectly' Pleasance to the back of a head and a cat in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE. But the best surely has to be Charles 'take a jump to the left' Gray in DIAMOND'S ARE FOREVER. Gray had already cropped up in THE MAN WITH GOLDEN GUN playing Bond's contact in Japan, named Henderson - for all of about a minute and a half before he was topped - but he is put to best use as easily the most demented Blofeld incarnation here. Pleasance was all stares and scars in Y.O.L.T. and was very good but then Gray both does all his threatening and associated schtick whilst smiling and he also appears, winningly, in drag in which he manages to take menacing to new heights.

SHAKIEST PLOT
Difficult to say whether this is a positive or negative attribute really, since we're not really that bothered about the likes of Dalton yawn-inducing latecomers THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS and LICENCE TO KILL which involve revenge and drug running and al that. Ho-hum, we say. Ho-bloody-hum. And even THUNDERBALL seems tiresomely plausible, comparatively speaking. It's just not what we want. So on the one hand is the bizarre notion that just enough jewellery can level Washington D.C. in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER and the concept that a big rocket can be gobbled up in mid-space by an even bigger rocket in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, which are really too stupid for words but are carried off with such a great sense of overblown fun that they're great to watch. But on that other hand are our old friends THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and a submarine chomping supertanker and a submergible city, and MOONRAKER and its too-many-space shuttles/world poisoning escapades, which are daft beyond words and just don't quite make it. We're not sure where the fine line that separates them is, but those last two are on the wrong side of it.

BEST SECOND STRINGER
This encompasses both those low-rent baddies that fill the ever- important 'henchman' role and the inevitable Bond Girls that generate so much interest, apparently. Now, saying that we're not that interested in the parade of popsies that have taken on the mantle of Bond Girl over the years probably sends out a few wrong signals about us we dare say, but to be honest we've always found that the whole Bond coupling process is as non-interesting as those Sid'n'Babs shenanigans we alluded to last week. Sometimes you can't help but take heed though, as with Roger Moore and Grace Jones in A VIEW TO A KILL which was macabre to say the least, but on the whole we're not that bothered. Baddies are better however, and Bambi and Thumper from DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER pass a few minutes pleasingly, but essentially we're talking about Oddjob from GOLDFINGER at this point truth to be told, although definitely not Jaws, who's just a comedy relief really, when all's said and done. And not even a good one at that.

None of this gives us much of a clue, we must admit, to what the best and worst of the genre are, but then let's face it; we were never really going to manage that in this anyway. For what it's worth, based on the categories listed it seems pretty obvious that the best Bond (or, at any rate, our favourite) remains tip-top non- serious guff DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER whilst the worst would appear to be the eternally crappy MOONRAKER. Sure it has a couple of nice moments (there's the Close Encounters homage when Roger has to tap in the code to the glass factory workshop in Venice and, erm, that's it) but it's safe to say that if you miss it on the telly, well, you're not missing much. Industry choice for best is usually GOLDFINGER but we have to say that we got tired of that back when it was trailed heavily as the Big Film of the New Year season on ITV in 1988 and so extensively that STV made it seem like they were screening live coverage of the Second Coming of Christ with commentary from Dickie Davies. And that put us off.

Fickle? No. That's just Movie! Movie!

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