A lengthy series of films based on Ian Fleming's literature about a British secret agent, code-named 007, which have also inspired many TV series. The 23 official movies thus far are:
but not the first person to play him — that title goes to Barry Nelson in the 1954 TV movie Casino Royale, while the first person to play a British Bond was Bob "I'll have a Q, Bob" Holness in a 1956 South African radio version of Moonraker
, Connery is perhaps the best known. When people think of Bond, they often think of his distinctive accent and his suave sophistication. In fact, it was due to Connery's portrayal that Bond was canonically established as half-Scottish. First to employ the Bond One-Liner, naturally.
You Only Live Twice (1967) — 007 goes to Japan and becomes a Ninja. 007 gets married (it's only part of his cover though). 007 meets Blofeld.
George Lazenby: Lazenby was an obscure actor and an obscure Bond. He only appeared in one movie, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. However, it is well liked among hardcore Bond fans and casual viewers alike. The film is widely assumed to be bad, since if it had been good, Lazenby would have made more, right? Well, not really. Lazenby's problems were primarily behind the scenes, and the fact that he was replacing Connery made it a no-win situation with some critics, but most of that criticism has faded with time. The film is well regarded these days among those who have seen it. Lazenby says that he didn't return because he was given advice not to. Apparently his agent told him that the Bond franchise was on its way out, but boy was that wrong. Lazenby fired his agent soon afterwards.
Roger Moore: Moore tended to play his Bond more for comedy, but he did do it pretty serious at times, as in For Your Eyes Only. He probably hung around too long, and was older than Connery when he took over the role, and is tied with Connery for the number of Bond movies made. He's perhaps the most polarizing actor on this list, since two of his movies—The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only—are among the most well-received Bond flicks, while The Man With the Golden Gun and A View to a Kill are considered among the worst.
Live and Let Die (1973) — Includes the line, "take that honky out and waste him." Also prompted some controversy as to whether or not Bond's bedding of Jane Seymour was really consensual. Has a villain who may or may not be an actual Loa (voodoo god). Also has Paul McCartney singing the theme song, which is arguably the most popular in the series considering it still gets frequent airplay on classic rock radio stations.
The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) — Christopher Lee tries to hold the world to ransom during the energy crisis. One of the greatest car stunts in Bond history is ruined by a sound effect.
And it's still one of the best Moore-era Bond flicks, and one of the best-loved Bond movies ever.
Moonraker (1979) — Bond investigates the theft of a space shuttle, and ends up going into space to stop a genocidal madman's plot, then having sex in orbit with Lois Chiles. Basically the same film as the above, IN SPACE!, except Jaws finds true love and executes a Heel Face Turn. Hurriedly greenlit after the success of Star Wars.
The scene in which Bond's Venice gondola turns first into a speedboat and then a hovercraft, whizzing across St. Mark's Square while a pigeon does a Double Take, is widely regarded as one of the low points of the entire series. It is widely thought that the producers watched it back, thought "My God, What Have I Done?" and commissioned...
For Your Eyes Only (1981) — In which an Englishman, a Frenchwoman and an Israeli do Greek. In character, a Liverpudlian does Austrian. Roger Moore's love interests are now young enough to be his granddaughters. And 007 kicks a car off a cliff. All done with very little spectacle, no gadgets (the Cool Car is blown up early in a statement of intent) and little incidental music, making a very tense and effective Cold War thriller.
Octopussy (1983) — Bond goes to India and imitates Tarzan. Maud Adams appears again as a different Bond girl. A mad Soviet general tries to destroy a US airbase. 007 dresses as a clown and makes it work.
Timothy Dalton: Nothing will start an argument among Bond fans as quickly as praising Timothy Dalton, the Marmite of Bond actors. He began the trend of portraying Bond with a darker tone, and is still considered the darkest of all of them, which some felt was needed after the sometimes overly comedic Moore films. He was also a fan of the books and tried to create Ian Fleming's Bond on-screen twenty years before Daniel Craig and the Bond producers ever thought of doing so. At the same time, he has also been praised for having the most realistic love scenes. The producers actually considered him for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but he felt he was too young at the time, and didn't want to be the one that replaced Connery.
A persistent rumour also claims that test audiences didn't know what "revoked" meant or that they thought it meant Bond wasn't allowed to drive. Pre-production Artwork and posters have the License Revoked title, and some pre-premiere interviews refer to it as such, but the title was changed at the last minute and this blunder ultimately hurt the film.
Pierce Brosnan: Brosnan is the other person whom people think of when they imagine Bond these days, especially among viewers who came of age in The Nineties and GoldenEye was the first Bond flick they saw. He was supposed to appear in The Living Daylights, but the production staff of Remington Steele decided to pull a fast one on EON Productions. Brosnan was just what the franchise needed after the six-year hiatus due to legal issues. He rates second on the Bond poll. He also scores points for looking the most like Bond as Ian Fleming described him (Black hair that falls into a comma over the right eye, cold blue eyes).
The World Is Not Enough (1999) — A boat chase down the Thames. A probe chase through an oil pipeline. A ski chase down a mountain. Oh, and it's got Robert Carlyle in it. Also, the final appearance of Desmond Llewellyn as Q before his death in 1999. John Cleese (who first shows up here) took over in the next film.
Skyfall (2012) — The film spent years in Development Hell due to MGM having serious financial problems, but was finally green-lighted for November 9, 2012. Stars Ralph Fiennes, Javier Bardem and Albert Finney, no less.
There are also at least three Bond films outside of the EON Productions canon:
Casino Royale (1954): The first screen adaptation of a Bond novel. A 1954 made-for-TV movie which recast Bond as an American. Named "Jimmy". It was performed live, which led to some unintentional hilarity such as Felix Leiter missing a cue and improvised dialogue when Jimmy couldn't undo his binds quickly enough.
Casino Royale (1967): spoof starring David Niven, Woody Allen (the second "Jimmy Bond"), and Peter Sellers, all as James Bond — along with five other Bonds, after a key point, including Ursula Andress. Despite being widely panned, it had a number of interesting features, such as predicting the official franchise's habit of replacing its leading man, and being the only Bond movie in which Bond dies.
Never Say Never Again: 1983 remake of Thunderball, made by a different production company and returning Sean Connery to the role, albeit at an advanced age.
The Q scene, in which Bond gets his gadgets for the movie. Expect humorous other gadgets to be seen i.e. a decapitating tray (completely absent from Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Live And Let Die. While Q appears in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, he introduces only one rather disappointing gadget to M - radioactive lint to plant on a suspect's clothes as a form of tracer device).
Also worth noting that many pre-Craig movies had a scene where Bond's watch has just the function needed when he's in a tight spot.
Bond and Moneypenny flirting (She has yet to appear in the Daniel Craig films).
The gun barrel sequence, which has started every movie (yet again, except for Casino Royale onwards, where it's moved to the end of the pre-titles sequence and incorporated into the sequence's plot).
The Bond Girls. Usually at least two of them in one movie. You could write a book on the different girls Bond has bedded over the years - in fact, Maryam D'Abo and John Cork did. The former played Kara Milovy in The Living Daylights, so she knows what she's talking about. Although it goes back to Thunderball, the Bad Bond Girl has become something of a feature recently.
Sport vehicle chase: snowmobiles, motorcycles, jetskis...
An action scene with a helicopter (which might be any of the above)
Bond And A Babe In A Boat: On a documentary about the making of The World Is Not Enough, one scriptwriter commented that the ending had to follow the form "the villain's base explodes as Bond and the girl escape in a rubber dinghy". But, because it had become a cliche of the series, it couldn't actually be "the villain's base explodes, as Bond and the girl escape in a rubber dinghy".
Usually a title with one or more of the following:
"Gold" (such as "Goldfinger", "Man with the Golden Gun" and "GoldenEye")
"Day" or similar (such as "The Living Daylights" or "Tomorrow Never Dies")
"Die" ("Live And Let Die", "Tomorrow Never Dies" and "Die Another Day")
"Kill" ("A View to a Kill", "Licence to Kill")
"Love" ("From Russia with Love", "The Spy Who Loved Me")
"Never" ("Never Say Never Again", "Tomorrow Never Dies")
M tries to call Bond at the end of most films, but Bond ignores him/her.
The cultural impact of 007 is, in a word, immense. The tuxedo has become associated with James Bond. The series has spawned legions of imitators and is pretty much thedefinitive spy fiction. Legions of media have also tried to "de-glamorise" espionage, such as the works of Len Deighton (the Stale Beer Approach To Spy Fiction, although it in fact predates Bond). He is also the definitive Action Hero, and many elements of many an action film can be traced directly to Bond, or at least were popularised by him, such as the hero saying something cool before or after offing the villain.Arguably the most iconic character in cinematic history. On a number of occasions, people declared that Bond is old hat and that some new spy has replaced him, most recently with Jason Bourne. The Bond films continue to be massively popular among cinema goers, hugely influential in popular culture, and the franchise is the highest grossing in history by a mile (accounting for inflation; at face value its second behind Harry Potter).So let's see what he's responsible for:
Movie-wise, it has been announced that Skyfall will not follow the Quantum Of Solace storyline in Daniel Craig era.
Action Girl: Wai Lin and May Day, principally. Though others, despite not lacking of good moments, go more for the Faux Action Girl side, sadly.
Camille Montes from Quantum of Solace is also a genuine Action Girl, requiring little to no saving and kicking serious butt when given the chance.
Adaptation Distillation: Also quite a bit, as Ian Fleming was inordinately obsessed with Bond's food and drink.
Also there is a good deal more racism/sexism (especially heterosexism) in the books than in the movies. Not really surprising, given that the books were written in The Fifties.
Body Count Competition: Bond probably has the highest on-screen body count of any film character ever, counting all 22 official movies. Unsurprisingly for an action hero/government assassin, he kills at least one person in every film, and more commonly a lot of people.
Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: For every movie you see, you can bet that you will never see the Bond girl in the next movie again. They will almost never even be mentioned.
Averted with the first-ever movie Bond Girl Sylvia Trench - after Dr. No, she's there again early in From Russia with Love. She never shows up after, though.
Distaff Counterpart: The John Gardner continuation novels had a female version of Q nickname Q'ute, who was basically a Q that Bond could (and did) have sex with.
Evolving Music: The iconic theme tune has changed over the years.
Girl of the Week: Or, in Bond's case, more a Girl Of The Movie — though some movies have two, often one good and one evil.
Go Karting with Bowser: The various villains inevitably have Bond over for dinner or cards.
Graying Morality: Over the course of the series, though the Craig reboot seems to have started out grey.
Dr. No and From Russia with Love are actually pretty grey movies; it becomes lighter with Goldfinger but has light and dark moments throughout. The series is more cyclical as far as this trope goes- it starts off grey, but then becomes progressively more outlandish and lighthearted, before going becoming Darker and Edgier again.
And of course, Tom Jones fainted on the last note of Thunderball.
It May Help You on Your Quest: The most useless-seeming gadget Bond is supplied with is usually the one that saves his life.
Jerkass: Sure, he's a hero and he saved the world on numerous occasions, but the guy's an asshole. Just how much is subject to change with every actor.
Just Between You and Me: Probably better named "Before I Kill You, Mister Bond...". Actually averted in nearly every movie- Bond almost always figures the gist of the plan on his own, and what the Big Bad tells him is usually more like a Motive Rant, explaining the profit in their otherwise senseless act of mass murder or seemingly mundane criminal enterprise that Bond was trying to stop anyway.
Goldfinger is the only movie that comes close to playing this straight, and it actually zigs-zags it a lot anyway, starting with Bond overhearing the villain explaining his plan to somebody else, and not even telling them the real plan anyway (partly by being interrupted) as well as murdering them afterwards. Sort-of played straight when Bond confronts him with apparent holes in his scheme and Goldfinger tells him he didn't get the whole plan, then confirms Bonds alternate theory- its still possible Bond had an inkling of what was really going on anyway, and would have / had figured out the real scheme, and was just manipulating Goldfinger into confirming his suspicions.
Meaningful Name: KGB-Chef is called Gogol. His second's name is Pushkin. For anyone with a degree in literature, they might as well have an Awesome McCoolname.
The Pornomancer: Bond. It's one of his defining traits. The Dalton and Craig eras, being Darker and Edgier, play with it. Bond practically has to be dragged into bed in the teaser for The Living Daylights, and stays monogamous throughout that movie Licence to Kill. In the Craig era, he actually doesn't sleep with the Bond girl of Quantum of Solace.
Recurring Extra: In the Roger Moore films The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only, the man who keeps seeing Bond do crazy stuff in Italy, probably without ever realising it is the same man (emerging from the sea in his car-sub; driving around the streets of Venice in his land-gondola; and escaping from armed assassins on skis in the Italian alps, respectively). In each case he is drinking and in the first two, finds what he's seeing so bizarre that he seems to wonder if he's been drinking too much (though not enough to stop, evidently). Played by Victor Tourjansky, who was the assistant director for these Italy-set scenes in all three films.
Producer Michael G. Wilson, Albert Broccoli's adopted son, has several cameos as various different characters, mostly extras or single-scene appearances; in Tomorrow Never Dies, for instance, he's the one Carver tells to blackmail the President.
Sociopathic Hero: How long have you got? Aside from Bond's endless coldly wasting Mooks with the only emotion registering usually being amusement, he doesn't treat women much better: he all but rapes Solitaire in Live and Let Die and Diamonds Are Forever begins with him strangling a woman with her own bikini top.
Supervillain Lair: The best of which, like the volcano rocket base in You Only Live Twice, were designed by legendary production designer Ken Adam.
On The Spy Who Loved Me DVD commentary around the time Bond and XXX are brought before Stromberg aboard his supertanker, there's a funny exchange between screenwriter Christopher Wood and director Lewis Gilbert. Wood wonders how anybody could build these great villains lairs without anyone noticing. Gilbert asks what about the huge staff and army the bad guy always seems to have. Does anybody write the next of kin whenever one of them gets killed? (The latter is lampshaded in the first Austin Powers movie.)
It was also lampshaded in a Saturday Night Live sketch where an interviewer talked with Blofeld, Goldfinger and Largo. For example, they mention how contractors tended to jack up the price of gadgets (like electric chairs) when they find out a Bond villain is the customer.
Tech Marches On: Given that it's a gadget-heavy series that spans over 50 years, it's bound to happen every now and again. However, the more basic and low-tech a gadget was, the less likely it was to look silly in a few years.
Casino Royale came close to invoking this by featuring Blu-ray discs in several scenes before it was determined what the next-generation HD disc would be. Beyond that, however, the Daniel Craig films appear to be intentionally averting this trope by rarely giving Bond anything more high-tech than a mobile phone to play with.
Technology Porn: Any scene in Q's workshop where he demonstrates his latest gadget for Bond to use on his next mission. A great example is in Goldfinger where he shows 007 his new Aston Martin DB5 with all kinds of hidden weapons and features.
Trust Password: Being spies, James has a number of signs and countersigns for when he meets friendlies (in GoldenEye, for example, he refused to even speak to Jack Wade until Wade showed him the Embarrassing Tattoo on his hip).
Tuxedo and Martini: Normally only in Bond rip-offs or parodies; however, the Moore Bond sometimes ended up like this, yet normally with hints of self-parody.
Unguided Lab Tour: Bond does this on occasion, though most of the time he's impersonating someone who has a reason to be there.
Villain Song: Characteristic of the Brosnan films - Goldeneye and The World Is Not Enough have two of the most iconic ones, and Tomorrow Never Dies has "Surrender" by K.D. Lang over the opening credits (and it was pretty clearly originally intended as the opening one, as its music is heard throughout the soundtrack).
What Happened to the Mouse?: One can't help but wonder what happens to the Bond Girls between movies, considering many of Bond's male allies have had recurring roles.
Wouldn't Hit a Girl: In fifty years, the number of women Bond has directly killed can be counted on three fingers, and two of those happened in the relatively recent Brosnan era: Fatima Blush (Never Say Never Again, 1983), Xenia (Film/Goldeneye, 1995), and Electra (The World Is Not Enough, 1999).
In The Spy Who Loved Me he blows up that helicopter pilot; Thunderball should count even if it wasn't him who pulled the trigger; he also tried to kill Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love but the Bond girl shot her instead; he savagely averts this trope in a more general sense too - while Bond is rarely overtly cruel with women, he has no problem fighting them, threatening to break their arms (The Man With the Golden Gun), strangling them for info (Diamonds Are Forever) and, in one case, actually threatening to slit one girl's throat [Licence to Kill). So yeah, Bond ain't this trope.
The works of John Le Carre, not stylistically but Bond's popularity lead Le Carre to write his novels as a deconstruction of Bond and a depiction of what real spy work is like.
That's an air pistol y'know...
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