Director: Guy Hamilton
Cast: Sean Connery, Honor Blackman, Gert Fröbe, Shirley Eaton*
Have I Seen It Before?: Many, many times.
Did I like it?: This may not be my favorite Connery-led Bond film. That will always be with From Russia With Love (1963). But it is hard to deny that this film has been the far more influential entry to the rest of the series.
One can see why EON productions spent most of the next forty years trying desperately to re-capture the magic of this film. Every ounce of it works**. The villain (Fröbe) and his henchmen (Harold Sakata) have just the right degree of hairbrained schemes and legitimate menace. For a man my age, the women in the film are beautiful in a sort of historical sense, but every one of them is memorable. And then there is Bond himself. Still lethal and cunning in the frame of Connery, there is a sense of bemusement in his face as the proceedings reach for the ridiculously sublime that is so charming here that you almost want to stop it from becoming an unstoppable brush fire by the time Roger Moore takes on the role.
The heirs to Broccoli have spent a lot of time saying that when they set out on a new 007 adventure they always venture to make Goldfinger, but sometimes are left with the reality that they made Thunderball (1965) instead. I would take a different tack and say they should (and in recent years have with more frequency) tried to make From Russia With Love, but all-too-often they ended up making Moonraker (1979) instead.
*Weird side note about Ms. Eaton. In a weird attempt by the collective world to make the uber-fantasy of the Bond films reality, there was an urban legend about how not just Jill Masterson, but Eaton herself also died because skin suffocation due to the gold paint. In truth, Ms. Eaton is alive to this day, but the dark cloud over the film once inspired my mother to warn me about the dangers of painting your entire body. To this day, I have no clue why she needed to tell me that, but I suppose the things parents wanted to warn their children about in the 1990s were going to seem weird either way.
**I’d change that to litres, but large swaths of the film take place in America, so the metric system is just going to have to sit in the ejector seat.