Never Say Never Again (1983)

Director: Irvin Kershner

Cast: Sean Connery, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Max von Sydow, Kim Basinger

Have I Seen It Before: Although largely ignored in the canon—what with it being the strangest bit of counter-programming ever committed to screen—I have the strongest memory of picking up a VHS copy* from Suncoast** and marveling that there could be a lost Sean Connery Bond to marvel at…

Did I Like It: And then I didn’t think much of it. I’ve often wondered if my initial reaction to a Bond film is largely dominated not by the star at hand, or the villain with which he grapples, but instead the music on display. I can forgive a lot from A View to Kill (1985) because it is propelled forward by Duran Duran, but never quite sign on board with The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) because Carly Simon’s song brings the series into a fitful romantic mode, despite never realizing that there is almost nothing romantic about the protagonist of these films. Here, not only am I robbed of any sort of memorable tune, but (for clearly understandable reasons) there is no gun barrel and no Monty Norman in earshot. It never quite feels right.

In subsequent years, I’ve revisited the film and found it—despite my knee-jerk reactions to its deficiencies—to be above average for this era of Bond films. Connery is good, his late-period heyday just over the horizon and his eventual somnambulism in the final years of his career still a good ways off. Had fate been reversed and Roger Moore had starred in this film, it would be far easier to dismiss.

And then we become to the real crux of the matter. It can be a little easy to offer film criticism by way of comparison, but this film exists only to be compared to other films. It is a remake of possibly Connery’s weakest canonical film, Thunderball (1965), and was released within a few months of Octopussy (1983). So, where does Never rank among this traffic jam of movies? It’s a faster-paced movie than Thunderball, which counts for some. Is it better than Octopussy? Well, Sean Connery never dresses as a clown in this film. Hell, he could have dusted off the weird outfit from Zardoz (1974) and he still wouldn’t have done what Roger did that year.

But that’s probably a discussion for a different review.

*Kids, ask your parents.

**Kids, ask your parents, and weep for how good you could have had it.

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

Director: Guy Hamilton

Cast: Sean Connery, Jill St. John, Charles Gray, Lana Wood

Have I Seen it Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: There’s a moment in the TV series Timeless, which I didn’t really enjoy, where the timeline gets altered and there are more Sean Connery-starring Bond movies than there were in our timeline. That part I found delightful. So, it is supremely strange that I find myself in the strange position of wishing that Connery had been in the series more, and somehow wishing that he had been in one less entry.

The movie already runs at a bit of a deficit, as it is trying even harder than most to ape the singular success of Goldfinger (1964). It probably isn’t nearly as egregious as A View to A Kill (1985) in that regard—that movie nearly did a find and replace of Goldfinger’s script—but it is a terrible impulse of the franchise to imitate the the third entry.

But that’s not the real problem. The problem is Connery himself. Lore around the movie indicated that Connery didn’t want to be there, despite the huge payday, and its difficult to not see that in his listless final (authorized, non-video game) performance as the superspy. He looks tired, and significantly older than he did in You Only Live Twice (1967) and even later in Never Say Never Again (1983).

Then again, the film’s screenplay doesn’t give him much to work with. The opening—usually the best part of even the worst films in the series—at least seems nominally propelled from the ending of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) with Bond (Connery) searching for revenge against Blofeld (Gray). Anything less would have felt like a cheat, but when it turns out that Blofeld survived Bond’s ministrations in the third act of the film, it isn’t a horrifying revelation for Bond. It’s barely a plot point.

Thunderball (1965)

Director: Terence Young

Cast: Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Luciana Paluzzi

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. I even remember being a little guy and trying to build a version of the miniature rebreather out of Lego, being disappointed that it didn’t really work, and then slowly realizing that the real one probably didn’t work either.

Did I Like It: I want to like it far better than I do. Connery is here, which improves matters more than a little bit, and he’s even young and fit, which should move the film ahead of Diamonds are Forever (1971) and Never Say Never Again (1983). Sure, the film is a little slavishly devoted to Goldfinger (1964), when I personally prefer From Russia With Love (1963). But that should all lead to a bit of fun, right?

There might be an impulse to view the film through some jaundiced eyes, as the byzantine nature of the rights associated with many of this film’s concepts quickly doomed everything after the Connery era to the episodic buffoonery that have proved to be the series’ worst impulses over the years. If there was one book in the Fleming canon to wait for years to see adaptation, I might have preferred this one wallow for years—certainly not be adapted twice—and we get a Casino Royale with Connery*.

But judging a film based on the studio politics and litigation surrounding it is kind of like dismissing Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) because we could have gotten a James Cameron version of the film**. I think it’s just that the film is so water-logged that it occasionally forgets to be an action film. We can marvel at some underwater photography, but scuba-based fist- and gunfights are a trifle bore. John Barry’s score is pulling extra duty, having to occasionally go up tempo to remind us we ought to be thrilled when the footage forgot, and even that sweeping music gets exhausted and settles into a cozy, and unremarkable nap.

*Yes, that would mean we probably would not have Casino Royale (2006), or worse yet a Craig-starring Thunderball, but you’ll note I said I might have preferred it that way.

**I mean, I would like to see that, but Raimi will more than do in a pinch.

The Untouchables (1987)

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia, Robert De Niro

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure*.

Did I Like It: I’ve been on a bit of a gangster movie kick as of late, having watched all of The Godfather films recently**, and Lora has taken to dismissing them as “Pacino De Niro Scarface movies.” I don’t know if I’d be willing to back up that assertion, but she came in and out of the room while I was watching the film, and eventually summed up her criticism of stray scenes by saying: “This film is kind of corny.”

Here, she might be on to something. Throw out a couple of truly tension-filled scenes (and even those are cribbed from Eisenstein; it’s not a vice to go watch a silent movie, folks) and there’s a movie occasionally fixated on being strangely old-fashioned. The question then becomes is that quality an earnest attempt to bring the movies back to something resembling a cop show from the 50s? Or is it a stealth commentary on that earnestness so present during those older days? I’m tempted to lean towards the latter. How could we not chuckle at a scene where Ness (Costner) and his wife (Patricia Clarkson, in her feature debut) muse about naming their new infant son after J. Edgar Hoover? Then again, how can we not collectively roll our eyes in any scene of domestic bliss when Morricone’s score positively groans under the weight of its sentimentality?

Then again, how could a movie—if even occasionally—screw up the use of a Morricone score? Is it possible I don’t like this movie… No. I do. I do.

I struggle mightily with expressing why I don’t mind all of those problems, but I don’t.

*I was definitely tempted at that moment to impart an anecdote where I once made a political speech based mostly on quotes from Sean Connery in this film. I won’t tell that story but will say: Don’t do that, but if you do, don’t worry about it. Hardly anyone will get it.

**Director’s cut on Part III, I’m not an animal.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Cast: Sean Connery, Akiko Wakabayashi, Mie Hama, Tetsurō Tamba

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: And yet, beyond <Dr. No (1962)>, <From Russia with Love (1963)>, and <Goldfinger (1964)>, I make a suspicious habit of not keeping Connery’s other three (official, and unofficial, for that matter) outings as Bond on regular rotation.

People might complain about Connery’s performance in the role, as he felt like he was at the end of his time in the role (he skipped out on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)), but I don’t see it. There’s something so singular about Connery in the role that even while Daniel Craig unassailably did more with the role than anyone else, I still picture Connery (even with his series of weird hairpieces) in the role before anyone else.

The plot is fine—it’s no sin for a Bond film to feel just a wee bit interminable, I love them, but the vast majority of they are a slog in the middle—and there’s scarcely better casting for a Bond villain in general (and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, specifically) than Donald Pleasance. It’s an exotic travelogue, the theme song (from Nancy Sinatra) was an absolute banger, even before Mad Men made it the stinger of their greatest season.

Is there anything else one needs from a Bond film? I’m racking my brain as I type this to quantify why this is one of the also-ran Bond films. It shouldn’t be. It’s just weird enough (and, for that matter, just early enough in the saga) that it doesn’t fall into the occasional problem Bond films have where some entries so, desperately want to be Goldfinger (1964) in every measurable way.

I guess that means You Only Live Twice is actually one of the all-time greats… That’s the thing I’m realizing as I watch some of these for these reviews: some of the entries I have spent this whole time discounting have been my favorite this whole time.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones

Have I Seen it Before: Yup.

Did I Like It: So, lately I’ve been listening to many of the later (read: preposterously impossible to be adapted to film) Tom Clancy novels via audio book and before we get into this film, I think now is as good a time as any to get some things off my chest. Never have I ever been through such a more progressively ridiculous set of events in my life, and I include both the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Trump presidency in that statement. Why have I subjected myself to these interminable tomes? Well, I had purchased Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears (read, those Clancy books which were begrudgingly—by all parties—adapted to film) on Audible and with my reading goal for 2021 well passed, I could take some chances on some books I only bought on an ill-defined impulse. By the time I was in the middle of Fears—which at least partially hinges on a subplot involving Ryan’s bout of erectile dysfunction*--I was “Jim-ing” an unseen camera so often, that John Krasinski’s eventual casting finally made sense. I kept going because the knowledge that Ryan’s supreme intelligence and only-honest-man-in-town-ness propels him into the Presidency… for reasons. It’s time I’ll never get back, and by the time of Executive Orders when Ryan addresses the nation and applauds his fellow citizens for making responsible decisions for themselves in the efforts to stem an outbreak of airborne Ebola, I laughed so hard at my car’s stereo, I fear I may have hurt my Honda Civic’s feelings.

Tom Clancy is garbage. He continues to be garbage, and he’s been dead for nearly ten years.

But, here’s the good news! None of the later—and even occasionally posthumous—absurdities of the saga of John Patrick Ryan are here. This is a brilliantly constructed spy thriller, where Jack Ryan (Baldwin – could you imagine him, or for that matter Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, or Krasinski portraying Clancy’s latter-day Reaganesque fever dream of a President?) is the perpetually under-estimated smartest man in the room… or boat.

While I might say that the story ultimately halts more than it concludes, the trip to that anti-climax is engaging enough, and all of the people involved aren’t bringing to the proceedings the same baggage as the source material** that it’s extraordinarily difficult not to like the film, despite my steadily increasing antipathy for the character.

*Clancy sure knew his audience. I’ve got to give him that.

**To be fair, part of the film’s strength is that the direct source material is far and away Clancy’s strongest book. It came before he started to buy his own press.

Finding Forrester (2000)

Director: Gus Van Sant

Cast: Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, Rob Brown, Anna Paquin

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Hell, I once gave a presentation to a writer’s group where I showed the famous “You’re the Man Now, Dog” scene as a segue to the virtues of using a typewriter.

Which really should have been the takeaway from that scene, not the decade-plus of memes we got as a result.

Did I Like It: It would be easy to dismiss the film for the parts that some might call derivative. The film is built on a foundation of the white savior complex, which one can only hope will age even more poorly as the years progress. It has enough of Van Sant’s early triumph with Good Will Hunting (1997) looming over it to ever get to be its own movie. And there’s more than a little bit of Scent of a Woman (1992) to make the whole thing feel familiar to the point of being a pat.

The thing is, I can never truly dismiss the film any time I see it. For one thing, it gets the feeling of writing correct*. Punching the keys; sometimes its the rhythm. Reading for dinner and dessert. Write with your heart; re-write with your head. 

And then there’s the case of Sean Connery. His storied film career went out with whimper in films like The Avengers (1998) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), and we forget that he had one great film performance left to him. His Forrester takes the broad brush strokes of J.D. Salinger and made him a triumph of both sadness and triumph. There are plenty of leading men built on an image of machismo who couldn’t reach for that level of vulnerability, much less in his second-to-last role.

*For other entries in this hallowed pantheon, see Shakespeare in Love (1998), Wonder Boys (2000) (of which I am shocked to learn that, as of this writing, I have not written a review), and Adaptation (2002)… I’m sure I’m missing others which might have been made prior to the Clinton administration, but they are escaping me… Let’s just go with the introduction scene of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and call it good.

The Rock (1996)

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, Michael Biehn

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. It’s never been a very important movie in my pantheon.

Did I Like It: There’s always a hard, impenetrable crust of Michael Bayness to any Michael Bay film which make it hard to truly love. He—being the pinnacle of those music video crafters that ended up getting handed the keys to a feature film—can’t quite help himself. Every movie since Bad Boys (1995) always simmers at the wrong end of too-much, and the less said about his later Transformers sequels, the better off we all are.

But it isn’t like the film is unenjoyable, though. I’m struck here by the fact that, for all his failings, Bay has a willingness to cast good people. From John Spencer through Raymond Cruz, not fifteen minutes of the film goes by where I was not pleasantly surprised by a performer’s appearance which I had apparently forgotten since the last time I watched the film.

If you embrace the notion—I dare not say turn off your brain—that it is too much and ride the wave safely to shore, there are worse ways to spend a few hours, especially in those days before he became an action figure salesman*. He set out to make a big, dumb action movie, and that’s what we got…

But, if you take the film on the notion that one James Bond, 007 of MI6 is a codename which several individuals had filled over the years**, and that one of those men were named John Patrick Mason, then this film can transcend it’s dumb roots and become something quite special, indeed.

It does take some mental gymnastics to get there. Best you don’t turn your brain off for the movie.

*To be fair, plenty of very fine filmmakers ended up as action figure salesman. I’m looking in your direction, Mr. Lucas.

**A conclusion which that film series can somewhat support, if you ignore the fact that Lazenby, Moore, and Dalton’s version of the character all apparently were married to a woman named Teresa, now dead. It’s only really difficult to get over during the opening scene of For Your Eyes Only (1981). Ignore it and the Bond universe can become far richer, indeed.

From Russia With Love (1963)

Director: Terence Young

Cast: Sean Connery, Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Amendáriz, Robert Shaw

Have I Seen it Before: Oh. Many, many times.

Did I Like It: For so many years, there wasn’t even much of a contest. Before some (underline, some) of the recent Daniel Craig entries, this was the best Bond movie ever made by several kilometers*. For my money, it still is the absolute gold standard of the franchise. 

And it can be hard to describe—to the uninitiated—why that is. There are few gadgets on display here. The iconic Aston Martin is still a film away. The main villain operates in the shadows, and the actual antagonists of the story are in roles that would normally be filled by henchmen as the franchise continued. To tell the truth, as a young lad I think this was very near the bottom of the list. Goldeneye (1995) was my jam. Boys do tend to have an affinity for whoever played Bond when they were about 10. We were all young fools, once.

It is the most faithful adaptation of one of Fleming’s original novels. That might account for some of it, but convincing oneself that the Fleming books are holy texts which should never have been deviated from is probably dangerous territory, and at minimum would preclude one from accepting Idris Elba as the next successor to the role, which he should 100% be. Don’t @ me.

Producer Albert Broccoli said that this is where the Bond formula was perfected, but I say that is bunk. If you want the formula perfected (before it was summarily regurgitated, you have to wait for Goldfinger (1964). This film’s true strength is that there was no formula yet. EON and Terence Young and the cast were content to make an actual movie the best way they knew how. By the time Thunderball (1965) came around, the whole affair had become a cottage industry.

With this movie, the chemistry between Connery and Bianchi (completely dubbed over, in the grand tradition of early Bond) is palpable. Those henchmen are both memorable villains without veering too much into cartoon territory. And Connery is never better in the role. He’s a man working the problems of his adventure out. There’s a mind at work, not a strange, inhuman superhero who is never in any danger.

If only the other Bond films could have pulled off that trick. At least Moonraker (1979) would have been a hell of a different picture.

*Felt weird to go with “miles” there, when we’re talking about 007.

Goldfinger (1964)

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.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Alison Doody, Julian Glover

Have I Seen it Before: I’m reasonably sure that I did not see it in the theater when it was released. I have a weird encyclopedic memory of movies I saw from 1989-1990. I would imagine most movie buffs have such a memory of the movies they saw when they were about that age.

But I surely ran a VHS copy of this movie down to the nub in the years since. I even skipped a lecture of Chemistry 1 to go grab the trilogy (and back then, it was a trilogy) when it was first released on DVD.

Did I Like It: Back in those days, I think I might have been convinced that it was the greatest of all the Indiana Jones films. 

I don’t think that any more. I certainly don’t think it is the worst of the series, but we’ll get to that later. After both the creators and the public decided (and I believe wrongly) that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) was a failed experiment, Lucas, Spielberg and company opted for what I’m sure was a course correction to make the third film in the series more like the original Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

And the film so desperately wants to be Raiders. The story is once again about Indiana (Ford) reconciling with someone from his past by making them his partner. In Raiders, he reconnects with old lover Karen Allen, here he makes amends with his father in the form of Sean Connery. The Nazis are back in full force, which is a sentence I write with unfortunate frequency in this last half of the first decade of the 21st century. Even the font chosen for the opening titles is directed to the sole goal of making the audience feel like this is going to be like the Indy adventure that they liked at first blush.

Now, it helps that what the film lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in charm. It’s likely the missing ingredient in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). That film wants to be Raiders, too, but it doesn’t have Sean Connery giving one of the most blissfully nerdy performances of any movie star. For a screen presence that was so thoroughly contingent on machismo, making Indy’s father an aloof bookworm who fells Nazis with an umbrella, some seagulls and some well-remembered Charlemagne. It also helps that this was in the time pre-Air Force One (1997) when Ford spent a number of years sleeping through every film in which he starred. He eventually corrected this notion by the time Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and maybe we’ll get one more charming outing with Henry Jones Jr. in our future.

Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)

Director: Russell Mulcahy

Cast: Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Michael Ironside, Virginia Madsen

Have I Seen it Before: One might be forgiven for asking why I decided to write it now.

Did I Like It: If I grade on a curve…

No. I didn’t like it. It’s an objectively bad film. I’m even reasonably sure that I watched one of the later revised cuts, that are supposedly better than the allegedly worst-of-all-time theatrical cut, and there isn’t much to like here. The theatrical cut apparently reveals that the immortals are extra-terrestrials. This may be profane among Highlander fans (I don’t really care if it is), but that’s a much better origin than the warmed over time travel mishmash served here.

Are there plot holes that you can drive a truck through, leaving the entirety of the plot incomprehensible? Sure. 

Are the special effects cheap to the point where one wonders if, a la Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987), the filmmakers ran out of money and simply had to release any old thing? I’m kind of thinking that yes, this is precisely what happened here. 

Is there no reasonable reason for Sean Connery to be in this film, to the point where the common legend that Bond The First turned down roles in The Matrix (1999) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy because he “didn’t get them” becomes absolutely astonishing? Yes. Demonstrably so. He died rather conclusively in the first film and is alive again in this one for… reasons. This series is about a clan of immortals who can only be killed by beheading. Also, beheading doesn’t matter.

But the consternation the film inspires in people is a little inexplicable. Anyone that is somehow betrayed by anything that happens, or fails to happen, or insists on happening despite all reason, is pointedly forgetting the weird car wreck that is the original Highlander (1986). They’re both crappy. This one is somehow a little more spirited in its crappiness. And that’s something.

Highlander (1986)

Director: Russell Mulcahy

Cast: Christopher Lambert, Roxanne Hart, Clancy Brown, and… Sean Connery?

Have I Seen it Before: Never. 

Did I Like It: God help me… Maybe?

I can’t be the first one to bring this up, but I’d be remiss if I completely avoided the issue.

A British spy. An Irish cop. A Russian submarine captain. Whatever the hell he played in Zardoz (1974). Connery has been—at least on paper—miscast more than any major movie star in history.

And then we come to Highlander. The movie about a Scottish immortal casts the frenchman as the Scot, and the most Scottish man who ever Scott’ed (and didn’t run a starship engine room) gets to play the Spaniard?

Oh. He’s an Egyptian. My mistake.

Truly bewildering decisions not withstanding, this opening entry in the inexplicable Highlander franchise is a wobbly hut built on the foundation of other, much better films. It plays out like a mixture of Terminator (1984) and The Duellists (1977), but clearly wasn’t made with any of the skill of either Ridley Scott or a James Cameron. I admire one of Mulcahy’s films, 1994’s The Shadow, but even that is a pillar of flaws with a few brief flourishes of watchability. This seems to be his M.O.

The fact that Christopher Lambert has enjoyed any manner of a career, while at the same time we collectively sneer at the very presence of Tommy Wiseau. They occupy the same real estate in moviedom. I don’t get it. Now that I think about it, has anyone seen Lambert and Wiseau in the same place at the same time?

And yet, it’s been almost a day since I watched the movie as I type this review, and Highlander hasn’t left my mind since. It’s almost gleefully bad, and, again, God help me, I’m morbidly intrigued to take in the experience that is Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), because apparently that is the truly inexplicably awful movie in this series. I can’t even imagine.

Dr. No (1962)

Director: Terence Young

Cast: Sean Connery, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord, Ursula Andress

Have I Seen it Before: I’ve seen them all before, let’s get that out of the way right now.

Did I Like It: It’s got some fascinating embryonic charms going for it. Ultimately it’s early Connery, so there’s plenty to like.

Man alive, the opening sequence to this, the first James Bond film, is disconcertingly weird. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just hard to ignore. In fact, it is sort of thrilling in a way, as it is clear the once and future EON Productions isn’t yet churning out a product with a winning formula, but actually trying to make a film. This phenomenon will come up a lot in the first several Connery-led pictures.

There are very few things that indeed come fully formed in this initial outing. Q-branch and their wonderful toys are nary heard from, there is no pre-title action set piece , and the gun-barrel shot is truncated and sounds like a flying saucer landed (both a byproduct of the aforementioned embryonic title sequence), and Bond (Connery) is—by his own standards—nearly eligible to join the priesthood. 

What is arrived in its full form is Connery’s Bond. With just the right menace of masculine confidence, wry charm, and the lethal edge in which Roger Moore remained supremely disinterested, Connery owns the role from his first scene. Indeed, that first sequence with Bond and Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson*) trading barbs during a round of baccarat may be one of the more prototypical Bond scenes in the canon. Legend (and DVD behind-the-scenes featurettes) have it that the scene from From Russia With Love (1963) where Bond first meets Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) is what is used to audition new Bonds before white smoke seeps out of the chimney at EON Productions, but I really think this scene is the much more important test.

The plot is sort of perfunctory, coming together and resolving itself with a simplicity that just isn’t found in some of the later entries. That isn’t much a criticism, though, as I am no baffled by how supremely bored I found myself during the final stretches of the later entries during the tenure of Roger Moore or Pierce Bronsan.

Also, is Felix Leiter (Jack Lord) wearing women’s sunglasses in this movie? Man the sixties were wild, weren’t they?

*Although the role’s dialogue was spoken by the same woman, Nikki van der Zyl, who dubbed over Ursula Andress later in the movie