The Viewpoint Blog's Ranking of the best James Bond Films. 23: Quantum Of Solace

So we continue to make our way up our ranking of the James Bond films from worst to best, and at number 23, we find Daniel Craig's second movie as 007, and the shortest film of the entire series, coming in at just over 1 hour 45 minutes.  In the old days, when films were shown on big reels that lasted about 20 minutes, this duration would make it a 5 reeler, where as most two hour films are commonly referred to as 6 reelers, and the big finale would always happen in reel 6.  So does the shorter film actually help or hinder the film.  Time to find out as we review, Quantum of Solace.



Oh boy, that trailer looked so good...

THE PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE

This is the second film not to feature the gun barrel sequence right at the beginning.  I don't really like this, especially as it's been a long term feature of the Bond films.  The Pierce Brosnan gun barrel sequences were just about perfect for modern Bond films, and I'm disappointed that we don't have those 3D style gun barrels, as they were visually very good, and a nice improvement on the original style created by Maurice Binder.

In fact, our first shot seems to be an incredibly long-distance, yet fast zoom, probably a helicopter shot, though maybe with some zoom on it as well.  And we're thrown right into the action with James Bond in a car chase.  This can work quite well if done right.  It throws you into the action quickly, and can be a great way of pulling the audience in quickly.  If done badly, it actually shocks you straight out of the movie, and it's very difficult to get the viewer back in, once that happens.

Unfortunately, this tends more towards the latter than the former.  Whilst it doesn't exactly shock you out of the movie, it doesn't pull you into it either.

The biggest problem with the sequence, is the editing.  I have this theory about editing and films.  The more you notice the cuts and edits, the less you're actually into the film, and the film hasn't done its job, which is to pull you into the story, and you don't really notice the edits.  When you notice the edits, they're not good edits.

This is part of the problem with Quantum Of Solace, and it comes in practically from the start.  There's a lot of fast cutting here, a lot of shots are no more than 5 seconds at most, which is 120 frames of film, and when you have shots that are no more than 12 frames, then the shots are probably unnecessary, and you should look at how the edit actually plays, because it won't play well to an audience.  If you as a Director or Editor think it's intense, then your average cinema goer is probably going to be blown out of their seats and not in a good way.  They're not going to understand what's going on, and you're going to lose them from the film.

Sometimes, shots need to take a little more time, in order to allow the audience to come along for the ride.

The next big problem, is the actual action itself.  Now, I have heard this car chase described as bland, and I think that's actually a little unkind.  It's not bland, but it doesn't feel very much like a James Bond car chase.  Part of that is down to the fact that the car doesn't have any gadgets other than bullet proof windows, but that on it's own shouldn't make this feel not very 'Bondian'.  Heck, the first car chase in the James Bond series ever, involving a hearse chasing Bond in a rental car, had no gadgets and really didn't have much happen, but that still feels more 'Bondian' than this one does.  Sure there's a lot of action in the sequence, and they do manage to get one thing right, which is managing to remove a door from Bond's car, which gives a little bit of vulnerability, and really helps the sequence actually, but just about everything else about the sequence felt like something out of Transporter or XXX, not really like a James Bond car chase at all.

Watching the "Bond On Location" special feature, I saw the camera they used to film some parts of the chase.  It's called the Ultimate Arm, and it really is a wonderful technical achievement, to get the shots they got, but ultimately, it feels a little bit like a great technical achievement rather than something that helps with telling the story.  The shots themselves don't really seem to add much.  However, the one shot they used a fair bit which really worked, was the shot from inside Bond's car, looking at Bond.  It's not your standard camera shot for cars, it's a lot lower, and is looking up from just off the passenger seat, and actually allows you to see more of what Bond does inside the car.  I'm not sure if it's a fish eye lens, or just a standard wide angle lens, but to my eyes, those are the best shots in the whole sequence   It's a nice angle, and I'd be happy to see further shots like that one in other car chase sequences.

The editing will crop up again later on...

So, anyway, Bond manages to dispose of his pursuers, and we get a wonderful establishing shot of the location that Bond is arriving in, Siena in Italy, ruined by an overly pretentious title card giving the name of the location.  This is another problem I have with this sequence and indeed the film as a whole.  These location title cards are just way too over the top.  It seems like an overly pretentious, arthouse way of titling locations, and what you really need is location title cards that just do the job, and do it without the pretentiousness.  This is a James Bond film, not some piece of arty French cinema.  Don't get me wrong, I like some really arty French films, but the style of one does not translate to the other very well.  The James Bond style would not translate to arthouse movies, it would be visually quite boring, and likewise, the arthouse style does not translate to James Bond films very well at all.

There is a place in Bond films for more artistic stuff, usually not in big action scenes, but in the quieter, talking moments, you can do things that are slightly different.  If it works, it's great.  If not, it matters less than if you mess up an action sequence for instance.  As long as the shots work for the story, it should be okay.

Anyway, Bond arrives at this underground garage, somewhere in Siena, we don't know exactly where, and he gets out of the car and opens the boot, to reveal Mr White is in the boot.  That moment actually works.  It has some real shock value.  If Bond pursuers had succeeded in driving him off the road, there was a chance they could have killed Mr White too in the resulting accident.  However, if we'd seen that Mr White had been put into the boot of the car that Bond was driving, the car chase would have had an extra tension all of it's own, which actually would have made it feel a little more James Bond-like.  Yeah, it worked in the way it was intended to, but it could have been so much better.  Also, I would have liked it, if like the Quantum Of Solace video game, the film had actually started at Mr White's mansion, picked up right where we left off Casino Royale, and maybe started with a shootout there, leading into the car chase.  So many missed tricks in this opening, it could have been so much better.

THE TITLE SEQUENCE.

This is a title sequence and title song that I have to put low on their individual lists, because they're not particularly good.  MK12 produced these titles instead of Daniel Kleinman, and to be honest, it shows.  There isn't really a lot of imagination showed in this title sequence, it's too dark, and everything is in slow motion, and it is paired with one of the worst main title songs in Bond History, perhaps only beaten by Moonraker.

The titles themselves animate onto screen in a weird way as well, and it doesn't really work.

I don't honestly know what more to say.  Jack White was good in The White Stripes and Alicia Keys was great as a solo artist, but the whole way they combine just doesn't work, at least not for this song.



THE PLOT

The film proper starts with a series of shots setting up Siena, again, specifically, a particular horse racing event that takes place every year.  A crew shot some documentary style footage to be used in the final film, and they did a very good job, it adds some good atmosphere to the sequence.

We are then shown Mr White being helped into a chair, and Bond tells him "Don't bleed to death."  Oh my goodness!  Humour, in a Bond film, and it's appropriate humour too.  It turns out this an MI6 safe house, and also here are various other MI6 operatives, Craig Mitchell, M's personal bodyguard, and indeed, M herself.

We then get a lot exposition, allowing us to remind ourselves what happened in the last film, and basically setting up the story.  I have to admire the fact that they do this very quickly.  In a 2 hour film, you have no more than 30 minutes to set up the film's story, and get into the "meat and two veg", the main course as it were.  Here, the basic setup is done very quickly, before we're 10 minutes in, so they got this part right.

The interrogation of Mr White begins, with M, Bond, Mitchell and another agent who we're not introduced to here as well.  Mr White seems exceedingly casual here, talking to Bond and M, and this should be a warning sign, but somehow nobody gets on alert, not even us in the audience.  The line about having people everywhere isn't even that noticeable in terms of how the sequence is shot, and this is one of the main problems with this sequence.  Nothing the director or his DP (Director of Photography) do indicate that there is anything special about what Mr White is saying, there is no tension being built up, which is kinda needed here.  I know they're trying to go for as much shock value as possible with the 'big reveal', but shocks like that, need a little leading into, so that you don't completely shock your audience out of the film.

Mr White looks up at somebody off camera and says "Am I right?", and Mitchell suddenly pulls out his gun and shoots the agent that we hadn't been introduced to at point blank range.  This is the old Star Trek; The Original Series "Red Shirt" gag.  You can guarantee that anybody in a scene we haven't been introduced to, and in Star Trek that usually meant the red shirt security guys, are going to be killed, and this had been pretty much signposted from the moment everybody got together.  Only one person there we didn't know, and they were going to be killed.  No lines of dialogue, means no life at the end of the scene.  It's an old old gag, and to be honest, one that shouldn't be used, it is somewhat obvious when it happens.

A fight breaks out, M narrowly avoids getting killed, and Mr White gets shot in the confusion with M making her escape.  I have to be honest here, and say it has taken me several viewings of that sequence of shots to realise what is going on.  The way that sequence is edited, there aren't many shots that last more than 1 second.  In essence, camera positions are changing all the time, and the flurry of cuts from one shot to the next renders most of that initial fight, unwatchable.  Your brain does not have time to process what you're seeing before moving on to the next shot, so you're left with a flurry of images that make little sense visually.

One shot that I do like in the sequence though, is the one that shows M running up the steps.  It's a handheld shot and gives the shot a nice documentary feel, as though the cameraman was just happening upon it, rather than everything set up ready to capture it.

There then follows about a 5 minute chase sequence, which starts under Siena in the tunnels, goes through part of the city at ground level, then goes onto the rooftops, and finally seems to end up at this bell tower, which includes a weird moment of an Italian woman dropping a box of fruit or veg, I'm not sure which, and going "Oh mama mia...".  Honestly that moment, wouldn't have looked out of place in Moonraker, but it sure didn't do anything here, except just look weird.

Bond thinks he has Mitchell cornered, but Mitchell surprises Bond and another fight ensues, one which, whilst some edits are as quick as before, most of the shots at least about 3 seconds and it makes the sequence much more watchable.  The sequence ends with Bond shooting and we assume he's shot Mitchell, but we don't actually see that he's shot Mitchell, nor do we see Mitchell die, which feels like a mistake somehow.  

We cut to London, and another pretentious location title card, and it's raining.  Oh my goodness, all the old stereotypes are coming out here.

Bond arrives at Mitchell's apartment, and we get what I can only describe as an odd scene here involving M and Bond.  Bond is looking cool as usual, but M is almost frantic, beside herself with worry.  What happened to the "evil queen of numbers" that we were first introduced to in Goldeneye?  Where's the stoicalness that we have seen so many times throughout the film series?  This is not the M we've come to know since Goldeneye.  I can't blame Dame Judi Dench for this, this comes down to the writers and director.  I get that they want to make the Bond/M relationship a subplot here, but to be honest, there have been better films that have used this subplot, even during the Judi Dench era.

M gets a call, and we suddenly cut back to M and Bond back at MI6, a very different looking MI6 to what we saw in the previous film, 2006's Casino Royale, and yet this is supposed to have happened in relatively quick time frame, about a day or so???  Mistakes like that are really avoidable, and you shouldn't make those kind of mistakes ever.

Anyway, we get a brief bit of exposition here, which links us, rather obtusely, to the next sequence.  Also, we have a touchscreen tabletop, which just seems a little over the top technologically for 2008, or should that be 2006, after all it is a direct follow on to Casino Royale.  Heck, in 2006, we didn't even have iPod touches yet.  The iPad didn't come out until 2010.  Heck, whilst the idea about tabletop touchscreen technology has been around for a long time, the actual technology still isn't that good yet.

We then go to Port Au Prince in Haiti, with another pretentious location title card, which looks like it came from an old spaghetti western.  I do wonder if there was some kind of game going on between the director and the editor to see how many different fonts they could include in the movie.

Bond arrives at a building, where he is supposed to interrogate a suspect, but he ends up killing him.  But honestly, what is this sequence here for?  It feels like an action sequence designed to fill a plot hole, the point being to introduce us, eventually to Camille.  It was like they thought, how do we get from London to our Bond girl, and they wrote this gratuitous fight scene in.

Anyway, Camille picks up Bond, not really knowing who he is.  And the car she is driving is followed by someone on a motorbike, but Camille manages to give him the slip.  But it turns out the guy who Bond killed back in his flat, was meant to kill Camille.  Camille ejects him from the car at gunpoint, and the guy on the motorcycle catches up, but Bond takes him out and steals the motorcycle to follow Camille.

Camille is tracked to some warehouse on the docks, and this serves as an introduction to this film's villains.  First, henchman Elvis, performed by Anatole Taubman, and our main villain, Dominic Greene, played by Mathieu Amalric.  The villains here are not that good, and really don't make much of an impression.  I'll talk more about the villains later on.  But the sequence where Camille confronts Dominic Greene just feels a little gratuitous as well.  There are better ways to introduce us to the villains.  There's one more villain that we're introduced to here as well.  General Medrano, played here by Joaquin Cosio

Bond has a short conversation with a gate guard, which serves no purpose at all, other than to show the card which has the name R Sterling on it.  R Sterling being a reference to Bond's cover name in The Spy Who Loved Me, Robert Sterling.  It's a nice touch, but it does nothing storywise.  Just gives Daniel Craig a small acting moment, along with the guys playing the gate guard and Elvis.

Camille is introduced to General Medrano here, and this is a big mistake in the film, as at this point, we have no idea what connects these two people, and it turns out there's some rather interesting history there, which we don't get until much later.  I know that nobody like exposition scenes and they try to use short quick ones throughout the film, rather than one long exposition scene, but the moment where Camille meets General Medrano would have had more impact in story terms, if their history had been explained before the meeting, and as such, the meeting happens too early.

There's a little side storyline here about Medrano taking over the Bolivian government.  It would have played better if there had actually been anything about it later in the film, but it never comes up again, so why mention it?  It just goes to show how terrible the writing was on this movie.

Anyway, Camille goes with the General, and Bond rescues her by boat.  Why he decides to do this I don't know, it doesn't really make a lot of sense, I think they just wanted to get a boat chase in here, but it just doesn't compare to the one that was done in Live And Let Die.  Stuff happens, and Bond basically wins out.  At least the editing here isn't a problem.

Bond steals a jeep, and calls the office.  M's office has a wall that becomes a massive display screen.

What the...???!!!???

Ye gods, the production design in this film feels more over the top than one of Ken Adam's.  Ken was known for extravagant sets, but this feels more Star Trek than James Bond.

M and Tanner have a conversation with Bond, and connect with Gregory Beam, the head of the CIA's Latin America section, played here played David Harbour, and we're re-introduced to Felix Leiter, played again by Jeffrey Wright.  Felix is a well-loved character in the Bond universe, but I've never taken to Jeffrey Wright's performance.  I wasn't keen on it in Casino Royale 2006, and I'm less keen on it here.  He does have one moment when it harkens back to the old-style Felix/Bond relationship, but the whole thing feels out of place generally.  It was as if they had hired him for two films, and were struggling to fit him in.

Gregory Beam here feels like he should be a hero, but he comes across more like a bad villain.  That is to say someone who just isn't that bad, but isn't that good either.  That kind of sums up both the character and the performance.  Not that bad, but not that good either.  He's got nothing about him that makes me root for him.  He's just bland, and you can tell he's not a good guy, but he's just not much of a bad guy either.  A slightly dirty shade of grey.

Don't get me wrong, it's fine to have some more morally ambiguous characters in the Bond world, but they really need to be done better than Gregory Beam.  Beam and Leiter meet up with Greene on a private jet, and conversation happens, which mostly leaves me cold, cos I have no real interest in seeing this, as it actually has very little relevance.  It's basically meant to give us a sense of the plot moving forward, the bad guy's plan in motion, but really, in this film, I couldn't care about it.  The real plot is Bond taking on Quantum, and what Greene is doing just doesn't really play into that at all.

There is one sequence, at the opera in Bregenz, Austria, with another totally pretentious location title card, in yet another different font, that actually does play into the main plot, where members of Quantum including Greene and Mr White are in conversation over earpieces and Bond manages to infiltrate that 'meeting' and causes quite a panic.  However also in this sequence, there is a shot of Elvis looking at what I can only guess is another henchman and smiling at him.  The other guy seems completely unamused.  Why is that even there?  Does it add anything to the story?  No.  It serves no purpose.  That moment should have been cut.

And yes, I know this is already the shortest film in the series, but any moment in a film that serves no discernible purpose must be cut.

Anyway, back to the plot.  Bond manages to get ahold of a special earpiece that Greene and his cohorts are communicating on, and forces them to tip their hand, meaning that he can get photographs of most of them, but not Mr White, who is also there at the opera, and takes his earpiece out rather than leaving.  The rest decide they've been compromised and leave.  Bond encounters them and gets into a fight with the bodyguard of one of the cohorts, called Guy Haines, who happens to be a special adviser to the Prime Minister.  The fight ends with Bond knocking him off a building, in a moment straight out of The Spy Who Loved Me.  However, instead of landing on the ground, he lands on Dominic Greene's car, and a henchman gets out and shoots the bodyguard dead.  Huh?  Killing the bodyguard of one of your own members?  That doesn't make sense.

One point I must make here, is that it is in this opera sequence that the name Quantum is first used, however, I don't think it's done that well.  Not badly, just not that well.  It feels a little bit random, and I'm just not sure how it could have been done better but then again, a lot of this film feels this way.  It could have been done a lot better.  Not entirely sure how, whether the blame lies more with the writers or the director, but suffice to say, the writing isn't strong and the direction doesn't feel like it has any... direction... to it.

Another point that I'm going to make here, is that after this point in the film, it is believed that Bond killed Guy Haines' bodyguard, even though that's not what happened.  And yet we have nothing to show why that is believed to be the case.  This film is so short, and it is missing so many important little things, and yet we have other moments that really do not belong there.

Anyway, Bond makes contact with London, and is told to come in for a debrief as the bodyguard that Bond fought is a member of Special Branch, but Bond refuses.  M puts a stop upon all of Bond's cards, and restrictions on his movements.  Bond tries to follow Quantum to Bolivia, but can't due to the stop put on Bond's cards.

We don't see how he does it, but the next cut we see is Bond travelling on a boat in Talamone, Italy.  How did Bond get there?  It's a short film, so a couple of minutes of montage to get us to this location would be good.  Also, yet another pretentious location title card.

It's no secret that the production of Quantum Of Solace was messy with the writer's strike, and filming and editing were condensed into less than a year.  Filming was done from 2nd January 2008 until 21st June, and the film was released on 31st October, with the London premiere 2 days before.  This feels like a rushed job, that they didn't give this the thought it required, never mind the care and attention.  Filming on any movie usually takes about 3-4 months, sometimes a little bit longer, and some big productions these days usually schedule re-shoots for a 2 to 4 week period halfway during editing to tidy up parts where editing is throwing up issues with the original shoots.  Here, they just didn't have the time to do re-shoots and tidy up bits, and they tried to fix what they could in the editing, but mostly it made it worse.

Anyway, it's here in Talamone that we are re-introduced to our second returning character from Casino Royale 2006.  Mathis, played once again by Giancarlo Giannini.  Mathis was cleared of being a double agent at some point between when we last saw him in Casino Royale, and when we see him here, in a villa that has been bought for him by MI6 as compensation, even though the whole timespan can not have been any more than a few weeks at most.  Continuity seems to have been a real problem with this film, I just don't get how they think this is believable.

Mathis agrees to help Bond get to Bolivia, and we get a scene on the plane over where Bond is drinking and Mathis joins him, and we get a 'boohoo, the woman I loved is dead' scene, which doesn't fit everything else that Bond has been saying and doing.  His approach so far has been very cold and almost clinical about shutting that episode out of his life.  Suddenly we have this???  It makes no sense.

Bond and Mathis arrive in La Paz, Bolivia, via another pretentious location title card, and it is here we are introduced to Agent Fields, who is an MI6 operative based out of the British Consulate in Bolivia.  She is played by Gemma Arterton, and she doesn't have a lot of presence really in the film, and I'm sorry to say, she feels like somewhat of a wasted character.  Gemma Arterton is a great actress, and she deserved far better than this.  I hope she gets another appearance in a Bond film, as she deserves to have a much better role than this.

One thing that jumps out at me on reviewing this is that Agent Fields seems to be dressed in nothing other than a beige trench coat and brown knee length boots.  Surely that's not all she's wearing?  But there is no other visible clothing on her.  Maybe a hint of a dress or some trousers, wouldn't have gone amiss, but the way she appears here is very suggestive, of many other things...

Fields tries to get Bond to turn around and head back to London, but Bond manages to seduce her and persuades her to work with him.  This part of the film really feels weak here, like they wanted a scene of Bond making love to a woman, but just couldn't fit it in well, and it does feel somewhat shoehorned in here.  It's a weak sequence.

We then come to the next big bug bear sequence in this film, which is the Greene Planet party.  This whole sequence is a big problem in this film.  Plot wise, it seems to have little relevance to anything else, and I truly wonder why it is here.  We have a shot of someone who could have been President Barack Obama's father, or older brother here, and a moment where Bond asks Fields what her real name is and she says "Fields.  Just Fields."  The moment should be a set up for a pay-off later where we learn her real name.  But it never comes.  And we never get the expected immortal line about Strawberry Fields Forever.  Yes, Strawberry Fields, that is her name.  Whilst I don't mind them not doing the obvious jokes sometimes, the idea here is actually kinda lame.  Set up a gag, and never pay off, it never feels good.

Then we immediately cut to Greene making a speech, and we start with a wide shot of the building, followed by a shot of the balcony where Dominic Greene is giving his speech from.  We get shots of Bond, Fields and Mathis watching on, and then we get a weird edit, to shots of people who I guess are really extras in the film, with Greene saying "I hope that tonight, you make the decision to be part of that."

I know other reviewers, like Calvin Dyson, are completely confused by why the director and editor chooses to show these people.  I've thought long and hard about this, and the best answer I can some up with, is that these people are prospective Quantum recruits, or maybe are part of Quantum, and that's why we focus on them, but if that's the case, the idea flops very hard, because we never see these people again.  Another setup without a payoff.

Also the way Felix Leiter is shoehorned in here is just horrible.  He has two moments in this sequence, one where we see Bond walking and we suddenly cut to a shot of Felix sat down as though he's watching Bond.  It really feels jarring to see that shot in there.  Then there's a second moment as Bond is leaving with Camille and that's a little less jarring but still very bad.

And then we have the infamous Fields tripping Elvis moment, and the reveal that he's wearing a wig. Just appalling really.  It's Fields last moment of action in the film, and it flops even worse than  anything else so far.  All in all, that whole sequence was a mess, and nothing even close to acceptable cinema, never mind good cinema.

And as if to top all that badness off, we get a moment with Bond being followed by Bolivian Police, and the reveal that Mathis is in the boot of the vehicle that Bond is driving.  The moment where Mathis dies in Bond's arms is meant to be poignant, and emotional, but like so much else in this film, it flops just horribly.  Even the short moment of action where Mathis is shot by the policeman, is poor, and just feels horribly random.

We're only just over an hour into the film, and it's already felt like 2 hours, it needs to be put out of its misery.

Bond and Camille rent a plane, and Bond is expecting to be sold out by the guy who they rented the plane off, yet he does nothing to prevent that?  Can we get some decent scriptwriters, please?

There's a nice moment where Bond references to Camille about why he's after Greene, and when he says that he tried to kill a woman, but it's not what you think, Camille asks "Your mother?" and Bond says with a smile, "She likes to think so."  I think that's a genuinely funny moment referencing M as being like a mother figure, and actually plays into how Bond in the books always looked at the M in the books, who was male, as a father figure.  I think it's a genuinely Fleming-esque moment, that is unfortunately overrun by so much that just doesn't hold a candle to it.

We then get a really well shot and well edited aerial dogfight sequence, which has some genuine tension and excitement about it.  It's probably the best sequence in the whole film, but most of the audience has been lost by this point.  But unfortunately, the sequence is kinda ruined by what follows which is Bond and Camille sharing a single parachute, leaping out of the plane, and landing in a sinkhole, and oh my goodness, the effects shots here are appalling.  It takes me out of the film instantly again, after having been pulled back in with the dogfight.  Come on guys, you can do better than this.

There is another pointless sequence here with M meeting the Foreign Secretary, which flops so hard.  This is no offence to Judi Dench or Tim Piggott Smith who are great actors, but this scene doesn't need to be here.  We don't need to see this.  It has no relevance to the plot, and is just painful to watch.  It shouldn't have even been written, never mind filmed or put in the final cut.

We get an interesting scene where Bond and Camille talk and there's a lot of exposition done here, and it's kinda nice, and we get what Greene is really up to, but again, too little, too late.  There's some scenes which just reinforce what we've just discovered, and again, it just feels like it's over the top.

We then get a scene where M is in Bolivia in the hotel where Bond has been staying, and Bond arrives, to discover her, and also to discover that Fields is dead, covered in oil.  Once again, the editing here is uber-pretentious, and at this point the whole M/Bond subplot just flops really badly.  By this point, I have lost interest in what's going on.  Even from a review standpoint.

Bond is suspended, and leaves with some agents, but fights his way out in an elevator, and then confronts M.  Suddenly, she changes her mind.  Why?  How?  Bad writing again.  The writing in this film is so bad, that it makes Thunderball look like a Shakespeare masterpiece.  I'll talk more about Thunderball in a later post, but suffice to say, Ian Fleming at his worst, was way better than this piece of garbage.

We get another Beam and Leiter moment, when Bond phones them.  And we get one final bit of exposition, and another piece of gratuitous action when Bond and Leiter meet up in a bar.  What they say here is relevant to the plot, but doesn't matter overall, because the whole plot is worthless by this point.  What plot there is, is just a means to get from one action sequence to another.  In a way, it's a bit like my number 24 entry on this list, the 1967 version of Casino Royale, the plot is a thread, and a bot threadbare in places, that is trying to hold together all these action sequences, and not doing a good job of it.

So anyway, we get to the hotel in the desert, and this is meant to be the big finale.  The final reel of the film.  It's a boring start as we see Medrano and the Police Chief talking, and we get a moment where Bond is talking to Camille about how this kill is personal and how she should rely on her training.  It's like good grief, can you make this any more boring than you already have?

Greene meets up with the Police Chief and Medrano, and stuff happens that I really couldn't care about by this point.  We're just waiting for the final battle to begin, but we don't see Bond really for a good couple of minutes, however we do get shots of Camille.  Then suddenly Bond appears, and it all kicks off, and within 30 seconds, the hotel starts blowing up.  I kid you not.  Less than 30 seconds after Bond appears, we get the first explosion and the hotel starts destroying itself.  Please, this is just so bad.

It is interesting that we have Bond fighting Greene and Camille fighting Medrano at the same time, the two sequences inter-cutting like this are interesting, but it just doesn't work as well as it should.  Bond lets Greene go, to rescue Camille, which he achieves, just barely, and Bond goes after Greene.  We never see Bond catch up with Greene, we just cut to Bond driving a car, and throwing Greene on the ground from out of the boot.  And then Bond, just leaves him in the middle of the desert with a can of motor oil.  Huh?  This is the second film in a row where Bond has not killed his main antagonist directly, and it feels weak here, like so much else in this film.

Bond says goodbye to Camille and we get a kiss but no sex.  That just feels weird.

We then cut to Kazan in Russia, once again via a pretentious location title card, and no two have used the same font in this film.

Bond is waiting for someone in an apartment, and we see two people come home, one of them being Vesper's former boyfriend, Yusef.  We then get a weird sequence of Bond confronting Yusef, and advising his current girlfriend to contact her superiors, they have a leak in their seals.  And she just leaves.  M is outside as well, why?  It makes no sense.

The one thing I do like is as Bond walks away, he drops Vesper's necklace in the snow, and we get a nice gentle piano piece as the film fades to black, which is really lovely.  It is then spoiled by a bad, out of place, gun barrel sequence.  The gun barrel has no interesting design or texture to it, Bond walks in far too fast really, and the gun barrel then becomes the title of the film.

THE VILLAINS

Dominic Greene really is our main villain here and he is like so much else in this film, instantly forgettable.  No disrespect to the actor, but he is given nothing to work with really.  His motley true of henchmen have nothing memorable about them at all, especially Elvis who really never acts like a henchman, he's seen a lot, but only once do I see him holding a gun and he doesn't shoot it.  Please, this is horrible characterisation.

Medrano is a stereotypical South American dictator-wannabe type, he just doesn't have much about him, and the Police Chief is similarly stereotypical here.  There's nothing about either of them that makes me interested in them as characters.

Mr White is possibly the best of the bunch, but even here, he feels like somewhat of a let down, he only really appears at the start of the film, and at the opera, we never see him again after that, until apparently the upcoming Spectre film.

THE ALLIES

I have to talk about M here as she is used far too much.  We have scenes that she should not be in, yet she is.  We have a scene between her and the Foreign Minister, that shouldn't be in the movie at all, and we have as character who is nothing like how she was originally written in Goldeneye, and all the films since until this one.  I can't blame this on Judi Dench,as she gives a wonderful performance here, but she is undone by the writing.

We have someone who is a forensics tech, but he comes across as almost Q-lite, as though they were testing him out to become Q in the next film.  He didn't make it, but it was kinda interesting to see this.

Bill Tanner reappears in this film, played this time by Rory Kinnear.  He's a great actor, and plays the character well, but isn't a patch on Michael Kitchen from Goldeneye, and The World Is Not Enough.

Jeffrey Wright makes his second appearance in a row as Felix Leiter here, and for me, flops badly.  He wasn't great in Casino Royale, but is actually worse here.  His version of Felix now gets put into the same category as Jaws and Jack Wade.  Better in their first appearance than in their second.

STUNTS AND ACTION SEQUENCES

Only 3 action sequences here really feel like they work, and they are the car chase in the pre-title sequence, Bond chasing Mitchell through Siena, and the aerial dogfight, the rest just don't really sell themselves that well, and the big finale where within 30 seconds of Bond firing his first shot the hotel starts blowing up just feels lazy.

THE BOND GIRLS/WOMEN

Camille is as close as we come to a traditional Bond girl, and is a pretty good character, but I'm left feeling that she really wasn't totally complete as a character here.   I can't explain it, but there feels like there was something missing.

Agent Fields is this film's equivalent of Paula from Thunderball, she exists only to die really, and her death doesn't even move the plot along.  Gemma Arterton does a good job with what she has, but she doesn't really have much.

OTHER NOTES

I've already written a lot about the writing and the editing and the location title cards, but let me bring all that together here.  Every location title card is done in a different font, for what reason really?  It adds nothing to the film, and really feels out of place in a Bond film.  The editing for most of this film is really bad.  Even the good sequences in the film, are sometimes undermined by editing that leaves you with no clue about what you've just scene.  In the initial fight with Mitchell in the safe house, there's a whole sequence of about a dozen or more shots and none of them are more than 24 frames, or 1 second.  Too much cutting between cameras, not enough focus on the action itself.

The best example I can point to of fast cutting in a fight is the fight between Grant & Bond in From Russia With Love.  The camera may only change position there every 3 to 5 seconds, but it's a perfect edit, allowing the pace of the fight to dictate the cuts, rather than cutting to make it seem pacy.

There are far too many moments in this film that should never have been included.  And there were scenes missing that really should have been written and shot but obviously weren't.    The writing on all this was bad, and the editing just emphasised all the problems.  You can't edit your way out of bad writing.  This film should have been postponed, re-shoots ordered, and a whole new re-edit done, but they were trying to turn this round fast and it fails, it flops so hard as to show up everything bad about it.

I mentioned it earlier, but the production design in this movie was bad.  Peter Lamont retired after Casino Royale, but the new look MI6 was something right out of Star Trek, not James Bond, and how could it look this different in mere days?  The film was set right after Casino Royale, and there wouldn't be the time to change the look so drastically.

OVERALL

There are too few good moments in this film, and far too much that flops and usually flops hard.  There isn't even any mediocre stuff in between, it either flops or it's good.  But overall, the whole film flops, hard.  Not quite as hard as Moonraker did, nor the 1967 version of Casino Royale, and I placed that lower than this because that flopped from a higher point to a lower one, but it still flops hard.  If I never watch this film again, it will be too soon.

Next time on this list, number 22, and a film that was another poor attempt at capitalising on a movie trend.    

The Viewpoint Blog's Ranking of the best James Bond films. 24: Casino Royale (1967)

Time to continue the ranking of all James Bond films, with the first "unofficial" entry on the list.  The Charles K Feldman produced, Casino Royale from 1967.

This is the teaser trailer, and the one that follows is the full theatrical trailer.

This film came out at the height of Bond-mania in the 1960s, and came about due to the fact that Ian Fleming sold the original film rights for it quite cheaply overall in 1955, for a mere $6,000, to a man named Gregory Ratoff.  Ratoff never managed to produce a film though, and after his death in 1960 from Leukaemia, producer Charles K Feldman bought the rights from Raton's estate for $7,500.

At first, Feldman wanted to produce a serious Bond film, and worked on the idea for a while, even at one point contacting Harry Saltzman and Albert R Broccoli about working with them to produce a film version.  However at the time, Saltzman and Broccoli had just done Thunderball with Kevin McClory and were unwilling to do another film that way.

So, Feldman decided to do the film as a spoof, in the same vein as What's New Pussycat? which actually featured a very similar cast.  Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Woody Allen and Peter O'Toole had all been part of that previous Charles K Feldman production, which Burt Bacharach had also provided the music for.

So would Casino Royale match Pussycat's gross of over $18mlln?  Well, let's take a look at 1967's Casino Royale.

THE PRE TITLE SEQUENCE

Amazingly, like the official Bond films, this has a pre-title sequence, albeit a very short one, which is actually a short scene clipped out from a point later on in the film, which features Peter Sellers as Evelyn Tremble/James Bond 007, and Duncan Macrea, as Lieutenant Mathis of the Special Police, even though he is listed in the credits as Inspector Mathis.  He shows Tremble/Bond his "credentials", though what he shows him isn't actually seen by the audience, to which Tremble/Bond replies that they appear to be in order.

This is a variation on a old Goon Show joke on the radio, where occasionally you'd hear a gunshot, someone sound pained, and another character, usually Neddy Season say something along the lines of "That got him right in the old credentials."  The joke somewhat relies on the listener's imagination to imagine what the "credentials" are, and in this visual medium, it doesn't work quite as well, as it does on the radio, which for a comedy, isn't a good thing.  The very first joke of a comedy film has to be right, otherwise, the audience is pretty much lost.

THE TITLE SEQUENCE

Well, what can I say about the title sequence, except it is weird.  Animated first letters, short clips from various points in the film, completely out of context, all set to music composed by Burt Bacharach and played by Herb Alpert & his Tijuana Brass.  It's a lovely piece of music, and is the right tone for the film.

There are a few other notable things in this title sequence and one of those is the fact that they credit 5 different directors for this project.  John Huston, who also appeared in the film as M, aka McTarry, Kenneth Hughes, who shot the Mata Bond stuff in the spy school in West Berlin, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish and Val Guest.  Second Unit Director Richard Talmadge also did some main unit directing and asked not be credited for it.  Val Guest had the task of putting all this together.

The other things to note, are some names who had some connection to the official James Bond films.  The obvious one is Ursula Andress, who plays Vesper Lynd here but appeared as Honey Ryder in Doctor No.

Another face who appeared in both official and unofficial films was Vladek Sheybal, who is better known as Kronsteen, SPECTRE's director of Planning in From Russia With Love.

Another name, this one appearing in the titles, was Wolf Mankowitz.  Wolf is famous for writing the first treatment for Doctor No.

And one final name connected to the official Bond films, that of John Richardson, who would produce Special Effects for Moonraker, Octopussy and A View To A Kill.  Casino Royale was actually John's very first film, though he was uncredited for it.

THE PLOT

The film starts with 4 cars converging on a road, somewhere, where another car is waiting for them.  The other car is driven by John Le Mesurier.  Yes, Sergeant Wilson from Dad's Army is a Chauffeur in this film.

Anyway, 4 men get into Le Mesurier's car and he drives them off, and they have a conversation in the back of the car.  The conversation starts sensibly enough and then turns completely crazy.  "Let's down his intestines down and washes them by hand..."  Excuse me, I don't even want to think about that!

The car looks to be driving through a safari park, as the car is surrounded by Lions, one of whom gets up on the car's roof as the car travels along, and we hear a quick burst of "Born Free".  This opening sequence sets the tone for the film, both in dialogue terms and in visual terms.  There will be a lot of visuals pulled off in the film that will have been quite expensive to pull off, and yet they are being done for a single joke or for some other reason that we haven't figured out, you'll get a lot of that in this picture.  It will present itself as extravagant.

We are then introduced to a retired Sir James Bond played by David Niven.  Sir James welcomes the four gentlemen, M, Ransome of the CIA, Smernov of the KGB, and Le Grand of Deuxieme Bureau. At this point Ransome lets loose a stream of initials that to us are completely meaningless.

The four gentlemen are hear to try and persuade Sir James Bond to come out of retirement to help them, as they have lost lots of agents to a fiendish organisation, but Bond is reluctant.  He is disparaging of all the gadgets, criticising each of them for their gadgets.  Bond shows them a black rose in his garden, and says he would not exchange one petal of it, for anything their world had to offer, "...even an Aston M-Martin complete with lethal accessories."  M & co implore Bond to help them, and after playing Debussy on the piano, he decides to turn them down, even with a sealed letter from Windsor Castle.

So what does M do?  He has Sir James's mansion destroyed, by mortar fire!  No, really.  It's a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but somehow, it seems to make a perverse kind of sense.  The whole thing seems to backfire slightly, as M himself is killed in the midst of all this.

So Sir James decides to take M's remains up to Scotland, to the home of the McTarry's, but word spreads to our villains, who make their first appearance here.  "Proceed with SMERSH plan B.  Sir James Bond is back with his morals, his vows and his celibate image.  We must destroy that image."

It's here we kind of realise what our filmmakers are really doing.  They're spoofing the whole world of 007.  Instead of womanising and doing whatever he needs to do to get the job done, this James Bond is a complete opposite of the character we know.  Also very notable here is the fact that apart from the big guy who we don't see here, yet, most SMERSH agents we see in this next sequence is female.  This is setting up a joke obviously, but we'll see what the payoff is.

At McTarry Castle, we discover that Agent Mimi is playing M's widow, Lady Fiona, who is being played by Deborah Kerr.  We're not even out of the first reel yet, and already the cast list for this film, is incredible.  But nobody seems to be in the film for very long so far, except David Niven who seems to be the constant in this.

We see Alexandra Bastedo here too, in a pre-The Champions appearance as well.  I have to say that this whole part of the film is a little weird.  It's strange seeing James Bond uncomfortable around sexy females, but that is, I guess supposed to be part of the joke.  There's a party scene with girls dancing, and Deborah Kerr does a little Highland fling, but it seems that the SMERSH agents just can't hold their scotch, as they all pass out.  Don't ask me to explain any more than that, I have no clue.

Lady Fiona/Agent Mimi then tries to seduce Sir James, but he resists, which apparently annoys Agent Mimi, as leaves Sir James' room, grabs a bugle and blows it, and calls for the big heavies, to "warsle" with Sir James, whatever that is, but apparently it has something to do with throwing cannonball sized stones at each other.  But the big heavies just cannot handle the stones, whilst Sir James handles them, not exactly with ease, but far better than the heavy mob did.  Apparently this impresses Mimi so much, that she falls in love with Sir James.

It's Alexandra Bastedo's character here who leads the SMERSH revolt on Agent Mimi, and lock her in her own room.

The next day, we see a grouse shoot, which Sir James is taking part in, but the SMERSH agents have a dastardly plan in place.  One of the buttons on his cape is secretly a homing device, which will allow the dastardly divas of SMERSH to fire explosive metal birds at our hero.  But even this Bond is still the crackshot that we know and he disposes of said exploding birds, before they can harm him.  He even seems incredibly nonchalant that these birds are exploding.  Then with the help of Agent Mimi, who escaped her imprisonment, by climbing down a fortuitous drainpipe, he turns the tables on SMERSH and destroys the van that is launching the deadly missiles, before Agent Mimi decides to start a new life in a nearby convent.

I have to say that the whole sequence is done very well here, John Huston directed this part and is an excellent director.  The scripting here is excellent too.  The sideswipes at Sean Connery's 007 in the early going, describing him as "...that sexual acrobat who leaves a trail of beautiful dead women like blown roses behind him." and "...the bounder you gave my name and number to." are particularly sharp, and on target.

It's hilarious and actually allows the film to get off to a good start, nothing special, but still good.  It has potential to pick up from there.

The next sequence involves Bond driving back down to London in his Bentley, when his car is sideswiped by a woman in a white Jaguar.  What follows is an... interesting chase sequence, which involves our two cars, and... a milk float.

I kid you not, a milk float.

The close ups here are all done as process shots on rear projection and it's not bad, actually it works pretty well, and isn't that distracting, but to be honest the whole sequence is quite weak.  The milk float is driven by remote control, the headlights come out to form part of the detonators, and there is a slight joke, and by slight I mean very slight, that in SMERSH control, the whole thing is 'displayed' via some huge Scalextrix set, it just looks weird.  Anyway, Sir James outsmarts them, manages to overtake the Jag, and via a remote controlled gate, gets away from the Jag, which is blown up by the oncoming explosive milk float.

Hmm, there are a lot of explosions here in this film, and whilst they don't feel gratuitous, they do seem to be a little obsessed with explosions.

We are then back in London, in the offices of MI6, where we are introduced to Moneypenny, played by Barbara Bouchet, who is actually Miss Moneypenny's daughter.  But Bond doesn't realise this and kisses her.  Wow, so much for that celibate image!  We are also introduced to someone called Hadley, who I guess is this film's equivalent of Bill Tanner.  Hadley is played by Derek Nimmo, who comes across as a kind of butler.  Mind you, that was always present in his voice no matter what he did.

Hadley explains to Sir James that the picture is not very good, and he talks about 3 agents who have been liquidated in various establishments of lesser repute.  One in a bordello, one in a geisha house, and the third in a ladies' sauna bath.  I love the line that comes from Sir James here.

"It's depressing that the words 'secret agent' have become synonymous with sex maniac."

Then there's one more shot at Sean Connery's 007, when Sir James asks where is his namesake.  Hadley replies...

"We've had to take him off the board, sir.  He's now doing television."

The James Bond film series is hardly television but it's a nice little shot across the bows.

We also get a nice "cameo" from Woody Allen here.  It comes as Sir James and Hadley are discussing various assignments, and it turns out that Sir James's nephew, Jimmy Bond, is on assignment for MI6 in the Caribbean.  Yep, you guessed it, Woody Allen is playing Jimmy Bond.  This is a subtle reference to the character that Barry Nelson played in the 1954 CBS production of Casino Royale in their Climax Mystery Theatre anthology TV series, who wasn't a MI6 agent but a Combined Intelligence Agent.  And yes, it is appropriate that Woody Allen, an American, is playing Jimmy Bond.

Unfortunately for Jimmy, it seems this could be it, as he is led out to face a firing squad.  I gotta admit, the lines he says here are very funny.  "...My doctor says I can't have bullets enter my body at any time...", "...What if I said I was pregnant?", "You realise, this means an angry letter to the Times".  It seems that little Jimmy Bond is a little bit of coward.  He asks for and is granted his last cigarette, which turns out to be a mistake, as as the firing squad prepare to fire, he throws the lit cigarette down in front of them, which promptly explodes.

Hmm, exploding cigarettes... they sure do love their explosions on this film.  We're only 2 reels in, and we've already had 8 explosions.  That's more often than most, if not all official James Bond films.

There is a nice punchline to this sequence.  Jimmy Bond scales the wall behind him with the help of some climbing plants that conveniently go right to the top of the wall, and he goes over the wall, and lands, at the feet of another prisoner on the other side, who is also facing a firing squad.  But Jimmy manages to escape.

It's probably taken me longer to write this up, and you longer to read it, than it would do for you to watch the whole sequence from Hadley's intro to the end of Allen's cameo.  But I do love the writing here, the whole sequence is very well written and played very well by Nimmo, Niven and Allen.  So, here it is for you watch and enjoy.

However, it's at this point that the rot starts to set in.  As Sir James Bond reasons out that because female spies are being used so much by SMERSH, what they need is an AFSD.  An Anti Female Spy Device.  This is where Terence Cooper is introduced, in an identity parade style scene where Moneypenny is testing out all these guys by kissing them, and looking for the best kisser, and Terence Cooper comes out the winner, and they continue in Moneypenny's bed.

It's here that Sir James comes up with the idea that all agents from now on are to be called James Bond 007, even the females.  This comes after he criticised M for giving his name and number to someone else...  The whole idea feels totally weird at this point.  However, there is little doubt that Terence Cooper is the nearest we get to someone actually playing the familiar James Bond 007 role.  It's just a shame that we see so little of him in the rest of this movie.  I almost think I would have preferred him to Peter Sellers at the Baccarat table.  It would have helped the film I think.

But we do an interesting scene where he starts his AFSD training, to resist the feminine wiles, and it's also here we get introduced to another interesting character, who once again isn't used as well or as much as she could be.  She is only known as The Detainer, and is portrayed here by Daliah Lavi.  She introduces herself as "...the new secret weapon.", but one that Cooper/James Bond 007 manages to resist, but she still tries to seduce him.  "And what are you doing after this?", to which Cooper replies, "I'm having my head examined."

I love this line.  Anyone being trained to resist women probably does need their head examined!

It's not a bad sequence overall, but it is weaker than the previous sequences and whilst it could have led into a nice set of sequences that could have helped the film, the filmmakers decided not to go down those routes.

Then we get the weirdest bit of the film so far as we are introduced to Vesper Lynd, played here by Ursula Andress.  She is dressed in a headdress that looks way out of place for a business woman, which is how she is presented here.  Sir James persuades her to do some work for him, via £5million in tax arrears that Vesper has accrued.  And then they discuss things in private.

Then we're introduced to Evelyn Tremble, in a tuxedo, playing a one-arm bandit, played here by Peter Sellers in glasses.  Vesper seduces Evelyn in a long sequence that changes location and even includes a strange bit where Vesper despises of a dead body into her deep freeze!   There's a fair amount of slow motion, and some slightly odd items in Vesper's apartment, which I have no sense what they were for.  I'm back to being completely confused here.

There's also a continuity gaff here as Vesper at one point is wearing a light pink gown, and suddenly it changes shade into a darker, duskier shade of pink.  It's little moments like that that take you out of the film.  Peter Sellers dressing up as various people including Adolf Hitler, Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, (at least I think it's meant to be Lincoln...) really doesn't add anything to the film either, and just leaves me completely baffled.  It's during this bit that they talk about Evelyn Tremble playing Le Chiffre at Baccarat, and beating him.  Tremble apparently has a system for winning at Baccarat.  I don't know that I'm supposed to care here, as I'm just lost in the pointlessness of so much that has just happened.  Exposition scenes in films do tend to be a little boring, if not handled really well, and I guess the idea is that they included some weird visuals to distract people from the exposition, but it doesn't work and the whole thing could have been done a lot better.  It just lasts too long.

Now at this point, we should have had a scene of Peter Sellers being followed into Harrods department store by a dwarf, but the scene was never filmed, primarily because Peter Sellers either walked off set, or was fired, both stories have been mentioned, and both are plausible here.

So instead the next cut we have is Peter Sellers exiting a elevator to meet Q, played here by Geoffrey Bayldon.  This is meant to be a parody of a Q Branch scene, with instead of being Q branch, it's the James Bond 007 Training School.  John Wells appears here as Fordyce, Q's assistant, but the whole scene feels like a waste of screen time.  It tries to set up the video watches that are used later on in the film, but the joke here was missed thanks to an error in post-production, where an image of Ursula Andress was used, instead of the intended image of Geoffrey Bayldon.

At this point, we cut back to Sir James and Hadley.  Why, I don't know, the whole construction here makes little sense.  This scene leads into the introduction of Mata Bond, who is supposedly Mata Hari's daughter.  I guess this is a different timeline to our world, as Mata Hari died in 1917, and Mata Bond would have been at least 50 years old in this film, not the 20-something that she appears to be.

The sequence where we are introduced to Mata is lavish.  The production design here is extravagant, the costuming is fantastic, and the music is wonderful, and we are given a dance sequence here that is brilliantly choreographed and also performed wonderfully by Mata Bond, played by Joanna Pettet.  It's a beautiful sequence, it would look good in any film, and it looks good here, don't get me wrong, but why is it here?  Its entire purpose is to introduce the character of Mata Bond, but it's just too much.

The conversation between them in the next sequence just is weird.  There is one joke which tries hard to be funny, but just doesn't work, as Sir James persuades Mata to be a spy and to infiltrate a spy school.  We then get a shot where Hadley is talking to Mata, and Bernard Cribbins, who is a taxi driver in this film.  And after arriving at West Berlin, in the taxi... ...how did it get across the English Channel?  There was no Channel Tunnel in 1966... ...we then enter what has to be the weirdest visual creation of the whole film.  The production design on the spy school is completely different to everything else in the movie, and that's not to say it's bad, it certainly isn't, but the whole design is deliberately off-kilter, both visually and in comparison with the rest of the film, it just doesn't match anything else.  The camera work here as well helps to sell the off-kilterness of the set.  Almost everything is shot at weird angles and with weird lighting effects.

In this sequence we are introduced to two characters who run the spy school.  Frau Hoffner, played by Anna Quayle, and Polo, who we are led to believe is a robot, played by Ronnie Corbett.  Anna Quayle here plays Frau Hoffner in a manner that is as off-kilter as the sets and the camera work, she is slightly disturbing and that's a not bad thing, if done at the right time, for the right reasons.  Here, I'm not sure it's right, but it's a good change from everything else so far.

Ronnie Corbett plays Polo as someone who feel in love with Mata Hari and sees her in Mata Bond and is finding himself falling in love with her too, despite the fact that apparently he's a robot.  I'm all confused and confuddled.  Quayle and Corbett give their scenes a wonderful energy and it's fair to say that they are a highlight in this film, but again, it just adds to the whole weirdness that is this film, and not always in a completely good way, but at least with these two, it's better than some of the Sellers stuff, which is not something you'll hear me say too often.

There's a toilet in Mata Hari/Mata Bond's room that is actually a revolving door when you pull the chain.  Like, what?

There's a brief appearance here by Vladek Sheybal as Le Chiffre's representative at the auction.  If that name means nothing to you, then I will refer to him in this review, by his other name, Kronsteen, who was SPECTRE's Director of Planning in From Russia With Love.  The character isn't given a name, so we'll use Kronsteen, even though Kronsteen was killed at the end of From Russia With Love, it just helps for our purposes.

Kronsteen is the auctioneer responsible for selling Le Chiffre's art collection of compromising photos and other stuff.

And we meet Frau Hoffner again who introduces something called Little Otto, which resembles an old dead German soldier, and we have a weird sequence where Frau Hoffner denies everything, even her own name.

The auction is another one of these sequences that is a waste of time, it really achieves nothing.  We are re-introduced to the taxi driver, Bernard Cribbins, who is in fact Carleton Towers of the Foreign Office, who tells Mata to make sure that Le Chiffre doesn't raise the money.  We then get a chaotic sequence of Mata causing chaos by substituting the art slides for a battle scene, and all the military men at the auction believe that war has broken out... what the...?

Mata tries to escape, but runs into Polo, who somehow knows she was responsible for what just happened, despite not being there to witness it.  I just give up at this point.

Polo threatens to kill Mata, but she seduces him and pulls out some wires from his battery, but be puts the wires back wrong, and Polo starts going backwards.  Frau Hoffner also appears to stop Mata, but  is weirdly shot by Otto.

Kronsteen and the soldiers try to capture Mata, but she gets the better of them, with the assistance of Captain Towers.  Mata then thinks about escaping down a drain, but the sound of the song "What's New Pussycat", stops her in her tracks, and Towers takes her back to their cab and they return to London, with Kronsteen pursuing for a while, firing a gun, 5 shots out of a 6 shot revolver.  He then goes to a nearby phone box to call Le Chiffre, to tell him the scheme failed.  Kronsteen is then killed by Le Chiffre, who sets off explosives in the phone box.

WHAT???

How on earth did Le Chiffre know that Kronsteen would call him from that phone box???  It just beggars belief.

I have to say though, that is the first explosion we've had in about 40 minutes, after having 8 in the first 40 minutes.

We now cut back to Tremble, who has taken the name James Bond, arriving in Paris, and assaulting a French Customs Officer.  Why?  It makes no sense.  Heck, the film even references that later in a conversation between Sir James and Moneypenny.  The stupidity here is monumental.

We then cut back to Mathis and Tremble/Bond having their conversation, that we saw started in the pre-title sequence.  In my opinion, it was a mistake to have that bit cut out from here and put in the pre-title sequence.  A parody pre-title sequence should have been written, and perhaps could have featured Cooper in a parody of a 007 pre-title sequence, it would have made more sense than what happened.

Also, notable is the people washing the car Mathis and Bond/Tremble are in are wearing black PVC clothes.  Well, I suppose it makes it easy to clean the uniform at the end of the day...

Sir James talks to Vesper via the video watches that was introduced earlier, and in the next cut, we are introduced to Miss Goodthighs, played here by Jacqueline Bisset.  She is holding a bottle of champagne and Tremble/Bond turns and shoots but misses.  It's not clear whether he was trying to shoot Miss Goodthighs or the champagne bottle, but either way, it's just gratuitous and useless in the whole context of the film.

Miss Goodthighs is a parody of Miss Mary Goodnight, who in the books was Bond's secretary, and would later appear played by Brit Ekland in the 1974 Roger Moore film, The Man With The Golden Gun.  But here, she's a SMERSH agent, and is trying to drug Tremble/Bond.  We then get a dream sequence, which just feels completely unnecessary.  The sequence features Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress and Jacqueline Bisset in various shots and perhaps was an attempt to use some of the footage  that they'd shot with Peter Sellers and get the most out of it that they could.  But to be honest, it just doesn't work.

We get to the casino, where Le Chiffre is playing Baccarat and performing magic tricks.  I kid you not, Orson Welles had it written into his contract that his illusion sequence be kept in the final cut.  Like so much in this film, it is completely meaningless and out of place, and does nothing for the film itself.  Tremble/Bond and Vesper arrive and go to the cashier, who is played here by Graham Stark.  Stark had performed with Sellers before in A Shot In The Dark, and would make other films with him, but this was little more than a token appearance.

We have a sequence where Tremble and Vesper observe Le Chiffre from the office of the Casino Director, and we have a strange sequence where it's revealed, kinda weirdly, that Le Chiffre is using X-Ray glasses to know what hand his opponent is holding.  In essence allowing him to cheat his way to victory every time.

The game itself between Le Chiffre and Tremble is kinda boring really and I'm glad it doesn't take up a lot of time.  It's shot well and the editing is nice, but the way it has been written here, just doesn't make it interesting.  I must admit though, there is one nice shot where the camera pushes into Le Chiffre after Tremble says "No cards", and the closeup is practically full face, it's a great way of symbolising the pressure that Le Chiffre is under at that moment, and really works in the sequence's favour, but most of this is undone by the fact that due to some hatred that came about between Sellers and Welles during a visit by Princess Margaret, Sellers forced the filmmakers to shoot his scenes at the card table separate from Orson Welles.  Not merely separate on the same day, but on separate days.  The scene would have worked much better had we had most of the shots being of the two of them at the table, with the solo shots only for odd moments when emphasis was needed.  But that's not what happened.

Vesper is kidnapped, and we get an odd scene where Stirling Moss cameos.  Tremble tells him to follow that car, which he does by running after it.  Tremble has also managed to mysteriously change from a Tuxedo to a racing driver's outfit in about 3 seconds.  This little bit is all meant to set up a car chase where Tremble pursues those who have kidnapped Vesper, but that sequence was never shot, again due to Sellers either leaving the production by his own choice, or by being fired from the film.

So instead of cutting to a car chase, we cut to Le Chiffre sat in front of some weird computer/control panel thing, with a periscope that he looks through.  Apparently he isn't even on the same floor where Tremble is being held captive.  Don't understand it, don't ask me to explain it, I just have no clue.

There's a sequence where Le Chiffre apparently is causing Tremble to hallucinate in various ways, again not sure how, but suddenly Tremble is in this weird smokey area with two different Scottish marching bands, and Peter O'Toole.  Vesper Lynd somehow makes the save here, we think, by shooting the pipers with her machine gun disguised as a set of bagpipes, but then she turns on Tremble and shoots him.  Again, don't ask me to explain, I guess it has something to do with Sellers not completing all the scenes he was required for, but I don't know that for certain.  Le Chiffre is then shot by two SMERSH agents on the orders of Doctor Noah.

We then cut back to London, where Sir James and a very different looking Mata Bond, now with short straight blonde hair instead of the long, curly hair we saw earlier, are at Downing Street.  Sir James sends Mata to watch the changing of the guard, whilst he goes into talk with the PM.

Mata is then kidnapped by a guard, and taken aboard a flying saucer that had just landed in Trafalgar Square.  Hey, this is the 1960s, flying saucers were a big thing then.

There's a weird scene with Moneypenny, Sir James and Sister McTarry, alias Agent Mimi from earlier in the film, who reveals to Sir James that Mata is going to be taken to Casino Royale.

The saucer takes her to an area just off the French coast, where a vehicle of some kind takes her inside a cliff, and dumps her in there.  It's completely confusing and totally nuts.

What then follows is a weird end sequence, that really has little to do with all the Peter Sellers stuff, even though it's set in the same Casino.  Sir James and Moneypenny arrive at the casino.  Nice to see Moneypenny here get a field assignment.

Almost instantly a maitre-d or some such character, approaches Sir James and tells him that the director would like to see him urgently regarding his daughter.  Okay, that's instant weirdness in my book, and would cause immediate suspicion, and thankfully, Bond seems immediately suspicious as well.  Sir James and Moneypenny are shown into the office we saw earlier, and three Scottish-dressed agents suddenly appear, tie up Moneypenny and fight Sir James, who proceeds to make monkeys out of them all.  Moneypenny manages to get herself free, and it looks like Sir James and Moneypenny might make their escape, but no, the heavies have guns, and Bond and Moneypenny are taken prisoner, and enter the "SMERSH headquarters of Doctor Noah".

By clever use of another Sir James tactic, they escape from their captors, only for an alarm to go off the very millisecond they trip up the heavies.  Then for some reason, the film is deliberately under cranked to give the next bit the appearance of an old silent movie as Bond and Moneypenny run for their lives.  This under cranking trick will crop up again later on.  It does give the resulting footage a slightly comedic look about it and to be fair, it isn't done a lot these days, but the simplicity of the technique makes it instantly recognisable.  They duck into a corridor, that is first red, then blue, then red, then blue again, then red again, and finally blue once more.  Why they did this, I have no idea, again, it makes no sense.

The room they then enter is circular, with a spiral pattern on the floor, and coloured doors the outside, and another spiral opposite the blue door.  I don't whether they're trying to outdo Ken Adam for set extravagance here, but some of these sets seem over the top, just for the sake of it.  The production design in this film was done by Michael Stringer, who also did the designs for A Shot In The Dark and Inspector Clouseau, both of which were far less extravagant than this film.

From this they go through the green door, into a room with a psychedelic green design, and finally into the main room, to meet, face to silhouette, with Doctor Noah.  I have to say, that Valentine Dyall, known to many radio listeners in the 1950s as The Man In Black, and also later known for playing The Black Guardian in Doctor Who, provides the voice for Doctor Noah up to this point.  Dyall himself made an appearance earlier on in the film as one of Vesper's assistants in her first scene of the movie.  His voice is very distinctive and would be recognisable anywhere.

Sir James meets his own double, manages to take the machine gun off him and kills him, then shoots at Doctor Noah's silhouette.  Once again, we get a gratuitous explosion as the glass shatters to reveal...

...Woody Allen!

Jimmy Bond is Doctor Noah!

I love this actually, it kind of points to the fact that even back then, the 1954 CBS production of Casino Royale was not highly regarded, and Barry Nelson's "Card Shark Jimmy Bond" was not a patch on the character Sean Connery so brilliantly brought to life in the movies.  So having Jimmy Bond as the villain here actually plays well, and is quite funny.

What makes it even funnier in my view is that he can't speak in the presence of Sir James, which begs the question who was talking just now, or was the glass barrier providing a kind of separation that made it easier for him to talk? I have no idea but whatever...

Actually, Woody Allen is one of the best things in this movie.  He is genuinely funny, and a shining light in the film.  That's not to say the other actors aren't good, but we'll deal with more of that later.

Anyway, Doctor Noah/Jimmy Bond/whoever else he is, there are so many dual identities in this film that it's so easy to become confused about who is known by what name, orders his female agents to take Bond and Moneypenny captive again, and they are led away somewhere, whilst Doctor Noah goes into another room, where we are re-introduced to The Detainer.  We haven't seen her or Cooper since before the halfway point.

It's a funny sequence, with Jimmy Bond trying to prove that he is better than his Uncle James, and failing pretty miserably on all counts.  He then reveals he's come up with a pill that can change a human into a walking atomic bomb, via 400 mini explosions inside the human body, starting a chain reaction.  This is silliness upon silliness, but Woody Allen actually pulls it off.  If you think about it, it's stupid, but in the moment, Allen makes it work.

The Detainer fools him into thinking she is interested in him, and Doctor Noah releases her from the restraints.  She sneakily grabs the pill and we cut to Sir James, Moneypenny, Mata and Cooper, who are trying to fill up something with a gas that is apparently highly explosive.  Oh boy, I think we're getting back to the explosions fetish here...

Another quick cut, and we are in Doctor Noah's Personal Jet, which looks nothing like any jet aircraft I've ever seen.  We see a double for The Detainer, as a air hostess, and we also see some of the many doubles that Doctor Noah plans to replace world leaders with.  Most of the doubles have their faces covered, so we can't see them.  5 are uncovered, and these are not duplicates apparently, but the real deal.  3 of them appear to be the leaders of Cuba, China and North Korea at the time, though who the other two are, I have no idea.

The Detainer drops Doctor Noah's atomic pill into his drink, and he unknowingly swallows it.  The Detainer makes her escape, and Doctor Noah seeks an Alka Seltzer.  Like that's going to help...

Meanwhile back with Sir James, and the crew, they've filled their pillow with this gas, and are using it to blow open the door.  This part of the sequence is under cranked again, to give it that silent movie treatment, as Sir James and company make their escape.  We're inside the final 10 minutes, and I think the explosion count is going up.

1 explosion to get out of the room, and more to come.  As they go back through the room where Sir James confronted Doctor Noah, Cooper calls for everyone to get down, as a load of SMERSH agents fire their machine guns at our heroes.  Somehow, they miss, and manage to set off a whole load of water jets that stop the baddies in their tracks.  Sense?  This film hasn't made sense since the start of reel 3.

Another door opens, and sparks start flying, and our heroes make their escape quickly before the door comes down as the fuse blows.  I love Sir James' comment in the chaos of Doctor Noah's HQ being destroyed.  "Try not to look conspicuous."

Our crew meet up with the Detainer, and they eventually find their way to the office, via a helpful Frankenstein monster, played by David Prowse, in his first movie role, and the crew get back to the casino, all except The Detainer, who decides she would rather risk a drainpipe than go through the casino again.

Sir James tells Cooper to get the ladies out of here, and goes to call Whitehall 0007.  But before his call can be connected, Vesper cuts him off and orders him back to the office, but then we're into "the big finish" with a parody of the big battle sequences that ended Goldfinger and Thunderball.

It's a good sequence with a lot of energy, but the whole thing has almost come too late.  But it has to be said the joke book at this point didn't have many pages left in it.

But at the end of all this silliness, involving laughing gas, an exploding roulette wheel (that makes 2 explosions in this last sequence), a cameo from George Raft, and even a Keystone Kops moment, at the end of this, everybody dies, as Woody Allen explodes, destroying the casino and everyone still in it, even a Sea Lion.  Yep, a Sea Lion.

THE VILLAINS

SMERSH are the villains here, but due to the parody nature of the whole piece, taking them seriously as villains is rather difficult.  Orson Welles plays Le Chiffre pretty well, and to be fair does a better job with the character than Mads Mikkelsen does almost 40 years later.  Woody Allen is the standout of the cast, I said that earlier, and I mean that most sincerely, folks.  His turn as Jimmy Bond/Doctor Noah is brilliantly written and very well portrayed.  It's amazing to think that Woody Allen himself dislikes this movie intensely, and cites the messy production of it as the main reason why he decided to start directing movies himself, though I do think he's been a little unfair to at least one or two of the directors of this movie, as there are some good sequences, just many of them make no sense in the flow of the film, but individually, the sequences are mostly pretty good.  Calvin Dyson says it best in his review of this film where he talks about trying to hold 4 stampeding elephants together with a single cotton thread, and it is a very fair point.

In a production like this, there has to be something that holds it all together, and more than a small something, it has to be strong enough to hold all the elements together.  When you have more than one director on a project, whether by choice or by circumstance, the producer has to be the voice of consistency, holding it all together, and unfortunately here, neither Charles K Feldman nor Jerry Bresler provide that consistency.

Ursula Andress playing Vesper Lynd here is kinda weak actually.  Now whether that's down to the script or her performance, I'm not totally sure.  Certainly the scripting isn't up to the standard of the first two reels, but I don't know whether that's down to the many rewrites that various actors including Peter Sellers were forcing on the production, or whether the original script was that bad.  Her performance is okay, but nothing special, and the reveal at the end that she's a baddie, isn't handled that well.

As to Agent Mimi and the others who make up the rest of the SMERSH crowd, most of them aren't really given any time to do much.  Jacqueline Bisset as Miss Goodthighs is good in her little sequence, but we don't see much of her.  Deborah Kerr is wonderful here as Agent Mimi, who falls in love with Sir James, but her scenes are mostly in the early going, except for one last cameo appearance towards the end.  Rather a lot of characters in this film get just a couple of scenes and they're done.  We don't really get invested in anybody because there are so many changes of cast all the way.

Anna Quayle and Ronnie Corbett are both excellent, and Vladek Sheybal is on good form here but again, they have limited screen time and you're not really invested in them all.

All the girls in Control in the early going are pretty good in what they do, but we know little about them, and they don't really show a lot of character.

THE HEROES

We have the same problem with a lot of our hero characters, who really don't have enough screen time to make much of an impression.

The only one who has much screen time in the whole project is Sir James Bond.  David Niven plays this to his usual standard and does a fine job playing the polar opposite of the Sean Connery 007 character that we know and love.  He has some great lines in the early going which really sets up a delightful character, with a wonderful charm and yet a sharp wit and sharp wits.  As a 007 interpretation, it holds up pretty well, and the subtle hints about Miss Moneypenny Junior that we get in David Niven's expression in Moneypenny's opening scene hint at the possibility of her also being his daughter.  Add to this the fact that Mata Bond IS his daughter, and it kinda sells Sir James as a changed man.  It's a wonderful characterisation that I almost feel sorry for, that it was trapped in this script and film.

You won't hear me say this often, but this is probably one of the few occasions when Peter Sellers didn't perform up to his usual standard.  Why this is, is unknown, but it's said that he had parts of the script rewritten to make it more serious, as though he was taking the James Bond role to heart, and there are definitely parts of the film where you can feel that it is taking something more seriously than it has in other parts.  The sequence in the casino director's office with Mathis, Vesper and Tremble/Bond certainly feel a lot straighter and a lot more serious than other parts of the film, and that in itself might not be a bad thing, as doing that can sometimes set up a wonderful punchline at the end.  In this case however, it never delivers any real punchline, and the sequence just adds to the sense of confusion that this film portrays.

Barbara Bouchet's Moneypenny is definitely not your standard secretary and actually that kinda helps her, because she plays the role quite well, I mean it's no Lois Maxwell,  but there is a good Moneypenny character here, and it's great to see the character get a decent bit of screen time.

The only other hero who gets any decent screen time is Mata Bond, and Joanna Pettet is pretty good here, nothing special, but she has some decent dialogue and plays her role in this pretty well.  The mix of sixties sass, and Mata Hari-ness that Pettet brings into the role makes her work better than many other "Bond girls" in the official series.

Terence Cooper is alright in the few scenes that we see him in, and is definitely the closest to the Sean Connery 007 character, but he just isn't seen enough to make much of an impact, though he does have a couple of good fight moments in the big final battle.

Dahlia Lavi as The Detainer is okay, but once again we don't really get enough of her for her character to really have much of an impact in the overall film.

OTHER NOTES

Most films actually film most of their shots in a space of about 3 or 4 months.  Production on this film began in January 1966 and didn't finish until November of that year.  10 months of prodcution.  A lot of this is down to the fact that Peter Sellers would be off the set for days on end, and even on the set, he was warring with Orson Welles.  His firing, or walking out was inevitable and I think it was a mistake that they left those scenes in there.  They should have rewritten the Tremble stuff and maybe re-assigned it to Cooper, or recast the role, but to not do anything is partially what doomed this project to critical failure, even if did make almost $30million profit for Columbia Pictures.

This film at times does feel like a collection of unrelated sequences, which are loosely tied together, and the thread just can't keep it all together.  It's enjoyable in places, but there is too much just outright crazy silliness that has no place in the picture really.  The best parodies are the ones that pick their target and zero in on it precisely, like a Goldfinger laser beam.  Here; the parody is broad, and isn't particularly well focused.  It takes some excellent shots at the official series, but it just isn't precise enough, or indeed funny enough, to make you ignore the gigantic leaps of logic between certain scenes, unlike a film like Masters Of The Universe, which is a bad movie, but done so well in its badness, that it's actually kinda enjoyable and you don't really care about the huge leaps of logic there.

It's not a good good film, and it's not a good bad film, it comes in as a bad good film, not totally bad and unwatchable but not good enough to make it anything other than okay, I guess.  In terms of being a James Bond film, most of the other films do stuff better than in this film, and even the stuff they do really well here isn't enough to overcome the messy production and the discordant nature of the whole film.  I really don't think there's enough to make me recommend this to anyone, but it has enough reasonable about it to make it come in just ahead of Moonraker on my list.

Next time, number 23... and a serious film that tried to be a sequel, and we know from Moonraker how those just never work...

The Viewpoint Blog's Ranking of the best James Bond Films. 25: Moonraker

Welcome to something that I'm going to do in the run up to the next James Bond film due for release in late October, Spectre.  The next 25 posts are going to be individual reviews of each of the James Bond films, including the 2 unofficial ones, but not the 1954 production of Casino Royale, which was made for television.

In these reviews I will give my reasons for where I place these movies in the list, and give reviews of the films themselves.

I will do this in reverse order, so starting at the bottom of the list and working my way up to the number one spot, and so, I start the list at number 25, with what I consider to be the worst James Bond film of them all.  Moonraker.

Yes, Moonraker, is in my view, the worst Bond film of them all, worse than even the unofficial ones.  But why?

First off, it wasn't even intended to be the next film after The Spy Who Loved Me.  The intention had been to film For Your Eyes Only.  But the success of Star Wars led the producers to look for a Bond novel they hadn't filmed, with a space theme applicable to it.  All they had was Moonraker, the third book in the original series of Ian Fleming novels, but the story had to be extensively re-written to make it palatable to a late 1970s audience, as making Hugo Drax a former Nazi, as in the book, would not help the movie sell in Germany, or in other parts of Europe at the time.

Christopher Wood, who had written the very successful plot for The Spy Who Loved Me film, would be commissioned again to write the story and script, only borrowing the name Hugo Drax from the book.

So how did this script hold up?

PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE

After the gunbarrel sequence, we see a space shuttle being transported on the back of a 747, as the US is loaning the Moonraker space shuttle to the UK.  But two stowaways aboard the shuttle steal it from right off the back of the jumbo jet, torching it and causing it to explode.

M gets informed by telephone and immediately asks Moneypenny where 007 is, and being told he is on his last leg of the return journey from Africa.  Cut to Bond, with his hand on a woman's leg.  Yep, definitely on his "last leg"...

However the woman turns out to be a baddie as does the pilot and as they make to leave the plane, a fight breaks out between Bond and the pilot.  The pilot falls out with his parachute on, but Bond turns to look out on him, whereupon he is promptly pushed out himself, without a parachute, by Jaws.

Yes, Jaws has returned after surviving The Spy Who Loved Me.  Boy I hope they keep him just as menacing in this film, as he was in TSWLM.

There follows one of the most amazing stunt sequences, performed by BJ Worth and Jake Lombard, where Bond catches up to the pilot, in free fall, and steals the parachute pack right off his back and attaches the pack to himself.  It's an amazing stunt, not quite on the same level as skiing off the mountain and opening his parachute as happened in TSWLM, but an amazing stunt none the less.

Hey, just a minute.  This sequence has felt somewhat similar to the one from TSWLM.  Submarine stolen instead of shuttle, phone call to M, talking to Moneypenny, Bond getting it on with a female, female turns out to be a baddie, and sequence culminating in an amazing stunt.

And, there were some similarities to the pre-title sequence from You Only Live Twice, minus the action and the amazing stunt.  It won't surprise you to learn that all 3 films were directed by the same man, Lewis Gilbert.  I guess he had a set idea about how to start a Bond film in the pre-title sequence, but for all that, they aren't bad sequences, don't get me wrong, they are wonderful excellent sequences all of them, just notable that he had a particular formula for this.

The one slight difference this time, is we get an extra little bit where once Bond has secured the parachute pack to himself, Jaws suddenly comes into view, chasing after Bond, catching up to him, and trying to bite his calf.

Bond pulls his ripcord and escapes, but Jaws discovers he has no parachute upon pulling his ripcord, and falls into a circus big top.

TITLE SEQUENCE / TITLE SONG.

The title sequence itself isn't bad, but the song, Moonraker by Shirley Bassey, is awful.  Hal David wrote the lyrics for the title song, and admittedly, trying to fit the word "Moonraker" into a song lyric is a difficult task, and props to Hal for trying, but I'm afraid the end result is awful.  I give you Exhibit A.

Where are you? Why do you hide?
Where is that moonlight trail that leads to your side?
Just like the Moonraker goes in search of his dream of gold,
I search for love, for someone to have and hold,
I've seen your smile in a thousand dreams,
Felt your touch and it always seems,
You love me,
You love me.

Where are you? When will we meet?
Take my unfinished life and make it complete.
Just like the Moonraker knows his dream will come true someday,
I know that you are only a kiss away.
I've seen your smile in a thousand dreams,
Felt your touch and it always seems,
You love me,You love me....

These are the lyrics to the song, Moonraker by Shirley Bassey. What is a Moonraker, why does it go in search of its dream of gold? These lyrics are complete non-sequitirs, they make no sense at all, and have no relevance to the film itself, other than the use of the film's name.

I've often thought that the theme should have been an instrumental, just like they did with On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I think that would have been better than the poor effort we have, sung rather poorly by Shirley Bassey. Her voice is not given free reign to be powerful as it was in Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever, and without that, there is nothing really special about her performance. If it had to be a title song, maybe somebody else should have sung this. Karen Carpenter would have been ideal, she had the voice to be able to do this song justice.

THE PLOT:

So, the pre-title sequence gave us our starting point for the plot. The Moonraker Space Shuttle has been stolen, the plane carrying it destroyed and 007 is on the case.  We get a brief moment with Moneypenny and Bond, and some quick exposition from M, Q & The Minister of Defence, Frederick Gray.  Also, Q introduces us and Bond to the gadget that would get a fair amount of use in this film, the dart gun.

It's one of the few gadgets that I wish hadn't been used in one film and disappeared.  A bit like the briefcase from From Russia With Love.  Versions of that briefcase should have appeared always in the films.  Same for the dart gun.  This should always have been on Bond.  Moonraker should only have been its first appearance, not its only appearance.

Anyway, Bond is sent out to California, the location of the headquarters of Drax Industries, who built the shuttle.  There Bond is met by pilot Corrine Dufour played by Corrine Clery.  There's some nice interplay here between the two, and gives us a brief moment of light heartedness before we get into the serious nitty gritty.

Upon arriving at the Drax residence, a mansion transferred brick by brick from France, Bond meets Hugo Drax, the head of Drax Industries, played by Michael Lonsdale.  Everything seems quite cordial, although with a serious undertone of concern from Hugo Drax, and understandably so, after all, the space shuttle he built for the US space programme has gone missing, and he's understandably not happy about this.  

But, after Bond leaves to begin his tour of Drax Industries, Drax turns to Chang, the man who bought in tea, and says one line of dialogue that spoils all the great work that had been done up to that point.  

"Look after Mr. Bond.  See that some harm comes to him."

Up until that point we had a nice little mystery building.  Nothing too fancy, but an interesting mystery that could have sustained the first half of the movie at least.  Instead, before the first reel of the movie is over, we have had the mystery spoiled and have no doubt that Drax is the villain of the piece.  

I'll talk more about Drax later, but back to the plot.

We are quickly introduced to Dr Holly Goodhead, played here by Lois Chiles.  

Dr Goodhead.  Now that's definitely a name from the Pussy Galore school of Female names.  I find Bond's reaction here very objectionable too, even when I saw this for the first time back in the 1980s, I thought the reaction was unnecessarily sexist, and made me feel very sorry for Lois Chiles, having to deal with that uncomfortable piece of scripting.

Bond and Goodhead have a very uncomfortable conversation as she shows him around, and we get a scene that is reminiscent of the scene in Thunderball where Patricia Fearing straps Bond into a motorised traction table.  However here, Holly straps Bond into a centrifuge chamber, which will spin him around the chamber at increasing speed, increasing the G Force on his body.

The scene is very suspenseful, and it is one of the rare occasions that we see Roger Moore's Bond look worried, even scared.  However, a well placed dart from the dartgun hidden under Bond's blazer, manages to stop the mechanism, and allows the centrifuge to slow down to a stop.  Roger Moore plays this part brilliantly, refusing Dr Goodhead's help, and doing his best to look cool, but failing.  It really helped to sell that sequence very well indeed.

Much later, Bond seduces Corrine Dufour and persuades her to help him in finding out more about Hugo Drax, which she does slightly unwittingly, including showing Bond where the safe is.  The next day, Drax tries again to kill Bond, in the midst of a grouse shoot, with a sniper, however Bond foils the attempt, and Drax has Corrine killed for helping Bond.  

Bond travels to Venice and discovers Dr Goodhead there too, as well as a secret lab, which is making some kind of liquid in special hexagonal glass vials.  An accidental breakage of one of these vials, leads to the death of two scientists working in the lab, but animals in the same room are unharmed, leading Bond to deduce that the phials contain a nerve gas that is deadly to humans, but not to animals.

It is also during this part of the film that be if the worst sequences in Bond history happens.  At around the 38 minute mark, we see the beginnings of the infamous Bondola sequence, as a man in a coffin on top of another water vehicle, suddenly opens the coffin and fires knives at Bond's gondola, killing the gondolier, but just missing Bond, who throws the knife back and finds his target.

The whole Bondola sequence lasts about 3 minutes, and is the most painful piece of cinema to watch, as it degenerates from a corny start, through a boat chase between a speedboat and the Bondola, which has a motor of its own and doesn't need the gondolier, through to the piece-de-no-resistance, a hovercraft style float inflating underneath and the Bondola going up on land, into St Mark's Square, and causing a commotion, including our second look at drunk man from the beach from TSWLM, a noble dog looking on, and a double-taking pigeon.

I'm not joking.  They played around with some stock footage in the moviola, to make a pigeon, double-take.  As sequences go, this one just went from badly corny, to inanely stupid, in about 3 minutes flat.  Any goodwill that was left after the badly handled reveal of Drax being the main villain, was completely spent here, by the end of reel 2, and we still have 4 more reels of this film to go.

If you wanna see the sequence, and I would suggest against watching, but I admit, I might not believe it from description alone, so if you do want to inflict one of the worst sequences in Bond history on yourself, you will find the scene below.

Okay, having got that monstrosity out of the way, does the film improve at all?  Back to the plot...

It's also during the Venice part of this story that we get the fight between Bond and Chang in the glassworks.  Much glass is destroyed during this fight, and of course Chang dies, before Bond does a very lame one liner, referencing Casablanca.  Most fight sequences are quite enjoyable, but this one leaves me cold.  It seems they designed that sequence to break as much glass as possible, but with the whole sequence making little real sense again.  The only thing it truly does is allow Bond to see that Drax is moving stuff to Rio De Janeiro.  

We also get a weird scene with Bond giving Holly Goodhead a jump scare, and the reveal of all her gadgets, and of her being a CIA agent.  Again, the scene makes only minor sense, as it doesn't really do the job well, it just does it and again, leaves me rather cold all told.

Anyway, after an embarrassing scene involving M, Drax, Frederic Gray and Bond, and I don't just mean embarrasing in the story, I mean, really embarrassing, badly done, badly acted, just another poor scene, we move the story on to Rio De Janeiro, and we're re-introduced to Jaws.

The porter in the Rio hotel is camp, and not in a good way, and we are introduced here to Manuela, who is from Station VH.  She has a small role in the movie, and is okay, but feels kinda weak as a character.

Bond checks out the importer in Rio whilst Manuela keeps and eye out for anything suspicious.  However, it is carnival time, so everybody is in fancy dress.  Jaws tries to kill Manuela but is foiled by the sudden appearance of party goers the first time, and then tries again, only for Bond to intervene and more party goers whisk Jaws away.

As a re-introduction to Jaws as a professional killer, this sequence once again leaves me cold, and not in the way it should.  Jaws should be menacing and here, the menace is completely undercut by the party atmosphere and the costume that Jaws wears to blend in.   It's not a bad sequence, but like so much else in this film, it feels weak and not very well done.

By this point, we're about halfway through the film, and you wonder if the production team actually took enough care with this film, as it doesn't feel well done.

In fact, there are some rather interesting similarities developing between this film and the previous one, The Spy Who Loved Me.  The pre-title sequence was very similar, the idea of humanity being killed is being developed here, even though by this point in TSWLM, it was already full blown in our minds what Stromberg was up to.  And of course, there's Jaws.  I'm beginning to sense a pattern...

Anyway, Bond arrives at a cable car station where he runs into Holly Goodhead once again, as he is spying on the airport through a telescope.  Then we have what I must apologise for saying is the worst fight sequence in Bond history.  It's not a bad sequence, it's just awkward.  

Jaws traps Bond and Goodhead in a cable car and snaps the steel cable with his teeth.  Jaws then rises on another cable car to meet the first one, and Jaws leaps across the gap to engage in a fight with Bond and Goodhead on top of the cable car.  

It's very difficult to co-ordinate a fight sequence on top of a cable car, and I have to say they don't do a bad job of it, but compared to so many other fights in other Bond films, it just doesn't meet the usual high standards of Bond fight sequences.  I cannot place any blame on the stuntmen, they did what they could, and they did it well, but... well, it just doesn't stand up compared to so many others.  It's the way it goes sometimes.  You do great work on a sequence, and no matter how well you do it, sometimes the sequence just doesn't work as well as it should.  This is just one of those times.

Bond and Goodhead manage to push Jaws down into the cable car and lock the hatch from the outside.  Then Bond uses a chain to slide both him and Holly down the cable to safety.  However, Jaws' accomplice starts up the cable car again, putting Jaws in hot pursuit of our heroes.  They make their escape by dropping down to the ground, whilst the cable car crashes into the station at the bottom, and another infamous sequence begins, as we, and Jaws, meet Dolly for the first time, and Jaws falls in love, as the famous music from Romeo and Juliet plays over the scene.

I feel really bad for Jaws here.  He is meant to be a menacing killer, and he ends up being just a joke in this film, completely misused, and really doesn't help the film at all.

We then have a weird sequence, where stretcher bearers come to rescue Bond and Holly, but they're really Drax employees who capture them, and transport them in an ambulance, to who knows where. There is a fight between Bond and one of the ambulance men which ends up with Bond and the guy on a wheeled stretcher exiting the ambulance and Bond leaving him to run into a British Airways billboard.

Oh yeah, there is also a lot of signs and billboards for 7Up in this film too.  A lot of fairly blatant product placement.

We then get another weird sequence with Bond arriving at some monastery looking like a poor man's Clint Eastwood, before it's revealed as a secret MI6 base, and Q is once again shown perfecting equipment in the field, some of which will get used later on.  And we get a second briefing scene between M, Bond and Q.

This then transitions into a sequence with Bond in a speedboat in a river, being chased by a boat firing mortars, but Bond disposes of them with some mines, only for 2 more boats to come after him, one of them lead by Jaws.  We get a slower rendition of John Barry's 007 track from From Russia With Love here, which is in rather sharp contrast to the editing in this part, which is fairly quick, not slow at all.

Bond uses a torpedo to dispose of one of his pursuers, but Jaws will not be put off, and we are faced with a cliffhanger moment.  A huge waterfall is ahead of them, and Jaws is in pursuit of Bond.  How is he going to get out of this one?

Bond escapes by transforming the roof of his speedboat into a hand glider, and takes off just before the boat goes over the falls, and I love Jaws' expression here as that happens, as if to say, that is just so unfair.

As Jaws and the pursuing boat go over the falls, we see Bond looking incredibly smug and self satisfied, and I have to say that is one of the worst character defining moments in Bond history.  Bond should never, ever, be smug.  No ifs, buts or maybes.  A smug Bond just doesn't ring true with the character established in the books, or indeed in the films.  That one shot made me cringe.

Bond lands in the rainforest, and just happens to encounter a beautiful woman.  Really???  The lack of imagination here is just numbing.  Like a siren, she leads him to Drax's secret base here in something that resembles an old Incan or Mayan temple.  This leads into Bond being surrounded by gorgeous women, and then being ejected into a pool to face a deadly python.

This sequence feels particularly weak, in a film that so far has come across as weak.  It's here that we meet Drax again, and get the full view of what Drax is doing.  Launching shuttles into space for some reason.  Bond is taken to join Dr Goodhead in a strange looking room, which slowly reveals itself to be underneath the exhaust of another shuttle.  Bond and Holly make their escape, barely, and manage to sneak aboard the last of the shuttles, and discover that they are headed to a space station that somehow nobody knows about.

How did Drax get this space station constructed without anybody else knowing?  This last piece breaks all bounds of believability.  I've had to "buy" so many things during this film and this last "buy" was just one too many.  

The whole of the last 30 minutes is set in orbit around this space station, and aboard Drax's shuttle, as we enter the usual climatic big battle in the villain's lair.  But before that battle, we get a speech from Drax, and I'm sorry to say that the speech is boring as hell, even though it's only about a minute long. This is in part due to the fact that the actor, Michael Lonsdale, has a flat, almost monotone voice, which he has used throughout the whole movie.  I get what they were trying to do, was have Drax be an understated villain, not over the top, not silly, but unstated, coldly menacing.  This is exactly what they did with Stromberg in TSWLM, only there there was enough inflection in the voice of actor Curt Jurgens, to give the words the required menace, but he certainly wasn't played in an over the top way, and they tried to do it again here, but this time, it falls as flat as Michael Lonsdale's voice tone.  

Bond and Holly disable a radar jamming system that Drax had built into the space station, and we get a cameo from General Gogol, and that's not even required.  Nice to see Gogol again, but it does feel shoehorned in.  

Bond and Holly are captured and taken to Drax, as he launches the globes that will release the nerve gas to kill the human race, and Bond persuades Jaws that his love Dolly will be killed by Drax, and Jaws turns on Drax, and just before Drax can laser an approaching American space shuttle, Bond stops the rotation of the space station causing everyone to become weightless.  Then we get the big space battle with laser guns that we saw being tested earlier.  

This sequence has echoes of the sequence in the volcano lair from You Only Live Twice.  Meanwhile we get a final confrontation between Bond and Drax, and to be honest, whilst the dialogue is quite good, the whole sequence feels like an anti-climax, as Drax is poison-darted by Bond and takes a "giant step for mankind' out of an airlock.

We have a gratuitous sequence featuring Jaws and Dolly, which feels really out of place as the space station is destroying itself, and Jaws helps release Bond and Holly's shuttle from the station as they go off to destroy the globes, which they manage to do, and then we have the worst double-entendre from Q, as Bond and Holly get it on in space as M, Q and the Minister of Defence make contact.

Overall, the plot feels like a thin thread, holding together a number of sequences that are actually quite weak all told and not that good.  Plots aren't necessarily the most important thing in a Bond film but they have to work, well enough, to be at least buyable, but there was so many things I had to "buy" here, that the bounds of believability were stretched beyond breaking point.

THE VILLAIN

Hugo Drax is a poor villain really.  They attempt to make him understated and menacing, and he just comes off as boring, flat and monotonal, which isn't good.  There is little emotion in Michael Lonsdale's performance and when he says...

"At least I will have the pleasure of putting you out of my misery."

...you're left wondering how he expresses pleasure as he sounds exactly the same as he has done all the way through the film.

STUNTS AND ACTION SEQUENCES.

Once again the stuntwork is excellently produced and performed, especially the parachute stealing moment, but the Bondola sequence felt really bad to watch, and the cable car fight, whilst excellently done, felt weaker than everything else.  As I said earlier, I can't place the blame with the stunt people, they did their work exceedingly well, but the problems of a fight on a cable car are rather easy to see.

THE BOND GIRL/WOMAN

Lois Chiles does okay here as Dr Holly Goodhead, though that name, like Pussy Galore's earns a full 10 exclamations on the weirdness scale.  !!!!!!!!!!

Dr Goodhead is not a Bond equal like Anya, but she's hardly a damsel in distress like Solitaire or Mary Goodnight.  She's tough and capable, and very intelligent, but she looked very weak in the cable car fight.  Much better in the space station though.

I can't say there was anything special about her, it was pretty obvious that she was this film's equivalent of Anya, and though she does a better job here than Barbara Bach did in TSWLM, she doesn't quite come off quite as well.

THE HENCHMEN

Chang is kinda disappointing.  He's mostly silent, except in the final fight in Venice where he goes all Kendo Nagasaki on us and has a smashing time...

The character I really feel sorry for is Jaws.  In TSWLM, he was this menacing, not unfunny, but not played for major laughs, character who you really felt could kill Bond quite easily.  Here, he's played mostly for laughs, and all of his menace is missing and undercut by the sillyness.  It's a waste of a great character, and I feel sorry for Richard Kiel having to put up with this.

OTHER NOTES

The one thing that strikes me most from watching the film, is how much they copied The Spy Who Loved Me in this film.  Christopher Wood obviously only had one plot idea, and whilst it worked the first time, the second time was just painful.  Drax is a space version of Stromberg, Jaws is here, the first of the villain's henchmen dies from a large fall, Dr Goodhead is Major Amasova-lite here, We had a shuttle stolen in this film, compared to the submarines being stolen in TSWLM, armageddon was the villain's scheme, with a new civilisation coming from under the sea, or in this case space.  The parallels are many fold, and Moonraker really demonstrates how trying to copy the previous film, never works, no matter how well established the hero is.  

Lewis Gilbert is an excellent director, but here he feels like he's hamstrung by the sequences he's trying to link together.

John Glen does a great job of editing the piece, but as the old saying goes, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and this was always gonna be a sow's ear, from the moment they copied the formula from TSWLM.  

Ken Adam's designs are marvellous as always, and to me it is a shame that this is his last Bond film as Production Designer, as his sets were always marvellous.

The cinematography from Jean Tournier was excellent as well, and the special effects crew, led by Derek Meddings did such an excellent job in creating the effects, that they were nominated in the Academy Awards Best Special Effects category.  John Barry's score is excellent, though some of the music they use for other sequences that they borrowed from other sources leaves a lot to be desired.

Roger Moore gives a good performance as Bond, and is obviously comfortable in the role here, after all, this was his 4th film, but there does seem to be something weird about 4th Bond films.  Each of the three previous actors to get to 4 films, the fourth one had been the weakest of the bunch.  I hope that doesn't afflict Daniel Craig in Spectre.

OVERALL

For me, what marks this film down significantly is the plot, how Jaws is utilised, and Hugo Drax himself.  These elements are key parts of the film, and seriously hurt it.  It doesn't even reach 001, on the double 0 scale where 000 is unbearable and 007 is perfection.  It's barely watchable, but there's little satisfying here.

It was a poor attempt to capitalise on the success of Star Wars, but capitalise on it it did, making over $210,000,000 worldwide.  This was Bond at its worst, and they needed to return Bond back to Earth, literally and metaphorically in the next film, For Your Eyes Only.

Next time: Number 24... with a story just too big for one James Bond...

Star Wars 9 Director announced, before 7 is even released.

So today, Disney announced that the director of Star Wars Episode 9 is to be Colin Trevorrow, who wrote and directed Jurassic World.

Err, excuse me?  We haven't had Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens yet.  That's not due to come out in the UK and Ireland until 18th December.  But this is the way that Disney are doing this, like one long production line of Star Wars films.

Even as the finishing touches are being put on The Force Awakens, they are already filming Rogue One, which is the first film in a new Star Wars Anthology series of films, a film that was written by John Knoll, who is a Visual Effects guru at ILM.  He's even down as an Executive Producer for this film.  Yep, an Executive Producer.  I hope that the film isn't just one long stream of visual effects shots with a minimalist plot to kind of make sense of all the various special effects.  That film is due out next year.

Then there's Episode 8, which is due out on 26th May 2017, 40 years and 1 day after the release of the original Star Wars movie.  That has yet to start filming, but Rian Johnson has previously been announced as the director for that film.  Knowing how long the prequels were in Post-Production with all the computer effects, that one should be shooting soon.

It does feel like a production line has been put in place for these movies and that worries me, because even the prequels felt like they had plenty of time to polish it, and a lot of care taken to make it as good as it could be, even though critical reaction to them has been mostly negative, though I liked them, but they weren't as good as the original trilogy, but that wasn't down to the technology.  The stories were a little bit weaker, and the characters didn't seem to have as much depth as before, even though some of them were actually the same characters as in the original trilogy, but in some cases, that would be understandable, especially for Anakin Skywalker in Episode 1 who was just a 9 year old kid.

I must admit though that with The Force Awakens in December, and Spectre in October, this is the first time that I have truly looked forward to movies coming out, and actually considering going to the cinema to see them, rather than my previous pattern since about 1995, which was waiting for it to comer out on home video and later DVD.  Hopefully, I won't be disappointed.

NYSE halts trading for over 3 hours. Nothing much happens.

I know that title sounds a little weird, because if a stock exchange stops trading for over 3.5 hours, you don't expect much to happen in that time, and nothing much did happen, but not in the sense you might think.

What happened was this, at around 11.30am EDT, trading on the New York Stock Exchange floor was halted, due to what the exchange called an "internal technical issue", saying that a cyber attack was not the cause.

And yet, despite this, trading seemed to pretty much continue almost as normal on NYSE stocks.  But how is that possible?

The New York Stock Exchange trading floor might be an iconic image, and a central point of trading in NYSE stocks, but it is by no means the only point for trading NYSE.  In fact only 13% of all NYSE stocks that are traded during the day are actually traded through the NYSE trading floor.

There are about a dozen other places where NYSE stocks are traded, plus the options are on a separate platform, as is the OTC (Over The Counter) market, and the alternative market.  The whole NYSE trading floor, is just one place where NYSE stocks are legally traded and the other trading floors were able to pick up the slack.

This story in itself provides us with two lessons, which is pretty rare to be fair.  The first is the simple, always have back up plans, at least 1 and preferably more.  That's a lesson that NYSE owners ICE obviously knew about and their back up plans were already in effect before the NYSE trading floor was halted at around 11.30am EDT.

My main problem with all these other backups is that they are all technologically based.  In other words, it's all the same basic technology, just differently written systems that manage to talk to each other, and yet manage to maintain enough separation that when there was a problem, the other systems managed to keep going.

The second lesson I take from this story is not to be over-reliant on technology.  Technology is actually a very useful thing, but especially these days with all the smartphones that I see people constantly staring at, we are in serious danger of taking this technology for granted.

When I first started doing radio back in 1990, computers were not being used to playout the music or the jingles or the adverts, in fact, they were barely more than a fancy text messaging system between studios.  That all changed in 1992 with the arrival of Pirate FM 102.

In the past 25 years, computers have become a major part of the radio industry, with everything from news production, traffic management, music scheduling, station administration, playout and every other aspect just about handled by computers, and although I'm okay with it being that way, I am okay with it, because I was trained in the old fashioned methods, splicing tape with razor blades and joining together with sticky tape, cueing up records, cassettes and CDs manually, slamming carts into cart machines.  All of these were standard things to learn when I started out in radio and now, they are techniques that many in the industry today wouldn't have a clue how to do, because they've never learned how to do them, because everything is done with computers.

But we are in an era where technology is pervasive, and we need to be aware that we need to be able to cope without it.  The US TV series 'Revolution' dealt with that concept, and it didn't do a bad job of it, but the show was cancelled after 2 seasons and didn't really explore the basic concept as well as maybe it could have, by choosing to start the series 15 years after the permanent blackout had happened.

Maybe the most reassuring thing about this whole situation, is the very fact that despite the main trading floor going down for over 3.5 hours, stocks continued to trade as though nothing had happened.  It suggests to me that all the systems did what they were supposed to do, and kept things going until the system got back up.

Indeed, the NYSE trading floor came back online 50 minutes before the official close, probably giving them just enough time to make sure that nothing else bad was going to happen with their temporary fix, before the close, and then they could spend the next 16-17 hours working on improving upon the temporary fix.

The real acid test will be tomorrow's trading day from 9.30am New York time.  Then we will see if the system repairs have truly worked.