OK, so which is your favourite Bond film?
Goldfinger? Has to be up there, great song and lots of good action. Gert Frobe as the villain, Honor Blackman as, well, you know her name.
How about Skyfall? Daniel does a good Bond, a very good Bond. You believe he became the assassin we all love and has the gritty background, yet can act suave and sophisticated when the need arises.
The Living Daylights has some good action sequences, but Dalton doesn’t quite make it as Bond, nice enough, but not “the” Bond.
How about View to a Kill? What lost it for me was Mayday’s sudden and somewhat unbelievable conversion. Indeed, most of the Moore films are somewhat tongue in cheek, not what Bond really stands for.
Goldeneye? Now, Pierce is definitely a great Bond, for me better than Connery. It’s a great film, spoiler alert – Sean Bean dies at the end, and a wonderful set of action set pieces. It’s still not quite enough.
No, the best Bond for me is the one with the worst Bond, but best overall sense of Bond the hero, Bond the action man, Bond the spy, Bond the covert antagonist, Bond the fighter, Bond the lover, Bond the compassionate, Bond the womaniser – Bond, the complete man of that time.
Yes, for me, OHMSS shows Bond in the complete manner.
PS The only way to better this option is to use the original storyline from the book as originally written by Fleming for “The Spy Who Loved Me“. But it wouldn’t fit what we’ve now come to expect of Bond. It’s told from the female protagonist’s perspective. It’s nothing like the Bond story as we now know them. Nonetheless it is the best Bond story I’ve read and for me would have been an absolutely stunning Bond film. It just wouldn’t have sold, and even in these liberated and more equal times it is still wrong, because it was of an era, of a time when things were different. It’s a shame, it addressed issues of its time well, and being told from the female perspective highlighted the challenges women face. And Bond is the hero who saves her. Even better than in OHMSS.
One day perhaps. I for one would love to see that different type of Bond.
I wonder if someone will have the courage to make it.
