It's nearly three months since I had the future-award-winning idea of bringing the whole blogging world together under a poisonously-spiked umbrella of Bond-love to blog about every James Bond film once a month until the release of the new one next November. I speak, of course, of BlogalongaBond, a title for which I take no responsibility despite the fact that it fell out of my own head.
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In a rare moment of feeling pleased with myself, the thing I like most about the whole project is that some people are watching - and finding new things in - Bond films they haven't seen before, or at least not for yonks, and that brings a manly tear of butch pride to my macho eye.
Around 30 similarly-inclined bloggers have sat themselves down in front of Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, then taken to the internets and spilled their brains all over the shop in the name of BlogalongaBond. There've been articles, videos, songs, podcasts and even some kind of half-assed but brilliant powerpoint presentation. Every entry gets pimped on Facebook and Twitterand is archived on this page, so if you fancy perusing a broad range of opinions on the world's greatest cinema franchise, then you know where to go.
If for some reason you haven't checked out any BlogalongaBondings yet, then a) you're dead to me, but b) this is your chance to atone for your sins. Here's a mere smattering of what you've been missing:
Kinnema.com writes proper good reviews that make like well good points about stuff in you know an intelligent and considered kind of wotsit. If you see yourself as any kind of writer and enjoy feeling inadequate, check out the Goldfinger review.
The Intermittent Sprocket's monthly Bond song has thrown up three classics already, my favourite of which is "Rogues' Gallery". Start placing your bets on the Christmas 2012 Number One album now.
Follow The Lemur's science-based posts are entertaining and educational. This one tells you exactly why Goldfinger's death-by-skin-suffocation is such a load of old tommywaddle.
After It Happens' From Russia With Love slide presentation is like sitting in the world's best middle-management meeting, like, ever. Watch on an overhead projector for the full effect.
Nobody knows clothes on film like Clothes On Film, which is lucky when you think about it. If you wondered why Sean Connery still looks like a sex puma in a blue towelling playsuit, here's the answer.
And last but by no means least, here's Douche On Film's Dr. No review which for some reason hasn't yet been sold to Sight & Sound.
It's April now, which means we're wading through the underwater tedium of Thunderball, but hey! In a couple of months it'll be time for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and THAT is a film.
BlogalongaBond's doors are wide open to newbies so if you want to crash the party, you're more than welcome to do so. It's black tie, bring a bottle. Dom Perignon, preferably (the '53; none of that '55 shit thank you very much).
With Dr. No out of the way and James Bond firmly installed in the cinemagoing public's hearts, From Russia With Love wastes no time plunging us into a labyrinthine Cold War spy thriller. We haven't quite got Bond right yet - playing the crashingly loud theme over a scene of 007 bimbling about in his hotel room is a rare misstep - but this is still both a glorious snapshot of 1960s cinema and a film years ahead of its time.
Before Goldfinger's needle found the series' groove there was still time for subtlety in Bond, and From Russia With Love contains some of the most understated moments in the franchise. Rosa Klebb's terrifying seduction / recruitment of Tatiana Romanova, Red Grant's silent guardianship over 007 for most of the film, Bond's tender squeeze of Kerim Bey's arm when he finds his dead body - all these and more point to writing and direction that rarely felt so confident again until Timothy Dalton took over 24 years later.
Triumphantly, all the sneaking about in the shadows and mumbling secret codes that could have made From Russia With Love a catatonic yawnfest are not just beautifully shot, edited and scored, but are contrasted perfectly with the action scenes - the revolutionary nature of which often goes overlooked. Take the brutal, bone-crunching fight on the Orient Express between Bond and Grant, who, incidentally, is so hard that when he whacks Bond in the chops he momentarily becomes Kenneth Williams.
The fight begins when Bond's standard issue "ordinary black leather case" explodes in Grant's face and ends exactly two bruising, breathless minutes later with 007 calmly straightening his grenadine silk tie and buttoning his Anthony Sinclair suit jacket. Between these two now-iconic elements of Bond lore, several people go to work on one of the greatest fight scenes in Bond - and cinema - history.
As soon as the fight begins, director Terence Young makes three genius decisions. First, he refuses to have music over the fight. He wants us to hear every punch, kick and grunt. Second, he has Grant inadvertently shoot out the light in the carriage, bathing everything in a disorientating, nightmarish moonlight blue. And third, Grant's flailing arm smashes the window, allowing the roar of the train wheels to flood in and heighten the mood even further.
Almost every sound you hear in those two minutes was created by dubbing editor Norman Wanstall and his team of noise wizards. Many of the crashes, bashes and smashes are exaggerated to the point where it sounds like someone shoving a drum kit down a stairwell, yet it never sounds unrealistic. Just very, very painful.
Young rehearsed for two days with Connery, Shaw and stuntmen Jackie Cooper and Peter Perkins to choreograph the scene to within an inch of its life. By the time it came to cut it together, Connery and Shaw had the ballet down so well that only one shot of the stunt doubles was required, and it's almost impossible to tell which shot this is.
Which brings us to editor Peter Hunt. With footage from three cameras at his disposal, Hunt cut the fight like nobody had ever cut a fight scene before. Many of his edits make no sense in isolation or are deliberate jump cuts - watch when Bond shields his face with his arms - but in context they transform the fight from a bog-standard punch-up to a gladiatorial rumble. There are quick cuts to heighten the tension, but Hunt isn't afraid to linger on the odd shot to show how titanic this struggle is. And, most importantly, it's completely possible for the audience to keep up with who's kicking whose ass during the bout - something crucially forgotten during the editing of Quantum Of Solace's fights.
It's no exaggeration to suggest that between them Terence Young and Peter Hunt changed the action genre forever with From Russia With Love. Every on-screen scrap since owes something to those amazing 120 seconds in a tiny set at Pinewood Studios.
It's a proper spy thriller
Made during a particularly chilly part of the Cold War, From Russia With Love is shot through with paranoia, double-crosses and shadow-cloaked deaths at every turn. Everyone's being followed by everyone else, people use ridiculously convoluted recognition codes, and there are hidden cameras and microphones everywhere. It's arguably the only Bond film that could be labelled a "spy thriller" before the series became a genre in itself, making it not just a great Bond film, but a great film full stop.
John Barry's score
"Tania Meets Klebb"
If you've ever skulked about in a Turkish mosque, watched two improbably beautiful gypsy women scratch each other to shreds or stolen a Macguffin from the Russian consulate in Istanbul, this is the music you would have been humming to yourself along the way. Perfect in almost every way.
Red Grant
Where the book's Grant becomes a raving psychopath with every full moon, Shaw sensibly goes for the cool, calculating, brick shithouse approach, setting the template for Bond henchpersons for the next five decades. The way he puts his gloves on before he kills anyone makes me do a little poo.
And finally: All hail the first barely-disguised reference to Little James:
BOND
You're one of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen.
Given that our last highly pleasurable session of aural lovemaking wasn't a completely limp disappointment, we may as well go for sloppy seconds now that you're all warmed up.
Just to reiterate for unbelievably lucky / unforgivably late newcomers, this is a weekly playlist of movie music, bound by a common theme, that I like to imply took ages to craft into a perfectly arranged, mutually complimentary selection of interwoven tuneage but which I actually threw together a few minutes ago. You'll need to download Spotify to hear it, which you can do right here. It's free so don't get your credit card out unless you want to pay me for all the amazingness I've given you over the last year and a bit, which would be both lovely and long overdue.
This week it's music from the Bond films of the 1960s, which is obviously when it was at its most sleazily, sexifully ace. John Barry scored all six of the sixties' Bonds (we do not speak of the 1967 spoof Casino Royale in this house, although it does have an incredible soundtrack), and he did an unspeakably good job of it. His part in creating the Bond of the films is as important as directors Terence Young and Guy Hamilton, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Salzman, set designer Ken Adam and even that Scottish milkman with the dodgy syrup.
So to get you in the mood, why not have casual sex with a string of improbably beautiful women, blow up a military installation, make a dreadful one-liner and enjoy some of the sounds that LITERALLY CHANGED THE WORLD.
The Incredible Suit is part of The Cineastes, a group of bloggers who review a film a month and link blogs in the hope of spreading the word of whatever it is we’re on about. September’s film is L’Enfance Nue, directed by Maurice Pialat in 1968.
The lovely folks at LoveFilm failed to send me a copy of L’Enfance Nue in time, so this article is based entirely, and rather fatuously, on the poster and trailer for the film. It might be best to watch the trailer before reading any further, otherwise this post is going to make even less sense than all my others. And that’s saying something.
***WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS MASSIVE FACTUAL INACCURACIES***
If you were to base your opinion of L’Enfance Nue entirely on its poster, you may believe it to be about two boys; one who’s incredibly smug because he’s stolen his grandad’s war medals, and another who intends to wipe that silly grin off his face by lobbing a Twix bar at him. Only one Twix bar, mind – the other he’s saving to give to a girl in exchange for a glimpse of her jumper bumpers.
However, having closely studied the trailer, it’s clear that medal theft and justice by confectionery-hurling is but one small aspect of this complex work of art.
A young scallywag – let’s call him Pierre – has got himself involved with a rum crowd of tinkers who force him to drop a cat down a stairwell as part of an initiation ceremony to their gang, Les Petits Bastardes. But all Pierre wants is to act out scenes from his favourite movies. He takes a girl to the countryside to educate her about the finer points of Tim Burton’s Sweeney Toddand its throat-slashing fun, but she’s unimpressed. In fact she slaps Pierre before falling over for no apparent reason.
After overhearing an adult conversation about how great Forrest Gumpwas, Pierre attempts to run across France in an attempt to emulate the legendary simpleton. When he reaches his destination he celebrates by kicking a door down in the style of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, but he’s captured by grown-ups and plonked on the next train back to wherever he came from. Probably Paris.
On the journey he thinks about all the great movies that have featured trains, such as Strangers On A Train, North By Northwestand From Russia With Love. Pierre even attempts to recreate the famous James Bond / Red Grant fight on the Orient Express by paying a bigger boy to whack him across the chops with a pair of dirty underpants.
Back at school, Pierre is given a small child in an orange turtle neck to look after. Tragically the child reminds Pierre of Steve Buscemi’s character from Fargo, and Pierre promptly feeds the boy into a woodchipper (not shown in the trailer). The End.
The moral of the story is a universal one: Never trust LoveFilm to get a DVD to you on time.
