James Bond will return, maybe, who knows, whatever

The future of the James Bond films hangs in the balance. Sony's distribution deal has ended, so MGM and EoN are currently jiggling Bond in front of a selection of suitors, all of whom are desperate for the rights while simultaneously nervous that Daniel Craig might not stay on board to guarantee boffo box office for the next film. It's a delicate situation, and one which could affect the very DNA of the franchise for the foreseeable future. And I, a lifelong Bond fan, couldn't give a hoot.

This is a problem. Mainly for me, to be fair, unless Barbara Broccoli is overly concerned about my devotion to her baby, in which case it's her problem too. But it's emblematic of how I've been feeling about the Bond films since Spectre dribbled onto screens nearly eighteen months ago (in that time I have rewatched maybe three Bond films, which is a dangerously low level of Bondery in my house), and I need to address it in the form of a rambling blog post, if only for my own mental wellbeing.

It seems inevitable that Babs will hand distribution rights for Bond 25 back to Sony, if only because she and Michael G Wilson seem to fear change right now (although Sony's pitch, apparently held on a recreated set from Dr. No, would have sold them to me in the time it takes Sean Connery to order a black man to fetch his shoes). The sooner that happens, the more likely Craig is to get back in the tux, and Christoph Waltz and Léa Seydoux can clear their schedules for Spectre II: Blofeld Boogaloo. Well, sorry if my enthusiasm isn't so much brimming over as struggling to fill a martini glass.

Don't get me wrong, I love Daniel Craig. He's made two Bond films I absolutely adore and one that I - and about three other people - like very much. And he's easily the best thing in Spectre, despite the fact that he still can't fit into his bloody suits. But his excitement levels for another outing seem about as high as mine are right now - obviously I can't read his mind, but my biggest fear for a fifth Craig film is that he snoozes through it like Connery did in the autumn of his Bond years. Compare his performances in Casino Royale and Spectre: the former boasts a wired, barely concealed hunger to make the role his own (partly fuelled by the epically stupid press campaign against him), while the latter has him mumbling monosyllabic retorts and reacting to cinema's biggest explosion as if a cat had broken wind in the distance.

Then there's the Purvis & Wade factor. I firmly believe the writers' contribution to the last six Bond films has been mostly brilliant - even Die Another Day's kitesurfing scene probably looked good on paper - but when they were revealed as the architects of Bond 25 my heart sank. More of the same looms large, and an entire generation of daring, brilliant writers has grown up while they've been at the helm. Casino Royale was a tremendous surprise - as was Skyfall, to some extent - but it feels like Bond needs to regenerate again to stay relevant.

I despise articles called things like "Here's What We Think Should Happen In The Next Bond Film" with an unquenchable passion, but Here's What I Think Should Happen In The Next Bond Film: Play around. Fuck about. Mix it up. Do a period Bond film set in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War, like when Michael Fassbender skulked around Argentina in X-Men: First Class, only for fuck's sake don't let Matthew Vaughn direct it. Do an Old Bond story, with Timothy Dalton (as we all know, the best James Bond) as a 70-year-old 007 who might just be losing the edge he's maintained for years because he doesn't know how not to (watch 2015's criminally underrated Mr. Holmes to see how to do something new and self-reflexive with a pop culture legend). Do an anthology film of three faithful adaptations of Fleming's short stories in tonally diverse styles. Just do something unexpected, for fuck's sake (but not so weird that I don't like it, that would be terrible. Don't forget this is all about me).

I don't know, maybe Purvis and Wade are currently beavering away at exactly one of these things, but I doubt it, because despite the evidence of successful franchises splintering off in unexpected directions (the MCU, Star Wars) it feels like Bond would never dare. I'm not saying the series has to become an entirely different beast forever - God knows its familiarity is the comfiest of comfort blankets at times - but there are 24 near-identical films that everyone can watch at the drop of a steel-rimmed bowler hat if they want to; would a couple of experiments be that bad for the series?

As a tediously vocal proponent of Serious Bond (Licence To Kill is still the best, don't fucking @ me) I'm going to sound like a massive hypocrite now, but you know what I also really want from the next Bond film? A bloody good laugh. An air-punching, howlingly brilliant stunt that's almost - but not quite - too outrageous for Bond. The other evening I drank a bit too much gin and began tearily reminiscing over Brosnan-era daftness like the time he rode a motorbike off a cliff and freefell into a falling plane. I'll never forget my reaction to that the first time I watched GoldenEye: my heart leapt out of my chest and I had to look around to confirm that everyone else in the cinema had seen what I'd just seen. I even miss things as potentially terrible as a smash cut to Brosnan in a Hawaiian shirt strolling through some Spanish backwater while David Arnold tosses off an almost culturally insulting salsa riff and a caption says "Havana, Cuba", because Brosnan looks amazing in a Hawaiian shirt and that salsa riff is KICKING and it's all just so wonderfully silly. I miss silly Bond. I think the Fast & Furious movies might have stolen him.

People who know me as The Boring Bond Guy are always asking me who I think should replace Daniel Craig, but what they don't understand is that I know far more about people who have already been Bond than I do about people who haven't but might. Glancing at random articles speculating on the next 007 fills me with the fear because I haven't even heard of half the names, and if I have I wouldn't know some of them if I fell over them in the street. Jack Huston? No idea. James Norton? Isn't he a TV chef? And you can fuck right off with your Toms Hardy and Hiddleston: the last thing a new Bond needs is baggage. If cornered, I will vigorously fly the flag for Dan Stevens, and anyone who disagrees needs to watch The Guest on a weekly basis like I do. He can do lean and mean, he doesn't take himself too seriously and anyone who doesn't have special thoughts about him is emotionally dead.

So that's what's going on with me right now. I'm a bit sad about Bond and I don't know if it's because the last one was upsettingly bad, or if I'm still recovering from two years of self-imposed watching, thinking and writing about Bond for no other reason than to see if I could, or if I'm just getting old and grumpy. But spunking all this self-indulgent bollocks onto the internet might help, although not as much as if Barbara Broccoli reads my spunk and fertilises her Bond egg with it and we make the perfect Bond baby together. Though frankly that's unlikely, not to mention worryingly inappropriately phrased. Anyway, my apologies if you've got this far expecting there to be some informed critical thinking, or at least the merest hint of a point, because there are none of those things to be found here. Just a picture of Roger Moore having his nose adjusted to remind us how much worse it could be.

De Palma

Brian De Palma is not a man who has issues calling a spade a spade. If he could, not only would he call a spade a spade, but he would put a wig and a dress on the spade and follow it round with a Steadicam for sixteen minutes while having John Lithgow shout "SPADE!" at it, such is his penchant for frankness. All of which is to be celebrated, because it's this frankness that makes De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's celebration of one of their movie-making idols, such a fun watch.

Plonked in front of an unassuming fireplace in one of the least De Palma-esque shots it's possible to compose, the 76-year-old director opens up about the highs and lows of his career over 110 minutes of delicious tittle-tattle and self-deprecation, while his interrogators regularly intersperse the chatter with clips from his remarkable 50-year filmography. It's as prosaic a format for a talking head as you could get, but it doesn't matter a hoot: firstly, BDP is so comfortably avuncular you just want to bathe in the glow of his chubby cheeks and tales of Hollywood madness, and secondly, most of the clips are so exhaustingly kinetic that anything more exciting than a septuagenarian in front of a fireplace would wear you out by the halfway mark.

Navigating De Palma's career chronologically and methodically, Baumbach and Paltrow tease out some tremendous nuggets of gossip. Precious actors are not rare in movie history, but evidence of their preciousness from their own directors is, so there's immense pleasure to be had in De Palma's bean-spilling over Orson Welles and Robert De Niro's unwillingness to learn their lines, Sean Connery's reaction to getting dust in his eye while filming a brutal death scene, or Cliff Robertson's questionably orange face in Obsession. Behind-the-camera squabbles are willingly aired too: juggling both David Koepp and Robert Towne's conflicting scripts for Tom Cruise's producing debut Mission: Impossible seems like it must have been, well, some kind of Task: Unachievable, and you boggle at how the film ever got made, let alone ended up as good as it did.

It's not all scandal and scuttlebutt though: De Palma talks at length about the difficulty of swimming against the Hollywood tide, particularly in the context of his movie brat friends Marty, George, Francis and Steven. "What we did in our generation will never be duplicated," he proudly boasts, but fully admits that his path was not necessarily as successfully navigated as those of his contemporaries. "I'm driven by unrealistic ideas [...] my movies tend to upset people a lot," he understates while musing on some of his frankly numerous critical and commercial failures. But his sheer energy and ambition shine through, emanating from the same well of indomitability that makes all his films fascinating to watch even when they spectacularly fail.

The De Palma process gets a good going over too, with split screens, split diopters, long takes and ludicrously elongated build-ups to comically overblown climaxes all covered by the man who made a lurid, lip-smacking art form out of a combination of all of them. Where it worked, De Palma allows himself a smile (the section on Carrie sees him deliver a glorious takedown of every successive project based on it), and where it didn't, he pragmatically shrugs and moves on. "It did good, it didn't do great" seems to be his career in a nutshell, yet at no point does he appear regretful or bitter.

Baumbach and Paltrow bookend their film with clips from Vertigo, and not without good cause: De Palma's well-documented love of Alfred Hitchcock not only set him on his way but has also been the source of some of his fiercest criticism. He ends the interview with a rousing defence of his decision to frequently homage the master of suspense so blatantly, and it's hard to counter the argument without coming across as the dullest of sticks. Ultimately though, his work speaks for itself and for him, and the carefully curated clips within this loving tribute illustrate this. As a document of its subject's fury, obsession and passion, De Palma is untouchable.

A little bit of SPECTRElation

There's a cheeky titbit of SPECTRE news that didn't hit the front pages this morning, but it's very interesting (if you're me): Jesper Christensen, who played Mr White in Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace, told Danish website Euroman yesterday that he'll be appearing in the 24th Bond film.

Now it always kind of bothered me that Quantum had been carefully built up over Daniel Craig's first two Bond films as a SPECTRE-esque villainous organisation (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Tolerant Underground Megalomaniacs, perhaps), only to be left out of Skyfall altogether, and the announcement of SPECTRE as a title suggested Quantum would become all but a memory. BUT! Christensen's casting, if true, surely means that Quantum will become SPECTRE, or will at least be bought out by them in some kind of elaborate hostile takeover, hopefully involving massive numbers of fluffy white cats.

I've banged on about this before elsewhere, but the parallels between Sean Connery's and Daniel Craig's tenures as Bond are growing: of Connery's first five Bonds, all but the middle entry (Goldfinger) featured SPECTRE. Craig, meanwhile, has done two films with Quantum pulling the strings, one without, and is reportedly signed on for two more, which look pretty Quantumy-slash-SPECTREy from where I'm standing. All we need now is for some Aussie lunk to do Bond 26 so terribly that Craig comes back for one final, flabby bow, and the circle is complete. At that point I think we can stop making Bond films because I live in perpetual terror at the thought of more being made after I die.

Who's your favourite James Bond? SHUT UP AND I'LL TELL YOU

You know how it is: you're at a dinner party, having a perfectly good time, and conversation suddenly turns to the eternal, dreaded question, usually posed by the most insufferable twit in the room: "Go on then - who's YOUR favourite James Bond?" You panic. You don't know. You've never given it that much thought, because really, does it matter? But it does matter. The rest of the evening could hinge on this one answer.

Fortunately The Incredible Suit, in conjunction with market research firm YouGov*, is here to help. YouGov recently launched "segmentation and media planning tool" YouGov Profiles, an app designed to reveal the "quintessential" (as opposed to "typical") fan or customer of almost any brand, person or thing. Naturally my first reaction was to investigate fans of The Incredible Suit, but for some reason there aren't any. My second reaction, therefore, was to have a look at the quintessential profiles of fans of all the actors to play James Bond. Yeah, it was kind of a slow day.

So in order to find out who YOUR favourite James Bond is, simply identify yourself from the following six profiles, and then you'll be armed with all the knowledge you need to survive the next excruciatingly awful dinner party. And remember: all of the following data - including the remarkable illustrations - are the work of YouGov. I am completely blameless.

Note: George Lazenby, who played Bond just once, is apparently so unpopular that he doesn't feature in YouGov's database. I was therefore forced to replace him with the closest search result, who was BBC News presenter George Alagiah. I don't think it makes much difference to the outcome.

THE SEAN CONNERY FAN

Age: 40-59
Favourite dishes: Bread pudding, deep fried mushrooms, Bombay potatoes
Customer of: Macleans toothpaste, Olay, Black & Decker
Favourite musical artists: Rod Stewart, U2, Phil Collins
Top Twitter follow: @denise_vanouten
Favourite magazine: PC Pro

See the full Sean Connery fan profile

THE GEORGE ALAGIAH FAN

Age: 60+
Favourite dish: Apricot strudel
Enjoys: Going to museums and galleries
Customer of: BBC News, BBC Two, BBC Four
Favourite celebrities: Huw Edwards, Fiona Bruce, Dermot Murnaghan
Top website visited: ford.co.uk

See the full George Alagiah fan profile

THE ROGER MOORE FAN

Age: 60+
Most likely to say: "UKIP are just saying what ordinary British people are thinking"
Customer of: Wall's sausages, Ginsters, Matteson's
Favourite musical artists: Bing Crosby, Liza Minelli, Bette Midler
Top Facebook page: Jeremy Clarkson Is Not A Racist
Favourite newspaper: Daily Mail

See the full Roger Moore fan profile

THE TIMOTHY DALTON FAN

Age: 25-39
Favourite dishes: Blueberry pie, lemon pie, Welsh potato cakes
Describes themselves as: Knowledgeable, but occasionally miserable
Customer of: I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, Flora ProActiv
Favourite TV shows: Wonder Woman, Seaside Rescue, Greatest Cities Of The World With Griff Rhys Jones
Top websites visited include: hoseasons.co.uk

See the full Timothy Dalton fan profile

THE PIERCE BROSNAN FAN

Age: 40-59
Politics: Slightly left of centre
Customer of: Wall's ice cream, Ben & Jerry's, Fabulous Bakin' Boys
Favourite movies: Where Eagles Dare, Cleopatra, Shark Tale
Top Twitter follows include: @rupertmurdoch, @dropbox
Favourite magazine: Take A Break

See the full Pierce Brosnan fan profile

THE DANIEL CRAIG FAN

Age: 40-59
Hobbies and activities: Painting, travelling, going on day trips
Most likely to say: "Fresh food is better than frozen"
Favourite movies: Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace, Skyfall, Cowboys & Aliens
Favourite TV shows: Trumpton, Rainbow
Top Facebook pages: Daniel Craig, James Bond 007, James Bond

See the full Daniel Craig fan profile

Didn't find yourself among those six profiles? Then you're clearly not a James Bond fan at all, get the fuck out of my dinner party this instant.

Other observations: 

• Sean Connery fans watch TV for over fifty hours a week.
• George Alagiah fans are the most current affairs-minded of all Bond fans: their top five TV shows watched recently are all BBC News programmes.
• Roger Moore fans are all, essentially, Alan Partridge.
• Timothy Dalton fans are the most right-wing of all Bond fans.
• Pierce Brosnan fans need to lay off the snacks.
• Daniel Craig fans are the wealthiest, with between £125 and £499 disposable income per month compared to all other Bond fans' measly £125 or less.

* YouGov have absolutely no idea that I'm abusing their precious data like this and would staunchly refute the phrase "in conjuction with" in this context.

BlogalongaBond / Diamonds Are Forever: Blofeld Blows It Again

The commercial disaster of On Her Majesty's Secret Service left the James Bond phenomenon in crisis. The only way forward was to look backward, and so Sean Connery was lured back with a massive cheque, Goldfinger's director Guy Hamilton was hired to make Bond fun again, and Tom Mankiewicz was told to inject more humour into his script, which was based on a dream Cubby Broccoli had. Apparently this is a perfectly valid way to write a Bond film.

Sadly Hamilton and Mankiewicz confused 'fun' with 'funny' and 'humour' with 'comedy', and the result is a decent story smothered by stoopid gags and ludicrous plot devices designed purely to raise a LOL or two.

Now I don't mind a good double entendre or a subtle, relevant visual gag in a Bond film, but in Diamonds Are Forever there's a fruit-machine-playing elephant, a chase across a fake lunar landscape inexplicably featuring slow-motion-running astronauts, and a pair of gay hitmen with comedy haircuts. And Mr Wint and Mr Kidd aren't the only ones raising the camp factor: Connery himself is only five minutes of photoshopping away from turning the pre-title sequence into a Carry On film.

The film's biggest crime, however, is its insulting decision to ignore everything OHMSS worked towards. The murder of Bond's wife is never even mentioned, and Bond himself doesn't appear to have been remotely affected by the brutal slaying of the only woman he truly loved, apart from the fact that he looks like he's tried to find happiness at the bottom of a freezer full of Pukka Pies.

Treated with equal disdain is the once enigmatic, now laughable figure of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. At one point Blofeld, for no adequately explained reason other than to get some cheap laffs, wears a dress, full make up and the same wig in which Dick Emery was prancing about on his none-more-'70s TV show. It's a glaring visual metaphor for the series as a whole: where once Blofeld had been classy, threatening and mysterious, he was now reduced to a punchline; an old queen just dying to go "I'm just stroking my pussy, ooh pardon!"

The Bond films' depictions of Blofeld over the years have never fully satisfied, neither in comparison to the books nor as original creations for the movies. Blofeld should have been Bond's Moriarty, his Joker, his Darth Vader. Instead he's Bond's Dr. Evil. Mike Myers probably gave himself a huge pat on the back for coming up with Austin Powers' nemesis, but in truth all the work was done for him by the Bond screenwriters.

Diamonds Are Forever marks Blofeld's fifth and, thankfully, final (kind of) appearance in the Bond films, ignoring a typically ludicrous (for the Moore era) cameo in For Your Eyes Only. He only appeared in three of Fleming's books, dramatically altering his appearance in each one, which I suppose gave the filmmakers an excuse to do the same - although the fact that it's never referred to on screen suggests it's more of a coincidence than a deliberate choice. In 'Ian Fleming's James Bond', John Griswold's exhaustive examination of the novels, illustrator George Almond shows how Fleming described Blofeld in each book:

In the films, however, the depictions were even more inconsistent, except this time without explanation.

In From Russia With Love, we never see the head of the head of SPECTRE, although his subordinates do. It's a nice touch and makes for an interesting and typically '60s master villain, especially at a time when we were constantly being told that the nearest dirty commie could be anyone. Christ knows why he's stroking a fluffy white cat though, the ponce.

By Thunderball, he doesn't even want his minions to see his features, so he hides behind shutters. This must make it tricky for him to see whose contract he's terminating in an improbably over-the-top fashion, but in a Cold War where nobody was trustworthy I suppose it makes sense to prevent yourself being identified by possible double agents. Or maybe he's hideously disfigured?

In You Only Live Twice, it turns out he's hideously disfigured. Not only that but he's short and bald and now has a silly squeaky voice. This reveal was kinda fun when I was eight, but the boring grown-up Bond fan I've become now wishes he'd stayed hidden. The threat and tension are immediately dissipated when it appears Bond could defeat Blofeld with a good tickle.

OHMSS's Blofeld had surgery to remove his earlobes, which makes sense in the context of the plot, but simultaneously took the opportunity to fix the scar, grow a few inches, add a mole to his left cheek, turn on the charm and speak with an American accent, which doesn't. In actual fact Telly Savalas makes quite a good version of the literary Blofeld, but his resemblance to his From Russia With Love self is negligible.

By Diamonds Are Forever, our confused antagonist has grown hair, changed his accent again and developed a penchant for cross-dressing. He wants to make copies of himself, which seems pointless when he can apparently change his entire appearance and demeanour at will, and claims that "science was never my strong suit", despite having spent the previous film developing viruses for use in chemical warfare.



Mercifully, after Diamonds Are Forever, EON Productions more or less left Blofeld alone. This was partly because the rights to the character were owned by Kevin McClory, who co-wrote the screenplay on which Fleming based 'Thunderball', and who was prepared to sue the asses off Broccoli and Saltzman if they used SPECTRE or Blofeld again.

With Connery saying "never again" again and SPECTRE and Blofeld off-limits, it was time for the third consecutive overhaul of the franchise. The tongue-in-cheek, raised-eyebrow strategy had paid off but someone with more cheek and more agile eyebrows was required to drag Bond, smirking and preening, into the 1970s and beyond. Only time would tell how much Moore the audience could take.

Bambi and Thumper

While the fact that a reclusive billionaire's entire security force consists of two female gymnasts is emblematic of Diamonds Are Forever's wilful stupidity, the scene in which Bond is beaten up by acrobatic totty is probably the most fun to be had in the whole film. It's the first time 007 gets into a decent scrap with the fairer sex (his tussle with Rosa Klebb just consisted of waving a chair at her, while Pussy Galore's tumble in the barn was basically foreplay) and it's the only time he gets a good hard kick in the knackers, which sadly - for those of us by now fed up of Connery - happens offscreen.

The rare moment of actual comedy

Not long after dispatching Bambi & Thumper, Bond and Willard Whyte hide behind a rock while Whyte's former lieutenant Bert Saxby takes pot shots at them. When Saxby is eventually shot and Whyte realises who's been trying to kill him, he exclaims "Tell him he's fired!" Connery's wordless reaction is funnier than all the homosexual villains, cross-dressing megalomaniacs and moon buggy escapes put together. Imagine that.

The score

John Barry - "The Whyte House"

As usual, the best thing about the worst Bond films is the score. John Barry pulls out so many great themes this time that you forgive him for helping to make some of the characters as comical as they are. He also pours so much sleazy loungecore into his Las Vegas themes that I daren't ever go there in case this music isn't playing on an eternal loop at ridiculous volume.


And finally: As Plenty O'Toole, Lana Wood's sole purpose in Diamonds Are Forever is to set up knob gags. The first, a cheap shot about her name, is just baffling, but the second is much better:

Having just disrobed Plenty in his hotel room, Bond discovers three men pointing guns at him.

BOND
Good evening... I'm afraid you've
caught me with more than my hands up.

BlogalongaBond will return with Black Dynamite Live And Let Die

What the hell is BlogalongaBond? I'll tell you.

Further BlogalongaBondareading here

BlogalongaBond / You Only Live Twice: Sets Appeal

By 1967, the James Bond brand was so phenomenally popular that even if someone had produced an unofficial spoof 007 film with ten writers, seven James Bonds, six directors, one Ronnie Corbett and absolutely no redeeming features, it would still have become one of the year's highest grossing movies. Of course if such a movie were to exist, we would not speak of it here at The Incredible Suit, so let's move on.

The problem with this success was that it led to complacency: You Only Live Twice's screenwriter Roald Dahl was literally given a formula to stick to by producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and Ian Fleming's macabre meditation on death was jettisoned in favour of a breezy Japanese jaunt that attempts to recapture all that was popular in the previous Bonds simply by lazy repetition. As a result, almost everything in the film is a faded copy of one of its predecessors:

Fortunately director Lewis Gilbert moves everything along with such a light touch and a sense of fun that it's easy to forgive the film's shortcomings. You Only Live Twice cheerily bounces from scene to scene being ludicrous and enjoyable, despite the best efforts of the script and cast to drag it back down to Thunderball-esque depths.

One man who didn't get the memo about kicking back, enjoying the sake and taking it easy, however, was the man responsible for You Only Live Twice's most memorable elements. Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for production designer Mr Sir Ken Adam OBE.

Adam's angular, modernist sets had already graced three of the first four Bond films, but it was on You Only Live Twice that he truly outdid himself. What's especially pleasing about his work on this film is that each of his sets is more impressive than the last, as if he was gradually building up to a grand, mind-blowing finale. Which, of course, he was.

I don't know about you but I can feel "a closer look" at the great man's work coming on.

Adam's first, simplest offering is the site of the antagonistic meeting between stereotypes representatives of the USA (bullish, arrogant) and the USSR (sly, threatening), chaired by global peacekeepers from the UK (statesmanlike, measured). Note the latticework design, simultaneously dividing and uniting the three parties. I've no idea what the massive hole in the floor denotes. Subsidence?

Henderson's Tokyo apartment is a mix of eastern and western influences, as befits a westerner living in Japan. Zaisu seats (cushions with chair backs) can be seen in the dining area - sitting seiza-style, as the Japanese traditionally do, is probably tricky with a wooden leg - while the next room contains more comfortable plush armchairs and a four-poster bed. All of which are about to become completely useless to their owner. Serves him right for serving Bond's martini "stirred not shaken", the galloping ninny.

Tiger Tanaka, essentially a Japanese M, has a much more modern office than his stuffy British counterpart. And whereas M's office is only ever really seen in the background of a character's close-up, Tiger's is afforded lingering wide shots to ensure every penny is on the screen. Adam fills the room with his trademark obscure angles and cheekily sneaks a tiger rug (GEDDIT?) into the middle of the room. I'm not sure what the giant Jenga's for. Maybe that's how Tiger relaxes after a hard day's ninja-ing.

Minor villain Osato's office HQ is an explosion in a perspective factory. Film sets rarely include ceilings because it makes them tricky to light, but Ken Adam doesn't give a shit about "rules". And when the ceiling is this amazing, quite right too. The office also features a personal dream of mine, a walk-in drinks cabinet, conveniently large enough to store unconscious henchmen.

The undoubted star of You Only Live Twice is SPECTRE's ludicrously unlikely but eye-poppingly amazing secret base, improbably carved into the guts of a volcano, and is as audacious a villain's lair as it is an achievement of set design. Neatly, its dome shape reflects Adam's first, simplest set in the film, but whereas that was designed to bring the USA and USSR together, the volcano's purpose is to force them into war with each other.

More than this, though, the volcano represents the peak of extravagance that the Bond series had reached. With this ridiculously over the top set, the films erupted through the crater of believability they'd been bubbling up towards for five years. While earlier Bonds still stand up to scrutiny today, You Only Live Twice became the launch pad for a million spoofs, and the only way the series could survive was by paring down the nonsense, ramping up the tension and going back to Ian Fleming's dark literary roots.

James Bond was about to undergo the biggest change of his life.

The Kobe docks fight

Bond beats off nineteen Japanese dockers with his bare hands (which is odd, given that he had a gun in the previous shot) and a big stick he finds lying around, in an amazing 22-second aerial shot. It's not a particularly impressive scrap - most of the henchfolk opt for a nice lie down rather than fighting back - but it makes a refreshing change to the way most fight scenes are shot. Having done all that, Bond then gets whacked on the noggin by a bad guy hiding behind some sacks. Sloppy.

The assassination attempt

In one of the series' most unnecessarily elaborate attempts on Bond's life (he's asleep! Shoot him!), a SPECTRE type trickles poison down a length of string toward's 007's snoozing chops, only for him to roll over at the last moment and for obligatory sacrificial lamb Aki to taste the deadly juice. Perfectly shot (the lighting on the poison is key to making the whole scene work), edited and scored, it's moments like this that make the Bond films so memorable. Grosse Pointe Blank's loving homage to this scene thirty years later proves its iconicness, which is definitely a word.

The cinematography

Having shot the first four Bond films, director of photography Ted Moore was replaced on You Only Live Twice by genius cinematographer Freddie Young, still basking in Oscar glory from Lawrence Of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. He achieved the near-impossible task of successfully lighting the volcano interior, and romanticised the land of the rising sun to the point where, despite Connery's alarming Japanese "disguise" and unflattering turtle neck sweater, this may well be the most beautiful Bond film of all.

And finally: The one thing Thunderball lacked the most is back:

In Tanaka's bath-house, Bond is attended to by a bevy of bikini-clad beauties, who lather him up with foamy bubbles. Bond glances towards his crotch:

JAMES BOND

Don't get the soap in my eye, will you?

And even more finally: Mie Hama, who plays Kissy Suzuki, took such a fascinating path to making You Only Live Twice that somebody wrote a song about her many years ago. It didn't make it into the charts and its creator now lives a sad and pathetic life writing about films on the internet for a tiny and long-suffering readership.

"Face Like A Pig"

BlogalongaBond will return with On Her Majesty's Secret Service

What the hell is BlogalongaBond? I'll tell you.

Further BlogalongaBondareading here

BlogalongaBond / Goldfinger: Cinema's Greatest Nostrils

Dr. No and From Russia With Love might be Great Films With James Bond In Them, but Goldfinger is the first Great James Bond Film. Director Guy Hamilton established a formula here which proved so successful that the series would employ it repeatedly, with varying degrees of success, over the next forty-odd years. Every frame of Goldfinger oozes impeccable style, 1960s cool and a sense of fun that mark it out as the definitive Bond Film, and ironically it was only when future entries dared to stray from the Goldfinger template that they came close to matching this film's genius.

Although there are several amazing things about Goldfinger that helped turn its constituent parts into cinematic gold, one thing stands taller than the rest. Six feet and two inches tall to be precise, and without it the film would be nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for Mr Thomas Sean Connery.

After stomping round Jamaica in Dr. No and bimbling through Istanbul in From Russia With Love, by 1964 the 33-year-old Connery had completely relaxed into the role of the world's most high-profile secret agent. When people say he's the best Bond, they're thinking of his performance in Goldfinger. No longer in awe of his surroundings but yet to display the irritation and boredom with the role that would taint his subsequent films, it's here that Sean Connery is the centrepiece of a film full of centrepieces.

His confidence and comfort in Bond's immaculately-polished shoes are apparent from the moment he removes a plastic duck from his head to the final smooch beneath a parachute with the world's greatest double entendre, Pussy Galore. But it's the details in Connery's performance that stand out; small reactions here and there that George Lazenby and Roger Moore were incapable of, that Pierce Brosnan seemed to have to force out and that only Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig since - as genuine actors - achieved naturally.

In Goldfinger, the requisite meeting with M is a masterclass in actorly minimalism rarely found in a 007 film. Bond is simultaneously harbouring guilt at inadvertently causing the death of the villain's mistress, a simmering lust for revenge, barely-concealed frustration with his boss for not letting him punch Goldfinger's fat head off immediately and annoyance at only being half-briefed for his next assignment. All of which are perceptible in the clenching of his jaw, the inability to look M in the eye, the impatient stance and the flaring of the magnificent Connery nostrils.

In fact Connery deploys the nostril flare with devastating effect at various points in the film when he's seething with sub-surface rage at Goldfinger and his dastardly deeds. It's there when he calls Felix Leiter to tell him about the gold-painted corpse in his room, and it reappears when Bond and Goldfinger finally meet at the golf club. It's a tiny movement of a few small muscles but it speaks volumes about Bond's state of mind; the only visible crack in his cool exterior that suggests the boiling fury beneath.

It's not all about the snotholes though; Connery's reactions when warned to pipe down by M after pretentiously diagnosing the problem with Colonel Smithers' disappointing brandy, when put in his place by Q's withering "I never joke about my work, 007" remark, and when introduced to a girl whose name may as well be Alotta Fagina, are all priceless.

Of course it takes more than the pulling of a few faces to make a convincing James Bond. A former Mr Universe, Sean Connery is physically peerless in Goldfinger. This is just before he became one of the most recognisable faces on the planet and let fame go straight to his gut, and I don't care how rampantly heterosexual you are, there's an undeniable pleasure in watching a man who can stride about in an alarming baby-blue terry-towelling playsuit as confidently as he does in a beautiful three-piece grey plaid number.

Trust me, I know from bitter experience that neither of those looks are easy to pull off.

It would be another 23 years until audiences saw another convincing James Bond, albeit a totally different one to that seen in Goldfinger, when Timothy Dalton arrived to take the character back to his literary roots. For now, though, one man would own the role, and for many people will continue to do so forever. For once, the posters got it right: Sean Connery IS James Bond.

The pre-title sequence

Goldfinger marks the first time we get a complete Bond mini adventure before the actual story begins, and it's also one of the finest. In less than five electrifying minutes it packs in exotic locations, gadgets, action, futuristic production design, a dinner jacket, a treacherous naked breast-shaking hottie, a close-up of an expensive watch, a massive explosion, a great scrap with a vicious thug and a tremendous kiss-off line. Infinitely better than the whole of Moonraker.

The unsolicited laser surgery scene

Further proof of Connery's skillz comes as we watch him try to think his way out of the impending separation of one side of his body from the other, beginning with his most treasured possessions. However we're also spoiled with an abundance of technical talent in this scene: Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn's endlessly quotable script; Ken Adam's deliciously angular set; Norman Wanstall's (Oscar-winning) sound effects; Peter Hunt's increasingly frantic editing; and John Barry's terrifying musical accompaniment to Bond's mounting fear. Only when the laser is turned off do you realise you haven't breathed out for about two minutes.

Ken Adam's Fort Knox set

Having never seen the inside of Fort Knox, Ken Adam was asked by Cubby Broccoli to create "a cathedral of gold". If there was ever a perfect example of the overused phrase "every penny is on the screen", this is it.

The fight with Oddjob

While not as technically groundbreaking as From Russia With Love's train-bound fisticuffs, Bond's showdown with Oddjob is equally as satisfying. With Harold Sakata's mute henchman apparently made of concrete, Bond clearly isn't going to beat him with his fists and Q has yet to invent the convenient poison dart-firing wristwatch. Pleasingly, 007 resorts to his wits to defeat Oddjob in a scene which also brings out the best in the aforementioned jaw-dropping set. 

John Barry's Score

"Oddjob's Pressing Engagement"

I'm going to attempt to not bring up John Barry's score for every Bond film he did, but when it's as phenomenal as this one it's impossible to ignore. Brassy, jazzy, bombastic and suspenseful, it's probably the best thing he ever did. Imagine how happy the Beatles-hating Bond would have been when the soundtrack album dumped the Fab Four off the top of the charts. Oh yeah, there's quite a good song too.

And finally: We get another of these beauties:

Bond, in bed with a semi-naked blonde, is on the phone to Felix Leiter.

BOND (to FELIX)

What's that? Dinner?

The semi-naked blonde twirls her hair into Bond's ear.

BOND (to FELIX)

No look I'm sorry, I can't. Something big's come up.

BlogalongaBond will return with Thunderball

What the hell is BlogalongaBond? I'll tell you.

Further BlogalongaBondareading here