The Man with the Golden Gun

I'm not sure how I felt about this one. It was a little unusual in some ways, I mean, just look at the kill count. Christopher Lee plays Scaramanga, a villain that I enjoyed for the most part but seemed to lack some of the ambition of his peers. Nick Nack is one of the series' more memorable henchmen, but more because of his novelty than being an interesting character. The movie is just sort of subdued, except when it isn't. Bond returns to Asia, but instead of doing it with a lot of their ladies he mostly gets attacked by martial arts schools. A welcome car chase is marred by the reappearance of the bumbling Southern cop from the last movie, a stunt sequence I'd be sure was a reference to The Dukes of Hazzard if the movie didn't come out five years before the show started, and a ridiculous transformation of a car into a car-plane.

I definitely thought I liked it more than the first Moore film when I was watching it, I'm just now struggling with reasons why. I guess it's just different from recent movies, a nice breath of fresh air to meet someone who just wants to make money and chill on his private island instead of blow up the planet or destroy society for some insane reason. Also, being honorable enough to want to duel with 007 is a much better reason to open yourself up to death than deciding to slowly lower your opponent to his doom without paying much attention to him instead of just shooting him in the fucking face. Maud Adams is a rare case of playing more than one Bond girl, as she reappears later in the series, but here plays Scaramanga's angry mistress and has some good, memorable scenes. The more traditional Bond girl is the garden variety Ditzybot 1.0, but she looks nice in a bikini so she gets a pass. Also, you know Moore's a pretty good Bond when he can pull of a love scene that's interrupted by an angry dwarf without it killing the momentum.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "The Man with the Golden Gun" by Lulu
Foreign locations: Beirut, China, Thailand
Bond, James Bond: 16:15, 22:15 (fake name), 46:45 (third person)
Martini shaken, not stirred: Not ordered
Ladies seduced: 2
Chases: 2
Kills: 1
Non-lethal takedowns: 6

Live and Let Die

And here we have the blaxploitation entry in the series. The villain is still fancy and has a secret base, but world-changing plots and nuclear weapons are replaced with heroin trafficking and voodoo rituals. Oh, it's also the first one starring Roger Moore, which is fairly significant. I've seen three of his movies now, and I think he's a pretty good Bond stuck in an era of not very good movies. Live and Let Die is actually pretty good for a while. Paul McCartney's theme song is really entertaining, and it informs the score for the entire movie. Bond's interactions with the predominantly black antagonists are an interesting and somewhat humorous look at the time. Baron Samedi and Tee Hee Johnson are quintessential weird villains for the era. Jane Seymour is a good Bond girl, years before she became the crazy cougar in things like Wedding Crashers.

Once the film gets to New Orleans though, I sort of lost interest. As I've mentioned, the filmmakers back then were very good at finding ways to make action scenes boring. There's a massive boat chase across a bayou that's just interminable. It's over twelve minutes long but filled with very little action other than skipping boats over short strips of dry land and a lot of comic relief by a bumbling southern cop that's not even close to funny. After the villain takes off his insanely bad makeup and reveals himself, he shows up chilling underground with some sharks while his inept henchmen dance to tribal music upstairs. His eventual death is hilariously cheesy looking, and it also marks the first time Bond actually directly killed the main villain in the story. Live and Let Die has some competent moments, and also the series' first real curse as an old lady says "shit", but I didn't like it that much.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "Live and Let Die" by Wings
Foreign locations: New York, Caribbean, New Orleans
Bond, James Bond: 24:05
Martini shaken, not stirred: Not ordered
Ladies seduced: 3
Chases: 3
Kills: 6 humans, 1 snake
Non-lethal takedowns: 7

Diamonds Are Forever

Sean Connery's swansong for the role, at least in an official capacity, completes a sort of trilogy featuring Blofeld as the main antagonist. This time he's played by another different actor, and one who played a different character that was killed by one of Blofeld's henchmen two movies ago, plus there's a bunch of plastic surgery-created clones of him running around, so it's all a bit confusing. The story is about blood diamonds, and of course the villain's plot is more diabolical than simply controlling the market. Probably needless to say, a satellite is involved. Blofeld's main agents throughout the story are a pair of hitmen who go around killing whoever comes in contact with the diamonds and taking them for themselves. Except for James Bond, of course, whom they merely leave to die in fairly easy-to-escape situations despite him being easily the most competent of any of their marks. One of them's just creepy too, not in a good way, just in a can't-act-what-is-this-man-doing-in-films kind of way.

The movie starts off okay, but once they get to Vegas, the story just kind of slows down. Bond does some spying and driving and impersonating and flirting, but for some reason I just wasn't totally into it. Bond only really has one girl as Jill St. John is running around most of the time, which was generally fine by me. There's a chase in a moon buggy and a pair of deadly female henchpeople called Bambi and Thumper. Really a visible increase in silliness in this film besides the absurdity of the evil plot - an elephant wins at a slot machine and dances happily, Bond is able to drive a car through a tight alley by balancing it on two wheels and thanks to a continuity error comes out the other side flipped in the other direction, and John is so unprepared for the recoil of an automatic weapon that it blows her back fifteen feet and off the edge of an oil rig. I also enjoyed how there's a guy there at the rig sitting by a microphone and counting things down, instead of it being automated. As we're entering the 70s, I can see it becoming a series that I can find enjoyment in, but not truly appreciate as films like the earlier Connery ones or the Craig ones.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "Diamonds Are Forever" by Shirley Bassey
Foreign locations: Amsterdam, California, Las Vegas
Bond, James Bond: 1:30
Martini shaken, not stirred: Not ordered
Ladies seduced: 1
Chases: 2
Kills: 7
Non-lethal takedowns: 7

Goldfinger

Of all these early Bond films I've seen (I'm up through the sixth), this is my favorite. It's also the only one that has nothing to do with SPECTRE. It's not that I don't like SPECTRE, I just enjoyed Goldfinger's story and characters the most. It gets rolling early with the classic scene of the woman covered in gold paint, something that wouldn't actually kill you, but an iconic moment nonetheless. Goldfinger himself is a classic Bond villain, with a particularly clever evil plan and penchant for theatrics. I mean, this is the guy who strapped Bond to a table with a laser and told him he expected him to die. Oddjob is the quintessential henchman; silent, nearly indestructible, and extremely deadly. And Pussy Galore is a great Bond girl; the first one who actually spoke with her own voice and was a legitimate actor, and actually put up a fight instead of just falling into his arms.

This is the first Bond movie to take place in the United States at least part of the time, and it's funny to hear the voices of the actors picked to play the gangsters Goldfinger works with, they're as stereotypically American as possible. The most important location in the film is actually Kentucky, which is fairly tame by Bond's standards, but there's a good reason, his target is Fort Knox, and the assault on said building is the series' biggest and most elaborate sequence yet. Bond actually spends a great deal of his time in Kentucky being captured and trying haplessly to get a message to the outside world, and it's interesting to see the first time he really seemed vulnerable. Of course his manhood's just as deadly as his brawling skills or Walther PPK and ends up being what saves the day in a convoluted sort of way. As a break from the early films' all-SPECTRE-all-the-time approach, I liked it a lot.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "Goldfinger" by Shirley Bassey
Foreign locations: Cuba, Miami, Switzerland, Kentucky
Bond, James Bond: 12:00, 38:20 (interrupted)
Martini shaken, not stirred: 55:30
Ladies seduced: 4
Chases: 3
Kills: 7
Non-lethal takedowns: 5