Happy New Year!

I do like New Year's Eve, and not just because of the splendid excuse it presents for a party. Time is always slipping away around us, continuously grinding the granite of our lives into a fine sand that is instantly lost on the wind. Rightly, we don't pay this much attention - we'd go mad if we did - but we all do notice at some point, astonished by how the decades have carved us into bizarre and unexpected shapes. New Year's Eve allows us to acknowledge the process, but it doesn't require us to get maudlin about it, offering instead the worthy and time-honoured alternative of revelling in the moment itself, blissfully distracted from our mortality by family, friends and booze.

This only works if we're all distracted at once which is why we mark the time together. Except that we don't. It's already 2012 in Australia as I type this, just before noon in the USA. My compatriots will be singing Auld Lang Syne six hours before the time-shifted Times Square celebrations get replayed on Texas televisions. This rolling wave of time, the blurring of midnight across the world also helps though, easing us through the transition. For some Time isn't so much relative as entirely arbitrary: Samoa has flipped itself into the future, for example, and we will continue with our newest tradition - popping corks twice, once with Big Ben for GMT and then again at midnight, local time. As I say, if nothing else, it's a splendid excuse for a party.

Thanks for reading the blog over the past year - your attention and comments have all been much appreciated. I hope you have/are having a wonderful evening and I wish you all a very Happy New Year, whenever it begins for you.

For Your Ears Only

Whilst we're on the subject of James Bond, you should go and listen to BBC Radio's adaptation of Goldfinger. It's available for the next four days, until New Year's Eve, and you can listen for free from anywhere in the world.

It's a straight retelling of the book, starring Toby Stephens as Bond, Ian McKellen as Goldfinger, and Rosamund Pike as Pussy Galore. Tidied up into ninety minutes, it's clean and unadulterated and as a result it's a refreshing change after watching all these films. It does a good job of evoking the Bond of the novels. Although Stephen's voice does sometimes seem a little too high and lacking the right amount of gritted resolve to be Bond, Pike spins Galore into a Southern glamour-puss with a sultry, breathy accent.

Worth a listen.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Oh look, it's Christmas! All Bond films are traditional festive TV fare, of course, but this is the Christmas Bond and, for better or worse, it's one of many distinctive elements that mark out On Her Majesty's Secret Service as different.

For the last time until Casino Royale, one of Ian Fleming's stories is told on screen. Saltzman and Broccoli had been trying to produce OHMSS since 1964. It was due to be the next movie after Goldfinger, but the legal wrangles over Thunderball displaced it. They wanted to make it instead of YOLT, but it was the wrong time of year for the required snowy mountain locations. Postponed again, it finally made it to the screen in 1969 with unknown model-turned-actor George Lazenby debuting as the new 007 and the ghost of Sean Connery lingering unhelpfully in the background.

The received wisdom is, I suppose, that if he had been available instead of Lazenby, this would be far and away the best Bond film of them all. But I'm not so sure. No, it's not the greatest movie and Lazenby was never going to win any Oscars. And yes, the weird newness of it all discombobulated audiences of the time who thought they knew what to expect from silly old James Bond.

But that's exactly the point. The brilliance of this is that we see the brutish invulnerability of Connery transformed - as much by the excellent story as by the casting - into something else, surprising and unthinkable. I simply can't imagine Connery making this film because I'm not altogether sure he'd have been able to provide what was needed. Maybe, if it had gone ahead in '65, he might have been still sufficiently interested to up his game, but I can't see the '67 version being at all bothered. Either way, his Bond is seemingly pathologically incapable of tenderness and without that OHMSS would be sunk. I firmly believe that for this film, we got the Bond we needed.

When I was very little, five years old, I played James Bond at school with two friends in the playground. Of course, we all wanted to be 007 and so the solution was that one of us would be Sean Connery, one Roger Moore and the other George Lazenby and we'd play all together in one meta team-up. And yes, we argued who would be who, because Sean was best, Roger was okay and nobody wanted to be George. It was playground common sense.

Just one example of how Lazenby and his performance in OHMSS have been unfairly maligned. But the truth is that he is engaging and convincing, albeit within a limited range. Like Craig, he is a beefcake Bond, but he also has a young man's body, full of (occasionally nervous) energy. He fidgets in M's office. He swings his arms when he walks. He throws everything into his punches and kicks in an extravagant and flamboyant fighting style, as if he's not quite in control of himself. It may be difficult to believe the man's a ninja, but he's definitely James Bond. Behind the wheel, in the casino, fighting or drinking, he cuts the mustard. The scene where he faces up to Blofeld is a perfect example. It's not much of a stretch, acting-wise - just "you'll never get away with this" stuff - but that's James Bond sat there, chin out, defiant, resolute, bloody but unbowed.

And even better, he presents emotions and expressions that we haven't seen before. Connery's Bond is a bit of a bastard and I never got the impression he was capable of any act that wasn't self-serving. With Lazenby, Bond becomes a (sort of) gentleman, exhibiting compassion, kindness and honesty. He dries Tracy's tears. He turns down Draco's £1,000,000 dowry by quoting the Bible ("her price is far above rubies"). Most poignantly of all, he flings Moneypenny his hat (instead of a bouquet) at the wedding. She clasps it and they share a single lingering glance. It's beautiful. But swap George for Sean and it would have been an entirely one-sided moment and all the worse for it.

This new Bond is also capable of doubt, anxiety and even fear. On the run from SPECTRE's thugs he tries to lose himself in a crowd of Christmas revellers, dejected, cold, alone and cornered. The perfect opportunity for the future Mrs Bond to show that she is deserving of him, magically skating into view to mount a rescue. This is the point when Bond falls in love, surely? As they run to her car she directs him with the command "Near-side door!" No woman in the series has spoken like that before and I reckon he melts right there.

Yes, Tracy - played by Diana Rigg - is something else. Almost, but not quite a one-off (the series will play with similar scenarios later), she is complete in a way that none of the previous women we've seen so far have been allowed to be. Rider was strong but child-like. Tania, an adoring patsy. Pussy Galore was good at her job but too cold. Fiona Volpe was sexy, deadly and independent, but only because she was a baddy. Kissy and Aki were capable, but demure and reserved. Tracy is given special dispensation by the Bond Universe to be sexy, reckless, fearless, capable, intelligent and even a little bit dangerous. She's also allowed her own opinions and a feisty independence that she looks set to maintain in marriage if the conversation with her father after the ceremony is any guide. She is Bond's match and the love story, although disjointed, is completely believable.

It helps that Rigg - unlike nearly all her predecessors - was both an established actor rather (than a beauty queen) and not redubbed. In more ways than one, Tracy is the first Bond woman to have her own voice.

The other guest stars are good too. Gabrielle Ferzetti is excellent as Tracy's father, the gangster boss Marc-Ange Draco. Charismatic, funny, stylish he's the best and most likeable man Bond's run into since poor Kerim Bey in FRWL. And it always surprised me, post-Kojak, that Telly Savalas should pop up as Blofeld, but he makes a good job of it: there's a chill unctuous menace behind the sophistication. These characters are convincing and effective because it's the emotional decisions they make that drive the story. Yes, there's some notional biological warfare plot, but it's almost entirely redundant. Blofeld's real motivation is his search for legitimacy, the idea being that his past crimes can be absolved and that he can be accepted into polite society as a Polish count. That he chooses to try and achieve this by holding global food-production to ransom is what makes him a super-villain of course: a permanent outsider, face pressed against the window of civilisation, the bully who wants to play but can't understand why the other children always cry and run away. For a James Bond film this is practically Ibsen.

Everyone else is also trying to plug the gaps in their incomplete lives. Draco is a concerned parent, determined not to helplessly stand by and watch his daughter's self-destruction. Bond and Tracy, perhaps, don't know what it is they're missing until they find each other. Even Moneypenny has a hole that can only be filled by one man.     

Most shockingly of all we meet, for the first time, an ordinary person. Amongst the harem of beautiful guinea pigs in Blofeld's mountain laboratory is curly-haired Ruby Bartlet, a chicken farmer's daughter from Morecombe Bay, Lancashire. Her accent is quite the most exotic thing to appear in the series so far but she's so normal, it's as if she's wandered in off the set of Coronation Street. It's a little thing, but it's a sign of how Britain has changed during the Sixties and a welcome and refreshing blast of modern life.

There's another welcome change here too as, for once, Bond's legendary effect on women is justified by the context: a group of suggestible young women have been locked up in a mountain lodge for months with only Frau Bunt for company when in walks young, buff George Lazenby in a kilt. I think they can be forgiven for having their heads turned, even if he is pretending to be a tweedy old bookworm.

Yes, there's an odd decision. Why take your new Bond and subsume him inside a different character all together for half an hour? I have to say I was surprised to discover that it is only thirty minutes that Bond has to pretend to be Sir Hillary Bray, Sable Basilisk of the College of Arms, for in my memory this sequence seemed to take up half the film. I think the problem is that Peter Hunt, the director, felt he had to dub over Lazenby's lines as Bond/Bray, replacing his voice with that of George Baker (Inspector Wexford to you) who plays the real Bray. It distances the new Bond from us at a time when we need to be getting more familiar with him.

As soon as his cover is blown, things really go up a gear with a terrific set of action sequences that play to Lazenby's strengths as a physical Bond. Firstly a tense escape via the gear wheels of a cable car winch, then a blistering night time ski-chase backed by John Barry's incredible OHMSS theme, this passage is a highlight of the series. 

It's not, though, for that that OHMSS is remembered. This is 'the one where his wife dies'. Tracy's death is shown just as it appears in the book, but the original plan was not to have it in the movie. If Lazenby had stayed on - and, contracted for seven films, he would have done had he not become disenchanted with being James Bond - then the plan was to have Tracy killed at the beginning of his second film. When Lazenby announced part-way through filming that he had had enough, the decision was taken to stick to the book's ending.

But it didn't go down well. Such is the shock of the drive-by killing in the last few minutes that it elbows aside details like James Bond getting married, or being played by George Lazenby. Audiences could cope with a new Bond. They were prepared to see him fall in love. But they didn't like the downbeat ending and there were boos at some showings. It was seen as a transgression that could not be tolerated in a James Bond film.

In Fleming's books, Tracy's death marks for Bond the beginning of an inexorable break down and he slowly unravels over the course of the remaining novels. It's a shame in some ways because the later books suffer as a result, struggling under the weight of it all. But at least, as a series, these stories are dramatically coherent and characters evolve over time with some degree of realism. This option wasn't available to the film series - without Lazenby around to develop his character and once the audience's reaction to OHMSS had been absorbed, the producers had no choice but to turn away from the continuing drama. Tracy's death is scandalously dealt with in the opening minutes of DAF with a few right hooks and a mouse trap but the emotional consequences for Bond don't even reach beyond the end credits of OHMSS. As soon as George Lazenby's Bond fades from the scene, it's somehow over and done with.

Until Casino Royale and Daniel Craig, I think it's fair to say that OHMSS was seen as a dead end in the Bond franchise. Lazenby gets the blame for this, and I'm sure most people assume he was dropped or fired for being mistakenly cast. He wasn't (and if you don't believe me, look here to see who else was considered). But without him, the emotional weight and impact of the film couldn't be sustained. Despite the odd grimace by Moore or Brosnan, the rest of the series is inoculated from the trauma because Tracy's death becomes something that only affects Lazenby's Bond as if, in his one-off appearance, he took an emotional bullet on behalf of all the others. And because we never see him again, it's impossible not to conclude that Lazenby's Bond, like Fleming's, never recovered which is why Roger Moore had to come back and avenge it for him.

Yes, Roger Moore. He may look and sound like a tubby middle-aged Scotsman, but DAF is really the first Roger Moore Bond film - they just hadn't cast him yet. In a panic, the producers wrenched things back to what the public demanded and for most of the next eighteen years both Bond and his films would be light-hearted, flippant and louche.

OHMSS, pushed to one side, became the experiment that no one wanted to mention. But not only is it one of the very best Bond films, it's also the template for the utterly brilliant modern Bond we have in the Craig films.

* * *

Pre-Credits Sequence: The introduction of the new 007 is carefully done and with some style - right up until Lazenby sticks his dimpled jaw through the fourth wall and reminds us there used to be some other James Bond. 

Theme: Many hold this to be Barry's best Bond score but his OHMSS theme is definitely completely brilliant: a throbbing muscular instrumental over which Binder has dumped some angular purple spatchcocked graphics.  

Deaths: 28. In fact no one dies at all for the first, what, hour and a half?  

Memorable Deaths: Two henchmen fall off the precipice. Another goes into the snow-grinding-whatever-it-is machine. Oh, and Mrs Tracy Bond is shot in the head. Spoilers!  

Licence to Kill: 5. He's trying to cut down.

Exploding Helicopters: 0. But this isn't about exploding helicopters.

Shags: 3. Although for the first time we see him get it on with the same woman twice in one film which makes me realise I'm counting sexual partners not acts. 

Crimes Against Women: Bond smacks Tracy across the face. It must be love. Caddishly, he re-uses the same shtick on Ruby Bartlet as he does on Catherine Schell. There are some patronising 'Good girl!'s to Tracy as she saves his ass, but he does mean it kindly.

Casual Racism: Each of Blofeld's patients comes from a different country and is allergic to something horribly stereotypical - hence the Chinese woman eats nothing but rice; the African, bananas; the Indian, naan bread. 

Out of Time: Bond's safe-cracking photocopier is perhaps the most cumbersome spy gadget ever. Everything is very 1969 with garish décor in the hotel and some far out fashion.

Fashion Disasters: George can get away with a lot (the kilt and the tweeds for example - and he totally rocks a cardigan somehow) but the brown and orange golf suit is horrible. And what the hell does Blofeld think he's up to in tight leggings and skull cap? He looks like Rumpelstiltskin. 

Eh?: Just the one thing: how the hell does Blofeld not recognise Bond the minute he walks in? Or did YOLT not really happen?  

Worst Line: Lazenby should never have been given lines like "Hmm, Royal Beluga. North of the Caspian." because they make him sound like someone trying to be James Bond. Worse still, he's talking to himself, so it sounds as if he's trying to make himself think he's James Bond. And then there's "This never happened to the other fella." Again, thanks for drawing my attention to the fact that you are not James Bond.

Best Line: Moneypenny's convinced though. Bond asks her, "what would I do without you?" "My problem," she replies, "is that you never do anything with me..." And Marc-Ange Draco gets lots of good lines, the best of which is his mild exhortation to 007: "Do not kill me, Mr Bond. At least, not until we've had a drink." Bond gets several saucy asides which, surprisingly, are pretty funny and not cringe-worthy. I'll leave you to remember/find them yourself because it'd take too long to set them up.

Worst Bond Moment: If you don't think George can handle the romantic scenes then it'll be all of those. For me, it's when he starts declaiming to M on lepidoptery. He bothered to master all these useless subjects and never learned to defuse nuclear bombs? (He'll have remedied this before TSWLM, don't worry.) And let's not mention Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? shall we?

Best Bond Moment: The first ski-chase is one of the all time great Bond moments. If you don't cry when Bond throws his hat, bouquet-style, to Moneypenny at the wedding then you are a monster.  

Overall: Tender, poignant, romantic, heart-breaking. Exhilarating music and chases, raw and visceral fights,  beautiful, beguiling women and a charismatic villain. This is excellent.


James Bond Will Return: ... in Diamonds Are Forever. But not like this.

You Only Live Twice

I used to play badminton with a man who claimed that a shot from this film - a helicopter-mounted track of Connery running across the rooftops of Kobe docks whilst fighting off a string of Japanese henchmen - was the definitive Bond moment of the 1960s. It says something that the least ridiculous part of that is that I once used to play badminton.

It's total nonsense of course but then that's not entirely inappropriate when considering You Only Live Twice. It's a series of disconnected and preposterous set pieces that seem to have been thrown together with the deliberate intention of breaking the Bond formula, but which only succeeds in  reinforcing the idea in the audience's mind that this is what a Bond film is. It's as if the producers have taken Connery's decision to leave the series as an apocalyptic calamity, like the Fall of Rome or something, and are just running around screaming: "Volcanos! Ninjas! The Space Race! Gyrocopters! Kill James Bond! Marry James Bond! Make him Japanese! DROP A CAR IN THE SEA FOR NO GOOD REASON!!!"

To be fair to them, they did have to manufacture their own narrative for the first time. The film is completely unrecognisable compared with its source novel. Partly it's because the book's story would make an even more ridiculous movie than we have already, and partly it's because Roald Dahl - with no scriptwriting experience, but a personal friend of Fleming - was given six weeks to come up with a script. The producers stipulated he had to stick to 'the girl formula' that appeared in Thunderball (early ally woman, bad woman, main woman), but that apart from that, he could write what he liked. Dahl also mentioned that the director, Lewis Gilbert, was happy to shoot the script exactly as it was written (unlike most directors, apparently). Dahl seems to have been praising Gilbert for respecting him as a writer, but I can't help but think that perhaps some additional scrutiny from the director might have helped. So, we have a lead actor who couldn't care less, producers who fear the sky is falling on their heads, an untried writer, and a director who's slapping the words on screen like wallpaper. Throw in the fact that the first edit ran to three hours and it begins to sound like perhaps the film we ended up with could have been a lot worse.

There is a sense of hysteria about it all. It's evident in, for example, the manic hyperbole of the promotional material. M even tells Bond "This is the Big One, 007," as if the imminent adventure was a prize marlin or something. The intention is to whip us into a frenzy of anticipation - but sadly everything about the film feels merely bloated and ridiculous.

Yes, Bond films do need to be larger than life. This isn't John le Carré. But the fantasy only works if it feels plausible, if the resulting silliness is (like the plots of Goldfinger or Thunderball) an eventuality that is only many logical if unexpected steps removed from the world we recognise. It is also depends on us believing in the man in the middle of it. The fantastic and grotesque are supposed to be what makes Bond shrug off his ennui and come alive. But of course, here Bond couldn't care less and is happy to let the whole mad circus dance around him.

Connery is poor in this. Dull and unconvincing. There's no real sense of the intense, cat-like man we saw in FRWL, and just two years on from Thunderball, he's looking distinctly flabby. (You can say what you like about the superannuated Moore of AVTAK, but Bond has never been in worse shape than he is here in Japan.) He'd clearly rather be somewhere else entirely and this shows in every scene: the eyes are dead, devoid of sparkle.

Not much else sparkles either. Tiger Tanaka is no Kerim Bey. Helga Brandt is certainly no Fiona Volpe. M, Moneypenny and Q all good give value in their usual cameos but that should hardly be the highpoint of the first hour. Donald Pleasance makes for a rather ungainly, bullish Blofeld, lacking the cultivation of No, or Goldfinger. But having said that, is there a good Blofeld? I'll come back to that one day.

But for now, let's just run through what is good about YOLT - it'll be quicker.

The space sequences are, I think, astonishingly good. It's not quite 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the effects, the model shots, the curvature of the Earth are all brilliantly done and, when combined with John Barry's excellent music, the overall quality of these scenes is very high.

Lost amongst the confusion of the Tokyo section is a great, if meaningless, fight between Bond and a henchman in Osato's office - it's fast, violent and well choreographed and I'd never really noticed it before.

And Little Nellie is good too. I was all geared up to pour scorn on the little gyrocopter, but the dog-fight is nicely done, excellently shot and choppily edited to maximum effect, really showing off the gyro's supposed manoeuvrability. 

And there's the small matter of HUNDREDS of NINJAS attacking a LAIR hidden inside a VOLCANO. This is is the one thing everybody remembers about YOLT and rightly so. I've been praising Ken Adam and his set design throughout these films, but the inside of the volcano lair is unsurpassed. It's gargantuan, cost more to build than DRNO's total budget and is amazing. The conceit of it is brilliant - a false caldera lake hides a vast subterranean base complete with monorails (at least two), helipad, rocket launch pad, luxury apartments and piranha pool -  but the execution is something else. Obvious model shots of, say, a helicopter landing turn out to be done for real, with tiny people in the distant background. I've literally no idea how they did the space capsule landing - again, it must be a model shot - but who knows? Either way, it's genius.

So obviously you drop hundreds of ninjas through the roof and have a MASSIVE battle. It doesn't matter that it's silly, ridiculous, or utterly the most over-the-top thing in any Bond film (remind me of this when I watch Moonraker): it is GLORIOUS. I showed this to my eight year old and as the shadowy figures approached the crater he felt compelled to speak. "Wait," he said. "Those guys are ALL ninjas?" I nodded. "Whoa," he breathed, "this is going to be COOL." And you just can't argue with that.

Starting out in DRNO as a rather dull (and cheap) tropical murder mystery, the series has changed incredibly during these five films. For example, all trace of British insecurity is long gone by YOLT in which (thanks to Bond) the UK is able to neatly side-step a SPECTRE-manufactured World War III that the USA and USSR seem too stupid to be able to avoid themselves. 007's world is now one where Britain, and British espionage is revered and feared and, although it is tacitly admitted that the US has the money and the hardware, the implication is that they wouldn't know what to do with it unless James Bond was on hand to save the day. The fame of Bond is now part of his character, as is his omniscience: he's become the world-famous know-it-all who so readily lends himself to pastiche. This would matter less if it wasn't for the fact that Connery consistently plays 007 without any sense of vulnerability whatsoever. There's the very rare grimace of doubt that fleetingly creases his features in the earlier films, but in YOLT, the most disconcerted he gets is when he can only find Siamese vodka in a drinks cabinet. He can be charming, yes. He is undoubtedly a highly attractive man. But he's emotionally inert, with only the occasional angry or sadistic flourish instead of actual character traits.

If it's to maintain any long term interest, the series is going to have to take some risks and show us what's underneath the glib veneer. It's time to rip open the black tie armour and show us the man's beaten, broken heart. Yes, it's time for Casino Royale! Well, one day...

* * *

Pre-Credits Sequence: Lovely space-murder opening, some geopolitical scene-setting and then somebody pretends to machine gun 007 in a Hong Kong brothel. It's functional and the whizz-bang pizazz of Goldfinger seems to be a one-off so far. We'll have to wait for TSWLM before the 'set-piece' PCS becomes a staple, believe it or not.

Theme: This is one of Barry's best scores and it's a great theme song too. Maurice Binder has read the script so it's naked Japanese women and lots of hot throbbing lava oozing everywhere. 

Deaths: 80. That's a record so far. There can't be any ninjas left in Japan after all that. 

Memorable Deaths: The astronaut who gets his lifeline severed. And there are two piranha-related fatalities.  

Licence to Kill: 13 - assuming that the security guard whom Bond shoots in the stomach outside Osato Industries would receive medical attention and survive.

Exploding Helicopters: 4! Excellent helicopter exploderising from Little Nellie. Mind you, as a percentage of the total number of helicopters in YOLT, this is not high. They are everywhere in countless numbers.

Shags: 3. I'd have counted the Chinese woman from the PCS but Bond tells Moneypenny he'd have needed another five minutes to find out if he liked her, so obviously that's a no.

Crimes Against Women: Hmm, well Bond seems to be going all Pinkerton on us when his Japanese nuptials take place. Later on it's revealed that he gave a false name to the priest, but let's face it, like this Bond would have counted it as a real wedding anyway. He's happy to demand his conjugal rights from his co-worker but doesn't rape her when she declines so that's a step in the right direction. Kissy, the Japanese secret agent in question, has "a face like a pig" according to her boss. Tough Annual Review there. Otherwise Bond doesn't so much force himself upon the women of Japan as wait for them to meekly offer to bathe him. And the two agents, Aki and Kissy, get the best treatment of any Bond women to date - they're shown to be efficient operatives, capable of (gasp!) resisting Bond until the mission is accomplished.

Casual Racism: Well, James Bond is given plastic surgery to make him look Japanese. It's pretty crass. I'm not an expert on Sixties Japan but I reckon it is possible that it was a country with both ultra-modern cities and strong cultural traditions as shown here.

Out of Time: Bond pilots Little Nellie with a cine camera stuck to his helmet.

Fashion Disasters: Flabby Sean in ninja pyjamas. Or in spats. Or dressed as a fisherman. Or as a construction worker. But Sean does get away with the Royal Navy uniform (even the hat!), so well done him. Other Bonds won't (See TND). Why does Blofeld wear that horrible beige suit? It's not a Nehru jacket though, let's nix that one straight away.

Eh?: Basically, everything but.. How can China afford to pay SPECTRE to mount its own space programme? In fact, it's a space programme with reusable capsules that swallow other capsules, based inside a dormant volcano - could they have spent any more money? Why does SPECTRE bother to capture the US and USSR craft? They don't need them. Surely it would be cheaper and easier to infiltrate the American and Soviet space programmes and sabotage the missions? >> When they launch their final mission, they paint CCCP on their own SPECTRE ship - is this the crucial evidence the Americans need? How're they going to see it? >> The Japanese security service apparently employs a helicopter with a magnet to execute enemies of the state by picking up their car and dropping them in the sea. >> How do the RAF, or whoever, know to drop the life rafts for the swimming ninjas? Don't tell me ninjas show up on radar. 

Worst Line: "Is my little girl hot and ready?" (Bond is, thankfully, referring to Little Nellie). 007 declares that saki should be correctly served at a temperature of 98.4°F. What a bore. Tiger points out that Bond's masseuse is "very sexiful". But there's all sorts of dire macho innuendo in that bath scene which is worse. Ernst Stavro Blofeld holds up a picture of a Walther PPK: "Only one man we know uses this kind of gun!" Which is just unbelievably stupid. 

Best Line: Oh dear, very poor showing here. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, but Blofeld's shrugged non-apology "Extortion is my business," is as good as it gets.

Worst Bond Moment: Dressed up as a Japanese fisherman? Flummoxed by culture shock during a Sumo bout? Mouthing off about his 'first' from 'Cambridge' in 'Oriental Languages'? (I'm dubious, can you tell?) The whole movie?

Best Bond Moment: Do you know what? It's probably the shot where he's running across the roof of Kobe docks fighting all the sailors. But that doesn't make it the defining Bond moment of the '60s, okay? 

Overall: Too much, but with flashes of genius behind the scenes. We'll be here again, with Moonraker and DAD: costly, extravagant messes that go too far but allow the series to go back to basics: OHMSS, FYEO and Casino Royale. Having said that, I'm looking at this through jaded eyes. As a kid, this was AMAZING and the ninja/volcano lair battle surely is the greatest Bond climax ever. Either way, for good or ill, this is the movie Bond cutting free of the baggage of the novels and letting rip. The next obstacle will be to prove the series can survive without Sean 'SEAN CONNERY IS JAMES BOND' Connery.

James Bond Will Return: Well, of course, he doesn't return. This is the last James Bond film because Sean 'SEAN CONNERY IS JAMES BOND' Connery isn't coming back. No, not in Never Say Never Again. Not even, I might argue, in DAF. But it does say, on screen: "James Bond will be back On Her Majesty's Secret Service" so I guess they have some other chap lined up. Good luck to him.

Bonus Fact!: Goldfinger is the only one of the six Connery films where he doesn't wind up in a boat at the end, and even then he's on a tiny little island. For Moore it's true four times out of seven, five if you count the Space Shuttle as a ship. But of all the other Bonds, it's only Lazenby who finishes up inside any form of transportation, and that's a car.