Four Movies on TV, Part 4

As the last of the four movies I saw on that lazy evening a few weeks ago, The Spy Who Loved Me ranks somewhere in the middle of all the James Bond flicks I've seen (which is all of them minus the latest one A Quantum of Solace). It is the third Bond film with Roger Moore in the star role as the suave, womanizing, and very violent British secret agent of Ian Fleming's literary series. Not that the movies have accurately reflected Fleming's vision of James Bond; the movies have to be appreciated (or despised) as entities distinct from the books.

The Spy Who Loved Me introduced Ringo Starr's later wife Barbara Bach as well as reacquainting the TV/movie audience with giant actor Richard Kiel (an actor who happens to be a giant). Kiel, you may recall, played the alien in the classic Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man. In The Spy Who Loved Me, Kiel plays Jaws, a free-lance hit man with metal for teeth and an incredible knack for survival. Jaws would return for the following Bond movie Moonraker and add a pretty cool twist to its ending.

The Spy Who Loved Me, like many James Bond movies before and after, pits the protagonist not against other nations but rather against an evil genius who wants to wreck the planet for the rest of us. As Bond, Moore teams up with Russian spy Bach to thwart the evildoer, with the usual impossible scenes involving chases, explosions, and fights (and some lovemaking thrown in on the side).

Of all the James Bond portrayers in the series, Roger Moore isn't one of my favorites. But he isn't one of the worst either. Here is my ranking of the actors playing Bond:

1 Sean Connery
2 Daniel Craig
3 Timothy Dalton
4 Roger Moore
5 Pierce Brosnan
6 George Lazenby

I am particularly grateful for George Lazenby's decision to only play Bond once, in the movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I never could accept him as Bond, although I understand that others have praised Lazenby's onetime portrayal.

If you're a fan of the James Bond movie series, you can't be like Star Wars or Star Trek fans and get hung up over the continuity of each movie with the next. Here are some examples:

--In the fourth Bond movie You Only Live Twice, Bond meets arch-nemesis Blofeld face-to-face and has a conversation with him. In the next of the series, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond once again encounters Blofeld while pretending to be an expert on heraldry. Blofeld doesn't recognize him as Bond.

--In Casino Royale, the 22nd (my count) Bond movie (introducing Daniel Craig), we go back in time to the beginning, when Bond gets his "007" designation and his very first assignment as the super spy. But his superior "M" is the same as the "M" in the previous four Bond movies starring Brosnan. And "Q" and Moneypenny, two longtime trademark characters of the Bond series, are nowhere to be seen.

--The 1983 unofficial Bond movie Never Say Never Again, starring Connery in his return to the star role, is really a poor rendition of the much better 1965 movie Thunderball.

--In the fifth movie You Only Live Twice, Bond reveals that his major at Cambridge was in oriental languages. But in the 19th movie Tomorrow Never Dies, he is completely stymied by Chinese writing.

Also, I found it hilarious how the villains would capture Bond and, instead of simply shooting him and being done with him, would try to make his death something creative and possible to escape from (which Bond always naturally did). So in Goldfinger, he is chained to an atomic bomb, in Diamonds Are Forever he is placed unconscious in pipes that are soon laid underground, in Live and Let Die he is tied up and gradually lowered into a pool of sharks, and so on. This ploy of the bad guy devising an elaborate scheme of getting rid of the hero has been copied and parodied in Get Smart, Batman, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and The Avengers, to name a few series.

I like the James Bond series as pure escapism and nothing more. There are definitely elements to Bond's personality that I find revolting, especially his cavalier attitude toward women. But, like the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, I find myself coming back and watching these movies over and over again.

A side-note: Beware of the USA Channel's presentation of the James Bond movies. They have edited too much out of them, apparently in order to be able to put on more commercials. I have noticed revised, butchered versions of the original Star Trek episodes and Andy Griffith on other cable channels as well. I find this practice to be deplorable.