From 2012: Bond Movies Ranked, For MSN Movies

 So. A couple of months, or weeks, or some­thing, ago—my sense of time grows sim­ul­tan­eously more com­pressed and expan­ded as I grow older—someone on social media asked me where I ranked Bond movie X, and it reminded me that a few years back I labored some­what migh­tily for my then-freelance-client, an entity called MSN Movies, on a lengthy piece in which I ranked the Bond pic­tures. That piece, pub­lished in annoy­ing multi-click “gal­lery” form, has been purged from what is left of the MSN web­site, along with pretty much everything else I did for it. Fortunately, or unfor­tu­nately, I’ve been keep­ing my ori­gin­al sub­mit­ted ver­sions of much if not all of my work for my freel­ance cli­ents backed up. So I thought, well, now that Spectre’s com­ing out, every­body else is rank­ing the Bond films, why should­n’t I get some of that Secret Agent Traffic?

What I’ve done is repro­duce my ori­gin­al text below, in the format in which it was sub­mit­ted (in accord­ance with the MSN Movies style book, such as it was, I’ve kept titles in quo­ta­tion marks, which is con­trary to this blo­g’s style book, such as it is, which does ital­ics. The only change I’ve made is to include rank­ing num­bers for both Skyfall and Spectre, which I give my rationale for in an appendix at the bot­tom of the post. Enjoy! 

INTRO:

It’s the 50^th anniversary…not of James Bond him­self, who was inven­ted by author Ian Fleming in 1953. But it is the 50^th anniversary of the first offi­cial Bond movie, 1962’s “Dr. No,” which also marked act­or Sean Connery’s debut in the role. It’s not too well known, but the first Ian Fleming Bond nov­el, “Casino Royale,” had already been adap­ted for the screen–the small, black and white TV screen–some years before. You’ll find out more about that below. With a new offi­cial Bond film (that is, a Bond film pro­duced by Eon, the pro­duc­tion entity foun­ded by then-partners Harry Saltzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli back in the day) open­ing soon, and a massive DVD/Blu-ray disc box set col­lect­ing all the films in the series, it’s an oppor­tune time to look at the action/espionage fran­chise that, at vari­ous points, set the bar for its genre. For this assess­ment, we enlis­ted MSN Movies’ chief film crit­ic, Glenn Kenny, to put his license to judge on the line and actu­ally rate the Bond pic­tures from worst to best. We’ve also thrown in two Bond movies that are NOT part of the offi­cial series, for reas­ons that will become clear. Agree? Disagree? Hopefully the rank­ing will leave you not shaken, but rather stirred to check out the best of the Bond movies one more time.

26) “Octopussy” (1983)

For Bond, swinging from a vine is the same as jump­ing the shark. Well, let’s be more detailed: swinging from a vine and hav­ing a vin­tage Tarzan yell eman­ate from the gen­er­al dir­ec­tion of his mouth. Faced with the likes of block­buster com­pet­i­tion that they’d nev­er seen before (for instance, the “Star Wars” pic­tures and “Jaws,” both of which inspired some bad mis­cal­cu­la­tions for “Moonraker”) the Bond pro­du­cers threw a lot of lousy ideas at the wall in a bid to both “keep up” and appeal to a young­er audi­ence. With this 1983 film, how­ever, it looks as if they just stopped caring—to call it “going through the motions” is too kind, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing how much money and second-unit effort was thrown at each suc­cess­ive Bond film. Roger Moore wanted out of the role, and nowhere was it more evid­ent than here. Fun fact: James Brolin screen=tested for the Bond role at around this time. Other fun fact: Maud Adams, here play­ing the title role, was a Bond girl for the second time here: the first time was in the snoozy but entirely more dig­ni­fied “The Man With The Golden Gun” in 1974.

25) “Moonraker” (1979)

The sins of this one are many, and a lot of James Bond fans boil it down to one, that is the idea of James Bond in space. That itself is not as bad as the cute styl­iz­a­tions added to Richard Kiel’s wan­nabe Odd Job, the phys­ic­ally for­mid­able but con­cep­tu­ally goofy “Jaws” (get it?). The ris­ible way that Bond “turns” this enfor­cer against his vil­lain mas­ter Drax is a real low point too. Lois Chiles, while attract­ive, is rather bland for her taste­less Bond girl monik­er “Holly Goodhead.” Michael Lonsdale is a fine idea for a Bond vil­lain in the­ory: he’s remark­ably good at effete con­des­cen­sion. But he’s knee­capped by goofy cos­tum­ing choices. Instead of a har­binger for the apo­ca­lypse, he looks more like a guy who thinks the chicks dig fake-futuristic vari­ants of the Nehru jack­et. So when it’s not being out­right silly, it’s pil­ing on the near-misses. Decent effects for its time, though. And it fea­tures the final appear­ance from the great Bernard Lee as “M.”

24) “Never Say Never Again” (1983)

Bad Bond movies were not the sole proven­ance of pro­du­cers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman and/or their pro­duc­tion entity Eon. “Thunderball” co-writer Kevin McClory took advant­age of a judg­ment that allowed him to make that scen­ario as a movie on his own, and he per­suaded Sean Connery to revive the Bond char­ac­ter for it, and “Empire Strikes Back” dir­ect­or Irving Kershner to go behind the cam­er­as for it. The res­ult was…a not very good remake of “Thunderball.” Which, depend­ing on what you think of “Thunderball” to begin with, isn’t very encour­aging. The movie looks kind of cheap from the get-go: the care­fully built-up Bond look was so fresh in view­ers’ mind that any kind of reboot was bound to look shoddy. Among its innov­a­tions: Connery’s Bond and vil­lain Klaus Maria Brandaur engage in video game battle. Ugh. It’s bet­ter than that year’s “offi­cial” Bond movie, “Octopussy,” but not by as much as you might expect.

23) “Casino Royale” (1967)

Longtime Hollywood play­er (as both pro­du­cer and tal­ent agent) Charles Feldman acquired the rights to Ian Fleming’s first Bond nov­el, in which the fate of the world kind of hinges on a game of bac­car­at, after it had already been adap­ted for a one-hour TV movie in which Barry Nelson (later Jack Nicholson’s boss in “The Shining!”) played an Americanized Bond with a great “card sense.” When the series with Connery took off in the ‘60s, Feldman approached pro­du­cers Saltzman and Broccoli about a col­lab­or­a­tion, and they balked. Feldman him­self balked at Connery’s million-dollar-asking price. And then he had an idea from which the stuff of legends is born. Since his last pic­ture, the Woody-Allen-scripted “What’s New Pussycat,” made a ton of money spoof­ing the emer­ging sexu­al mores of the ‘60s, and romantic com­ed­ies them­selves, why not make a spoof ver­sion of the Fleming book. The bizarre cine­mat­ic mon­ster that emerged had no few­er than five dir­ect­ors, at least three “James Bond”s, and was a sprawl­ing, semi­ot­ic­ally inco­her­ent mess with few genu­ine laughs. It’s long been said a great movie could be made of the mak­ing of this: cost­ars Peter Sellers and Orson Welles hated each oth­er with the heart of a thou­sand suns, which made shoot­ing their cli­mactic (sort of) bac­car­at face-off some­thing of a chal­lenge. (Welles threw in as a favor to Feldman, who pro­duced his great “Macbeth” back in the day; Woody Allen, whom Feldman broke in as a screen­writer, was involved for sim­il­ar help-a-brother-out reas­ons.) The vari­ous Bond girls, includ­ing “Dr. No”’s Ursula Andress, perky Joanna Pettet as a Bond daugh­ter (long story), and early Jacqueline Bisset, are all delight­ful, as is the Burt Bacharach score. Any movie that fea­tures Deborah Kerr pro­noun­cing the line “ Doodle me, Jamie” to David Niven can’t be all bad.

22) “Quantum Of Solace” (2008)

A real let down after the con­fid­ent and largely suc­cess­ful reboot of “Casino Royale,” which intro­duced Daniel Craig in the Bond role. At 106 minutes, it’s the shortest of the offi­cial Bond pic­tures. (The great ”Goldfinger” is a ‘60s pop song longer.) That might be con­sidered refresh­ing in a secret-agent action thrill­er series that many com­plained was over­blown and far-removed from real­ity. But in point of fact, “Quantum of Solace” feels like a sketch for a James Bond pic­ture. It’s too bad: the great French act­or Mathieu Amalric gives awe­some crazy-man stare as the oth­er­wise unin­spired vil­lain, an eco-terrorist of sorts (where’s SPECTRE and SMERSH when you need them, a view­er may well ask), Jeffrey Wright sets a good pre­ced­ent by being the first act­or to play C.I.A. ally Felix Leiter twice in a row, and Olga Kurylenko is an apt Bond girl. But the whole thing feels sim­ul­tan­eously rushed and under­developed and the cli­mactic battle is over­whelm­ing. Also, the scant attempts at humor are pretty lame: if nam­ing an agent “Strawberry Fields” is sup­posed to con­sti­tute some kind of apo­logy for Bond diss­ing the Beatles in “Goldfinger,” well, they needn’t have bothered. Also, the title song, per­formed by the tal­en­ted but oth­er­wise inex­plic­able duo of Jack White and Alicia Keys, is kind of “huh?”

21) “Die Another Day” (2002)

Speaking of bad title songs…while Madonna’s theme tune here might be a not-bad stan­dalone Madonna tune, Bond music it’s too cheekily indi­vidu­al­ist­ic. Somebody shoulda giv­en her a little edit­ing upon hear­ing the deathly dire “Paging Dr. Freud” open­ing lyr­ic. In any event, this, Pierce Brosnan’s last hur­rah in the Bond role, has sev­er­al things to com­mend it, for instance, an inter­ra­cial romance that’s not por­trayed pat­ron­iz­ingly or as any sort of a big deal. The oppos­ite num­ber for said romance is Halle Berry at her most Halle-esque, so that’s a plus too. But the movie tries to have it both ways. It ostens­ibly “human­izes” Bond a bit by hav­ing him held in cap­tiv­ity by North Korea for over a year, and look­ing mighty bad as a res­ult. But by the time the con­vo­luted plot has the movie’s action tak­ing place among all man­ner of ice-structures, it might as well by “The Never Ending Story.”

20) “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971)

When a Bond film is work­ing, it achieves a bal­ance of humor and not-quite-gravitas that makes it a thor­oughly enga­ging exper­i­ence. Tilt the bal­ance too far in one dir­ec­tion, and you’ve got prob­lems. We see this in the second-to-last Roger Moore Bond, “Octopussy,” and it’s also the case here, in the final “offi­cial” Bond film to star Sean Connery. As “The Psychotronic Encyclopedia Of Film” so mem­or­ably put it, “It’s the worst. Everything leads to saus­age kind Jimmy Dean.” Indeed. It also doesn’t help that arch-villain Blofeld is here played by Charles Gray, who played a doomed ally in “You Only Live Twice” but, more cru­cially, went on to play the Inspector in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Jill St. John makes for a brittle Bond girl (Lana Wood is more sym­path­et­ic, in many respects, but doesn’t get to stick around for long) and Connery acts like he’d rather be golf­ing through­out. The addi­tion of pos­sibly gay assas­sins Wint and Kidd was an “inter­est­ing” innov­a­tion; that Wint was played by Crispin Glover’s dad Bruce and Kidd was played by Putter Smith, a jazz bassist who’d worked with Thelonious Monk, makes it sound more inter­est­ing than the char­ac­ters actu­ally play, alas.

19) “The Man With The Golden Gun” (1974)

For genre nuts, the pro­spect of British hor­ror great Christopher Lee play­ing a Bond vil­lain was prac­tic­ally cat­nip. And while Lee (who was a rel­at­ive and friend of Bond cre­at­or Ian Fleming) cer­tainly sinks his teeth into the role of Scaramanga, the vil­lain with not only a golden gun but a third nipple, the movie itself is sim­ul­tan­eously on the dry/boring side (the nar­rat­ive is con­vo­luted without ever build­ing to any­thing spec­tac­u­lar) and the panicky-about-keeping-up-with-the-times side (it brings some Asian martial-arts styl­ings, which the kids were start­ing to go crazy about, into the fight scenes). Hence, Roger Moore’s second out­ing as Bond proves a less than sat­is­fact­ory mis­sion. Bond girls Britt Ekland and Maud Adams are easy on the eyes but kind of bland, as is, oddly enough, little Hervé Villechaize as what’s sup­posed to be a creepy hench­man. The movie also makes the mis­take of bring­ing back “funny” red­neck sher­iff J.W. Pepper from “Live And Let Die.”

18) “Live And Let Die” (1973)

After Connery decided he was done with the Bond char­ac­ter for good, or so he thought (hence the title of the later, non-official “Never Say Never Again”), pro­du­cers Saltzman and Broccoli gave the Bond role to the far more light­weight Roger Moore. But “Live and Let Die” brought the char­ac­ter back with a bang, with the title song from Paul McCartney and Wings ostens­ibly blow­ing out the cob­webs from the series. (Tellingly, the pri­or Bond pic­ture, “Diamonds Are Forever” had a theme sung by Shirley Bassey of “Goldfinger” fame.) The movie itself is really not bad at all, des­pite being dogged through­out by some embar­rass­ing racial depic­tions (which are kind of gen­er­ic to a lot of Hollywood product of the time). Oh, and the sexu­al polit­ics, while always dicey, are here begin­ning to show as such: much is made of the fact that this film’s Bond girl, psych­ic Solitaire (Jane Seymour) begins the scen­ario as a vir­gin, and that this is cent­ral to her gift. Ugh. In any event, though, Bond traipsing through the mean streets of Manhattan and the maze of New Orleans and bey­ond is good globe-trotting action, and Yaphet Kotto is a highly cred­ible vil­lain. And while Moore’s rel­at­ively cal­low next to Connery, here he’s com­fort­able enough not to overdo the arched eye­brows and so on. The intro­duc­tion of J.W. Pepper remains highly regrettable.

17) “The World Is Not Enough” (1999)

Pierce Brosnan’s third out­ing as Bond has two really hys­ter­ic­ally funny ele­ments, and they’re the female leads. Between Sophie Marceau’s “I’m mad, I tell you, mad!” oil-heiress vil­lainess and Denise Richards get­ting them rolling in the aisles merely by intro­du­cing her­self as a nuc­le­ar phys­i­cist, the movie seems to want you to laugh at the Bond girls’ Those two errantly ridicu­lous albeit attract­ive factors aside, this is actu­ally a better-than-not-bad Bond, in both the plot and vil­lain depart­ments. The plot has the vil­lains try­ing to raise oil prices by blow­ing a nuc­le­ar react­or (an idea that was revived in “Cloud Atlas,” of all things) and the main vil­lain is a guy who can’t feel pain on account of a bul­let in his brain wip­ing out his senses. As played by excel­lent screen crazy per­son Robert Carlyle, Renard is scrap­pi­er and less imper­i­ous than your aver­age Bond vil­lain, which is a pretty neat switch­eroo. By now, the stunt-spectacle pre-credits sequence for a Bond film had become some­thing of a sac­ra­ment; the one here, involving a motor­boat chase on the Thames and end­ing with some hot-air bal­loons, is one of the best in the series.

16) “A View To A Kill” (1985)

This is the last Bond pic­ture to star Roger Moore, so he leaves with a little more dig­nity than the pri­or “Octopussy” would have allowed him to, but still doesn’t quite go out with a bang. Making Christopher Walken into a Bond vil­lain wasn’t bad idea on paper: mak­ing him into a Bond vil­lain who looks as if he spends his off hours selling cocaine at the Mudd Club was a mis­take though. (As it happened, David Bowie had ori­gin­ally been con­sidered for Walken’s role as Zorin, an overly ambi­tious indus­tri­al­ist.) Grace Jones does intriguing duty as Zorin’s appro­pri­ately stone-faced and leth­al con­sort. Tanya Roberts is a sur­pris­ingly for­get­table Bond girl. While the Golden-Gate-bridge set cli­max is one of the more impress­ive set pieces of the Moore ten­ure, it only suf­fices to elev­ate this Bond pic­ture up to a little above ordinary.

15) “The Living Daylights” (1987)

If the crit­ic­al and fan con­sensus was that the Roger Moore Bond films took the fran­chise into a too-comedic dir­ec­tion, the cast­ing of more stol­id, young­er, and more men­acing Timothy Dalton as Bond was a cor­rect­ive. There was also the added attrac­tion, ostens­ibly, that Dalton was a Serious Thespian With Classical Training and all that. The down­side to this was the “what am I doing here” look that came across Dalton’s face in cer­tain of the more ris­ible situ­ations Bond would find him­self in. This has less spec­tacle than what the Moore Bond films so unwisely chased after: its plot line is a pretty straight­for­ward one of defect­ors and betray­ers, one of the last Bond scen­ari­os to take advant­age of the real-world Cold War. On the oth­er hand, it’s a little on the dry side, and while the movie clearly wants to make a genu­ine char­ac­ter instead of a sex object car­toon out of Bond girl Maryam D’Abo, it can’t find an entirely cred­ible way to do so.. And the theme song, by A‑ha, is so awful it makes the largely reviled Duran Duran title song from “View To A Kill” sound like, well, “Goldfinger.” Joe Don Baker makes a great ugly American turn­coat though.

14) “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997)

The second Bond movie to star Pierce Brosnan, this is an extremely mixed bag. There are some abso­lutely first rate ele­ments: Brosnan’s Bond and Hong Kong legend Michelle Yeoh’s motorcycle-pursued-by-helicopter scene is an action movie set piece for the ages. And the cast­ing of Yeoh, an action heroine in her own right, was inspired. On the minus side, the weirdly jokey supervil­lain played by Jonathan Pryce is a bit of media-mogul-skewering inside base­ball that’s kind of a snooze, and the weird­nesses involving the movie’s ini­tial Bond girl, played by Teri Hatcher, and her fate at the hands of an extremely uneth­ic­al phys­i­cian played by Vincent Schiavelli seem to have been impor­ted from a film by a very bad Terry Gilliam imper­son­at­or. The movie picks up sub­stan­tially after her char­ac­ter dis­ap­pears, and after Pryce him­self recedes and lets his character’s machines and martial-arts flu­ent hench­people do his work.

13) “License To Kill” (1989)

The second and last Timothy Dalton Bond pic­ture was ori­gin­ally titled “License Revoked,” but that was rejec­ted because too large a num­ber of poten­tial view­ers polled did not know the mean­ing of the word “revoked.” Or so we hear. How depress­ing. In any event the ori­gin­al title was more accur­ate, as it’s what hap­pens in the movie: after Bond’s pal Felix Leiter is maimed and his new bride killed, Bond decides to go after those vil­lains, which dis­pleases his bosses at MI6, who take away his license to kill. And Bond kills any­way. This pic­ture does a little bet­ter by way of giv­ing us a more full-bodied (in terms of per­son­al­ity and accom­plish­ment, we mean; get your mind out of the gut­ter) Bond girl in the way of Carey Lowell. Robert Davi, bless him, still seems like too much of a con­science­less hench­man type to handle the role of the full vil­lain. But the movie offers the grat­i­fy­ing spec­tacle of a really ticked-off Bond, and while the end­ing is weird–the usu­ally dis­ap­prov­ing old equip­ment guru Q sud­denly goes all avun­cu­lar, and the avenged Leiter is a little too cheer­ful for someone with no legs and a dead wife as of a week before–this is largely sat­is­fy­ing latter-day Bond.

12) “GoldenEye” (1995)

After a nearly six-year lay­off fol­low­ing “License To Kill,” Bond came back in the form of very cred­ible Irish lead­ing man Pierce Brosnan, whose tough-guy qual­it­ies always seemed to go hand in hand with an abil­ity to laugh at him­self. The chal­lenges for a post-Cold-War Bond were inex­tric­ably linked to the dearth of plot points the new world order yiel­ded, so this movie smartly planted its story seeds in pre-Glasnost Soviet Russia and then made its bad guys reneg­ades in the S.S.R. after­math. The fur­ther shak­ing up of the Bond world includes a female M, Judi Dench, who has, with “Skyfall,” appeared in sev­en Bond pictures—still not very close to Bernard Lee’s elev­en, but enough to estab­lish a strong, famil­i­ar pres­ence. “GoldenEye” is often a weird muddle: we still haven’t figured out why Minnie Driver shows up singing in a Russian club wear­ing a cow­boy hat. But it is very ener­get­ic, globe-trotting, action-packed, and all that. And Famke Janssen is both suf­fi­ciently beau­ti­ful and a good enough act­ress to make her ridicu­lously named femme fatale Xenia Onatopp (because she likes to strangle dudes with her thighs while she’s on-a-top of them, get it?) almost credible.

11) “Spectre” (2015) See Appendix, below

10) “Skyfall” (2012) See Appendix, below

9) “For Your Eyes Only” (1981)

In between the dis­asters that were “Moonraker” and “Octopussy” it occurred to the pro­du­cers of the Bond series that it might be a good idea to just go out and make a James Bond movie rather than an attempt to one-up every stu­pid and mere­tri­cious new-styled sci-fi or action block­buster now com­pet­ing with the fran­chise. This proved to be a very good idea indeed and in fact yiel­ded the second-best Roger-Moore-starring film in the series. The storyline is good old-fashioned high-tech spy stuff involving a sunken weapons sys­tem and a race between our side and the Soviets to get it. Complicating mat­ters is a smug­gler who wants to get on the Soviets’ good side. And take some of their money. The only Bond adven­ture so far to fea­ture the star of a Luis Buñuel mas­ter­piece as Bond girl: Gorgeous Carole Bouquet had beguiled Fernando Rey in Buñuel’s bam­booz­ling sur­real­ist mas­ter­piece “The Obscure Object Of Desire” four year pri­or. The Sheena-Easton-sung theme song is a lav­ishly sat­is­fy­ing bit of pop pap, too. Also not­able for a weird sub­plot involving a sexu­ally pre­co­cious young fig­ure skater played by real-life skater Lynn-Holly Johnson.

8) “Casino Royale” (2006)

The Bond reboot-for-the-21^st-Century was on a very good track in almost every par­tic­u­lar. The cast­ing of steely Daniel Craig was inspired, as is the new intens­ity he brings to the role: he’s the most intim­id­at­ing Bond since Connery. Giving he char­ac­ter a slightly more com­plex emo­tion­al life also worked out well, although over­do­ing this in future install­ments may prove a prob­lem. Doing a very straight adapt­a­tion of the long-elusive-to-filmmakers Bond debut nov­el by Ian Fleming, a tightly plot­ted and diabol­ic­ally emo­tion­ally knotty piece of espi­on­age storytelling, was also a ter­rif­ic idea. Casting Eva Green as Vesper Lynd, pos­sibly the Only Woman Bond Could Ever Really Love, mag­ni­fi­cent. And Jeffrey Wright as C.I.A. pally Felix Leiter? Brilliant. Changing the card game from bac­car­at to poker, and, more spe­cific­ally, to Texas Hold ‘Em? As Homer Simpson would put it… That aside, an inspired effort.

7) “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977)

Among oth­er things, this is the pic­ture that made it de rigueur for all future Bond movies to open with a spec­tac­u­lar Bond-led action sequence that would not neces­sar­ily have any­thing to do with the sub­sequent action, in this case a spec­tac­u­lar ski chase end­ing with the cheesy gag of a British flag para­sail thingy. All of the movie’s humor is at about that level: mildly groan-inducing but nev­er awful And yes, this IS the movie that intro­duces the gigant­ic vil­lain named “Jaws,” and yes, he does bite a shark to death herein. But Jaws has his roots in an actu­al Ian-Fleming-created bad guy, and this movie prob­ably melds Roger Moore’s own insouci­ant style to an action thrill­er more organ­ic­ally and effect­ively than any of the oth­er movies he played Bond in. Barbara Bach is also very good as a Bond girl not to far removed from the one in the immor­tal “From Russia With Love.”

6) “You Only Live Twice” (1967)

Rumor had had it that Sean Connery, for all the world­wide fame his efforts as Bond had brought him, was get­ting pretty tired of the role and the pigeon­hol­ing it had earned him. But still, audi­ences didn’t neces­sar­ily expect to see Bond trapped in a Murphy-bed style con­trap­tion and machine-gunned to death in the first scene of the follow-up to “Thunderball.” This socko open­ing led into a truly great theme song sung by Nancy Sinatra. While the sub­sequent pro­ceed­ings, in which Bond had to mas­quer­ade as a Japanese man to infilt­rate a Blofeld-initiated spaceship-snatching scheme designed to start a glob­al war, are a bit on the racially insens­it­ive and argu­ably over­blown side, the movie’s a tri­umph of both action and gigant­ic set design, a really impress­ive spec­tacle. The Bond girls here are equally ador­able Mie Hama and Akika Wakabyashi, them­selves vet­er­ans of Japanese spy movies. In fact they also starred in “Key Of Keys,” the Japanese thrill­er that was redubbed in English by Woody Allen for the crazy pas­tiche com­edy “What’s Up Tiger Lily.” The movie also fea­tures a gone-native-in-Japan MI6 agent played by Charles Gray who mis­takenly notes that Bond takes his mar­tini “stirred not shaken.” We can only assume that Bond was too polite to cor­rect him.

5) “Thunderball” (1965)

In a sense, any movie fol­low­ing the sub­lime “Goldfinger” was going to have to be some­thing of a dis­ap­point­ment. But “Thunderball” has a lot going for it. Fishing for nuc­le­ar weapons is an excel­lent plot hook for a spy movie in a real world still reel­ing from the Cuban mis­sile crisis. The diabol­ic­al scheme involving a dead pilot and a ringer turned into his double via plastic sur­gery is still a pretty creepy gam­bit. The Bahamas as a set­ting for intrigue and adven­ture both pro­fes­sion­al and recre­ation­al. Claudine Auger as Domino is not a Bond girl to sneeze at. The faults here are min­im­al but sig­ni­fic­ant: first off, the storytelling is a little logy: where “Goldfinger” logged in at a very tight hour and fifty minutes, this dawdles a bit at 130 minutes. But the main offend­er is the vil­lain, Largo, played by Adolfo Celli. Rather than con­vin­cing the view­er he’s a diabol­ic­al mad­man intent on world dom­in­a­tion and being very very rich, the lum­ber­ing, white-haired Celli comes across merely as a petu­lant piece of Eurotrash who enjoys severely under­tip­ping valet park­ing guys. Villain fail.

4) “Dr. No” (1962)

The first movie in the fran­chise is a lean, largely gadget-free espi­on­age thrill­er (it’s most spec­tac­u­lar ele­ment is a so-called “dragon” with which its title vil­lain pro­tects his private island, which is in fact a kind of tank with a flame-thrower). Licensed-to-kill agent Bond is summoned away from the bac­car­at table, giv­en a scold­ing on weaponry from boss M (who makes him replace his Walther PPK with a Beretta) and dis­patched to Jamaica to invest­ig­ate the dis­ap­pear­ance of an MI6 agent there. Among the calypso dan­cers and exot­ic sea­shells he dis­cov­ers the world-domination bent Doctor, whom he squelches, after some shrug-offable radi­ation expos­ure. Ursula Andress is a great first Bond girl even if her act­ing is laugh­able. The loc­a­tions are gor­geous, and Connery’s Bond is grat­i­fy­ingly nasty (immor­tal line, right before he dis­patches a vil­lain min­ion who’s out of ammo: “You’ve had your six”), if not all that impress­ively com­pet­ent. Of course the agent has to get into dan­ger­ous situ­ations, but he walks into more traps and abduc­tions here than aver­age. Fun trivia: A juni­or loc­a­tion scout on the movie was Chris Blackwell, future music industry legend as founder of Island Records.

3) “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969)

The jokey open­ing, with new guy George Lazenby laugh­ing that such things nev­er happened to “the oth­er guy” is the only meta touch in this movie that handed Lazenby the seem­ingly impossible task of filling Sean Connery’s shoes after “You Only Live Twice” marked the ori­gin­al actor’s exit from the series. The crit­ic­al lam­bast­ing the movie and Lazenby took, and the short­fall in box office draw­ing power (the movie was in fact a hit, but not as much of one as the Connery pic­tures had been) the movie showed threw the pro­du­cers into a pan­ic, and Lazenby was quickly thrown under a bus, or an Aston-Martin, or some such vehicle. As it hap­pens, though, he’s a pretty good Bond, and “Secret Service” is an excel­lent Bond pic­ture, a sol­id attempt to provide Bond with emo­tion­al depth almost forty years before the Daniel-Craig-starring movies. Here Bond falls in love with poor-little-rich-girl Tracy, played by Diana Rigg, and actu­ally mar­ries her. A more mobile Blofeld, played here by Telly Savalas dur­ing the peri­od when you could still take him ser­i­ously as a psychot­ic, has oth­er plans for the couple that don’t allow for much in the way of domest­ic bliss. This still remains the best mix­ing of char­ac­ter study and action in a Bond movie. Also fea­tures Louis Armstrong singing a great John Barry song, “We Have All The Time In The World.”

2) “From Russia, With Love” (1963)

The second Bond film is the ulti­mate Bond Cold War movie, and its ends with a spec­tac­u­lar thaw centered on blackmail-intended 8mm foot­age of what we would nowadays call a “sex tape.” Up until the cur­rent Bond series, which has some con­tinu­ity built around Bond’s “Casino Royale” lov­er Vesper Lynd, this was the only Bond movie to have a Bond-girl con­tinu­ity, char­ac­ter wise; as we are intro­duced to the real Bond (a look-alike is killed in the open­ing scene by an assas­sin in train­ing played by a never-to-be-in-such-great-shape-again Robert Shaw) he’s still dal­ly­ing with Sylvia Trench, who he picked up at the bac­car­at table in “Dr. No.” But there’s not much time for that, as he has to traipse all over Europe chas­ing a Russian cod­ing device, in the sights of ace, knife-in-the-boot-toe vil­lainess Rosa Klebb (the great Lotte Lenya), wit­ness­ing Gypsy cat­fights with Turkish op Kerim Bey (Mexican-born Pedro Armendariz, who else?), and fall­ing hard for Soviet maybe-defector Tatiana, my per­son­al favor­ite Bond girl, played by Daniel Bianchi. Lots of action; the train battle between Shaw’s char­ac­ter and the real Bond is one of the greatest fist-fight blo­wouts in the his­tory of the fran­chise, if not CINEMA ITSELF. Super awe­some, even if few people can actu­ally name the guy who sang the theme song without the help of Wikipedia (it’s Matt Monro, and in fair­ness to him, he was cheated; an instru­ment­al ver­sion of the tune plays over the open­ing credits).

1) “Goldfinger” (1964)

As fond as we are of “From Russia With Love,” which is widely acclaimed as the best Bond, we think this beats it. While Rosa Klebb and her min­ions were great, they were play­ing second fiddle in “Russia” to an unseen num­ber one bad guy; with Auric Goldfinger, we get a mas­ter vil­lain who’s for­mid­able and vul­gar, more cred­ible than the sci-fi inflec­ted Dr. No, one who gives really good catch­phrase (as in” No Mr. Bond I expect you to DIE”), and one who’s his own boss. The set design, while not as gar­gan­tu­an as that in “You Only Live Twice,” shows Ken Adam at his most ima­gin­at­ive; who doesn’t WANT Goldfinger’s pool room? The three Bond women, played by Shirley Eaton, Tania Mallet, and Honor Blackman, are enga­ging and beau­ti­ful. The strong­man hench­man, Odd Job, is weirdly for­mid­able. The globe trot­ting, from the Swiss Alps to Kentucky horse coun­try (one shot even shows an early KFC res­taur­ant) is awe­some. And it has the best theme song of any Bond film ever. Still. Such is our case. What’s yours?

APPENDIX

LIKE I SAID, the only change I made to the ori­gin­al text I sub­mit­ted to MSN Movies, which, if I recol­lect cor­rectly, was pub­lished in more or less the form sub­mit­ted, was to include rank­ings of Skyfall and Spectre, I reck­on that at 10 and 11 respect­ively, some might protest that I’m rank­ing them WAY too high. I under­stand the objec­tion. My reas­ons are as fol­lows: 1) Once one (and by “one,” I mean “me,” pretty much) really grows accus­tomed to the facts that these movies are part of an actu­al reboot, rather than exist­ing with­in the (let’s face it) poorly main­tained con­tinu­ity of all the pri­or Eon films, their logic and espe­cially their tone become easi­er to pro­cess. 2) Daniel Craig does a bet­ter po-faced Bond than Timothy Dalton did. He just does. 3) The movies are superbly cast. Albert Finney is in Skyfall! Okay, Dave Bautista in Spectre struts around as if he really thinks he’s the bet­ter of Robert Shaw and Richard Kiel com­bined, and he’s not even close, but nobody’s per­fect. 4) The movies aren’t com­pletely humor­ous. Bond fail­ing to make the car he nicked do what he wants to do in the Rome chase sequence in Spectre is pretty funny. 5) While over­long and a tad self-serious, the two movies are very well-made espi­on­age thrillers, with Skyfall bene­fit­ting in par­tic­u­lar from breath­tak­ing cine­ma­to­graphy by Roger Deakins. So there.