Something to watch tonight: Thursday 12 December

The Sound of 007 (Whitecross, 2022)

Time is short today as I have some work com­mit­ments and at the time this lands in your inboxes I will be ensconced watch­ing The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim so I can talk about it on the wire­less tomor­row night.

So, we’ll try anoth­er attempt at a radio tran­script, this one is from 16 December 2022 when Karyn Hay was still host­ing RNZ Nights. It might make more sense if you listen to it …

Look I think it’s obvi­ously just ooz­ing nos­tal­gia but, actu­ally, this is the time of year when we do want to sit down and, you know, have some­thing that’s not ter­ribly dif­fi­cult to watch, and not deeply emo­tion­al, but just reminds you of sim­pler times I suppose.

This kind of film is the kind of thing that might nor­mally be a DVD extra – if you bought a Bond movie you’d find that there would be a little doc­u­ment­ary about the his­tory of the music. Where this sits apart from that kind of approach is how com­pre­hens­ive it is.

It’s made dur­ing No Time to Die which was the most recent film, the last Daniel Craig Bond film. and they talk to every­body – well at least every­body who’s still alive, and they also have lots of archive inter­views with people who are no longer with us. So lit­er­ally every­body who’s ever worked on a Bond movie fea­tures some­how. Whether it’s Marvin Hamlisch who wrote “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me or Paul McCartney of course, “Live and Let Die”.

But really the great music­al hero of the Bond movies is John Barry who wrote the music for 11 Bond films and fam­ously made the arrange­ment for the ori­gin­al James Bond theme (even though Monty Norman wrote the tune for it). It’s got John Barry’s fin­ger­prints all over it, that par­tic­u­lar tune.

And, I mean, what a mas­ter arranger! It was his arrange­ments, and his com­pos­i­tions as well, that really gave Bond music its unique fla­vour. And you know when you hear “The Living Daylights”, that A‑Ha wrote the theme song for, it was John Barry’s arrange­ment that really elev­ated and made it a Bond song.

So if you’re inter­ested in film scores and the the­ory behind what makes a par­tic­u­lar piece of music work with a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject mat­ter or a par­tic­u­lar genre, it is I think a really inter­est­ing documentary.

It’s only 90 minutes long so it won’t take up too much of your time and it will make you want to go back to those films. So be pre­pared that you may end up find­ing your­self down a bit of a Bond rab­bit hole as you’re reminded of those films.

Also in that seg­ment, Karyn and I talked about Andor, the Star Wars thrill­er that will get its own entry here before sea­son two lands next year, The Little Drummer Girl (which has already been a recom­mend­a­tion here) and – as is my cus­tom – a diver­sion into World Cup football.

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Where to watch The Sound of 007

Worldwide: Streaming on Prime Video

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Further listening

Last night I made an extra vis­it to RNZ Nights to chat with Emile about movie star­dom – what makes a movie star and why some great act­ors don’t have what it takes. It was a fun chat.