For a Few Dollars More (1965)

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Director: Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonte

The Man with No Name is back.

The Man with No Name is indeed back and this time he wants more dollars, $10,000 to be exact. The money comes in the form of Indio, an escaped criminal planning to rob a bank, who is also dealing with demons from his past. However there is another bounty hunter pursuing Indio too one who will not stand aside and let our hero take the rewards. Lastly there is a haunting jingle of a pocket watch which is shrouded in mystery and violence.

After the success Sergio Leone had with A Fistful of Dollars (in Europe anyway, the movie was not well-received in the US) another spaghetti western was always going to happen and the great director brought back his old crew including composer Ennio Morricone, star Clint Eastwood and the previous movie’s villain Gian Maria Volonte, this time in a new role. Previous to this blog I had only seen the first two parts of what came to be known as the ‘Dollars Trilogy’ once before about fifteen years ago. While I instantly fell in love with the final movie The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and I was quite fond of A Fistful of Dollars I didn’t enjoy For a Few Dollars More nearly as much. I have no idea why however as this movie is really good. I think maybe at the time after having heard many times that these three movies were part of a trilogy, even in reality they are not directly related films, I was confused as to why Volonte’s character was still alive and it took away some of my immersion.

The plot here, despite being more intricate than the previous film, lacks the crazy action set-pieces such as Roman’s gang shooting their rivals as they flee from the burning house but instead it builds up its characters and the ending here has far more emotional impact than the trigger-happy ending of Fistful. Well there are characters with a bit more depth here but Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name (nicknamed Manco this time round) isn’t really one of them and is as aloof as ever. In Fistful there was a quick throw-away line about something in his past that made him act heroic and defend Marisol against Ramon, but here he is just after the almighty dollar. I don’t mind that at all though as the less we know about Eastwood’s cowboy the more enigmatic he becomes. He also shoots a person without even looking at them at one point too. Such a badass.

I did love what they did with the bad guy El Indio (Volonte’) and think it was a great upgrade from his evil heartless villain of the previous movie. Oh he is still a complete sick psycho here, at one point he guns down a mother and child to get back at an old rival, but he carries around the pocket watch of one of his previous victims and is completely tormented by the clockwork jingle it makes, turning to marijuana as a coping mechanism to deal with the horrid deed he did. Volente is such an engaging actor and he has a magnetic presence that makes it hard for me to take my eyes of him. His El Indio, while almost as much of a mystery as Eastwood’s cowboy aside from a flashback of the incident that haunts him, is a fascinating character to watch. I feel that it is a massive shame he wasn’t brought back in some way for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly as he has added so much to the trilogy in his two roles that it’s sad he wasn’t in the grand finale. If I could go back in time I would love to have convinced Leone to direct a fourth movie so they could have added an extra adjective to Good, Bad and Ugly (Weird perhaps?....) and made that film end in an epic four way shoot-out.

The third lead in this film is Lee Van Cleef’s Colonel Douglas Mortimer and in many ways this is Van Cleef’s movie. I think every scene in this film includes one of the three main actors and while it’s El Indio’s actions that drive the plot along it is Mortimer who has the closest ties to our antagonist whilst Eastwood is really just along for the ride, almost a side character in his own movie. Van Cleef might even get more screen time and dialogue than Eastwood (which isn’t saying that much as The Man with No Name is famously shy of words) and I found myself rooting more for him than Clint. When Mortimer says they should team up I agreed completely and was annoyed at Manco when he tried to break their pact. Van Cleef gives a great performance and it’s alluded to in the movie that he is just like Eastwood’s character but a decade or so older and wiser which is matched very well by Van Cleef who gives out a confident portrayal of a man who’s seen this all before and is way smarter than everyone around him. I especially enjoyed it when Eastwood kept shooting Mortimer’s hat whenever Van Cleef tried to pick it up in a futile attempt to intimidate him and force him to quit his pursuit of Indio’s bounty. In return Mortimer shoots Manco’s hat off his head and then basically juggles with it by firing five more shots at the hat before it even touched the ground. Amazing. While I’m sad Volonte won’t be in the third movie I am happy we get to see one more film of Lee Van Cleef in my retrospective reviews.

Director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone pretty much mastered the western in the first attempt but if anything they have both improved here. Leone is now using some fantastic wide angles including the opening scene where a man rides a horse a few hundred feet in the distance before being shot to the ground by the gun of an unseen man in the foreground. It’s never revealed who the man on the horse or who the shooter were but it’s a spectacular camera shoot nonetheless. I also loved the shot during the Mexican standoff at the end of the film with Van Cleef on the far left, Volonte on the far right and Eastwood in the middle and it feels like a small hint as to what is to come next. Of course Leone is perhaps more famous for his extreme close-ups and in this film we get our first shots that show nothing but a character’s eyes which is something that has become such an iconic western visual now. Also the landscapes are simply stunning at times too and it feels like Leone is showing off in the best kind of way at times.

Then there is Morricone who composes another good theme tune, though I do like A Fistful of Dollars more, but it’s the beautiful, slow, creepy piece ‘30 Seconds to What?’ that plays every time Indio opens up the pocket watch that is truly his best work in the movie. I can’t say how much I adore that piece and it is the most memorable thing in the film (it was even sampled on an awesome garage track by 187 Lockdown called the Gunman) and it’s been stuck in my head all day- finally replacing the theme from Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill! I also really liked the clock-tower chime piece he used when El Indio was telling his second-in-command that he knew Manco and Mortimer were bounty hunters all along and that he was planning to kill them. The revelations and plotting went so well with the chimes after every sentence.

So was For a Few Dollars More as good as A Fistful of Dollars? I really can’t decide between the two, but when they are both this good does it matter? Leone, Morricone, Eastwood and Van Cleef were all excellent and I am so very much looking forwards to reviewing the final part of the trilogy.

8/10- This second instalment was a marvellous follow-up and you can see that everyone involved is just getting better and better. Now, time for them to make a masterpiece.

Best quote: No, old man. I thought I was having trouble with my adding. It’s all right now.

Best scene: I am going to go with the end duel between Mortimer and Indio.

Kick-ass moment: Mortimer is trying to collect a bounty but the man he pursuing is fleeing on a horse. Not fazed at all Mortimer walks to his own horse, suddenly unfurls a pouch that contains four rifles, casually picks one up and shoots the fleeing man dead.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we’ll be talking about another British secret agent movie. But this time it isn’t Bond…

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Director: Russ Meyer

Starring: Tura Sutana, Haji, Lori Williams

Superwomen! Belted, buckled and booted!

It was a day like any other for Tommy and Linda, a young all-American couple like any other, as they drove out the desert without a care in the world, but unbeknownst to them await a trio of murderous go-go girls. Who will survive and what will be left of them?

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence! While violence cloaks itself it a plethora of disguises its favourite mantle still remains sex” claims the movie’s opening narrator, over a black screen. The narrator proceeds to teach us that there is a new form of violence, one encased in the supple skin of a woman, and warns the viewer to be on their guard. For these harbingers of destruction, this new breed of violent women, prowl both alone and in packs. “They operate at anytime, anywhere and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist or a dancer at a go-go club.” There is then a sudden jarring cut to our three ‘heroines’ dancing at a bar while the films amazingly catchy theme music plays. We then see the girls driving lovely vintage sports cars and the main character Varla (Sutana) laughs to herself as the second chorus of The Bostweeds title track kicks in and the title card appears on the screen over Sutana’s face. I really can’t do the opening of this movie justice, but I absolutely loved it, and have watched the start to the film a good twenty times in the last two days. The cut from the narration to the go-go club and the title song instantly playing is just such a sudden jolt of pure trashy excitement. It is honestly one of my favourite starts to a film I have ever seen.

Then the movie begins. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is unique so far in my anthology of action movies as it is the first film reviewed that I had not previously seen before. I knew nothing about the film at all aside from the fact there are three women who kick arse in it. I was hoping and expecting a mixture of the Planet Terror/Death Proof Grindhouse films that were inspired by this and other exploitation movies, and wanting a story where our heroes encounter chauvinistic male pigs and righteously beat them to a bloody pulp. Instead what we got was our supposed heroes killing a man for no reason at all and then kidnapping his girlfriend before they pass her like a dutchie to a lecherous rapist old man in order to distract him whilst they look to find and steal his money. My opening paragraph with its borrowing of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre tagline was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to turn this movie into a horror film as it’s the only way to look at Faster Pussycat to really to make sense of it all.

So-called ‘King of the nudies’ director Russ Meyer made a lot of exploitation movies, all with big chested women and a lot of them with nudity, yet here is a movie which to a lot of people is a feminist classic. Yes none of the women in Faster Pussycat show their breasts in this film but how did one of cinemas most prolific producer of exploitation skin-flicks manage to direct a movie that so many women love? In my opinion it is completely by accident. Russ Meyer, if you take his words at face value, was a disgusting misogynistic dinosaur, having been quoted as having said that a woman’s place is in the kitchen or in the bedroom and that sex is only for men to enjoy. So it seems incredibly unlikely to me that he would make a movie that empowers women on purpose. More likely he just found the idea of buxom women in miniskirts and knee-high boots, driving fast sports cars and going on a killing spree to be sexy and just wrote a quick script, hired the first three gorgeous ladies he found and made a movie. Now that is what you call a passion project. It’s commendable in a way.

Oh yeah, the murders. See that’s what I find strange about the way the ladies of this picture are so beloved. Yeah, they have great dialogue, really great in fact, but they are all freaking psychos. Okay so Billie (Williams) is the lesser of three evils and I have to say that I did love her character. After seeing the first three Bond movies, and to a lesser extent North by Northwest, where the main females were basically a prize for our hero to bed, here we have Billie being the one to pursue the guys- “want to look under my hood?” Of course the main guy she’s hitting on is a mentally handicapped man called ‘Vegetable’ (yes, really), but if we try and ignore that a film showing a woman be this forward and independent “I do whatever feels good” in a movie in 1964 was quite excellent. Also Williams brought a really fun, bubbly personality to this role and at risk of sounding as creepy as the director she is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen put on film. Then there’s Rosie (Haji) who like Billie is guilty of being an accessory to murder, but also of the crime of having an awful Italian accent. Not going to lie, I loved it and laughed every time she spoke.

That brings us to our main character Varla, the hero villain of the film. Donning a black catsuit that shows off as much cleavage as humanly possible this woman is a furious wrecking ball of contempt and pure id. All her lines of dialogue are almost spat out as if the very idea of having to talk to people displeased her. If she is indeed the dangerous, violent, personification of sex the opening introduction warned us about then you should be very afraid indeed. Everyone it seems is scared of her, including friend and possible lover Rosie, and those that aren’t scared by her wind up becoming her victims. Heck, even Varla’s eyebrows look terrified of her and seem to be trying to escape from her face. They are ludicrous. We are never given a reason as to why she’s so angry or why she kills Tommy at the start, but it is notable that she twice gives Tommy a chance to get back into his car and twice he continues to fight her instead. Perhaps he underestimated her in the same way that the old, creepy, lecherous disabled man (played by Russ Meyer, sorry I mean Stuart Lancaster) did and his pride was wounded because she was a female and it was that which cost him his life.

But perhaps Varla doesn’t needs a motive for all of her pent-up rage I guess? To quote Scream’s Billy Loomis “Did Norman Bates have a motive? Did Hannibal Lecter have a motive?” But the lyrics of the theme tune might give a bit of a clue- “It’s sad she doesn’t see what’s wrong from right/She’s running fast and free child of the night/in her life will be no time for love/You’ll never take her make up your mind/You will find Pussycat is living reckless/Pussycat is riding high/If you think you can take her well just you try/Yeah just you try.” Yeah, there’s no taming this reckless pussycat. I do get why women like her character in way thanks her wild devil-may-care spunky attitude, but I actually think the real one they should look to is Linda. Played by sixteen year old future Playmate Susan Bernard Linda is the helpless victim for almost the entire film and risks either being murdered, raped, or both the whole movie but is actually her that kills Varla in the end by running her over with a car. Kirk (Paul Trinka), son of the old man and brother to Vegetable and the only other good person in the film aside from Linda and her late boyfriend, thanks Linda for saving his life, but as Linda more accurately puts it that she didn’t save his life, she saved her own. They then drive off to the excellent theme tune as the credits roll.

So after all that, was the film actually any good? From a technical standpoint no. No it’s not. When I was watching I reacted just like Crusty the Clown when he sees Worker & Parasite, the Eastern European replacement for The Itchy and Scratchy Show, “What the hell was that?” However that being said I have not been able to get this movie, or the theme tune, out of my head since I first watched it and immediately wanted to see it again. I loved the end of the movie and adored the start and I like the middle the more I think about it. So yeah, I am going to surprise myself and give this a decent score.

7/10- As Billie would say- It was a gas.

Best quote: “Well you won’t find it down there Colombus!” says Varla to a gas attendant is talking to her about finding America while unabashedly starring directly at her tits. Yeah, she is pretty cool.

Best scene: Linda finally killing Varla and her and Kirk driving off to the sweet Bostweeds song.

Kick-ass moment: The opening narration with the sudden cut to the go-go dancing and the title song. Just so darn awesome.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow The Man with no Name has a fistful of dollars, but he now wants A Few Dollars More.

Goldfinger (1964)

Goldfinger (1964)

Director: Guy Hamilton

Starring: Sean Connery

James Bond is back in action! Everything he touches turns to excitement!

So Goldfinger is without question the most famous James Bond movie of them all. From the pre-title sequence where Bond unzips a wetsuit to reveal a pristine white tuxedo underneath, to Shirley Bassey blaring out the titular theme tune, to Oddjob decapitating a statue with his hat, to Pussy Galore’s introduction “I must be dreaming”, to the gadget-laden Aston Martin DB5 with ejector seat “I never joke about my work 007”, to the laser scene “Do you expect me to talk?” “No Mr Bond I expect you to die!” and perhaps the most iconic moment in all Bond films, even more so than Ursula Andress emerging from the sea, Shirley Eaton’s dead body painted gold.

This movie feels like a ‘Greatest Hits’ package more than a film and you can see why this movie is credited for being the one that created the so-called “Bond formula” and while I think that all started really in From Russia with Love it was with Goldfinger that Bond movies kind of became their own genre. I mean what genre would you classify Goldfinger in? You have your Bond’s like From Russia with Love and The Living Daylighs that you could label as spy thrillers, your pure action revenge flicks like License to Kill and Quantum of Solace but Goldfinger is… well, it’s a Bond film and there’s really nothing else like it apart from the inferior clones within its own series. So maybe we should just break down the Bond formula to see how well it holds up.

They say a good hero is only as good as its villain and in that regard this move scores well as Auric Goldfinger, played by Gert Frobe and voiced excellently by Michael Collins, is my favourite of the whole franchise. From the moment this portly, balding German sounding Englishman with awful dress sense walks into frame you instantly hate his character. However his plan, not to rob Fort Knox of gold as per the novel, but to detonate a nuclear bomb inside it so that his own gold’s stock rises is so genius (my favourite of the bad guy schemes) and with the hilarious delivery of “I expect you to die!” you can’t help but like the guy. He’s kind of like Die Hard’s Hans Gruber in that you really like him, but still want him to lose. Die Hard is superb, for many reasons, but one is that while the bad guy is strangely endearing, the hero is even more likeable. Here however James Bond is sort of a dick.

I know I called 007 a dick in my Dr No review and used the term to complement our spy but in Goldfinger I think it’s just much. Yes he bedded Taro, knowing he was going to have her arrested after, in Dr No and even struck Tania in From Russia with Love but Goldfinger crosses the line for me. The scene with Pussy Galore in the haystacks has been talked in depth a hell of a lot and I used to defend it slightly in an awful Robin Thicke “you know you want it” (no Robin, they don’t, you creep) way to imply Pussy Galore really wanted Bond, but didn’t want to give into her feelings and I think that is what movie makers were going for, but Pussy fights Bond way too long for that to work. On this rewatch it reminded me of the awful Jamie/Cercei Lannister scene in Game of Thrones where the director wanted it to come across as one thing, but to the viewer it did kind of look like Jamie raped her and the show swept it under the rug never to be mentioned again. I watched Goldfinger this time with my thirteen year old sister, trying to get her into James Bond like I did when I was her age, so I was very sensitive to how women were being treated here what with the haystacks scene and when Bond slaps Dink on the arse and tells her to leave with “Man’s talk.” I’ll justify the Dink moment as just a relic of the sixties but at the least it dates the movie a lot. What I can’t justify however is Bond slagging off the Beatles! What the hell James?! At least they chose a band that stood the test of time as Moneypenny trying to seduce Bond with Barry, bloody, Manilow in the Living Daylights makes me cringe.

While we are talking about pop acts shall we mention Bassey’s theme? Do I like it? Yes. Do I love it? No. I respect the song a lot and when it comes on the radio I might sing along and it might sneak into my top ten themes, but not into my top five or anything. You all know the song though, so the fact it’s so famous is another huge plus for this film. I don’t really like Robert Brownjohn’s credit sequence however as while projecting the casts faces onto gold women sounds great on paper it actually gives away small spoilers for later on in the movie and he seems to run out of footage as time goes on and uses first what appears to be a deleted scene and secondly a clip from From Russia with Love. This was the last time Brownjohn did the credits as for the next movie Maurice Binder would get the job again and would retain it until Piece Brosnan’s first Bond film and the next movie’s title sequence would set the benchmark for them all. John Barry I feel was better on this film, using the Bond theme more wisely and scarcely, though he did sadly drop the 007 theme. I especially liked Barry using the chimes whenever Oddjob appeared and especially when you first catch a glimpse of Shirley Eaton’s Jill Masterson covered in gold. It’s a moment that could have been laughable, but thanks to Connery’s acting and the score it comes across as horrific like it should.

Oddjob for many people is the greatest henchman of all time (in my top three) and he does start two much-copied henchman tropes by being silent and super strong and you can see Oddjob copycats in guys like For Your Eyes Only’s Emile Leopard Locke (silent), Octopussy’s Gobinda (strong), Spectre’s Mr Hinx (silent and super strong) and of course most famously in Jaws. Even with the great deadly bowler hat gimmick Oddjob could have been just another grunt like so many later henchman will be, but Harold Sakata is just wonderful in this role and it’s his smiling portrayal that make Oddjob one of cinema’s best ever bad guys, even more so than Goldfinger himself. Sakata, an Olympic weightlifting silver medallist and former pro-wrestler, was described by director Guy Hamilton as “absolutely charming man” and Harold was actually badly burned during his death scene when he “blew a fuse”, but he still kept hold of his hat to make sure the take looked good. Goldfinger and Oddjob are the best Villain-Henchman pair in any Bond movie.

Honour Blackman, from hit television show The Avengers, was also a delight as Pussy Galore, a name that was nearly changed, particularly in America, to Kitty Galore, but thankfully Pussy remained and Blacktook tried to use the name as much as possible in interviews to promote the movie in effort to cause embarrassment to her hosts. I love Pussy at first (that was an odd thing to type) and think she’s superb deflecting Bond’s flirtations and there’s one exchange with Bond that made me very happy. Bond had previously seen Oddjob kill Jill’s sister Tilly (Tania Mallet) and patronisingly tells this to Pussy in hopes of getting her to switch allegiances with “Do you know he kills little girls like you?” but Galore has none of Bond’s charm, replying with a confident “And little boys too.” It’s just too bad that for all her bravado it’s not Goldfinger planning to kill all the Fort Knox guards, as opposed to using sleeping gas on them like he said he was going to, that gets Pussy to change her ways, but James Bond’s magic penis. It is especially bad after her claim earlier that she was “immune” to him. In the book she was a lesbian and James converts her, so I am glad they didn’t go down the ‘Bond can convert gay women route, but they could have handled it better. Hey at least Galore is competent in judo, and her Flying Circus and her are all competent pilots which is a huge improvement over the damsel in distresses archetype of Honey Ryder and was oddly forward thinking in the sixties, especially from Ian Flemming who has never been accused of being politically correct.

Jill Masterson thanks to the legendary death is a famous Bond girl, but she doesn’t get much to do in her two scenes. Tilly has a bit more of an arc, being out for revenge for her sister which I would love to have seen explored more as a similar Bond girl wanting revenge worked so well in For Your Eyes Only, but she too is killed, again in a very memorable way. It is sad that both sisters died when you think about their family. God Oddjob’s a bastard. A loveable, charming bastard, but a bastard nonetheless. Tilly as the avenging angel is also responsible for my favourite shot in the movie when the camera focuses on Bond on a hill looking at Goldfinger before it zooms out to show Tilly looking at both Bond and our villain. I don’t really like Guy Hamilton’s Bond’s, but Goldfinger is good and his best by a wide margin and that shot was lovely.

The MI6 regulars all their usual wonderful selves, this was my favourite performances by Bernard Lee’s M and Louis Maxwell’s Moneypenny so far, and I liked Moneypenny being the one to throw Bond’s hat onto the rack. Jack Lord was set to return as his Dr No character Felix Leiter, but he demanded more money and a bigger role rivalling Connery’s, so he was axed sadly, but understandably. He was replaced by Cec Linder and I don’t know who this guy is, but it isn’t Felix. He looks way too old to be Bond’s equal, despite Linder being a year younger than Lord, a fact which astounds me. Desmond Llewelyn made his debut in the previous movie but this is where he truly became the Q we know and love. In perhaps Guy Hamilton’s cleverest stroke he told Llewelyn to play the role like he had contempt for Bond, confusing Desmond who said “What? But everyone loves Bond, why wouldn’t I like him?” before Hamilton replied with “Because he doesn’t bring your gadgets back in one piece” and with that bit of direction the friendly antagonistic relationship between Bond and the Quartermaster that defined Q’s character was born and he became the most beloved character of the franchise.

Mentioning Q I guess we have to talk about the iconic Aston Martin DB5. It’s such a beautiful car and the gadgets, especially the ejector seat, are superb. The actual chase leading up to the ejector seat moment and following on from it is rather disappointing however and we’ll have to wait a few more years to get a truly great car chase in cinema. The Aston Martin DB5 is the most popular car in Bond lore, and I do love it although it’s not my favourite, but I do hate its use in the Brosnan and Craig movies. It wasn’t so bad in Piece’s movie actually as while he did drive the Aston in a “look he’s Bond, honest!” way he later got his own great car to rival the DB5 whereas in the Craig movies it feels like they are constantly trying to remind us of better Bond movies and use the DB5 to syphon our goodwill from Goldfinger and Thunderball into the newer films rather than make us like them for what they are. Also Connery had a car, Moore had his Lotus, Dalton got his own cool Aston, Piece had his own, so why can’t Craig get his own signature car rather than ripping off Connery? And don’t even get me started on the fact it’s full of gadgets in Skyfall despite not having met Q yet…. But I’ll get to that when I come to the Craig era…

So I like the car but I like the scene where Q presents it to Bond even more. The “Ejector seat, you must be joking?” “I never joke about my work 007” exchange would be my favourite of the movie if there wasn’t a better one later on. Llewelyn’s deadly serious, almost angry, reply and Connery’s fading smile are simply perfect. My favourite lines of dialogue of course come from the famous laser scene and it’s also my favourite scene of the film too. Bond is in real peril, the most we’ve seen yet in a movie, and he’s against a villain who doesn’t want information, doesn’t want to recruit him, doesn’t want to talk and simply wants him dead in an entertaining fashion and Bond has no way to get out of it. No deux ex machina gadgets, nobody coming to his aid, just two words he overheard earlier and doesn’t know the meaning of. All he has is a bluff and as we saw earlier Goldfinger is not a good card-player and Bond has him beat. It’s such a gripping scene sold so well by everyone involved, especially by Bert Kwouk’s Mr Ling who walks back into shot upon hearing the words “Operation Grandslam” and I adore how it’s contrasted by Goldfinger who adopts a pokerface, trying not to give out any signals, whereas Mr Ling gives the game away.

I want to talk briefly about Ken Adams sets as he returned to the franchise for this movie and again they are beautiful. The set in the laser scene and his Fort Knox are just amazing, but the one I simply love is the set used when Goldfinger is talking to the mobsters about his plan. Adams has rotating pool tables, automatic shutters and an opening floor with a mechanical model of Fort Knox. We are a couple of movies away from his real masterpiece, but this is simply fantastic.

Sadly that set is displayed during the worst scene in the movie. Goldfinger tells the annoying mobsters, complete with 1920’s Chicago accents and terrible dialogue “The floor’s moving” “What’s going on?” “Turn on the lights”, about his plan and he kills the guy who wants no part of it (I do love that the turned him and the car he was murdered in into a cube, that was amazingly horrible) but then he kills the mobsters who wanted in on the plan too, so what was the point of the scene?! I get it was so Bond, and the viewers, would know what Goldfinger’s plan was, or at least his fake plan, but it was so badly written and thought-out. We have had three Bond movies in three years, with the fourth movie released the following year and I am thinking that maybe they are trying to do too much too soon and are making sloppy writing mistakes like this. Also Oddjob, you know I love you, but I do not believe you would be willing to be blown up by an atom bomb to protect Goldfinger’s plan, especially when it had already failed by that point.

Lastly I wanted to say how much I liked the pre-title sequence and I really enjoy when Bond movies give us a mini-story unrelated to the rest of the plot in a "Here's Bond, he's awesome, now onto the film proper" way. The most recent pre-title sequence not connected to the story was way back in A View to a Kill and I think it's about time they brought them back.

I do have some flaws with this film and having watched three Bond movies in four days now I was worried I might be getting too much of a good thing, but Goldfinger is still enjoyable even after having watched it some twenty something times. Let’s see if that continues with Thunderball…

8/10- It’s Goldfinger! What else is there to say? While it’s a weaker movie compared to From Russia with Love it’s one of the very best of the franchise. Try not to overthink things and just enjoy all the famous scenes.

Best quote: “Do you expect me to talk?”, “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!”

Best scene: It’s the laser scene. I know, shocker.

Kick-ass moment: Bond killing the guy by hitting the light into the bathtub. “Shocking. Positively shocking.”

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we enter 1965 with killer go-go girls in an exploitation cult classic.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Director: Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood

This is the man with no name. Danger fits him like a glove.

Okay so it’s a spaghetti western and not an action movie, but Leone’s ‘Dollars Trilogy’ with their Mexican stand-offs and violent gun battles really helped influence later movies that I will be talking about. John Woo’s heroic bloodshed films nearly all have a Mexican standoff at some point and Antonio Banderas’s mysterious mariachi player who comes into town and finds himself in trouble is similar to Eastwood’s the Man with No Name, who funnily enough has a name in all three movies, here it is ‘Joe’. Also when talking about the best movie shoot-outs you need to mention The Wild Bunch, which is also a western and a movie I’ll be writing about later, so if that western is fair game then so I feel is A Fistful of Dollars. Also reviewing this means I get a break between Bond movies. Lastly I wanted to include this film as I loved it and well, it’s my blog so there.

From director Sergio Leone, who is a legend despite only directing seven movies, comes his second picture in what is basically an unofficial remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Kurosawa himself said A Fistful of Dollars “is a good movie, but it’s MY movie” and he even won a case against Leon’s movie and got an out-of-court settlement. What Fistful lacks in originality it does make up for however in style and the superb direction of Leone. This is an Italian movie filmed in Spain and the director and star Clint Eastwood had to communicate via one of the movie’s stuntmen who could speak both English and Italian. Indeed the movie was filmed in silent with actors having to dub their own lines in afterwards. Yet none of that matters or hurt the movie as Leone was a master visual storyteller.

Leone’s style is perfectly complimented by the great Ennio Morricone’s fantastic score. Morricone might just be my favourite film composer of all time and I can’t imagine these movies working without his music and it’s what I hear when I think of westerns. I mentioned in my review of North by Northwest how much I respected Alfred Hitchcock for making Cary Grant’s wait for the mysterious George Caplan by the side of the highway so, so long and building up an incredible amount of tension by doing so, well Leone may well do that even better that the great Hitchcock, best shown in Once Upon a Time in the West’s opening scene and the three way shoot-out in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. However Leone has said one of the reasons why some of those scenes are so long is because he didn’t want the music to end and with a score this good who can blame him? Leone considered music to be such a huge part of his movies and really this could almost work as a silent movie in many regards. In the opening scene you know what Marisol (Marianne Koch) is thinking just with her facial expressions, tears and hopeful looks to Joe alone.

You have Leone and Morricone who are two thirds of what make these movies so iconic, but the last part of the package is the superb Clint Eastwood in the role he was born to play. I know I use the word “cool” a lot, but when you are talking about Sean Connery’s James Bond, Steve McQueen on a Triumph motorbike or Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’ how can you not help but use that word to describe them? Eastwood’s cool, quiet, laconic portrayal fit Leone’s style like a glove. Leone said of Clint’s acting style “More than an actor, I needed a mask, and Eastwood, at that time, had only two expressions: with hat and no hat.”, and I get what he means as he needed a kind of blank canvas for which he could add expression onto with his direction or later with the score or editing, but it still sells Eastwood short on how great he was. For starters the look of the character, besides the poncho, was all Eastwood who bought the spurs, the gun holster, the gun prop, the jeans, the cigars and the hat. I just found out reading on Wikipedia that Eastwood is actually a non-smoker and that blew me away as if there was ever an advert to make smoking look cool (and sadly I’m sure there is) it’s Clint smoking his famous cigars. But no, Eastwood hated the taste of the cigars and reckons the foul taste put him in the right frame of mind for his character. Because The Man with no Name is so laconic it’s easy to overlook Eastwood’s performance, but he can convey more emotion in just the squint of his eye than some actors are capable of with their whole bodies and words.

The rest of the cast are all solid. Gian Marie Volonte’ is perfectly loathsome as villain as Ramon Rojo and I really hated (in the best possible way) Esteban Rojo played by Sieghardt Rupp, with his horrific laugh and smugness when Eastwood’s ‘Joe’ was being beaten up and I was so glad when innkeeper Silvantio (Jose Calvo) shoot him dead. Calvo and Joseph Egger brought real warmth to their roles, as innkeeper and undertaker respectively and were likeable being Joe’s only allies in the film. I feared that Silvantio would be killed due to his relationship with Eastwood which shows how much I liked him. The aforementioned Marianne Koch as Ramon’s kidnapped girlfriend and hostage brought a real vulnerability to her Marisol but I really liked how her weak female character was balanced out by Margarita Lozano’s strong Consuelo Baxter. Consuelo was the wife of the Baxter gang’s leader and sheriff, but she was the matriarch and really called the shots in the gang (it’s telling that Eastwood always spoke to her and not her husband) and Ramon even asks the sheriff if he needs his wife’s permission at one point too. She’s by far the best female character we’ve seen in a movie on my list so far and she was my second favourite person in the film, behind Joe.

I haven’t even touched on the plot to this film, which to be frank is really straightforward and secondary to the characters. It starts when Eastwood’s character rides into a town, a town which he is told by the bell-ringer, can either make you rich or get you killed. The Man with no Name decides to get try and get rich and play two warring families, the Rojos and the Baxters, against each other and get money from both, befriending both sides and crossing, double-crossing and triple-crossing them all. This all goes well until he sees the kidnapped Marisol, who has been pried away from her husband and child, and he decides he has to free her from Ramon’s clutches which has huge consequences. It’s kind of a basic plot, a real familiar one if you’ve seen Yojimbo, but I was engaged and the movie sped by for me so I liked it. I have to mention the huge gunfight, actually a “gun massacre” would be more accurate, at the end where the Rojos gun down the Baxters as it features an incredible stunt of an actor on fire for a really long time. I had to rewind it as I thought maybe I had not seen it properly and it was just a dummy on fire, but nope, it was a stuntman walking out of a burning house, on fire, and falling on the floor, still on fire, for ages before the camera cut. It was great stuff. At the time of release critics called it overly violent, and it was violent for the time, but none of it is violence for violence sakes and all the deaths matter in this movie.

I first, and last, watched this trilogy around fifteen years ago and while I loved the last movie, I didn’t enjoy the first two nearly as much, but this time around I really had fun watching A Fistful of Dollars and am now looking forwards to seeing For a Few Dollars More.

8/10- A really enjoyable western that introduced the world to Clint Eastwood and his famous Man with No Name character. Great film.

Best quote: “Get three coffins ready.” …. “My mistake, make that four coffins.”

Best scene: In between the two quotes above we have Clint Eastwood asking four of the Baxter gang to apologise to his mule and then shooting them all when they don’t. It’s a fantastic introduction to this character.

Kick-ass moment: Innkeeper Silvantio has been tied up by the Rojo gang and is about to be whipped but just when you expect to hear the crack of the whip you instead hear an explosion of dynamite as The Man with No Name has returned to save the day.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow what we’ll be talking about will be “Shocking. Positively shocking.”

From Russia with Love (1963)

From Russia with Love (1963)

Director: Terrence Young

Starring: Sean Connery

James Bond is Back!

After the death of Dr No Spectre leader, a mysterious cat stroking man who’s face is never seen and name is never uttered, wants two things. First he wants to steal the Lektor, a decoding device from the Russians, and then revenge by having James Bond killed. Spectre member #5 Kronsteen, a championship chess player, devices a plan to lure MI6 and James Bond into stealing it for them whilst Spectre #3, Soviet-defector Rosa Klebb, tricks Russian agent Tatiana Romanova into helping Bond and hires assassin Red Grant to shadow the pair, kill them and bring the Lektor to Spectre.

From Russia with Love is regarded to be the best Bond movie of the series by many people. It’s the favourite Bond film of Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton, and Daniel Craig along with the creators of the series. Even if it’s not your favourite it’s hard to argue that it is not the best and that the case for me. It’s not my favourite but it’s the most perfect. It’s funny that when I was a child I really didn’t like this one, I think I found it boring, but as I’ve got older, and perhaps wiser, I now view this as the classic it is. It’s not just the best Bond, it’s one of the best British movies ever made in my book.

So why didn’t I like this when I was young? Well I think that’s because I used to prefer the huge bombastic larger than life movies like The Man with the Golden Gun or A View to a Kill over the more serious spy movies such as Living Daylights or this whereas now I’ve done a 180 on all of those films. Secondly I think I just didn’t quite follow the plot properly honestly and even when I last watched it just prior to the release of Skyfall I still think I didn’t quite get it perfectly. Indeed it was only when I watched it again for this review that everything finally fell into place rather than me just enjoying the set pieces but being a little confused as to why the things on screen were happening.

This movie’s plot is complex. It throws you into a world of spies in Istanbul, where everybody is keeping tabs on everybody and espionage not only happens but is expected. When Bond first arrives he tells his driver that they are being followed, but the driver already knows this and is used to it. You are deep in this cold war between the East and West and I just love it. It feels like this world is real as if we are just watching one week’s events in Istanbul and the excitement we see could just be any other day to the locals. However with this complex world where Bulgarians are working with Russians who keeping tabs on the Turkish working for the British and SPECTRE is trying to play all sides off against each other you do need to pay attention. There is a scene where Bond says to his contact in Turkey, Ali Kerim Bey (played with amazing charm by Pedro Armendariz) that they need to tell Tatiana (Daniela Bianchi; voiced by Barbra Jefford) what day they are going to steal the Lektor from the Russian embassy and Kerim asks “the 13^th?” but Bond instead says the 14^th. I only just got that Bond told Tatiana the wrong day on purpose as he didn’t fully trust her and so he could steal it easier having given her the incorrect date rather than 007 just being superstitious about the number thirteen.

Although the plot is basically everyone chasing around a macguffin it’s so intricately well told and full of great locations and set pieces that you can’t help but be wrapped up in it. Some have criticized the gypsy camp scenes and thus the fight between the two girls as an unnecessary side-story, but I feel like it just adds flavour to the movie. I love the European setting in this film as not only does it differ so greatly from its predecessor but I just find all the Istanbul architecture so claustrophobic, like you believe spies could be hidden anywhere. I especially like the scene where Bond has agreed to meet Tatiana but is followed there by Grant and the Bulgarian guy into the cathedral while a tour is going on. With four people all with differing motivations it feels so dangerous and the location really enhances that feeling. Heck I didn’t even miss superb set designer Ken Adams who was absent for this film. You don’t need sets when the real locations are this good I suppose? But as much as I liked Istanbul the gypsy scene gives us a nice change and also provides us with our first good action set-piece in a Bond movie with the shoot-out.

The shoot-out is also when we get to hear the 007 Theme (not to be confused with the James Bond Theme) which I adore and really, really wish a new Bond movie would bring it back. It’s great that John Barry brought in a new theme, but he still relies way too heavy on Monty Norman’s Bond theme and he plays it it at rather random times instead of using it during exciting action scenes where it works best. Lionel Bart composed Matt Munro’s ‘From Russia with Love’, which again I simply love. I can’t quite say why but underneath all the espionage I feel there is a romantic aspect to this movie and Matt Munro’s crooner style really compliments that. Better still is the theme that plays over the title credits- starting with Barry’s short but brief ‘James Bond is Back’ then transitioning to the instrumental ‘From Russia with Love’ then into the ‘James Bond Theme’. It might just be my favourite Bond credits theme. The credits themselves are simply sublime with Robert Brownjohn (replacing Maurice Binder who briefly fell out with EON) having the frankly genius idea to project the credits onto the midriffs of belly dancers. If that alone doesn’t justify the gypsy scene then I don’t know what does.

Prior to the credits we get the pre-title sequence which gives us a fascinating look at the inner-workings of Spectre and a fake-out where it looks like Bond has been killed by Red Grant before revealing that the dead man was just wearing a 007 mask. How an Earth did they find a guy for that role? “So you want me to put on the mask while an assassin tries to get me as quick as possible….. This does sound dangerous, are you sure I’ll be fine?” We don’t actually get to see the real Bond until the 19^th minute which shows great restraint and it is to this film’s credit that we don’t miss him.

It’s often said that Goldfinger created the so-called “Bond formula” but really that all began here. This movie introduced the pre-title sequence, introduced Desmond Llewelyn as Q (though he still wasn’t referred to us such nor had any personality yet), gave us our first gadget, and perhaps his best ever, with the exploding briefcase, gave us a great villain in Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) with her infamous spiked shoe, a beautiful Bond girl and the best henchman in the series in my opinion with Robert Shaw’s Red Grant. Grant as the evil mirrored image of James Bond is superb, you believe he could have been a 00 agent had things worked out differently and I really like how’s kept in the shadows the whole movie, observing Bond and even saving his life during the gypsy gun battle, but not revealing himself until near the end. Grant also has the incredible fight with Bond on the Siberian Express train and after a decade of shaky-cam and terrible editing this fight looks even better today in 2017 appearing brutal and real. The fight is the movie’s highlight. They have tried to replicate the train fight at least five times in Bond movies, including the latest Spectre, and have had several a tall blonde henchman in the Red Grant style even more times and none compare to him or the fight.

Elsewhere in the cast Bernard Lee and Louis Maxwell are perfect as always and the part where Moneypenny overhears Bond telling Tatiana a salacious story about him and M in Tokyo before being cut off is sold expertly by Maxwell’s widening eyes. Armendariz gives so much life to Kerim, I want this guy to be my father, and he is my favourite ally Bond ever has. But of course as he’s an ally he has to die and this dath hurts you as well as 007. Vladek Sheybal is soooo creepy as Kronsteen he can make your skin crawl, Lotte’s Klebb despite being so short, is always an intimidating presence and Eunice Grayson is fun in her one scene as the returning Sylvia Trench. Sylvia was going to be a regular character as Bond’s lover before becoming the main Bond girl in a future movie but those plans were cut which I think is a bit of a shame as I’d take her over Tiffany Case in Diamonds are Forever. Walter Gottel makes his first appearance in a Bond movie, but not as the General Gogol character from the Moore movies but as a henchman and I never realised how tall he was or how menacing he could be. Lastly of course this movie introduces us to head of SPECTRE Ernst Staveo Blofeld, here just referred to as “#1” and played by Dr No’s Professor Dent Anthony Dawson. The faceless bad guy stroking a white Persian cat is so iconic and this is where it all began. The cat wasn’t a Flemming thing but was created for this movie and it’s a stroke (pun intended) of genius. This, along with Thunderball’s faceless Blofeld, are my favourite incarnations of Bond’s greatest enemy.

So From Russia with Love is a fantastic cold war spy thriller and a movie that set the template for the Bond formula set the standard for every future Bond film to aim and fail to achieve. It also is full of terrific action set-pieces including Bond being attacked (and Connery actually nearly killed) by a helicopter in a clear homage to North by Northwest.

10/10- It may not be my favourite 007 movie but objectively it is the best.

Best quote: “The mechanism is… Oh James. James, will you make love to me all the time in England?” “Day and night. Go on about the mechanism.”

Best scene: James Bond vs Red Grant on the train.

Kick-ass moment: Bond had been held up a gun point by Grant, mocked for knowing that you shouldn’t drink red wine with fish, and patronisingly called “Old man.” After killing Grant, Bond takes back his money saying “You won’t be needing this… old man.” Yeah!! Geez Grant, calling Bond old man?! He’s got 22 more films to come yet!

I’ll be going into 1964 with my next article but before I do so it’d be wrong not to at least mention another movie.

The Great Escape (1963)

Director: John Sturges

Starring: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson, Richard Attenborough, Donald Pleasense, James Coburn, Gordon Jackson

From a barbed-wire camp to a barbed-wire country.

The Great Escape is not an action movie obviously but it is one of the most exciting movies I have ever seen so I was tempted to include it. It features an all-star cast, several of whom we’ll be seeing again in these reviews including Donald Pleasense, Gordon Jackson, Richard Attenborough and most notable Charles Bronson and of course Steve McQueen. I said before that Connery encapsulates cool so perfectly, well McQueen perhaps does so even more and along with the guy we’ll be talking about next time, is the coolest guy in cinema history. Here he turns up to a prisoner of war camp in casual clothes and baseball glove and nobody bats an eyelid because of how awesome he is. Then of course there’s the motorbike chase, which is why I am mentioning it, as while the rest of the film is a tense thriller that chase is pure action. McQueen requested the chase for his character and even played one of the Nazi’s chasing him at one point too. Of course the big stunt where his character Hilts jumps one of the two barbed-wire fences to freedom was done by stuntman Bud Ekins, but you know McQueen really wanted to do it himself. It’s a fantastic stunt and you are crushed when he fails to get over the second fence, but then when Hilts is captured and put into confinement once again and bounces his baseball of the cell walls you are uplifted again as you know that his spirit, and that of the allied forces, will never be broken.

10/10- if you haven’t see this movie please do. It’s one of my favourite films and is the UK’s favourite Boxing Day movie.

Next time in A Bloody Tomorrow the trifecta of coolest actors ever is complete as 'The Man with No Name' comes to town.

Dr No (1962)

Dr No (1962)

Director: Terrence Young

Starring: Sean Connery

NOW meet the most extraordinary gentleman spy in all fiction!...JAMES BOND, Agent 007!

Strangways, a British agent, goes missing in Kingston Jamaica whilst investigating the mysterious Dr No and so the British secret service send in their best spy to find out what happened- Bond. James Bond.

So we get to the first movie in the long-running and hugely successful James Bond franchise in this big-screen adaptation of the sixth 007 book. Wait, why did they start with the sixth book and not the first? It’s a long story. The short version is that James Bond author Iam Flemming had been trying to get his spy series of books adapted into live action for quite a while and in his haste to make it happen he sold the rights to his first book to an American TV channel who would go on to give agent 007 his live action debut in Casino Royale. Of course with it being a US production James Bond had to be turned into an American, changed to Jimmy Bond, whereas Felix became the Brit instead. The black-and-white live TV special wasn’t very good to be honest and it’s only really notable, aside from being 007’s first live action production, because it stars the great Peter Lorre as villain La Chiffe.

Later Ian Flemming sold the rights to the rest of the books he had written to Harry Saltzman and Albert, Cubby, Broccoli who went on to form EON, the studio that produces the movies to this day. Unable to get Casino Royale to the big screen due to not having the rights to Casino Royal why then did they chose to adapt the sixth book rather than the second Live and Let Die? I’m not sure, but I reckon they just fancied a holiday in Jamaica.

When it comes to Dr No there are those who think it’s one of the very best 007 adventures and those who think it’s only really notable for being the first. I’m kind of in between ranking it around the middle of the franchise. One thing everybody agrees upon however is that Sean Connery IS James Bond. This is his movie. Connery just exudes screen presence, is coolness personified and is just captivating to watch. Ian Flemming was initially against the casting of Sean Connery as his secret agent but Sean hit the floor running and completely nailed the part perfectly and Flemming himself was so impressed by Connery that in the later Bond books he actually gave 007 a Scottish background.

Connery’s depiction is suave, charming, cocky and he’s also a bit of a ruthless bastard. The best example of how much of a bastard 007 is in Dr No is with the character Miss Taro, played by the stunningly gorgeous Zena Marshall. Bond suspects that Taro is working for henchman Professor Dent and thus working for main villain Dr No so he accepts an invite from Taro to go round to her house in order to get closer to unravelling the mystery disappearance of Agent Strangways. On route to her home 007 is attacked by assassins the Three Blind Mice, who try to ram Bond off the road. The mini chase, complete with appalling rear projection it must be said, ends when the hearse the Mice are in drives slightly off the road and explodes for literally no reason. It does provide us with our first great Bond quip however “I think they were on their way to a funeral.” With his suspicions proved by the failed ambush he arrives at Taro’s house, much to her shock, sleeps with her and under the pretence of calling for a taxi to take them both out for dinner phones his own agents to arrest her. It’s cold and he kind of deserves it when Taro angrily spits on him right after.

His ruthlessness his also on display in the scene that directly follows too. Bond had overheard Taro on the phone speaking to somebody earlier and knows that whoever it was that called Taro is coming to her house to kill him. Bond is prepared though and makes the bed to trick his would-be assassin into believing he is in sleeping in. In a great long shot by Young we see Bond set the scene in the living room. He pours two glasses of wine and places them on a table near the sofa, he ruffles the cushions to make it appear as if it were used, throws his jacket onto it and then put on a record- Underneath the Mango Tree, which seems to be the only song in Jamaica in 1962.

Bond then hides behind the bedroom door waiting and calmly playing solitaire to pass the time when sure enough Professor Dent comes in and shoots the bed six times. James then pushes the door closed, and points his Walther PPK at Dent, demands the Professor put down his own firearm and questions him on information about Agent Strangways and Dr No. During the questioning 007 almost seems uninterested in the answers and it looks like he’s not even paying attention, being sloppy even, as we see Dent’s foot pull his gun closer and closer. The henchman eventually picks up the weapon and fires it at 007 only to hear the click from the empty chamber. We, along with Dent, have vastly underestimated Bond, who had counted how many shots had been fired and he reveals this by calmly telling Dent “That’s a Smith & Wesson and you’ve had your six” before shooting him dead. MGM studios supposedly wanted this scene where Bond shoots the unarmed man cut from the movie, but thankfully Cubby and Saltzman did not balk as it perfectly encapsulates Bond as the “blunt weapon” that Flemming describes him as in the novels.

James Bond was also blessed by his character getting perhaps the best on-screen introduction in cinema. We see the back of a man playing cards against a beautiful lady. The woman has just lost a hand and asks for more money and the camera then cuts to the hands of the mystery man who is taken a cigarette out of his cigarette case. The man somewhat mockingly compliments the woman with the line “I admire your courage Miss?” “Trench” the woman replies. “Sylvia Trench. And I admire your luck Mr?” “Bond.” It’s at that moment when we first see the face of Sean Connery. “James Bond” continues the secret agent and the words exit his mouth along with cigarette smoke and right on cue the James Bond theme starts to play.

It’s just a magnificent magical moment where everything came together from the delivery by Connery, to Monty Norman’s legendary theme, to the wise choice of director Terrence Young, my favourite man to helm a 007 movie, to hide Bond’s face until just the right time.  I also love that the only reason Bond says his name in that trademark way of his is because Sylvia Trench did it first. In fact later on Honey when asked what her name says “Ryder. Honey Ryder. And you?” and 007 simply replies with “James.” Harry Lime’s arrival in The Third Man and Jessica Rabbit’s are really the only character introductions I can think that match it, well apart from Honey Ryder’s an hour later of course…

While James Bond’s introduction is a fantastic moment Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in that white bikini, a change from the books where she was naked, is THE Bond moment. It’s an image so famous and well known that the Bond movies themselves have twice paid homage to it first with Halle Berry in Die Another Day and then with Daniel Craig himself in Casino Royale. It’s a great arrival and the dialogue between her and Bond is gold with Connery answering Honey’s question about whether he too is looking for shells with “No, I’m just looking”. Ursula Andress, or more accurately the woman who voiced her- Nikki van der Zyl (who also voiced Sylvia Trench), is given a good line herself responding to Bond’s claim that he promises not to steal her shells with a strong, confident “I promise you won’t either.” It’s such an iconic, sexy moment that I believe people therefore overrate the actual character of Honey Ryder and claim she’s the best Bond girl of the series.

I get that in 60’s Britain when wearing a miniskirt was seen as risqué that Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in a white bikini like a goddess would have been breath-taking but in reality Honey is given nothing to do in this film and were she not Flemming character you’d accuse the movie creators of including her solely to give Bond a woman to make love to at the end. She’s also not really got much of character either and what she does have is almost a childlike naivety, which makes the fact Bond sleeps with her a little creepy in retrospect. She does utter a quite bizarre line about having seen a mongoose dance (in Jamaica?!!) and a sun-stroked scorpion sting itself and there is a subplot about how Dr No murdered her Father but it’s never really explored.

It’s also just after her introduction that the rest of the movie becomes less fun for me. Aside from the wonderful scene where Dr No is dinner host to 007 I don’t find the last fifty minutes nearly as engaging as the first hour. The scenes prior to Crab Key island where Bond is, shockingly, actually doing detective work I find quite thrilling and really make this movie stand out compared to the bombastic affairs the franchise falls into in a couple of years’ time. There is also quite a lot of silliness in the latter half too. Now obviously to be a 007 fan you need to embrace a lot of camp silly aspects but why would Dr No abduct Bond and Honey, treat them both like they are guests at a hotel (I do love that actually), lock them in a room with no way out yet still feel the need to drug them? Why was Honey tied down to the floor at the end in 1cm of water? Are they trying to drown her? If so it looks like it will take hours! Then there’ the “dragon”. Sigh.

We first hear about the dragon from local fisherman Quarrel (John Kitzmiller), who prior to that had been a bit of a badass, highlighted in a moment when a camera woman (again voiced by Nikki van der Zyl) stabs him in the face with the broken camera bulb and he doesn’t even flinch. Yet when he gets to Crabkey Quarrel becomes a moron with this dragon nonsense. He sees clear car tire tracks in the stand and mistakes them for dragon prints (we all know dragons always drag their feet when they walk, right) and then later we see what is clearly some kind of tank with a flamethrower attached and Quarrel exclaims “If that’s not a dragon then what is it?!” You’re an idiot Quarrel. Of course he dies just after due to the dragon and becomes the first in a long tradition of 007 allies who are killed. I do have to admit however that Connery’s fantastic incredulous delivery of “What?!” when Quarrel first mentions the dragon makes me laugh as it perfectly matched my own thoughts about such a preposterous concept.

Speaking of the latter part of the movie I am also always completely confused about what Dr No’s actual plan is. Is he trying to shoot down missiles? Launch his own nuke? What do all the valves the Bond turns actually do? It’s all very confusing, but Dr No himself is fantastic. A bit less outlandish than future Bond villains, which says a lot seeing as he has metal hands, but I love Joseph Wiseman’s portrayal and as I said the dinner scene is riveting.

I especially love it when Bond goes to smash the bottle of wine over a henchman when Dr No says that bottle is classic ’55 and it would be a shame to waste it before 007 proves that there is nobody as cultured as himself by saying that he prefers the ’53. Bond then tries to get under the scaly skin of Dr No more by asking if the toppling of US missiles really compensates for the lack of hands. It’s excellent. Bond suggests that No must be working for the East and then we get two lines that really define all our future Bond villains. First Wiseman replies with “East. West. They are just points of a compass, each as stupid as the other” setting a standard that every Bond villain has no allegiance to any country or anyone but themselves. Dr No instead says that he instead is a member of S.P.E.C.T.R.E (SPecial Executives for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), who would be the villains in all but one Connery Bond movie. Dr No invites Bond to join SPECTRE and 007 says he “wouldn’t mind joining the Revenge department, starting with the man who killed Strangways.” This snappy dialogue and cool-under-pressure Bond is just wonderful. Bond then utters the second line that defines future villains with “World domination. The same old dream.” I had no idea when first watching this that Dr No, and Miss Taro too, were meant to be Chinese and it really is quite laughable. It wouldn’t be the last time someone was meant to look like a different race in the series- I’m looking at you Japanese Sean Connery…

The rest of the cast are all well-acted be it Anthony Dawson’s creepy reptilian Prof Dent, Jack Lord who is perhaps the best Felix Leiter and you can see his Felix and Bond becoming the great friends they are in the novels so it’s a pity (not to mention Lord’s stupidity) that it never happened. Bernard Lee is superb as M and Louis Maxwell perfect as Miss Moneypenny and her flirtations with Connery are just magical. However Major Bothroyd AKA Q is played by Peter Burton and it won’t be until next time that Desmond Llwelyn takes up the mantle and a movie after that he really becomes Q and gives him the frustrated character we all know and love. Also the only gadget Q gives Bond here is his signature Walther PPK (Sam Mendez would love such a vanilla Bond no doubt).

I said in my review of North by Northwest that it felt like that movie was James Bond 0 but that is also true here too in many ways, despite it actually being the first. There being no proper Q being a key example but there is also no pre-title sequence, something that comes to define a Bond flick. Instead we go straight to the gun barrel sequence (with stuntman Bob Simmons being the one actually firing the gun rather than Connery) and credit sequence. In those credits we can see all the usual people involved in making a 007 flick but they haven’t yet mastered their craft. Peter Hunt is the editor, but some of his jump cuts here are simply horrific, John Barry scores the movie but he is really over-reliant on using Monty Norman’s theme tune and Underneath the Mango tree and hasn’t yet found his sound and even the titles themselves created by Maurice Binder are not a patch on what he would later do. Director Terrence Young does an excellent job, costume designer Tessa Welborn must get credit for designing Honey’s iconic white bikini and then there is set designer Ken Adams. I love him. He would go on to bigger and better things in later instalments too but his sets here are wonderful.

The simple scene where Dr No gives Prof Dent a tarantula to murder Bond (notable for being our first instance of a villain using an animal to kill 007 rather than a, oh I dunno, a gun? And for the fact tarantula’s are not deadly to humans) could have just been done in a forgettable office or similar room but the set Adams created with the empty hall and the light coming in from the grated grill on the ceiling makes this far more memorable than it likely was on the page.

All in all Dr No is an enjoyable but flawed Bond film. I love the first half, but only enjoy parts of the second and I never chose to watch this one unless I am doing a James Bond marathon.

Best quote: “You looking for shells?” “No. I’m just looking.”

Best scene: Bond coldly shoots Prof Dent.

Kick-ass moment: “Bond. James Bond.”

7/10- A promising start for the James Bond franchise featuring a couple of iconic moments.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow...

...James Bond will return and we'll see the introduction of one of the most famous and imitated villains in cinema

North by Northwest (1959)

A Bloody Tomorrow

I am a huge fan of action movies. From classics like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon to the so-bad-they’re good movies like Con Air or any movie with Jean Claude Vam Damme in! From sci-fi action flicks like Aliens or Predator to adventure movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark. From your secret agents Ethan Hunt and James Bond to policeman who don’t play by the rules but get results damn it such as Harry Callahan or Axel Foley. I love action. The chases, the shoot-outs, the combat and of course the cheesy one liners!

I also have a lot of spare time recently so I decided that it might be fun to try and watch every notable action movie in chronological order from the 60’s to the present day. Starting with your spy thrillers and spaghetti westerns of the 60’s to the gritty violence and Blaxploitation of the 70’s to the over-the-top one man armies of the 80’s, the explosive and silly thrills of the 90’s, the shaky cam mayhem of the 00’s ending with your Fury Roads, John Wick’s and the better-than-they-have-any-right-to-be straight to video releases of today.

I’ll also be dipping my toes into world cinema, especially Hong Kong movies of course, so I’ll be talking about the hard hitting Bruce Lee, the incredible stunts and comedy of Jackie Chan to John Woo’s heroic bloodshed classics. You might have guessed I am something of a John Woo superfan…

So join me in a journey through time with the best movies from Arnie, Sly, Willis, Gibson, Reeves, Lee, Li, Chan, Yeoh, Seagal, JCVD and Chuck Norris- a man so tough that when he does division there are no remainders.

I was going to start this list with the movies of Akira Kurosawa, especially Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo but I don’t actually own any of his movies with the exception of one, which we’ll get to much later. So instead I’ll start with the Alfred Hitchcock classic North by North West

North by Northwest (1959)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Starring: Cary Grant

Alfred Hitchcock takes you.... North by Northwest!

A waiter at a posh hotel asks out loud if a Mr George Caplan is in the room whilst at the same time Roger Thornhill beckons the same waiter over to send a telegram. Two thugs are also in the hotel searching for George Caplan and thus mistake the hapless Roger Thornhill as the man they are looking for and from this simple case of mistaken identity comes a thrilling cat and mouse chase through the United States.

Cary Grant is at his charming best as Roger Thornhill, the unfortunate victim of the mistaken identity, and he’s so naturally suave and charismatic that it’s not too hard to see why he’s mistaken to be a spy by the movies villain, the excellently named Phillip Vandamm. James Mason is a delight in the role “That’s not very sporting of you, using real bullets”, and his henchman Leonard is really well played too by Martin Landau who gives his character a subtle creepy menace throughout the film. Of course this being a Hitchcock movie you need a blonde female and this time the role was played by the excellent Eva Marie Saint who plays Clark Kent’s adopted mother in the new Superman movies. Perhaps best of all is Jessie Royce Landis playing Thornhill’s sarcastic Mother who has no time and tolerance for her son’s far-fetched stories about gangsters trying to murder him, even going so far as to outright ask the thugs in a crowded elevator “You’re not trying to kill my son are you?”

I’ll be straight up and say that I adore this film and it may be my second favourite Hitchcock movie behind the criminally underrated Dial M for Murder. It may be almost sixty years old but aside from some dodgy rear projection shots whenever the characters drive this movie still holds up and is a timeless classic. Okay so it’s more of a thriller than a straight up action movie, but it certainly does have its fair share of exciting moments including one of the greatest scenes ever filmed.

Ah yes that crop-duster scene. Hitchcock was known as the master of suspense and this is the perfect example to show why. Roger Thornhill has arranged to meet the mysterious George Caplan. We the audience know George Caplan doesn’t actually exist and that our hero is heading into a trap, something Thornhill isn’t yet privy too. Thornhill was told to take a bus and get off on a remote road in rural Indiana surrounded by nothing but farms. We have no dialogue or music for the next few minutes and aside from a crop-duster far away in the distance Thornhill is completely alone. Roger waits for Caplan to arrive and sees a car heading down the road, but the car doesn’t stop and drives right past. A second vehicle, this one coming from the other direction, is spotted but it too carries on going and then a minute or so later a truck does the same, covering Thornhill in dirt as it does so. Cary Grant dusts himself off and as the dust settles we aww a black car heading down a small slip road to the highway he is standing on.

A man in a hat gets out as the car drives back down the road it came from. Roger stares at the man and the guy looks back at him. Both stand still either side of the highway in almost a Mexican stand-off kind of way. Thornhill wonders to himself if this man is Caplan and we wonder if this man has been hired by Vandamm to kill him. It’s such a tense scene, but it turns out the man is guilty of nothing more than simply waiting for a bus. Thornhill and the man-who-isn’t-Caplan make awkward small talk about how crop-dusting is a lucrative career. As the bus pulls up the man points out that “the crop-duster is dusting crops where there aren’t no crops” before departing. Thornhill continues to wait, checking his watch to see what the time is wondering where Caplan is and we have a sense of dread that something bad is coming.

Then it happens. The crop-duster ever so slowly descends to ground aiming straight at Thornhill, who only avoids death by leaping out of the way at the last minute. Roger and the audience realise at the same time that this crop-duster is trying to kill him. What follows is a thrilling sequence where Thornhill tries to avoid the gunfire from the plane by hiding in the crops by the side of the road. Roger eventually tries to flag down an oil tanker for help when the plane collides with said tanker in a huge explosion. Other motorists pull up and get out to take a look at the fiery crash and then in one of my favourite action movie clichés (which obviously wasn’t a cliché yet when this film was made) our hero steals the vehicle of one of the shocked motorists who then gives chase shouting about his stolen car.

Altogether from the moment the Cary Grant gets off the bus to when the crop-duster attacks there are six minutes of mostly silent tension. You know an attack is coming but you have no idea where it’s coming from and even after the “dusting crops where there aren’t no crops” line you still don’t figure it out until it’s almost too late. I don’t think many other directors would be brave enough to show such restraint and let the scene play out for as long as it does, but it works wonderfully. The crop-duster attack and the six minutes prior to it are obviously the movies highlight but it’s not the only one by any means and here we also have an exciting end on Mount Rushmore which to my eyes still looks fantastically convincing today however they managed to film it. It would also be wrong not to mention the excellent score by Hitchcock regular Bernard Hemman or the famous opening titles by Saul Bass.

In many ways this movie, featuring a would-be spy (even though he’s actually not) travelling around the country on a train with a beautiful woman and trying to avoid death at the hands of a criminal organisation, feels like it could be James Bond 0. I don’t know if Hitchcock was at all influenced by Ian Flemming’s From Russia With Love but the movie of the same name would certainly be influenced by North by Northwest when it gets made a few years later. Hitchcock was even in the running to direct a James Bond movie at some point and he said that North by Northwest was effectively his Bond film.

Best quote: Now you listen to me, I'm an advertising man, not a red herring. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself "slightly" killed.

Kick-ass moment: The aforementioned crop-duster scene

10/10. A cinema masterpiece.

Speaking of 007… Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow:

“I admire your courage Miss?”

“Trench. Sylvia Trench. And I admire your luck Mr?”

“Bond. James Bond.”