The James Bond series leaps into action with guns blazing as Sean Connery spends several hours talking to British colonial officials and wandering around Jamaica looking for a clue. Then he turns up the heat and starts blasting by sneaking around an island for a while, hoping not to get captured, before getting captured. Okay, it’s a little slow for what we’ve come to expect, but in 1962, this rocked. And even today, Miss Taro and Honey Ryder can still make your palms sweat. I compare the film to the book thruout and look for motifs, iconic elements, and firsts. I compare it to the Flint and Austin Powers movies that it inspired and to other Bond flicks. Note: Some comments are shaken while others are stirred. Somehow I make the bizarre mistake of saying that Sean Connery appeared in Zulu Dawn.
Start the film at the same time you start the commentary. (52 MB)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Hi there. Great commentary, full of fun facts. I can’t help but comment on your assertion that the men in the hearse were Bond’s first on-screen kills. I’ve heard other people say the same thing and it’s just plain wrong. Bond didn’t have anything to do with them being killed. He was being pursued and managed (because his car was small enough) to drive underneath an obstruction in the road (the construction vehicle) and get away. The villains, in a larger car, couldn’t fit underneath and so the driver steered off the road and they died. Even if Bond *hadn’t* been able to drive underneath that construction equipment, the bad guys *still* would have veered off the road to miss it and crashed. Bond didn’t make the bad guys pursue him, he didn’t know there’d be a big crane in the middle of the road, and he sure didn’t make the guy steer off the side of a cliff in a panic.
True, if it were me, I wouldn’t brag “I’ve killed two men.” Scorekeeping is kind of pointless. I think I say something like that about the “first Bond car” too.