4/4/2023 0 Comments Spectre film timesDiana Rigg played the woman who shows 007 is no commitmentphobe. Had he done more, Lazenby might have developed into a favourite. George Lazenby’s sole appearance wasn’t a bad Bond. ★☆☆☆☆ On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) David Niven saunters unsexily as the retired “Sir James Bond” in this chaotic film. Even a cameo from Orson Welles couldn’t lend lustre to this pointless and unfunny spoof Bond, a dire tongue-in-cheeker which slipped past the franchise control of the producers, Eon. Connery announced his intention to quit after this. This great action movie put Sean’s Bond right back on top, and introduced us to the horribly scarred, Nehru-suit-wearing, cat-stroking master criminal Spectre chief, Blofeld, played by Donald Pleasence. Good stuff here, but the franchise faltered a bit, with long underwater sequences. The evil organisation Spectre had its first appearance in Fleming’s Thunderball novel, and we’d got used to it by now. Photograph: Konig/Rex Shutterstock Thunderball (1965) Those will be covered in future posts.Sean Connery and Honor Blackman in Goldfinger. SPECTRE -and Blofeld- would reappear in 1963’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and 1964’s You Only Live Twice. And the SPECTRE Board Room scenes are both chilling and darkly funny at the same time.ĭon’t believe me? Click here to borrow our copies. Fleming’s usual compelling writing style is at it’s best here, from detailed descriptions of the hijacking and the military efforts to find the bombs, to even humorous offhand observations by the author. The characters are depicted well there’s genuine emotional feelings between Bond and Domino. Plus there’s also some great underwater action sequences (the one where Bond finds the hijacked plane underwater, with its dead crew, will give you nightmares) , culminating in an unexpected climax. Domino is there as the mistress of playboy treasure hunter Emilio Largo…who just happens to be SPECTRE’s top agent and the brains behind the extortion plot. With help from his boss M, Bond deduces that the bombs are somewhere in the Bahamas and, after arriving there, meets up with the sister of one of the hijacked plane’s pilots, (who had been working for SPECTRE), Domino Vitali. The American and British intelligence forces combine to find the bombs in a joint campaign codenamed Operation Thunderball. SPECTRE threatens to destroy two major cites unless their ransom (about 100,000,00 British Pounds) is delivered. Led by their founder and Chairman Ernst Stavro Blofeld (who, strangely enough, shares the same birthdate as Ian Fleming…), the SPECTRE organization steals two nuclear bombs from a hijacked RAF bomber. But their whole set up and origin is first revealed in Thunderball. SPECTRE would only appear in three of Fleming’s Bond novels (plus getting a shout out in 1962’s The Spy Who Loved Me) but they would play a major part in both the books and films. Said organization would be called S.P.E.C.T.R.E., (hereafter, just plain SPECTRE), which stood for “the SPecial Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion”. (McClory & Whittingham, who had also worked on the screenplay with Fleming, were not happy about their work being novelized without their permission and sued him, but that story is better related here.)Īnyway, after rejecting the Russians and the Mafia(!) as potential villains in the original screenplay & subsequent novel -various sources credit Fleming, others McClory-, it was decided that Bond would battle a new, wholly fictional criminal organization consisting of ex intelligence agents, Nazi war criminals, and gangsters from various countries. Delays ensued and Fleming adapted the completed screenplay for his 1961 007 novel Thunderball. In 1958, Bond creator Ian Fleming worked with film producers Kevin McClory and Ivar Bryce, along with writer Ernest Cuneo and screenplay scribe Jack Whittingham, to launch a Bond film with a new story devised by the five of them. (yes, it’s actually an acronym, at least in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels) first appear? The new James Bond 007 thriller SPECTRE hit theatres in the US today after having been released a week earlier in Europe and looks to be another big international hit.
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