I believe TND knew what to do with Brosnan, and for the most part did so in a modern Moore way. Overall, the template for the Brosnan era was explosions, machine guns and puns. The issue is how much that template expanded, meaning if bigger, bigger, bigger means you lose your way. History judges they did with the release of Casino Royale straight after Die Another Day. Brosnan was a hero, until he wasn’t. Changing the focus with a reboot makes the predecessor look like an ill advised disaster, when it’s more like the weather: wait long enough and the fashions will change. We can only exist in the bubble of time we’re given. Brosnan did that and succeeded.
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Great point on Laz. While we’ve often had discussions about what DAF could have been, I don’t think we’ve ever really ended up with that admission. A revenge-filled DAF probably would not have aligned with a late 60s-early 70s cinema landscape birthing real anti-hero stories (The Wild Bunch, French Connection), at least not in the style of film that EON were making.
And being revisionist (isn’t that what we are?!), OHMSS has attained its status in part because of it’s one-off nature - one-off lead, one-off tone, one-off ending. Laz in two undermines the status of the one.
What the DC-era has shown, is that if you really want to commit to an evolving character, you have to plan it out. The (needless) retrofitting of the last four films has added nothing but plot - it hasn’t added to the original characterization done so well in CR.
As for GE - one and done? Maybe. I’ve come around to TND and I buy that it might be his “best” performance in the role, but it’s still a lightweight film, disappearing easily into the other two dozen. And Brozza (like any Bond to be fair) had some great moments scattered across his tenure, I guess his first is the one where both film and star’s performance are most closely aligned. Whipping boy TWINE contains some of his best moments (I really buy his first meeting with Renard) but then the Elektra stuff is pure cobblers. DAD is what it is, but what it’s not, is his fault.
The “Greatest Hits” nature of GE was always going to undermine what followed. If Bond was a band, then the Greatest Hits Album should have been followed by something more…experimental?? But that’s just not EON’s style. Let’s face it, if you like QoS, you do have to admit that there is sense they kind of got there by accident…
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So true.
I totally agree. While popular opinion currently still ranks Craig‘s tenure as THE BEST it will become clear that it mostly was scattershot, taking too long with the unrefined brute, traumatized by a past which seemed to develop in the future, jumping from one crisis to the next without giving this Bond the chance to just be Bond. Thereby the portrayal stayed the same, just as the previous portrayals did. Only this time, it was even more loaded with obvious nostalgia to compensate for any real attempt at new directions.
GE already understood that this is the way to go if you want to keep the masses. Stay on brand.
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Frankly, it’s hard to imagine GE being more ridiculously overpraised than it already is. And to this day, fully half the people I know who praise it, when pressed as to why, say, “The video game was so awesome!” Maybe what Brosnan needed wasn’t so much a better run of Bond films as more consistent quality from the tie-in video games. Then he might be considered the best Bond of all.
Let’s face it, once GE was successful, there was no scenario where Eon and Brosnan were going to just walk away and say, “one is enough.” The only way we’d have gotten a single Brosnan entry is if, God forbid, some real-life tragedy had seen him shuffle off this mortal coil, after which we’d all be saying things like, “After that promising start, he’d have been the greatest Bond ever” and “we’d never have gotten crap like DAD if Brosnan had still been around!”
That said, I agree with the general notion that GE, like CR, represents a classic example of Eon saying “Let’s pull out all the stops on this one and reinvigorate the series,” followed by several years of, “Well that worked, but what do we do now? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?”
It’s often pointed out on this board that the last guy gets dumped on whenever the new one takes the reins. Usually the point is “in time, he’ll be re-appraised and everyone will love him again,” but the reverse can just as easily be true. There’s every reason to believe that a film or two into the next guy’s tenure, people will take a less giddy, more critical view of Craig’s films, and only decades down the road will we know where he really fits in the scheme of things. All this “best ever” and “big shoes to fill” stuff is very much of the moment, and temporary.
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April 14 - I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Tomorrow Never Dies is the Brosnan’s best film.
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I think so, too.
That’s exactly what it was. Once you get past Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, which is as good a two-film stretch as the franchise has ever had, the rest of Craig’s tenure is a massive disappointment, the biggest missed opportunity this franchise has ever witnessed, even moreso than the tragically short tenure that Dalton had. Craig was as good as anyone had ever been in those first two films and was still pretty darn good in Skyfall, but I don’t think that they really had an idea as to where they wanted to take things moving forward with that movie. Did they want the franchise to be more like the earlier films, did they want to continue the experimentation, did they want to do something else? They doubled down on the classic elements following Skyfall, rather than give them their due in that film and then continuing on down the road less traveled, and it resulted in two absolute trainwreck films. Watching that absolutely embarrassing Blofeld scene in NTTD makes one scratch one’s head and wonder how on earth the team that brought us the great moments of CR and QOS could be responsible for that.
As for Brosnan, GE, while somewhat overrated (largely due to the videogame), is still his crowning achievement by an incredible margin. TND has some good, perhaps even great, concepts, but they don’t fully execute on them. GE works for the most part, even if it takes darn near forever to get really moving once it starts. To answer the question, it probably would be viewed better if it was his only one, as it does get dragged down a bit by what follows if you’re looking at the tenure as a whole, but he should be credited for the film and what it did to save the franchise. I think if you plug TND, TWINE, or DAD into that first spot in 1995, rather than GE, the Bond franchise might not have made it much further.
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Ha! Dame Diana miscast? Best actress of the whole endeavor, enduring Lazenby‘s shenanigans should have allowed her to survive the film instead.
But, yes. She is too sprightly and charismatic a person for the novel Tracy. But since Hunt never made the movie Tracy a believable character Rigg had to make Tracy at least fun to watch.
The whole treatment of a bipolar woman whose father‘s idea of curing her is getting an assassin to marry her and turn her into his housewife was stupid in 1969 already. Just like Tracy actually getting cured immediately after one song-sequence. Although it is a terrific song.
Imagine OHMSS starring 1981 Carole Bouquet - she would have been closer to the novel. But the (always overpraised) movie would have fallen flat.
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April 15-
By that rationale, all three actors were miscast. It’s faithful to the spirit of the book and Rigg is far more appealing than book Tracy so why she was cast is obvious.
Tracy I always saw as someone like Claudia Cardinale, with that sadness in her eyes.
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New member here, here are my thoughts:
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For me Diana Rigg’s casting was an improvement over the source material, at least she gave the character a lot more personality and strength, she’s not weak, sappy nonsense. In Diana Rigg’s Tracy, I get why Bond would fall in love with her, but in the novel? I don’t know what Bond saw in her, maybe Bond was old enough and has been hurt by many women before, that in his frustration he decides to marry her?
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And it helped with her great acting caliber, had it been other actresses, I don’t know, this role needs a real acting, and I really liked that she’s not dubbed for the rest of the film.
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If you’re saying that Diana Rigg was miscast, then I should also say the same for Honor Blackman, because she was so different in the novel.
She’s a Lesbian with black hair and violet eyes, and I can’t help but to imagine Elizabeth Taylor in the role.
That’s only my opinion.
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Welcome to commanderbond.net!
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[quote=“secretagentfan, post:169, topic:2299, full:true”]
Oooh SAF, you slipped that in there!! 
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Welcome, MI6HG. Pretty much agree with your post. That said, by the letter of the page, she probably is miscast (like the Blofeld discussion a week ago). Yet, as the script is, it works.
I’d argue that from the franchise’s perspective, her casting was an anomaly. While Blackman was well-known to British audiences, Rigg was an international name, and the biggest star in the lead actress role - a modus operandi that has continued to the day, with that part always going to a “fresh” face (ok, so Ekland is maybe an exception).
It had to be done, to balance Laz, but also to do justice to the most “important” female role up until Vesper Lynd (who if the rumours are true they considered repeating the strategy with names like Charlize Theron thrown about).
For me, the hardest thing about re-reading the novels, is shaking the celluloid image of the characters (and goddam it, OHMSS is a great read!), but in this instance, it’s not a drawback. Rigg was brilliant (in everything she did!), and what Fleming wrote is (rightly) supplanted by the screen characterization.
Miscast, yes. Do I look like I give a damn? No.
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Welcome to the boards, MI6HQ!
In the sense that Diana’s version of Tracy is many times more appealing, compelling and fully developed than what Fleming gave us, yes she’s “miscast.”
As written by Fleming, Tracy was such a pitiful, broken, neurotic wreck of a human being that it’s frankly impossible to believe Bond would have felt anything but revulsion for her. Then she returns from therapy all better; happy and chipper and able to save Bond’s bacon in a car chase. So what the heck, let’s marry her. Tracy is one of the less thought-out women in the Fleming canon, as far as I’m concerned, albeit arguably the biggest hard-luck case our James comes across and therefore his kryptonite, as even he seems to realize (Molony writes that Bond is a sucker for “a bird with a wing down” and Bond ruminates that Tracy has “a wing, maybe two wings down.” So he’s in the soup, for sure).
Diana Rigg’s Tracy is self-destructive, but I never feel like she’s completely shattered. Rather she’s willful and unmanageable, even for an over-controlling Dad who spies on her wherever she goes in the world, tries to pay someone to marry her and knocks her out with a right cross, making a joke about “sparing the rod.” She hates her life as any grown woman not allowed to make her own choices would. But she never totally gives in. When she realizes Draco’s made a deal with Bond, she calls him out on it. When he tells her to obey her husband, she says sure she will, “just as I’ve always obeyed you.” There’s a fire in Diana’s Tracy, an independent spirit that’s almost a curse for a woman living in a time where a “loving” father can say things like, “What she needs is a man to dominate her.”
Then along comes Bond, a free spirit like herself, addicted to excitement and adventure and in his own way as powerful a personality as her Godfather pop. Okay, so he’s also the world’s most famous male chauvinist, but when he finally falls for her and proposes, it’s not based on her beauty or her fortune like every other man in her life, but for her courage, talents and spirit. He loves her for the qualities everyone else wants her to abandon.
Could someone else have played it that way? Maybe. Maybe none of that is even in the script. Maybe it’s 100% a result of Dame Diana’s performance. Maybe it’s not there at all and I’m just projecting it, based on “borrowed” vibes from Emma Peel. All I know is that at a very crucial moment in this film, James Bond is supposed to say, “I know I’ll never find another girl like you” and we are supposed to believe it. I do believe it with Diana Rigg. I’m not at all sure I’d believe it with anyone else.
So yes, I guess she is miscast, but for me it’s one of the two happiest pieces of miscasting that ever graced the Bond franchise. The other? “Roger Moore as Ian Fleming’s James Bond.” If this is how Eon gets things “wrong,” then I say keep those mistakes coming!
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Yes, As everyone’s saying here, she’s miscast but in a Good thing.
Diana Rigg’s Tracy was actually an improvement.
It’s believable that Bond would fall in love with her.
Was she’s a miscast? Yes, as so many other Bond Girls in the series, yes I also felt the same way for Honor Blackman, she’s far from Fleming’s Pussy Galore, even Daniela Bianchi, she’s also different from the novel Tatiana.
But, Tracy in the novels, in my opinion was a weakly written character, that in all of the Bond Girls, it’s she who Bond chose to marry, it’s hard to believe because she’s not that great or special, because Bond had encountered so many great female characters before this woman, and to have Bond marry this woman was somewhat disappointing, she’s not in the same level as Tiffany Case, Domino or even Honey Ryder, or heck even Vesper Lynd.
Unlike in the film, she can do all, she can drive a car, ski, horse ride, and even fight a bad guy! It’s believable that Bond would fall in love for this woman, she’s strong willed and adventurous just like Bond himself.
Thanks for welcoming me here 
I appreciate it.
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I have read only a few, and stopped some more after some chapters.
Since none stayed in my memory the way Fleming’s work did I must conclude: my expectations were not met by the continuation novels.
Also, my expectations were unrealistic.
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First and foremost, Ian Fleming’s novels are set in stone as the James Bond blueprint. However, if we want more Bond content we have no choice but to expand beyond the creator, while attempting to retain his spirit. If I had a closed minded attitude towards continuation novels I would have left a lot of unseen adventures on the table. Some which I rate rather highly.
I can’t take anyone else’s opinion on what is good or bad as definitive without doing my own research - I have to make that judgement myself. And that’s only done via actually reading the books. Nothing much happens in Brokenclaw, for example, and I could understand why people don’t like it. But there’s a particular atmosphere I enjoy in terms of it being a piece of literature.
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April 16 -
As fans we have interest in the continuation novels and read them as Easter Eggs if you will. Fleming’s books are read now in school as examples of pulp fiction with objectively brilliant writing. My son’s class read From Russia With Love along with Chandler and Le Carre. There is not one continuation novel that could live in that company.
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April 16: Not one of the continuation novels is worth reading.
I think a number of the continuation novels are fun distractions if you’ve got time to kill, like maybe on a plane trip or a day at the beach. Certainly I haven’t ever come across one that was worth reading again, but as a one-time thing – and most importantly in a cheap paperback edition – sure, why not. Generally it’s more gratifying to read Fleming, then give it a couple years and come back and read Fleming again. But I know a couple years can be a long time.
What can I say? Sometimes you get the “itch” for more James Bond, and there’s such a thing as “good enough.” A continuation novel works as well as any of the more recent films; entertaining for a couple of hours, but don’t expect anything that’s going to leave a deep impression over the long haul.
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I would agree if we’re talking about post-Gardner. Some of Gardner’s novels are decent reads, especially a few of his earlier ones. After that, it’s been largely a trainwreck. Benson had some good ideas that, in the hands of a better writer, could have made for some really good Bond stories, but if we’re talking about Bond novels that are truly worth reading, that pretty much all came to an end after Gardner.
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