For June 12…
Favourite David Arnold Bond score
- Tomorrow Never Dies
- The World is Not Enough
- Die Another Day
- Casino Royale
- Quantum of Solace
0 voters
Favorite Felix Leiter? The one and only David Hedison. He’s a likable actor, and he pulled off the Bond-Leiter friendship angle better than anyone–even in Licence To Kill.
Favorite David Arnold score? He did five solid scores ranging from good to great, but his best one for me is his first–Tomorrow Never Dies. He didn’t know if he would do another Bond film so he pulled out all the stops and swung for the fences, and he proceeded to hit a home run. The entire score is fantastic, with great action tunes (Backseat Driver to name one), laced throughout with the James Bond Theme (which we NEVER get enough of nowadays 
), and capped off by arguably the best non-main theme song of the series in k.d. lang’s terrific Surrender. Arnold was a worthy successor to the incomparable John Barry.
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This was hard, I adored all 5 of Arnold’s scores but in the end it had to be The World Is Not Enough - Caviar Factory is what made me a Bond fan!
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I choose David Hedison as my favorite Leiter. You realy feel the friendship between him and Moore’s Bond. It was also great to see him back in the part in LTK. I only wish he played him also in TLD, instead of the the dull, inconspicuous guy who looked more like some surf dude to me.
The best Arnold score is TND. I listened to the cd before I saw the movie and I immediately got the Bond feeling, which was missing from the previous film.
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Best Leiter is Wright - easily. His actual friendship with Craig and his love for the character ooze off the screen in his 3 appearances.
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Jack Lord for me, not just because he’s the first but I feel that his portrayal was the closest to the books, the way Leiter acts in the books, I think Jack Lord came close to that.
In the score, I’d cast my vote for TWINE, I liked the PTS score and the caviar factory theme.
A lot of the one offs have had the same issue for me - they’re so of their time you can hear the exact year of the film, Hamlisch in particular you can hear those flared trousers. Zimmer and Martin did what Barry and Arnold always tried to do and aimed to make their scores timeless.
I’m glad Zimmer delivered an undeniable Zimmer score, which is why he was hired in the first place. For example, Final Ascent being a variation on Time from Inception. It all sounds like I thought it would. George Martin’s success is in going his own way while still blending in to the sound Barry established.
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What I see in my head when Bond ‘77 plays
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I can’t be alone in this!
Am I?
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For June 13…
Favourite one-shot continuation novel
- Colonel Sun
- The Authorised Biography
- Devil May Care
- Carte Blanche
- Solo
0 voters
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John Pearson’s James Bond: The Authorized Biography Of 007 is a good read–and a must read–but it’s not a “normal” continuation Bond novel so it doesn’t get my vote here.
Sebastian Faulks’ Devil May Care has some great ideas in it (the Ekranoplan concept was brilliant) and is almost a winner, but at just about the last second he takes the mickey out of the story. It’s almost like he felt like he had to let his literary brethren know he really didn’t take the Bond job seriously, that he knew it was beneath him, and that he was just doing it for a paycheck. If he would have avoided that, it could have been a solid continuation novel.
Jeffrey Deaver’s Carte Blanche is entertaining and I like it, but something seems to be missing–and it’s NOT that it is set in the present day as opposed to Ian Fleming’s timeline. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I didn’t like the part about Bond’s parents’ deaths being mysterious in nature instead of just being an accident.
William Boyd’s Solo has a good henchman in Kobus Breed and that is about it. Not a lot happens in the book and Bond is often just watching as opposed to doing, whether that be in the field or out of it. Simply put, it is the worst Bond novel.
So I’ll go with Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun. It feels the most complete and Bondian of the bunch. It has great characters in ally Niko Litsas, henchman De Graaf, and villain Sun Liang-tan. It’s got some good set pieces with Bond’s escape after he’s drugged in London and his torture and later escape from Col. Sun in Greece. And with Amis being such a fan and contemporary of Fleming’s, it is also the most Flemingesque of the continuations. It’s too bad he didn’t do a few more.
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For June 14…
Favourite Ken Adam production design, overall
- Dr No
- Goldfinger
- Thunderball
- You Only Live Twice
- Diamonds are Forever
- The Spy who Loved Me
- Moonraker
0 voters
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Ken Adam is the master. He’s created so many incredible things for the James Bond series that it’s hard to pick one over another. That said, for me, it comes down to two films:
The Spy Who Loved Me makes great use of the gargantuan 007 Sound Stage with the Liparus supertanker set, and then there is, of course, Atlantis–somewhat octopus-shaped rising out of the sea. Very original. So you get double your production design pleasure there.
And then there is You Only Live Twice. How Adam came up with the volcano set, first from having the balls to suggest it, and THEN to deliver on it–and deliver on it so incredibly well–I don’t know how, but all us Bond fans are forever grateful. It’s a shame that it couldn’t have remained standing.
But YOLT gets the nod for my favorite Ken Adam production design overall. The sheer size and spectacle of that volcano set completely set the standard of what could be done in a Bond film. Adam had made great sets before both big (Goldfinger’s Fort Knox) and small (Dr. No’s spider room), but his work on YOLT upped the WOW! factor and further cemented the 007 films as being larger than life. The man was a genius. 
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Had to give the nod to MR: the centrifuge, the cathedral-like control room in Drax’s jungle HQ, the conference room that converts to a blast chamber, the gigantic space station interior…
With the possible exception of Barry’s score for TLD, this has to be the most triumphant “swan song” for any series contributor, in front of or behind the camera.
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Completely agree. Moonraker was firing on all cylinders creatively. Barry, Bassey and Adam with the original MI6 team - featuring the last appearance of Bernard Lee. A glorious end of an era.
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For me, it is hard to choose between DAF and MR.
DAF’s production design blends so seamlessly with actual locations that it is hard to tell where Ken Adam stops and Las Vegas begins.
As for MR, it is a triumph of design–they had the money, and Ken Adam ran with it. He may be the film’s true auteur as opposed to Lewis Gilbert.
An interesting point: Drax is our top villain; praise has been doled out to Adam, Bassey, Barry, and other collaborators. I would add that MooreBond is just past his peak, which for MooreBond was his peak.
Yet the combination of all these wonderful factors results in a film that is ousted early in our Deathmatches. For all of its good parts, MR seems to lack an it factor that less well-crafted competitors possess, which push them ahead of it.
One thought that occurs to me is that MR Bond is not one many viewers would want to be, and that his incarnations on either side are more attractive in this regard.
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