Saving the British film industry they may have been, which appears in the early days to amount to giving anyone who worked on The Saint or Danger Man some additional employment, the Broccolineage 25 Bonds could still on occasion be a bit… scruffy.
There are some notorious continuity errors easily spotted but then some - continuity issues or just plain oddities - that give one pause to wonder whether they meant it. Although they might not have, and just needed to move on. Is it proper, i.e. they intended this, or is it just slopper, i.e. we’re days behind schedule, who really cares?
Proper or Slopper?
Dr No
When we first encounter Sylvia Trench, on her left hand she is wearing a huge diamond ring, the sort that could well be an engagement ring.
When we later see her in Bond’s flat (Bond’s flat is massive, by the way), and at the precise point she says “Oh, I hope I did the right thing”, for the first time in that scene we see her left hand, she raises it to camera as she says this, and the ring is not there.
Proper - as a story point she has deliberately removed the (probably engagement) ring given what is about to happen with The World’s Sexiest Man? Subtle direction, that. Or the rules of the time; couldn’t have an engaged woman shown to be starting squidgies with another man? Or Slopper - they just forgot about the ring / this was filmed out of sequence anyway and they thought about adding the ring subsequently.
Well, in the screenwriter’s defense, some time has elapsed from when James Bond left Sylvia Trench to when he returns home to find her putting in his living room. We don’t see her in her fancy gown attire when Bond arrives, so she COULD have conceivably returned home and changed clothes and left the ring there. Or she could have just left the ring in her purse with her dress in the bedroom. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. And besides, no one–at least any serious golfer–plays golf wearing that big of a ring. You can’t get a glove over it.
Given how the production in general seems to have had a laissez faire approach to props and continuity - see this vid about its guns that are even made plot points - I strongly suspect it was merely an oversight coupled with ‘who cares’.
But one might well argue a woman going to such lengths to have a ‘sweet distraction for an hour or two’ doesn’t want to waste time with having to take this stuff off in the heat of the moment. And she really seems to have moved with some urgency; it would only be natural for her to only wear the bare necessities.
The bigger question is what May would have made of Bond’s guest helping herself to his shirt and golf clubs…
Considering that they’re all sloppy, this one is PROPER!
The moment she first meets Bond at the casino, Trench is panting like a dog just finished chasing a tennis ball for 20 minutes (yes, I’m exhausted right this moment. From throwing said ball, let me be clear) when she first meets Bond, so the whole heels and shirt thing means she’s been thinking well ahead and somehow left her ring in the bathroom when she was getting ready to go out.
While DN maybe the first film, I suspect that this is not Ms Trench’s first rodeo, if you know what I mean…
Proper. She’s let down her hair and ditched her dress, so taking off the ring makes sense as part of her preparations for what’s coming.
Also, Bond gives off a “bad boy” vibe and has just cleaned her out at the casino, so she might have dropped the ring off at home out of fear she couldnt trust it not to “mysteriously vanish” in the company of this rogue.
When she says she “needs another thousand,” what’s she writing? A check to purchase the chips or an IOU against her line of credit with the house? Given that Bond beats her again, maybe she had to surrender the ring before they’d let her leave.
Thunderball presents us with two scenes in Moneypenny’s office that bracket the wider 00 briefing and Bond’s individual appointment with M. On the wall of her office alongside the door into M’s lair, there is a framed map.
Between the two scenes, this map changes.
Given that we have just seen the slidey-map thing in the 00 briefing, is this a similar thing, that Moneypenny can change the map on a whim, perhaps with a button, and accordingly has her own gadget? Or is it just sod-it-just-film-it-anything-will-do?
Proper. She’s got that map attuned to The Hotspots Currently Under SIS Scrutiny ™ and it changes hourly with the incoming sitreps (and once a week with the top 100 billboard charts; though M doesn’t approve when it shows Abbey Road as the major location of concern for the western world).
Slopper! Apparently they’re still tidying up the editing suite from TB - more bits of celluloid lying around than snakes at that place where Indiana Jones found the Ark (God love basic cable marathons!).
As much as I love the film, TB seems not to have a shooting script, with crew just filming everything and anything and then slicing it all together later - continuity errors, cranking, under cranking, whatever you call it when the film is the wrong side around, TB has it all, everything and the kitchen sink to boot.
I mean, on the big briefing day, doesn’t Bond go home and change before his individual meeting (blue blazer into brown suit)? Or perhaps the countdown hadn’t even started, so, what’s the rush?
During the final skirmish with Nick Nack, perhaps the silliest scene of an already daft film, Bond has wine bottles thrown at him, which he smashes aside with a chair back.
The bottles are empty. Not one drop of wine is splashed.
Given Scaramanga’s penchant for hoarding inanimate objects bereft of life - an extensive butterfly collection, wax dummies, several guns, Maud Adams - is collecting drained bottles, albeit a bit odd, merely another manifestation of this, and therefore Proper?
Or is this just another example of the sloppy casualness that pervades this film as a whole?
Of course, it would have been a huge mess if wine had actually been inside those bottles - so it was the properness which drove that decision.
But the whole scene was sloppily created and did not help the movie. The more one thinks of it - all the broken glass on the floor, and Bond doesn‘t wear any shoes, Goodnight not helping, and NickNack ending on top of that mast inside a basket earning a hearty laugh in the cinema (weren‘t the 70‘s a lot of fun?) - the more one feels ashamed for this whole sequence, padding out the story completely unneccessarily.
And really, why was it considered a good idea to have the tall Lee paired with a little person? Wasn’t a third nipple enough?
At least the costs for elephant shoes were not the worst idea of EON‘s.
Scaramanga is the most overrated of the villains, always seeming to be near the top (along with another dud, Pleasance’s Blofeld) of countless fan polls (ahem), I put this down to the fact that it’s LOOK - Christopher Lee, wow BIG star in a Bond movie! more than anything interesting about the character himself.
As with the majority of them, he’s hardly fleshed out except for a bit of exposition from the novel, surviving instead on the fact that it’s LOOK- Christopher Lee, wow BIG star in a Bond movie. Scaramanga seems entirely superficial and vacuous with questionable taste at best. A whole island paradise and the dining room is tiny and seems surrounded by knick-knacks (no pun intended). A million a shot and nothing left over for a half-competent interior designer. And a waxwork of Bond? WTF - that’s like me putting a portrait of our esteemed Jim above the fireplace! Nonsensical and questionable of taste.
Even as a villain, he’s quite bland and actually doesn’t prove his villainous. He’s a top marksman yet…whats-her-name is sitting still, Hi-Fat is standing still, and Solex dude at the start is leisurely strolling. Not exactly William Tell stuff.
If anything, it’s entirely unsurprising that this guy keeps empty bottles of expensive wine (ooh, I should make a note of that with my little notebook and pencil) around the place. Entirely on-brand for a one-note, uninteresting foil for our hero.
Living where he did, there was no recycling pick-up.
Caring about the environment, Scaramanga saved his empties, stored them on his junk, and would drop them off for recycling during one of his voyages. Bond killing him interrupted the process.
That reasoning is most plausible, not least that it’s aboard his Junk. B-bm. Basically a floating bottle bank. This idea appeals, and chimes with the general idea of the film that Bond is at least as threatening, destructive and unpleasant as the villain.
That one of me reclining nude whilst masticating a pomegranate is up for auction next week.
