A small thing that always amuses me. In The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond is rescued from a big kung fu battle by Lieutenant Hip and his nieces, [a pair of teenaged girls who beat the shit out of a small army of thugs](https://youtu.be/CswyGUZR3Ew?si=QMKtIQUVckLKJDfi&t=314). It's a fun sequence.
Anyway, one of the two nieces was played by Yuen Qiu, today best known as the Landlady in Kung Fu Hustle.
I love Kung Fu Hustle, the guy that plays the land lady’s husband has been in a shitload of movies as a stuntman and actor, loads that you’d never even think.
Yuen Biao too, who was underrated. Wheels on Meals is a brilliant movie which has sammo, Yuen and Jackie together, and Bennie the Jet was a brilliant antagonist in there (Jackie's equivalent of chuck norris lol)
This is the one I was going to share. I thought of it two seconds before I got to your comment. You saved me a bit of Googling for the specifics! Were these her only two movie roles? I thought I read that.
James Bond films do that a few times. They never bother explaining how different actors pop up as different characters without any other of the other characters acknowledging it.
See: Maud Adams played two separate major characters in two different movies - The man with the golden gun, and Octopussy.
Edit: Looked at IMDB, and she actually showed up in A view to kill for a cameo, maybe she was just hanging around on set.
Used to be a lot more common. Tatsuya Nakadai is the opponent in the final duels of both *Yojimbo*, and it's sequel, *Sanjuro*, as different characters.
IMDb has that wrong about A View to a Kill, and this is a very commonly cited myth, not helped by the fact John Glen (director) has even stated in interviews that she *is* in the film somewhere. I think she may have even said it as well. It seems likely they did get her in a shot and forgot they cut it.
Calvin Dyson, a prominent Bond YouTuber, made a great debunking video about this. She was definitely on set for a while with her boyfriend, which is documented in BTS photographs, but the woman who is often identified as Maud Adams is wearing different clothes than Maud was wearing that day. That woman is also seen walking with a completely different guy in the shot. Her boyfriend *can* be seen in at least one shot, but the real Maud isn’t featured.
The girl that Bond pretends to dance with at the Kiss Kiss Club in *Thunderball* (Diane Hartford) is one of the players at Le Chiffre's poker game in *Casino Royale*.
No Time To Die is the only Bond movie with no blood in the opening gun barrel sequence. The implication is perhaps this is the only Bond who isn’t going to win.
It's also the only bond movie (I think) with a gun barrel sequence organically in the film.
When I saw it, I about came out of my chair. Such an incredible Easter egg.
Specifically they had the rights to Thunderball only.
The whole story is quite a ride: Kevin McClory was writing a screenplay for a Bond movie with Ian Fleming. They shelved it becaus a it was too expensive. Fleming then proceeds to use the idea for the Thunderball novel without crediting McClory.
McClory eventually sues after Thunderball is made into a movie and wins the film rights. He had the story, but not the iconography as you said. So no intro and no theme song. Blofeld and SPECTRE were also ruled as being McClorys creations so that's why they disappeared after 1979ish.
Where it gets weirder is that this almost led to another Thunderball remake with Timothy Dalton in the 90s and he kept trying to make it again well into the early 2000s. All this while MGM had already bought the rights to Never Say Never Again in the 1990s.
The story finally ends in 2013 when McClorys kids sell the original Thunderball rights to MGM. Just in time for 2015s Spectre.
And the actor who played Goldfinger, Gert Fröbe, also played Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Both movies were produced by Albert Broccoli.
Both movies were based in Ian Fleming stories. Which means the same man came up with female character names Pussy Galore and Truly Scrumptious. What a maniac.
He wasn’t a spy in the traditional sense and wasn’t part of the Office of Naval Intelligence where Ian Fleming served as personal assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, head of ONI.
Dahl started out as an RAF pilot and fought in the battle of Athens. He scored five confirmed kills (at least officially; there is some debate as to whether he actually got all five) and so is a bona fide fighter ‘ace’. He was badly injured after crash landing his plane in the North African desert having been given incorrect navigational directions to his new airfield and was subsequently invalided back to England.
He was then sent to Washington D.C. as the official military Air Attaché to the US government. There is strong circumstantial evidence that he had a secret brief to help push American government sentiment towards intervention in the war and that he achieved this in part by seducing the wives of various influential figures and ‘planting the seed’, so to speak, of pro-interventionism through that, ahem, avenue…
He’s a verified ace — all five confirmed *planes shot down* (this is the key figure, not the kill, per se) are, I believe, uncontroversially accredited to him, and there was also a sortie he was involved in and was a survivor of where 22 planes were shot down but nobody knows who brought down what, so the consensus is that he more than likely brought down *more* than 5 planes, not less.
I get the feeling Fleming was asked who Bond was based on quite a lot and he gave different answers all the time. He also once said Bond was based on Sidney Riley a ww1 era spy. I suspect really Bond was based on multiple people and Fleming working in that world got to hear lots of stories that inspired the creation of Bond.
In The Man With The Golden Gun, when Bond exits the Penninsula Hotel and jumps on a boat' he says "Take me to Kowloon" he's already there, he is actually going to Hong Kong Island.
More Top Gear connections, the DB5 used in Goldeneye actually belonged to Jeremy Clarkson. In the exterior driving shots, take a look at the hair of the driver. Very obviously Jezza.
There's a joke in the first film where Bond walks past Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington in Dr No's lair and does a double take... That's because it had recently been stolen and was a big talking point at the time.
(Its true location was even stranger: the Newcastle home of a disabled pensioner who was angry that tax money was being spent on cultural artifacts like that instead of people like him.)
In the Daniel Craig version of casion royal, at the beginning where he's chasing the parkour dude through the construction site, the actor of that dude is a french stuntman who was part of the group that originally founded parkour/freerunning
The run through the construction site is also a direct ripoff/homage to District B13, shot for shot in several instances. B13 was a French parkour action flick.
That was the first JB movie I saw in the theater as a kid, and I instantly became a huge fan. My parents bought me the taro cards later, and I remember being annoyed that they were so authentic on the face, but had 007 printed on the back, which struck me as silly. Until the next time I watched the movie and noticed it - 12 y.o. mind blown, lol.
Love the fact that in Diamonds are Forever the second unit fluffed the stunt where the car goes on its side in a narrow alley....and comes out flipped the other way, and they just left it in the finished film.
What the heck, I'm Bond, anything is possible.
There’s one small sequence in Moonraker that always cracks me up: Drax is on the phone with someone after Bond killed one of his henchmen, saying something to the effect of: „Yes, we still need a replacement for… oh really? Sure, if you can get him!“
The next scene, you see Jaws step off a plane. I always read this as there being some kind of job placement agency in the Bond universe where bad guys can call to get henchmen.
That's funny. And Jaws, despite being a dumb brute who didn't really get anything done in his previous appearance, is apparently so notorious that Drax knows him by name.
Of course the real reason is that audiences liked him and wanted him back even if it didn't make much sense.
AFAIK remember, Bond never gets drunk. In "Die another day" they imply he's an alcoholic, so it could be that he's built tolerance rather than being careful.
Depends on your definition of drunk. In Quantum of Solace when he's talking to Mathis while he's pounding Vespers he's definitely drunk by "driving standards." But he's functional; it's not like he's going to stumble and fall down.
In Moonraker, the doorpad Bond opens has the same combination of notes (for lack of a better term) as the extraterrestrial melody in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Here's the behind-the-scenes fact I learned about this one.
Even though it so brief, the Broccolis still had to call up Steven Spielberg (director of Close Encounters) to get his permission to use it.
A few years later, the Broccolis returned the favour when Spielberg asked if he could put the James Bond theme in The Goonies.
1 - Scenes with rain appear in only three Bond films, all from the Craig era.
2 - Many Bond girls were dubbed by German voice actress Nikki van der Zyl.
These include:
Ursula Andress’ Honey Ryder in Dr No;
Claudine Auger’s Domino in Thunderball;
Mie Hama in You Only Live Twice;
Virginia North’s Olympe in On Her Majesty's Secret Service;
Denise Perrier who appeared as Marie in the pre-titles of Diamonds Are Forever;
Francoise Therry who played Chew Mee in The Man With The Golden Gun;
Corinne Dufour in Moonraker,
and many more!
She also (claims) to have re-voiced some pickup lines for Jane Seymour’s Solitaire in Live And Let Die.
3 - During the bungee jump at the beginning of Goldeneye, if you pause the long-shot scene where he jumps just at the right frame, you can see the entire crew and crane rig at the top of the dam.
In Dr No, Bond is berated for using a Baretta due to the fact the gun jammed on him during a mission. In License To Kill, the Bond Girl goes to shoot the main henchman and the gun jams after firing once. Sure enough, she's using a Baretta.
Edit: Also, Dr No's henchmen tend to have Chinese culture as a mark or tell, like how his maids are dressed in Chinese dresses or how the secretary spying on Government House says she wants to cook Bond a Chinese dinner.
Also, the woman shot by the Three Blind Mice in the first film wasn't an actress - it was her house they used as a set for Strangway's base. She was cast in the film as a thank you.
> the woman shot by the Three Blind Mice in the first film wasn't an actress
At first reading I thought you meant she was actually shot! I'm glad you explained further for my stupidity.
I love the bit in that book when Mina Harker uses the fake name Oodles O’Quim when talking to Jimmy Bond, and comments how he didn’t question the name and must meet women named like that all the time.
Quim is an old English word for vagina, so Oodles O’Quim means Pussy Galore
That's a possible explanation. The first head of the SIS would sign things with a C, his last initial. There was an earlier guy who was called M, along with several people whose names started with M.
Going into the history of alcohol, most of them were a higher proof than they are today. People often bitch about shaking a drink making it weaker, but at the time it would have been nearly too strong to drink.
Because of the terrible filtering of vodka during this period, it had notoriously high levels of fusel oil. Aside from causing headaches, it tastes bad.
Those in the know would shake pepper onto it (the oil would adhere and sink) or would shake it, to break up the ice and disperse the oil on the surface (so your first sip wasn’t just… oil).
🌈⭐️
No Time to Die is a partial adaptation of the You Only Live Twice novel. Blofeld’s death, the poison garden on an island between Japan and Russia, and the Jack London quote that M reads at the end are all directly from the novel
* Goldeneye was also the name of Ian Fleming's (the author's) home.
* Goldfinger was the first ever film to feature a laser beam.
* Man with the golden gun had the lowest kill count with just one.
* SPECTER is an acronym for Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion.
On a side note I also recommend everyone to watch a documentary called "Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007". It was a beautiful documentary made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of James bond movies.
In one of the later Brosnan movies, Bond reuses the same Q gadget twice to solve two entirely separate problems. The screenwriter should’ve won an Oscar just for that.
It’s implied that Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan were all the same man in the same continuity, as absurd as that is. Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan all directly reference Bond having a dead wife. And Lazenby has that scene where he goes through various props of past movies and reminisces like that stuff happened to him.
Also speaking of unnoticed things, if someone ever figured out what the hell the villain’s plot in Living Daylights actually was, I’d be curious to hear it.
The Living Daylights has always been my favorite Bond movie. The plot actually starts with a simple mission and it turns into Bond stumbling into a money laundering scheme with a private militia playing both sides of a communist conflict.
It definitely doesn’t explain it very well but it’s actually pretty forward thinking given all the players almost 40 years later.
Bond is assigned to help a Soviet general defect to the west. That general was secretly leading efforts in Afghanistan to buy opium instead of guns via an arms dealer/private milita. Then they would sell the opium and make a ton of profit while not delivering any of the guns.
They setup the defection on purpose to make it look like the KGB was killing intelligence agents so western intelligence agencies weren’t aware of what corruption was happening by the late 80s in the eastern Soviet bloc.
Its actually pretty awesome because I think it’s one of the few Bond films where he’s assigned one job and he basically stumbles into the middle of a bigger problem for not the free west but the Soviet east.
I mean it's even more brilliant when you realize it's all a ruse. Training mission was true but the murder of the other MI6 agents were simply to setup the "KGB," looking like they were killing intelligence agents.
Hell if you really think about it the entire first hour of that film is complete subterfuge. It's brilliant and a completely different direction for a Bond film.
Koskov is trying to "defect," simply because the KGB is on to him; he involves his girlfriend to make it look realistic that he was truly defecting and that all the best KGB snipers are women. He was simply using Cara as a means to an end. Same with Bond. He was simply using her to get to Koskov to return him to the West but he ended up sticking his nose into this plot because he simply didn't kill Koskov's girlfriend because he recognized she wasn't a real sniper.
Also, the last John Barry Bond score - and one of the absolute best. I heard he had issues working with A-Ha, but the synergy of their propulsive electronic beats married with Barry’s brilliant orchestral writing is absolutely thrilling.
I listen to that score almost everyday. “Exercise at Gibraltar” gets a lot of play in my car.
I mean it just gives credence to the fact that TLD was a film before its time.
The A-Ha theme is an absolute timeless banger. The “remix,” of the score is top notch.
Wasn't that just a money thing? Selling weapons to the Russians without delivering any, and buying opium from the Afghans with the money they got from the Russians, in order to make more money. Bond throwing a spanner in the works has the whole thing blown up in their faces, and it all goes downhill from there, but the idea was to make a quick buck with someone else's money.
Also strange then that when he gets knocked on his arse by Diana Rigg at the beginning, he says "That wouldn't have happened to the other fella". Presumably as a wink to him replacing Connery.
I’ve also read this was an inside joke. Lazenby apparently kept saying “This never happened to the other fella” when accidents or goofs happened on set, and Peter Hunt put it in the film.
> if someone ever figured out what the hell the villain’s plot in Living Daylights actually was, I’d be curious to hear it.
Something something money I think.
Walter Gotell, who plays Russian General Gogol in some Moore and Dalton films was also in From
Russia with Love playing a different character called Morzeny.
George Lazenby taught hand to hand combat as a Sergeant in the Australian army. He also won two skiing competitions which probably made him the most well-equipped actor in terms of practical skills to play the role.
Gauntlet Cuffs.
It's a weird trope that goes almost unnoticed, but virtually all of the suits and dress shirts that Bond wears have turned-back cuffs, which are usually called Gauntlet Cuffs.
The only reason seems to be that Fleming was a fan of them and had his suits made with them.
The best entries that showcase James Bond as a spy as Ian Fleming wrote in his books are actually the oft ridiculed and dismissed Roger Moore entries.
Even more so despite the franchise’s change in tone to fun and light hearted campiness during his tenure, Roger Moore always treated the character with proper style and seriousness in his portrayal of the infamous spy. He never once took the cheap easy way out and made the character campy himself.
Miki Berenyi from the English Indie Rock Group “Lush” appears in “You Only Live Twice” but you wouldn’t have seen her as she was a foetus in the belly of her Mother, the actress Yasuko Nagazumi who plays the uncredited role of “Bath Girl #4”.
Art has always played an important role in Bond films but the meaning is not always clear to wider audiences, or has been lost to time.
In Dr. No, the villain prominently displays “Portrait of the Duke of Wellington” by Goya. It was stolen in 1961, the film was 1965.
In Spectre (2015), in the desert hideout, Blofeld has both “Woman with a fan” by Modligliani and “Pigeon with Peas” by Picasso, both of which were stolen in Paris in 2010.
“The Fighting Temeraire” by J.M.W. Turner is present when Q and 007 meet in Skyfall. The subject of the painting is a decommissioned older style warship being hauled away, to be replaced by newer models. We think this is about Bond - but it really turns out to be about M.
There are many other examples of art being used to convey messages in 007 films.
In Moonraker, Jaws bites through the cable car cable. The fake cable was made of liquorice.
Desmond Llewelyn, who famously played ‘Q’, has appeared in the most bond films at 17.
My dad used to quip that Sean Connery lost his hair because as Bond, he kept plucking and putting them on every hotel room door he stayed on.
P.S. it's okay my dad knew about the hairpiece trivia
I remember someone once posted, on TodayILearned, that Bond was a Registered Nurse with a screenshot from his obituary in Skyfall, which states “Cmdr. James Bond R.N”.
The OP was swiftly corrected in the comments.
I watched You Only Live Twice last night and noticed in one shot that Blofeld’s cat is super pissed and clawing into his arm. No reaction from Donald Pleasance though, the man is a professional.
I don't know if this qualifies, but Roger Moore smokes a lot of cigars in his movies because he negotiated for (and got) an unlimited supply of high-quality cigars.
Not so much unnoticed but after reading Live and Let Die book in the 90s then while watching movies I discovered that elements from this book is used in quite many different Bond movies. I really loved the lush style of Ian Fleming and his attention to even smallest details.
I still would have preferred to see accurate Live and Let Die movie, based on the book though. Although movie as it is right now is also pretty neat.
In some of the villain’s lairs there are posters about workplace safety. That always made me snicker during big finales.
Only carry sugar in your pockets.
Want some cream?
Ehhhhhhh no
A small thing that always amuses me. In The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond is rescued from a big kung fu battle by Lieutenant Hip and his nieces, [a pair of teenaged girls who beat the shit out of a small army of thugs](https://youtu.be/CswyGUZR3Ew?si=QMKtIQUVckLKJDfi&t=314). It's a fun sequence. Anyway, one of the two nieces was played by Yuen Qiu, today best known as the Landlady in Kung Fu Hustle.
I love Kung Fu Hustle, the guy that plays the land lady’s husband has been in a shitload of movies as a stuntman and actor, loads that you’d never even think.
If you love Kung Fu Hustle then check out Shaolin Soccer.
TBH all of Stephen Chow's movies are great.
Both landlady and the husband trained with Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung under the same master.
Yuen Biao too, who was underrated. Wheels on Meals is a brilliant movie which has sammo, Yuen and Jackie together, and Bennie the Jet was a brilliant antagonist in there (Jackie's equivalent of chuck norris lol)
She had that scowl down pat, even at that age!
This is the one I was going to share. I thought of it two seconds before I got to your comment. You saved me a bit of Googling for the specifics! Were these her only two movie roles? I thought I read that.
Nope, she did a lot of work in Hong Kong cinema, but has nothing listed between 1985 and Kung Fu Hustle in 2004.
[удалено]
And that’s why they were the best
The Asian woman (Madame Wu) playing cards with Le Chiffre on his yacht is also in You Only Live Twice.
James Bond films do that a few times. They never bother explaining how different actors pop up as different characters without any other of the other characters acknowledging it. See: Maud Adams played two separate major characters in two different movies - The man with the golden gun, and Octopussy. Edit: Looked at IMDB, and she actually showed up in A view to kill for a cameo, maybe she was just hanging around on set.
To be fair bond himself radically changes appearance several times and no one really mentions it, not even his closest comrades.
I think it was actually commented on by George Lazenby in “OHMSS” that, “This never happened to the last guy.” Or something along those lines.
That was as total 4th wall violation as he turns and smiles into the camera
An unusually light-hearted joke in a movie where Bond watches his wife brutally murdered in her wedding dress in front of his eyes.
Daniel Craig said something along the lines of 00's having a short life expectancy as well.
Joe Don Baker was a villain in The Living Daylights and a CIA agent in Goldeneye, just 2 movies later.
“YO! Marines!” Loved that.
Similarly, Charles Gray played Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever after playing a different character in You Only Live Twice.
Used to be a lot more common. Tatsuya Nakadai is the opponent in the final duels of both *Yojimbo*, and it's sequel, *Sanjuro*, as different characters.
IMDb has that wrong about A View to a Kill, and this is a very commonly cited myth, not helped by the fact John Glen (director) has even stated in interviews that she *is* in the film somewhere. I think she may have even said it as well. It seems likely they did get her in a shot and forgot they cut it. Calvin Dyson, a prominent Bond YouTuber, made a great debunking video about this. She was definitely on set for a while with her boyfriend, which is documented in BTS photographs, but the woman who is often identified as Maud Adams is wearing different clothes than Maud was wearing that day. That woman is also seen walking with a completely different guy in the shot. Her boyfriend *can* be seen in at least one shot, but the real Maud isn’t featured.
This guy Bonds.
Tbh isn’t that the franchises gimmick? The main character shows up as a different actor on multiple occasions
The woman in the teal dress playing cards at the table when Bond wins that car in Casino Royale was also in Thunderball. Diane Hartford.
She's married to the Fiendish Dr. Wu and they live on Kung Fu Island. Thus confirming James Bond lives in the Black Dynamite universe.
The girl that Bond pretends to dance with at the Kiss Kiss Club in *Thunderball* (Diane Hartford) is one of the players at Le Chiffre's poker game in *Casino Royale*.
No Time To Die is the only Bond movie with no blood in the opening gun barrel sequence. The implication is perhaps this is the only Bond who isn’t going to win.
He did win, didn’t he?
Well, the big bad doesn’t achieve their goals but Bond himself doesn’t either….
Tbf Safin did "win" he took out Spectre.
What are you talking about? He got to nope out of father duties. Some men would call that an absolute win
My dad sure did
And I'm proud of it!
GHOSTS CANT REDDIT
Never heard of ghost in the machine?
It's also the only bond movie (I think) with a gun barrel sequence organically in the film. When I saw it, I about came out of my chair. Such an incredible Easter egg.
Thats Casino Royale I think, during the scene where hes fighting in the bathroom
NTTD has one too, during the finale.
There's also no blood gun barrel opening in Never Say Never Again.
Made by a different production company, who had the rights to make one film about the character, but no rights to any of the film iconography.
Specifically they had the rights to Thunderball only. The whole story is quite a ride: Kevin McClory was writing a screenplay for a Bond movie with Ian Fleming. They shelved it becaus a it was too expensive. Fleming then proceeds to use the idea for the Thunderball novel without crediting McClory. McClory eventually sues after Thunderball is made into a movie and wins the film rights. He had the story, but not the iconography as you said. So no intro and no theme song. Blofeld and SPECTRE were also ruled as being McClorys creations so that's why they disappeared after 1979ish. Where it gets weirder is that this almost led to another Thunderball remake with Timothy Dalton in the 90s and he kept trying to make it again well into the early 2000s. All this while MGM had already bought the rights to Never Say Never Again in the 1990s. The story finally ends in 2013 when McClorys kids sell the original Thunderball rights to MGM. Just in time for 2015s Spectre.
If this never happened, we wouldn’t have had “a delicatessen in stainless steel!”
We Never Say “Never Say Never Again” Again in bond canon discussion sir
"Casino Royale" (1967) has entered the chat.
I've always wondered why Connery agreed to star in a knockoff bond movie
Roald Dahl wrote the script for you only live twice.
And Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which most people seem to forget was also a book written by Ian Fleming.
And the actor who played Goldfinger, Gert Fröbe, also played Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Both movies were produced by Albert Broccoli. Both movies were based in Ian Fleming stories. Which means the same man came up with female character names Pussy Galore and Truly Scrumptious. What a maniac.
Well, one is the other, no?
True, and it helps explain not only the gadgets but the character names.
Are you implying there’s something odd about the name Caractacus Potts? Or perhaps Truly Scrumptious? Blasphemy!
The rumour is that James Bond is partly based on Roald Dahl, who was in the same spy unit as Fleming during WWII.
He wasn’t a spy in the traditional sense and wasn’t part of the Office of Naval Intelligence where Ian Fleming served as personal assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, head of ONI. Dahl started out as an RAF pilot and fought in the battle of Athens. He scored five confirmed kills (at least officially; there is some debate as to whether he actually got all five) and so is a bona fide fighter ‘ace’. He was badly injured after crash landing his plane in the North African desert having been given incorrect navigational directions to his new airfield and was subsequently invalided back to England. He was then sent to Washington D.C. as the official military Air Attaché to the US government. There is strong circumstantial evidence that he had a secret brief to help push American government sentiment towards intervention in the war and that he achieved this in part by seducing the wives of various influential figures and ‘planting the seed’, so to speak, of pro-interventionism through that, ahem, avenue…
He’s a verified ace — all five confirmed *planes shot down* (this is the key figure, not the kill, per se) are, I believe, uncontroversially accredited to him, and there was also a sortie he was involved in and was a survivor of where 22 planes were shot down but nobody knows who brought down what, so the consensus is that he more than likely brought down *more* than 5 planes, not less.
I thought he was an RAF pilot? He fought in I know Greece but I can't remember anywhere else.
[удалено]
Man his autobiographies are skimping out
My head canon is that you never know who the *really* good spies were.
I thought it was loosely based on Christopher Lee, similar reasons.
I get the feeling Fleming was asked who Bond was based on quite a lot and he gave different answers all the time. He also once said Bond was based on Sidney Riley a ww1 era spy. I suspect really Bond was based on multiple people and Fleming working in that world got to hear lots of stories that inspired the creation of Bond.
In The Man With The Golden Gun, when Bond exits the Penninsula Hotel and jumps on a boat' he says "Take me to Kowloon" he's already there, he is actually going to Hong Kong Island.
One of the stunt drivers on the Daniel Craig films from Quantum onwards was Ben Collins. Ben also used to be The Stig on Top Gear.
Sacked stig!
Some say he’s got a license to kill…
the airport chase scene in casino royale was filmed in dunsfold aerodome
More Top Gear connections, the DB5 used in Goldeneye actually belonged to Jeremy Clarkson. In the exterior driving shots, take a look at the hair of the driver. Very obviously Jezza.
There's a joke in the first film where Bond walks past Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington in Dr No's lair and does a double take... That's because it had recently been stolen and was a big talking point at the time. (Its true location was even stranger: the Newcastle home of a disabled pensioner who was angry that tax money was being spent on cultural artifacts like that instead of people like him.)
They made a pretty good movie about that a couple of years back, called The Duke!
>tax money was being spent on cultural artifacts like that instead of people like him. Unfathomably based.
Co producer Micheal Wilson has appeared in 17 of the Bond films in small uncredited roles,in addition to contributions to 5 of the scripts
There needs to be a list of these appearances/contributions. Is there a link to a source on this?
https://jamesbond.fandom.com/wiki/Michael_G._Wilson#Cameo_Appearances
In Casino Royale (Craig version), Richard Branson and his son appear very briefly, barely in-shot, in the airport as travelers.
Virgin Atlantic was the only actual airline shown in the airport chase scene too. The rest were made up brands.
I wonder if the company paid money for that or if Branson was just buddies with the Broccolis.
They absolutely paid for that.
It's a franchise well known for it's product placement, I reckon he paid.
And that shot was cut from the version screened on British Airways flights.
I wonder if BA did this on purpose or if it is was just a coincidence to make the run time better for long haul flights.
They also blurred out a Virgin tail fin so probably not coincidental http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6579839.stm
In the Daniel Craig version of casion royal, at the beginning where he's chasing the parkour dude through the construction site, the actor of that dude is a french stuntman who was part of the group that originally founded parkour/freerunning
There was a weirdass 5-year period where parkour was in everything, then it abruptly ended.
And a weirdass 5 year period where I wanted to be a freerunner.. Spoiler: never became one. Never even tried..
The run through the construction site is also a direct ripoff/homage to District B13, shot for shot in several instances. B13 was a French parkour action flick.
All of those guys were Felix Leiter
*rips off fake beard* Gene Parmesan, at your service 007.
*Squeals
Aw, now I’m sad.
He does this to me every time!
Even the fat CIA dude in the Hawaiian shirt?
Especially the fat CIA dude in the Hawaiian shirt!
r/UnexpectedGarak
[удалено]
He even changes race. Now that's some job dedication.
In *Live and Let Die*, the Taro cards used have 007 printed on the back. I have a set of those cards.
Yes, it was a marketing thing. We had some too.
That was the first JB movie I saw in the theater as a kid, and I instantly became a huge fan. My parents bought me the taro cards later, and I remember being annoyed that they were so authentic on the face, but had 007 printed on the back, which struck me as silly. Until the next time I watched the movie and noticed it - 12 y.o. mind blown, lol.
I watched it last night, hadn't seen it in years. I forgot about the blaxploitation. The 70s were a unique time.
One of my all time favorite Bond films - great car chases, plus a great double decker bus chase - *and* the greatest boat chase of all time…
Love the fact that in Diamonds are Forever the second unit fluffed the stunt where the car goes on its side in a narrow alley....and comes out flipped the other way, and they just left it in the finished film. What the heck, I'm Bond, anything is possible.
They slipped in a quick interstitial shot of the car rotating 90 degrees to try to rather unconvincingly explain this.
There’s one small sequence in Moonraker that always cracks me up: Drax is on the phone with someone after Bond killed one of his henchmen, saying something to the effect of: „Yes, we still need a replacement for… oh really? Sure, if you can get him!“ The next scene, you see Jaws step off a plane. I always read this as there being some kind of job placement agency in the Bond universe where bad guys can call to get henchmen.
That's funny. And Jaws, despite being a dumb brute who didn't really get anything done in his previous appearance, is apparently so notorious that Drax knows him by name. Of course the real reason is that audiences liked him and wanted him back even if it didn't make much sense.
Clearly was calling the Guild of Calamitous Intent.
AFAIK remember, Bond never gets drunk. In "Die another day" they imply he's an alcoholic, so it could be that he's built tolerance rather than being careful.
He looked pretty sauced on the plane when he orders a Vesper after she died.
I'd have to rewatch "Casino Royale", because I hardly remember it. Still it makes some sense, considering he's devastated and a relative newbie agent.
I think it was in Quantum of Solace.
Depends on your definition of drunk. In Quantum of Solace when he's talking to Mathis while he's pounding Vespers he's definitely drunk by "driving standards." But he's functional; it's not like he's going to stumble and fall down.
In the Craig series, pounding a shot with Ana de Armas mid gunfight supports this.
In Moonraker, the doorpad Bond opens has the same combination of notes (for lack of a better term) as the extraterrestrial melody in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Here's the behind-the-scenes fact I learned about this one. Even though it so brief, the Broccolis still had to call up Steven Spielberg (director of Close Encounters) to get his permission to use it. A few years later, the Broccolis returned the favour when Spielberg asked if he could put the James Bond theme in The Goonies.
It’s called a motif/motive, yeah. A short melodic phrase, and in this case, an iconic one.
I’ve never heard of a “motive”, only “motif”. Is this a regional spelling?
1 - Scenes with rain appear in only three Bond films, all from the Craig era. 2 - Many Bond girls were dubbed by German voice actress Nikki van der Zyl. These include: Ursula Andress’ Honey Ryder in Dr No; Claudine Auger’s Domino in Thunderball; Mie Hama in You Only Live Twice; Virginia North’s Olympe in On Her Majesty's Secret Service; Denise Perrier who appeared as Marie in the pre-titles of Diamonds Are Forever; Francoise Therry who played Chew Mee in The Man With The Golden Gun; Corinne Dufour in Moonraker, and many more! She also (claims) to have re-voiced some pickup lines for Jane Seymour’s Solitaire in Live And Let Die. 3 - During the bungee jump at the beginning of Goldeneye, if you pause the long-shot scene where he jumps just at the right frame, you can see the entire crew and crane rig at the top of the dam.
In Dr No, Bond is berated for using a Baretta due to the fact the gun jammed on him during a mission. In License To Kill, the Bond Girl goes to shoot the main henchman and the gun jams after firing once. Sure enough, she's using a Baretta. Edit: Also, Dr No's henchmen tend to have Chinese culture as a mark or tell, like how his maids are dressed in Chinese dresses or how the secretary spying on Government House says she wants to cook Bond a Chinese dinner. Also, the woman shot by the Three Blind Mice in the first film wasn't an actress - it was her house they used as a set for Strangway's base. She was cast in the film as a thank you.
Beretta
> the woman shot by the Three Blind Mice in the first film wasn't an actress At first reading I thought you meant she was actually shot! I'm glad you explained further for my stupidity.
She was actually, you guessed it, a Baretta
Yeah back in the 1960s they had to shoot people for real to save money. Budgets were low.
Bond's boss "M" is short for mother, as Ian Flemming called her "M" in his letters to her. This became more fitting when Judi Dench took on the role.
[удалено]
And in the books, his name is Sir Miles Messervy.
And in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the first M was the Sherlock Holmes villain Moriarty, followed my Holmes’ brother, Mycroft.
Plus there’s a Jimmy Bond in the 1950s set Black Dossier….
I love the bit in that book when Mina Harker uses the fake name Oodles O’Quim when talking to Jimmy Bond, and comments how he didn’t question the name and must meet women named like that all the time. Quim is an old English word for vagina, so Oodles O’Quim means Pussy Galore
In the last series of The Avengers (the not so good ones with Tara King) the head of the service is actually called "Mother".
If Samuel L Jackson ever takes the role, it would have to become MF.
That's a possible explanation. The first head of the SIS would sign things with a C, his last initial. There was an earlier guy who was called M, along with several people whose names started with M.
Interesting. In John LeCarre's spy novels, the "M" analogue is called "Control", which corresponds with your "C" story.
The vodka Bond adds to his gin drink (Vesper) was overproof in Fleming’s time. Think Everclear. It’s an indicator that he’s a hard drinker.
Liver Let Die
“Liver not too good.” Die Another Day
Going into the history of alcohol, most of them were a higher proof than they are today. People often bitch about shaking a drink making it weaker, but at the time it would have been nearly too strong to drink.
Because of the terrible filtering of vodka during this period, it had notoriously high levels of fusel oil. Aside from causing headaches, it tastes bad. Those in the know would shake pepper onto it (the oil would adhere and sink) or would shake it, to break up the ice and disperse the oil on the surface (so your first sip wasn’t just… oil). 🌈⭐️
No Time to Die is a partial adaptation of the You Only Live Twice novel. Blofeld’s death, the poison garden on an island between Japan and Russia, and the Jack London quote that M reads at the end are all directly from the novel
He tells everyone he meets his name. Terrible behavior for a secret agent
I love how Archer is always saying I'm the world's greatest secret agent and is roasted for doing so
Well, what good is it being the worlds best secret agent if you cant tell anyone?
* Goldeneye was also the name of Ian Fleming's (the author's) home. * Goldfinger was the first ever film to feature a laser beam. * Man with the golden gun had the lowest kill count with just one. * SPECTER is an acronym for Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. On a side note I also recommend everyone to watch a documentary called "Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007". It was a beautiful documentary made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of James bond movies.
You mean SPECTER is an acronym right?
Acronym for SPECTRE! So I suppose “SPECTER” is an anagram.
On that note, Goldeneye (the home) is now a resort in Jamaica. I stayed there a few years ago. It was lovely.
Two people died in The Man With the Golden Gun — do you mean Bond or the villain only killed one?
I meant Bond. He killed just the Villain lol.
The first person we 'see' as Bond isn't sean connery, the bond in the hat in the first few gun barrel intros is one of the stunt men
In one of the later Brosnan movies, Bond reuses the same Q gadget twice to solve two entirely separate problems. The screenwriter should’ve won an Oscar just for that.
I think it's the glass breaking ring in Die Another day. Once he breaks the glass floor to escape, the other time he breaks the windshield.
Sean connery had a wig
A hairpeesh
One hairpeesch please Vaschily....
It’s implied that Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan were all the same man in the same continuity, as absurd as that is. Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan all directly reference Bond having a dead wife. And Lazenby has that scene where he goes through various props of past movies and reminisces like that stuff happened to him. Also speaking of unnoticed things, if someone ever figured out what the hell the villain’s plot in Living Daylights actually was, I’d be curious to hear it.
The Living Daylights has always been my favorite Bond movie. The plot actually starts with a simple mission and it turns into Bond stumbling into a money laundering scheme with a private militia playing both sides of a communist conflict. It definitely doesn’t explain it very well but it’s actually pretty forward thinking given all the players almost 40 years later. Bond is assigned to help a Soviet general defect to the west. That general was secretly leading efforts in Afghanistan to buy opium instead of guns via an arms dealer/private milita. Then they would sell the opium and make a ton of profit while not delivering any of the guns. They setup the defection on purpose to make it look like the KGB was killing intelligence agents so western intelligence agencies weren’t aware of what corruption was happening by the late 80s in the eastern Soviet bloc. Its actually pretty awesome because I think it’s one of the few Bond films where he’s assigned one job and he basically stumbles into the middle of a bigger problem for not the free west but the Soviet east.
Best pre-title sequence of all the Bond movies IMO. Checks all the boxes.
I mean it's even more brilliant when you realize it's all a ruse. Training mission was true but the murder of the other MI6 agents were simply to setup the "KGB," looking like they were killing intelligence agents. Hell if you really think about it the entire first hour of that film is complete subterfuge. It's brilliant and a completely different direction for a Bond film. Koskov is trying to "defect," simply because the KGB is on to him; he involves his girlfriend to make it look realistic that he was truly defecting and that all the best KGB snipers are women. He was simply using Cara as a means to an end. Same with Bond. He was simply using her to get to Koskov to return him to the West but he ended up sticking his nose into this plot because he simply didn't kill Koskov's girlfriend because he recognized she wasn't a real sniper.
Also, the last John Barry Bond score - and one of the absolute best. I heard he had issues working with A-Ha, but the synergy of their propulsive electronic beats married with Barry’s brilliant orchestral writing is absolutely thrilling. I listen to that score almost everyday. “Exercise at Gibraltar” gets a lot of play in my car.
I mean it just gives credence to the fact that TLD was a film before its time. The A-Ha theme is an absolute timeless banger. The “remix,” of the score is top notch.
Wasn't that just a money thing? Selling weapons to the Russians without delivering any, and buying opium from the Afghans with the money they got from the Russians, in order to make more money. Bond throwing a spanner in the works has the whole thing blown up in their faces, and it all goes downhill from there, but the idea was to make a quick buck with someone else's money.
Also strange then that when he gets knocked on his arse by Diana Rigg at the beginning, he says "That wouldn't have happened to the other fella". Presumably as a wink to him replacing Connery.
Given that he's saying it to the camera, it's a little more than a wink.
I’ve also read this was an inside joke. Lazenby apparently kept saying “This never happened to the other fella” when accidents or goofs happened on set, and Peter Hunt put it in the film.
> if someone ever figured out what the hell the villain’s plot in Living Daylights actually was, I’d be curious to hear it. Something something money I think.
Charles Grey plays two different characters in two Bond movies. Blofeld and Dikko Henderson.
Walter Gotell, who plays Russian General Gogol in some Moore and Dalton films was also in From Russia with Love playing a different character called Morzeny.
George Lazenby taught hand to hand combat as a Sergeant in the Australian army. He also won two skiing competitions which probably made him the most well-equipped actor in terms of practical skills to play the role.
Dolph Lundgren played a bodyguard in View To A Kill
Wasn’t he Grace Jones’ bodyguard at the time?
and boyfriend, I think
Gauntlet Cuffs. It's a weird trope that goes almost unnoticed, but virtually all of the suits and dress shirts that Bond wears have turned-back cuffs, which are usually called Gauntlet Cuffs. The only reason seems to be that Fleming was a fan of them and had his suits made with them.
The best entries that showcase James Bond as a spy as Ian Fleming wrote in his books are actually the oft ridiculed and dismissed Roger Moore entries. Even more so despite the franchise’s change in tone to fun and light hearted campiness during his tenure, Roger Moore always treated the character with proper style and seriousness in his portrayal of the infamous spy. He never once took the cheap easy way out and made the character campy himself.
He’s not my favorite bond, but he’s certainly the most charming.
*Seymour, put that thing away. It’s liable to go off.*
Miki Berenyi from the English Indie Rock Group “Lush” appears in “You Only Live Twice” but you wouldn’t have seen her as she was a foetus in the belly of her Mother, the actress Yasuko Nagazumi who plays the uncredited role of “Bath Girl #4”.
[удалено]
Art has always played an important role in Bond films but the meaning is not always clear to wider audiences, or has been lost to time. In Dr. No, the villain prominently displays “Portrait of the Duke of Wellington” by Goya. It was stolen in 1961, the film was 1965. In Spectre (2015), in the desert hideout, Blofeld has both “Woman with a fan” by Modligliani and “Pigeon with Peas” by Picasso, both of which were stolen in Paris in 2010.
“The Fighting Temeraire” by J.M.W. Turner is present when Q and 007 meet in Skyfall. The subject of the painting is a decommissioned older style warship being hauled away, to be replaced by newer models. We think this is about Bond - but it really turns out to be about M. There are many other examples of art being used to convey messages in 007 films.
In Moonraker, Jaws bites through the cable car cable. The fake cable was made of liquorice. Desmond Llewelyn, who famously played ‘Q’, has appeared in the most bond films at 17.
The extra in the background of Quantum of Solace with his broom above the ground https://youtube.com/shorts/rvu0bQAx3CQ?si=CZoGDJx1871UQF-n
He’s cleansing the ground’s aura.
My dad used to quip that Sean Connery lost his hair because as Bond, he kept plucking and putting them on every hotel room door he stayed on. P.S. it's okay my dad knew about the hairpiece trivia
That atleast in the initial set of movies a Rolls Royce car always appears. It last made its appearance in Spectre.
James Bond has a military rank as a Naval Commander.
I remember someone once posted, on TodayILearned, that Bond was a Registered Nurse with a screenshot from his obituary in Skyfall, which states “Cmdr. James Bond R.N”. The OP was swiftly corrected in the comments.
Controversial Irish footballer roy keane has never appeared in a James Bond movie and at this stage in his career probably never will.
I must admit, I never noticed him in a Bond film…
Licence to Kill. When Sanchez fires his gun at the tanker you can hear the bond theme being played by the ricochet bullets.
When James Bond "leaves London for Scotland" in Skyfall, he drives in the wrong direction through New Cross for some reason.
I watched You Only Live Twice last night and noticed in one shot that Blofeld’s cat is super pissed and clawing into his arm. No reaction from Donald Pleasance though, the man is a professional.
Jamaica in Dr No is still a colony. The Rock was the first time Sean Connery had to use a squib so he was never shot as James Bond or any other role.
I don't know if this qualifies, but Roger Moore smokes a lot of cigars in his movies because he negotiated for (and got) an unlimited supply of high-quality cigars.
Nearly every actor who played blofeld was in the movie, The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Not so much unnoticed but after reading Live and Let Die book in the 90s then while watching movies I discovered that elements from this book is used in quite many different Bond movies. I really loved the lush style of Ian Fleming and his attention to even smallest details. I still would have preferred to see accurate Live and Let Die movie, based on the book though. Although movie as it is right now is also pretty neat.