Completely agree. The rest of the Moore Bond films suffered from terminal silliness; only FYEO managed to avoid that. I don’t know what stars happened to be aligned when they made it, but it was a one-shot deal, then they were right back to the silliness.
By the by, CalMeacham, I just saw “This Island Earth” and finally grok your username! Bravo.
This. For the reasons you gave. Though the rock climbing scene bothered me. Technically it was fine more or less and as a former climber myself I did like seeing Bond using his boot laces to fashion prusik ascenders where most action heroes would simply hand-over-hand it up the rope. No, my problem was when the henchman starts knocking out the pitons one by one. Why not simply cut the rope? Hard to believe that any henchman worth his salt didn’t have a knife but if he didn’t, then why not shoot the rope?
What about the end scene?
standingwave:
Perhaps it wasn’t a simple fabric rope, but a cable made of sturdier material.
Still, stupid henchmen are par for the course in Bond movies. Love and Let Die always bothered me because of the scene in which Tee Hee had Bond at gunpoint…and used that not to shoot him, but to force him onto an island to which he then attracted crocodiles??? IF YOU WANT HIM DEAD, AND YOU HAVE A GUN, SHOOT HIM!
The Spy Who Loved Me. Great song, great opening scene, iconic parachute, Barbara Bach, and a reasonably decent plot and ending, though admittedly bordering on the coming over-blown stupidity that seriously debuted in Moonraker.
Asking which Moore Bond film is the best is asking which is the best of the worst Bond films.
Live and Let Die was the first Bond film I ever saw. I was 9 years old, my dad’s visitation weekend, he took me to see it in a theater. Loved the theme song, the occult stuff and all the crazy blacksploitation in the background. I was too young to get the over-the-top comedy of putting James Bond in that element, but as a kid growing up in St. Louis I enjoyed seeing a honkey be so cool and calm in that environment, when my culture told me it was dangerous for a white person to go alone into black neighborhoods.
The Spy who Loved Me is probably the quintessential Moore era Bond and if I could vote for two it would be it and For Your Eyes Only,
Having said that, I think FYEO is a far better film.
+…
The boat chase scene.
For Your Eyes Only, for **Cal Meacham’s **reasons.
For Your Eyes Only, followed by Spy who Loved Me and Man with the Golden Gun. Of course none of them could compare with his best Bond film, Ffolkes. He played the Bond of Fleming’s books in that. Why the hell did he not do it in Broccoli productions, sigh.
He is the Natalie Portman of James Bond actors. His movies are as good as his mood when making them, he can be brilliant in some, awful in others.
While ffolkes* was an interesting flick, it wasn’t Bond, especially Fleming’s Bond, by several light years. A bearded hero who likes cats, knitting, and hates women!!! Not even close.
*The movie title and poster both feature a small letter “f” at the front, and the letter is doubled. Iconoclastic and eccentric all around, like ffolkes himself, and unlike Bond.
Agreed.
I know there’s a lot of love for Eyes, but there are several things in that film that just ruin it for me: The opening sequence with not-Blofeld is ludicrous and and silly; Carole Bouquet shows all the acting range of a department-store mannequin and Lynn Holly-Johnson, cute as she may be, is teeth-grindingly awful. Not to mention the obvious recycling of the Karim Bey-like character in From Russia With Love and the skiing sequences from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Things do pick up a bit in the last third, with that spectacular monastery setting.
Oh, and I see it was directed by John Glen, which pretty much explains everything. Most consistently bad of the various Bond directors, IMO. Sorry.
Jane Seymour is my favorite Bond Girl of the group, and Live and let Die is something of a guilty pleasure for me, but IIRC that film and Man With the Golden Gun came pretty close to killing the franchise.
I voted for The Spy Who Loved Me, but the truth is, I enjoyed ALL of the Moore flicks except the wretchedly bad Man With the Golden Gun.
Despite the fact that I liked Ian Fleming’s books, despite the fact that Timothy Dalton was my favorite Bond (his*** License to Kill ***was MUCH closer to Ian’s Fleming’s ***Live and Let Die *** than the Moore film of that name was)… I almost always had FUN watching Moore’s movies.
As critic Vincent Canby observed, Moore’s Moonraker was MUCH funnier than The The Nude Bomb, the Maxwell Smart spy comedy that was supposed to to spoofing James Bond.
If you have a fixed image in mind of James Bond as a cold-blooded killer, you’re likely to think thta, say, Daniel Craig is the perfect Bond, and hate Moore for treating the role as a silly joke.
But I disagree- I can like the campy comic approach to Bond AND the serious approach. Roger Moore played Bond with a wink and a nudge, and I usually enjoyed that.
To use an example I’ve posted before… just as there’s plenty of room for Adam West’s campy, comic Batman AND for the Dark Knight, I can enjoy Roger Moore’s goofy Bond AND Daniel Craig’s grim 007.
The doubled f isn’t iconoclastic and eccentric; it’s Welsh.
If you think Bond isn’t supposed to be iconoclastic and eccentric, I think you’re missing the whole point of ordering a “vodka martini, shaken not stirred.” I’m told he also prefers coffee to tea.
I know. But it sets him apart, which is my point
Fleming said often enough that Bond wasn’t supposed to be eccentrivc – he was pretty much a blank slate who enjoyed Good Things, and he gave Bond that bland name to be in keeping with that philosophy.
the preference for his Vodka martinis Shaken but not Stirred is pretty minor. I’m told that his choice of liquors for his the Vesper is more eccentric, but that never caught on.
That’s how I feel about it too, which is why I voted “The Spy Who Loved Me” as the best Moore Bond film. It’s right up there with “You Only Live Twice” for mega-villain excess and silliness, and in a lot of ways, the goofy Moore Bond works better in that element than Connery’s Bond did.
Also, TSWLM just was better than Moonraker or the other Bond mega-villain movies.
Compare his “crocodile bridge” scene to Daniel Craig on that crane in Casino Royale. It’s the difference between “working smarter” and “working harder.”
Critics of the Bond franchise (notably one Alan Moore of Northampton) have long felt that he doesn’t much like them either.
But not in the same way. Even Alan Moore (who has voiced his disapprobation of 007 in several places) has to admit that he likes to seduce and bed women. Fleming explicitly points out how Bond has a soft spot for “birds with a wing down”, which is a helluva long way from the woman-hater Moore would have you believe. But ffolkes wants to have as little to do with women as possible – not associate with them, talk with them, or touch them.
I think, too, that ffolkes didn’t drink.