Have No Fear, Mata Bond Is Here

Let's be honest; nobody views Casino Royale (1967)  as a searing feminist masterpiece.  This is, after all, a film that literally uses women as set dressing.  Scene after scene there are random girls loitering in the background, propping up the scenery, washing cars in skintight leather, pressing against Orson Welles' back.  They're all over the place and they very rarely have much to do.

The women with speaking parts don't fare much better.  It's been more than fifty years, so I think it's safe to say that Ursula Andress is terrible in this film.  She doesn't posses a single comic instinct, and it really makes you appreciate the work of Nikki van der Zyl in Dr No because she managed to give Honey emotions that I don't think would be there in Ursula's native voice.  Deborah Kerr has the air of a maiden aunt playing with children at a family party.  She's not entirely sure what's going on, but she's willing to join in and do what the young ones tell her to do.  Angela Scoular would turn in a much better performance as a teenage temptress with a regional accent two years later.  Barbara Bouchet is beautiful but bland as Moneypenny, and while I think Daliah Lavi is underrated - she manages to more than hold her own against a Woody Allen at the height of his scene-stealing powers - she's barely in the film.

Also they make Daliah wear this outfit, which is hands down the worst costume any Bond woman has ever worn, and yes I'm including everything Tiffany Case wears.

Joanna Pettet as Mata Bond, on the other hand?  Incredible.  This is the kind of performance that could've made Casino Royale a success - a sly, tongue in cheek, naughtily sexy performance that in any just universe would've made her a star.  Casino Royale was only her third film, after a string of guest appearances on American telly, and they threw her up against the likes of David Niven, Anna Quayle, Ronnie Corbett and Bernard Cribbins.  I'd argue that she actually outclasses all of them.  You can't take your eyes off her.

Yes, she's gorgeous, and rocking a a metal bikini sixteen years before Carrie Fisher.  Her dance sequence introduction is the kind of entrance that should've had Hollywood beating at her door, like Cameron Diaz in The Mask.  The camera and director absolutely love her.  Joanna's face seems to glow out of the screen.

It's more than that, though: Joanna/Mata is funny.  Bond Girls are very rarely allowed to be funny.  Generally 007 gets all the best lines and when they try to make a girl amusing, they tend to do things to her rather than let her be an active comic partner - think of Tiffany falling off the oil rig, or Goodnight getting locked in a boot, or Stacey thrashing around with a vase while Bond does the actual fighting.  Mata gets proper comic lines and scenes and Joanna carries them easily - Eon could've learned a lot from her.  I love that moment when Sir  James asks her if she learned that language at her fancy finishing school; "no, I taught them," she mutters, subtly, but no less hysterically.  She's in comedy scenes with Cribbins and Corbett and very much not being burnt to a crisp.  (I'm obsessed with the way she shouts "well I don't 'ave any change!" at Cribbins like she's auditioning for Nancy in Oliver!).

She's also having a ball.  The Berlin sequence descends - as with much of Casino Royale - into frenetic slapstick, with Mata spraying a collection of military personnel with a fire extinguisher.  There is a shot of Joanna on the steps, laughing, and I bet if you've seen this film you can absolutely remember that moment because it's pure joy.

Adorable.  Unfortunately, as with so much in this amazing mess of a film, she promptly vanishes from the film save for a couple of brief appearances towards the end.  I'm guessing these were a late reshoot because by now Mata's had a haircut.

Mia Farrow left gagging.  She gets kidnapped in Horseguards Parade by a guardsman (I really wanted them to repeat this sequence with Madeline in No Time To Die) and then carried away in a flying saucer.  She's reduced to being rescued and worse, sidelined, taken out the back entrance by Cooper and not getting to take part in the general insanity of the final fight.  She does still get blown up though, which implies Coop stuck her out by the bins rather than taking her and Moneypenny to safety.

Her last line is "Good heavens, Daddy, I couldn't have enjoyed it more!" and you have to agree with her.  Casino Royale gets a lot of things wrong, but everything to do with Mata is very, very right.  (Except maybe when she says she might've fancied Sir James if he wasn't her dad.  That's a bit weird).  

Angels

The recent death of Raquel Welch produced a lot of obituaries talking about her role as an iconic sex symbol; a woman whose talents and sheer beauty made her transcend being a mere actress and turned her into an icon.  Many of those obituaries also mentioned how, in an alternate universe, Raquel Welch was Domino in Thunderball, until she was released for FantasticVoyage.  

This isn't a blog post about the Domino we could have had.  Instead it's a blog post about mortality, and about how we're now facing up to a new era.

In my head, Bond villains died all the time.  When I was a kid, getting into 007 around the time of the 25th anniversary, many of the great villains were already gone.  Gert Frobe.  Robert Shaw.  Lotte Lenya.  Curt Jurgens.  It was unsurprising.  

The 007 support staff were going too.  Bernard Lee died, and so did Desmond Llewellyn, and Lois Maxwell.  But we'd watched them age and so it felt inevitable.  

Then Bonds themself passed away; Roger Moore and Sean Connery.  But again, that seemed like something that would happen eventually.

Now though?  Now we're losing Bond Girls, and that carries a sadness all of its own.  To quote the documentary, Bond Girls Are Forever, preserved.  Bond Girls are the high point of human existence: beautiful, brave, athletic, smart.  Every Bond Girl is a woman at her absolute peak.

Raquel Welch's death somehow reminded me that the girls of the sixties are now in their eighties at least and, sadly, some of them have already passed.  Honor Blackman has gone.  So has Tania Mallet, and Eunice Gayson, and Zena Marshall.  Molly Peters and Claudine Auger and Mitsouko; Karin Dor and Angela Scoular; Diana Rigg.  These iconic women of the Sixties Bond movies are slowly succumbing to age and there is a deep sadness to it - a different sadness to the loss of Tanya Roberts or Cassandra Harris, Bond Girls taken too soon.

This is a world in which these beautiful, young, lithe, happy women are quietly passing away.  There is a strange sadness to it I can't really articulate.  They were captured on film in iconic roles as a moment of astonishing beauty.  Claudine Auger is that girl in a swimsuit on a beach in the Bahamas - she is eternal.  I can't quite reconcile that with her death.  There's also the sadness of knowing that where these Bond Girls go, others will follow; as John Gardner once wrote, Nothing Lasts For Ever.  It's a strange sadness but it's one I feel profoundly.  A death of hope and beauty that will never be regained.  

Those Cats Are All Dead

The last time we saw the cat:

What happened next:

The last time we saw the cat:

What happened next:

The last time we saw the cat:

What happened next:

The last time we saw the cat:

What happened next:

Someone call the RSPCA, Blofeld is a terrible pet owner.

No Time To Live Twice

I saw No Time To Die for the third time today - Odeon again - and about the third time is when I stop just wallowing in a new Bond film and start actually processing it.  There were a bunch of things I noticed this time I hadn't seen before - though I kept forgetting to look at Nomi's name on Q's readout; does she have a surname or what? - but I also dwelled on all the bits of it that were taken from the novel of You Only Live Twice.  

As I wrote in this piece back in 2017 (wow, No Time To Die has taken forever to reach the screen, hasn't it?) You Only Live Twice is a pretty odd novel, preoccupied with death and decay and with a massive wodge of travelogue in the middle as 007 works his way through Japan.  Much of it is unlikely to ever make it to the screen, unless they can work out a way to get Bond spitting beer onto a cow's back into an action sequence, but there's still enough there to get picked over, and that's what No Time To Die does.  Here's the moments that I can think of.

• Bond is no longer 007, but is given a new number (in the book he becomes 7777, while when he first returns to MI6 and the Double O's in the film Nomi is still 007 and we're not told what number he becomes)
• The Bond Girl has James Bond's baby (within the story in the film, after it in the novel; the Raymond Benson story Blast from the Past posits that his name is James Suzuki and he's murdered by Irma Bunt.  Like a lot of Raymond Benson's writing, it is terrible).
• The villain's headquarters is on a remote island near Japan.
• The villain has a poisonous garden full of plants that can kill (this feature was particularly exciting to see onscreen, though I wish they could've found room for the piranha pool as well).
• When Bond throttles Blofeld, he hisses "Die, Blofeld, die!", although unlike in the book he doesn't strangle him to death.
• M repeats Mary Goodnight's epitaph for Bond - "I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them; I shall use my time."
• Is it stretching things to say that Safin's secret trapdoor exit is reminiscent of the oubliette in Blofeld's castle?

And then there's the ending.  I've made peace with No Time To Die's controversial finish by telling myself they're doing You Only Live Twice and the next book will start like The Man With The Golden Gun.  In the novel, Bond is hit by a bit of debris as he escapes Blofeld's exploding castle and it gives him amnesia.  Kissy Suzuki convinces him he is her husband, and they live happily together for a few months, until he sees the word Vladivostok on a bit of newspaper they use for loo roll and it rings a bell.  The novel ends on a cliffhanger with Bond heading off to Russia to find out more about himself.  At the start of the next novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, we learn he was picked up by the Russians and brainwashed into being their agent.  They send him back to London with a gas gun to murder M.

Here's how you can get out of No Time To Die's ending and into Bond 26.  One of those two ships that are headed for the island finds a battered, barely clinging to life, brain damaged Bond.  They take him away with them to Russia or wherever (the film is careful not to tell us where those two ships are actually coming from; they could be from Russia, or perhaps North Korea, or perhaps Quantum is back).  There's your pre-titles.  He's rebuilt - lots of plastic surgery, cough cough - under the title sequence (a la Die Another Day) then he arrives at MI6 and tries to kill M.  Deprogramme him (Sir James Molony!) then send 007 off to get revenge on the people who tried to turn him against Queen and Country.  This also means that he can either (a) forget all about Madeline and Mathilde because of the brain damage or (b) live with the eternal pain of never being able to see them because of the nanobots.  I'd prefer (a). 

They probably won't do any of that.  They'll probably just start all over again.  But until I see Bond 26, this is the story I've written in my head to stop me getting very annoyed indeed by the end of No Time To Die.  And I'm putting it down on the internet so when Bond is hanging out in a brothel in Sav'la'Mar with a possibly homosexual assassin and a girl with a pet bird you'll all know I was right.   

Roughly Everything That Went Through My Head During No Time To Die

This is a very rough, off the top of my head, not necessarily entirely accurate, not necessarily in the right order, run down of my thought processes while watching the first IMAX showing of No Time To Die at the Liverpool Odeon yesterday morning.  Spoilers abound, obviously.

1. You know, MGM might not be in such a terrible financial state all the time if they didn't keep changing their logo.
2. Get off the screen Universal, this isn't about you!
3. No blood in the gunbarrel?
4. Tamagotchi!
5. This is like some dark French drama that has wandered into a Bond film.
6. It's the Wrong Trousers, Gromit!
7. How old is Madeline meant to be?  And how old is Safin meant to be?
8. Was he wearing a bulletproof vest or did she just miss anything important?
9. Let her drown.
10. That Italian coast looks an awful lot like Jamaica.
11. You take we all the time in the world out of your mouth, that belongs to George Lazenby.
12. This is very pretty.
13. I was going on holiday close to here in 2020.  Sigh.
14. "He had come a long way since then, dodged many bullets and much death and loved many girls, but there had been a drama and poignancy about that particular adventure that every year drew him back to Royale and to its casino and to the small granite cross in the churchyard that simply said 'Vesper Lynd. RIP.'"
15. Although that's a bit more than a granite cross.
16. That made me jump.
17. James Bond's ears must be fucked if this happens every time he's near an explosion.
18. Is that henchman hot?
19. Didn't expect that.  Is his eyeball on a spring?
20. Are we getting the title sequence at any point?
21. This is a properly good car chase.
22. Fuck, didn't expect that crash.
23. It feels a bit weird that Bond is allowed to drive around Europe with this lethal arsenal now he's not a spy any more.
24. That spin shoot thing was good.
25. Yeah, dump her on the train, stuff her.
26. Finally the titles.  Not as bonkers as usual.
27. They cut it off after the big note.  Good.
28. Hugh Dennis!
29. It's a 21st century Kutze.
30. I'm not entirely sure what's going on.
31. There's a lot of people dying.
32. Magnets!  Ok that's delightfully bonkers.
33. Moneypenny!
34. OK, those shorts are a bit tight.
35. Who is paying for this Jamaican bolt hole?  Does MI6 really pay that much that you can retire on it?
36. Someone's been in your house James, are you not more bothered?
37. Billy Magnussen is very pretty.
38. Aw, I like that they're having a good time.  Although I don't understand the game.
39. This is the wildest nightclub in the history of the Bond films.
40. Are they line dancing?
41. Nomi's doing an accent!
42. I love that she's wearing fake hair.
43. Of course she's 007.
44. I like the little wave.  Cocky.
45. Paloma missing picking up her handbag continues to annoy me.
46. Oh she's new.
47. Oh she's amazing.
48. I love Paloma completely.
49. There's the sex traffic woman!
50. Don't they recognise James Bond?
51. An eye on a cushion?  Is this the Addams Family?
52. Those sores are pretty grisly.
53. No, I really, really love Paloma.
54. Where are all these men coming from?
55. Pushing him out the car made me laugh.
56. Surely they're not going to just arrest Nomi?
57. Clever girl.
58. No Paloma, stay!  Come back!
59. No!  Not Billy Magnussen!
60. Did he just shoot Felix?
61. This is a bit brutal.
62. Fuck you, scientist man.
63. They're not going to kill Felix, surely?  Is this their version of feeding him to the sharks?
64. They killed Felix! 
65. Oh there just happens to be a lifeboat nearby.  That's handy.
66. But does he have a Vantage because he used to be Timothy Dalton, or did he just buy one?  Actually that car got blown up, never mind.
67. James Bond with a Visitor pass.
68. "I can see why you shot him."
69. Blofeld's in Belmarsh.  I love that they say Belmarsh like everyone should know what it is.
70. Q's flat is lovely.
71. Q IS A GAY!  OFFICIALLY!
72. Never mind all this, tell your date you can't make it.
73. They're drinking Q's romance wine.
74. The Albert Bridge, the only bridge in London.
75. Is that On Her Majesty's Secret Service in the background?
76. How have I been so thick not to realise who Blofeld's psychiatrist was going to be?
77. She just takes on a new patient without knowing his name, his background, nothing.
78. Are they going to explain that face?
79. She's going to poison Blofeld then.
80. Shake his hand you miserable cow.
81. I like Blofeld's little train.
82. Is Blofeld better or worse this time around?
83. Fuck off with the cuckoo.
84. "Die Blofeld! Die!"
85. Oh, he did.  Good.
86. Really underlines how pointless it was bringing back SPECTRE and Blofeld.  Fucking John Logan.
87. At least they twigged Madeline was responsible.
88. Nanobots?!?!
89. Bond is always three degrees away from sci-fi and it's at its best when it is.
90. So has Madeline kept this place all this time as a summer home and just not mentioned it? 
91. Oh no.
92. Please don't give a shit about the little girl.
93. "She's not yours" - yes, maintain this mystery, so Bond can fuck her off.
94. Although Kissy Suzuki had a baby, didn't she?
95. Mathilde is perfectly fine with Mummy shagging some new bloke then.
96. Why does Mathilde only speak French when she was presumably brought up in London?  Does everyone know Madeline has a child or has she kept her in a cupboard somewhere?
97. Secret islands.  Lovely.
98. There's something wonderful about knowing that a massive car chase is about to start.
99. That didn't take long.
100. More cars!  And a helicopter!  This is glorious.
101. It's turned into Jurassic Park.
102. This is really good.
103. That's a great way to kill him.  Proper nasty.
104. She's not going to drop her toy and leave it behind is she?
105. What was Nomi doing all this time?  Was she having lunch?  Poor show.  She's far too competent to be half an hour behind everyone else.
106. Is she going to drive the car onto the plane?
107. At least this means they're not going to kill Nomi so Bond gets the 007 back.  But what number is she?  Make her 008!  She can replace Bond all the time!
108. A poison garden!  They are doing You Only Live Twice!
109. Let Mathilde touch the poison flowers, whatever.
110. I love this glider thing.
111. Handy they had a secret underground dock that nobody was looking at.
112. Wasn't this electromagnetic watch in one of the computer games?
113. This island base is wonderful.  Ken Adam bonkersness plus plain weirdness.
114. Yes Nomi, smack him one!
115. Why is he putting the mask on the screen, that means nothing to anyone except Madeline.
116. He's not going to just leave Nomi there, is he?
117. Oooh, very zen.
118. So is he just going to wipe people out?  Is there a pattern to it?  Is there a reason?  DID SAFIN DO COVID?!?!
119. This bowing down is a bit much.
120. Comedy trapdoor!
121. So that's it, one bite and you send her running off on her own?  I hope she's full of nanobots.
122. She was under the table!  Fuck off.
123. Go Nomi!  Kill the racist!
124. Has anyone actually said "No Time To Die"?
125. So they're going to just send all the girls off in a boat?  Even Nomi?  Wouldn't she be a great help?
126. Ah those blast doors.
127. There are literally millions of goons in this place.
128. Exploding eye!  Amazing.
129. And a quip!  I miss quips.
130. It's closing again.
131. Those gunshots looked a bit close.
132. Broken arm!  Fucking hell.
133. Ah, so Bond is now infected with the nanobots, so he can never see Madeline or Mathilde again!  Good.
134. He just shot Safin?  Oh.  I thought he was going to drown him in that pool.
135. No, he should've laid in the pool, still alive but unable to move, then when the blast doors opened he'd fall through into the poison pool and disintegrate. 
136. Bond is properly hurt.
137. Oh whatever, Madeline's rubbish anyway.
138. Trying to imagine what Nomi is saying to Mathilde in the background.
139. That rooftop looks very close to the blast site.
140. Fuck off.
141. They can't kill Bond.
142. He'll come back right?
143. Fuck off.
144. "I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them; I shall use my time."  Wonderful.  If wrong.
145. Fuck off Madeline.
146. Is this the original or have they got someone modern to sing it?
147. It's the original!  No!  THIS BELONGS TO BOND AND TRACY.
148. Fuck off.
149. I hate that ending.
150. And where's James Bond Will Return?
151. Fuck off.
152. Although thinking about it, if they are doing You Only Live Twice, then that ends with Bond off to Russia.  And this island is close to Russia.  Maybe they're doing that.
153. Maybe the next one will start with 007 returning brainwashed and trying to kill M.  
154. I don't want them to start all over again again.
155. Maybe they should get Daniel Craig to do another one, just to untangle the mess.
156. Where's the fucking James Bond Will Return?
157. THANK FUCK FOR THAT.

One-liner

 

As I was showering this morning I had my phone on shuffle, and it randomly played Helicopter Ride from Tomorrow Never Dies.  As so often happens I heard the dialogue in my head as it played.

Another Carver building.  If I didn't know better I'd say he'd developed an edifice complex.

It's a stupid, throwaway little joke.  Just a single line for a quick gag.  But as I towelled off, it occurred to me: that doesn't happen any more.  Jokes in the Daniel Craig era - when they occur - are placed very deliberately within the film.  There's a kind of "here's the funny bit!" deliberateness; it's Q, so it'll be funny.  It's this one car chase through Rome, so there will be funny bits.  Much as Cubby used to refer to the action sequences as "bumps", the set-pieces that the film is aiming towards, you get the feeling that the funny parts are marked out on a white board somewhere.

I like Bond films that are funny all the way through.  Not all out comedy but a mix.  Action, comedy, sex, that's what I want from a Bond movie, and it feels lost.  007 should be quipping and laughing and being flippant.  I want that back.

Played Out

Back in the 80s, when streaming was the fantasy of science fiction writers, if you wanted to listen to an album without actually buying it you had to go to the library.  Fortunately Luton Central Library - a beautiful 1960s building which, I am sad to report, has been horribly modernised and has lost all its charm - had a great record library.  From there I managed to get a loan of this album: James Bond Greatest Hits.

All the James Bond themes, plus some extra tracks from the soundtracks.  This being the 1980s, I immediately made a copy of it, recording it to a blank C90 tape.  (Home taping didn't kill music, as it turned out).  And then I played that album into the ground, along with my cassette of the Licence To Kill soundtrack.  To this day, when I'm listening to Bond music, there's a part of me that expects Bond 77 to be followed by Moonraker.  

The music companies have continued to issue albums of Bond themes, no longer needing to pad them out with instrumentals, and usually turning up when a new film comes out.  Sometimes they add on a rarity - a remix of the James Bond Theme, or the superb Parodi/Fair backing track from the GoldenEye soundtrack - but usually it's pretty simple.  Twenty-odd tracks.

Except it's not that simple.

In this age of streaming and playlists, it should be easy to create a definite track listing for the 2020 version of James Bond Greatest Hits.  But you can't, because there are a load of side issues that nag at someone like me who has an overanalytical mind.

Let's start with the number of tracks on the playlist.  Twenty-five, right?  One for each film?  (For the purposes of this discussion we are discounting Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again, because that's a whole different layer of complexity).  Except: On Her Majesty's Secret Service has two themes - the instrumental title track, and We Have All The Time In The World.  Do you put just one of them in, and if so, which one?  No, the correct procedure is to put them both in, meaning your playlist now has twenty-six tracks.  But... does that also mean we should be including one or all of the songs from Dr No, since that film also has an instrumental theme playing over the title sequence?  In fact, Three Blind Mice shows up while Maurice Binder is still playing around.  Is that as much of an alternative theme as We Have All The Time In The World?  

Let's say no, and put them in the category of secondary themes.  We can of course agree that the secondary vocal tracks cannot be included.  No Make It Last All Night, no Where Has Every Body Gone, no Surrender, no matter how much better than Tomorrow Never Dies it may be.  And yes, sadly, that means no The Experience of Love.  So now we're adding the theme tunes, and it goes like this:

1. James Bond Theme (1:48)

2. From Russia With Love (2:35)

3. Goldfinger (2:50)

4. Thunderball (3:03)

5. You Only Live Twice (2:47)

6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (2:35)

7. We Have All The Time In The World (3:15)

8. Diamonds Are Forever (2:43)

Hang on.  Let's just pause for a second with that track.  The usual version of Diamonds Are Forever is roughly 2 minutes 43 seconds long (I'm taking all the timings from my iTunes, so there may some slight variation with what it says on your platform of choice).  That one has a ten second intro until The Bass starts singing.

However, in 2003 the Diamonds Are Forever soundtrack was remastered and reissued.  This new issue includes the title song as it is heard in the film: a crashing opening note, then an extended intro, meaning it's 20 seconds until we get the vocals.  The new version is 2:53.  So which is the correct version to put in our theoretically definitive playlist?

Instinctively, I would say "the version that's in the film", so the longer version with the initial note that scared the bejesus out of me the first time I listened to the new soundtrack goes in.

8. Diamonds Are Forever (2:53)

And we have immediately created a rod for our own back.  The next film, Live and Let Die, features a title song that runs to 3 minutes 13 seconds on the soundtrack.  That's standard.  The title sequence, however, as seen on this YouTube video, is only 2 minutes 47 seconds long.  Even taking into account the fact that the running speed is faster, there's a chunk missing: the distinctive falling strings after one minute.  If we're going to apply the rule that we use the version of the title song that's in the film to Diamonds Are Forever, then we should surely use the same for Live and Let Die?  Unfortunately, this version doesn't seem to have been released anywhere, so we're left with the full album version on our playlist.

9. Live and Let Die (3:13)

10. The Man With The Golden Gun (2:37)

Tragically there's no room for the awesome Goodnight, Goodnight/Sleep well, my dear/No need to fear/JAMES BOND IS HERE! end credits version of The Man With The Golden Gun.  That belongs on an entirely different playlist.

For The Spy Who Loved Me, we once again have a division between the album version and the film version.  On the album, there's a fade-out; in the film, there's a "baby, baby, baby, you're the best" and then a final note.  The fade out version does appear at the end, but there it's preceded by a camptastic male voice choir version, so that's not right either.  Once again, however, there's no commercial release of the title sequence version, so we're stuck with the album track, and a gnawing sense that it's just not right.

11. Nobody Does It Better (3:13)

12. Moonraker (3:12)

13. For Your Eyes Only (3:07)

14. All Time High (3:06)

15. A View To A Kill (3:35)

As you may have noticed, the length of these tracks has been slowly creeping upwards.  With The Living Daylights, we got our first Bond theme to cross the four minute mark, coming in at 4:17.  This obviously could not stand for Maurice Binder; there were only so many nipples he could put onscreen before things got silly.  Rather than create his own edit, however, he simply faded the track out after two and a half minutes.  Again, this short version has never been released, so the full album version will have to do.  Deploy your volume control to simulate the film experience.

16. The Living Daylights (4:17)

Now we've reached Licence To Kill, and this is where things get complicated.  Normally you would turn to the soundtrack album for the definitive version, but track one there comes in at a full five minutes seventeen seconds.  There's a much longer intro, plus some repetition in the chorus, which meant a single version was released that was a whole minute shorter.  Interestingly, even the compilation creators couldn't decide which version to use - for 2002's The Best of Bond they use the album version, but for 2008's The Best of Bond... James Bond they revert to the single version.  There had been single versions before - in 1967, Nancy Sinatra released a groovetastic version of her own - but this was the first time the producers put the different version in the film.

Adding an extra frisson of difficulty is the fact that the single edit is still too long for the titles, so Binder chops out the entire first verse and chorus, meaning Gladys Knight's first proper line after her intro scatting is "Hey babe!", which doesn't seem very respectful.  We'll be going with the single edit, because that's the shortest version available.

17. Licence To Kill (4:12)

In retrospect, Licence To Kill was a sign of things to come.  From here on out the soundtrack album contained only one theoretical version of the theme tune.  It's not necessarily going to be the definitive version because (a) they might have chopped out a load of the song to make it fit the titles and (b) there could be a single edit which is different yet canonical.  GoldenEye is a case in point.  The soundtrack has a longer intro and at the end, it fades out with Tina Turner repeating the title.  The single edit has the doesn't have the range "GoldenEYYYYYYYYYYYE!" with the crashing final notes, and that's the ending that makes it into the film.  A bit galling if you've bought the soundtrack album.  The single therefore goes into the playlist.

18. GoldenEye (3:30)

Once again, for Tomorrow Never Dies, a thirty seconds shorter single version was released; this has an instrumental midsection and ends faster.  That can go in the playlist.

19. Tomorrow Never Dies (4:24)

Good news!  For the 19th Bond film, both the soundtrack album and the single version were the same length, 3:58.  

Bad news!  In the title sequence, they cut out an entire verse (it's the one with there's no point in living if you can't feel alive, so maybe it was done for spoiler reasons).  So The World Is Not Enough makes it onto the playlist direct from the soundtrack album, but it's still kind of wrong.

20. The World Is Not Enough (3:58)

Another single edit for Die Another Day, this time 3 minutes 31 seconds long versus the 4 minute 39 seconds of the album version.  

21. Die Another Day (3:31)

With Casino Royale they got round the whole album vs single mix by not including the theme song at all.  Which was annoying.  But more annoying was the fact that, for the first time ever, the commercial version of the song differed from the film version lyrically.  At the two minute point in the 4:02 single, Chris Cornell sings:

"...I've seen diamonds cut through harder men..."

In the film, he sings:

"...I've seen this diamond cut through harder men..."

So a Bond nerd (that's me) in search of the proper version must instead turn to Chris Cornell's album Carry On, which actually does include the film lyric. (The Best of Bond... James Bond has the "this diamond" version, so I think we can safely say this is the preferred wording).

22.  You Know My Name (4:00)

23. Another Way To Die (4:24)

24. Skyfall (4:49)

25. Writing's On The Wall (4:39)

In the case of the last three Daniel Craig themes, the single edits are longer than the version in the titles, but they're all we have to use so I'm afraid that's what we have to settle for.

26. No Time To Die (4:02)

Which brings us right up to date.  The soundtrack to No Time To Die will apparently include the theme song for once, though who knows what version this will be: perhaps there will be an extra minute at the end of Billie Eilish noodling.  All in all, I think we can agree that until the producers release a compilation album that consists only of the music ripped directly from the title sequence, there will be an eternal debate about the contents of the perfect Bond playlist.  At least in my head.

NEXT TIME: we compare the four remixes of Die Another Day on the CD singles and ask: which one is shittiest?