Wow, What A View!

There is an alchemy around Bond titles.  You hear a sequence of words and it sounds... Bond-y.  Ian Fleming managed to come up with a formula for his novels - largely continued by the films - where they sounded simultaneously sexy, violent, mysterious and glamorous. 

It's one thing to put these titles on a book.  For a film, you have to actually have human beings say it onscreen, and that's where it gets difficult.  They often aren't phrases you can casually drop into conversation and, as a result, the films have sometimes struggled to crowbar the title in.  This is a rundown of where the title of a Bond film appears in the film, ranked by how well it's done.  Is it natural?  Is it dramatic?  Is it significant to the plot?  Is it just really annoying?

Note on methodology: I've concentrated on the first time the title is spoken only, otherwise the entries on films named after characters or organisations would get silly.  Likewise, wherever possible I've gone with where the line is actually spoken, rather than an earlier appearance on files or boats or whatever.  The very first shot of Moonraker is a space shuttle with the name of the film written on the side, for example, but I'll disregard that for this list.

24.  Diamonds Are Forever

Somewhat unbelievably, even though Bond lists the features of a diamond ("they cut glass, suggest marriage, I suppose they've replaced a dog as a girl's best friend") he doesn't add "also, I believe Diamonds Are Forever."  It's a shocking oversight in a film where people are talking about diamonds in almost every scene, so this goes at the bottom.

23.  Quantum of Solace

QoS skipping mentioning the name is more forgivable, given that it's a title that takes quite a lot of explaining.  Calling the criminal organisation Quantum gives it a measly half-point.

22.  Tomorrow Never Dies

Similarly, TND features the word Tomorrow an awful lot, but the title never makes it to the screen.  I wonder if there was a Tomorrow Never Lies line that was cut?

21.  Live and Let Die

There's no actual reason for Live and Let Die to be called Live and Let Die.  It doesn't really have anything to do with the plot, and the dialogue from the novel explaining it never made it to the screen.  So we can only assume it's named after that snappy tune performed by BJ Arnau in the Fillet of Soul.

20.  The Spy Who Loved Me

The title is never said on screen, though Stromberg does say "a British agent in love with a Russian agent", which is more or less the same thing in a roundabout way.

19.  On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Another close but no cigar; Draco says that if he did have information on Blofeld "I wouldn't tell Her Majesty's Secret Service."  Four words out of five isn't bad.

18.  A View To A Kill

The original Fleming short story was called From A View To A Kill; without that first word, it doesn't really make sense.  That's no excuse for the absolute nonsense that Grace Jones and Christopher Walken are forced to spout.  "Wow," says May Day, with all the enthusiasm of a woman who's just discovered her birthday treat is a trip to the Mrs Brown's Boys Interactive Tribute Experience.  "What a view."  "To a kill," adds Zorin, in a line of dialogue that makes no sense on any level; not as part of the script, not as a scene within the film, not as something a real human being would ever say.  It is nonsense, but it is, indeed, the title of the film, so it has to rank higher than the ones before. 

17.  From Russia With Love

Another phrase that no person who wasn't in a film would use, this one isn't spoken, but is scrawled over a picture of Tania on the backlot on the Bosphorus ferry.  I'm ranking it higher than A View To A Kill even though it's not dialogue because it doesn't make you cringe, and also Sean Connery's handwriting is very nice.

16.  Casino Royale

The building gets a lot of beautiful shots later, but the first time anyone says Casino Royale is a very casual mention in a bit of dialogue about Le Chiffre.  There's no drama or import given to it; if you're not paying attention you could miss it altogether.

15.  Licence To Kill

"Your licence to kill is revoked" is a bit clunky and, as with Judi above, it's sort of thrown away.  If only there was an M who knew how to bring some gravitas to a film title.

14.  For Your Eyes Only

"For your eyes only, darling," says Melina in her usual fashion of sounding like she'd just been woken from a nap.  She's not a spy, so quite why she's tossing out secret service jargon like this I have no idea.

(It should be noted that there's a bit earlier in the film where a file with For Your Eyes Only on it gets a whacking great close up and a musical sting, which would have been perfectly sufficient before they decided to over-egg the pudding right at the end).

13.  The Living Daylights

"Whoever she was, I must've scared the living daylights out of her."  It's a perfectly adequate shoehorning in of the title, and it gets a nice zoom as it's being said, but it's just a bit dull.  Solid mid-table stuff.

12.  Die Another Day

It should be good.  There's a dramatic reveal of Bond wielding a pistol.  It leads directly into the explanation about Graves' secret identity.  But Brosnan sounds so bored.  It's like they couldn't decide what to call the film, so they made him sit there and recite a load of alternative lines ("I see you're beyond the ice, Colonel Moon").  "So you live to die another day," was at the end of the shoot, when he just wanted his dinner and a cup of tea.

11.  Goldfinger

"Auric Goldfinger.  Sounds like a French nail varnish."  I'm guessing Guy Hamilton was okay with this understated introduction of the film's title and villain, because he knew it would be immediately followed by Gert Frobe making his entrance looking like the most brilliant Bond villain you've ever seen.  The dialogue was incidental.

10.  GoldenEye

"We're going to test the GoldenEye," says Ourumov, in a way that is casual but also hints at its importance.  Whatever a GoldenEye is must be significant because we know that it's the name of the film, but it's said in a nicely underplayed manner.

9.  Moonraker

Bond enters M's office, fresh from showing off to Moneypenny about how great he is, and finds the Minister of Defence and Q in there as well.  From this he intuits that he's about to be sent off to investigate the current national crisis, so he says, "Moonraker, sir?"

8.  The Man With The Golden Gun

The location is the same as Moonraker; its position in the film - immediately after the titles - is also the same.  There are even two extra bodies in the office.  What puts TMWTGG above MR is that Bond isn't being a smug git in this one.  His "Scaramanga?  Ah yes - the man with the golden gun," comes because he's asked a question by M, not because he's the cleverest person in the room and wants to show it off.

7.  Spectre

I'm not going to get into how a woman who is estranged from her father knows more about the organisation he worked for than the world's intelligence agencies; suffice to say, it's nonsense.  I will say that Lea Seydoux says it in a very good way, pronouncing it so well it made it into the trailer.

6.  Skyfall

This one's an oddity, because it's said by someone off camera, and we don't understand what it means for another hour and a half.  But the fact that it causes 007's face to crack and collapse is fantastic, and draws you even further into the film.

5.  The World Is Not Enough

This one suffers because it's a little clunky - Elektra's sudden, dramatic "I could've given you the world!" seems to come out of nowhere - but both Brosnan's reading and its position within the film are excellent.  "The world is not enough," is both a motto and a statement of defiance.  Bonus points for laying the groundwork for this one in a film thirty years before too.

4.  Dr No

"What else do we know about this Chinese gentleman?"
"Nothing much... except his name.  DOCTOR NO."  Honestly, if there had been a sudden cymbal crash and a flash of lightning, it would have seemed entirely in keeping.  Jack Lord manages to say the villain's name with so much drama it could very easily slot into a Hammer Horror.

3.  Octopussy

Weirdly, the first mention of the film's title has nothing to do with the character it's named after.  Instead, it does what everyone had been saying from the moment it had been announced: makes a joke about vaginas.  "That's my little octopussy," says Magda, in a saucy way that could be talking about her tattoo, but also could be talking about her genitalia.  Textbook.

2.  Thunderball

Remember numbers 15 and 16, where Robert Brown and Judi Dench failed to bring any drama to the title?  They should've watched Thunderball to see how it's done by a proper M.  Bernard Lee gruffly announces "Codename: Thunderball" with authority, gravitas and absolute purpose; it works both within the scene, and also as a little reach out to the audience of "this is what that nonsensical word means."  Brilliantly done, and only slightly mangled by the cut to Bond's face.  We need a big close-up of M, dammit!

1.  You Only Live Twice

So.  We're inside a hollowed out volcano turned rocket silo.  James Bond just almost went into space.  A man pokes his head out and announces that he is Ernst. Stavro. Blofeld.  And he's Donald Pleasance.  And he looks like that.  Then, just to heighten it even further, they reference Bond's fake death right at the start, and 007 claims this is his second life. 

Right on cue: "You only live twice, Mister Bond."

Absolutely impeccable. 

The Other Manuela

There's a fantastic Twitter account called Thunderballs which I highly recommend you follow.  Every day, they post a few pictures from Bond movie history - production stills, promotional shots, publicity materials.  It's a real treasure trove and there's loads of stuff I've never seen before (or, in the case of a Smiths Crisps A View To A Kill tie-in poster, I haven't seen since I took it down off my bedroom wall in about 1992).

Last Friday, they posted another picture I'd never seen before: a production still from Moonraker.

That's Roger Moore posing with the MP sports car driven by Manuela when Bond arrives in Rio.  What's unusual about it is Moore is not wearing the outfit he's got on when the car appears in the film; he's in the tuxedo from the carnival sequence.  Which immediately made me think: is this from one of the Adele Fatima scenes?

I have a minor obsession with actresses who were nearly Bond Girls - the Pia Lindströms, the Julie Christies, the Rachael Stirlings. Adele Fatima is different though.  Adele Fatima was actually cast as Manuela in Moonraker, and filmed some scenes around Sugar Loaf Mountain.  For some reason she was fired - there are rumours about her English skills - and Emily Bolton was flown out from the UK to replace her.  It's why Manuela disappears with a cursory "I'll drop you off at the hotel".

Footage of Adele has never emerged, and the only photo I've ever seen of her that is actually, definitely Bond related is the cover of this magazine:

I'm not sure if Rog has been cropped out by the person uploading the picture, or if the magazine just really wanted to concentrate on the girl in the bikini.  Either way, this looks like it was taken from the "Welcome to country XXX James Bond" press conference they always do with Bond and his girl.  This press report from the Revistas Antigas twitter account (which I ran through Google Translate) highlights the beginning of filming in Brazil and Adele's participation.

(The piece also mentions two other Brazilian actors, Cecil Thire and Fabio Sabag who, as far as I can tell, didn't make it to the final cut either).

The mismatch between the outfit and the car is the key part of Thunderballs' photo which makes me think it was taken during Adele's brief filming block.  When the car appears in the released version of Moonraker, Bond is wearing a groovy white suit with flares.  He's in the Rolls ahead of the MP and it's a rare moment in the film where there's no back projection:

If this was the only scene the car appeared in, this is where they'd have taken the shot with Moore, and he'd have appeared in the publicity photo wearing the white suit.  He's wearing his carnival tuxedo though.  Either they dressed him up in the monkey suit just for a photo shoot on the beach with an anonymous car - which seems unlikely - or this shot was posed for during a missing scene between the carnival and Bond at the cable car station.  Note that the caption says "...the natty little MP sports car driven by James Bond."  It could be just a lazy publicist, or it could be that 007 drove to Sugar Loaf Mountain (the sexist pig Bond of Moonraker would definitely have pushed Manuela into the passenger seat). 

Since Adele Fatima reportedly filmed at Sugar Loaf Mountain (the scene that followed), that seems to hint she was present at this photo shoot, raising the tantalising idea that there are pictures of her as Manuela out there.  I've long given up seeing the actual footage, but I'd love to see Adele and Roger together, perhaps with her wearing Emily Bolton's orange dress. I really hope Thunderballs - or someone else - digs them up someday.  Alternate universe Bonds are always fun.

The Leftovers

Earlier this year there was a rumour going around that Bond 25 would be a remake of OHMSS.  Apparently, Bond would marry Madeline Swann, she gets murdered, then Bond spends the rest of the film getting his revenge. 

I hate to debunk this rumour any more than it deserves (it was in the Sun) but that's not OHMSS.  The dead wife part is, but the whole "Bond getting revenge against the murderer" part?  That's You Only Live Twice.  The book.  And that wouldn't be a remake, because that whole plotline from YOLT has never been adapted for the screen. 

Which made me think: what bits of Fleming are there still out there, waiting to be picked up?  Below is a run-down of the stuff I can think of that could still make the screen.  It's not an exhaustive list, because obviously there's many small moments in the novels that could still be adapted, but it's the characters, plotlines and scenes that I think could still turn up in the films - and some stuff that almost definitely won't.

Note on methodology: in some cases the principle remains, while the details changed - so Pussy being a gangster in the book but a pilot in the film is not worth mentioning, because the spirit of the character remains.  

CASINO ROYALE

The 2006 version of Casino Royale has "Based on the novel by IAN FLEMING" right there in the titles (a moment that caused me to grin like Tee-Hee on helium) and it's deserved: pretty much the whole novel is there onscreen.  There's only one significant omission for me.  In the novel, two killers try to kill Bond; they have a box with a grenade in it and a box with a smoke bomb in it.  Their instructions are to throw the grenade then use the smoke bomb to escape.  They think it'd be better to use the smoke first, and push that button, but they've been betrayed, and both boxes contain bombs.

It's an amusing little bit of action, but it's relayed second hand by Mathis, so we miss the real impact.  Onscreen, it'd be reliant on you getting a load of backstory first about the "smoke bomb" which wouldn't be interesting considering they were going to die anyway.  The other part of Casino Royale which is mentioned in passing but I'd like to see filmed is the assassination at the Rockefeller Center that gets Bond his Double 0.  An accomplice shoots a hole in the thick glass, then Bond shoots through that bullet hole and into the mouth of the target.  Spectacular.   

LIVE AND LET DIE

The second Bond book has been picked over three times - first for its 1973 adaptation, then to add to For Your Eyes Only (the keel hauling sequence) and Licence to Kill (Felix being fed to sharks).  Bloody Morgan's treasure could perhaps form part of a future Bond plot - the valuable coins are being sold to fund SMERSH operations - and the Isle of Surprise is an evocative location, with its barracuda being kept active through meat being chucked in the water and the fake drums to scare the locals.  There's also a fun moment where a clock in Bond's hotel room explodes, leaving behind a creepy message, and Mr Big and Solitaire's real names - Buonopart Ignace Gallia and Simone Latrelle, respectively - deserve more attention.

My favourite potential movie moment, however, comes at the end.  Bond scuba dives across the bay to reach Big's ship, the Secatur.  He attaches a limpet mine with a countdown to the boat but is subsequently captured... and taken on board the same boat!  It's a thrilling, tense situation, that 007 only escapes from because Big decides to keel-haul Bond and Solitaire across the reef, leaving them off the ship when it blows.  But imagine seeing that on screen - Bond having to escape a ticking countdown clock that he himself put there.

MOONRAKER

While the bones of Moonraker turned up in the film (Drax, the space device donated to the government then used by the villain, Bond and the girl left in the rocket's blast chamber) more of it actually appeared in Die Another Day; Toby Stephens' character has the personality and backstory of  a 21st century Drax, the fight in Blades is a more cinematic bridge game, Icarus is a device for good turned bad like the Moonraker, and Rosamund Pike was even initially announced as Gala Brand, the heroine from the book.  A subsequent name change (possibly because Pike's character turns out to be a baddie) means Gala remains unseen on screen, which is a shame, because she's one of Fleming's more interesting heroines.  She also walks away from 007 at the end of the book, because it turns out she has a fiance; an interesting twist that the films haven't used.

Other character names not used in the film are Krebs, the nasty German henchman, and Doctor Walter.  Oh, and I know it'd look ridiculous, but Drax's notion that every man who works for him should have a shaved head and a giant moustache would be hilarious to see.

Moonraker has a few action sequences that would be great onscreen, too.  Drax blows up a cliff face while Bond and Gala are underneath, leaving them to dig their way out; it could be a tense, grimy sequence.  That moment also leads to a great black comedy scene when the two shock Drax and his henchmen by turning up at dinner.  There's also a scene where Bond and Gala are hiding from Drax and Krebs in the air ducts of the rocket site, and they use a boiling hot steam hose to try and flush them out.  It doesn't work of course, but it's tense and violent for Bond and the girl.  The villains also disable Bond during a car chase by cutting the ropes holding rolls of newsprint and having it crash into him, though I mostly like that because Krebs refers to them as "toilet paper of the Gods".

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

DAF is not a great Bond book; it's very bitty and doesn't really make much sense.  The film took all it needed.  What's missing are the villains, Jack and Serraffimo Spang; tedious gangsters on the page, but Seraffimo is a great name (as is the moniker Jack adopts, 'Rufus B Saye' - or ABC in French!).  Another good name is the jockey, "Tingaling" Bell (potential Bond Girl?).  The Wild West town used in the climax, sadly, carries too many B-movie associations for it to make a decent transfer to the screen, and we had a load of interminable horse race fixing in A View To A Kill.  The Brooklyn Stomping Bond receives - kicked into unconsciousness by Wint and Kidd in football boots - is perhaps a bit too violent for the PG-13 world of 007.

One extremely successful element of the book is Tiffany Case.  She's a hardboiled, no-nonsense girl, with a neat line in sarcasm and a compelling desire to be "woo'd" by Bond because of her awful past.  She'd make a great new film Bond Girl (with a different name, of course).

FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE

Another one where pretty much everything made it to the screen, the only part I miss is the flamboyant name of the head of SMERSH - General Grubozaboyschikov.  Now the Russians are villains again, perhaps it's time to introduce General G.?

DR NO

There are three big sequences in Dr No that are hugely important to the novel and yet will, most likely, never be filmed.  The first is Honey being staked out on a mountain to be fed to crabs - way too B-movie.  The second is Dr No dying by having a load of guano dropped on him.  I can possibly see 007 emptying a craneload of something on the villain and burying him alive, but I very much doubt it will be bird shit.  The third, and the biggest one, is the giant squid.

James Bond works his way through Dr No's torture tunnels and ends up in a sectioned off piece of sea.  A giant squid then rises up from the depths and battles with 007, but is defeated when Bond rams a piece of wire in its eyeball.  It was a fantastical sequence in 1958, never mind now, and absolutely impossible to film on Dr No's low budget.  In 2017 - when we have actual live footage of giant squids, and when CGI can put anything on screen - it remains unfilmed.  Mainly because it's pretty silly.  It could possibly be done, but as Die Another Day proved, Bond and CGI action sequences don't work.  It'd most likely be too camp to ever make it onscreen.

GOLDFINGER

The longest Bond novel became one of the shortest Bond films because they cut out the many chapters of 007 thinking.  This isn't a criticism; it's just they pared the novel down to its essentials and put them on the screen.  The only thing missing is the sequence where Bond goes snooping round Goldfinger's house; he finds a cine camera filming him, and drops a cat in the box to expose the film.  Goldfinger comes back, realises Bond has got one over him and so gets Oddjob to smash up a marble mantlepiece with his bare hands.  He then rewards Oddjob with the pet cat for his dinner.  Gross racism aside (Oddjob is Korean, remember) the idea of a henchman feasting on a family pet is gloriously sick.  It's not likely to make it into the films though, precisely because it's so twisted.  And am I the only one who'd like to see a lesbian Bond Girl who actually stays gay, as Tilly does in the novel?  (I'd also prefer her to not die, thanks).

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

The 1981 film put the title short story directly on the screen.  It also used the plot and characters from Risico, in the same collection; Risico remains one of the few titles never used, which is weird to me, because it sounds incredibly Bondian.  More so than Quantum of Solace, which, of course, they have used, though none of its story made it to the screen (it's a very slight tale of domestic strife told to Bond by the Governor of Bermuda) and probably never will, unless they're getting really desperate for names and decide Rhoda Masters is the new Bond Girl.  From A View To A Kill sort of donated its title and the French location, but Stacey Sutton was no Mary-Ann Russell, and there was no sign of  the secret Russian headquarters hidden inside a rosebush.  That is a tragedy. 

The final story in the collection, The Hildebrand Rarity, is one of the other unused Fleming titles, though Spectre's safe house was in a book dealer's called Hildebrand (Hildebrand Rarities, geddit?!?!).  The story's villain Milton Krest and his ship the Wavekrest appeared in Licence to Kill, though he was greatly toned down - the Krest of the story is an appalling human being, and everyone's happy when he gets a poisonous fish rammed in his throat; another horribly imaginative death that would be great on film.  The Seychelles location plus brilliantly named Quarrel-lite Fidele Barbey would also be nice to see.

THUNDERBALL

Perhaps because there was a phalanx of lawyers monitoring every page of the script, Thunderball the film is very similar to Thunderball the novel.  The only great omissions are Domino's lengthy story about falling for the sailor on the Player's cigarette packet (obliquely referenced by a poster on the wall of Vauxhall Cross station in Die Another Day) and the climax, where Bond and a load of sailors swim from a US submarine and fight the SPECTRE frogmen with home made weaponry made out of  broom handles and table knives.  Not very Bond movie, admittedly.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

Famously, Fleming barred the filmmakers from using any of this novel apart from the title (though they did still have a character with metal capped teeth hide in a wardrobe to surprise the girl).  Vivienne Michel therefore remains an unfilmed Bond Girl, and it'd great to see a character with that name appear - if only for completion's sake.  The rest of the book is a very simple tale of a girl growing up (I can't see Barbara Broccoli ever putting Viv losing her virginity in a Windsor wood into a Bond film) combined with a hardboiled crime thriller.  (Although if I won the lottery I'd pay for an adaptation of it, completely straight, in period, with Daniel Craig only turning up in the last third).

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE

Another one that made it to the screen intact, with the only notable omission being the SPECTRE employee pushed down the bobsleigh track to his death as punishment for molesting one of the allergy girls.  I should also put it on record that the first girl sent back to England by Blofeld has the name Polly Tasker which is another Fleming moniker I am weirdly obsessed with. 

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

This is the big one, 007.  Roald Dahl stripped out the characters (Tiger, Henderson, Kissy, ninjas, ama girls), Bond's obituary, and the Japanese setting - and then made up the rest.  That means there's two hundred pages of Bond waiting to be adapted... but it probably won't be.  Though the initial part is compelling - Bond has lost hope after Tracy's death, so M gives him an 'impossible mission' to snap him out of it - much of YOLT is a meandering travelogue, with Bond simply observing stuff that happens in Japan and moving on.  If Bond 25 does kill off Madeline (*crosses fingers*) that first part could be a great setup. 

The novel only really comes to life in its back third, and this is another part that could be adapted.  Blofeld, having murdered Tracy at the end of OHMSS, has moved to Japan and occupies a castle on an isolated island.  His castle is surrounded by a Garden of Death - a mix of fumaroles belching sulphur, piranha filled lakes, and poisonous trees and plants.  He's built it simply to attract people who want to kill themselves; Blofeld has surrounded himself with death.  It's a hellish location, and would make for a wonderfully dark twisted climax.  It should also be noted that Blofeld's cover name is Dr Guntram Shatterhand which is absolute genius and should be saved for a proper film villain.

At the end, 007 destroys the castle but loses his memory; he is last seen wandering off to Russia.  If they do use this for Bond 25, and Craig is sticking around for Bond 26, I hope that's the ending they use, because it leads directly into the unfilmed opener of...

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN

In the first couple of chapters of this book, Bond returns from Russia, brainwashed, and tries to kill M with a cyanide gun.  How about that for a pre-title sequence?  It'd be dramatic and punchy, but it absolutely depends on the previous film ending on a cliffhanger, and I'm not sure the Bond people would ever be willing to go that far.  Dropping it anywhere else would lessen the impact.  (It'd also mean we could finally see Sir James Molony as Bond's deprogrammer).

The rest of the book is sadly subpar, though it does have a character called Tiffy, whose real name is "Artificial"; all her sisters were named after flowers, but her mother couldn't think of another one for her.  It's a gloriously daft reason to give a Bond girl a gloriously daft name, and I wish it was in a film so everyone else could appreciate it.  (Other good/awful names in the book are the CIA agent Nick Nicholson and Bond's very subtle cover name, Mark Hazard).  The book climaxes with a shootout on a small-gauge railway; it is not worth filming.

OCTOPUSSY AND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS

Both of the title stories were put onscreen almost whole, though admittedly one was only done as a story relayed between characters.  Hannes Oberhauser was also referenced in Spectre, of course.  The Property of a Lady was mentioned in the film of Octopussy, but could still be used as a title at a pinch; it contributed the auction and the Faberge egg, but the traitor Maria Freudenstein didn't make it.  The only thing 007 in New York has that should be put on screen is Bond's love of scrambled eggs.  He's always eating them in the books and yet off the top of my head, I can't remember him ever eating them in a film.  Stick that in Bond 25, Babs!

Goodnight, Goodnight

There's a bit in The Man With The Golden Gun where Bond - having just seen Gibson shot in the head and lost the Solex - is told by M to take Goodnight to Thailand with him.  "After tonight's debacle," says M, "an efficient liaison officer wouldn't go amiss."

In 2017, this is a line that elicits guffaws.  Mary Goodnight: efficient?  This is the girl who nearly fries 007 with her out of control buttocks, yes?

And they're right: Goodnight is a mess, a terrible wimp of a character.  But stop and rewind.  At that point in the film, what has she done?  She's picked up Bond at the ferry terminal.  She's proved her local knowledge by telling him about the green Rolls-Royce limos.  She's flirted with him, then peevishly noted that he's probably going to shag someone else instead.  She has, in short, been an efficient liaison officer.

Oh, she goes downhill fast.  Like Tiffany in Diamonds Are Forever, she makes a great first impression, then slips into bimbo mode.  Tiffany, however, declines over the course of the film, and still shows smarts at the end.  Mary makes a shift change.

Look a bit closer at the film and you can actually pinpoint the moment when efficient Goodnight turns into inefficient Goodnight.  When Bond dines with Mary and she rejects his advances, she's cool and capable and funny.  When she turns up in his bedroom in the very next scene, she's needy and desperate and the kind of girl who doesn't mind sitting in a cupboard while her intended beau diddles someone else.  Her change of mind has always annoyed me, but I think I've finally worked out what happened.  Those two scenes were written by two different writers.

Rewind back to the early seventies, and it looks like the as yet unreleased Live and Let Die is going to be great.  Broccoli and Saltzman reassemble the winning team, including screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz.  Mankiewicz has a concept for Golden Gun, based on Shane: the two greatest guns in the world finally square off.  Bond vs Scaramanga.  It would be a grittier film than its predecessor - no gadgets, more down to earth.

Something happens though during the process - some have said that Mankiewicz was burned out from the effort of writing his third Bond in as many years, some say there was a falling out with Guy Hamilton.  Mankiewicz leaves (with no hard feelings - he returns with ideas for the next two Bonds) and veteran Richard Maibaum is brought in.  Maibaum adds the entire Solex subplot to add a MacGuffin 007 and the villain can both pursue.  The two storylines mesh badly, clunking from one side to the other and never really satisfying - it's never adequately explained why Scaramanga would be interested in the Solex.

Maibaum also reintroduces humour to the "gritty" script, amping it up for Roger Moore's style.  And this is where Goodnight was broken, for me.  Until the Phuyuck scene, Goodnight has been - well, not witty, as such, but she's got in a few zingers, and her rejection of 007 comes from a place of strength.  In the next scene, she gets locked in a cupboard.  Then she gets locked in the boot of a car.  Then she activates a laser with her arse.

It occurred to me that all this stupidity only happened in scenes that mentioned the Solex.  Andrea and Bond are bargaining over it while Goodnight's in the cupboard.  She has it in her handbag when she's locked in the boot.  On Scaramanga's island, she's actually funny and doing her best at the dinner table, but when Bond is trying to dig the Solex out she can't even find an off switch on the console.  In short, she's only a bimbo when Maibaum writes her.

Now I'm not saying Mankiewicz's Goodnight would've been one of the greatest Bond Girls, up there with Tracy and Vesper.  His previous female characters were not great - Tiffany, as mentioned, de-evolves to the point where she falls off an oil rig; Plenty is a hooker who's thrown in a pool topless; Rosie is naive to the point of stupidity and is killed; Solitaire is a drippy virgin.  But Andrea, in the same film, is great; she's sophisticated and exotic and haunted.

Part of Andrea's success is of course down to Maud Adams, so a word about Britt Ekland.  She's very pretty, and... that's it.  Tiffany is a far better Bond Girl than Goodnight, despite the same downward slide, because she was being played by Jill St John, a gifted comic actress.  Britt Ekland is not funny, and it harms Goodnight as a character.  Britt is adequate in the early scenes, but when she's being chucked about she's just there.  Maibaum's vision of a woman who can't control her own buttocks may have worked with someone else: imagine what Goldie Hawn would've done with it!  As it is - not so much.

Watch the film again and switch it off after Phuyuck and you'd think that Mary Goodnight was a competent agent in Her Majesty's secret service with a flirtatious side and the power to say no to 007.  I'm sure that was how Goodnight would've been throughout the film, if there hadn't been these last minute rewrites.  (I'm also sure that the dinner scene was a Mankiewicz creation - the dialogue is sharp and barbed, and Mary's role is similar to Tiffany's on the oil rig).  She's not that exciting, which is why I can see Maibaum would introduce easy gags as a way to give her a bit more colour and personality.  They were working on a deadline so, yeah, stick the blonde in the boot of a car and let's move on.

Of course, this is all theory.  I don't have access to the original scripts to compare and contrast (if you want to send them to me, feel free).  But I'm glad to finally have an explanation for Goodnight's change of heart in Thailand.  It's so sudden, so out of character, and so wrong, it's irritated me for years.  I'm happy to have my own headcanon to explain it away.

If my demands are not met, I shall proceed with the systematic extinction of a whole series of cereals and livestock all across the world.

There's been a minor piece of Bond 25 news lately, as apparently Neil Purvis & Robert Wade have been hired to write a script.  This has been met with horror in certain quarters, because apparently we've reached the stage where Spectre is the worst film ever made; a film can no longer just be "not very good", it has to be apocalyptically awful.  Somehow, Purvis & Wade are to blame for Spectre's failures, which seems unfair since they were the last people brought on board.  Personally I'd blame John Logan, because many of the criticisms of Spectre - its fan-wankery, its attempts to answer questions that no-one ever posed, its refusal to ever stop - could also be levelled at Logan's Star Trek Nemesis.

James Bond is incredibly hard to write, as anyone who's read my fanfic While England's Dreaming will attest.  Each Bond film or novel needs to be exactly the same as the one before and also completely different to the one before; it needs to be extremely modern and yet still hark back to the fifties and sixties; it needs to present a modern rounded character who is somehow also just a blunt instrument.  Few people can do it, which is why the same names keep turning up - Richard Maibaum, Tom Mankiewicz, Michael G Wilson, Bruce Feirstein and, yes, Purvis & Wade.  If they can take this formula and make it fresh and interesting time and again, then by all means, keep returning to them.  Mickey and Babs are smart enough to know that they can get the old reliables to knock up a framework and then bring in a John Logan or a Jez Butterworth or a Paul Haggis to spice it up.

Having said all that, I do have a few requests, and as someone who occasionally knocks out a Bond blog which is read by literally ones of people, I feel that Purvis & Wade should listen to me.  So here's what I'd like to see in Bond 25.

1.  No sign of Madeline Swann.

She's dead, she's missing, she just got bored; whatever.  Use another bit of leftover Fleming and have her run off to America with a US Embassy attache.  I don't care.  Lea Seydoux is a lovely actress, and she did her best, but Madeline was just boring.  She reminds me of Harriet Horner or Flicka von Grusse, Bond Girls created by later writers who James Bond supposedly considers on a romantic par with Vesper and Tracy.  They're not.  Give it up.  Don't kill her in the pre-titles and have Bond go out for revenge for the rest of the film.  In fact...

2.  Don't make it personal.

By my count, the last film where Bond didn't have some kind of deep personal reason for fighting the villain was The Living Daylights, thirty years ago.  Since then, there's always been a certain level of betrayal or revenge and I'm bored of it.  James Bond is a civil servant whose job happens to include a lot of sex and violence.  Do that.  His motivation should only be that a crime is to be committed against the UK or the world.  That's plenty.  Turn up at MI6, get your assignment, then bugger off to Hong Kong or Seville or wherever and kill some people before they kill us.  Speaking of which...

3.  Enough of the Scooby Gang.

Bond is a lone figure.  He has few friends and fewer emotional attachments.  And part of the glory of a Bond film or book is seeing him manage to overcome the odds all on his own.  Spectre, though, had him being aided by M, Q, Moneypenny and Tanner, with Bond's hunt for Madeline being paralleled with the MI6 crew stopping Moriarty.  No.  I get that when you've got actors of the calibre of Fiennes et al on staff, you want to use them, but no.  A bit of help is fine - we all love it when Q turns up in the Bahamas - but beyond that, stop.  M can give Bond the assignment.  Moneypenny can pine hopelessly.  Tanner can... do something.  If Bond needs help then...

4.  Bring back Felix Leiter.

I never thought I'd be advocating more Leiter, but Jeffrey Wright is great as Felix, and he's barely been in these films.  If you want Bond to have someone to talk to and to work with, that's Felix's job.  If you can't get Jeffrey Wright back again, then feel free to create an ally for whatever country Bond is in.  A new Mathis, a new Vijay, a new Tanaka.  You can even kill him if you want to go really traditional; it'll make the baddie look even badder.  As would...

5.  Give the villain a proper scheme.

Daniel Craig's fought four villains and only one - Dominic Greene - had a proper, Bond movie Evil Scheme.  (One which is sadly foggy in the finished film).  Le Chiffre was just cleaning up a mess of his own creation, Silva just wanted to kill M, and Blofeld just wanted to get his hands on a lot of information.  Boring.  I'm guessing we're never again going to see a Bond baddie try to eradicate the entire population of the earth, but how about an ambitious plan to do something properly nefarious?  Create a war for some reason.  Hold a country to ransom.  Threaten something with destruction.  Something with a nice big ticking clock and a fight against the odds.  And if it involves two huge armies fighting in a secret underground base, all the better.  In other words...

6.  Make a Bond film.

Finally, please, give in and make a Bond film.  Have Bond actually enjoy his job.  Have a couple of beautiful girls: one dies, one lives, no-one falls in love.  Have some outrageous stunts.  Have some jokes.  Have lots of jokes.  Make it fun and exciting and entertaining.  I know you're worried it might go a bit A View To A Kill, but it might go a bit GoldenEye.  It might go a bit Spy Who Loved Me.  It might go a bit World Is Not Enough.  Make a Bond film, not an action movie with James Bond in it.  It'd just be nice.

Or, you know, ignore everything I've said and make exactly what you want to make.  Let's face it; you've already got my money, so who cares what I think?

James Bond's Greatest Hits

Singing a Bond theme is an honour.  It's a privilege.  It should be one of the highlights of your career; admission into a select band of artistes.

As such, as far as I'm concerned, there is an absolute: put your Bond theme on your Greatest Hits.  I don't care if you're a "serious" artist, I don't care if it didn't actually do as well as some of your other tracks.  You sang the theme to a James Bond film; it is a career high point.

Does every performer do this, though?  I decided to have a whizz through some of the Greatest Hits albums available on Amazon, and see if the singers in question have kept their end of the bargain.  There will be harsh stares if they haven't.

Artist: Matt Monro
Song: From Russia With Love
Album: The Very Best of Matt Monro
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

That album is absolutely worth buying, by the way.  He's a fantastic crooner.

Artist: Shirley Bassey
Songs: Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, Moonraker
Album: The Greatest Hits: This Is My Life
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

Well, obviously.  She IS The Voice Of Bond, after all.

Artist: Tom Jones
Song: Thunderball
Album: Greatest Hits
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

Did you know Tom fainted when he did that final end note?  No?  In that case, welcome to Earth, recently-arrived alien.

Artist: Nancy Sinatra
Song: You Only Live Twice
Album: The Very Best of Nancy Sinatra
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

It's lucky they could find space to squeeze YOLT on there, what with Nancy's many, many other hits *side eye*

Artist: Louis Armstrong
Song: We Have All The Time In The World
Album: The Very Best of Louis Armstrong
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

You could legitimately make a case that a legend like Louis Armstrong didn't need to include the underperforming We Have All The Time In The World, but there it is.

Artist: Paul McCartney and Wings
Song: Live and Let Die
Album: Wings Greatest
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

I always liked that Macca.

Artist: Lulu
Song: The Man With The Golden Gun
Album: Erm...
Is The Bond Theme There?: Sort of.

It seems that Lulu has a somewhat complicated history of "Greatest Hits".  Her work with various different record companies means that songs are scattered all over the place.  The top hit on Amazon, Greatest Hits, doesn't have TMWTGG.  But it also doesn't have The Man Who Sold The World or Boom Bang-A-Bang or Independence.  The next one, Best of, has TMWTGG and The Man Who Sold The World, but there's no To Sir With Love or Boom Bang-a-Bang or Independence.  The third hit, also called The Best Of, has all those songs... but no The Man With The Golden Gun.  I think we're going to have to give Lulu a "could do better".  Sort it out, woman.

Artist: Carly Simon
Song: Nobody Does It Better
Album: Nobody Does It Better: The Very Best of Carly Simon
Is The Bond Theme There?: Clue's in the title, folks.

I did have a minor panic, because the very first hit on Amazon is for The Best of Carly Simon, which doesn't include Nobody Does It Better.  The shock of this sent me to Wikipedia, where I discovered that album was in fact released in 1975.  Phew.

Artist: Sheena Easton
Song: For Your Eyes Only
Album: The Best of Sheena Easton
Is The Bond Theme There?: NO

Even though I'm pretty sure the cover art is from the publicity for her Bond Theme, Sheena doesn't include For Your Eyes Only on her Best Of.  RUDE.  However, I think this may be another Lulu-esque rights issue, because a different Greatest Hits, The Gold Collection, does have FYEO on it.  Meanwhile I'm wondering how Sheena Easton can have more than one Greatest Hits collection.

Artist: Rita Coolidge
Song: All Time High
Album: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: Rita Coolidge
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

Of course it's on there.  In fact, there's a 1993 collection that's actually called All Time High.

Artist: Duran Duran
Song: A View To A Kill
Album: Greatest
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

Track 3, in fact, ahead of many of their bigger hits.

Artist: a-ha
Song: The Living Daylights
Album: Time and Again: The Ultimate a-ha
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

It seems that in the years between recording the song and releasing their Greatest Hits, a-ha have mellowed towards their Bond theme: the version on this album is John Barry's mix, not the far more synth-heavy version they petulantly put on Stay On These Roads.

Artist: Gladys Knight
Song: Licence To Kill
Album: The Greatest Hits
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

This is slightly complicated by Gladys's work with the Pips; most of the Best Of collections cover her work as a group, with maybe an odd solo effort.  This album seems to have the best of both worlds.  Unfortunately I'm not sure if it's the long mix from the LTK soundtrack or the superior single mix.

Artist: Tina Turner
Song: GoldenEye
Album: All The Best
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

Tina's a classy lady.  Of course she'll include her Bond theme.

Artist: Sheryl Crow
Song: Tomorrow Never Dies
Album: The Very Best of Sheryl Crow
Is The Bond Theme There?: NO

I know Sheryl wasn't over keen on her Bond theme, but really?  On an album with 17 tracks, there wasn't room for Tomorrow Never Dies?  Compounding the omission is the fact that this is the "UK/Japan" version, and TND was one of her bigger hits in those countries.  How dare you, Ms Crow.  This is just further evidence that Surrender should have been the title song.

Artist: Garbage
Song: The World Is Not Enough
Album: Absolute Garbage
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

SEE, SHERYL?  TWINE isn't a typical Garbage song, but they still put it on THEIR Greatest Hits.  They're CLASSY like that.

Artist: Madonna
Song: Die Another Day
Album: Celebration
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES but see below

There were two versions of Celebration: a single disc version and a 2 CD version.  DAD doesn't make it to the single CD version, but for once, that seems fair enough: it's MADONNA.  Squeezing all her hits onto a single disc is difficult enough.  Die Another Day is on the two disc version (and is also on the earlier GHV2), and yet it still misses out True Blue and Causing a Commotion and Dear Jessie and Rain and other big Madge classics.  SEE SHERYL - MADONNA COULD'VE GOT AWAY WITH NOT INCLUDING HER BOND THEME AND YET SHE STILL STUCK IT ON THERE.

Artist: Chris Cornell
Song: You Know My Name
Album: The Roads We Chose
Is The Bond Theme There?: YES

Chris Cornell doesn't actually have a commercially available Greatest Hits album: The Roads We Chose was a promotional CD that received a very limited release.  But fair play, You Know My Name is on there.

And that's the end of the line, because Jack White, Alicia Keys, Adele and Sam Smith are yet to release Greatest Hits albums.  At a guess, I'd say Skyfall and Writing's On The Wall will take pride of place on their singers' Best Ofs, but Another Way To Die will be quietly skipped past; it's extremely atypical for both artists and, as a duet, it's not going to be as important as their solo work.  I hope I'm wrong.  Come on, Jack and Alicia.  Don't be a Sheryl.

PS: in case you was wondering, Patti Labelle's Greatest Hits does include If You Asked Me To, but The Pretenders, Eric Serra, k d lang and Scott Walker have left their Bond songs off their respective Best Of albums.  Somewhat bafflingly, I can find no record of a Tim Feehan Greatest Hits.