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.

...only more so!

Fifty years ago today George Lazenby turned up to the premiere of On Her Majesty's Secret Service in an unfortunate beard.  It was the first sighting for a Bond film that has been forgotten then rediscovered over the decades.

It's been my favourite Bond film for over 30 years.  It was the first I ever owned on VHS; before that I'd only seen them on the telly.  I was curious about this 007 movie I'd never seen and only heard about so my mum and dad bought it for me for Christmas 1988.  I instantly fell for it.  I'd read the book a hundred times by then and this put it on the screen, while at the same time, making it better.  It was action and romance and drama all in one amazing package.  I loved it.

So here are what was going to be fifty reasons, but turned out to be more, off the top of my head, why On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the greatest Bond film in history.

1. Harry Saltzman & Albert R Broccoli Present.  The clock's been reset; we're going back to the start.
2.  Incredibly funky fuzzbox guitar in the Bond theme.
3.  Dropping to one knee.  Take THAT!
4.  Radioactive lint.  Possibly the stupidest gadget in the entire series.  Who says this film isn't funny?
5.  Tracy driving like a maniac.
6.  Tracy's green frock, later seen on the Morecambe & Wise Show.
7.  Seascape With Figures, but on the big screen.
8.  The editing; fast, shocking, mad.
9.  "This never happened to the other fellow."  It's a wink and it's brilliant and if you think it's terrible you're a very boring person indeed.
10.  That theme tune.  So good they've been trying to do it again ever since.
11.  Naked girls with erect nipples in front of the Union Jack forming a royal crest.
12.  The dissolve to the CASINO sign in the pool.
13.  That purple wallpaper on the stairs.
14.  Bond's frilly shirt.
15.  The little old lady at the baccarat table.
16.  "Teresa was a saint, I'm known as Tracy."
17.  Bond slapping Tracy.
18.  A midget whistling Goldfinger.
19.  Bond chucking a knife into a calendar and getting the wrong date deliberately.
20.  Bond telling Draco to shove his million quid up his arse.
21.  "Same old James... only more so!"
22.  "What would I do without you Moneypenny?  Thank you!"  Britain's last line of defence indeed.
23.  Tracy dressed as a ringmaster.
24.  We Have All The Time In The World.
25.  Gumbold's safe.  (a) it's an incredibly tense sequence (b) the Playboy gag is great (c) that massive photocopier (d) it was cut out of the VHS, for some reason, so I didn't see it for years, and I still get a tiny ripple of excitement every time it shows up.
26.  Quarterdeck!
27.  M's butterfly collection.
28.  A brief appearance of Luton Town on Campbell's newspaper.
29.  Irma Bunt, the most glorious dumpy villainess the series has ever seen.
30.  Piz Gloria; beautiful, inspiring, lonely on top of the mountain.
31.  Every single one of the Angels of Death, but especially Angela Scoular, Catherine Von Schell, Joanna Lumley saying "of course I know what he's allergic to", Helena Ronee's big hair, and the way Sylvia Henriques eats a banana.
32.  The room number on the inside thigh.
33.  The bit of wood between the broken rubber escape technique.
34.  "It's TRUE!"
35.  Irma Bunt in Ruby's bed.  You would genuinely shit yourself.
36.  Blofeld's explanation of his plot; urbane, sophisticated, bonkers. 
37.  The way Blofeld smokes a fag with the lit end inside his hand.
38.  The wrapping paper on the girls' presents.
39.  Bond catching his cardigan on that bit of spiky artwork (foreshadowing!).
40.  Bond's powder blue ski suit.
41.  Opening the door onto the slopes and the music kicks in: bom, bom, bom, bom...
42.  Skiing on one ski.
43.  The cat's screech.
44.  "We'll head him off at the precipice!"
45.  Throttling that bloke with a ski.
46.  Creepy polar bear man.
47.  Tracy skating up to Bond at exactly the point he needs her because she is utterly magnificent.
48.  Tracy doing all the driving in the car chase because, as I said, magnificent.
49.  "I love you, and I know I'll never meet another girl like you.  Will you marry me?"
50.  George Lazenby being really fucking good here.
51.  "Of Acacia Avenue, Tunbridge Wells."
52.  The man falling into the snowplough and "he had lots of guts."
53.  Blofeld kidnapping Tracy, which doesn't happen in the book, and means she's even more of a part of the story.
54.  Bond seeing Tracy being dragged away in M's window.
55.  Tracy's poem.
56.  The helicopter attack on Piz Gloria being brutal and violent (people are incinerated!)
57.  Bond sliding towards the camera while firing a machine gun as the James Bond theme plays.
58.  Tracy fighting Gunther and winning.
59.  "Spare the rod and spoil the child."
60.  That acid burning a hole in the glass.
61.  The way Bond pulls down those two pictures on the left so they slide behind one another.
62.  The whole bobsleigh sequence, but especially that noise as Bond's head is dragged along the side of the wall.
63.  Tracy's wedding outfit.  Trousers!
64.  M getting hammered with Marc-Ange.
65.  Q being paternal.
66.  "This time I've got the gadgets - and I know how to use them."
67.  Moneypenny crying and catching Bond's hat.  Oh God.
68.  "Three girls, three boys."
69.  Blofeld in a neck brace so it's Irma having to do the shooting.
70.  A single perfect gunshot in Tracy's forehead.
71.  "We'll be moving along soon.  There's no hurry you see, we have all the time in the world."
72.  Bond crying.
73.  The tender music going into the loudest, boldest, brassiest version of the Bond theme you've ever heard.
74.  Diamonds Are Forever.
75.  Peter Hunt, Peter Hunt again, Richard Maibaum, Simon Raven, John Glen, John Barry, Syd Cain, Marjory Cornelius, George Lazenby, especially Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas,  Ilse Steppat, George Baker, Gabrielle Ferzetti, and every single other element of this, the greatest James Bond film ever made.

Towards A Unified Timeline Of Bond Films

The Spectre trailer premiered this morning (is that title all in caps?  Is it not?  I need guidance!).  There were guns, gadgets, girls, all the usual stuff, but it was backed by something unusual: the theme from On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

The trailers usually use either a souped up version of the James Bond theme or a bit of music from one of the previous films.  For Spectre, they've gone to the trouble of arranging a new, 2015 version of John Barry's 1969 classic.  That's odd.  Obviously, it's a superb piece of music, but why that specific theme?  Does Spectre tie into OHMSS in some way?

This lead me back to one of my pet theories about the time frame of the James Bond films.  Between 1962 and 2002, it was simple: James Bond was a creature who went from film to film, one after the other, in a straight and linear fashion.  We'll have to gloss over the fact that he hasn't aged over the course of forty years, because that's a whole different can of worms, and it plays right into the hands of those idiots who claim that "James Bond" is just a codename.

References to previous films are few and far between but they definitely point to a linear route.  Kronsteen mentions that 007 killed Dr No in From Russia With Love.  Bond tries to get his hands on his black attache case from that film in Goldfinger.  On Her Majesty's Secret Service has an entire scene where Bond fiddles with stuff from previous adventures, and then the death of Tracy is referenced in The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only and Licence To Kill.  There's a school of thought that believes Robert Brown is playing Admiral Hargreaves from The Spy Who Loved Me, newly promoted to M, in Octopussy through to Licence To Kill.  And Die Another Day features an entire raft of self-referential moments, including a scene in Q's lab that may as well have had a caption running along the bottom telling you to freeze frame your DVD for maximum enjoyment.

Casino Royale, though, presented a Bond newly promoted to the 00-Section, so the assumption was: we've rebooted.  This is a new Bond without any past, starting all over again.  Quantum of Solace continued on directly from Casino Royale.

But then Skyfall came out, and didn't reference either of the two films.  And rather than 007 being a new, relatively green agent, he's explicitly back to being an old dog, someone M will really go to bat for ("He's the best we have - though I'd never dream of telling him" she confesses to Elektra in The World Is Not Enough).  Meanwhile, Mallory explicitly suggests that Bond simply gives it all up and retires to the Cotswolds or something, which seems a bit much given that he's only completed two assignments at that point.

So I came to think: maybe Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace weren't reboots.  Maybe they were prequels.  They were flashbacks to a time before the rest of the series started, a bit like episodes of Friends that suddenly feature Fat Monica and Rachel's old nose.  You have to take on board the fact that the flashbacks were set in the present day, because if they suddenly set a James Bond film in 1961 it would be weird (plus you'd have that whole question of exactly how old is 007 anyway, given that he's been an operating agent for the best part of six decades).  Remember how the Enterprise of Jonathan Archer's time was much more advanced looking than the Enterprise of Jim Kirk's time, even though technically it took place decades before?  It's like that.  Bond had access to computers and mobile phones in Casino Royale and a while later in Dr No he was sticking hairs over door jambs - just go with it.

It's perhaps best to think of the Bond films as running into one another, assignment after assignment after assignment, that just happened to be filmed and released over the course of fifty years.  If you add up the timescale that way all 24 Bond films happen over the course of a couple of years.

Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace are the flashback episodes then: how James Bond earned his stripes.  After Quantum, we move onto Dr No, and the rest of the series proceeds from there.  After Die Another Day, the next film in the timeline is Skyfall, and from there we move to Spectre.

Ah, but what about Judi Dench's M. I hear you cry?  Simple: there are two female M's, one who promoted James Bond, and one who took over in GoldenEye.  They both happen to look a lot like the venerable Dame Judi, but Henderson in You Only Live Twice looks a lot like Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever and we all accepted that.  Something terrible happened to Judi Dench I after Quantum of Solace, and so Bernard Lee's Sir Miles Messervy took over for Dr No (he does actually mention that's he's not long been in charge - ok, he says he's in charge of MI7, but that's not the point).  Then, after Robert Brown's M/Admiral Hargreaves retires, Judi Dench II takes over.  Female M never actually got a name (I'm ignoring Barbara Mawdsley from the awful Raymond Benson novels on the basis that it's a really awful name and the books are really awful) and so she could be two separate people.  We're also expressly told that her replacement is Gareth Mallory, not Sir Miles, so Skyfall can't take place before Dr No.

Naomie Harris' Moneypenny is also a different Moneypenny to the one from Dr No to Die Another Day; perhaps she's Moneypenny's daughter, like in the 1967 Casino Royale (there's a fifteen year age gap between Harris and Samantha Bond, so it's not inconceivable).  And there have definitely been three different Q's - Major Boothroyd (Peter Burton/Desmond Llewellyn), John Cleese (who was presumably sacked after Die Another Day for being rubbish) and Ben Whishaw.

To bring it back to Spectre, which appears to follow on from Skyfall, that would make this the re-introduction of the criminal organisation, not its introduction - that already happened in Dr No.  Perhaps Quantum has been subjected to a hostile takeover.  Perhaps it was just a cell of SPECTRE all along.  And so the use of the OHMSS theme is deliberate: Christoph Waltz says, "It was me James; the author of all your pain" - exactly the kind of thing someone who was responsible for the death of both Vesper and Tracy would say.  In my timeline, Bond was still married to Tracy and widowed, only after he fell for Vesper (when Daniel Craig was a one year old, apparently - again, don't be too welded to the actual passing of time in the real world).

The one problem (every single reader: ONE problem?) with this theory is Felix Leiter.  Unfortunately, Bond meets him for the first time twice: once in Casino Royale, where he doesn't recognise him at the gaming table so he's clearly a complete stranger, and once in Dr No, where Bond outright says "I've heard of him, but never met him."  We'll just have to gloss over this.  I mean, nothing about Felix Leiter really makes sense over the course of the series (is he fat or thin?  Old or young?  Blonde or brunette?  Black or white?  CIA or DEA?  Effective or incompetent?) so we'll just have to handwave this one away.

Of course, this is all just stupid conjecture.  When Spectre finally comes out in October it'll probably turn out the whole thing is set in the far future, and Monica Bellucci is a cyborg, and Christoph Waltz is Bond's long lost son.  Until then I am clinging to my little theory.