This raises a conundrum for the filmmakers. How do you show that Bond is now in a new country? How do you convey that shift of location to the audience? You could just whack a caption onscreen, but for a long time they tried to be a bit more imaginative.
At first, the filmmakers bought into that Sexy Air Travel mythos and used the airport itself. Both Dr No and From Russia With Love feature air traffic controllers passing on the information that a plane has just landed in "Kingston, Jamaica" or "Istanbul", saving the audience from having to work it out themselves. The filmmakers then have Our Hero stride manfully through the airport because yes, it's just that thrilling.
From Russia With Love introduced a second method for the audience: the really, really famous landmark. In this case, it was St Mark's Square in Venice:
Goldfinger also features the airport method, with a tannoy announcement about the British United Air Ferries flight to Geneva, but it adds in a third informational tool - the really bloody obvious sign.
For a few films, that was enough. Thunderball has a really, really famous landmark:
You Only Live Twice has a bloody obvious sign:
On Her Majesty's Secret Service has a slightly less famous landmark for its scenes in Portugal, with the Ponte 25 de Abril bridge and the statue of Christ:
And in the absence of really famous Swiss landmarks, it just goes to town with everything else Swiss (snow! Skiing! Bobsleigh! Cable cars! Cow bells! Ice rinks! St Bernards!)
The start of Diamonds Are Forever takes the local colour angle for its rapid fire start. We get two locations, very fast, in the first few minutes, and they have to do it fast. So Tokyo is plinky music and a paper screen and a charming floral arrangement:
Couldn't be more Japanese if it tried. And though we get dialogue saying "Cairo!", could it have been more obvious once we saw a large man in a fez in a casino?
They then doubled up on the location cliches, with not only shots of the Amsterdam canals, but also a voiceover explaining you were in Amsterdam and by the way here's a really famous bridge.
Live and Let Die presented a problem. Its pre-title sequence didn't just cut between three different locations, all without the friendly face of Bond to carry us there. It also had to introduce a location that was entirely fictional - Dr Kananga's home of San Monique. Finally, after eleven years, they caved and introduced captions. New York and New Orleans are shown...
...and then we get our fake location, complete with explanatory text.
Having broken their duck with the captions, the filmmakers still resisted making them part and parcel of the Bond experience. In The Man With The Golden Gun, they returned to bloody obvious signage:
...and helpful voiceovers explaining Bond was about to arrive in Hong Kong (by hydrofoil this time, because aeroplanes are no longer exciting). There was a single caption in the follow up film, The Spy Who Loved Me:
A sub-rule was now established: captions were fine, so long as there was nobody familiar around to explain the location. Since 007 hadn't appeared in the film yet, a Moscow caption was perfectly acceptable. (By the way, what a great font that is). When the exact same shot reappeared in For Your Eyes Only, there was no need for the caption, because it was followed by our old friends General Gogol and Rubelvich so we knew we were in Russia.
Moonraker stuck to a combination of famous locations - there's St Mark's Square again:
...and Bond getting off a Concorde in Rio before being driven past every famous sight in the city. For Your Eyes Only largely moved between Greek Islands, so there was a bit of dialogue, but nothing really to catch your eye.
However, anxiety was setting in. Someone had developed a taste for captions. So while Octopussy's first shot after the titles was a close up of the Berlin Wall, they didn't trust the audience completely to join the dots, and a caption was added:
(I'm going to now complain, loudly and vociferously, that the onscreen captions are not always used on the DVDs, and sometimes they simply whack the closed captioning on there instead. It is ugly and unacceptable). Octopussy also laid a caption for the Kremlin Fine Art Repository, even though John Glen had filmed a big close up of the brass plaque. Octopussy features our first piece of on-screen translated text: the legendary "GET OFF MY BED". Fortunately they trusted the audience to work out that a huge shot of the Taj Mahal meant they were in India.
A View To A Kill returned to the well of famous landmarks - the Eiffel Tower for Paris, the Golden Gate Bridge for San Francisco...
...but it was clear this was proving to be far too much effort. The Living Daylights broke out the captions for Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, and Tangier, as well as Rosika Miklos's "What kind of girl do you think I am?"
Licence To Kill opens with Michael G Wilson telling us we're in Florida...
...and then an entirely necessary caption because we were in a fictional country...
...but that was really the last time we'd be trusted in this way. From GoldenEye onwards, captions became commonplace. It's never made clear where Goldfinger's pre-title sequence is set; it could be any one of a dozen Latin American fleapits. It's not important. We get the gist. GoldenEye, on the other hand, tells us there and then where we are:
We then got our first ever time caption, with "NINE YEARS LATER" appearing after the pre-credits. Still, things got even worse come Tomorrow Never Dies:
That's not even a real place. We got follow up captions for a ship:
...and an office building...
...and Wai Lin having a bit of a chat...
...and another ship...
A Bond film was starting to become a reading test. Never mind the visual beauty, look at those captions! The unofficial "only caption when Bond isn't there" rule went out the window too.
It continued with The World Is Not Enough...
and Die Another Day, though that was those ugly closed captions again so I've not done a screencap of those. A new Bond in Casino Royale didn't mean a new style, and they continued with simply whacking a caption on up there to let you know where we were:
...unless it was St Mark's Square, because they probably figured out you'd already seen it enough in Bond movies so you didn't need a caption.
But the Bond people really lost their mind with Quantum of Solace. Every single shift in location got a caption. Every single one. And not just a few words on screen either - MK12 really went to town and designed beautiful, location-appropriate cards for each one, in a different font every time.
They were undoubtedly gorgeous but were they really necessary? We need to know where 007 is, but not that much. Context can tell us things. M and Tanner were in amongst rainy concrete; obviously that's London. There was a speedboat and a castle and a lake - it was beautiful, yes, but was there any need for us to get a caption telling us it was Talamone, Italy more than, say, where Marie was sunning herself in Diamonds are Forever? It's as if the filmmakers now feel the need to spoonfeed us all the info. And it's boring. At least Welcome to Miami Beach trailing from the back of a plane was a bit glamorous.
This fear that we might stop caring if we don't know exactly where things are happening reached its logical conclusion in Spectre.
That's a shot of the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, the River Thames, the South Bank... and they still stuck a caption saying London over the top of it. Gee, do you think?
With any luck Bond 25 will be a bit more trusting. Bit of sun and sand? Jamaica. Cheers. Leaving everything else aside, they're going to Italy again. By this point in time we can pretty much work out it's Italy again. It always is.
