Grain of Salt: One Tuxedo Fits All - The Many Faces of 007
“The image of Bond as mythological hero may be a likely one when one considers that the decade of the Sixties was seriously lacking in real-life heroes. An increasingly unpopular war in Southeast Asia could not yield the Eisenhowers and MacArthurs who stepped forth from the glory of World War II. Domestically, assassin's bullets robbed the public of the men who seemed destined for even greater prominence as politicians and humanitarians. In an age of such turmoil and uncertainty when flesh-and-blood heroes could be cut down in less than a heartbeat, perhaps there was a psychological need for a hero-even a fictional hero-who was invincible.” -Drew Moniot
Actor Pierce Brosnan, while being interviewed for the documentary Everything or Nothing (2012), reflected enthusiastically on his membership in the elite fraternity of those who have portrayed “James Bond” on screen: “It’s a small group of men who have played this role. More men have walked on the moon!” Brosnan was the fifth actor to don the tuxedo of secret agent “007” and the lunar excursions he makes reference to were inaugurated by astronaut Neil Armstrong on July 21st, 1969. Five months later, practically to the day, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), the sixth film in the Bond series, had its London premiere. Though the film’s alpine photography and dark, melancholy epilogue are quite memorable, it was seen as a relative financial disappointment, grossing about thirty million dollars less (Young, 2014, 22) than its immediate predecessor, You Only Live Twice (1967). What makes “OHMSS” particularly distinct in a series that has produced twenty-four films over fifty-five years, is that it introduced the second person to portray James Bond. For the first five films, the part had been played by the Scotsman Sean Connery, and the idea of replacing an actor who had so clearly personified a character in the hearts and minds of fans was born out of necessity, not choice. When Connery left the series in 1967 the role went to Australian model George Lazenby, who suffered the brunt of the negative discourse following the film’s critical and commercial “failure.” His interpretation received such a resounding, public rejection that the executives at United Artists agreed to Connery’s exorbitant financial conditions to return for the Las Vegas-set bauble Diamonds are Forever (1971). But time has been surprisingly kind to Lazenby and his solo-outing as Bond. The film has even aged into a cult favorite, receiving the occasional re-affirmation from filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh, who wrote, in a 2013 essay: “It feels like [in 1969] everyone was so focused on what he wasn’t (Sean Connery) that they didn’t take the time to figure out what he was […] Lazenby has a vulnerability that Connery never had- there are scenes in which he looks legitimately terrified and others in which he convinces us that he is in love…” (Soderbergh, 2013). But the necessity for Lazenby’s casting laid the foundation for a precedent that would come to define the role and the series. The idea of the character as a cipher- a faceless vessel whose tuxedo can be re-tailored to fit a new personification when necessary, changed the fundamental nature of the series. Four additional actors have been cast since Lazenby’s single film tenure: The London-born Roger Moore in 1973, Welshman Timothy Dalton in 1987, Irish Brosnan in 1995, and Northern English Daniel Craig in 2006. Each man, acting as cultural emissaries for their individual epochs, absorb and refract the sociopolitical mores of the respective decades in which they were cast. Their discrete interpretations of Bond, as well as the style and substance of the films in which they appear, speak to the idea of the character as an enduring pop culture entity- an immortal superspy, cursed and privileged with many different “faces.”
From the very beginning, the ascendance of mortal actor to immortal cultural icon was a complicated proposition, especially while the man who first created the character on the page was alive and weighing in, creatively. Katharine Cox observes: “Choosing Bond is a very public event, caused in part by the overt consumerism attached to the character. Bond is defined by the objectification central to the films, resulting in a type of public ownership that causes massive consternation at the time of change…” (Cox, 185). For many, Sean Connery’s visage, voice, and swagger are unmistakable components of the subconscious response that follows a mere mention of the character’s name. But his initial casting was as much of an uncertainty as any of his successors. Cox notes, quoting author Ian Fleming in Sterling and Morcambe’s 2003 compendium Martinis, guns and girls: 50 years of 007: “Even the quintessential film Bond, as defined by Connery’s butch bravado, when first cast met with stern opposition from the author…” (Cox, 185). Fleming’s reticence is quite interesting, given the fact that Bond was deliberately and consistently presented as a cipher in the books. During a television interview at his estate in Jamaica, Fleming recalled: “When I started to write these books I wanted a really flat, quiet name. And one of my bibles out here is ‘James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies.’ And I thought: ‘Well now, James Bond, now that’s a pretty quiet name.’ And so I simply stole it and used it” (2012). But while the name and literary interpretation were purposely flat, Fleming was clearly writing out of a potentially unconscious impulse for creative wish-fulfillment. He had been particularly useful and perhaps even heroic during WWII as an active specialist in black operations and counterintelligence. But most of his contributions had been confined to the offices of the Royal Navy (Lycett, 2004). As such, his desire for adventures “in the field,” (particularly those that involved women, alcohol, and gambling) found a sympathetic venue on the page. John Pearson, one of Fleming’s oldest surviving friends, offers his considered interpretation of the first James Bond novel: “He gave one description- Bond is looking in the mirror, the dark hair, the high cheekbones, the same height, the same build. It was Ian’s alter ego. Bond was Ian […] His first book, ‘Casino Royale,’ it’s almost a confessional really, of what he is, what he wanted: Sadism, sex, and all the secret, unspeakable things he desired. It was an autobiography of a dream” (2012). Fleming, who only ever cited one famous composite for Bond in the form of musician and actor Hoagy Carmichael, would clearly never be fully satisfied with any face beside his own as the representation of his literary alter ego.
In an article written in 1976, only 14 years removed from Connery’s casting, Drew Moniot observes: “The rags to-riches success story of the early Bond films was of genuine importance. The moderately-budgeted Dr. No, which cost only about one million dollars to produce, eventually grossed $6,300,000 […] James Bond quickly became the screen hero of the Sixties and Sean Connery, who portrayed the invincible secret agent, had skyrocketed to stardom” (Moniot, 25). Fleming created the character in 1953 at the onset of the Cold War when his political and existential wounds from WWII were still very raw. By the time the films came along, nearly a decade later, the threats first introduced in the text had become more resonant. Dr. No (1962) premiered in the UK two weeks before the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and stateside six months later. The looming dread of a nuclear threat became foreground elements in three of the five films produced for the series during the 1960s. But Connery’s Bond, whose calm, almost blasé demeanor (particularly in From Russia with Love [1963], Goldfinger [1964], and Thunderball [1965]) regarding death, destruction, and potential nuclear detonation, speaks to the cultural necessity for a character both confident and unflappable when tasked with protecting a world on the brink. “The general mood of the Sixties was a growing discontentment with the current state of affairs. Perhaps the success of the Bond films was at least partly due to their awareness of the situation and their portrayal of at least a glimmer of hope and the promise of resolution” (Moniot, 30). Connery’s Bond is principally concerned with locating the next roulette wheel, cocktail, or conquest. But he’s also consistently square, not just in jaw but in principle and politic. He doesn’t go rogue, doesn’t talk back to his superiors, and is unwavering in his devotion to Queen and country. His clean-cut, sensibly-suited, company man is not averse to indignantly bristling at contemporary pop music in Goldfinger (“That’s as bad as listening to The Beatles without earmuffs!”), even as John Barry’s bold, brassy rhythms and Maurice Binder’s sexy, psychedelic titles presage the inevitable coming of the counterculture. Connery’s delicate balance of continental stuffiness, smoldering virility, and the icy detachment with which he dispatches all comers (the aspect of Fleming’s creation Connery appears most academically dialed-into) made him the perfect Bond for a world on the cusp of a shattering, social upheaval. Unlike his successors (all of whom have been publically reverent of his portrayal, and grateful for the hand-me-down role), Connery always seemed to carry an easy confidence that he was born to play the part, even as he felt superior to it. He never really needed James Bond, in the emotional sense. And perhaps that’s why the character came so naturally for him.
Roger Moore, by contrast, was the acquiescent, lapdog of the Bond fraternity. Already a television star and close friend of producer Albert Broccoli since before the series had even begun, Moore was the easy, agreeable option to replace the disenchanted Connery and the divisive Lazenby. Moore began his run in 1973 and would play the character in seven films over twelve years. But despite Moore’s willingness to dutifully return to Bond every twenty-four months, his polarizing take on the character was firmly rooted in a late 1970s ideological identity. Every bit the “bell-bottomed-Bond” of the disco era, Moore’s sartorial approach, casual physicality, and cheeky embrace of a free-love archness introduced a previously-unseen levity to the series. Moore, three years Connery’s senior, was forty-six when he took over the role. As such, he couldn’t begin to compete with his predecessor’s physicality, let alone the Scotsman’s dark, hirsute virility. So the pale, ruddy, affable Moore leaned heavily in the opposite direction- embracing the effectiveness of his disarming smile and trading on his comic timing. It comes as no surprise that Moore’s characterization is at its most rudderless when attempting to channel Connery, as evidenced in the somewhat undignified nature of his early Bond outings. His growing pains are most apparent during the four-year period leading up to The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and his gradual acceptance of an era-appropriate “let your mind go and your Bond will follow” approach is echoed in the tonal inconsistency of his first two outings. Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1975), while responsible for some diaphanous surface highlights (Paul McCartney’s opening theme for the former, the iconic island location of the villain’s lair for the latter) also represent the introduction of a particular insecurity that has hobbled the series ever since. The films began following where they had previously led.
Live and Let Die’s uncomfortable appropriation of the Blaxploitation subgenre and The Man with the Golden Gun’s clumsy incorporation of a Hong Kong Cinema / “Chopsocky” influence speaks to a trend that would grow within the series, constantly indicative of a periodic, creative bankruptcy bubbling beneath the surface. When desperate to prove their cultural relevance, the films will often grasp desperately at de rigueur filmic styles, genre exercises, or cultural phenomena: Moonraker (1979) as a reaction to Star Wars (1977), Licence to Kill (1989) as a reaction to “Miami Vice” and Die Hard (1987), Die Another Day (2002) as a reaction to xXx (2002) (itself, a kind of 21st-century Bond-knockoff) and the rash of extreme-sports trends, Quantum of Solace (2008) as a reaction to The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), etc. Ironically, post-Connery Bond films are at their most creatively successful when they appropriate themselves- re-making, re-imagining, and eventually hard-rebooting (a necessary overhaul that took the series forty-four years to finally commit to). The triumph of this practice is never more apparent than in Roger Moore’s third and most critically-acclaimed outing, The Spy Who Loved Me. The film, a barely-veiled remake of You Only Live Twice, affectionately embraces the tropes the series had been collecting and perfecting since Dr. No: A megalomaniacal villain with a physical deformity who holes up in an extravagant lair, a larger than life henchman with a gimmicky weapon, a mode of conveyance that can transform into a different mode of conveyance, etc. The film, in some ways, represents the first “self-aware” Bond exercise and this postmodern approach liberates Moore to become the version he was always meant to be, “The Jester Bond.” He mugs wildly, quips giddily, and nary breaks a sweat, even when trekking through the Egyptian desert. This Bond even reaches across the geopolitical divide to collaborate with his Russian Intelligence counterpart- a woman who proves to be Bond’s superior in virtually every way… until she deteriorates into a distressed damsel, requiring Bond’s rescue and eventually capitulating to his advances by the epilogue.
The politically paranoid Bond of the 1960s remained on a constant swivel- his missions rooted in a kind of jittery, social relevance that tempered their overt sensationalism. The Bond of the 1970s willfully ignored the topically unpleasant or controversial- embracing the anodyne potential for escapism and encouraging audiences to stop thinking and simply join the fun. Moore’s Bond turned the series into a key party with a side of espionage. He might just as soon gallivant off to Southeast Asia in 1975 with nary a reference to any political unrest in the region (The Man with the Golden Gun) as venture into East Germany in 1983 without even a casual mention of a certain, controversial wall (Octopussy, 1983). Moore’s Me-Generation Bond was unequivocally fun. But the party eventually had to end. And it did, with a whimper, when the fifty-eight-year-old actor bowed out after A View to a Kill (1985) with seven Bond outings notched on his bedpost. By 1987 the cultural requirements of the Reaganomic-era necessitated another dramatic tonal shift in the approach to the character. Where the free-wheeling Bond of the 1970s chose gleeful ignorance over topicality, Timothy Dalton’s incarnation is a scrutinizing Bond, so rueful over the state of the world that he rarely finds cause to crack a smile. Cartel culture and the rise of Pablo Escobar meant that a late eighties narrative would be compelled to address narcotic distribution and arms-dealing. Plus, the threat posed by the AIDS epidemic called for the fourth Bond to hew as close to monogamy as the series could manage.
Like Lazenby before him, Timothy Dalton’s alienating take on the character led to a period of re-evaluation on the part of the audience as well as the producers. The somber but serviceable The Living Daylights (1987) was significantly more successful than its predecessor, Moore’s swan song. But the clumsy, violent, ripped-from-the-headlines aesthetic of Licence to Kill dramatically repelled audiences, and the series experienced its softest box office numbers in 14 years (Young, 22). Roger Moore’s Bond had descended into flippant camp by the time he took his leave. But Dalton’s deathly-serious overcompensation (inspired by the actor’s commendable commitment to recapturing Fleming’s “edge”) threw the series completely off its axis, necessitating a six-year production hiatus (the longest break between any of the installments). The fact that Dalton only made two films before his unceremonious resignation speaks to the crisis of identity that the series was experiencing as it neared the turn of the century. Dalton was technically the right Bond for his time and, on paper, his methodology made a lot of sense. But audiences rejected him and his films didn’t resonate. Pierce Brosnan, by contrast, was immediately embraced by audiences and beloved by fans old and new, even as the quality of the films deteriorated so rapidly that the ultimate series reinvention became necessary.
Brosnan survived four films and, at first, seemed to be the perfect blend of Dalton’s steely assassin and Moore’s pun-dropping playboy. But the quality of his films dipped steeply and swiftly following the enormous critical and commercial success of Goldeneye (1995)- the first post-Cold War Bond outing. The box office numbers recovered from the Dalton days and broke series records. But the production costs climbed exponentially as the films hustled to keep up with the special-effects spectacles of the late 1990s. As such, the profit margins narrowed and the narratives began literally targeting less sophisticated (read: younger) audiences- prioritizing bullets and explosions over espionage, romance, or even fan service. If Dalton’s Bond had echoed the cold, humorless, “Just Say No” restraint of the late 1980s, then Brosnan’s Bond re-spun the disco ball of Rave-culture-ready excess, ratcheting up the visual absurdity and re-embracing promiscuity. This over-the-top attitude clashes wildly with the films’ flimsy but admirable attempts to address issues of feminism and misogyny as thin ruminations on era-appropriate sexual politics. The approach is hardly progressive as it mostly pays lip service to these issues as opposed to atoning for or modulating Bond’s behavior. But the decision to cast Judi Dench as “M,” the first woman to act as Bond’s superior officer, did represent the most significant ovation up to that point to nudge Bond, ever so slightly, into the 21st-century.
As a Y2K-ready spook, standing in the rubble of the Berlin Wall, Brosnan has a perfectly reasonable take on the character. Grounded in a tech-savvy, 1990s professionalism, he’s proficient with remote-controlled vehicles and comfortably at home delivering salacious double-entendre, punctuated by blasts of electronic music. But, like Dalton before him, Brosnan’s Bond is adrift in an ocean of tonally-confused, also-ran filmmaking that’s so distracted, trying to emulate the en vogue cinematic flashiness of Jerry Bruckheimer and Luc Besson, that it forgets to be distinct. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and The World is Not Enough (1999) find Bond closing out the twentieth century with slick, sexy, disposable baubles that are tangentially interested in telecommunication, mass media consumption, and oil dependence. But their principal concerns are glossy spectacle and product placement. By the time the series reached its inevitable creative nadir with the release of the critically-reviled (but still extremely profitable) Die Another Day (2002) it was clear that simply switching out the man in the tuxedo wouldn’t be enough to properly defibrillate the series this time. Drastic measures were called for.
Producer Barbara Broccoli, reflecting on the circumstances that led her and step-brother/producing partner Michael G. Wilson to Casino Royale (2006), recalls: “9/11 happened and that had a huge impact on all of us. Michael and I struggled with the direction we were gonna take Bond. It didn’t really seem right to have a flippancy to the films at that point” (2012). The decision to “hard-reboot” had been a long time coming and coincided perfectly with the out-of-court settlement that gave Broccoli and Wilson the legal right to adapt the novel “Casino Royale” after decades of litigation. Eduardo Navas, argues that the film version of the debut novel is actually more akin to a musical mash-up of the entire series than a straight literary adaptation: “…the aesthetic of [the] sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original; material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact to be recognizable. The producers of Casino Royale have "sampled" the transmediated mythos of James Bond and created a film remix: a transformation of the franchise that acknowledges previous iterations while claiming its own autonomy” (as quoted in Arnett, 2009, 1). An argument can be made that the controversial casting of “Blonde-Bond” Daniel Craig in the role follows a similarly appropriate, self-aware, bird’s-eye perspective of what the character truly required as he closed in on his fifth decade on the screen.
As the post-9/11 Bond for a jaded audience that had been considering abandoning the character for decades, Craig’s version actually beats them to it. He rejects being Bond almost immediately- carrying a willful disdain for his very “Bondness.” He formally resigns from MI6 in the third act of Casino Royale, risks his job, potential incarceration, and assassination by going rogue in Quantum of Solace, embraces the indefinite sabbatical provided by the presumption of his death in Skyfall (2012), and absconds with his girlfriend and newly-detailed Aston Martin in the deliberately ambiguous epilogue of Spectre (2015). Indeed, the character of Vesper Lynd even calls Bond out on his crises of identity within minutes of meeting him in Casino Royale: “By the cut of your suit, you went to Oxford or wherever. Naturally, you think human beings dress like that. But you wear it with such disdain. My guess is you didn't come from money, and your school friends never let you forget it” (2006). Of course, James Bond, a member of the fraternity of great literary orphans, actually did come from money- a fact reinforced during a visit to his ancestral home in the third act of Skyfall. But by allowing Daniel Craig’s Bond to engage in a critical dialogue with the character itself, the seen-it-all series finds new depth and purpose that had been hidden within Fleming’s coded language for over half a century. Craig’s installments, though as relatively inconsistent as the films of any Bond era, manage to comment on the character without lapsing into winking-parody or didactic-sermonizing. The films, particularly Casino Royale and Skyfall, turn the lascivious gaze the series had become so infamous for exploiting onto Bond himself, pouring over the contours of his body, examining the depths of his Oedipal psychosis (as embodied in his complex and deeply-moving relationship with Judi Dench’s M[other], the primary “Bond girl” of Skyfall), and even questioning the nature of his sexual orientation. The homoerotic overtones of Bond’s torture as the hands of villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale or the overt sexual pass made by Raoul Silva in Skyfall (Bond’s reaction could be described as legitimate curiosity, not repulsion) speak to a 21st-century move toward androgyny or something like gender parity. Daniel Craig’s Bond may bleed, wince, or even legitimately fall in love. But he certainly doesn’t blush.
There may be no more usefully indexical example of the series’ desire to deconstruct this new type of Bond mythos than the opening credits of Casino Royale: “Unlike other Bond title sequences that privilege women’s bodies as sex objects, threats, or victims of violence, Casino Royale’s title sequence is populated almost exclusively by male images. We get only a glimpse of Vesper’s face superimposed on the Queen of Hearts playing card. […] This masculinist move not only complicates Bondian gender norms, it also reinforces the notion that Bond’s body is the battleground on which Western insecurity is fought” (Racioppi and Tremonte, 2014, 21, 22). Vesper Lynd, Bond’s first true love, is featured only for a moment in this sequence- the face of actress Eva Green visible as the pattern of a rifle site passes over her (anticipating her eventual demise before the film’s end). The rest of the sequence is populated not only with the bodies of men but faceless, jagged silhouettes of men- masculinity reduced to a series of shapes like cave paintings or shadows on the wall. As the title card “Based on the novel by Ian Fleming” (the author’s first book credit on a Bond film since 1981) appears, Bond’s silhouette approaches from a distance. Chris Cornell’s striated voice screams the loaded-lyrics of the opening theme “You Know My Name” as the contours of Daniel Craig’s soon-to-be-world-famous visage (all high and tight blonde locks and piercing, azure eyes) fades in and out of the abstract outline as if the personified history of the character is vacillating on whether or not the actor is indeed worthy to don the tuxedo.
In October of 2019, Daniel Craig will become only the third actor to appear in five Bond films (joining Connery and Moore) when the twenty-fifth series installment is released. Shortly before that film premieres, he will officially pass Roger Moore as the man with the longest character “tenure,” at thirteen years. Richard Dyer, on “the notion of character,” writes: “Discrete identity. By this is meant the sense of characters having an existence and an identity independent of what they say and what they do - a self as well as roles. This is a problem for any narrative form, in that character logically only exists in the detail of the medium, in 'the words on the page.' This is granted by most literary theorists, yet the sense of an independent existence is none the less seen as requisite: if character manifests itself only in action, can we say it exists apart from action? This seems to be what we do say and believe with all our hearts - that character is absolutely, quite apart from what it does at any time” (Charles C. Walcutt, as quoted by Dyer, 1998, 95). Ian Fleming’s literary creation James Bond, as he has been represented on the screen, is not a character defined by any one interpretation any more than it would be appropriate to point to any individuated interpretation as the proper one. He is a complex mosaic made up of each actor’s persona, that actor’s performance, the films they appeared in, and each film’s relationship to the series as a whole. In the final moments of Casino Royale’s title sequence, Daniel Craig’s face finally becomes clear as he presents himself to us, in character, for the first time. A split second later his form is reclaimed by abstraction and he once again becomes a faceless vessel- a tuxedo-clad, gun-toting silhouette. The implication of that moment appears to suggest that “James Bond will always return. But who he will be the next time you see him will forever be informed by how our changing world needs him to be in any given era”.
Works Cited:
Robert P. Arnett. 2009. “Casino Royale and Franchise Remix: James Bond as Superhero”. Film Criticism, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 1-16. Meadville, PA: Allegheny College.
Richard Dyer. 1998. Stars. London, UK: British Film Institute.
Andrew Lycett. 2004. Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908–1964). Oxford University Press 2017.
Published in print: 9/23/2004. Date accessed: 12/7/17.
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-33168
Drew Moniot. 1976. “James Bond and America in the Sixties: An Investigation of the Formula Film in Popular Culture”. Journal of the University Film Association, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 25-33. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Linda Racioppi and Colleen Tremonte. 2014. “Geopolitics, Gender, and Genre: The Work of Pre-Title / Title Sequences in James Bond Films”. Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 66, No. 2, pp. 15-25. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Steven Soderbergh. “A Rambling Discourse”. Extension 765. Accessed on 12/15/17: http://extension765.com/soderblogh/2-most-irrelevant-no-1
Derek S. Young. 2014. “Bond. James Bond. A Statistical Look at Cinema's Most Famous Spy”. CHANCE, Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 21-27. Published online: 4/23/2014.
Orit Fussfeld Cohen. 2016. “The Digital Action Image of James Bond”. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 101-121. Published online: 1/11/2016.
Klaus Dodds. 2014. “Shaking and Stirring James Bond: Age, Gender, and Resilience in Skyfall”. Journal of Popular Film & Television, Vol. 42, No. 3, 116-130. Published online: 9/30/2014
Lisa Funnell & Klaus Dodds. 2015. “The Man with the Midas Touch”: The Haptic Geographies of James Bond's Body”. Journal of Popular Film & Television, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 121- 135. Published online: 9/23/2015.
Tony W. Garland. 2009. "The Coldest Weapon of All": The Bond Girl Villain in James Bond Films”. Journal of Popular Film & Television, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 179-188. Published online: 8/8/2010.
Stijn Reijnders. 2010. “On the trail of 007: media pilgrimages into the world of James Bond”. The Royal Geographic Society, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 369-377. Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
Filmography:
Eon Productions:
Dr. No (Terrence Young, 1962)
From Russia with Love (Terrence Young, 1963)
Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964)
Thunderball (Terrence Young, 1965)
You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert, 1967)
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter Hunt, 1969)
Diamonds Are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971)
Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, 1973)
The Man with the Golden Gun (Guy Hamilton, 1975)
The Spy Who Loved Me (Lewis Gilbert, 1977)
Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert, 1979)
For Your Eyes Only (John Glen, 1981)
Octopussy (John Glen, 1983)
A View to a Kill (John Glen, 1985)
The Living Daylights (John Glen, 1987)
Licence to Kill (John Glen, 1989)
Goldeneye (Martin Campbell, 1995)
Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997)
The World is Not Enough (Michael Apted, 1999)
Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002)
Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)
Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008)
Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012)
Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)
“Non-Bond”
Casino Royale (Ken Hughes, John Huston, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, 1967)
Never Say Never Again (Irvin Kershner, 1983)
Die Hard (1987)
Everything or Nothing (Stevan Riley, 2012)
Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007)
xXx (2002)