007 - Thunderball

Terence Young's back in charge for a third and final pass at James Bond. Thunderball might be overlong and dramatically slack but at least 007 is calling the shots. As sumptuous and entertaining as Goldfinger is, that Bond comes very close to being a passenger. In Guy Hamilton's film the secret agent is a nosy parker swept up in events and reacting rather than actively participating. Young's Bond is no such thing. He's a dark cloud, sweeping over the tropical landscape, foretelling ruin. There's an element of mechanism in Young's take on Bond, a remorseless calculation in everything he does. Other people don't quite register with him, they're just not equally important. Allies get thumped. Love interests are used up and manipulated; 007 employing sex, and a dangling promise of romance, as a kind of coercion.

In Goldfinger Hamilton's Bond was having fun, tripping his enemies up then thwarting their plots. It was all a game to him. Young's version wants, needs, to win. He's a shark. Even his kiss-off lines are spitefully delivered. Instead of the usual levity, Young's Bond is a victor heaping on hate - the act of murder simply not enough for him. Four films in, we have an emerging franchise about a bad penny that fouls up the plans of the rich and psychotic. Terence Young tries to conform to this winning formula but can't quite help making a Biblical epic length treatise on cruelty. An underwater action sequence - that could have passed in a perfunctory shuffle - ends up being a sustained, terrifying, leer at interpersonal jeopardy. Colour-coded divers prod and stab at each other in a desperate, slow-motion struggle. Death piled upon death until cinematographer Ted Moore is photographing an expansive, leaking, vista filled with nothing but pain and termination. Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wanted blockbusters, Young better suited to thrillers that dripped with venom.

007 - From Russia with Love

From Russia with Love is a more luxurious proposition than Dr. No. The film is confident, stately even, not quite so rough around the edges. For a start Ian Fleming's alarmist world-view is softened considerably. The evil Soviet empire of his novel is deferred, with all the serial killer recruitment transplanted onto a stateless terrorist organisation that wastes its time murdering lookalikes. The SPECTRE we saw in Dr. No was rooted in a kind of post-war paternalistic panic - an organisation filled with duplicitous, indigenous, Jamaicans lead by a Chinese super-criminal intent on scuppering America's Mercury rockets. In Dr. No self-determination, a starkly British concern in the 1960s, was treated as a very real threat to world stability. The film mixing general Red Scare with Sinophobia and a peculiar appeal from the UK for a continued, geopolitical, relevance. 

If the Crown's ideals are stripped away, what could possibly replace them? Heaven forbid, Maoism? These thorny little anxieties are absent from Terence Young's follow-up. From Russia with Love's syndicate is instead firmly European. A trashy, moneyed, collective with access to helicopters, Wehrmacht surplus and deep enough pockets to buy out card-carrying Communists. Incidentally, the Soviets themselves are depicted here as irrelevant dupes. This Bond is too busy braining stuntmen in black polo necks to worry about any ideological clash. From Russia with Love then is a sequel suffused with doubling. Like 007, SPECTRE's agents takes their orders from a well-educated, Received Pronunciation, accent behind a grand wooden desk. Bond is given two doppelgängers, an ageing Turkish womaniser who heads up British operations in the East and Robert Shaw's Red Grant, a blonde phantom that trails Bond across Europe. Grant is 007's unhinged reflection, a less refined version of the dapper secret agent who hasn't quite learned how to match an appropriate wine to the food he's just ordered. When the two clash they are indistinguishable, a flurry of stamping legs and clasping hands, framed tight for maximum violence.

007 - Dr. No

Sean Connery's portrayal of James Bond stays interesting thanks to his relationship with violence. He willingly places himself in dangerous situations as if to test, or maybe even flaunt, his ability to turn the tables then do serious harm. There's a kind of daredevil savagery to the portrayal, helped along by the physical agitation Peter Hunt invests into his helter-skelter editing. Whilst in London, director Terence Young shoots Bond in open, airy, rooms. They're beautifully dressed but obviously sets. You get a sense of the parlour games to come, with Bond as the know-it-all detective breezing through soured social situations to right a series of wrongs. This assumption dies once Bond lands in Jamaica. 

Met by a nervous chauffeur, Bond immediately gets on the phone to radio in with his superiors. No car has been sent by the British embassy. Young holds on Bond's face - dark eyes fixed on his anxious quarry, a smile creeping up the corner of his mouth. An opportunity for violence has immediately revealed itself. Bond's reason for being in the Caribbean is initially contextualised as a waste of time - a radio operator in a colonial holding is missing calls because he's, quite probably, ran off with his secretary. On site, Connery's bolt upright Bond stands out as he prowls around the island's tanned officials. 007 is bigger and louder than these slouches, he's a muscled predator determined to take up as much physical space as possible. Bond's enemies start out as local lads with pistols before graduating all the way up to a mad scientist with metal hands. None register as particularly taxing for the lethal secret agent. Dr. No then is about the joy of overwhelming force, Bond as the house brick sent to smash an insect.