Bullz-Eye continues its look back at every James Bond film, 007 One by One, as part of our James Bond Fan Hub that we’ve created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Bond film.

You’ve seen “Skyfall,” now how about taking a look at the other best James Bond movie you’ve never seen?

Ask a hardcore Bond aficionado what his favorite 007 entry is, and there’s a very good chance the answer will be “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”

We don’t necessarily want to make bold claims as to what the best Bond movie is, as it differs from person to person, but “Majesty’s” should be Top Five material for any die-hard fan of the franchise. The film is littered with all kinds of “firsts” and “onlys” — both in front of and behind the camera — but the most obvious is of course its lead, George Lazenby, and it’s with Lazenby that, for better or worse, most talk of the film begins (but should by no means end).

In the year 2013, we take for granted the changing of the lead actor within the Bond series, as we’ve now had a half a dozen different 007s, but back in the late sixties there was only one James Bond, and his name was Sean Connery. During the production of “You Only Live Twice,” Connery decided to exit the franchise that made him a household name (though as we now know today, he’d return to the character not once, but twice), however, quite understandably, the producers of the series weren’t finished telling their stories, and the public seemed far from tired of 007’s adventures.

So there was really only one option and that was to recast. The search was extensive, but in the end Bond producers decided on a complete unknown – Lazenby – a model with virtually zero acting experience. Regardless, Albert Broccoli was certain he could transform the man into his new James Bond.

The debate has raged for over 40 years as to whether or not the recasting was successful, with many schools of thought on the matter. Having viewed “Majesty’s” numerous times, we feel confident in saying that it’s a shame Lazenby didn’t give it at least one more go in the part (the decision to not return was, amazingly, his own), because as it stands, he cannot help but be somewhat swallowed up by the richness of his surroundings. One thing is for certain: Lazenby in no way ruins it, or keeps “Majesty’s” from being the best film it can be. “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” is a fine, fine movie, and one that deserves to stand on its own, away from the greater picture of the whole franchise, and Lazenby – as any lead would be – is at least partly responsible for its artistic success.

The Plot: “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” relies heavily on Ian Fleming’s original text, the last Bond film to really do so until 2006’s “Casino Royale.” The story is two in one: the first is about Bond’s hunting for and eventual finding of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and the second is about Bond falling in love and getting married (yes, you read that right) to an initially suicidal young woman named Tracy. Her father, Draco, runs a crime syndicate, and has info about Blofeld’s whereabouts, which James requires. Turns out Blofeld is posing as a high-profile allergist in Switzerland. Bond tracks him there, and infiltrates his organization by posing as a genealogist. Once the jig is up, all hell breaks loose, and Bond finds himself on the run, and only one person can help him…

The Girls: Blofeld’s mountaintop Swiss hideaway, Piz Gloria, stockpiles quite the cache of babe-alicious flesh – including a very young Joanna Lumley (“Absolutely Fabulous”) as well as the lovely Catherine Schell (“The Return of the Pink Panther”). Odd then that James zeroes in on the homeliest looking one of the bunch, Ruby Bartlett (Angela Scoular). But then again, this is also that unique Bond flick wherein James falls in love, and perhaps going for runt of the litter was the only way for him to rationalize cheating on his beloved Tracy.

Bullz-Eye is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first James Bond film with look back at every Bond movie, 007 One by One, along with a series of features about the Bond franchise, all laid out in our James Bond Fan Hub.

As the worldwide spy craze peaks, the James Bond series settles in for the long, tongue-in-cheek haul with this often maligned but very enjoyable entry, introducing the world to both ninjas and the original Dr. Evil. It also might have been the final appearance of Sean Connery as 007, except that it wasn’t.

“You Only Live Twice” (1967)

The Plot

A United States space capsule is hijacked, killing one astronaut. Naturally, the Americans assume the Soviets are at fault and world war seems a real possibility. There’s only one thing for the level-headed English to do: Stage James Bond’s death and send him on an undercover mission to Japan to expose SPECTRE head Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s plot to dominate the world by partially destroying it.

The Backstory

With enormous success comes enormous pressures and change was very definitely in the air as “You Only Live Twice” began production. Now one of the world’s most bankable stars after the mega-success of “Thunderball,” Sean Connery was contractually on board for only one more film and starting to be seriously fed up with all the 007 insanity.

Behind the camera, original Bond director Terrence Young had had his fill and “Goldfinger” helmer Guy Hamilton was unavailable. Editor and second unit director Peter Hunt, who had been instrumental in the series’ creative success, badly wanted to helm the project, but producers Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman apparently weren’t ready for a first timer for Bond #5. Therefore, a new recruit was sought out to join the small fraternity of James Bond directors.

An old hand at period pieces and war films, Lewis Gilbert was hot off an Oscar nomination for a classic-to-be about a compulsive womanizer who could give Bond a run for his money. “Alfie” starred Connery’s good friend, fellow movie spy, and now award-winning box office rival, Michael Caine.

Lewis Gilbert also brought along one of the very few directors of photography who could have reasonably stepped into the very big shoes of series regular Ted Moore. Freddie Young had won the first of his four Oscars a couple of years prior for David Lean’s visually stunning 1963 70mm masterpiece, “Lawrence of Arabia.” For the sake of keeping things consistent, all the other key collaborators, were back on board in their regular roles, i.e., composer John Barry, credit designer Maurice Binder, and production designer Ken Adam. For once, they’d all have a nice budget to play with, too.

The script, however, was an issue. The novel “You Only Live Twice,” was the last Bond book published in Ian Fleming’s lifetime and the story was problematic for more than one reason. For starters, it was actually the third and final installment in what literary Bond fans call “the Blofeld Trilogy.” EON’s original intent had been to film the books in their original order. That way Blofeld, who had been teased as a character starting in “Dr. No,” would get his long-delayed onscreen introduction in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” and finally suffer James Bond’s revenge in the follow-up, “You Only Live Twice.” Unfortunately, logistics made the ski chalet setting of “Majesty” impractical for the summer release EON and United Artists had their hearts set on.

The other problem was that the plot of Ian Fleming’s novel, which involved Blofeld setting up a lavish sanitarium for wealthy suicides, just didn’t seem to be the stuff of a James Bond movie. It also ended with Bond fathering a child with Kissy Suzuki. Only a few elements from the book would remain in the finished movie, most notably the Japanese setting, love interest Kissy, and friendly spy boss Tiger Tanaka.

There was also a problem with finding a writer. Richard Maibum, who had worked on every Bond up to this point, was deemed unavailable. A rumored screenplay by renowned author Kingsley Amis had been reportedly dismissed. Another script was commissioned by writer Harold Jack Bloom, but little of his work would remain in the finished film.

The final choice of screenwriter turned out to be an interesting one. Decades after his death, Roald Dahl remains one of the world’s most popular children’s writers with such film-friendly classics as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Witches,” “Matilda,” and “James and the Giant Peach” all too his credit. He might have seemed a far likelier choice for writing an adaptation of Ian Fleming’s children’s book, “Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang,” the gig that was apparently keeping Richard Maibum busy. Nevertheless, Dahl had written his share of adult thrillers and had actually performed wartime espionage and been friends with Fleming. Scads of 007-inspired spy spoofs were upping the humor ante and this would be a somewhat more tongue-in-cheek Bond. Dahl’s dark sense of humor would be a plus.

The main thrust of the film’s new plot was apparently invented by Cubby Broccoli, however. Upon seeing a dormant volcano while scouting locations, he came up with the idea of using it as a giant villain’s lair. With the U.S.-Soviet space race at full swing, the Russian-Chinese split a topical news item, and terrorism on the rise, the idea of SPECTRE hijacking spacecrafts in order to start a world war on behalf of Red Chinese clients seemed like a natural.

The Bond Girls (Rule of 3 + 1)

Once again, 007 does the espionage nasty with three beautiful women on his Japan adventure. Shockingly, however, the movie’s main love interest is not one of them.

Ling (Tsai Chow) — This lovely lady of Hong Kong engages in mildly racist pillow talk with Bond and then reveals herself to be an accomplice in the spy’s elaborately faked death. Though her part is small, actress Tsai Chow was already a recording artists and a major star of the London stage in “South Pacific” and “The World of Suzie Wong.” Her very long film career would include parts in “The Joy Luck Club,” “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and the 2006 Bond reboot, “Casino Royale.”

Helga Brandt (Karen Dor) — The latest Bond villainess with preying mantis-like tendencies, the dangerous Ms. Brandt is the secretary/in-house assassin of the wealthy SPECTRE operative, Mr. Osato. She has her way with Bond, then fails at killing him. It’s only natural that she winds up a victim of SPECTRE’s signature approach to personnel management, which in her case means being fed to the CEO’s pet piranhas. Actress Karen Dor has enjoyed a very long career in German films and television that continues to this day. She also appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s unsuccessful spy thriller, “Topaz,” and the modestly titled horror flick, “The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism.”

Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) — The lovely Aki at first appears to be an enemy agent, but quickly turns out to be an able helper and a willing Bond sex partner, until her untimely end. Actress Akiko Wakabayashi is known to genre geeks around the world and not just for “You Only Live Twice.” Monster mavens know her for appearances in two films by “Godzilla” co-creator Ishirō Honda: “Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster” and “King Kong vs. Godzilla.” The name of the lead character was changed from Suki to Aki at her request.

Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama) — Unusually virtuous by Bond girl standards, Kissy never actually gets to home plate with Bond, at least not during the actual movie. Nevertheless, this student of Japanese spy chief Tiger Tanaka proves an able aid to Bond, assisting in his not-so-believable transformation into a Japanese peasant and in foiling SPECTRE’s evil plans.

Actress Mie Hama was originally assigned to play Aki/Suki and was nearly let go from the project because of her difficulties learning English. As the story goes, Hama suggested the shame of being fired might force her to commit ritual suicide and the producers buckled. Her part, like that of nearly every other foreign player in an early Bond film, was eventually dubbed by another performer. Other roles include appearing alongside Akiko Wakabayashi in “King Kong vs. Godzilla.” She also made waves by promoting “You Only Live Twice” via a nude appearance in Playboy.

Friends and colleagues

Dikko Henderson (Charles Gray) — The avuncular, kimono-clad representative of MI6 in Japan only lives long enough to get Bond’s most famous cocktail preference wrong. The late actor, Charles Gray, was a wonderfully distinctive presence in well over 120 films and television productions. Today he is mainly remembered as the narrating “no neck” Criminologist who taught the world to dance the Time Warp in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” — a film musical he claimed to have never seen. Gray would also have the rare distinction of being killed by SPECTRE and later heading it. He would return to the Bond series as none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld in “Diamonds are Forever.”

Tiger Tanaka (Tetsurō Tamba) — Bond makes a new friend who, for a change, survives the film. It makes sense as the bold but crafty head of Japanese intelligence has a personal subway train and routinely forces guests to arrive via trap door as a precaution. Actor Tetsurō Tamba was a venerable presence in sixties Japanese cinema and had also worked in England, making him a natural leader among the Japanese cast. With 242 credits listed on IMDb, he has appeared in a number of films well known to Western cinephiles and cultists including “Pigs and Battleships,” “Harakiri,” and the notoriously gory and campy 1991 midnight-show staple, “Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.” Also noted for his work as a spiritual teacher, Tamba passed on in 2006.

Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) and M (Bernard Lee) — Bond’s unimpressed boss and his partner in flirtatious byplay return, this time dressed in full UK navel regalia. The comic business aboard one of her majesty’s atomic submarines is spry but brief, though they make an unusual appearance in the film’s final scene. Moneypenny/Lois Maxwell, we should say, looks adorable in uniform. We understand, however, that her hairstyle was thoroughly non-regulation for the English navy. Shocking.

Q (Desmond Llewelyn) — With gadgetry now a major part of the series, an appearance by the irascible armorer is now mandatory. This time, the perpetually annoyed Q finds himself forced to trudge to Japan to deliver “Little Nellie” — a thoroughly souped-up and tricked out autogyro. If Desmond Llewelyn’s irritation seems believable, it might have helped that the actor disagreed with director Lewis Gilbert’s costuming choices. Japan might be a warm country, but Llewelyn wasn’t thrilled with the military-style shirt and shorts he was given to wear. He didn’t think the very proper Q would permit himself to wear anything other than his standard business attire

The Nemesis

Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) — After being teased for years, the face of Bond’s most intractable enemy finally appears onscreen in “You Only Live Twice.” He is, of course, as diabolical and likely to feed an underperforming employee to carnivorous pets as ever. Sporting Blofeld’s trademark white Persian cat and a nasty scar on his right eye, the great character actor Donald Pleasence was already familiar to movie fans for hits like “The Great Escape” and “Fantastic Voyage.” He went on to even greater recognizability to horror fans for his portrayal of the heroic Dr. Sam Loomis in the “Halloween” series of slasher films. By the time of his death in 1996, Pleasence had racked up well over 200 film and television credits.

Lesser Bond Baddies

Assuming they aren’t personally killed by Mr. Bond, the hench people in “You Only Live Twice” have somewhat greater longevity than they did in “Thunderball.” Still, SPECTRE’s personnel practices remain below industry standard.

Mr. Osato (Teru Shimada) — Helga Brandt’s industrialist SPECTRE employer tries to have James Bond killed innumerable times, with predictable results. He manages to avoid the pet piranas that finally get Miss Brandt, but he still winds up getting a surprise bullet in the chest from Blofeld. Japanese-American actor Teru Shimada had recently appeared in 1966′s “Walk Don’t Run” with Cary Grant, but was actually nearing the end of a decades long career that began in the early 1930s.

Hans (Ronald Rich) — Blofeld’s gigantic body guard is repaid for his loyalty and diligence by being allowed to live long enough to get killed during the final battle. English actor Rich’s career appears to be a short one, but TV geeks should note that he did appear as the giant alien Trantis in the 1965 season of “Dr. Who” and in various roles in the 1968 run of “Benny Hill.”

SPECTRE #3 and #4 (Burt Kwouk and Michael Chow) – It would be easy to ignore these two very minor characters if it weren’t for the interesting guys playing them. You may remember that Burt Kwouk, the very talented performer who brilliantly portrayed manservant Kato opposite Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, also appeared in a similar, slightly larger, role in “Goldfinger.” As for Shanghai-born character actor and citizen of the world Michael Chow, he is best known in the West as a classy restaurateur. The first Mr. Chow location opened in London in 1968, followed by editions in Beverly Hills, New York City and, eventually, Miami and Las Vegas.

License to kill

Bond’s career in extra-judicial killings of often disarmed enemies began with the unlucky Prof. Dent in “Dr. No,” but it reaches a new high here. Admittedly, there are several moments where the morality of the situation might be vague — or where we’re not sure whether Bond has actually killed an assailant or merely subdued him. Bond very definitely instantly slays the killer of his MI6 contact, Dikko Henderson (Charles Gray), however. True, the man’s act was cowardly but, morals and legality aside, it might have made more sense to keep the assassin alive and find out what was up. He also immediately dispatches both Aki’s poisoner — before he even knows what the intruder is up to — as well as the quickly disarmed would-be assassin who assaults him with a bo (a Japanese quarterstaff) in the ninja dojo.

The gadgets

Production designer Ken Adam, efx man John Stears, and the whole EON team attempt to create an airborne companion to Bond’s Aston-Martin with “Little Nellie,” a tricked up autogyro that’s a sort of cross between a helicopter and a toy plane. The film version is equipped with enough armory to take out a banana republic with machine guns, flamethrowers, and missiles. Minus the fancy weaponry, it was the very real and serious creation of designer Ken Wallis, a retired RAF pilot.

Many other gadgets are so casually integrated into the “You Only Live Twice” storyline you might almost miss them. Below are some of our favorites.

* Ninja cigarettes that eject bullet-like projectiles.

* The water-proof sarcophagus used to stage Bond’s “burial” at sea

* The “Bird 1″ ship, with a front opening used to capture U.S. and Soviet spacecraft.

* Trap doors that both Blofeld and Tiger Tanaka use to create unwelcome surprises for coworkers.

* A giant magnet on a helicopter deployed by the Japanese to pick up a car filled with SPECTRE henchman and drop it in the nearby Pacific. (Since it seems unlikely the occupants could have lived, we wonder if Japanese secret services also have something like Double-O authority.)

* Mr. Osato’s spiffy X-ray desk for spotting concealed weapons.

* A pocket safecracking doodad which would come in handy if Bond ever decided to go full time to the wrong side of the law.

Note: Both the Murphy bed used in Bond’s fake assassination and Tiger Tanaka’s personal subway are sometimes considered Bond gadgets. However, since both were examples of what was very common mid-sixties technology, we don’t think they qualify as Bondian gadgetry any more than would a blender or an electric can opener.

The exotic locales

With the exception of the opening, just about all of “You Only Live Twice” takes place in Japan and the film’s exteriors were shot largely in the then-emerging economic powerhouse. Producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, director Lewis Gilbert, and cinematographer Freddie Young spent considerable time scouting Japanese locations. Their work paid off both in terms of visuals and, at least in the aforementioned case of the dormant volcano which became Blofeld’s lair, story ideas.

The outrageous villains’ lairs and good guy haunts

With the Bond films established as a series of reliable blockbusters, resident production design genius Ken Adam was allowed to go to town with a series of extraordinary sets, which meant more work and frayed nerves than ever. Adam has said that he and his staff were all but “living on valium” during the production of the film.

The most overtly spectacular set was obviously SPECTRE’s volcano-based super-bunker. Featuring a crater lake on top as camouflage, a rocket launch pad, and an internal light rail system, the Pinewood Studios set was very possibly the largest interior built for a film up to that point and one of the most expensive at $1 million. Ken Adam reportedly bragged that more steel was used in the set’s construction than in the London Hilton.

A more modest Adam classic is the lattice-work dome in which hot-headed U.S. and Soviets are persuaded to put off worldwide thermonuclear war while the intelligence boys at MI6 do their work. The design seems to have been influenced by R. Bunkminster Fuller’s then trendy geodesic domes.

Moving on, we’re also impressed by the apartment of the short-lived MI6 contact, Henderson. It’s a cheerful mix of British and Japanese design cliches. Tiger Tanaka’s underground office is, however, more up to the minute. Clearly, the EON team had noticed Japan’s increasing fascination with futuristic technology which was fueling the nation’s post-war economic renaissance. Similarly, the offices of bad guy Mr. Osato are an angular, half-insane variation on an ultra-modern mid-sixties interior.

The Opening

The “You Only Live Twice” pre-credit sequence is a departure from the “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball” openings in that it is not actually a Bond mini-adventure. Instead, it’s a more complicated variation on the opening of “From Russia with Love”; it’s primarily a prologue designed to set up the story and tease us with another fake Bond death. Bond doesn’t even try to kill anyone. (He’ll make up for that later.)

We begin in outer space as a mysterious vehicle snatches an American space capsule, murdering an astronaut in the process. Next, we are in some kind of super-high level diplomatic meeting room in which the calm, thoughtful British must mediate between jingoistic Americans and nasty Soviets to avoid a rush to global thermonuclear war. Finally, we are in a garish Hong Kong boudoir as Bond has finished making love with the seemingly treacherous Ling (Tsai Chow). She traps Bond in a Murphy bed, where he meets an apparent quick end at the hands of machine gun wielding thugs. Afterwards, a police officer who appears to have known Bond philosophizes that, at least, Bond met his demise “on the job.”

A close-up of a shot of (presumably fake) blood fades out into an animated design reminiscent of a Japanese umbrella and we’re off for another striking credit sequence by Maurice Binder. As the lyrical title song plays, we are given Japanese-inspired abstract designs, shots of lava flowing inside a volcano, and the usual female silhouettes. Once again, we are being promised adventure, a bit of tasteless exoticism, violence and, naturally, sex, sex, sex.

The Music

By now, it was a foregone conclusion that composer John Barry would provide both the score and the title song. Barry’s “Goldfinger” lyrical collaborator, show tune specialist Leslie Bricusse, returns for one of the better songs in the Bond cannon. Barry seems to have decided to abandon the brassiness of “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball” for a more romantic tune along the lines of “From Russia with Love,” only better.

Nancy Sinatra and her famous father, Frank, were friends of the EON team. So, it was only natural that she was brought on to perform the song, even though an earlier version had already been recorded by English singer Shirley Rodgers. The only difficulty was that the younger Sinatra, whose recent recording of “These Boots Were Made for Walking” had been a monster hit, was much more a rock and roll singer than a polished classic pop chanteuse. As Nancy Sinatra herself tells it, it took countless takes and a lot of editing to produce the sexy and charmingly wistful “You Only Live Twice” title track.

As for the instrumental score, composer Barry adds a bit of Japanese beauty to the mix, but it was the cosmos that inspired the most influential work. The haunting and majestic “Capsules in Space” is a definite influence on John Williams’ music for “Star Wars.”

Action Highlights

“You Only Live Twice” was instrumental in popularizing Asian martial arts in Western films and also for establishing ninjas as go-to pop culture badasses. The final battle, in which hundreds of ninjutsu-trained operatives invade Blofeld’s mega-lair, is certainly among the most spectacular fight scenes in the 007 cannon. It’s also probably responsible for a number of increasingly elaborate, you might even say overblown, Bond finales to follow.

An arguably even more thrilling set-piece, however comes much earlier in the film as Bond and Aki are pursued at the Kobe docks by a number of local SPECTRE henchmen. In a bold move, director Lewis Gilbert and camera-great Freddie Francis film part of the fight via a thrilling aerial shot of the ongoing action. Speaking of aerial shots, the airborne battle in which Bond and Little Nellie fend off “improper advances” from four machine-gun equipped aerial helicopters is an enjoyable blend of exciting aerial footage and back projection close-ups.

For those who enjoy a bit more hand-to-hand combat, we’re somewhat fond of a relatively brief but delightfully brutal fight between Bond and a sword wielding opponent, portrayed by uncredited Samoan-American pro-wrestler and fight choreographer Peter Fanene Mavia. Mavia, who unfortunately passed on at age 45, is today best remembered as the grandfather of wrestler-turned-action star Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson.

The ninja camp training sequence is also an enjoyable spin on the “Spartacus”-inspired SPECTRE training camp in “From Russia With Love.” It was probably the first time a truly gigantic Western audience was exposed to Asian martial arts in a major motion picture. It also contains a surprisingly faithful homage to the fight scenes in the Japanese samurai films that were then being discovered in art houses throughout America and Europe.

The one-liners

James Bond (Prior to making love to the evil Helga Brandt): The things I do for England!

Hong Kong Policeman #2: [finding the fake-deceased Bond in Ling's Hong Kong boudoir] At least he died on the job… he would have wanted it that way.

Kissy Suzuki: No honeymoon. This is business.
James Bond: [pushing aside a plate of oysters] Well, I won’t need these.

Mr. Osato: You should give up smoking. Cigarettes are very bad for your chest.
Helga Brandt: Mr. Osato believes in a healthy chest.
James Bond (observing Brandt’s upper torso): Really?

Tiger Tanaka (showing Bond a projectile equipped cigarette): It can save your life, this cigarette.
James Bond: You sound like a commercial.

James Bond: Well, if I’m going to be forced to watch television, may I smoke?
Blofeld: Yes. Give him his cigarettes. It won’t be the nicotine that kills you, Mr. Bond.

James Bond (having just dispatched an adversary into Blofeld’s piranha-infested indoor pool): Bon appetit!

Tiger Tanaka: You know what it is about you that fascinates them, don’t you? It’s the hair on your chest. Japanese men all have beautiful bare skin.
James Bond: Japanese proverb say, “Bird never make nest in bare tree.”

[About to have his chest hair waxed so he can pass for Japanese]
James Bond: Why don’t you just dye the parts that show?

James Bond (greeting Q, who has brought Little Nellie to Japan): Welcome to Japan, Dad. Is my little girl hot and ready?
Q: Look, 007, I’ve had a long and tiring journey, probably to no purpose, so I’m in no mood for juvenile quips.

Cocktails and other beverages

Bond’s drinking is more under control than usual here, though the super spy gets to show his knowledge of the finer points of Japan’s native beverage, the rice wine known as saki. It’s usually served warm — 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit, he reminds us. Bond seems considerably less enthralled with some Siamese vodka. Most famously, 007 politely endures confusion regarding his cocktail preferences by the soon-to-be-slain Dikko Henderson. The MI6 man offers him a vodka martini “stirred, not shaken,” in an incorrect Tom Collins glass, which Bond accepts without complaint. At another point, he is tempted into some morning drinking by a bottle of Dom Perignon 1959.

Random facts

* There are a number of jokes about cigarettes and cigarette smoking in “You Only Live Twice.” Considering the historic U.S. Surgeon General’s Report definitively naming smoking as a serious health risk had only come out in 1964, the same year heavy smoker and drinker Ian Fleming had died at age 56 of a heart attack, it was a highly topical subject. (To this day, you will find more smokers on film sets than elsewhere.)

* Donald Pleasence was actually a last-minute replacement as the first fully on-screen Blofeld. Czech actor Jan Werich was originally cast in the role and shot a few days worth of scrapped footage. The EON team decided that the bearded thespian’s grandfatherly appearance was too benign for the ultra-ruthless super villain.

* For whatever reason, Ernst Stavro Blofeld would, from this point on, be played by different actors with radically different looks in each film. Future Blofelds would include the relatively hulking “Kojak”-to-be Telly Savalas in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” who at least was as bald as the somewhat diminutive Donald Pleasence had been in the role. Blofeld would miraculously sport a full head of hair, however, when he was played by the aforementioned Charles Gray in 1971′s “Diamonds are Forever.”

* Donald Pleasence’s appearance and manner as Blofeld is pretty obviously the primary inspiration for Mike Myers’s Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers series. (Evil’s speaking voice is just as obviously inspired by “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels.)

* Fans trying to put together a complete biography of Bond have made much of the ever humble 007′s reminder to Moneypenny that, “You forget, I took a first in Oriental languages at Cambridge.” This is a contradiction with the novels, where Bond was ejected from Eton College for an unsurprising infraction with female cleaning personnel and had to finish his education in Scotland.

* “You Only Live Twice” is actually the second time that Sean Connery, as a pre-coital Bond said, “The things I do for England!” The line was also shot during the filming of “Thunderball.” It made it into that film’s promotional material but was cut from the actual movie. Being too good a line to waste, it was re-used and included here.

* Ironically, screenwriter Roald Dahl’s World War II intelligence experiences were in some ways more Bondian than those of Ian Fleming. It was, in fact, his youthful gift for starting affairs with prominent women that seems to have attracted the attention of British spies working in North America trying to draw the United States into the war prior to Pearl Harbor. His most famous conquest in England’s service was playwright and conservative Republican politician Clare Booth Luce, the wife of the founder of Time magazine.

* When Mie Hama was unable to swim for her scenes, she was doubled by Australian actress Diane Cilento, an able swimmer who was married to Sean Connery at the time. Cilento, who passed on in 2011, is probably now best known for her supporting role in the 1974 cult classic, “The Wicker Man.” She also appeared in such notable 1960s features as “Tom Jones,” “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” and “Hombre.”

* Some have mistakenly said that the title, “You Only Live Twice” comes from a poem by Basho, Japan’s most famous poet. It’s actually from a not-quite haiku Bond attempts to compose in Basho’s style in Ian Fleming’s novel.

“You only live twice
Once when you’re born
And once when you look death in the face.”

Leslie Bricusse’s lyrics for the song, “You Only Live Twice,” equate the second life to falling in love. Much more romantic.

* By all accounts, Sean Connery and Diane Cilento had a pretty miserable time making “You Only Live Twice.” Spy mania and an aggressive Japanese press in particular seems to been a huge problem for the star and his bride. By the time “You Only Live Twice” was released, Connery had made it public that he would cease playing Bond. It turned out to be the first of three times that would happen.

The Romantic Ending

“You Only Live Twice” is, we think, the only Bond entry where the main romance seems to have gone not much further than passionate necking. Kissy abandons her resistance to Bond by the end of the film, but they are interrupted by an inopportune submarine and Moneypenny seems only to anxious to cut off any more funny business. All the more tragic as it looks like Bond and Kissy might not be allowed to see each other again.

“James Bond Will Return”

“The end of You Only Live Twice but James Bond will be back On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” read the final titles this time around. A similar credit was originally included at the end of “Thunderball” and later removed. In fact, James Bond did come back, but he would be George Lazenby.

Bullz-Eye continues its look back at every James Bond film, 007 One by One, as part of our James Bond Fan Hub that we’ve created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Bond film.

The third Bond film is more than one of the most enduringly popular movies in the series and the final template for James Bond movies from that point forward. In many respects, it actually set the pattern for actions films in general. It was also perhaps the first modern-day blockbuster in that it was intended as an event as well a movie — complete with mega-bucks generating merchandizing opportunities. Sadly, it’s also the first movie in the series that Bond’s 56 year-old creator, Ian Fleming, didn’t live to see completed. He could not have conceived of how insanely popular his creation would become within months of his passing.

“Goldfinger” (1963)

The Plot

007 locks deadly horns with a mysterious millionaire known for cheating at gin rummy, golf, and the exportation of gold. That naturally turns out to be only the tip of the iceberg as James Bond discovers a diabolical plan aimed at destroying the economy of the free world and making portly Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) the world’s richest man. The aptly named, gold-obsessed supervillain’s target is, of course, Fort Knox.

The Backstory

With the back-to-back success of “Dr. No” and “From Russia With Love,” the money conscious EON producing team of Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli were ready to spend what was actually pretty big money in early 1960′s movie production terms — $3 million! (The 2008 Bond entry, “Quantum of Solace,” had a reported production budget of $200 million.)

Dashing director Terrence Young, who had launched the series so ably with “Dr. No” and “From Russia With Love,” smelled the cash and held out for more money. True to form, EON decided to go with a more thrifty option and brought in an accomplished journeyman director who was, nevertheless, a new hand when it came to staging elaborate action scenes, Guy Hamilton.

American writer Richard Maibum was back on board, this time with an assist from British screenwriter Paul Dehn. A very probable inspiration for the dashing English spy played by Michael Fassbender in “Inglourious Basterds,” Dehn was a former film critic and admitted World War II assassin. His next gig was, ironically, helping to adapt John le Carré’s specifically anti-Bondian espionage classic, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.”

Most importantly to the financial bottom line, Sean Connery had made himself synonymous with 007 and was also on board for another go round, though he wouldn’t appear on set until he finished off his highly dramatic starring role in Alfred Hithcock’s “Marnie.” Connery was starting to worry a little about this whole business of being typecast as a veritable superhero; he would continue to go out of his way to remind the public he could be someone other than Bond.

In any case, everyone working on the film seems to have understood what kind of opportunity “Goldfinger” represented. That bigger budget meant one thing: more — more action, more gadgets, more violence, and an extremely fast pace by the standards of its day. It was just the kind of wretched excess that could lead to a film so enormous it could launch what has to be the longest lasting and most consistently successful franchise in movie history.

The Bond Girls (Rule of 3 + 2)

Bond keeps to his usual score of three sex partners per movie. However, as befits the more lavish “Goldfinger,” we actually have five legitimate “Bond girls” this go-round. It’s just that Bond respectfully keeps his hands off of one and apparently never quite reaches home plate with another. To be specific…

Bonita (Nadia Regan) — She gets kissed while naked at the end of the pre-credit sequence, but it appears that actually doing the deed with Bond was never in the treacherous beauty’s plans, and she ends up with only a nasty bump on the head for her trouble. The adorable, Serbian-born Nadia Regan was actually on her second Bond go-round, having played a very brief kittenish role in the just-prior, “From Russia With Love,” where she was the Turkish secretary/girlfriend of Ali Kerim Bey (Pedro Armendariz.)

Dink (Margaret Nolan) – This lovely bathing beauty and amateur masseuse appears to be Bond’s very temporary girlfriend during his very short vacation at Miami Beach’s ultra-lux Fontainebleau Hotel. In true super-sexist style, he dismisses her with jovial rudeness and a smart smack to the backside when his American colleague shows up. Actress and model Margaret Nolan would go on to appear in a Playboy pictorial and several entries in the “Carry On” series of British sex comedies.

Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) – Bond wastes little time in seducing the bikini clad Masterson, who has unwisely taken a job helping a certain highly suspicious gold broker cheat at gin rummy. The superspy clearly takes a liking to the spunky, frankly sexual Masterson. He is devastated when he wakes up from a clubbing-induced slumber to find her suffocated to death by being painted completely gold from head to foot. It’s a tragic death, but it gave the movie its poster and one of the most creepily memorable and iconic images in the Bond lexicon. Shirley Eaton, already a busy working actress in the British film industry, would go on to star in a number of mostly not-so-distinguished films before retiring in favor of motherhood in 1969. She came out of retirement three decades later with a memoir, Golden Girl.

Tilly Masterson (Tania Mallet) – When Bond gets his first good look at the vengeance-seeking sister of Jill Masterson, “Discipline, 007!” he reminds himself. Still, though Bond clearly sympathizes with her need for justice, there’s simply no time for romance. In the book, Bond’s chances were even worse as Ian Fleming made it more than explicit that this Masterson sister played for the other team; she was more interested in hooking up with Pussy Galore than any man. The beautiful and sad, but also somewhat remote Tilly was played nicely by model Tania Mallet. That sadness was probably assisted somewhat by the tragic real-life death of her longtime boyfriend prior to filming. After “Goldfinger,” Mallet mostly abandoned acting in favor of her more immediately lucrative career as a model. Her only other significant role of any sort was a 1976 episode of “The New Avengers.”

Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) — The ultimate Bond girl with the ultimate Bond-girl name, Ms. Galore is the closest thing Bond meets to his female equivalent in any of the early Bond films. Goldfinger’s personal pilot also has something going for her in that she’s not immediately attracted to Bond. In fact, careful viewers might notice that she’s not immediately attracted to men in general. Pussy Galore’s name raised enough hackles with censors and the filmmakers weren’t about to risk a total ban with an avowedly lesbian leading lady. The film plays her inclinations — and that of the other beautiful members of her fellow pilots in “Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus” — on the down-low. Ian Fleming’s novel did not play them down, however. In fact, horny homophobe Fleming threw in an overt flirtation between Tilly Masterson and Pussy — in the book the leader of an all-lesbian criminal gang called “The Cement Mixers.”

Honor Blackman was already a fairly big acting name, having preceded Bond-girl-to-be Diana Rigg as the leading lady on the popular English spy series, “The Avengers.” Blackman brought real class and grace to her portrayal of her oddly named character and, while she was typecast as Pussy for much of the rest of her career, she enjoyed success as a singer and a busy working actress of stage and screen. She continues to work both as a performer and a political activist, campaigning to eliminate the British monarchy, a cause of which we are certain 007 would not approve.

Friends and colleagues

Felix Leiter (Cec Linder) — Bond’s CIA opposite number from “Dr. No,” returns, but it sure looks like he’s had a very stressful two years. Cec Linder looked considerably older than the stolid Jack Lord (“Hawaii Five-O”), who originated the role and preferred not to return. The 42 year old Linder was actually slightly younger than Lord, but he played Leiter as a wry, very middle-aged older brother to Bond and something of a subtle comic sidekick. From “Goldfinger” on, Leiter would become a shapeshifter, being played by completely unrelated actors of varying physical types and races from movie to movie.

Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) and M (Bernard Lee) — MI6′s most beloved secretary is back once again to flirt madly with Bond while boss man M once again cuts the flirting short so the plot, and the necessary exposition, can keep barreling forward. M gets more comic business this time around, especially during a dinner with Bond and a bigwig from the Bank of England. However, he has to make way for the first really substantial appearance by another beloved member of the growing Bond movie family.

Q (Desmond Llewelyn) — The armorer formerly known as Major Boothroyd had actually appeared in both “Dr. No” and “From Russia With Love,” but he had only been played for the first time by Desmond Llewelyn in Bond #2. Since “Goldfinger” was the first film in the series where the gadgetry took center stage, it was natural that Q branch would also have a lot more to do. So, for the first time, the man known as Q grew a discernible personality. The new film would provide Llewelyn an opportunity to show his comic chops and introduce one of the series most well loved running jokes: Q is permanently annoyed with Bond for breaking all the great toys with which he regularly presents him, and for not being particularly sorry about it. Llewelyn was so good at being irritated by 007′s flippancy that he appeared in every EON-produced Bond film until his death in a car accident in 1999.

The Nemeses

Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) – Goldfinger is, next to Ernst Stavros Blofeld, the most archetypal of Bondian supervillains. Along with his diabolical master plan and his lavish abodes, Goldfinger really knows how to stick to a theme. He keeps a staff of blonde pilots, owns a golden Rolls Royce, and he carries a gold pistol. When it comes time to do away with the lovely Jill Masterson, he has her killed by painting her body completely gold, resulting in “skin suffocation.” In the novel, he wears golden underwear and sleeps only with gold painted prostitutes.

German actor Gert Fröbe was seemingly born to play the role, but he was not yet an English speaker and his voice was provided by actor Michael Collins. Nevertheless, the tall, portly actor’s grim yet oddly humorous presence was crucial to the film’s success. He continued to make sizable contributions to a number of movies, including the epic comedy, “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” and the big-budget children’s musical, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (loosely based on an Ian Fleming novel and also featuring a gadget-filled car).

Oddjob (Harold Sakata) – No Bond villain ever had a more memorable henchmen than Goldfinger’s Korean bodyguard/manservant/paid killer. Oddjob says nothing, but his body language is killer, especially when he is flings his deadly derby hat, a sort of flying Frisbee of death. Along with his imposing presence and martial arts skill, Japanese-American Harold Sakata brought a great deal of ironic humor to the role, making the silent killer as oddly likable as he was deadly.

A former Olympic weightlifting silver medalist, the Hawaii-born Sakata came to the attention of Bond producers as a “bad guy” wrestler named “Tosh Togo.” Not at all a bad guy in real life, his good-natured, easygoing personality and work ethic made him a favorite of the “Goldfinger” cast and crew. Being Asian and more than a little bit gigantic, Sakata wound up being typecast and he was never quite free of Oddjob. At least he was able to star in our pick for the most awesome cold remedy commercial of all time.

(Short-lived) Lesser Bond Baddies

Wantonly doing away with one’s colleagues is a hallmark of any great James Bond villain. Even so, Auric Goldfinger has what has to be considered an itchy trigger finger and ends up knocking off every minor villain in the movie. First, he uses nerve gas to do away with an entire roomful of gangsters gathered at his home, while Oddjob is tasked with shooting the uncooperative Solo (Martin Benson) and having him crushed inside a Lincoln.

While invading Fort Knox, Goldfinger — wearing an U.S. Army uniform — shoots his previously trusted Red Chinese contact, Mr. Ling (Burt Kwouk), in order to blend in as G.I.’s retake the compound. Anglo-Chinese actor Burt Kwouk was, by the way, the gifted performer who portrayed Inspector Clouseau’s long-suffering houseman/sparring partner, Kato, in “The Pink Panther” series.

License to kill

Bond is on some of his best behavior here and never really uses his 00 authority. Every bad guy Bond kills here is in pretty inarguably in self-defense. Even Goldfinger dies not die at Bond’s hands but, in the style of silver age comic book supervillains who weren’t allowed to be killed by superheroes, the movie’s big bad gets conveniently sucked out of an airplane window. Interestingly, while Bond in the books tends to be less violent than in his film incarnation, in the novel Bond loses control of his anger and actually strangles Auric Goldfinger.

The gadgets and the car

No small part of the success of “Goldfinger” was the fact that it was the first film to really bring the gadgetry front and center. In this case, all those gadgets were mostly housed in one place — the world’s coolest automobile. So it was that Bond’s old Bentley was replaced with the more up to date Aston Martin DB5, as customized by production designer Ken Adam and efx genius John Stears.

An early example of the practice we now know as “product placement,” the Aston Martin company supplied a single car (another one was later purchased). As legend would have it, the auto was originally only to have a smoke screen device, but crew members began suggesting so many other nifty devices that James Bond becomes visibly irritated as Q informs him that describing them all won’t take more than an hour.

And what devices they were. Director Guy Hamilton had been plagued by parking tickets, so he was attracted to the revolving license plates that had been mentioned in the novel. Hamilton’s stepson suggested the auto-ejector seat that caused Bond to exclaim, “You’re joking!” There was also the bullet-proof windshields, the oil slick release mechanisms, and, of course, the left and right front-wing machine guns. Not technically built into the car as a practical effect, but created largely through the magic of editor Peter Hunt, the car also came equipped with a wheel-based tire-destroying device. That idea was a more or less direct lift from the killer chariots featured in the hit 1959 biblical epic, “Ben-Hur.”

The car was, of course, a huge hit with audiences and played no small part in the enormous commercial success of the James Bond series throughout the 1960s. Corgi’s model of the Q branch Aston Martin DB5 became the most successful toy of 1964 and one of the most iconic merchandizing opportunities of all time. (It was also maybe the first toy to be aimed at children from a movie containing material thought inappropriate for kids.) The Corgi DB5 was a key part of a worldwide merchandising bonanza that would prefigure films like 1977′s “Star Wars,” financed largely on the back of its built-in merchandising possibilities. David Worrell’s out-of-print 1993 book about the DB5 was aptly entitled The Most Famous Car in the World.

The exotic attractive locales

If “Goldfinger” skimps in any area, it’s the settings. While reasonably spectacular, they really aren’t as exotic as usual. We have the pre-credit sequence set in an unnamed Latin American country, presumably Mexico; a brief sojourn with M, Moneypenny, and the Bank of England official in London; and a memorably tragic visit to Goldfinger’s compound in the relatively mundane nation of Switzerland. The rest of “Goldfinger” takes place mostly in the United States, specifically semi-exotic Miami Beach and not-at-all exotic Kentucky, near Fort Knox. Nevertheless, the film does make use of a truly spectacular post-credits aerial shot of Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel, then the last word in opulent accommodations. It also makes use of the more mundane aspects of Louisville and is probably the first major film to give a plug to a new fast-food franchise called Kentucky Fried Chicken. Felix Leiter, in particular, seems to be a fan of what we now call KFC — though the actual restaurant where the scenes were shot was in Florida.

In reality, the bulk of “Goldfinger” was made back in England at Pinewood Studios outside of London. Sean Connery, in particular, never set foot in the U.S. during the production, leading to a lot of rather obvious process shots during the Fontainebleau sequence. Still, what the film lacked in exteriors it more than made up when it came to its interiors, which leads us to…

The outrageous villain’s lairs

Production designer Ken Adam had taken a break from the Bond films with a spectacular job creating the cavernous White House “war room” and other hugely memorable settings for Stanley Kubrick’s epochal black comedy masterpiece, “Dr. Strangelove.” His return to the series on “Goldfinger” turned out to be at least as much of a career high for Adam. Quite apart from his brilliant work tricking out the Aston Martin DB5, these sets rank easily among the most famed in movie history.

Most famous of all the “Goldfinger” sets is the enormous rumpus room located in Auric Goldfinger’s not so old Kentucky home. Looking a little bit like a hunting lodge gone ultra-modern, with a gigantic pool table that turns into a control panel operating a number of devices, it houses equally gigantic models of Fort Knox that literally come out of the woodwork. This was a few decades before PowerPoint, and these models make memorable visual aids as Goldfinger partially explains his evil “Operation Grand Slam” to a group of skeptical crime kingpins.

The room later turns out to also be a giant gas chamber in which the supervillian will kill the criminals he has just worked so hard to sell on his plan. Goldfinger clearly enjoys explaining his diabolical plans to people he plans to kill even more than most Bond villains.

On a serious note, many commentators have noted an especially disturbing side to the gas chamber designed by Adam. A German Jew, Ken Adam had come to England as a young wartime refugee and eventually joined the Royal Air Force (RAF), serving with notable heroism. Though Adam denied any conscious associations, it’s hard not to imagine that the genocidal crimes of the Nazis weren’t on his mind on some level as he designed the room.

Other notable villain-lairs include the Latin American drug silo that Bond blows up in the pre-credit sequence, Goldfinger’s ultra-posh Fontainebleau suite where Bond seduces Jill Masterson in record time, and the laser room where Bond nearly comes to an unpleasant parting of the ways. Finally, though it’s not a villain lair, we have to at least give a shout out to the film’s imaginative and striking depiction of the interior of Fort Knox. Fort Knox is so secure and super secret not even the U.S. president is allowed inside of it, so of course the film makers were not allowed to see its interior. Adam later admitted that he was glad to have no reference, as he was able to make up his own idea of what the place looked like inside.

The Opening

“From Russia With Love” had already used the then-unusual device of a pre-credit “teaser” opening, but “Goldfinger” took the idea one step further. While the opening of the prior film was fairly similar to the “cold open” of a sixties TV drama, in that the action hinted at the main story to come, the opening of “Goldfinger” amounts to a miniature James Bond adventure.

Though completely unrelated to the main story in terms of plot, it brilliantly sets up the more overtly tongue-in-cheek nature of this film right away: Our hero snorkels his way into a heroin processing compound, camouflaged by a drenched stuffed duck attached to his head. Almost without breaking a sweat, Bond places some plastic explosives in a silo housing a drug lab. In perhaps the sequences most famous shot, he removes his wet suit, revealing an immaculate tuxedo. The ever meticulous Bond even has a small rose ready to use as a boutonniere. Entering a nearby cantina to greet his contact, he is the only person not to react to the gigantic explosion he has set off — an early version of the “cool guys don’t look at explosions” phenomenon. Later, an intimate encounter with Bonita, a dancer in the bar, comes to a deadly end as a reflection’s in her eyes (have you ever seen a reflection in an eyeball?) reveals her true purpose. For the first — but definitely not the last — time, Bond uses a treacherous woman as a human shield to survive an encounter with a would-be killer, whom Bond then dispatches with the first of his famously groan-inducing post-mortem quips.

The overall message of the opening is clear and simple: prepare for big fun and, whatever you do, do not take any of this too seriously.

The Credits

Designer Robert Brownjohn returns for his second and final Bond credit-sequence outing, using the same process as he used in the “From Russia With Love” credits. As the title song plays, scenes from the film are projected on a scantily clad female body, but this time it’s a golden painted one. As strong as Brownjown’s visuals are, however, what really makes those credits is the greatest of all Bond theme songs…

The Music

John Barry had proven himself far more than able in various musical capacities on the first two Bond films. So, even though he had never before written a pop hit, he was finally allowed to write the music for the opening song, and what a song it was.

The brassy opening bars of “Goldfinger” announce melodramatically that we are in for an adventure of vast proportion and the music is jazzy yet almost operatic in scale. The lyrics, from the theatrical songwriting team of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, were inspired by Bobby Darin’s unlikely hit version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s “Mack the Knife,” (the only megahit we know about a thief, murderer, and rapist). As Barry had no problem admitting, the astonishing, hell-bent-for-leather vocals of singer Shirley Bassey were crucial to selling the outrageous lyrics, a warning that gold-obsessed millionaires may not be good boyfriend material. The song was, of course, a tremendous hit. It remains easily the greatest Bond theme and, for all its near-camp excess, one of the greatest movie theme songs of all time. The rest of the film’s score isn’t so bad, either.

Action Highlights

Though it might feel a bit leisurely next to frenetic modern day action flicks, “Goldfinger” has the most action of any Bond film up to that point. That action is underlined by the ace work of editor Peter Hunt, whose “crash cutting” style propels the film ever forward and even makes a golf game exciting and fun to watch.

Easily the most famous action sequence in “Goldfinger” is the final face-off between Bond and Oddjob inside Fort Knox. Harold Sakata, Sean Connery, and stunt double/stunt coordinator Bob Simmons performed some of the most bruising action of the entire series during a fight which very nearly one-ups the spectacular fight sequence with Robert Shaw in “From Russia with Love.” Connery apparently sustained some kind of back injury during the Fort Knox fight, which Connery’s representatives are supposed to have used as a bargaining tool when negotiating his salary for the upcoming “Thunderball.”

Harold Sakata reportedly sustained a more serious injury during the moment when he is “electrocuted.” Apparently, something went wrong and Sakata’s hand made direct contact with burning pyrotechnic material. Such was Sakata’s commitment, he held on to the bar tenaciously until director Guy Hamilton yelled “cut!”

Another battered “Goldfinger” star was, of course, the Aston Martin DB5 which received plenty of “wear and tear in the field” during the Switzerland sequence. First, there is the encounter between Bond and the mysterious armed woman who turns out to be the revenge-seeking Tilly Masterson, in which Bond gets the upper hand via the “Ben-Hur”-inspired tire destroyer. Most of the car’s other devices get used during a later chase through Goldfinger’s home offices as he evades scores of North Korean and/or Chinese henchmen as well as a little old lady armed with a machine gun — a touch none other than Alfred Hithcock openly envied for its black humor.

Finally, Bond and Pussy Galore’s final confrontation with Goldfinger on board his private jet deserves some mention for visual bravado and questionable physics as a gun shot causes the plane to depressurize and plummet. While uberbaddie Goldfinger meets an undignified end, somehow Bond and Galore manage to escape with parachutes…how?

Speaking of physical action and Pussy Galore, the two have a famous/infamous tussle in the hay in one of Goldfinger’s horse barns, which naturally ends in romance. It was something of a cliché in fifties and sixties movies for the man to force a kiss on an initially resisting woman who, after a token struggle, passionately returns the hero’s affections. Today, of course, this kind of behavior is deemed sexual harassment at best and rape at worst. Intriguingly, Goldfinger’s seduction scene actually comes across more playful and a lot less offensive than most scenes of this type, perhaps because Pussy is arguably Bond’s equal in many respects. When she kisses Bond back, we’re pretty sure it’s not her weakness or fear, but her suddenly awakened feelings that are driving her. Pussy is nobody’s doormat.

The one-liners

Though the early Bond films certainly didn’t lack for a sense of humor, “Goldfinger” is the movie that really embedded funny and/or groan-inducing one-liners and quips into the Bond canon. Some are witty, some are dopey, some are snobby and intriguingly dated, but they are all a huge part of the fun of “Goldfinger.”

Bonita (annoyed by Bond’s gun): “Why do you always wear that thing?”
Bond: “I have a slight inferiority complex.”

Bond (surveying the freshly electrocuted corpse of his would-be killer): “Shocking, positively shocking!”

Goldfinger: “Choose your next witticism carefully, Mr. Bond, it may be your last.”

Bond (watching a deadly laser beam get ever closer to his crotch): “Do you expect me to talk?”
Goldfinger: “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

Radio: “At the White House today, the president said that he was entirely satisfied…”
Bond (postcoitally canoodling with Jill Masterson): “That makes two of us.”

Bond (noticing his champagne has lost its chill:) “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done, such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.”

Pussy: “My name is Pussy Galore”
Bond: “I must be dreaming.”

Bond: “You’re a woman of many parts, Pussy.”

Cocktails and alcoholic beverages

Just as it ups the ante on action and sexiness, “Goldfinger” keeps the drinks coming. Not long after the tragic aftermath of that insufficiently chilled champagne, Bond gets into a colloquy on a “disappointing” Cognac with Colonel Smothers of the Bank of England. Bond offers a prompt diagnosis: “I’d say it was a 30 year old finé, indifferently blended, sir,……..with an overdose of Bon Bois.” Neither 99.9% of the audience, nor M understands what the hell Bond is talking about and Bond’s boss is clearly not pleased. (Bon Bois, it turns out, is a portion of the Cognac region of France whose grapes are considered slightly less fitting for a truly superior brandy than some others.)

Later, for the first time in any movie, it’s Bond himself who makes the most famous drink order in movie history. You’d think Bond would request a very strong coffee after awakening from a tranquilizer dart-induced sleep, Instead, he requests strong drink from one of Goldfinger’s prettier minions. “A martini, shaken, not stirred.” Without going into an extended colloquy on the debate among mixologists and cocktail connoisseurs, it’s interesting to note that the movie Bond usually orders a vodka martini with this suggestion, a somewhat less controversial choice than ordering a gin martini shaken, which he also does. Apparently Bond, like Ian Fleming, liked all his martinis to be shaken whether they were gin or vodka based.

Speaking of Fleming, in the books, Bond imbibed at least as much good old American bourbon as anything else and “Goldfinger,” with its rural American setting, gives Bond a chance to quaff what might be his actual favorite spirit. Indeed, he specifically mentions to Pussy that he understands the “bourbon and branch water is rather splendid here in Kentucky.” (“Branch water” is water from a stream, ideally the same stream where the bourbon manufacturer gets its water.) Later, Goldfinger offers Bond a “traditional, but satisfying” mint julep and Bond politely requests his be “sour mash, but not too sweet, please.” (Sour mash is a process using previously fermented material that is thought to result in somewhat sweeter tasting whiskey.) Later, Goldfinger checks to ask if Bond’s beverage is tart enough for his taste. The politeness between Bond and his supervillainous hosts can be quite touching.

Random facts

* It sounds modest by modern standards, but “Goldfinger” generated over $51 million at the U.S. box office. (Adjusted for inflation, it’s the 41st top grossing U.S. release of all time.) “Goldfinger” was, however, a worldwide box office bonanza by any definition. It escalated the already growing worldwide vogue for espionage films into the highest end of the movie stratosphere, generating endless knock-offs and spy spoofs made all over the world. The next film, “Thunderball,” generated even more cash, though “Goldfinger” may remain the most widely seen of the early Bond films.

* “Goldfinger” was one of only two Bond movies to win an Oscar. It went to sound effects editor Norman Wanstall. It received no other nominations.

* The most obvious plot change from Ian Fleming’s novel in the film version resulted from a point raised by many critics. Goldfinger’s original plan of simply robbing Fort Knox was physically impossible. As screenwriters Richard Maibum and Paul Dehn have Bond point out himself in the movie version, it would take weeks for even a large team of robbers to remove most of the gold from the Kentucky compound. Therefore, the diabolical plan in the film is to explode a relatively small but “very dirty” atomic bomb inside Fort Knox, making the gold deadly for nearly a century and therefore drastically raising the value of Goldfinger’s gelt.

* One of the most widely noted flubs in movie history occurs when Bond needs the help of an expert to disable Goldfinger’s atomic bomb at the end of the Fort Knox sequence. Bond says “Three more ticks and Mr. Goldfinger would’ve hit the jackpot.” However, an insert shot of the bomb indicates that exactly “007″ seconds were left on the counter before Bond and company would have been blown to nuclear bits. The visual joke with the timer was a last minute addition, and apparently nobody bothered to have Connery re-loop the dialogue.

* The name “Goldfinger” might sound made up, but Ian Fleming seems to have largely modeled his bad guy after the very real Erno Goldfinger, an infamously humorless avant garde architect with pro-Soviet sympathies whom Fleming despised. The real Mr. Goldfinger was, naturally, none too happy at the prospect of receiving endless prank calls and was ready to sue prior to the publication of the book, but pop-cultural disaster was averted with an out-of-court settlement. Ian Fleming had threatened to use an alternative title: “Goldprick.”

* Speaking of names and genitalia, the monicker “Pussy Galore” was just as problematic in 1963 as you might expect. “Dirty words” with double meanings were less commonly used and understood in the early sixties, but the non-feline meaning of “pussy” was the same then as today. TV promotions routinely failed to mention the name.

* “Goldfinger” was reportedly banned in Israel for a few months because Gert Fröbe had admitted in an interview to having been a member of the Nazi party before World War II. The ban is supposed to have been lifted after a Jewish family publicly thanked the actor for helping them to escape from Hitler’s Germany; it was possible that the actor had used his party membership to help smuggle a number of Jews out of the country. Fröbe, also a lifelong violin virtuoso died in 1988. In 2000, his image appeared on a German postage stamp.

* Other actors considered for the role of Auric Goldfinger included Orson Welles and actor and singer Theodore Bikel. The legendary Welles was rejected for asking for too much money, and his literally and figuratively outsize presence might have thrown the film off-balance. Screen tests reveal, however, that the relatively trim Bikel would have been a very reasonable choice.

* At the time of filming, Jill Masterson’s death-by-paint was believed to be a feasible method of murder. Indeed, just as described by Bond in the film, a small area of Shirley Eaton’s body was left unpainted to keep her safe. (A doctor was also on call.) Today, we know that any deaths caused by being painted head to toe are caused by heat exhaustion and certainly wouldn’t kill a person quickly enough to suit Goldfinger and Oddjob. Nevertheless, an obviously false urban legend arose that Eaton had died during the filming.

* The money conscious EON Team was forced to pay for one of the two Aston Martin DB5′s featured in the film. After the massive success of film and the notoriety of the car that resulted, it appears that Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman never had to budget for a car again.

* “Solo” is the name of the go-it-alone gangster who winds up compressed inside a compacted Lincoln. It’s no coincidence that the superspy played by Robert Vaughn on the hit American spy series, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is named Napoleon Solo. Ian Fleming suggested the name to the producers.

* “Goldfinger” was not only a free advertising bonanza for car manufacturer Aston Martin, the Ford Mustang driven by Tilly Masterson was also one of the legendary American car’s first film appearances. Apparently, Ford was more product-placement savvy and also supplied other cars, including the aforementioned Lincoln.

* Though he claims to have seen the movie only twice — at the premiere and many years later at the urging of his daughter — Sean Connery owes his lifelong love of golf to the film’s lengthy golf game sequence.

* “Goldfinger” plays down the part-time lesbianism of the “man-hating” Pussy Galore and her all-female flying circus, and makes a complete mystery of the proclivities of Tilly Masterson. In the book, however, the same-sex proclivities of Pussy and Tilly provide Fleming a chance to editorialize as Bond mediates on what he perceives as a growing and dangerous energy-sapping breakdown in traditional gender roles. (Bond seems to trace it all back to women being given the vote.) Similarly, Oddjob in the novel is not just a bad guy who happens to come from Korea, but is seen as being somehow typical of the Korean people. Fleming was not considered an enormous bigot by the standards of his time and place, but modern readers need to be prepared for some pretty outrageous sexism, racism, and homophobia.

The Romantic Ending

If “Goldfinger” is the model for modern action films, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic espionage thriller-comedy, “North by Northwest,” is the model for “Goldfinger.” If you’ve seen it, you know the ending essentially finesses it’s climactic literal cliffhanger with a bit of editing panache; Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are transported by the magic of cinema from the side of Mount Rushmore to a cozy train compartment.

In terms of sheer editorial bravado, the ending of “Goldfinger” one-ups Hitchcock as we move from Bond and Pussy in a rapidly plummeting airplane with no apparent hope of escape, to the two of them on what appears to be the nicest, safest looking island in the Atlantic with a couple of spent parachutes nearby. How the two were able to get into those parachutes and out of Goldfinger’s now-exploded plane in time to escape safely remains an eternal cinematic mystery. Clearly, Bond and Pussy owe their safety entirely to the skill of editor Peter Hunt.

When Pussy tries to signal to a search plane above, a perfectly relaxed Bond dissuades her. “Oh, no you don’t. This is no time to be rescued.” Ever mindful of his privacy nevertheless, Bond pulls one of the parachutes over the two of them as they consummate their relationship in the magic land of off-screen sex.

“James Bond Will Return”

“Goldfinger” continues the practice, begun in “From Russia With Love,” of teasing the title of the next film in the series. This time, the title card reads: “The end of ‘Goldfinger’ but James Bond will be back in ‘Thunderball.’” It appears that, probably owing to the ongoing legal dispute over “Thunderball,” the original UK title card, however, actually teased another Bond novel title, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” It would eventually be filmed without Sean Connery in the lead in 1969.

We continue our look at the film adventures of the world’s most beloved killer spy with the James Bond flick many critics and fans consider the best movie in the series, based on probably the most well regarded of Ian Fleming’s spy novels.

“From Russia with Love” (1963)

The Plot

After the death of their operative, Dr. No, SPECTRE is one rather peeved diabolical organization bent on world domination. Also, they could use some cash. The villains’ collective therefore devises a plan to steal a hugely prized Lektor decoding device from the Soviets by using the superspy responsible for No’s demise as a pawn. Endgame: Sell the device for a huge sum and kill James Bond. The bait will be the defection, with the Lektor, of a beautiful and unknowing Soviet operative working out of the Russian embassy in Turkey. She is another pawn, a loyal low-level agent who is tricked into cooperating and told to develop a romantic fixation on Bond. The proposal is such an obvious trap, and the Lektor such a desirable prize, that there’s no way the British secret service can possibly resist going to Istanbul for a look. It all wraps up in a sexy and violent trip on the legendary Orient Express and an exciting and dangerous (for stunt men) boat chase.

The Backstory

Following up on the success of “Dr. No,” the EON production team of Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman elected to follow the lead of the series’ most famous fan. President John F. Kennedy had singled out Ian Fleming’s novel, From Russia with Love, as one of his ten favorite books in an issue of Time Magazine. Despite nearly 100 opening pages in which Bond does not appear, the story was more or less tailor made for a movie, and the rest was a matter of bringing back “Dr. No” writers Richard Maibum and Johanna Harwood to make the story more Hollywood friendly.

First of all, the relatively simple Stalin-era plot of the original novel was updated and complicated to avoid controversy. In light of the more morally complex Khrushchev era and the recent Cuban missile crisis, many viewers were likely to disagree with Ian Fleming’s extremely hawkish, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, take on the Cold War. And, so a story about ultra-evil Russians trying to take out the West’s most effective counterspy with maximum collateral PR damage, became a tale involving SPECTRE’s desire to grow its cash and power reserves while manipulating MI6 and the KGB into a costly and unnecessary battle. Seeing as the production code was growing weaker even as the Bond budget was growing larger, the sex and violent action quotients was also bumped up considerably from the novel.

Along with newborn superstar leading man Sean Connery, dashing director Terrence Young returned for his second Bond outing after the success of “Dr. No.” Aside from allowing the talented Young to firmly set the tone for the series, bringing him back proved to be a wise choice. Often described him as something of a real-life James Bond, Young was the kind of steady hand the difficult shoot would require.

The challenges Young would face included several changes in locations, numerous reshoots, plus lots of difficult and dangerous stunt work. A scene involving hundreds of rats proved especially tricky because English law permitted only the use of white rats. When the animal wranglers placed cocoa powder on the rats to give them a less hygienic look, the rats were distracted, licking the tasty cocoa powder off themselves and each other. The scene wound-up being shot in Spain.

Murphy’s law was certainly in force on the second Bond film, but director Young took events in stride. He was reportedly back at work within hours after being involved in an apparently minor helicopter crash, though we’re not sure how a helicopter crash can be anything less than a big deal. More tragically, Young also had to deal with the news that key actor Pedro Armendáriz was terminally ill. (More about that below.)

The Bond Girls (Rule of 3 or, in this case, 4)

Yes, an apparent threesome boosts Mr. Bond usual number of consummated movie affairs. The “From Russia with Love” Bond girls are…

Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson) — Bond’s Chemin de Fer opponent from “Dr. No” returns. Trench was supposed to be an ongoing liaison in each of the films, but her lakeside tryst with Bond was to be her final appearance. We’re guessing that even a hint of sexual repetition was seen as too much of a hindrance to 007′s womanizing ways. Ironically, Gayson had originally tried out for the longer-lasting but more chaste role of Moneypenny.

Vida and Zora (Aliza Gur and Martine Beswick) — Bond watches with interest, and some concern, as a pair of extremely jealous Gypsy girls stage a to-the-death fight over a man,  but are interrupted by a sudden violent intrusion by a group of Russian-paid Bulgars. After Bond helps save the day for the Romany, it is strongly hinted that the hot blooded trio spend the rest of the evening making love, not war. (In the novel, Bond is more of a passive observer of some kinky bloodshed.)

As for the talented and lovely ladies who played Vida and Zora, Aliza Gur was a former Miss Israel and Miss Universe semi-finalist. She would later appear in such spy-themed TV shows as “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Get Smart.” The Anglo-Jamaican Martine Beswick, who may or may not have been one of the dancing silhouettes from the “Dr. No” credits, would return to Bondage as Paula Caplan in “Thunderball” and enjoy a lengthy career as a busy working actress. A supporting role in 1966′s “One Million B.C.” would be followed by such low-budget productions as 1967′s “Prehistoric Women,” 1971′s “Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde,” and 1980′s “The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.” More upscale roles from the eighties and nineties included “Melvin and Howard,” “Miami Blues,” and the 1993 version of “Wide Sargasso Sea.”

Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) — An idealistic operative who thinks she’s working for the Soviets in an operation designed to pass false information to MI6, Tatiana finds it easy to play the role of a love struck defector when she meets the dashing James Bond. Though her loyalties may be divided, her attraction to Bond is undeniable.

Since her character was described as resembling 1930s film star Greta Garbo in the novel, it was a sure bet that former Miss Rome and Miss Universe semi-finalist Bianchi would be lovely and charismatic, if not quite up to the acting standards of the great Garbo. Ms. Bianchi does, however, deliver a credible and very sexy performance, though her Italian accent was removed with a total voice assist from veteran English actress Barbara Jefford. Unfortunately, her best remembered non-”From Russia with Love” outing remains the notorious Eurospy spoof, “Operation Kid Brother,” which starred real-life Sean Connery kid brother, Neil. (Check out this slideshow for more pics of Daniela Bianchi)

Friends and Colleagues

M (Bernard Lee) and Moneypenny (Louise Maxwell) are both back for more banter. By this point, the pattern is being set for the character’s inevitably fun but equally exposition-heavy scenes throughout the series: It’s Moneypenny’s job to provide some flirtatious silliness and M’s job to make sure the frivolity doesn’t eat up too much screen time. The business with Bond throwing his seemingly unworn bowler hat on the hat stand makes a return as well. However, “From Russia with Love” gives us two additions to Bond’s onscreen colleagues, each in their own way legendary.

Ali Kerim Bey — Jovially ironic and cheerfully vice-ridden, the Istanbul station chief has produced enough sons with a variety of women to populate the entire Turkish branch of MI6; he is clearly a man after 007′s own heart. Indeed, in the movie he seems to be one of the very rare male characters who could be described as an actual friend of Bond. (In the novel, Bond’s ongoing admiration for Bey reads to modern eyes like an out-and-out man-crush.) The character was reportedly inspired by Ali Nâzım Kalkavan, an Oxford-educated Turkish shipowner connected to the English film industry whom Ian Fleming met while researching the novel.

Film acting great Pedro Armendáriz might have hailed from parts significantly west of Istanbul, but he had just the right playful, larger-than-life presence to embody Ali Kerim Bey. The American educated Armendáriz had stumbled into a career as major star in his native Mexico as a handsome youth. He also appeared in a number of north of the border films in Hollywood, and it was none other than the legendary director John Ford who suggested the half-Anglo Armendáriz to Terrence Young for the part of the half-English Kerim Bey.

The actor had costarred with his good friend, John Wayne, in Howard Hughes’ notorious epic, “The Conqueror” — a film many believe to be “cursed” by radiation from early atom bomb tests. Whatever the cause of his illness, Armendáriz, a smoker, learned just before production began that he was suffering from terminal cancer. He decided to make the film, perhaps mainly to help support his family after his death. Reports about the precise sequence of events differ, but it appears he returned to Los Angeles and the UCLA Medical Center after his illness grew too debilitating, where he killed himself with a bullet to the heart. Terrence Young used doubles to complete the film. Armendáriz’s son, actor Pedro Armendáriz Jr., would appear in 1989′s “License to Kill.”

Major Boothroyd — The armorer, eventually known simply as Q of Q Branch, actually did appear in “Dr. No,” but don’t feel bad if you missed blink-and-you’ll-miss-him original Boothroyd/Q Peter Burton; we did too. Unable to return because of a prior commitment, veteran working actor Desmond Llewellyn replaced Burton in the second Bond film. Though Llewellyn’s debut lacks any humorous by-play, the production team apparently realized they had something with the droll actor. Things would be different next time.

The Nemeses

“From Russia With Love” is distinguished by a group of genuinely distinguished and fascinating bad guys who were, in turn, played by some of the most fascinating performers in the Bond cannon.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld — The cat loving, human hating, head of SPECTRE makes his first film appearance here, though we won’t be seeing his face until “You Only Live Twice.” The hand which pets the pretty white kitty is provided by Anthony Dawson, who portrayed the unfortunate Prof. Dent in “Dr. No.” The voice is by Austrian actor Erich Pohlmann. Perhaps partially because of ongoing legal wrangling over “Thunderball,” which first introduced SPECTRE in the Bond novels, the credits only list his name as “?”

Kronsteen — The brilliant chess player who develops the original plan is able to defeat a chess opponent in a matter of a minute, even while risking death by not immediately answering SPECTRE’s call. Nevertheless, he eventually falls prey to Mr. Blofeld’s very strict personnel policies. Kronsteen was portrayed by Vladek Sheybal, a Polish-born newcomer chosen for his memorable face and performing style. He would remain a consistently interesting and watchable character actor in English productions until his death in 1992.

Rosa Klebb — In the novel, the toadish Klebb is the depraved and, naturally, lesbian operative of the Soviet SMERSH. In the movie, she has defected to SPECTRE, but that fact has been kept hidden by the Kremlin, making her just the person to deceive the communist but otherwise innocent Tatiana. With the poison tipped knife in her shoe (SPECTRE standard equipment, it seems), Klebb is a figure of pure bile, yet believably human.

What many Bond fans don’t know about Rosa Klebb is that the woman who played her, Lotte Lenya, would be an important figure in world culture if she had never appeared in a single film. A world famous cabaret performer and the wife and muse of German-emigre theater composer Kurt Weil, you can hear Lenya being name-checked in the classic Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong recordings of Weil’s best known melody, “Mack the Knife.” Her other notable film roles include an Oscar-nominated turn in 1961′s “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” and as a Klebb-like sadist of a masseuse who humorously tortures football star Burt Reynolds in 1977′s “Semi-Tough.”

Donald “Red” Grant — The utterly cold-blooded killer who meets his end after one of the famous hand-to-hand battles in movie history is a pure psychopath or perhaps, as we’re told, a homicidal paranoiac. The novel goes into some detail describing his apparently inborn propensity for murder and cruelty, but from the pre-credit sequence on, the movie makes that clear enough. The film subtly establishes the emptiness inside Grant by making him silent throughout the film as he shadows Bond and helps keep him alive long enough for SPECTRE’s evil plan to take hold. He finally speaks, but not as himself, when he meets Bond under the guise of a recently deceased MI6 contact. As in the novel, his repeated use of the English boarding school expression “old man” becomes a bit of a tip-off to Bond. He also conveniently explains the entire plan to Bond before trying to kill him, which is always helpful behavior in a villain.

Young Bondians are often astonished to learn that the gigantic, strapping, red-haired Grant is the very same human being who portrayed the scrappy, not-quite-gigantic brunette seaman, Quint, in “Jaws.” Shaw was clearly one of the better actors tasked with killing James Bond and Grant was far from his only memorable movie bad guy. He was the chillingly ruthless Doyle Lonigan of “The Sting,” the uncompromising subway hijacker, Mr. Blue, in the original 1974 “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and the most imposing Sheriff of Nottingham ever opposite Sean Connery’s middle-aged Robin Hood in “Robin and Marion.” Between those films and his Bond gig, Shaw won an Oscar for his portrayal of King Henry VIII in 1967′s “A Man for All Seasons.” The master thespian was also a novelist and playwright, perhaps best known today for the play “The Man in the Glass Booth,” inspired by the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. He died while still at the height of his movie fame in 1978.

Lesser Bond Baddies

With such a large and notable cadre of bad guys, you’d think we’d have the notable bad guys covered. However, we should give at least a nod to the Soviet paid Bulgar assassin Krilencu, whom Kerim Bay does away with as he is looking out of a poster for an upcoming Bob Hope/Anita Eckberg comedy. The assassin was played by the late Hungarian-born actor and stunt man, Fred Haggerty.

License to kill

After the fairly wanton killing of Prof. Dent last time around, Bond is on slightly better behavior. He does, however, offer to perform the cold-blooded assassination of Krilencu. Instead, Kerim Bey performs the honors in what is arguably a case of “all’s fair” in the war between the two men. We suppose you could make a case 007 doesn’t actually have to garrote Red Grant to death at the end of the fight in the train, but we’re willing to chalk that one up as reasonably pure self-defense and some justifiable anger for messing up an enjoyable evening.

The gadgets

The really elaborate doodads will be making their debut in “Goldfinger.” However, Boothroyd/Q does give Bond an extremely nifty and useful briefcase which the spy describes as a “nasty little Christmas present.” It features a folding AR-7 sniper rifle, hidden rounds of ammunition, a throwing knife that pops out of the side, an innocent looking can of talcum powder that holds a tear-gas canister, and hiding places for 50 gold sovereigns, always handy for potentially life-saving bribes. Believe it or not, with enough cash you can purchase a suitcase claiming to be the actual Bond case from the firm of Swaine Adeney Brigg. We’re wondering if those sovereigns would cover the cost.

The exotic locales

After the success of “Dr. No,” the famously thrifty Cubby Broccoli was prepared to spend a bit more on travel-related expenses. However, while many sequences were filmed in Istanbul, Venice and elsewhere, a surprising number of sequences were actually shot in Sean Connery’s native Scotland and at London’s Pinewood Studios. Again, director of photography Ted Moore does a fantastic job of creating a sumptuous look on a relatively lowish budget, give or take some of those inevitable obvious early sixties back-projection shots.

The outrageous villain’s lair chess room

Befitting the reputation of “From Russia with Love” as the most straightforward Bond film made in the 20th century, the sets are, on the whole, a bit more restrained than in future entries. However, even with legendary production designer Ken Adam taking a break from the series, they range from beautiful to spectacular. Syd Cain had worked in an accidentally uncredited capacity as the art director on “Dr. No” — rather than expensively redo the credits, Cubby Broccoli gave Cain a solid gold pen instead — and he was more than up to the task of production design.

Still, the villain’s lairs get upstaged this time. Yes, there is Blofeld’s rather lavish office on his yacht, but it’s a relatively restrained affair. Even his aquarium is normal sized and only houses three ordinary Siamese fighting fish. The oft-spoofed SPECTRE Island training facility, with its live shooting galleries and deadly dojos, is suspiciously similar to an elaborate multipurpose silent film set used to comic effect in, believe or not, “Singin’ in the Rain.” Easily the most spectacular set this time around is the room where Kronsteen wins his chess game. The huge Venetian frescoes that adorn the room remind us of where we are and spice up what might have been a somewhat dry scene.

The Opening

By the early sixties, teasers were a common technique used to persuade the ever-growing TV audience to sit through commercials, and so it seemed like a natural way to “hook” a movie audience right away. Producer Harry Saltzman had come up with the idea that the second film should open with the apparent death of James Bond. Furthermore, Stanley Kubrick’s Oscar-winning film of “Spartacus,” had given the filmmakers the idea of an extremely rigorous SPECTRE instructional camp where death was the equivalent of a non-passing grade.

Thus, the thrilling James Bond movie pre-credit sequence, which eventually became as much a part of the series as the girls and the guns, was born. This time, we meet psychopathic, eerily silent professional killer Donald “Red” Grant who encounters the apparent Mr. Bond in the spectacular garden of an English mansion and dispatches him with the help of some garroting wire secreted in his watch. We quickly realize the entire thing is a very deadly war game when one of Grant’s superiors pulls a mask off the body, revealing a mustachioed man who should have considered the dubious employment practices of SPECTRE.

The Credits

Like production designer Ken Adam, “Dr. No.” credit designer Maurice Binder was not on board for “From Russia with Love.” He was very ably replaced by the imaginative Robert Brownjohn, who borrowed an old avant garde film technique and projected the credits on and around the bodies of dancer, setting the sexy, male-gaze friendly tone of the production. Brownjohn would employ a variation of the process in his next and final Bond outing, “Goldfinger.”

Action Highlights

With a bigger budget came more frequent and more elaborate action sequences. Undoubtedly the most famous action scene in “From Russia with Love” is the climactic fight in Bond’s private room on the Orient express. The fight, rather brutal by the standards of its time, wowed audiences but it took a lot work as the use of stunt men was limited, allowing for a greater degree of realism than audiences were used to. The scene must have given Broccoli and Saltzman at least a touch of indigestion and it is supposed to have taken some three weeks to choreograph and film — enough time to shoot an entire movie. The effort certainly paid off, however. A later boat chase was more even more dangerous to film, though perhaps less effective for jaded modern viewers.

The Music

John Barry might not have gotten the credit he felt he deserved for the iconic James Bond theme he conducted and arranged for “Dr. No.” Of course, it was Barry, and not credited composer Monty Norman, who was asked back to score the second Bond film. Even so, the extremely talented 30 year-old still had to play second-fiddle when it came to the theme song. Since Barry had yet to write a pop hit, the producers instead turned to songwriter Lionel Bart, who had just made a smash in London and on Broadway with his songs for “Oliver!”

In our opinion, Bart is not quite in the same musical league as Barry (we’re not big fans of “Oliver!” either) and his “From Russia with Love” is not one of our very favorite Bond melodies. So, the film wisely leads off with an instrumental rendition arranged and conducted by Barry, leaving a vocal rendition by Matt Monro for later. Barry adds elements of quasi-classical dramatic film music and jazz, transforming Bart’s somewhat bland melody into an exciting composition that properly sets the tone of romance and adventure.

Perhaps trying to get a bit of his own back, Barry also created his own “007 Theme.” While the original Bond theme emphasizes danger, violence and mystery, Barry’s new melody, which would become a staple in Bond films for decades to come, strikes a playfully martial note. It sounds almost as if it might have been composed for a classic Hollywood adventure along the lines of “Gunga Din” or “Beau Geste.”

The one-liners

The enjoyably groan-inducing Bondian witticisms are, to the relief of some, few here. However, after Tatiana saves Bond from the poison-tipped hidden shoe-knife of Rosa Klebb, Bond says of the late Miss Klebb that “She had her kicks.”

At another point, Bond risks a movie-related in-joke, which has become very “in” indeed. After shooting down a SPECTRE helicopter, he quips, “Looks like one of their aircraft is missing.” This is a reference to “One of Our Aircraft is Missing,” a once popular World War II-era propaganda film from cinephile favorites Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (“The Red Shoes”). Sadly, the film in question fell into public domain and has rarely been seen in any but the most battered prints for decades.

The cocktails and beverages

There is some booze, but no actual cocktails this time. Bond — who actually seems to prefer bourbon over martinis in the novels — seems to be in more of a caffeinated mode. He orders his super-strong Turkish coffee “medium sweet” while hanging with Ali Kerim Bay, and later requests from room service that his morning wake-up beverage be “very black.” Nevertheless, Bond and his new buddy, Bey, drink an allegedly “filthy” Turkish liquor called raki at the Gypsy camp.

Later, Bond is disturbed when Red Grant, masquerading as Bond’s contact, orders a red wine with his fish dinner. An especially tragic faux pas as it was Grant’s last meal. (Actually, oenophiles inform us you can pair red wine with fish as long as you know what you’re doing. Grant clearly didn’t know what he was doing.)

Random facts

– The poster that soon-to-be deceased assassin, Krilencu, is looking out of shortly before his last breath is for the Bob Hope, “Call Me Bwana.” Not surprisingly, the film happened to be another movie produced by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman’s EON Productions. If you’re going to give a movie free advertising, it really should be your own.

– “From Russia With Love is one of numerous thrillers to include trains in general and the Orient Express in particular. A few of the films Terrence Young and company might have had in mind as they were shooting the train sequence were Josef von Sternberg’s “Shanghai Express,” 1934′s “Orient Express,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” and “The Lady Vanishes,” as well as Carol Reed’s “Night Train to Munich,” which had a somewhat Bondian-leading man portrayed by Rex Harrison. Although Agatha Christie’s novel, Murder on the Orient Express was first published in 1934, there was no film version until America’s Sidney Lumet made an Oscar winning film version, costarring Sean Connery, in 1974.

The Romantic Ending

Fans who saw both “From Russia with Love” and “Dr. No” might have spotted the beginning of a pattern. Bond and Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) wrap up in the first movie engaged in some heavy movie-style petting in a small boat. Bond and Tatiana end the film engaged in some goodness-knows-what in a Venetian gondola. Whatever they’re doing  may or may not be legal under Italian law, but Bond probably has license for that as well.

“James Bond Will Return”

One last tradition began in “From Russia with Love” and it was the promise of another 007 adventure before the end credits. In keeping with the tendency of films of that era to get a bit cute with the closing “The End” title card, here it’s followed by “Not Quite the End” and then, “James Bond will return in the next Ian Fleming thriller . . . ”Goldfinger.” And so he did.

The girls, the gadgets, the stylish violence and absurd deeds of derring-do… It’s no wonder that the handsome and ruthlessly heroic James Bond has been an icon of masculine wish fulfillment and feminine desire for 50 years. Harry Potter and “Twilight” films might sell more tickets at the moment, but Bond belongs to an elite group of internationally popular, impossible to kill, long-running heroes.

One thing that distinguishes Bond from your Superman, Batman and Sherlock Holmes types is that, with three quirky exceptions, the Bond character has been exclusively handled by the same small, family-owned production company which has maintained a tight creative grip on the franchise since the very first Bond movie. This has led to a remarkable degree of consistency, which can be a mixed blessing.

Keeping things fresh is surely a concern on the upcoming 23rd entry in the series, which was intelligently rebooted with 2006′s “Casino Royale,” but it’s been an issue since the Bond craze first kicked into overdrive with “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball” in the mid-sixties. In fact, there’s something enjoyably ritualistic about the Bond films, which repeat the same elements with just enough variation to keep fans returning film after film, even as they might grumble that the series hasn’t been the same since Sean Connery stopped playing Bond. Without the Bond girls, the amazing stunts, the pre-credit sequence and elaborate credits, and especially the theme, Bond just wouldn’t be Bond.

And so, we at Bullz-Eye will be looking at 007 film by film, with a special emphasis on those key ingredients in the Bond martini, both familiar and hopefully somewhat surprising, that have kept so many of us devoted to the series, movie after movie after movie, year after year after year. We’ll start at the beginning…

“Dr. No” (1962)

The Plot

James Bond, an MI6 spy with a “double O” designation which means he is both an investigator and an occasional assassin with a “license to kill,” is sent to investigate the murder of British operative and his secretary in Jamaica. The man behind it turns out to be a Chinese-German millionaire with an unhealthy interest in America’s space program and scores of expendable extras on his payroll. 007 gets his man, kills a few others, and makes a few new female friends.

The Backstory

It’s not surprising John F. Kennedy could relate to stories about an international man of mystery with whom he shared a vice or two. It’s more surprising he admitted to it in public. For a U.S. president to openly endorse a series of risqué potboilers was unheard of in the early 1960′s. Instead of hurting himself, however, Kennedy helped the books and turned a reasonably successful series into an early sixties publishing bonanza.

Seeing a potential to make a killing with a low-budget film of the character, an American expatriate producer residing in England, Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, teamed with Canadian-born Harry Saltzman, who’d been holding on to the Bond film rights. At first, the newly written “Thunderball” was to be the first film in the series. That project, however, got waylaid by an issue regarding the rights to that story which would haunt the producers for decades.

Perhaps because of its simplicity and memorable title villain, “Dr. No,” the sixth novel in the series, was then selected as the basis for the first James Bond movie. Numerous hands would produce material that made it into the finished screenplay, but the final version was largely the work of American screenwriter Richard Maibum. He would remain with the series through the remaining decades of his career.

As for casting Commander Bond, at first producers Broccoli and Saltzman sought a major star. Cary Grant apparently considered the role, but it was a no-go: the self-aware 58 year-old knew that his leading man days were numbered and he would have no part of a sequel. Patrick McGoohan, already famed as a TV spy in the UK as “Danger Man,” turned the part down and eventually became a cult television legend with the surreal, weirdly Bond-influenced, “The Prisoner.” Shakespearean actor Roger Johnson would also reject the idea of committing for several films. He would later play one of Bond’s pulp predecessors, Bulldog Drummond, in a pair of mid-sixties spy spoofs.

When the winner of a “play James Bond” contest was rejected by Broccoli, the producers looked elsewhere. 1n 1962, Sean Connery was known, if he was known at all, for playing a male ingénue role in Walt Disney’s live action “Darby O’Gill and the Little People.” Described as “merely tall, dark, and handsome” by New York Times critic A.H. Weiler and admittedly a bit roughhewn to play the ultra sophisticated spy, the 30 year-old Scotsman was nevertheless selected.

By that point, journeyman director Terrence Young was already on board. Young was a fortuitous choice. Seen by his colleagues as the suave, well-dressed, lady-killing model for the movie Bond, he took charge of the production and set about creating that thing we now call “a James Bond movie.” Crucially, he understood that also meant the image of Bond himself. A grateful Sean Connery would later credit him with helping to smooth out the rough edges he needed to embody the super-suave, super-deadly spy.

Just as important, Young managed to create an extravagant look on a modest budget while shooting at London’s Elstree studio and within spitting distance of Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s Jamaica estate. The rest is about as historic as pop cinema gets.

Meeting Mr. Bond

Director Young must have realized he had a great screen presence on his hands with Sean Connery. He certainly gets the credit for crafting an introduction that ranks just behind the first appearances of Orson Welles’ Harry Lime in “The Third Man,” John Wayne’s Ringo Kid in “Stagecoach,” and Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in “Casablanca” in terms of sheer movie panache.

Set in a swanky London casino, the scene delays our first good look at Connery/Bond for about as long as it can. As he beats a beautiful opponent in the high-stakes game of Chemin de Fer, first we see an extreme close-up of the spy’s hands picking up his two-card hand. Then, we see that hand lighting a match. Next, Bond’s attractive new acquaintance introduces herself to the handsome stranger as “Trench, Sylvia Trench.” Only then do we finally see the tuxedo clad Bond/Sean Connery, lighting a cigarette hanging carelessly on his lips. “Bond, James Bond” he replies in his distinctive Scottish accent. Cue the Bond theme. In a matter of seconds, Sean Connery’s 007 was sold to the world.

The Bond Girls (Rule of 3)

James Bond is, of course, the most ridiculously effective womanizer in English-language popular culture. Moreover, regular viewers of the series know that Bond usually manages three romantic conquests per adventure, roughly one for each act of the screenplay. (In the novels, Bond is relatively chaste while on the job, sometimes delaying gratification until after the last page.) Despite the fact that seeing even married people sharing a bed together was still a naughty novelty in 1962, “Dr. No” pushed the censorship envelope and boldly established Bond’s sexual rule of three.

Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson) — Bond’s first ever onscreen hook-up, Miss Trench is every bit as sophisticated and in control as Bond, even if her Chemin de Fer strategy may be open to question. She was intended to be Bond’s ongoing on-again-off-again girlfriend throughout the series, but the stunning and statuesque Eunice Grayson would only return for the initial sequel, “From Russia with Love.”

Miss Taro (Zena Marshall) — A embassy secretary secretly in the employ of Dr. No, the Chinese-Jamaican Taro is the first in a long line of treacherous beauties upon whom Bond would turn the sexual tables. She is also Bond’s first in-the-line-of-duty dalliance. (Sylvia Trench is strictly recreational.) In the manner of the time, Marshall was an English actress whose “exotic” looks often got her cast as women of various ethnicities. This was, needless to say, a less politically sensitive era in movie-making.

Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) — Ian Fleming famously described professional seashell collector Honeychile Ryder’s naked emergence out of the Jamaican surf as resembling Botticelli’s Venus being birthed full-grown from the sea. Art and mythology aside, blonde and buxom Andress’s bikini-clad introduction set the stage for millions of youthful sexual awakenings. Almost a complete amateur during the making of “Dr. No,” Andress would go on to enjoy a significant film career despite the fact that her “Dr. No” performance was dubbed in later by another actress on account of her thick Swiss accent. Later films would include “What’s New, Pussycat?” opposite Peter O’Toole and “The 10th Victim” with Marcelo Mastroianni. (Check out a clip of this scene and more photos of Ursula here)

Friends and Colleagues

James Bond isn’t exactly the kind of guy to get misty-eyed thinking about the importance of friendship. Yet his working life does bring him into contact with an assortment of memorable characters. Not everyone was on board for the first Bond opus, but three of the series’s recurring characters do show up for the first time.

M

As portrayed by Bernard Lee, Bond’s boss is all business; both respectful of his underling’s heroics and a bit concerned about his love of danger. The part was dryly played for decades by the eternally miffed Bernard Lee. We’re told that in real life Mr. Lee was a witty raconteur and quite the life of the party. It’s called “acting” folks.

Moneypenny

“Dr. No” is the first of 14 appearances of the wonderful and thoroughly hot Lois Maxwell as the eternally smitten but entirely sensible Miss Moneypenny, M’s trusted secretary and the only person on earth the movie Bond may actually love. The backstory developed by Maxwell, Sean Connery, and Terrence Young, was that Bond and Moneypenny had enjoyed a youthful fling together, but both realized that a romance was incompatible with their respective roles at MI6. And so, cute and sexy repartee would have to substitute for actual sex. In this case…

Bond: Moneypenny! What gives?
Moneypenny: Me, given an ounce of encouragement.

“Dr. No” also marks the first appearance of a recurring bit of business where Bond would toss a hat onto a coat rack when entering Moneypenny’s office, the odd part being that Bond rarely wears a hat.

Felix Leiter

Bond’s opposite number in the American C.I.A. is the closest thing he has to a buddy in the series, though it’s a million miles from a full-blown bromance. In “Dr. No,” Leiter is Jack Lord, later to become legendary to 1970′s TV viewers as stolid, teetotaling supercop Steve McGarrett of “Hawaii Five-O.” Here, he drinks a little; you can’t not drink around Bond. Leiter would return frequently, but Lord never reprised the part. Instead, Bond’s counterpart would be portrayed over the decades by an assortment of actors of differing ages and ethnicities.

The Nemesis

Dr. No

Ian Fleming attributed the inspiration for the titular baddie to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, now almost universally seen as a viciously racist anti-Chinese stereotype. Fleming, who often included racial asides in the Bond novels, was clearly unperturbed by that. Even so, No’s half-German ancestry may have something to do with Germany’s Dr. Mabuse, who director Fritz Lang and others had turned into a symbol of international evil in a series of influential films. (Bond villain-to-be Gert Frobe of “Goldfinger” was already playing Mabuse and future “Man With the Golden Gun” Christopher Lee would soon be recreating Fu Manchu in a Bond-inspired series of mid-sixties British cheapies.) Since he’s in only one movie, Dr. No proves a lot easier to kill than his ancestors, even with his death-dealing metal hands. Still, he’s a memorable villain who sets the pattern for future Bond baddies, with his cool stoicism and odd politeness.

Once termed “the spookiest actor in the American theater,” Jewish-Canadian Joseph Wiseman seems to have had a solid understanding of his character, an ultimate outsider. That aspect also played into his status as a member of SPECTRE, the non-ideological amalgamation of bad guys bent on world domination which allowed the Bond producers to tone down the cheerfully strident Cold War politics of Fleming’s novels. In the book, No was more simply in the employ of the Soviet assassination outfit, SMERSH.

Lesser Bond Baddies

The crew of assassins, toadies, and femme fatales we’ve come to expect in all Bond films appears in “Dr. No.” This time we’ve got the “Three Blind Mice,” a trio of Jamaican hit-men — all played by uncredited actors — the unfortunate Prof. Dent (Anthony Dawson), who we’ll discuss below, the alluring though downright slutty Miss Taro, and also a pretty photographer who’d rather have her arm broken than say word one about Dr. No. (Marguerite LeWars, Miss Jamaica 1962)

License to Kill

Even after several decades of mindlessly brutal so-called heroes, James Bond’s first onscreen use of his Double-O license to commit murder remains oddly one of the single most disturbing moments in the Bond cannon. Not surprisingly, it took a bit of persuasion to get the “unsporting” killing of the conniving double agent, Prof. Dent, through censorship.

Don’t get us wrong, Bond has his reasons. However, Dent is unarmed by this point, having discharged all the bullets in his gun into a bed he thinks contains a sleeping Bond. Moreover, Bond is actually destroying a valuable intelligence asset, and there is still something slightly sickening about a putative hero killing a man in cold blood, even a loathsome and cowardly multiple murderer. But that’s what makes it so memorable. The scene gave rise to a quotable Bond line reportedly often repeated by UK schoolboys: “You’ve had your six!”

The Gadgets and Guns

Does a gun count as a gadget? Bond is forced by M to switch from his beloved Beretta to his signature Walther PPK for reasons that we understand make little ballistic sense. Then, there’s the armored-tractor tank-like thing with an attached deadly flame thrower which is almost comically disguised as a dragon. Is that a gadget?

The fact of the matter is that it was early days in 1962 and thrifty Cubby Broccoli wasn’t about to spend a ton of money on an unproven property. The elaborate doodads would come later.

The Car

Along with the guns and gadgets, most Bond fans obsess about the cars as well. The cars take on more importance as the series progresses, but Bond gets off to a nice start in Dr. No by driving a Sunbeam Alpine 1961 Series II along the Jamaican countryside during the obligatory automotive chase scene.

The Exotic Locales

Bond’s only trip this time is to Jamaica. However, Ted Moore’s great cinematography gave sixties audiences a real eyeful on a small budget, and we’re not just talking about Ursula Andress. The amazing sets and the beaches of Jamaica are a visual treat. See the restored version on Blu-Ray or projected in a state-of-the-art theater, if you can. Amazing.

The Outrageous Villain’s Lair

Ken Adam, who remained with the series through 1977′s “The Spy Who Loved Me,” is easily one of the two or three most distinctive production designers of all time. Here, he makes the most with least. His sneakily tongue-in-cheek approach to minimalist set design includes an almost bare holding cell with a single circular skylight casting a cross-hatched shadow — all the better to make poor Prof. Dent seem even more small and pathetic.

And let us not forget Dr. No’s living room with the giant fish tank. It was actually, a film projection which editor Peter Hunt was forced to hunt down at the last minute, and so the fish in it were much larger than they ought to have been. According to Hunt, that led to some new dialogue between Dr. No and Bond about “minnows pretending they’re whales.”

The Opening

This is the only official Bond film without a pre-credit sequence. Thank the spy gods, however, designer Maurice Binder was already on board for the credits themselves.

Firstly, Binder created the signature intro, now so much a part of the Bond mystique, in which we see a silhouetted Bond (actually stunt man Bob Simmons this time ’round) through a gunman’s site. Bond turns around and shoots at the audience/assailant, and then the screen is covered in a wash of animated blood. As stylized as it is, it’s almost shockingly graphic for its day. It’s also probably the most effective logo ever designed for a film or television series.

That’s followed by a spiffy and abstract Saul Bass-influenced credit sequence set to the James Bond theme. Then the music changes to a calypso version of “Three Blind Mice” and we see the colorful silhouettes of the trio of assassins who set the events of “Dr. No” in motion. It’s hard to imagine a more memorable opening, except that we know that even better ones will be following.

And speaking of that great James Bond theme…

The Music

There’s no doubt that composer-conductor-arranger John Barry’s compositions and orchestrations for the Bond films set the standard for spy music. There’s just one little difficulty that comes up with “Dr. No”: Barry is not the credited composer. The film’s score, including that incredibly recognizable Bond theme, is supposed to have been written by Monty Norman.

That leads to a question: Who the hell is Monty Norman? Well, Norman is an otherwise little-known theater composer and pop musician who has remained otherwise little-known despite having his name on one of the two or three most recognizable pieces of film music ever written. Something seems odd here and there has been libel litigation over it in the United Kingdom, which Norman nevertheless won.

Though he stopped short of saying he’d actually written the Bond theme, Norman’s credit for the melody always seemed to stick in the late John Barry’s craw. Barry, who arranged and conducted the music for “Dr. No,” would point out that he was the person who would be asked back and write a great deal more music in the same vein, and it’s an impossible point to argue with. It’s also true that the score for this first film is entirely undistinguished compared to the great work to follow, though many point out the Bond theme is similar to an earlier composition by Norman. Regardless, the only memorable pieces of music in it are variations on the Bond theme, whoever wrote it, and the silly but catchy calypso number, “Underneath the Mango Tree,” which Norman pretty definitely wrote.

The One-Liners

“Dr. No” has it’s share of witty badinage, some of it quoted elsewhere, but the jokey asides, often made after a killing, were mostly still to come.

The Cocktail

First a Jamaican room service waiter and then no less than Dr. No himself inform the audience of Bond’s movie cocktail of choice: vodka martini, twist of lemon, shaken not stirred. Cocktail aficionados will note with horror that the Jamaican hotel serves the drink in what appears to be a very small Tom Collins glass — shocking! Dr. No provides the superior service, serving the beverage in an appropriately shaped, small cocktail glass. Probably perfectly chilled, too. Just one thing, that martini is extremely tiny by modern standards, though surely made with 100 proof vodka.

Random Fact

Prior to becoming a major force in reggae and rock music, a young Anglo-Jamaican named Chris Blackwell served on the “Dr. No” production in several capacities. He had been an acquaintance of both Ian Fleming and Monty Norman. The Island records founder can be heard extensively on the “Dr. No” DVD/Blu-Ray commentary.