John Barry Plays 007

Where Norman
Has Gone Before

John Barry Plays 007
by Geoff Leonard & Pete Walker
No visible ISBN
Windmill Books

A very quick shout out of a review to an interesting book a friend bought me for Christmas last year, John Barry Plays 007. The book was published in 2022 and has no ISBN. I’d not heard of it before and so am assuming my friend, who is always in the know about John Barry stuff (and alarmingly prejudiced when it comes to discussing authorship of The James Bond Theme), probably ordered this one direct from the publishers.

It’s a pretty cool book and does what it says on the tin, by taking each of Barry’s eleven Bond scores (plus the arrangement job from Dr. No) and breaking each one down dealing with a quick summary of the content of the film (which I suspect is not needed for most readers), followed by anecdotes on how the famous songs and scores were written and recorded, along with lots of info on the releases of the various records (and cover versions) of the various Bond related music and, of course, how both the singles and albums charted in various countries.

So yeah, there’s lots of stuff you may not know along with a lot of things the casual Barry listener will probably be aware of. So you get the anecdote Michael Caine recounted at John Barry’s return concert in the late 1990s about the gestation of Goldfinger (gosh that concert went on quite a few hours too long... I remember everyone having trouble getting home from central London after that gig), the chestnut about Shirley Bassey freeing her bust to be able to sing properly on the recording of that same song, the one about Tom Jones nearly passing out in the studio while trying to hold the last note of Thunderball... and various other things which are all a part of the John Barry myth and legend.

It also gives some nice insight into why Nancy Sinatra was not at her best when attempting to record You Only Live Twice (the final recording is made up from several different takes recorded on different days), a mystery about why her dad Frank pulled out after agreeing to sing the title song for Moonraker, and mention of earlier versions of You Only Live Twice, including the one that appeared on the Rarities album a few decades back and also one I’ve never heard recorded by Julie London.

Added to all this are many photos including rare ‘behind the scenes’ shots and, in itself quite valuable, absolutely loads of pictures of the covers of all the releases of the songs, soundtracks and knock offs (although I was a bit annoyed the old Eric Winstone Plays 007 album was not included). And then there’s the elephant in the room of course...

The book starts off with what I thought was going to be a credible testimony as to why many people believe John Barry wrote The James Bond Theme, rather than just arranging it. Using testimony from court cases and other sources, the authors try to paint a picture where Barry did just that, de-emphasising the importance of Monty Norman's role in it. It’s not convincing at all however and I still believe that Monty Norman was himself responsible for the melody and its use in various scenes. Barry did an arrangement... the definitive arrangement for sure... of the theme but, nope, it seems obvious to me now that Norman wrote the tune. And here’s the thing I will say to all those naysayers who have just stopped reading... just listen for yourself to the score in the movie Dr. No. Especially towards the end, in Norman’s underscore, you can hear The James Bond Theme dynamically woven into the fabric of the music. Not only was it Norman who wrote the main score which utilises this theme, before Barry was brought on board to make it more punchy and help carry the movie (which he assuredly did)... but one of those cues was even tracked in/added to the score of From Russia With Love in the final release cut so, yeah, go and have a think about that one.

Other than that, though... John Barry Plays 007 is a lovely book and I’m glad to have it. I also have yet another, much thicker book on the music of Barry to read and review at some point soon so, yeah, look for that on here either this year or the next.

The Black Hole

In Cygnus And In Health

The Black Hole
USA 1979 Directed by Gary Nelson
Walt Disney Club 30th Anniversary Edition 
Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Some slight spoilers in this.

I loved The Black Hole as a kid and, dated as it might seem in certain aspects today... I still love it.

I remember thinking nothing of the details of the story and the way it plays out at the time (I would have been 11 years old when I first saw this at my local cinema) but, looking back on it now, it seems to be a little grim and ambiguous for what was perceived at the time as a ‘kid friendly’ family film. I just read that, despite the ‘cute’ robots in this, it wasn’t necessarily made for kids at all and it was being made with adults in mind as much as the youngsters. Although, if memory serves, it wasn’t exactly marketed like that.

Okay so, first things first, the film has a tremendous cast. You have the main heroic leads played by Robert Forster as Captain Dan Holland, Yvette Mimieux as Dr. Kate McCrae (she was the main female lead in the original version of The Time Machine, you might remember), Joseph Bottoms as Charles Pizer and Anthony Perkins as Dr. Alex Durant. Also joining our heroes is the mighty Ernest Borgnine as reporter Harry Booth (who is a little more ambiguous in his actions towards the end of the movie) and the uncredited voice of Roddy McDowall as the cute robot V.I.N.CENT. They comprise the crew of the Palomino spaceship and later on in their adventure, they are joined by another cute robot, Old B.O.B, voiced, again uncredited, by Slim Pickens.

And the plot is a simple one... they find a black hole in space and when they go in for a closer look they discover the great, lost starship the Cygnus ‘parked’ just outside of the full pull of the hole. It seems deserted but, when they explore it, they find themselves guests of the mad tyrant scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt, played by Maximilian Schell, along with his giant robot Maximilian. Plus a crew of sentry robots and also... well, there’s a crew of some kind but I don’t want to spoil the movie if you haven’t already seen it.

And, yes, if you are wondering if this sounds a little like the plot of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea relocated to deep space with Maximilian Schell as the Captain Nemo figure, you’re absolutely right and there are a few parallels with Disney’s earlier adaptation of that novel thrown into the mix too. Ultimately though, the plot involves Reinhardt wanting to move into the black hole ‘and beyond’ while the crew of the Palomino are racing to fix their crippled ship and get off the Cygnus before this happens... and, due to some trouble they have later in the story, getting into all kinds of laser gun shoot outs with the various sentry robots as they try to get somewhere safe as Reinhardt steers everyone into the black hole.

It’s a nice looking film, full of colour and action. I well remember the Topps Bubble Gum cards (these days called ‘trading cards’) from the film which hit the newsagents at the same time... still got my set from back then, all in a presentation album now. It’s a bit of a mixed bag in terms of acting and effects though.

The effects work wasn’t farmed out to dedicated houses (as was just about becoming the normal procedure since the invention of Industrial Light and Magic a few years earlier) and so they were done totally in-house by Disney. So some of it, where the various crew members are floating around in various states of anti-gravity, looks quite extraordinary to this day and I would give myself a headache if I could figure out how they did it and make it look so natural with everyone on a different ‘flight path’. There must be some wire work in there but it really is quite special. Unfortunately, the matte lines around the various characters later and the pedestrian, cartoony looking laser gun bursts don’t do the film any favours. They didn’t look great then and, now the film has been restored for this limited Disney Club USA Blu Ray, they look even worse... the film looks especially grainy still where several shots are overlaid so, this didn’t really feel like a great restoration job, if I’m being honest.

And then there’s the acting/tone of the movie too. They really need V.I.N.CENT the robot as comic relief here because absolutely everyone else in the movie is deadly serious. There are very few smiling faces through most of the film and there may not be a lot of gravity in some scenes but there’s an overabundance of gravitas, that’s for sure. Also, for a film which was perceived as a kid friendly movie and was basically one of many space operas which came out riding the Star Wars bandwagon, it’s got some really questionable content.

For instance, you don’t expect the first of the death of three of the main protagonists, Anthony Perkins’ character, who is the only one who thinks what Reinhardt is doing is a good idea, to have his chest and stomach drilled open by the whirling blades of the Maximilian robot and falling to an electrical death (if he isn’t already dead after having his intestines churned in his tummy)... you don’t see stuff like this in a Disney movie for kids that often. Ditto for the unbelievably WTF ending where the heroes totally fail their mission and everyone goes through the black hole, which is when the movie really starts to get like the end of 2001 - A Space Odyssey, with bizarre, religious imagery as everyone, including Maximillian Schell who clambers inside the continuity challenged shell of the Maximilian robot (Schell within a shell!), are transported to a land of skull faced followers around volcanic pits and an angel floating through an endless corridor. And absolutely no comments from anyone in the cast by this point... the heroes lost their roll of the dice and are in some strange, abstract vision of heaven and hell and that’s the end, deal with it! It’s not exactly a fun looking vision (if you’re stuck in the middle of it)... it’s pretty dark and grim, to be honest.

So yeah, I just loved that ambiguous ending as a kid but I remember some of the other kids at school having a problem with it, now that I think of it.

Another great thing is the musical score by the late, great John Barry. I believe it was the first film to have its score recorded on digital equipment and also one of the last two movies to feature an overture of the music in cinemas before the film started (the other being Star Trek The Motion Picture). Now I believe Barry didn’t actually like the absolutely brilliant and upbeat ‘overture/heroic things happening’ theme he was asked to write for this because it was in the romantic adventure mode just being re-popularised by John Williams at the time (and possibly felt inappropriate to him?) but, honestly, it’s a fantastic piece of music. As is his totally hypnotic and repetitive, swirling opening title music, which really makes you feel the presence of the antagonistic title element. And, yeah, the whole score does just sound like Bond in space, more so than even Moonraker (which is a far lesser score in comparison to this one)... and what’s wrong with that? Easily one of Barry’s greatest scores from this period and another CD I could listen to on repeat when required.

So yeah, there you have it. Well performed but sombre characters, a mixture of staggeringly good and unbelievably ropey effects, some impressively colourful scenes, a thunderously cool score and some comedy robots... what more could you want from a movie. I know it has its detractors but I still, after all these years, love The Black Hole and would recommend it to those movie watchers who are interested in seeking out films which are... I dunno... just a little bit wrong or off-kilter for their marketed target audience. I don’t think you could really get away with delivering this movie in the current political and cultural climate but I would absolutely welcome a remake/reboot of this if anyone had anything interesting to add in the way of ideas to infuse into this template. I’ll definitely be watching this one again at some point over the next few years.

Howard The Duck

Duck To The Future

Howard The Duck
(aka Howard - A New Breed Of Hero)
USA 1986 Directed by Willard Huyck
101 Films  Blu Ray Zone B

I didn’t see Howard The Duck at the cinema when it was first released back in 1986. I probably should have, given some of the similar big budget franchise movies of a certain style I saw that were biting into the box office at the time but the character was not one I was all that familiar with. I’d never read a Howard The Duck comic (still haven’t that I can remember but, you know, that will change) and for some reason this just didn’t appeal to me. It was no tragedy for me at the time when I realised it had disappeared from cinemas, even though the main driving force behind the picture was über director George Lucas, who the world was about to find out ‘could’ bankroll a bad movie after all. Well, it’s not that bad but I’m sure most people reading this will know the reputation of this flick as being right up there with Plan 9 From Outer Space as being one of the worst movies ever made.

The reason I wanted to see this movie was because of the score or, rather, the partially rejected score. I already had a bootleg CD of the original LP release backed up with a bootleg of The Black Hole (both scores have now been commercially released in expanded and properly mastered versions... hooray!) but was happy to replace it towards the end of last year when music label Intrada released a definitive three CD set of, not just John Barry’s full score (including the stuff which never made it into the movie) but also the parts of the score rewritten by the likes of Sylvester Levay, who used Barry’s themes for the other parts to make everything in the final cut of the movie sound pretty seamless. And it’s a nice Barry score, typical of the decade in which he wrote it, sounding like the lush writing of the more romantic side of the composer juxtaposed with that hard hitting, heroic action scoring that the composer used in his scores for the James Bond films. It also sounded like it should be a total mismatch of a composer for that specific kind of project to me... so I wanted to see the film to experience how it was all meant to fit together. And, yeah, I was right... it is a bit of a mismatch in terms of the tone of the film, I think. Barry plays it dead straight a lot of the time when perhaps a more overtly comical score may have suited the material better.

Even so, I’d have to say that the score is absolutely much better than the movie it was composed for... but having seen the movie now I’m here to tell you that, you know, perhaps it really doesn’t live up to its reputation. Or rather, down to its reputation. I’m here to say quite positively, its not even close to being one of the worst movies ever made (I think I’ve seen lots of others which could perhaps hold that title) and it’s actually not all that different from many of the blockbusters which were doing the rounds at the time.

What it has got is an extra ‘adult’ sensibility which is presumably part of the original comics on which it was based but, since it was being released as a family film, the elements of sleaziness and adult humour have been toned down quite a bit. Instead, we have this weird alliance of kiddy flick and sex references that certainly make some sequences rather questionable... at least in terms of today's watered down, 'don’t be offending anyone with your art dude', silliness attitudes to practically everything going on in the world. Honestly, I take a stroll down my Twitter timeline these days and I’m almost convinced I’m living in Victorian times.

So when Howard finds himself a fish... er... duck out of water on the planet Earth, he goes to the employment agency and they give him a job working on maintenance in a local brothel. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. There’s also a scene where the lead female actress, Lea Thompson, finds a condom in Howard’s wallet and a long scene where she tries to seduce Howard in her lingerie. Except, it’s really weird because Howard is fighting her off in this scene and that goes against everything we’ve been told about the titular duck so far in the story. There’s not a lot of character continuity in this film folks, for sure.

I have to give a huge shout out to Lea Thompson in this, though. I’ve not seen her in much and never really thought that much of her but seeing her here where she’s practically carrying the movie and also looking very beautiful too (which is another word I might not have used about her in something like, for instance, her presence in Back To The Future), she really does an absolutely fantastic job. Maybe I should check her out in some other things... if anyone has any recommendations, drop them in the comments box below.

She’s also ably supported by Jeffrey Jones, playing a good guy mad scientist accidentally responsible for bringing Howard The Duck to our dimension, who halfway through the film becomes the host body to the film’s primary antagonist... and also a very young Tim Robbins, who really goes out of his way doing truly silly and embarrassing stuff so, power to him for going with it, I guess.

The film is a bunch of action set pieces, often kinda forced into scenes almost as padding, in between attempts at adult humour (without being allowed to show anything truly adult but getting real close to it on occasion and, when it comes to things like topless duck centre spreads in Howard’s issue of Playduck, I think it’s very much a matter of personal opinion as to whether this film was given the right rating), gazillions of duck puns and... not much else, it has to be said.

And I honestly didn’t hate it. Sure, there are some sequences with scientifically questionable moments filled with silliness that will make you cringe but, honestly, that’s most big budget 1980s movies isn’t it? It’s obviously not as good as, say, Back To The Future or the first Gremlins movie (although Howard walks all over Gremlins 2 - The Next batch, I reckon) but the style and presentation of the content really isn’t all that different from films like these and I have to wonder why this one bombed so badly at the box office. Like I said, it isn’t exactly the worst film ever made.

101 Films have done an amazing job bringing this to us in a new Blu Ray transfer (but why?) and there are a fair few extras on here too, not least of which is a second commentary track by soundtrack guru Charlie Brigden and Dan Whitehead, which is well worth a listen. I discovered from this commentary that, if you don’t count the ‘repackaged for cinema’ TV shows that Marvel had occasionally released overseas, that this was Marvel’s first live action film of one of their comic books. It’s fitting then that the duck in question has been getting a few cameos of late in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films.

All in all, I can’t say I’d recommend or even wish the movie version of Howard The Duck on anyone I know but if you do end up watching it, I don’t think you’ll actually hate it. You might question its values somewhat but it certainly won’t hurt you either, I think. I might even watch it again someday but, certainly, not for a long time.

Q The Music In Concert

A Q To A Kill

Q The Music...
James Bond Concert Spectacular
17th March 2019 - Adelphi Theatre, London

Regular readers of this blog (and I know from my stats there must be at least a few of you) may remember that I’ve gone on record as being not a big reviewer of music and rarely write up any of the many concerts I’ve been to in my life. Although I absolutely love music, it’s not a medium I feel confident to talk about with any level of expertise, or even competence for that matter but, occasionally I will go out on a limb and try to do something because a concert has either been an exceptionally good experience, such as concerts by Hans Zimmer (reviewed here) and Brian Tyler (reviewed here) or, once, an exceptionally bad experience such as the Star Trek - The Ultimate Voyage concert from 2015 (reviewed here). In fact, as far as concert reviews go, I think those three were the only ones I've put on here so I’m pleased I’ve found another concert which was both fun and exciting enough... not to mention having a certain amount of authenticity where it was needed in relation to the original recordings... to report on here.

Now I’ve seen a lot of the greats of film music composers both conducting and performing over the last four decades, many pf them more than once. Ones I can remember off the top of my head are Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Goblin, Fabio Frizzi, Clint Mansell, Brian Tyler, Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino, Murray Gold, James Newton Howard, Howard Shore, Danny Elfman, Zbigniew Preisner and perhaps more pertinent to this particular concert... John Barry, George Martin and David Arnold. I’ve also seen live performances to movies handled by other conductors but I don’t like those so much because I prefer to hear the music without sound effects when I see such things. And the concerts I really have a problem with is when a random conductor leads ‘cover versions’ of various composers works and does ‘an interpretation’ of a ‘concert arrangement’ of a piece which, frankly, does not sound much like the originals...

The reason I’m making this point is because, when my friend ‘Doctor Rob’ rang me up to see if I wanted to go and see this concert with him my first impulse was... thanks but, no thanks. However, in the end I turned that into a strong yes for two reasons. Reason number one was that the concert was supposed to be compered by Madeline Smith and Caroline Munro and, if you are a regular reader of my blog, you’ll know that Caroline Munro has a special place in my cinematic heart and I wanted to see her performing from a script rather than just meet her at the signings I regularly attend when she does one in London (there’s one this Saturday in Camden Town if anyone is interested). As it turns out, this first plus point didn’t go quite as planned but... I’ll get to that in a minute.

Secondly, I clicked on the video link on the concert promo page and, asides from one of the singers doing some really nice vocals of various Bond tracks (I’ll get back to Kerry in a little while too) I thought the orchestra was getting really close to an authentic ‘John Barry sound’ on the clips... rather more so than pretty much anyone else I’ve heard trying to go for that as, believe me, Mr. Barry’s orchestrations are pretty hard for a group to get right live, in my experience. So, yeah, I thought I’d give them a go and... I’m really glad I did.

So I sat in my seat at the Adelphi Theatre with my friend, flicking through my newly purchased programme (okay, it was an expensive tenner but it’s one of the more substantial programmes I’ve ever bought at a concert, to be honest and well worth the money). Bond music from the various movies was being played on some loud speakers for ambience while we waited for the show to begin. I loved that Caroline Munro had four pages to herself in the programme and... well... it was such a shame that although she was originally billed to be there, she’d been replaced (presumably last minute because there were no slips in the programmes and no announcements that we could hear) by Caroline Bliss, who played Miss Moneypenny in the Timothy Dalton era. However, both Miss Bliss and Miss Smith did an excellent job of compering, as did the mind behind the orchestra Q The Music, Mr. Warren Ringham, who wrote their scripts and plays both Trumpet and Flugelhorn in the show.

And, I have to say, it was a treat from start to finish.

The show has two singers in Matt Walker (who handles the majority of the male vocals, although not all) and the absolutely incredible vocal talent of  Kerry Schultz, who also does all of the female vocals and some of the male vocals too. Now, it’s not just songs either. The show was jam packed with Bond stuff and although roughly three quarters of the shows are dedicated to truly awesome versions of various Bond songs (not only the title songs either) there are also instrumental cues listed in the programmes as ‘Special item - To Be Announced’ and these further highlight just how well this ‘band’ are able to nail the James Bond sound. For example, we were treated to some quite meaty and lengthy suites from Goldfinger (Into Miami, Odd Job's Pressing Engagement and Dawn Raid At Fort Knox), A View To A Kill (including a beautiful solo performance by a lady who's name I can't find listed in the programme) and The Living Daylights too.

However, some of the cues scheduled for the evening had to be dropped, from what I understand but, well you certainly can’t complain that this orchestra and vocalists, who were on their feet for the best part of three hours, didn’t give us value for money. And it was an absolute pleasure to hear Miss Schultz belt out tracks like Live And Let Die, GoldenEye and Another Way to Die. I also liked the two accompanying dancers who would come out every now and again, matching Miss Schultz, costume change per costume change and who were especially fetching in their latex and boots combos... but that’s probably something I should comment less on here.

One of the nice things also, about the band, was the way that when featured instruments had a significant contribution to the proceedings, such as on cues like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Bond ‘77, the people playing would step out of the orchestra to the front so you could see them doing their thing. That was pretty good.

As an encore for the show, they did one of my favourite Bond songs, Surrender, from Tomorrow Never Dies and that was a great one to end the evening on. Mr. Ringham did intimate that a version of Backseat Driver was also scheduled for the performance but, alas, they just ran over time and couldn’t squeeze it in. Mr. Ringham also, asides from Caroline Bliss and Madelaine Smith, told some absolutely wonderful stories from both fans of the orchestra (one who found inspiration battling cancer stands out) and also a brilliant anecdote about Sir Roger Moore which I’d never heard before. It really was a good evening.

Now, there were some ommissions that would have made the concert even better for me... if I wanted too much of a good thing. Renditions of 007, Capsule In Space, Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Look Of Love, Where Has Everybody Gone (vocal version) and Die Another Day were not included in this performance. However, in all of those cases, they are in their repertoire and you can see them performing these in concert in all the usual places you can find such stuff on the internet (including their web page, which you can find a link to at the end of this article). However, in the case of doing a credible version of a less substantial song such as Die Another Day, well... I can see why they dropped that one.

There was also a double CD and a double DVD of one of their concerts for sale in the foyer... which meant I ended up unintentionally spending a lot of money that evening when I didn’t mean to. These are also available to purchase, along with a few other things, at their website.

My one bugbear of the concert was that they neglected to play what is, frankly, the greatest Bond song ever written... one which I still don’t know why other people don’t acknowledge as the best. But, there you have it, the absolute awesomeness of Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was not included. What the heck? Maybe they’ll include it in June when they are playing a night at Piz Gloria in Switzerland but, well, it was a bit of a blow that this one didn’t make it onto their list yet. Would have been better than some of those awful Daniel Craig songs that the band here somehow managed to respin into musical gold, I reckon.

That being said, Q The Music’s James Bond Spectacular was still one of the best concerts I’ve been to in years and I certainly hope to catch them when they make it back to London, for sure. If you are a fan of the world of Bond and the wonderful, musical soundscapes from the films... well this is probably the only way to experience this range of material done in as pleasingly an authentic style that you can possibly get out of a live concert situation. Heartily recommended and you can visit the group on their home page at https://qthemusicshow.com/ to read about them, hire them, watch and listen to them and just generally get involved. I can’t wait for them to head my way again sometime soon. Nobody does it better.

Greatest Christmas Music

Christmas Needle Drop

So it’s that time of the year again when seasonal shoppers trample peace and good will into their fellow consumers, as they hastily clamber over their fallen bodies to snatch up the best bargains they can in the name of completing that long list of Christmas shopping requirements. Thankfully, it’s also the time of year when a fair few people get an extended holiday away from work and so the anticipation of this annual absence from the drudgery of the real world (for the most part) suffuses most of our hearts with a feeling of peace, well being and joy... blocking out thoughts of the gazillions of people who die in Christmas shopping traffic or those expiring from hypothermia as the winter bites down hard.

One of the things I always look forward to each year is the start of December because that’s when I feel I can legitimately start playing all my Christmas themed music without getting too many funny looks. So this year, I thought I’d do something new, for my blog, which is pull out and highlight my all time favourite Christmas sonorities for you all to consider listening to at this most festive time of the year. To make things more easier and less agonizing in deciding what’s what, I’ve put my eleven favourite Christmas albums, in reverse order of course, first and then made a second list for absolutely unmissable, stand alone Christmas themed tracks which aren’t on any of those albums listed. Before I start though, a few caveats...

You won’t find Johnny Williams’ two, almost certainly excellent, Home Alone scores on here. Why not? Well simply because I’ve never heard the scores or even seen the movies (and I still have no desire to see Macauly Caulkin do an impression of a work by Edvard Munch, thanks very much). I’m sure these are very good, Christmassy albums but, honestly, I can’t personally recommend them without having heard them.

Also, you won’t find Danny Elfman’s score to Edward Scissorhands on here. Yes, I know it’s been used in a gazillion seasonal adverts and has become almost synonymous with the yuletide season (and dodgy perfume) over the years and... it is a great score... there just wasn’t enough of a Christmas link for me to be able to justify extending my list to twelve, as far as I’m concerned. Elfman’s score for The Nightmare Before Christmas is similarly missing in action but for a simpler reason... I think it’s a bit rubbish and you can hear another, much more interesting musical's influences coming through from the temp track... at least I think I can. Either way, it’s just not for me. However, Elfman fans can relax because one of his Christmas scores did make it in here, so make like a snowflake and chill when it comes to that particular composer.

Okay so first up we have...



The Top Ten Coolest Christmas Albums

11. Everly by Bear McCreary
If you love the music of composer Bear McCreary as much as me, especially his amazing stuff for the last incarnation of the Battlestar Galactica TV show, then you’ll no doubt love the score to this Christmas set shoot ‘em up featuring a machine gun toting Salma Hayek. The icing on the cake is a bunch of Christmas songs with vocals performed by Brendan McCreary and Bear’s wife Raya Yarborough (seriously, her version of Silent Night is well worth the price of the CD). This album is quite new to me but it’s going to be spinning every year in December for me from now on.

10. Die Hard by Michael Kamen
This much loved Christmas action movie has a sequel which also takes place at Christmas. However, Kamen’s music for this first film is much more seasonal as, asides from quoting musical source material like Beethoven’s Ninth and Singin’ In The Rain, he also weaves in some festive tunes which mesh perfectly with the underscore and are manipulated in a similar way to how Kamen manipulates the audience’s emotions. There’s a wonderfully sinister interpolation of phrases from Winter Wonderland in here which will change the way you receive the spirit of the music.

9. Scrooged by Danny Elfman
Danny Elfman’s take on the classic Bill Murray update on Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol uses a lot of Christmas melodies and is a perfect summation of Elfman’s ‘Yuletide stylings’. My one complaint would be that the four note melody from Ronald Stein’s score to Roger Corman's ‘Lovecraft masquerading as Poe’ movie The Haunted Palace, so famously (and allegedly) stolen by Toto for the score to Dune, also seems to play a prominent role in this score. Still, a great listen and a fun album.

8. A Christmas Carol and A Child is Born by Bernard Herrmann
Double header from Kritzerland of two phenomenal Christmas scores, including songs, written by my all time favourite composer Bernard Herrmann. It’s a limited edition and probably out of print now but well worth grabbing if you can get hold of one.

7. Gremlins by Jerry Goldsmith
The late great Jerry Goldsmith’s famous score to Joe Dante’s ‘almost horror’ movie is a bit of a masterpiece. Again, the sequel to this was also set during Christmas but that score can’t hold a candle to this one. Asides from the Gremlins and Gizmo themes, of course, there’s some great seasonal tunes encoded into the DNA of this thing and it’s always going to be on my stereo throughout the season. The FSM expanded version of this score is a must-have.

6. Krampus by Douglas Pipes
What an incredible score to a newish Christmas movie. There’s some great, traditional tunes from the Xmas genre which are used to counterpoint and metamorphosise a horror film, and score, which is like a much grimmer version of Gremlins in tone. It’s kind of lazy to say that Pipes score is reminiscent of Elfman at his most Christmassy but he is and I honestly think he out Elfman’s Elfman in some passages. A grim and unsettling but ultimately fun and addictive listen.

5. It’s A Wonderful Life by Dimitri Tiomkin
Kritzerland finally gave us a limited edition of the music from this much loved, and rightly so, Christmas movie... blowing away all the pseudo compilation imitations on the market. It’s a great job they do on this score, considering the age of the master tapes... just put it on and find yourself transported back in time to a black and white Bedford Falls. How cool is it that we finally have this music released?

4. Doctor Who: The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe by Murray Gold
This Christmas special set in the 1940s is easily the most moving and emotional episode of Doctor Who ever and Gold’s music, presented by Silva Screen as a double header with music from the Christmas special The Snowmen, is absolutely heart rending. It doesn’t take many minutes of listening to this music before I’m a blubbery mess, crying into a handkerchief.

3. Star Wars Christmas Album - Christmas In The Stars
How can you not love an album of very strange songs sung by See Threepio, R2D2 and their alien friends to celebrate Christmas in a galaxy far, far away. It even has a young Bon Jovi on at least one track. Despite its absolutely infuriating lack of continuity with the rest of the Star Wars canon, something which my mind can’t even conceive, especially since the Christian faith surely wouldn’t exist in a universe with Jedi in it, it’s hard not to repeatedly play an album which has such cool songs as “What do you get a Wookie for Christmas when he already has a comb?” on it. I’m so glad this album is back in print and on CD.

2. A Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince Guaraldi
Jazz legend Vince Guaraldi’s amazing Christmassy score to the very first Charlie Brown animated special is absolutely spellbinding and something I will always come back to every Christmas. His slightly downbeat version of O Tannenbaum is the most powerful performance of that particular seasonal standard and this is also the first Charlie Brown score to feature the less Christmassy but much loved and popular Linus And Lucy theme. This is an album everybody should have on in the background on the approach to Christmas.

1. Christmas With The Chipmunks by David Seville
There is simply never going to be a better Christmas album than this outstanding volume of Christmas with The Chipmunks (now known, on Amazon, as Christmas With The Chipmunks Volume 2, for some reason). I’ve been listening to this every Christmas since I was born in 1968, originally on the first pressing vinyl and then, from about the mid 1990s, on a CD my friend in America sent me one year. It’s absolutely unbeatable and make sure it’s this version of the album you get because it has the most moving, “there’s something in my eye” rendition by Seville of Silver Bells that you’re ever likely to hear.



Bonus Beats - more unmissable single tracks

9. The Christmas Wine by John Barrry from The Lion In Winter
A very traditional arrangement which is almost hymn like in its rendition but it’s a beautiful side of John Barry from his prime which a lot of listeners may not be familar with. I’ve never seen the film but this is a cool album and this is a great track.

8. A Christmas Song by John Barry from The Last Valley
Another lovely score from a Barry scored movie I’ve never seen... this one sung in a language I don’t even understand (perhaps Latin?). This is another, peaceful hymn and is a good companion piece for my previous pick.

7. December Will Be Magic Again by Kate Bush
The ultimate queen of modern popular music brought this song out very early in her career... which is cool because it’s become a Christmas standard and transports me straight back to the 1970s... even if I did only discover her music from the mid 1980s. This is classic, early Bush and should be played at least once at every Christmas party to make said party more bearable.

6. Birth Of A Penguin by Danny Elfman
Absolutely astonishing, jingly, snowy, Christmassy track which serves as a prologue (and pre-credits sequence) to Tim Burton’s Christmas set, second Batman movie. This fun track tells of two parents throwing away their newborn where he floats into the sewers in a basket before being raised by penguins. This leads into a dynamic version of the Batman theme and it’s a great album to get because it also features the gem of a musical piece that is used to accompany the ‘transformation’ of Selina Kyle into The Catwoman. The expanded La La Land edition is definitely the way to go here because the original release of the score was always sounding muddy and muted... the two La La Land editions don’t.

5. Dragnet Parts 1 and 2 by Stan Freberg
This double header of a Christmas sketch parody of the original Dragnet TV show by Stan Freberg trumps some of his other Christmas themed stuff and also features Miklos Rozsa’s four note theme from The Killers (Rozsa successfully sued the makers of the original Dragnet for nicking this part of his score). It’s a bit of a masterpiece and what more can one say about the inimitable Freberg other than... most people call them Green Onions but really they’re called scallions.

4. 7 O'clock News/ Silent Night by Simon and Garfunkel
The most chilling and depressing version of Silent Night you’re ever likely to find, from Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album. This cross-fades some horrendously chilling news stories such as a serial killer strangling and stabing student nurses and President Nixon’s response to the anti-Vietnam war protests against the classic hymn, with the grimness of the news broadcast getting louder and louder until the carol is almost fighting to be heard underneath. Jaw dropping stuff and a timely reminder that not everyone is having a great Christmas.

3. Troika from Lieutenant Kijé by Prokofiev
I first became aware of Prokofiev’s Troika as a pre-teen when it was used as the opening title music from Woody Allen’s masterpiece Love And Death. Since then, of course, I've noticed it’s also one of those “Christmas tunes to go to” when it comes to sampling a bit of the main melody and sticking it into your Christmas song. The original composition and orchestration is, however, a beautiful piece which will always conjure up the sound of sleigh bells in my mind.

2. Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? by John Barry from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
I’ve never understood why more people don’t realise this but the John Barry song Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service isn’t just one of the greatest Christmas songs ever recorded, it’s also, without doubt, the greatest James Bond song ever released. Sure, Goldfinger, From Russia With Love and You Only Live Twice are great songs... but they pale in comparison with this masterpiece, sung here by Nina of Nina and Frederick fame (they did a cool version of Little Boxes too). On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is easily the greatest Bond movie by a country mile and, though it also has a more famous song sung by Louis Armstrong (of which I’m not a big fan), it also has the coolest Bond song ever... this one.

1. I Wanna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek by The Go Gos.
Oh wow. you can’t go wrong with this wonderful piece by the GoGo’s. You will hear all the love for a Dalek that you can get in this song, and even hear one join in on occasion, asking for Mince Pies and stuff. It’s a silly song but most Christmas songs are and this is one of the silliest... therefore the greatest and most entertaining Christmas song ever recorded. Why there aren’t a gazillion cover versions of this I’ll never know but, this one is just perfect so you can just play it on repeat for about 15 times before moving onto Christmas With The Chipmunks... a powerful combination, for sure.

The IPCRESS File

Palmer, Sans Cheese

The IPCRESS File
1965 UK 
Directed by Sidney J. Furie
Network/Rank 
UK BluRay Zone B

When this well loved and hugely popular British spy film was released into cinemas back in 1965, one of the criticisms of it was that it was “over directed”... whatever that means.

I don’t think it’s over directed.

I think it’s... not only one of the greatest pieces of technically brilliant film making ever committed to celluloid, able to get away with so many innovative things within its modest running time... it also does all these amazing things without ever once losing the fiery, burning, emotive heart at its centre. You do care for and relate to the various characters as you meet them throughout the course of the film... and that’s just the icing on the cake.

Based on the first of Len Deighton’s four novels about a nameless (in the books) spy - The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water, Funeral In Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain (the last two were also made into sequels to this film) - it was pretty much a conscious decision that the central spy role, called Harry Palmer in the films, a role which pretty much shot Michael Caine to international stardom, would be an antidote to the kind of 'secret agent' stereotypes running in the wake of the hugely successful James Bond films produced, at that time, by Saltzman and Broccoli. Indeed, Harry Saltzman also produced this movie, although he hated the director, which is a shame because Furie is a veritable magician of the silver screen when it comes to what he did with this movie.

I’ve been watching this series of films for over three decades by now and my friend bought me the new Blu Ray edition from the Network label for Christmas. It’s an absolutely brilliant print/transfer and, watching it once more, I am falling in love with the movie all over again as the spellbinding technical innovation, combined with the beautifully written, sharply witty script and the unbelievably cool musical score from John Barry... all work their magic.

The film starts off with almost a double pre-credits sequence, first starting with the kidnapping of a scientist and the death of a British Secret Service agent before introducing us to Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer character waking up in bed to his alarm clock. The credits start running as he goes about his business making coffee, dressing and various other things in a dull routine, with the finding of a misplaced gun in bed to juxtapose the concept that the life of a secret agent is often as humdrum as any other job.

However, even getting to the point where the credits start running over this sequence, the visual and audio artistry already comprises a brilliant few minutes of film, full of beautiful ideas. For instance, as the scientist Radcliffe and his bodyguard, an unnamed secret agent, are walking down Marylebone Station, Furie and his editor Peter Hunt (who edited the early James Bond films and who would later go on to direct the greatest Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service - reviewed here) use shots of the two of them walking towards the camera. The camera then cuts (on movement, which is an innovation Hunt first brought into play in Dr. No - reviewed here) away to something else before cutting back on the same scene at a slightly different angle and with the figures closer to the camera, still moving towards us. This is pretty amazing because I reckon the first time you see this movie, you don’t even notice Furie doing little dynamic things like this. But this is not the only thing in just this opening sequence...

As the agent discovers the villain’s henchman and the disappearance of Radcliffe, we cut away outside to the disturbing sound of a train whistle heralding death... we then pan over to where the agent’s corpse has been left in a mail trolley. As the camera cuts to a closer shot of the dead agent, with his eyes almost filling the screen in a face tipped on its side, we hear a very cool and extended, mounting John Barry musical sting... followed by the sound of an alarm clock and the replacement of the dead agent’s eye with Harry Palmer’s eye, which we then slowly pan back from to see him at the same kind of angle.

And then... on top of all that... we have a point of view shot from Harry Palmer’s perspective as we look around his apartment and can’t see very much at all... why is it all a blur and out of focus? Because Furie is using this technique as a way of, almost subconsciously, introducing the concept of Harry Palmer’s (soon to be Michael Caine’s) trademark glasses. He puts his glasses on and then the point of view shot of Harry’s apartment is repeated... this time in clear focus. We then see Harry himself from the other side of the room as he gets out of bed and opens the curtains, with the alarm clock in foreground, which has been continuing on the soundtrack all this time. Then he comes towards the screen to hit the alarm clock off and as it stops... that’s when John Barry’s opening title music suddenly thunders in... absolutely gobsmacking stuff and we’re only a few minutes into the film.

And it doesn’t stop there... the whole film is loaded with absolutely clever stuff... including a repeat of the point of view/blurred focus shot much later on, but this time used in reverse as Harry cleans his glasses at a lecture, to highlight the fact that he is still being tailed by the Americans.

Another thing the director does, and somehow makes work brilliantly, occurs when Palmer first goes to see his boss, Colonel Ross (played brilliantly by Guy Doleman).

The scene starts out with Ross looking out of his office windows, feeding the pigeons, and not looking at Palmer, in order to establish his status within the conversation. We see some of the action of this sequence from the other side of the windows which Furie, brilliantly, uses to split portions of the screen so that when Palmer comes in on the other side of the room, he can interact with Ross and both are in the same shot at massively different sizes and each highlighted by different sets of rectangles... marvellous stuff. The scene goes on as Ross makes Palmer go back to shut the door and keep him waiting as much as possible... never once asking him to sit down. When the two characters talk, they are sometimes seen in reverse of each other on opposite parts of the screen as a small head, for example, on bottom left while the entire rest of the screen is black from being masked by the other character’s body. As the characters move about the room, they are seen talking from individual shots in contrasting sizes and angles but, because they are always speaking and looking towards the opposite side of the screen, the eye lines somehow still manage to match between shots and, with Hunt’s deft editing, it all works seamlessly as a conversation. Seriously, you may not notice it the first time around but, try watching it with the sound turned off on just a visual level (something I probably ought to do with it sometime) and you will probably fall off your seat with what the director is getting away with here. It’s just perfect.

He’s also setting the scene for some continuity later in the film - when Ross is seen at one point he is feeding ducks from the side of a bridge which is a nice character echo of him feeding the pigeons earlier in his office. More relevantly, when Ross takes Palmer over to meet his new boss “Dalby” (played so well by Nigel Greene), Dalby plays exactly the same 'office politics' games with Palmer, to the extent that some of the dialogue and shots are pretty much the same, to both show what’s going on and also to offer, perhaps, a slight criticism of the silly suits in power and their stupid games which, frankly, Palmer obviously has no respect or love of.

And later, when Furie shows another of a few meetings between Ross and Dalby, when Ross goes into Dalby’s office, he does so aggressively, taking the upper hand, not playing any of the same games and offering up one of the ultimate insults in office politics... invading the other man’s desk space with his hat, briefcase and umbrella. That probably doesn’t mean a lot to people in some countries and cultures, and perhaps not to the younger generation here in the UK, I shouldn’t wonder, but certainly British people of a certain generation (and definitely back then) will know what all those shenanigans are about.

There’s a lot in the details and focus of the movie and its probably quite rightly been said somewhere along the line, and certainly by me, that the film is fresh and believable because it takes the fantastic plots and chooses to highlight the little details of the hum drum and ‘everyman’ in a secret agent’s life... like always signing forms for a piece of equipment such as a firearm or a car... and making sure the report forms are filled in for each different action in an investigation. Stuff like that. However, even though we are looking at actors playing characters in a very believable and naturalistic manner... you can’t ignore the brilliance and dynamism of the way the shots and sounds... and even some of the dialogue... is put together.

More visual wonders would include things like highlighting an American agent who is tailing Palmer by giving him an even more ridiculous pair of glasses than the main lead (I had a pair of glasses like Palmer's for years, specifically because of this film, and haven’t really strayed too far from the style ever since) and someone has the bright idea of adding a white piece of tape down the middle of the bridge to suggest that they’ve been broken at sometime. However, what that trick with the piece of tape is really about is to make absolutely sure the audience establishes in their mind what the character in question is wearing on his face. Why? Because later, when Palmer accidentally shoots the American agent dead, Furie can shoot the aftermath in a much more creative manner. Once the agent is dead, we don’t see his face again, we see just his distinctive glasses lying on the floor to let us know who Palmer has really shot. This is followed by an absolute humdinger of a shot which is a shot from the ground, looking up through the lenses of those same glasses, to catch the reactions of Dalby and Palmer as they come into focus through the glasses. I’ll say it again... this stuff is absolutely amazing.

All the way through the film, Furie is doing stuff like this shot after visually rich shot. He uses Dutch angles constantly, uses surface colours and textures to split up frames within frames and a load of other clever things while, unbelievably, the footage all cuts together amazingly well and isn’t jarring and certainly never works against the naturalistic tone of the acting. And there’s more...

A shot down through a light fitting on the ceiling of Palmer’s apartment reveals, when the light is turned on, another dead American agent’s body. A fight between Grantby’s henchman and Palmer is filmed from a distance and from inside a classic, red British telephone box, the camera looking through the windows and into the distance as the fight between the protagonist and antagonist is split by the red verticals and horizontals of the booth. This is a far cry from some of the stuff which you see in, say, the average James Bond movie.

Also a far cry from James Bond is the prelude to an unseen sex scene between Jean, Ross’s agent working undercover in Dalby’s team and played by the wonderful Sue Lloyd, and Harry Palmer. It’s all brilliantly done by razor sharp dialogue and body language. After a meal that Harry Palmer has cooked for them, Sue Lloyd asks Caine “Do you always wear your glasses?” To which Caine replies, “Yes, except in bed.” With that, Sue Lloyd slowly removes Caines glasses and the suggestion of what’s about to happen, off camera, is pretty implicit and also very effective. This is pretty good stuff.

One thing I did catch on the dialogue on this viewing, though, was in a scene where Palmer is telling Dalby about another American agent. The sound looping is quite bad in that the words “American agent” suddenly don’t lip synch in on that portion of the sentence. I reckon the dialogue, recorded wild sound on the day, was replaced with a slightly different line, possibly due to some kind of censorship issue, and was fixed later on in the dub. Of course, I doubt if I’ll ever know the truth or not of that guess... but that’s my belief at any rate.

One more important thing to talk about here before I’m done with this review though and that is, of course, John Barry’s tremendous score. He’d already made a huge hit with the sound of spy music with the Bond films, when he reorchestrated Monty Norman’s original Bond theme (subsequently used all over Dr. No in places it wasn’t even rearranged for) and had gone on to build on that success with From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and, from the same year as The IPCRESS File, Thunderball. For this film he uses some of the same musical language but he makes it colder, edgier and also uses a cymbalom, which is similar in some respects to the zither played by Anton Karas in the score which inspired Barry for this one, The Third Man. What we get with The IPCRESS File, of course, is another heavily influential kind of more serious, cold war “spy sound” which would be copied stylistically time and time again.

Barry would build on this himself the following year when he scored the film adaptation of Adam Hall’s (Elleston Trevor’s pen name) novel The Berlin Memorandum. The first of the Quiller novels, this one would soon be retitled after the film adaptation and forever be known, in successive printings, as The Quiller Memorandum (review of this movie in a new Blu Ray transfer, coming soon to this blog). Both IPCRESS and Quiller have wonderful music and represent Barry at the absolute best of his flip side to Bond scoring... truly memorable (and immensely hummable) music.

And that’s about it for this review, I think. I’ve never had the opportunity to take any kind of film studies class in my life (hey, when I was a kid, if you wanted to be 'creative' you had the options of Woodwork, Metalwork or Art and that was it) but I would hope that tutors instructing future, inspired students these days make a point of putting The IPCRESS File on their syllabus. There is so much innovation and inventiveness in pretty much every minute of footage that a proper study of it would surely arm people with an inspired approach to the syntax of the motion picture. But the heck with that... it’s also one of the most enjoyable spy films of the mid-1960s and is an absolute classic that anyone worth their salt, who appreciates movies, will want to look at and enjoy. It deserves it’s status as one of the great British movies... which I assume it surely has... and people should not forget or underestimate this great film. If you’ve never seen it, the new Blu Ray transfer from Network is right up your street, loaded with the same extras as the old Anchor Bay US DVD and with a whole heap of other extras on top of that. Just buy it... you surely won’t regret it.

The Living Daylights

Dalton Towers

The Living Daylights 
1987 UK 
Directed by John Glenn
EON Blu Ray Region A/B/C

Okay, so after losing interest in the Bond movies after Octopussy and not actually bothering to see A View To A Kill at the cinema when it came out, I got interested again when a newspaper proclaimed that Roger Moore would not be in the next film and that the producers were looking around for a new Bond. It was all the guys at school were talking about (asides from whatever video nasty they’d seen that week). I piped up and said that it would be great if they could ever think to get the guy from Remington Steel in as James Bond. He’d be perfect for the part. This comment was met by scorn and derision from most of my peers, hardly any of whom had been watching the show or even knew who Pierce Brosnan was. And why would a little TV actor ever be considered to play a character who was, at the very least, the English equivalent of a full blown super-hero.

I would have been a lot more confident of my suggestion, of course, if I’d known that one day, Brosnan would indeed go on to play the role I thought he was perfect for. Moreover, I would have been extremely surprised, to say the least, if I’d known that the producers were indeed considering him to play Bond in The Living Daylights and had more or less offered him the role. Only the contract of the Remington Steele TV show, expiring just one day too late, prevented Brosnan from playing the role back in 1987, it turns out.

Anyway, as it happens, the press finally announced who would play Bond and it was certainly a surprise. At first I couldn’t place the actor but then I remembered he was Prince Barin. Yeah, that’s right. Timothy Dalton, the guy who had fought Sam J. Jones on the spikey-tippy thing of death in the 1980 version of Flash Gordon would be Bond.

So this was kind of interesting and I took confidence in the fact that Roger Moore wouldn’t be clogging up the next Bond picture and decided I’d go and see this one. I remember seeing it in a cinema in Llandudno on my Summer holidays when it came out, if memory serves. It had an interval with an organ solo in the middle. They still did that in Wales back in the 1980s.

And you know what? The Living Daylights was awesome.

It opens with a quite spectacular action sequence which, for my money, is one of the best pre-credits sequences in Bond history. And no small part of that is due to John Barry’s kick ass scoring, it has to be said. This was Barry’s last film for the franchise which had made him a household name, due to various sticking points about his control over the title songs and the deals behind them, but he didn’t know that at the time and, frankly, the score is way ahead of the stuff he’d been doing recently on the Moore films.

The score aside, though, Timothy Dalton is absolutely wonderful as James Bond.

Now I don’t have a lot of love for his second and final outing as Bond in License To Kill (bleah) but even in that film, he does the role of Bond perfectly (even if the second movie is not much cop). Maybe not straight from the book (none of the best Bonds are) but certainly he upholds the traditional values kick started by Sean Connery and co in Dr. No and it has to be said, he is one of the all-time great Bonds. And this is his all time great Bond movie. The always solid and reliable John Glenn outdoes himself here, producing a film which seems cut from a slightly different cloth to his previous outings. It’s his high point for the series as far as I’m concerned and the pacing and rawness of his framing and editing coupled with the humourous dialogue and near perfect script make for a beautiful Bond film which I’d gladly include in my top 5 Bond movies if I ever had to make a list.

The writing does actually take a few little moments from Fleming’s original short stories from this collection too and, though the script was originally written for Roger Moore and certain quips and gags made it through to the draft used for the final product, Dalton’s delivery is much more acceptable and rugged. He makes the part his own very quickly and you never once stop believing in him in the role. I hate to gush about an actor so much, especially not one who I’ve not seen in that many movies, but Dalton acts his socks off in his two Bond films and really nails the part. It’s a brilliant performance and one that bears many repeat viewings.

Of course, with all this newness to the role, including a new Miss Moneypenny, there’s a lot of the familiar brought back in to compensate. So Barry’s score once again ushers the new Bond in and you also have Desmond Llewellyn’s Q, Robert Brown’s M and, sadly (but perhaps this character did overstay his welcome just a little), Walter Gottel’s last appearance as running character General Gogol.

But none of this detracts or adds to the fact that you have an absolutely brilliant and entertaining movie with a bunch of supporting actors and actresses like Maryam d'Abo, Jeroen Krabbé, Joe Don Baker, John Rhys-Davies and Art Malik... all doing an incredibly good job and pulling together to make this one of the best of the post-Lazenby Bond films. Even a throwaway character used to build confidence in the Bond personae, called Saunders and played by Thomas Wheatley, is given a certain depth to what is actually a very small role. It all works so well and you believe that Bond is fairly angry by this character’s death... enough that you know that handy licence to kill he has will not be waiting too long before getting some serious usage.

The gadgets are back too but they aren’t too overused and Bond’s new Aston Martin is equipped with rockets and such like to help him on his mission. The best addition is an update to the old Goldfinger tyre-slasher gag, but with laser cutters instead. A nice little homage in a film which itself was marking 25 years of Bond on screen.

And, as I said near the start, you have John Barry’s absolutely brilliant score building and releasing tension throughout, including some electronic enhancements which I think is the first time he got back into major orchestrations for synthesisers again on a Bond film since his score for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It’s the one part of the score that tends to date the music a little bit but it certainly doesn’t stop it being effective. And since the plot of this film involves a Bond girl who is a cello player, you even get to see Barry in the actual film himself, conducting her in a symphonic concert at the end of the movie. This is all good stuff and adds value to subsequent rewatches.

Not much more to say about this one, to be honest. If you want a jumping on point for Bond, this would easily be one of my top five picks (but still way behind On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). Certainly the director and producers got all the ingredients just right on this one... not once overcooked or presented too raw. A great 007 meal which deserved a much better dessert than what it got in the next film.

EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice  

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun  

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill 

The LIving Daylights 

Licence To Kill  

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough  

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace

Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E

A View To A Kill

Keeping Up With The Jones

A View To A Kill 
1985 UK/USA 
Directed by John Glenn
EON Blu Ray Region A/B/C

After the dire spectacle of the previous EON film Octopussy, I had definitely had enough of the Bond franchise. A View To A Kill was released at cinemas when I was 17 years of age and, frankly, I wasn’t going to sit through another film which had the potential to be as bad as that last one. I’d had way too much Moore in the role of a “softened” James Bond anyway. So A View To A Kill is, as far as I can tell, the only Bond movie I’ve still not seen screened at a cinema (although, to be fair, when I did catch it years later, I did at least see it projected as film onto a screen, at a film club).

When I did eventually catch it, probably a couple of years after the next movie in the franchise, I actually didn’t think it was all that bad, for a Roger Moore film and even decided that I liked it almost as much as Live And Let Die at some point. I think, looking back at that initial screening now, I was probably responding to two main things about it almost exclusively... one being that, once you get the “submarine shag pad disguised as floating ice” thing out of the way, along with the truly dreadful opening titles design that followed it, you have a film which is not reliant on any real gadgetry and, the second thing being a script where the detective work, while still just following link by link, is a little less infantile and reliant on the “bad guy” tipping his hand than a few of the previous Moore movies in the series. So I responded quite well.

However, time has not been kind to the movie and looking at it again, I find that it is actually, in fact, quite dire in places and, although director John Glen is as solid and reliable as he always is, I think it’s overall not that much better than the likes of stuff like the dreaded Octopussy. This was also Lois Maxwell’s last film in the Moneypenny role so that’s a bit of a shame. It’s nice, though, that she got out of the office for a bit and even indulged in a mini-tribute to My Fair Lady in an infamous Eliza Doolittle quote when she’s at the racetrack (and no, before you ask, I’m not sure if that line is in Shaw’s original Pygmalion... you tell me).

There’s some nice stuff thrown into the mix in this film but it all seems so tempered with the bad stuff that it comes out as a bit of a non-entity as a Bond entry, to be honest.

You have Christopher Walken really going for it as the main villain, Max Zorin, and he’s almost over the top in his enthusiasm with this larger than life Bond villain. Never mind listening to the dialogue he is asked to deliver (it’s really quite bad in some sequences) and look at the way he uses his body language and the inflection of his words to play what is essentially a “test tube psychopath”... it’s pretty interesting. He really seems to get into it with his plot which, quite frankly, is a little similar to Goldfinger, in concept if not execution. But he’s very watchable and one wishes he had more scenes in the film.

Grace Jones, also, adds an interesting texture to the movie... possibly due to the fact that Moore, among others, allegedly couldn’t get on with her very well. Her villainess is interesting and they play the “Jaws” card from Moonraker with her because, at the end, she sacrifices herself to foil her former lover Zorin’s plan... admittedly due to the fact that he’s double crossed her more than any real change of heart but, since she does deliberately blow herself up, the act can seem to be at least a little like an act of redemption.

Of note, also, is another appearance by running character General Gogol, who appears to be almost shoehorned into the plot this time by being Zorin’s former boss at the KGB. And in the role of Jenny Flex, we have an early appearance by Alison Doody, predating her Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade “Jones-girl” role by four years. The main Bond girl of the piece is Tanya Roberts, who does a more than serviceable job with her role (people may remember her from The Beastmaster and Sheena) but the real find in terms of on-screen Bond girl sexiness is a turn from Fiona Fullerton, all grown up now from the role people might remember her from in the 1972, John Barry scored movie of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. She is seriously steamy in her brief appearance in this film and makes for some good eye candy, if you are that way inclined.

There’s also some really strange stuff happening here. Patrick McNee has a turn in the movie but comes across more as irritating in this than anything else... a far cry from his more famous John Steed personae which, given the usual campy writing associated with the Moore era of Bond films, might have been a better role for the producers to cross over into this film. Steed helping out Bond in a few scenes would have been much more interesting.

There’s also a very bizarre scene where Bond tells a police officer he’s James Bond and the police officer replies that, if he’s James Bond, then the police officer is Dick Tracy.

What the @&$*£!? Really? Let me get this straight in my head. He’s responding to Bond’s identity like Bond is either a) a fictional character or b) so famously well known that he’d be useless as a spy to any government. What kind of metatextual mind buggery is this? It makes no sense unless the director wants to play some Godardian mind game in order to get an odd joke in. I think I’ll just leave that where it lies.

John Barry’s score is, of course, one of the highlights of A View To A Kill. Quite apart from having a title song which is actually pretty energetic and addictive, his score is classic Bond although, to be fair, the action music is very repetitive in this one. I tend to see the main action theme as an homage to his work in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service because it kinda reiterates, although not as blatantly, that same descending base line and we first hear it while Bond is on a snowbound, pre-titles mission.

At the film’s close, the card “James Bond will return” comes up, with no hint at what the title will be. This is the first of many times (every Bond film since) where this phrase doesn’t set up the next title. I guess the film’s producers had had enough of getting the title of the next film wrong. It had happened twice in the sixties movies and at the end of Octopussy, they had put the full title of the short story from which this film takes it’s title (and pretty much nothing else from the pages)... From A View To A Kill. So a smart but admittedly disappointing first here. Grace Jones and Christopher Walken do say half of the original title each to make up a mention in the film (reportedly changed to “...from a view”... “to Tokyo” on some Asian prints of the film... which makes absolutely no sense given they’re flying over San Francisco at the time) but, again, this comes across as really lame, it has to be said, and that’s another line of dialogue I wish wasn’t in the film. You can almost see Walken cringe in embarrassment.

All in all... this isn’t a terrible Roger Moore as James Bond film... it just isn’t particularly good either, it has to be said. Lovers of Moore’s Bond probably won’t have a hard time with it (although Moore apparently doesn’t think much of this one at all) and if you’re not that fussed about how your action is delivered, you’ve certainly got a director who can at least deliver it well and keep the pace moving. Not as good as Moore’s Live And Let Die or For Your Eyes Only, though. Duly warned.

EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice  

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun  

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill 

The LIving Daylights 

Licence To Kill  

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough  

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace

Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E

Octopussy

Pussy And Vijay

Octopussy
1983 UK/USA
Directed by John Glen
EON Blu Ray Region A/B/C

I don’t even know how to start on this one... so I guess I’ll just start off with a reminder that 1983 was the time we had two James Bond movies at the cinema in the same year. But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself here.

Okay, so I was 15 and, four days before Octopussy came out in the UK, my country saw the release of what was probably the most anticipated movie sequel since the days of the cliff hangers. Star Wars Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi is the film that was on everybody’s minds at this point and so, maybe this contributed to my general disappointment with that year’s Bond movie at the time... but I can hardly use the same excuse when, on subsequent viewings, my verdict of the movie really hasn’t changed all that much.

And it’s not like there wasn’t enough hype and publicity surrounding the film either. I even remember working my way through my Shredded Wheat so I could finish the box off and move onto the next one and get another in their series of Octopussy stickers. Oh yes, I remember them well... those stickers. James Bond dressed as a clown... was this meant to be a joke? James Bond’s head peeking out of a one man submarine disguised to look like a crocodile. Well that looks silly. And, yes, it’s in the movie too... and what do you know? It is silly. Granted, Sean Connery swum into a shot disguised as a duck once in Goldfinger, but that was a quick, cheap gimmick... a fake crocodile with a grown man inside it is... well it’s campy and rubbish and that’s just exactly what Octopussy was/is. Campy rubbish of the worst kind... because it’s campy inappropriate rubbish.

I remember coming out the cinema with my mum and she’d quite liked it and I was thinking that maybe something was wrong with me. That wasn’t a Bond movie we just watched, it was a travesty. When the rival Bond production came out at the end of the year, the Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again starring Sean Connery as Bond, well it was obvious that the Connery flick had much more edge and ‘entertainment weight’ to it than the EON produced flick. I was sick to death of Moore in the role and completely fed up with the direction that the films were heading in... so as a consequence, I never even bothered to go to the cinema to see A View To A Kill when it finally came out. No more Moore for me, I’d decided... purely on the lousiness of this film.

Again, I’ve nothing against director John Glen. He got the best he could out of an aging Bond and the raw materials he had to work with... it just all falls rather flat for me. I remember at the time thinking that Octopussy was the worst James Bond movie to ever be released into cinemas and it wasn’t until decades later when two equally bad Bond films hit our screens, Die Another Day and Quantum Of Solace, that I was able to make good on my new comparison/insult of... “all in all I’d rather be watching Octopussy”. Even the much lamentable License To Kill has more edge to it than Octopussy.

So, what is there of note in this movie? Well, it sees Maude Adams returning to the franchise in the title role after playing Scaramanga’s girlfriend in The Man With The Golden Gun. It also had a joyful but possibly somewhat embarrassing performance by professional tennis player Vijay Amitraj playing... well he’s playing himself, using professional tennis playing as his cover for being in the secret service. Which is all well and good and certainly is no different from, say, Peter Falk playing himself who was also actually an angel who returned to Earth from heaven and became an actor called Peter Falk in Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire and Faraway, So Close! However, the fact that the Vijay character in this film is bloodlessly killed with a highly impractical ‘spinning buzzsaw yo-yo’ but, in fact, didn’t get killed in real life, was a source of profound puzzlement to me at the time. Nowadays I can just shake it off as needless twaddle in a film which is just too awful to worry or care about... but at the time I found that concept kinda mind bending.

So what else? Well the recurring character of General Gogol has a much more active role in this movie... as does Desmond Llewellyn’s Q, who takes more of an integral part in Bond’s on screen shenanigans here than he does in most of the films. And we also have respected actor Steven Berkoff playing a thuggish Russian military villain, hamming it up good and proper and once again proving that, for a serious thespian, he’ll do anything for money (hopefully, he does this in the same spirit that John Cassavetes used to... use the process of acting in bobbins to fund his own artistic projects).

None of these things really make the movie worth actually watching, however.

The one redeeming element, I think, that Octopussy does have going for it is, despite an absolutely awful “all time low” of a title song, is John Barry’s amazing score. How he could get inspired enough by this movie to turn in what is almost an old school young-Barry Bond score is beyond me but this one certainly goes in the right direction and, as a stand alone listen away from the context of the movie, it’s really not a bad score. Such a shame it’s just attached to such a yawn fest of a movie. This is one of the worst three films in Bond history, as far as I’m concerned. Even Skyfall was better than Octopussy. 

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one. Not James Bond’s finest hour, I have to say.

EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice  

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun  

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill 

The LIving Daylights 

Licence To Kill  

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough  

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace

Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E