1981 Retro: Revisiting the Women of "For Your Eyes Only"

Team Experience is revisiting 1981 this week inbetween your regular programming...

by Deborah Lipp

For Your Eyes Only  (1981) is fairly well-loved among Bond fans; in looking at the 24 official movies plus Never Say Never Again, it ranks a bit above middle-of-the-pack. I slice my data on a few different metrics to get an accurate picture (but that’s a story for another day). The 12th Bond film is often thought of as Roger Moore’s best outing (I prefer The Spy Who Loved Me) and it's certainly his most serious.

My love for James Bond, and Bond movies, is unwavering, but each time I revisit them, I see them with new eyes. I’ve seen 1981’s For Your Eyes Only many times, but watching it in 2020 is necessarily different from watching it at any other times. After all, we always bring ourselves to our movie-going...

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Sir Roger Moore (1927-2017)

By Deborah Lipp

Sir Roger Moore has passed away at the age of 89. Known first for the television show The Saint, he achieved world renown as James Bond, playing the role officially more than any other actor. (Moore and Sean Connery each made seven Bond films, but one of Connery’s, Never Say Never Again, is not part of the official franchise.) 

When Roger Moore arrived in Phuket, Thailand to film The Man With the Golden Gun, it was not a resort. The city was thrilled to have a film crew working there, and pulled out the stops, giving them the best luxury housing that could be found in the area – there was no hotel...

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James Bond's Women, Frozen in Time?

TFE welcomes back its friend and resident 007 expert Deborah with a statistical investigation brought on that recent "Spectre" press conference. If you love Bond Girls or Bellucci, and who doesn't?, read on - Editor

With the announcement earlier this month that Monica Bellucci had been cast in the forthcoming Bond film, Spectre, the media has recently been replete with headlines like “James Bond finally falls for a woman his own age” It was the oft-repeated “finally” that put me in an analytic mood. Is this really the first time (“finally”) that Bond has been with a woman his own age? How often has there been a really large age disparity?

I decided to analyze each movie so I could derive some statistics. James Bond is almost always with two or more women per film, but we can generally identify the “main” and “secondary” woman. I decided, for the sake of my own sanity, to disregard however many other women there might be, with the following exceptions: You Only Live Twice has three women of almost equal importance. Meanwhile, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, and The Living Daylights give us only one important woman each. Sure, Bond made love to other women in each film, but they had little screen time and were strictly fly-by-night. Let’s not trouble ourselves.

First question first...

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007 Favorite 007 Films

Deborah Lipp, the Ultimate James Bond Fan, is listing 007 of her favorite things as we count down to Skyfall

I spent a couple of years compiling lists made by James Bond fans; primarily favorite movies, least-favorites, and  ranked lists of the whole series. The fun thing to discover is, when it comes to James Bond, everyone's an outlier. Every single movie appeared on someone's favorites and someone's least-favorites. Plus, everyone's list had a unique feature, an eyebrow-raiser. I bet if we did a poll here -- should we do a poll here? -- the same thing would happen.

So, eyebrow-raiser and all, here's my top 007 Bond films...

001 From Russia With Love (1963)
To me, the second Bond movie is the greatest of them all. It's the perfect blend of Bond ingredients: Action, adventure, exotic locations, sex, mystery, espionage, music, humor, visual impact, and an outstanding cast. Beyond Sean Connery and the other regulars (including the introduction of Desmond Llewellyn into the series), there's Robert Shaw, Lotte Lenya, and Pedro  Armendáriz in his final role.  Eunice Gayson returns from Dr. No: a rare recurring character role. Plus, this is the movie that introduces Blofeld as a hand petting a white cat. Underground catacombs in Istanbul! Gypsy mud wrestling! Daniela Bianchi wearing nothing but a ribbon around her neck! All that and a North by Northwest homage too. It's perfect.

002 Goldeneye (1995)
Restart the series after a six year hiatus, during which the audience went from anticipatory to disinterested. Introduce a new Bond to a new generation. Make Bond modern in a post-Cold War era without throwing away tradition: Goldeneye succeeds on every level. Hey, this is the movie that introduced Judi Dench as M, and wasn't *that* a great idea? The cast is incredible—in addition to being Pierce Brosnan's first outing, we have Sean Bean, Samantha Bond, Famke Janssen, Izabella Scorupco, Robbie Coltraine, and Joe Don Baker. The stunts are mind-blowing (the dam jump? Holy wow!), and the deft mixture of action, drama, humor, and globetrotting is out of this world. I'm happy every time I pop this one into the DVD player.

Daniel Craig, Roger Moore, and... Timothy Dalton (?!?) after the jump.

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