Welcome back, Mr. Bond

Leslie and I caught a late-afternoon showing Friday of the new James Bond flick, “Casino Royale”, marking the debut of Daniel Craig as 007. I was delighted to find that with this film the producers not only have given us a great new Bond, they’ve also dispensed with the increasingly outlandish gimmicks of the Pierce Brosnan films (an invisible car??!!) and given the movie a much harder edge.

This is in large part due to the casting of Craig (“Layer Cake”, “Munich”), who manages to pull off a rather neat acting trick: He makes you believe his Bond is a brutal, coldblooded killer at the same time he shows 007 at his most vulnerable in his growing relationship with Vesper Lynd (Eva Green). She’s a treasury agent who’s been sent along to watch over the millions Bond is betting in a high-stakes poker game in which he hopes to take down the villain, Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelson), a banker of terrorists who’s been caught short and is desperate to win.

It’s notable that this is the first Bond movie in 19 years to use one of the titles of Ian Fleming’s Bond stories and the first in decades to actually be based in large part on the original Fleming story. This came about because the film rights to “Casino”, the first Bond story Fleming wrote, were sold before he made his movie deal with Eon Productions, which has been in charge of the official 007 movies since “Dr. No” in 1962. “Casino” originally was done cheaply for American TV and then was made as a bloated 1967 Bond spoof with David Niven, Woody Allen and Orson Welles (notable chiefly for the song “The Look of Love”). It was only when Sony Pictures acquired UA/MGM and the Bond series that the rights to “Casino” became available to Eon.

That came at a propitious time in the history of the Bond series. While the Brosnan films made tons of money, they had become increasingly preposterous (as happened with the Roger Moore films) and their star was getting too old for the role (again, as happened with Moore). It was time for a new Bond and a new approach.

So they’ve taken 007 back to his Fleming roots. The new film opens with a black & white prologue in which we see Bond earn his double-0 (license to kill) status with his second assassination. The story then picks up (in color) with Bond botching a job in Africa and getting in the doghouse with his boss, M (Judi Dench, held over from the Brosnan films), and then setting out to make good.

While the gadgetry that became a 007 trademark and then an albatross has largely been dispensed with (realistic computers, cellphones and PDAs play major parts), many of the traditional elements of Bond movies are present, including foreign locales (such as the Bahamas and Venice), beautiful women (mainly Green and Caterina Murino), and lots of gunplay and explosions and fast cars (in a clever conceit, Bond gets to drive a vintage 1964 Aston Martin DB before moving to the brand-new DBS, the most notable feature of which is an indispensable first-aid kit that includes a defibrillator unit). Q and Moneypenny also have been dispensed with, but Bond’s CIA pal, Felix Leiter, shows up in the umpteenth casting change for that character.

Not only is Craig easily the best Bond since Sean Connery, but Green is the best Bond Babe in ages. Not only is she breathtakingly beautiful, but her character is smart and complex and engages in a lot of witty give-and-take with 007 (into whose arms she DOESN’T automatically melt).

If the early Connery films are your favorite Bond movies and/or you’ve been dismayed by the loud, far-fetched Bondapalooza trend of the Brosnan films, the new “Casino Royale” is for you. Even if you’ve never seen a James Bond movie before, I encourage you to check this one out. It’s not just a first-rate Bond movie, it’s a first-rate movie, period.

BOND HIGHS & LOWS: Whenever I’m asked what I think the best James Bond film is, I answer without hesitation: “From Russia With Love”. To me, it’s the series entry most grounded in reality and is more of a true spy film. The gadgets and special effects had not yet taken over the series. “Dr. No” is a close second, kept out of the top spot by the supervillain-lair-in-a-volcano bit that became such a Bond cliché. And “Goldfinger” is pretty terrific, too, with probably the best Bond villain, though the laser-beam inching toward Bond’s crotch (setting the template for another Bond cliché ridiculed in Mike Meyers’ Austin Powers films) was a bit much. Other Bond films not equal to those three but worthy of mention: “Thunderball” (Connery), “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (a fine film despite George Lazenby’s rather wooden acting, and, hey, Diana Rigg as a Bond Babe!), “The Spy Who Loved Me” (Roger Moore’s best, with Barbara Bach a memorable Bond Babe), “For Your Eyes Only” (which was less gimmicky than most Moore 007 films) and “GoldenEye” (the first Pierce Brosnan film, with Izabella Scorupco a better than average Bond Babe). Worst Bond movie? Easily “A View to a Kill”, with Moore looking more like 007’s grandfather, Tanya Roberts as the all-time worst Bond Babe and Christopher Walken coming off like a bad parody of himself as the villain. Other bad Bonds: Moore’s “Moonraker” and “Octopussy” and Connery’s ill-advised return to the role in “Diamonds Are Forever”. … My pal Mark Gunter brought to my attention the recent release of four boxed sets of the original Bond films in new versions that have been remastered frame by frame, have 5.1 surrroundsound and even more bonus material than earlier DVD releases (the sets devote two discs to each film). The boxes each have an $89.98 list price, but Amazon has them for $29 to $33 less than that. Unfortunately, these remastered versions currently are available only in these crazy-quilt collections (not chronological) and not individually.

WIN A BAR BET: I recently heard a movie critic say that other than “Casino Royale”, the official Bond movie series had used up all the titles from Ian Fleming’s original 007 novels and short stories. Wrong. While the last Fleming title used was for 1987’s “The Living Daylights” (with Timothy Dalton), there remain four Fleming titles never used: “Quantum of Solace”, “Risico”, “The Hildebrand Rarity” and “The Property of a Lady”. Reportedly, the Bond producers don’t plan on ever using any of them, either.

GREAT SPY MOVIES: What about non-Bond spy films? Here are a dozen of the best: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 “North by Northwest” with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint; 1964’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” with a brilliant Richard Burton and Claire Bloom; 1965’s “The Ipcress File” with Michael Caine; 1968’s “Ice Station Zebra” with Patrick McGoohan and Rock Hudson; 1975’s “Three Days of the Condor” with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway; 1976’s “The Eagle Has Landed” with Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland; 1981’s “Eye of the Needle” with Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan; 1987’s “The Fourth Protocol” with Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan (in a pre-Bond role); 2001’s “Spy Game” with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, and “Enigma” with Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet; and 2002’s “The Bourne Identity” with Matt Damon, and its 2004 sequel, “The Bourne Supremacy”.

NOT QUITE THE REAL THING: The success of the Bond series in the ’60s inspired a host of Bond knockoffs, most of which were pretty terrible (and not all that far removed from the Austin Powers spoofs). But I recently stumbled across one of these films on cable that I’d never seen before, and while it openly aped many aspects of the Bond films (particularly the music), it wasn’t bad. “Deadlier Than the Male” starred Richard Johnson (rumored to have been considered for 007 before Connery was cast, briefly married in the mid-’60s to Kim Novak, and still acting today at age 79) as a suave London insurance investigator chasing down a pair of glamorous assassins (Elke Sommer at her peak and Sylvia Koscina) who work for a secret business mogul (familiar ’60s British actor Nigel Green). The cast includes a couple of other familiar faces: Laurence Naismith and Leonard Rossiter. Johnson’s character actually was based on “Bulldog” Drummond, a famed British private-eye star of novels, films and radio from the 1920s through the 1950s (and mentioned in the Coasters song “Searchin’”), but the Bulldog nickname was dropped entirely in this 1966 film. “Deadlier” has some nice touches, including inventive killings a la “The Avengers” and gorgeous, sexually aggressive women. A showdown with the main villain in the midst of an oversized chess set is striking, and there’s a nice twist at the end. The title song by the Walker Bros., an attempt to ape Tom Jones’ “Thunderball”, is pretty bad, however. Overall, the feel is rather similar to the color NBC seasons of “The Saint”. The film apparently did well enough to merit a sequel (1969’s “Some Girls Do”) but definitely flew under my radar. A bare-bones DVD issued three years ago is available in the U.S., and a more elaborate two-disc version has been issued in Britain. If you enjoy U.K. spy fare from the 1960s, you might want to check this one out.

QUICKIES: It turned out that the Nov. 10 airing of “Vanished” was the final one to air on Fox. The last four episodes of the 13-part series are being made available as streaming video on Fox-owned MySpace. And that’s the only place you can see the Sara Collins abduction conspiracy unraveled — unless the series gets released on DVD. NBC pulled a similar stunt with “Kidnapped”, and I’m not too thrilled with this trend of pulling serialized shows mid-story and burning off the unaired episodes online. In the future, I’m going to think long and hard before I commit again to watching one of these serialized dramas. … Motown legend Smokey Robinson turned up in a guest spot this week on “Days of Our Lives” (our family’s soap of choice for four-plus decades), rescuing Dr. Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall) after she’d jumped out of a plane in a Canadian blizzard (don’t ask), and later serenading her and husband John (Drake Hogestyn) with “I Love Your Face” from his recent “Timeless Love” album. Smokey, who’ll be one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors next month, sounded great, but he has that Ronald Reagan-Paul McCartney unnatural-looking hair dye thing going and appears to have had his face lifted about as many times as Joan Rivers. … This past week saw the release on DVD of Season 2 of Marlo Thomas’ “That Girl”, a ’60s sitcom about a single girl trying to make it as an actress in the Big Apple that managed to be groundbreaking while offending no one. I first met Marlo, daughter of Danny Thomas, back in 1983 on a trip to L.A. for one of those TV critics tours. She was promoting one of her socially conscious TV movies, “The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck”, but she had an opinion on everything and didn’t mind speaking out. I have to say, I could understand how Phil Donahue had fallen for her when she appeared on his talk show. She was sexy, intelligent and very charismatic. She did talk nonstop, however. In fact, I walked with her and her entourage as we left the group interview and joined them on an elevator. When I got off, as the doors to the elevator closed, she was still talking to me! My most enduring memory of That Girl.

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