Icon. Cinema Icon.

It’s hard to find a person alive who doesn’t know who James Bond is. He has so permeated our society, that every spy movie made since his debut has compared itself to the franchise. He is the spy, while Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan and others are just spies. His name is also a genre unto itself; it’s easy to describe a movie as being “a James Bond film.” The only other character I can think of that has this distinction is Godzilla. (“It’s a Godzilla movie.” No further synopsis required.)

We can argue about what the best Bond movie is (Goldfinger) or the worst (Die Another Day), but in the end, we keep coming back to our gentleman spy, whether he is Connery, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig or (god forbid) Lazenby. What is the attraction? Is it the old cliché that “women want him and men want to be him”? Or is there something deeper? Is the James Bond series popcorn entertainment personified, or is there something about the alcoholic, womanizing assassin that speaks to our deeper subconscious?

Or is it simply that, while there are many imitators, there is only one Bond? As Carly Simon sang: “Nobody does it better.”

For Christmas, I was given the Bond 50 collection, which included every James Bond film to date (SkyfallI was not on video when the box set was released, but there was an empty slot, just waiting for it).  Glancing at the titles, it dawned on me that out of the twenty-two films included, I had only seen six.  I decided to watch them all. The wife was none too happy about this, as, to her, they seemed to melt together into one tuxedo-clad mass. “Didn’t you already watch this one?” she asked more than once. “No, no,” I’d tell her. “This is a different beautiful woman with a silly name and a different European actor planning global domination.”

(Truthfully, sometimes I get them confused.)

Yet, while the films are cookie-cutter, seeming sometimes to simply change local and actors but otherwise telling the same story over and over again, we (including me) keep going back for more. Perhaps it is this consistency that is key to Bond’s survival. We know, regardless of actor, that Bond is going to sleep with some beautiful women (only half of which survive), we know he is going to be wined and dined by his nemesis (played by a respected, often foreign, actor) while being explained exactly what his nefarious plot is, we know he’s going to flirt with Moneypenny and get cool stuff from Q (Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace excluded). We know all those things are going to happen, but what makes it fascinating, is how it’s going to happen. As the old saying goes, it’s not the story; it’s how it’s told.

Bond, over the last 50 years, has changed, while staying fundamentally the same. And that’s part of his appeal. In an ever-changing world, where today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy (look at Bond helping Afghan terrorists in The Living Daylights), Bond will forever be on the side of the angels, getting the job done and drinking and whoring it up the whole way.

But, let’s talk about the Bonds.

Sean Connery.

For many people, Connery is Bond, everyone else is just a pretender to the throne. Connery, with his Scottish burr, thick eyebrows and often obvious toupee. He was calm, smart, confident, just as ready to place a gentle kiss on a woman as go upside her head.

Dr. No set the groundwork for Bond. Crazy villain with weird body tic (metal hands)? Check. Smoking hot babe (Ursula Andress)? Check. Card playing? Check. An implausibly elaborate hideout for the villain? Oh, yeah.

From Russia With Love is the movie where James Bond fights Quint from Jaws (it’s The Spy Who Loved Me where he fights Jaws from Eegah!) and finally figures out that he’s a Russian agent because he orders the wrong wine with dinner. (I’d probably be accused of being a spy if I ever ate with Bond- I don’t know a thing about wine.)

Goldfinger.

Really, what can I say about Goldfinger that hasn’t been said already? It’s a classic. Not just a classic Bond, but a classic. It’s the most quotable Bond: “My name is Pussy Galore.” “I must be dreaming.” Or, how about:  “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” If you ever encounter a space alien that doesn’t know what James Bond is, this is the movie to show them.

I honestly think the best thing about Thunderball is the Tom Jones song at the beginning. But that’s just because I think Tom Jones is awesome. (Also, this is the Bond movie that was remade years later as Never Say Never Again and it co-starred Kim Basinger and Rowan “Mr. Bean” Atkinson.)

In You Only Live Twice, James Bond got married, got a bad haircut and some make up and became Japanese. It’s cringe-worthy. But, worth watching because Roald Dahl (yes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl) wrote the script. Also, Donald Pleasance pops up as Blofeld, with scar, crazy eyes and a cat that looks like it can’t wait to get away. If you can watch him and not think of Dr. Evil, then you are a stronger person than I.

Now, we get to George Lazenby.

I suppose the nicest thing you can say about George Lazenby is that he seems like an okay guy. You know, your cousin who may not be so bright, but is always willing to buy a round of drinks. He’s not suave, he’s not sophisticated. Actually, he’s kind of a putz.

In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond has to fight Kojack, who, since he lost his lollipop has gone nuts and now thinks he’s Ernest Blofeld. It has the most downbeat ending of any Bond movie ever. As the end credits start, you wonder if Ingmar Bergman took a crack at the script.

Connery returns!

Just once.

Diamonds Are Forever has gay henchmen, a moon buggy chase, female ass kickers named Bambi and Thumper and The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Charles Gray as Blofeld. Oh, and sausage king Jimmy Dean as Howard Hughes (kinda).

Now, we get rather silly.

Roger Moore, best known at the time for the television show “The Saint” took over the role and brought both his eyebrows with him.

Live and Let Die- even if you’ve never seen the movie, you know the song. Paul McCartney (he used to be in this band called The Beatles, you may have heard of them) provides us with possibly the most memorable thing about this movie. But then, maybe that’s not totally fair, after all, it does have a pre- Dr. Quinn Jane Seymour and a pre-Alien Yaphet Kotto. It also has what must be the longest boat chase in cinema history. But,  the less said of Sheriff J.W. Pepper, the better.

I love The Man With the Golden Gun. 

Why, you may ask?

Two words: Christopher Lee.

Lee gives us a villain we can hiss at while secretly rooting for. We haven’t been this entertained by the bad guy since Goldfinger. We’ve also got Britt Ekland (of The Wicker Man fame) in a bikini, Herve Villechaize in a tuxedo and M in a half-sunk boat headquarters where everything is tilted to the right.

The Spy Who Loved Me has A) the coolest villain lair ever and B) Richard Kiel as Jaws. Oh, and a catchy Carly Simon song. That’s about it. Well, that and Bond’s Union Jack parachute, that was pretty cool.

Moonraker has Jaws (again), and NASA’s own contingent of heavily armed astronauts. It was James Bond trying to be Han Solo and not completely succeeding.

And then we come to For Your Eyes Only, in which Bond doesn’t sleep with a girl because she’s too young for him (you are starting to look your age, Roger), James Bond’s good friend Tevye, and Bond at his most oblivious. More than once, I found myself screaming at the screen, “How do you not know he’s the bad guy?!?”

Octopussy has the title song “All Time High” because nothing rhymes with octopussy. At the climax, Roger Moore’s James Bond is disguised as a clown, which more or less sums up Roger’s portrayal as 007.

A View to a Kill has a Nazi-engineered Christopher Walken (!) deciding to destroy Silicon Valley with Grace Jones. Apparently, Walken’s Zorin has also seen Superman. This was to be Moore’s last outing as Bond. Some say it was because he discovered that he was older than his love interest’s mother. Some say it was because he didn’t like the increased violence (in one part, Zorin machine-guns a crowd of people, their bodies floating away in a flood he caused).

Our next Bond is Timothy Dalton.

Now, some have said less than stellar things about Dalton’s Bond. Personally, I think the man was ahead of his time. His Bond is serious, a man who gets angry when his friend is killed, and who has no qualms about pulling the trigger on a villain. I think audiences at the time just weren’t prepared for the complete 180 from Moore to Dalton.

We start with The Living Daylights which sees Bond not killing an assassin because he can tell by watching her that she doesn’t know a sniper rifle from a hole in the ground. The plot is rather complicated, involving a Russian defector who isn’t really defecting, an Aryan henchman and Joe Don Baker (Mitchell!) as a war-obsessed gun runner, a man who takes Risk seriously. Oh, and a cello case that becomes a toboggan. (And, again, Bond helps out the Taliban, but let’s try to forget that part.)

But, it was Dalton’s second outing as Bond, Licence to Kill that upset most hardcore, longtime Bond fans, with its graphic depictions of violence, earning the film a PG-13, a first for the series. In this one, Bond’s longtime CIA buddy Felix Leiter is fed to a shark by a ruthless South American drug dealer, something that royally pisses 007 off. Bond, against M’s orders, goes on a quest for revenge. The villains in this picture (including a young Benicio Del Toro) aren’t the over-the-top cackling super villains of the past; these men are real, perhaps too real for audience comfort. The climactic tanker truck chase is one of the highlights of the series.

Dalton never did a third Bond and was replaced by Pierce Brosnan.

Brosnan’s first outing was in the better-than-most Goldeneye, which spawned the most addictive video game since “Tetris.” Brosnan managed to find the middle ground between Moore’s eyebrow-wriggling camp and Dalton’s uber-serious killer-for-hire. This time the villain is 006, Alex Trevelyan, played by “Game of Thrones” and The Lord of the Rings star Sean Bean (affectionately nicknamed “Seen” Bean by yours truly). This is a return to classic Bond, tank chases, implausibly named women (Xenia Onatopp) and space lasers used for nefarious purposes (actually, is there ever a good use for a space laser?). Brosnan was my first Bond, having watched Goldeneye when it first came out on video, so it’s the role I will always identify him with (sorry, Mama Mia fans). The best thing to come out of Brosnan’s tenure as 007 is Judi Dench, the fantastic Oscar-winning actress takes over the role of M, turning the role from simply “James Bond’s boss” into something truly memorable, she would play the role in seven films.

In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond teams up with Michelle Yeoh to defeat Jonathan Pryce, who is basically an evil Ted Turner. No space lasers, but Michelle Yeoh will be the last good Bond girl until Eva Green in Casino Royale, in fact, she’s so kick-ass in this movie, you have to wonder why Hollywood didn’t offer her a spin-off series instead of Halle Berry’s forgettable Jinx (from Die Another Day).

The World is Not Enough’s most interesting character is not Bond, nor either of the vacant but pretty girls (a decent Sophie Marceau and a god-awful Denise Richards), but Robert Carlyle’s Renard, a bald, scarred terrorist with a bullet lodged in his brain, making him not only stronger, but unable to feel pain (or pleasure or hot or cold or…you get the idea). Carlyle plays the character with an almost Karloff level of sympathy. He knows he is a monster, and to a certain extent, we pity him. If this film is worth watching, it’s worth watching because of him. And not Denise Richards as an atomic scientist (yeah, right) named Christmas Jones.

Really. I’m not making that up.

Last and least for Brosnan was Die Another Day, which starts off with the worst Bond title song ever, performed by Madonna and a computer, sounding like some sort of unholy hellspawn of Stephen Hawking and Moby. We then have a Korean guy who turns into a white guy (DNA transplant. Oh..wait, what?), an invisible car, yet another giant space laser, and Halle Berry who is an awesome CIA agent because we are told this repeatedly (all evidence to the contrary).

And yet…

And yet…

Die Another Day was a huge hit.

Go figure.

The series rebooted, went back to basics, went back to Fleming, and brought us Daniel Craig, who is arguably the best Bond yet (even die hard, old school fans will place him second to The Great Connery).

Casino Royale features Craig as the chiseled, not-terribly handsome, but supreme badass Bond, a Bond who has a little problem with killing people before MI6 has had an opportunity to interrogate them. He is, as M describes him, a blunt instrument, not yet the suave man in the tux with the implausible gadgets. He is still vulnerable in this film; we can see that brutally killing a man with his bare hands gets to him. At one point, he decides to resign, telling Bond girl Vesper (the beautiful Eva Green), that he should get out while he still has any soul left. And Vesper, a smart, lovely, well-rounded character, easily the best Bond girl ever. The plot revolves around a man who gambles with terrorist’s money, thereby getting them more money and Bond has to enter a winner-take-all poker tournament with him and the bad guy weeps blood, and a house sinks in Vienna and…

Well, it’s a bit complicated, but worth the price of admission.

Let me say something controversial here for a moment.

Jack White and Alica Keyes recorded the song “Another Way to Die” for the film Quantum of Solace and I, unlike many, love it. Partly because I’m a White Stripes fan, and partly because I just happen to think that it’s a kick-ass song.

Quantum of Solace has the most unusual title of any Bond movie. I’m still not quite sure what it means. Despite its long title, it is the shortest Bond ever. Bond is out for revenge, trying to get those responsible for Vesper’s death. We have car chases, a weird opera, a hotel in the middle of nowhere blowing up, a sadistic dictator, a girl covered in oil (an homage to Goldfinger) and Bond finally letting go of the past by leaving his heart in the snow- metaphorically, of course.

Last, but certainly not least is last year’s Skyfall, with Javier Bardem playing that special kind of crazy that he appears to excel at, 28 Days Later and Pirates of the Caribbean’s Naomie Harris confidently inheriting the role of Moneypenny, a Q who looks like he stepped out of “The IT Crowd” and the most emotional resonance of any Bond movie, ever. It is a film that reminds us that while we know James Bond, 007, we know very little about James Bond, human being. Skyfall, like Goldfinger, is not just a great James Bond picture, it’s a great movie, period.

So, that’s it.

So far.

Bond will always be out there, whether he’s Scottish, Welsh, Irish, blond, brunette, bald, tall, short, young, old, camp or serious, there will always be Bond. Possibly the truest words in the history of cinema are these:

James Bond Will Return.

            We, the audience, are looking forward to it.