58 replies to this topic

[PrinceKamalKhan]

The earlier link I posted of Roger Ebert's 12-29-69 take on OHMSS wasn't working. Here it is:

 

https://news.google....0,4258993&hl=en

 

I thought this quote was interesting:

"On Her Majesty's Secret Service, then, is more closely related to Bullitt than to Thunderball."

[Dustin]

This is most interesting; the first time I read Ebert's take on OHMSS in whole. Funny he regards Amis as 'pop sociologist' - though perhaps he's closer to the truth than Amis would have been comfortable with, at least as far as his creed is concerned. I've read a lot of fandom philosophy recently; it always astonished me how those preaching with furor about the end of our culture in childish amusement often seem to be the ones most in need of a change of nappies. What would Ebert make of this? And how would Amis answer?

That said Ebert throws the film against the genre as a whole, which is okay but probably not really fair when you consider its source predates most of what audiences saw up till then on the screen. Ebert always was very hit and miss with Bond films, his approach never was that of a fan. But he probably had a better understanding of the series at that point than most other critics.

[Revelator]

This Canby guy certainly liked a good hatchet job...

 

Definitely. Did Hunt run over his dog? What accounts for such pure hatred? And Gold is damn good film by the way (as is Shout at the Devil--the rest of Hunt's filmography seems to be weaker but might be worth investigating).

 

As for Ebert, his potshot at Amis--who never had any difficulty in looking for and acclaiming art--is not merely silly but stupid. Amis wasn't elevating Fleming into high art (or elevating Bond into the "mystical high priest of the gadget society"--Amis was completely uninterested in gadgets and barely mentions them) but claiming Fleming did his job well enough to qualify as a minor artist in the adventure story genre.

As a film critic, Ebert should have remembered that lots of what we now regard as classic Hollywood cinema was once dismissed as trash; as a semi-auteurist he should have remembered that many of the directors now acclaimed as artists were once regarded as mere entertainers or just hacks. Finding art in popular culture is part of a good critic's duty.

His point about Bullit is good but leaves out the point made by the LA Times critic: after YOLT, "Humanity was the only course left for the Bond series." I agree that Ebert was rather erratic with the Bond series--he badly underrated TLD and then realized his mistake by highly praising LTK.

Edited by Revelator, 11 December 2015 - 06:50 PM.

[Dustin]

Ebert's mistake - if having a general point of view on the matter of pop culture can be called a ' 'mistake' - in my opinion always was that he was simply looking at the films, nothing else, and only regarded them according to his own personal enjoyment at the time. For a film critic that is okay but it leaves a lot of the wider picture untouched. He obviously was ahead of his time in predicting - although hedging his bet with 'if' - a Bond series thirty years onward, something few would have done, maybe not even Broccoli and Salzman. Strange that this very vision becoming reality at times left him clueless as to the needs and changes such a cultural icon would have to endure.

Amis with his bon mot about Bond being a cultural heir to Sherlock Holmes - a point later reused and detailed by Burgess - was spot on with his appraisal. Yet of course Amis never claimed Fleming's work was high art; to the contrary he fully understood it as harmless but entertaining juvenile fantasy fiction, well-made but - maybe undermining its own value - never in danger of being taken seriously. Amis' opinion - and I feel I agree with him - was just that as adults we need not feel adult all the time, and surely not in our moments of enjoyment.

[Turn]

Ebert was big on rereviewing films for his great films series. It would have been interesting to see him go back on each Bond. Given his many other activities, not to mention his health concerns of later years, it never happened. But I would have welcomed it.

 

He and reviewing partner Gene Siskel devoted a whole show of their TV review series to Bond back in 1983 at the time NSNA was out. Siskel referred to Lazenby as the answer to a trivia question. Siskel especially epitomized the Connery/Goldfinger is the end-all, be-all of the series mentality. Ebert at least seemed more open-minded. Though Siskel did give FYEO and OP high marks at their time of release.

[stromberg]

A short review from German magazine "Der Spiegel" from December 1969. A slating.

https://translate.go...html&edit-text=

 

The Google translation isn't very good, but sufficient to get the gist of it. Here's the original page:

http://magazin.spieg...el/pdf/45226542

[Dustin]

"Der Spiegel" seldom had kind words for Bond. Their praise of CASINO ROYALE was already an exceptional thing for a paper that habitually used to poke fun not just at Bond but at the entire intelligence circus; the genre just as much as the real life variant. Bond often was their easy target and for decades nobody expected differently from their culture desk. You can see how they picked the obvious soft spot here again in pointing out Lazenby's lack of experience and the 'unconventional' end.

[glidrose]

This Canby guy certainly liked a good hatchet job...

Not at all...

Moonraker is one of the most buoyant Bond films of all. It looks as if it cost an unconscionable amount of money to make, though it has nothing on its mind except dizzying entertainment, which is not something to dismiss quickly in such a dreary, disappointing movie season. Among other things Moonraker deals in creative geography. Moonraker, like all of the better Bond pictures, returns us to a kind of filmmaking that I most closely associate with the fifteen-part serials of my youth. Our astonishment depends on the ingenuity by which the writers and directors disentangle Bond from the impossible situations into which he seems to fall every seven minutes. Moonraker begins with one of the funniest and most dangerous (as well as most beautifully photographed and edited) sequences Bond has ever faced. He's booted out of an airplane without a parachute and must do mortal combat, during a swooping, soaring free fall, with an adversary who, luckily, does have a parachute. There are also a high-speed chase through Venetian canals (with one gondola a disguised Hovercraft), another chase on the Amazon, a fight on the roof of the funicular that goes to the top of Rio's Sugar Loaf mountain, and a final confrontation in space that is as handsome as anything in Star Wars. What's it about? It's about movie-making of the kind Georges Méliès pioneered in films like Voyage to the Moon (1902) and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1907). It's the unimaginable most satisfactorily imagined. Almost everyone connected with the movie is in top form, even Mr. Moore, who has a tendency to facetiousness when left to his own devices. Here he's as ageless, resourceful, and graceful as the character he inhabits. Richard Kiel reappears as Bond's thug-enemy, the gigantic Jaws, who, you may be happy to learn, undergoes the kind of character transformation that means he'll probably turn up in yet another Bond film. Welcome back to old friends.

Wot? We're not allowed to praise MR in this thread? Tough!

[Revelator]

No, Canby still liked giving hatchet jobs. But he occasionally took a break to praise bad movies. He was consistent in his perversity.

I'll restore sanity to the thread with Pauline Kael's MR review:

 

The previous James Bond film (The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977) had been a triumph of design, choreographed action, and self-parody; this one doesn't look too bad, but it has no snap, no tension. It's an exhausted movie; maybe the director, Lewis Gilbert, and the production designer, Ken Adam, just couldn't work up the charge they gave to the earlier film. Roger Moore is dutiful and passive as Bond; his clothes are neatly pressed and he shows up for work, like an office manager who is turning into dead wood but hanging on to collect his pension. As the scientist-heroine, Lois Chiles is so enervated she barely reacts to the threat of the end of the world. And as Drax the industrialist, a neo-Hitler with a city in outer space and plans to create his own master race, Michel Lonsdale walks through impassively. The only zest is shown by Richard Kiel, who returns as Jaws; this time, he falls in love. The picture is big, though. (It cost more than twice as much as its predecessor--and even allowing for inflation, that still means a huge rise in expenditure.) And it was extremely successful.

Edited by Revelator, 17 December 2015 - 03:27 AM.

[Dustin]

The crazy thing is, I perfectly understand both critiques. At the time I was a huge fan of the serials that were shown on the telly with their hair-rising cliffhangers. The episodic nature of the whole show was not a fault for me at all. Later I did see a lot of the criticisms from the feuilleton myself - some critic at the time called Lonsdale's depiction that of a constipated bulldog - and I realised the film's highlight and best moment was the pts; sadly softened by the circus tent rescue for Jaws.

Anyway, I digress...

[glidrose]

No, Canby still liked giving hatchet jobs. But he occasionally took a break to praise bad movies.

And good ones, as his MR review demonstrates.

He was consistent in his perversity. I'll restore sanity to the thread with Pauline Kael's MR review:

I'll trump you with Jay Scott's review "007 in space as good as ever". Scott was an intellectual and art film fancier, don't you know.

THE BOND by which to compare all other Bonds is Goldfinger and by that standard Moonraker is second-best. But, by the standards of most of the other candy served up as summer fare, Moonraker is marzipan - it's so insubstantial it melts in your mouth, but its flavor is distinctive and you can't get enough of it. This movie is going to hit like Muhammad Ali.

Moonraker in the first few minutes before the credits offers more thrills than most escapist movies provide in two hours. A space shuttle is hijacked, a jumbo jet explodes and James Bond (Roger Moore) and two of the villains plummet to earth, fighting over a parachute. By the time Shirley Bassey flexes her leather lungs and exhales the Moonraker theme song (fourth best, surpassed by Goldfinger, Paul McCartney's Live and Let Die, and Carly Simon's The Spy Who Loved Me), the excitement has gone all the way up to giddy. And never comes down.

Drax (Michael Lonsdale), the smoothest Bond nasty yet - a witty Howard Hughes and William Randolph Hearst hybrid but with better taste in furnishings than either - feeds filets to his Dobermans and orders his butler to Look after Mr. Bond. See that some harm comes to him. Mr. Bond will find himself in harm's way in L.A., in Venice (there is an amphibious gondola that is one of the funniest machines ever made) and in Rio, where we go to Carnival and where the suave satyr saves Dr. Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles).

Like Rocky, the Bond formula is a bonanza, and there's no fighting it - why would any one want to fight a good time? Ken Adam's production designs are spectacular enough on earth, but in outer space, where Moonraker climaxes with a war between NASA and the forces of Drax, they are high-tech Piranesi. The script by Christopher Wood pops off some vintage one-liners. (Bond, asked about his association with a CIA agent, says, I have some friends in low places.) There is even a sweet, campy lampoon of Frankenstein. And as a travel movie, Moonraker is first-rate: when you go to Rio, you won't have to bother with the cable cars and when you go to Venice, you won't have to bother with the glass factories - you've already been there.

Moore is getting a little long in the tooth but his aging has had an unpredictable effect on Bond: this older, wrinkled agent acting like a man half his age is unexpectedly affectionate and cute. Cuddly. When one of the Bond beauties announces that she has laid in a case of Bollinger champagne for him and he quips, If it's '69, you were expecting me, the line is not nearly as salacious - and it's much funnier - than it would have been coming from the smooth-faced Moore of some years ago.

To Drax, James Bond appears with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season. To the rest of us, he's like summer: the inevitability of his arrival is one of the few pleasurable certainties we have been granted.

[Turn]

Kael is hailed as a film critic goddess by many. But she's also the writer who claimed in her review of YOLT that Connery gave his best performance as Bond in it.

 

And I disagree with her again as I've long preferred MR to TSWLM.

[glidrose]

I think some of us - myself included - have gone too far off-topic. What did critics think of Lazenby and OHMSS in 1969?

[Revelator]

Kael is hailed as a film critic goddess by many. But she's also the writer who claimed in her review of YOLT that Connery gave his best performance as Bond in it.

 

She didn't say "best," but rather "Connery gives him more character than he's ever had before. This casual, human Bond is rather tender in his sex relationships." I'm not sure if I agree, but it's more worth thinking over and interesting than the usual parroting of "Connery looks bored" . I don't view Kael as a goddess--like any critic she had her idiosyncrasies (I don't agree with her pan of FYEO), but when she was on-target she was usually the most incisive voice in the room (her point about Moonraker's enervation pinpoints exactly what bothers me about the film...aside from stuff like the double-taking pigeon).

 

And I disagree with her again as I've long preferred MR to TSWLM.

 

Thankfully a minority opinion.

 

Apologies Glidrose--from now on I'll stay on topic.

Edited by Revelator, 18 December 2015 - 02:38 AM.

[Turn]

No, she didn't outright say the best, but that's how I took it. Kael, for some reason, finds Bond as spectator more interesting. It may get old talking about Connery seeming bored, but it's pretty undeniable. Maybe not so much bored, but more in the background for sure, which doesn't necessarily make him more interesting, at least to me, and apparently several others.

 

Guess I missed the tender part too. Cutting off the straps of a dress counts as that I suppose.

 

I think part of my affection for MR comes from having seen it before I ever saw TSWLM. I saw it at the right time and it helped me become the Bond fan I am today. Having waiting for TSWLM it made it seem lesser for some reason and I've never had as much affection for it.

[Revelator]

Getting slightly more on topic, it might be interesting to also see what critics thought of Lazenby and OHMSS just a couple of years after 1969, when Connery returned to the role.

With that in mind, here's an excerpt from Kael's review of Diamonds Are Forever:

 

...the film doesn't have anything like those flamboyant sequences in the snow--the ski chase and the bobsled run--that were quite literally dazzling in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. What's missing may be linked to the absence of Peter Hunt, who worked on the action sequences of all the earlier Bonds, and who directed the last one; perhaps it was he who gave the series its distinctive quality of aestheticized thrills. The daring seemed beautiful in the earlier films--precariously glorified.

 

Pointing out Hunt as the missing ingredient--which indeed he was (DAF is the first Hunt-less Bond film)--is to me another example of her perspicacity as a critic. If memory serves, either her opposite number Anthony Sarris or his wife Molly Haskell also noticed and lamented Hunt's absence from DAF. Haskell's review of OHMSS--reproduced earlier in this thread--is perhaps the best contemporary piece on the film (whereas Canby's seems to be the most putrid). 

As for YOLT, Kael was referring to Connery's performance, which does indeed have a note of tenderness in his acting with Kissy and Aki, rather than Bond's role in the script.

[Dustin]

In hindsight it would seem Hunt has been the - secret - heart and soul of the production side for many years. In one of the standard works, Rubin's perhaps, it is claimed Hunt was the guy putting the whole of THUNDERBALL together from a messy jumble of material practically on his own. It seems on more than one occasion Hunt was the healthy influence behind the scenes.

[Revelator]

I'd definitely agree. Regarding Thunderball, the Taschen book says that after shooting finished Young went off to direct another film and pretty much dumped the footage in Hunt's lap, saying "There you are, dear boy. Get on with it." (Other trivia--Hunt's original cut of the underwater battle was 4 minutes--the producers told him to lengthen it to 9 or 10!) To Young's credit, he was always generous when discussing the impact of Hunt's innovative editing.

IIRC, Hunt also much restructured FRWL in the editing room. He was an integral part of the classic Bond team.

[glidrose]

re: Kael on Hunt

The problem is that Kael identifies Hunt as the 2nd unit director. No mention of his editorial work which was the indisputable crucial factor. No matter how much she denied it, Kael was an auteurist at heart. For example, in her review of Octopussy she complains that director John Glen loses track of the story.

Going back to Hunt, I myself have said that DAF would have been much better had Hunt edited it. That moon buggy chase - not to mention everything else in the film - cries out for Hunt's touch. It's painfully obvious how lazy the editing is in DAF - not just the "action" scenes but also the dialogue scenes.

[Blofeld's Cat]

I'd definitely agree. Regarding Thunderball, the Taschen book says that after shooting finished Young went off to direct another film and pretty much dumped the footage in Hunt's lap,.....

The film he went off to direct (for free!) was Poppies Are Also Flowers. It was, ironically, based on a Fleming story.

[Revelator]

The problem is that Kael identifies Hunt as the 2nd unit director. No mention of his editorial work which was the indisputable crucial factor. No matter how much she denied it, Kael was an auteurist at heart. For example, in her review of Octopussy she complains that director John Glen loses track of the story.

 

Complaining that a director doesn't keep track of the story is not an auteurist complaint, especially since it puts the director at the service of the script. Auteurism, as defined by Sarris and company, was not simply that the quality of direction was one of the most important factors in a movie's artistic success (a notion Kael fully agreed with)--it was the idea that an auteur had a distinctive visual style that transcended the limitations of his scripts and ensured that even a lesser film by an auteur was worth more than a film by a mere Metteur en scène (which is what most of the Bond directors would qualify as). It's no accident that auteurist critics usually trashed the Bond films as Hitchcock rip-offs (i.e., imitations of a true auteur), whereas Kael liked them. As for mistaking Hunt as a second-unit director, that depends on how ambiguous you find her phrasing. The fact that she begins by knocking the editing of the elevator fight in DAF suggests that she was thinking of Hunt's editing as part of what she missed.

Edited by Revelator, 21 December 2015 - 07:03 PM.

[hilly]

IIRC, Hunt also much restructured FRWL in the editing room. He was an integral part of the classic Bond team.

 

Hunt talks about this in the dvd documentary for FRWL. He re-organised the scenes on the SPECTRE yacht with Klebb and Blofeld and managed to re-write elements of the plot in the process. He talked about how he would "wrestle" with a film when editing it

[Connerybond]

I still remember not a lot of positives from the critics.

[Revelator]

This appeared in The New York Times on Jan. 1 1970. It's so wretched it almost makes me long for Canby:

 

What Sex! What Violence! So What Else Is New? (Feb 1, 1970)
By J. MARKS

Those of us who spent our most formative years during that decade which we already refer to with nostalgia as the sixties celebrated the New Year by jettisoning all kinds of paraphernalia. We unloaded all the great childhood gadgets and emotional trinkets which couldn't make it into the seventies without showing signs of appalling age.

Danish modern didn't make it, for instance. The hippie ideal of building a good life in the ghettos didn't make it either. Prop airplanes didn't make it; nor did railroads or cigarettes or the aspiration of making it and leasing an apartment in a luxury building with a doorman. Also on the list of things we thought we dug but ended up ditching are Brooks Brothers suits, booze, big new cars, haircuts, parlor pianos, opera subscriptions, spin the bottle, etiquette, cocktail parties, fountain pens, caviar, small talk, neckties, Peggy Lee, white linens, cuff links, corsages, calf-bound books, Broadway shows, dates, postcards, contraceptives. Monte Carlo, Fort Lauderdale, movie stars, heroes, chicken soup and mamma, buttoned-down shirts, underwear and James Bond.

Which brings us to "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" - the sixth and possibly final installment in the adventures of 007. Do you remember 007? Do you recall May of 1963 when "Dr. No" had lines around the block at your local movie house? And James Bond, played by that rough-cut sophisticate Sean Connery--the ultimate kitsch hero who could identify a woman's perfume at 50 feet and knew his caviars and wines from Provence all the way to the Caspian Sea! Wow, the epitome of chic! What every young man wanted to be when he grew up!

But of course in those days boys didn't grow up; they simply went from Christmas office party to office party. And today many boys don't get a chance to live long enough to grow up. But in 1963 popcorn still cost a dime at the movies and the world was beautiful. Ah, yes, the world of James Bond was the world of the early sixties. There he stood, Brooks Brothered to death in a dark blue serge or getting kinda gamey in a terry-cloth jumpsuit. Daredevil gentleman, with expertise in absolutely everything, even a nonchalance which permitted him to seduce superduper double spies on a whim. Ah, the world of 007! Where the enemy was either an exotic samurai with a lethal black derby or six dozen fold-outs from Playboy magazine. And people always died so beautifully in a James Bond movie. The explosions were the biggest darn explosions we had ever seen. The blood was redder and the sounds of fists in faces were crisper and crunchier than ever.

Even technology was fun in a Bond movie--the lethal gadgets killed with ultra-comic book flamboyancy. Death was always so intricate in the World of 007. That astonishing automobile with its deadly cargo of special effects. That attache case! What magic! What imagination! What spectacle! What violence! What a bore...

So, while I was standing in line on a recent weekend at the Waverly Theater to see the latest Bond bundle, I noticed that I was not the only die-hard 007 fan. It was a young crowd which went into the theater smiling and came out looking perplexed. The formula didn't make it any more. And it wasn't merely a question of whether the new Mr. Bond--George Lazenby--was as effective at his bits as Connery had been or whether the latest Bond thriller was as thrilling as its predecessors. It was essentially a matter of change. But the change was in us and not in 007. Like Superman and all other good super-heroes, James Bond had not changed. But since 1963, when all of us first caught sight of the dashing Mr. Bond, our heads had gone through more changes than you could shake a joint at. And it was astounding to realize how different we were at the start of the seventies!

I sat there during the movie recalling how incredible the sensation had been during "Dr. No" and "From Russia With Love" and "Goldfinger" and '"Thunderball" and ''You Only Live Twice." All that karate and all those bloody noses had really been a thrill. Now, as the entrails of a "nameless" enemy geysered out of a snowplow and Bond quipped, "He sure had a lot of guts," I was roundly turned off. The fists smashing into faces were grotesque and vicious. The "baseball game" in which bodies were sent flying over a cliff was cruel and humorless.

Why was I so disturbed by the lavish violence--which had previously amused me so much? Was it possibly because I had
been in Chicago and seen real people and real friends bashed and battered? Was it because I had seen young Bob Kennedy cut down in the pantry of a Los Angeles hotel and the Hell's Angels brutalize a crowd at a rock festival in Altamont, Calif. or because. I was desperately sick of the useless obscenity of death in Vietnam? I don't know. I only know that the idea of seeing a Follies of sadism turned me off.

And what about James the man? Well, he seemed something of a drag. A rather pompous dirty old man who asserts his moribund concept of masculinity by cruising every chick who passes. The covey of allergic ladies in the film comes on as the ultimate male self-deception. A lady on the hour, every hour, is the phallic fantasy of the middle-aged man. He's not
up to the mere physical labor, let alone possessing the sexual prowess. What Bond used to do as our surrogate adulterer he can't do for us any more. We would rather do it ourselves because we do it so much better. 007 gets zero for sexual conduct. Bond is masculinity according to Madison Avenue.

Intellectually, he's also fraudulent. Spectre--that diabolical world organization of sin and corruption--seems less corrupt than Bond himself, not to mention his heartless superiors who license 007 to kill. Meanwhile, the enemy is an enigma. We aren't told why we must hate the enemy but only that we must at all costs HATE the enemy. But it doesn't work. We are enlightened young men and women who have learned the importance of knowing the enemy--and we have learned to know him well in real life. In fact, we are downright intellectual about the enemy. And we aren't buying any hate propaganda; so the evil that lurks behind the gullible shadows of childhood doesn't frighten the activist-oriented kids of the seventies. We don't get our jollies from sitting in dark theaters and hating prescribed enemies.

Bond is fighting a shadow in a shadow play. Ultimately it's all fake. However, it is not harmless because it's essentially sadistic and cruel and last-ditch expression of that confounded militant egotism which used to be the trademark of the normal middle-class male.

Rest in pieces. James Bond. Rest in PIECES!

 

Since one act of vituperation deserves another, Mr. Marks strikes me as a gigantic ninny and an insufferable prig. He's also a terrible writer--over-reliant on leaden sarcasm--and a terrible thinker, who relies on the old trick of deciding that the reactions of some (we never know how many) people in the audience are those of the entire mass audience. And like an egomaniac he decides the mass audience thinks exactly the same he does--wrongly. Audiences were not, after all, tired of James Bond, as the grosses for Diamonds Are Forever and Live And Let Die demonstrated. And if some audience members "came out looking perplexed," it was probably because of something Marks never bothers mentioning, because it would capsize his argument about the film's supposed sadism.

Marks whines a good deal about "lavish violence" and confuses stylized violence with the real thing. He reminds me of those well-intentioned fools who complained about Horror comics in the 1950s and how their violence would lead to juvenile delinquency. In this case, sensitive Mr. Marks can no longer distinguish between Bond and Vietnam. But while he endlessly whines about the film's supposed sadism, he is completely silent when it comes to discussing the most significant act of violence in the entire film, an act no one could take pleasure in, aside from Blofeld himself. The end of OHMSS confronts the viewer with bloody violence that can't be laughed off or enjoyed. Marks's failure to not address that, even in a veiled form to avoid spoilers, shows that as a critic he is a fraud.

The rest of his screed is even more simpleminded and smug ("We would rather do it ourselves because we do it so much better"--sure). But it shows how distraught some people were by the end of the sixties--so distraught they projected onto Bond everything they hated about the world: Madison Avenue, the Vietnam War, middle-aged men, what-have-you. As it turned out, the rest of the country didn't share his opinions. Neither did his generation. Mr. Marks is now no more than a forgotten journalist (albeit briefly revived in this forum), while OHMSS enjoys a higher critical reputation than ever and is acclaimed as a classic even by people who aren't hard-core Bond fans.

[Major Tallon]

Goodness, Revelator, what a load of tripe that Marks review was.  (I'm frequently surprised at how many reviewers mistake invective for analysis and vituperation for insight.)  Of course, Marks appears not to have been the only person of this view.  Lazenby has claimed that his agent, Mr. Ronan O'Rahilly, had views about Bond that appear to have been somewhat similar to those held by Mr. Marks and dissuaded him from continuing in the role.  And that, I reckon, was a real shame.

 

In passing, I'll point to some errors in Marks' review  Despite his claim that "the blood was redder" in the early Bonds, not a single drop of blood was shown in "Goldfinger."  His mystifying claim that Bond goes after SPECTRE based upon some mindless notion that we have to hate the enemy simply because they're the prescribed enemy overlooks the fact that we've previously been introduced to Blofeld, SPECTRE, and their nefarious deeds in all but one of the previous Connery films.  Perhaps Marks didn't know as much about James Bond as he pretended but was rather just another snooty social commenter who had decided that Bond was beneath him. 

[Dustin]

Actually I think Marks merely used this 'review' as a vehicle to voice his own feelings about the end of a decade in the spirit of the 'Hamburger Hill'. Understandable but hardly the topic of a Bond film or a profound review thereof. Consequently it's neither fish nor fowl and doing a disservice to OHMSS as well as to whatever it was he wanted to point out. Which I daresay Marks may not have been too sure about himself.

Bond frequently was accused - often from behind the Iron Curtain - to represent the spirit of those who went to Angola or Vietnam to murder and rape, simply ignoring the fact that (at least back in the day) most of the folks going to war, regardless of the side the fought for, were not doing so of their own free will. The majority were victims of the draft and did not particularly enjoy being shot to pieces, the odd exception not withstanding.

Moreover, Bond - film Bond, the only version Marks would probably be aware of - is generally depicted as the regulative force that actively prevents the worser follies of the generals throughout his career. And OHMSS is hardly the exception there.
You might even make a case that Bond himself - the concept of Bond - is the antithesis of war: the one man sent to do the job of a whole army.

Fleming, like any half-orphan, was of course greatly influenced by the absence of his father, whom he lost in a war where millions of young men were literally put into a mincer. He himself played an important role in a war just as gruesome and horrible as the one his father was killed in. Fleming's brain child Bond dates back to the time when he fantasised about killing Hitler atop his mountain resort by two snipers and ending WWII with this one simple assignment. It never came to be, for various reasons, but the idea itself was what defines 007's raison d'être: Bond is the bullet shot around the globe so others needn't send their kids. Bond is not the opposite of war, that would of course be peace. Bond is the containment of war.

At least after a fashion.

[glidrose]

This appeared in The New York Times on Jan. 1 1970. It's so wretched it almost makes me long for Canby:

Since one act of vituperation deserves another, Mr. Marks strikes me as a gigantic ninny and an insufferable prig. <snip> Mr. Marks is now no more than a forgotten journalist (albeit briefly revived in this forum), while OHMSS enjoys a higher critical reputation than ever and is acclaimed as a classic even by people who aren't hard-core Bond fans.

Eddie Felson (Paul Newman): You're acting like some girl who got felt up at the drive-in. "The Color of Money" (1986)

J. Marks? Forgotten journalist? Not on your life. J. Marks a.k.a. Jamake Highwater was an acclaimed author, poet, art critic, television host, Indian-rights activist and award-winning children's author. He published two well-regarded books on rock music including "Rock and Other Four Letter Words : Music of the Electric Generation" (1968) with photographs by Linda Eastman (a.k.a. Linda McCartney, yes, that Linda McCartney).

The New York Public Library's prestigious "Humanities and Social Sciences Library Manuscripts and Archives Division" has his papers.

http://www.nypl.org/...ns/pdf/1395.pdf

Here's his impressive resume:

https://web.archive....and/resume.html

"Highwater's novels have also won wide critical acclaim, major awards, as well as the esteem of authors as diverse as John Gardner, Dee Brown, N. Scott Momaday, Walter Abish, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Edward Albee, and Studs Terkel."

Note: the John Gardner who praised his novels is the award-winning American novelist and scholar (1933-1982) and not Bond's own JG.

And your own accomplishments are...?



























Okay, so he was also the original "Rachel Dolezal" with a touch of "James Hatfield", but hey - if he's telling the truth - he shagged Mick Jagger!

The following articles will no doubt be more to your liking:

(read the first one if you don't have time for both - they're both long pieces)

http://www.dancingba...e_highwater.htm

http://indiancountry...wont-die-160773

[David_M]

What a character!  A real low-life.  No wonder the literary establishment loved him.

[Revelator]

 

J. Marks? Forgotten journalist? Not on your life.

 

Oh alright, slightly infamous journalist/charlatan whose sometimes plagiarized books were once highly praised...unless the testimonials are also fake.
 

And your own accomplishments are...?

 

Not having written that NY Times article.

Joking aside, thank you for delving into the background of Mr. Marks. A true surprise!

Edited by Revelator, 03 February 2016 - 02:49 AM.