Customer Reviews

James Bond in the Cinema

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John Brosnan's "James Bond in the Cinema" was unique when it was first published in the early 1970's. It was to my knowledge the first truely ambitious look at whole Bond movie experience with a freshness and sense of fun. Unlike other critics of the day who seemed to be hung up on series latent sadism (also a potent mix in Ian Fleming's novels), Brosnan(no relation to Pierce) fully understood that walking into a Bond movie was like walking into an entirely different world. Once you get the "joke" so to speak these escapist yarns do work with varying degrees of wit and sophistication.

Indeed from 1962's "Dr. No" till 69's "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" the Bond movies were groundbreaking in the same way "Star Wars" and "The Matrix" are to modern audiences. From the animated dots that opened amid John Barry's unmistakable brassy music, you saw art direction, editing techniques, special effects, fight scenes and sly eroticism unlike anything you've seen before. Brosnan captures all these elements vividly in practically scene by scene reviews but he is also a perceptive critic. Quite rightly he realizes the series may have peeked with the near perfect slickness of "Goldfinger" thus turning the series into a perpetual state of trying to recapture that movie's "genie in the bottle" over and over again.

Updated in 1981 to include part of the Roger Moore years (who he dubs "James Bland") the books are wonderfully illustrated with great production stills and both offer an appendix chock full of other Bondian material of special interest. Buy both volumes if you can find them as they are collectable in every sense of the word.