My top five favorite scenes in the James Bond franchise

5.    “This is XXX.” (Lewis Gilbert, The Spy Who Loved Me)  Director Gilbert’s method of introducing Major Amasova is brilliant.  General Gogol and his secretary discuss the whereabouts of Agent XXX without using pronouns.  Cut to some guy in bed with a girl.  We know from the way the secretary’s voice carries over into this shot that one of these people is XXX, and because this scene is staged like so many scenes of Bond in bed with a random chick (and because this is 1977 and we’re all chauvinist pigs), we assume that the guy is Agent XXX.  The radio asks for XXX, she gives him a look that seems to say “you have to answer that”, he gets out of bed… and then she answers.  

4.     “Do you expect me to talk?” (Sean Connery, Goldfinger)  It’s so freaking iconic, and arguably Connery’s best performance in the series. Of course, he’s not entirely acting, because the stagehand under the table with the acetylene torch can’t see where to stop cutting, but it’s still really the only time the normally-stoic Connery Bond gets to really show any emotion (namely fear). (Because Connery's Bond is so damn stoic, a lot of his acting comes through very subtly. This just happens to be the scene where he gets to drop that.)  On top of that, he’s entirely dependent on his wits to survive, which doesn’t happen anywhere near enough in these films.


3.    “The answer to your question is yes.  I did kill him.” (Roger Moore, The Spy Who Loved Me)  Bond finds out that occasionally – just occasionally – actions have consequences.  The result is the first sign since OHMSS that there’s an actual human being lurking behind the 007 number.  Roger Moore is deadly serious for once, and his performance here is enough to make one wish his Bond hadn’t treated almost everything else across his seven films as successive punchlines.

2.    “Don’t you want to know why?” et seq. (Timothy Dalton, Licence to Kill)  Sorry, Daniel.  Timothy Dalton does a better job of showing Bond’s utter exhaustion in one brief clip than the best montage Skyfall could muster.  He’s won the most personal mission of his cinematic career, but they throw in this one quick shot after the villain gets incinerated just to let you know just how much it means to Bond that it’s finally over.  Dalton might not have the screen presence of Connery or Moore, that ability to own a room just by walking into it, but damn if he didn’t get to show off a wider acting range in two films than they did in six or seven.

1.    “Thy dawn, O Master of the world, Thy dawn…” (Diana Rigg, with an assist from John Barry and Peter Hunt, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service)  To set the stage: Bond has already proposed to Tracy, meaning there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell she’s walking out of this film alive.  She’s been captured by Blofeld, and Bond and her underworld kingpin father have teamed up to rescue her (and also save the world).  As soon as she recognizes her father’s voice on the radio, Tracy realizes what’s about to go down.  She plays to Blofeld’s ego perfectly and lures him up to his fortress’s most vulnerable room, not to distract him from the oncoming helicopters - he's already dismissed them - but rather to increase the odds of him dying in the opening salvo, and if that means putting herself in the line of fire, so be it.  Diana Rigg cinches her place as The Best Bond Girl Ever with this scene.  Meanwhile, John Barry’s brooding score and Peter Hunt’s direction help lend the scene a level of tension the series has never bettered.

The Great 2014 James Bond Review-A-Thon will continue this weekend with Thunderball.