Dr. No...
Started the New Year in Southfields, South West London visiting a good friend. We saw in the New Year with Ursula Andress rising up from the sea in a digitally remastered DVD of Dr. No - wonderful quality. We noted that Dr. No was the first ever Bond movie, and, as such was finding still finding its feet. We sensed the film making a journey from the 50's (the world of gentlemen's clubs, gaming tables, politesse, in London) to something wilder, more surreal and less easy to pigeonhole when Bond travels to Jamaica...My friend noted how amazing the lavish sets of Dr. No's lair on a Caribbean island must have seemed to the audiences of the early 60's. Easy to underestimate the impact. I wondered if the sheer sumptousness and generosity of the designs, the play with colour, must have come as a wonderful and distraction to audiences still reeling from the austerity years.
We speculated on the way the film dances around the big subjects of radiation, paranoia, with espionage as the eye of the audience, Bond being our "way in" to these sinister, yet compelling hidden worlds: his quintessential Englishness is an essential ingredient. It is vital that he is not alien to us, but that he acts as a trusted guide to these alien worlds presided over by "super-powerful" concerns. We have to be able to recognise James Bond as one of our own. For him to be too crazy or too outlandish would be out of the question: 007 the conduit to richer, more dangerous, more tantalising experiences...
The erotic in Bond is always on the edge of danger...He engages with women who could be about to kill him...The kind of sex that a side of us both fears and desires...
So the sex must also be part of the drug...It too must be on a heightened plane of experience...The edge of a cliff, the edge of a bed...
And back to Bill's flat in Southfields: early to bed (about 1.00, which was fine by me), and, as Bill rightly judged it, a most pleasant fry-up breakfast of scrambled egg, bacon, toast and marmalade wtih English Breakfast tea...The only way to start the New Year, and an effective counterbalance to the two Dry Martinis (shaken not stirred) he had downed the night before, plus his glass of champagne: I had 7-Up, as is my wont.
Started the New Year in Southfields, South West London visiting a good friend. We saw in the New Year with Ursula Andress rising up from the sea in a digitally remastered DVD of Dr. No - wonderful quality. We noted that Dr. No was the first ever Bond movie, and, as such was finding still finding its feet. We sensed the film making a journey from the 50's (the world of gentlemen's clubs, gaming tables, politesse, in London) to something wilder, more surreal and less easy to pigeonhole when Bond travels to Jamaica...My friend noted how amazing the lavish sets of Dr. No's lair on a Caribbean island must have seemed to the audiences of the early 60's. Easy to underestimate the impact. I wondered if the sheer sumptousness and generosity of the designs, the play with colour, must have come as a wonderful and distraction to audiences still reeling from the austerity years.
We speculated on the way the film dances around the big subjects of radiation, paranoia, with espionage as the eye of the audience, Bond being our "way in" to these sinister, yet compelling hidden worlds: his quintessential Englishness is an essential ingredient. It is vital that he is not alien to us, but that he acts as a trusted guide to these alien worlds presided over by "super-powerful" concerns. We have to be able to recognise James Bond as one of our own. For him to be too crazy or too outlandish would be out of the question: 007 the conduit to richer, more dangerous, more tantalising experiences...
The erotic in Bond is always on the edge of danger...He engages with women who could be about to kill him...The kind of sex that a side of us both fears and desires...
So the sex must also be part of the drug...It too must be on a heightened plane of experience...The edge of a cliff, the edge of a bed...
And back to Bill's flat in Southfields: early to bed (about 1.00, which was fine by me), and, as Bill rightly judged it, a most pleasant fry-up breakfast of scrambled egg, bacon, toast and marmalade wtih English Breakfast tea...The only way to start the New Year, and an effective counterbalance to the two Dry Martinis (shaken not stirred) he had downed the night before, plus his glass of champagne: I had 7-Up, as is my wont.
posted by paul at
2:42:00 AM
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