Riding high on “Octopussy”’s success, not just at the box office but in seeing off the threat of “Never Say Never Again”, the official Bond franchise pressed ahead with the next instalment. With the public’s affection for Roger Moore’s portrayal of Bond so recently validated, and with the producer’s preferred actors unavailable, the drive to cast a younger actor lost some momentum and so Roger…

Coming off the back of the biggest, most successful Bond film to date, what were the producers to do? Having had such major success in sticking closely to the source novels, they decided the best thing to do would be to take the title and setting of the last of Fleming’s Bond novels published before the author’s death and chuck everything else away. So, the Bond readers of 1967 found themselves…

It’s still not Sean in the opening gun barrel sequence but pretty much everything else which makes a Bond movie a Bond movie crystallises here, setting a template and a benchmark which the series would follow for the next forty years. For the first time, Bond appears in the pre-credits teaser and what a teaser it is. Brash, tongue in cheek and effortlessly cool. The wrinkle-free tuxedo under the…

After seeing it for the first time, James Bond creator Ian Fleming reportedly declared “Dr. No”, “Dreadful. Simply dreadful.” He was being more than a little unfair. The very first theatrical James Bond adaptation is a decent spy thriller, imbued with a few stylistic flourishes new to the genre and a surprisingly (in retrospect) humble attitude. Welcome to the first instalment of Craggus’ Bond…