"Thunderball" (1965) Vs "No Time to Die" (2021) (MAJOR SPOILERS FOR BOTH)

I don't QUITE come here to post that "No Time to Die" was too woke to live. "Woke" has become a loaded word that draws anger as much as supporters. The world has changed, and the men and women who run "Hollywood" have changed, and here we are. And by now everybody knows just how far they took James Bond from his beginnings with this "final film" (for Daniel Craig.)

But I'd like to "fill in the blanks" a bit by offering a little Bond history and focusing on perhaps the MOST Bond-like of the Connery Bond films: Thunderball.

I offer three opening points about James Bond:

ONE: The "Connerys" of the 1960s were a true phenomenon of that decade. They weren't just movies. They were EVENTS. Box office then and now is subject to population, worldwide theaters, inflation of ticket prices, but clearly back then, two of the Bonds -- Goldfinger(1964) and Thunderball(1965) were like "Titanic" in their earnings and even bigger as events that were Number One on the mind of moviegoers in countries all around the world.

TWO: The Connery Bonds were also -- well before the R rating came in 1968 -- shockingly "new" and direct about a couple of things: (1) Killing people (the "hero" had a license to kill, and clearly enjoyed doing it, in a sadistic manner , to bad guys who deserved it; (2) Having sex (no settling down to a wife and kid for THAT Bond -- at least two women per movie, sometimes more and the babe he had in his arms at the end of the movie was gone by the next movie.) Even more than the violence, the sex of James Bond was revolutionary and drove a lot of married men crazy. Married women too -- Connery was as much a sex object as "the Bond girls."

THREE: James Bond as something important -- I say -- really ENDED with the 60's. Box office peaked with Thunderball, and the next Connery(You Only Live Twice) did a little WORSE at the box office, and he quit. A one-hit wonder named George Lazenby -- the only Bond who was close to Connery's big, strapping size -- dully presided over a very big budget Bond(On Her Majesty's Secret Service) in which Bond finally got married -- and lost his wife to Blofeld's bullets on their wedding day. It was 1969. The 60s were over. Bond was effectively over. Surely all the TV spy shows he inspired were over -- The Man From UNCLE, I Spy, The Wild Wild West, The Avengers -- all gone ("it was a fad," said UNCLE star Robert Vaughn.)

But James Bond continued on for 50 plus more years, you'll say. Sure, but he was no longer shocking or sexual( the producers never allowed an R Bond) or Number One(much). Connery returned for "the first Roger Moore Bond" in the jokey and cheapjack Diamonds Are Forever(1971.) And then Roger Moore fronted "spoof Bonds" that were tied to other hits: Shaft(Live and Let Die), Enter the Dragon(The Man With the Golden Gun), Jaws(the waterbound Spy Who Loved Me with bad guy "Jaws") and Moonraker(Star Wars.)

When Moore's lackluster "For Your Eyes Only" came out against Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman II in 1981, a studio exec said "Bond performs -- usually around Number 5 for the summer -- but nobody cares."

As Moore stayed too long(a Bond who couldn't take his shirt off!) it took forever for the Bond movies to finally seem like REAL action movies -- the Dalton era started that, and that led to a SIX YEAR break(Bond wasn't missed) til Brosnan came along and then Craig and ...here we are.

Word is that the Craig Bonds have earned more than any of them, but I'd like to know more about inflation and ticket prices, and the bottom line is that there are zillions more worldwide customers today(China!) and Bond is still...boring.

So they had to DO something with him.

Which takes me back to : Thunderball.

The Bond movies started out as low-budget gambles, but once they hit, Thunderball got more budget than any of them and made more money than any of them. It had epic scale, Panavision shots of the Bahamas and the open seas, big action sequences( a lot of them underwater) and...probably the largest number of sexiest Bond Girls(one blond, one brunette, one redhead) in any Bond movie.

Still short of the R rating, Thunderball is perhaps the sexiest Bond movie ever made. Much of it is "at the beach" so both Connery(a big, tall, hairy, former bodybuilding champ ala Arnold) and some of the women are wearing skimpy swimsuits a lot of the time. Playboy magazine dutifully put the women(dressed I think) in an issue but also played up CONNERY as a brawny shirtless sex symbol(indeed, for anyone who thinks the Connery Bonds played up women as sex objects, they also played up CONNERY as one. The ladies loved him.)

Early on, Connery famously "beds" (standing up, against a glass steam room wall) his health club trainer(she's gorgeous -- its NOT rape -- and they end up in bed together later.) That's in England. That's the blond.

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