ABC is showing one of the three or four best — arguably the best, and closest to the books — James Bond movies, From Russia With Love, tonight. The network's experiment in rerunning a dozen or so of the 007 films in chronological order began with Dr. No last Saturday, and was a ratings flop, either because young whippersnappers today won't watch a 40-year-old flick or because it was padded to three hours with unwatchable skits about the cast of ABC's Jim Belushi sitcom watching the movie, struggling to open a can of nuts, and discussing whether 007 could beat Godzilla. Courtney Thorne-Smith can star in my Bond movie any day, but otherwise must-miss TV.
But if you don't mind time-tripping to 1963 and can Tivo through the foul filler, it's well worth seeing not only the increasingly suave and confident Sean Connery but the superlative villains, Lotte Lenya and Robert Shaw, and getting a taste of Ian Fleming's Bond: a character as dated to the 1950s as Sherlock Holmes is to the 1890s, but a thoroughly credible Cold War spy, an underpaid civil servant working for a declining England, and (though Fleming called him "that cardboard booby") a far more three-dimensional figure than the jokey superhero of most of the movies.
After FRWL, the third big-screen Bond and breakthrough hit was 1964's Goldfinger, which also has a claim to be the greatest but whose gadget-equipped Aston Martin set the series on its fateful path toward Saturday-morning cartoons starring Roger Moore; today, Pierce Brosnan and the producers are at least trying to unsplit Bond's personality or find the right ratio of guts to glitz, but the damage has long since been done.
The movies have also done wrong by Bond's true heir; the late Adam Hall's Quiller novels are an amazing combination of Fleming's "one man saving the world" swashbucklers and John le Carre's realistic, gritty depictions of the half-bureaucratic, half-murderous life of British Intelligence. But the only movie, The Quiller Memorandum, combined a stagy Harold Pinter screenplay and miscast American star George Segal.
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