‘Sean Connery 007 James Bond Collection’ 4K UHD Blu-ray (review)

The words “legendary” and “iconic” are tossed around a lot these days but sure if any subject deserves them it’s Sean Connery, and especially his portrayal of Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

With the possible exception of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name no single performance did more to change what an adventure movie could be, or what we expect from the hero of such a film to act like.

Connery’s Bond is ruthless, tough, sensual, stylish, smart and sexy. The Bond films became international blockbusters beyond the producers’ wildest dreams because they tapped into a universal fantasy of power, sex appeal, and sophistication.

Presented here are Connery’s six official outings as James Bond 007 (his unofficial turn in 1983’s Never Say Never Again is omitted) in glorious 4K restorations on UHD.

A word on all of the films so it doesn’t need to be repeated in each review: These films are products of the mid-60’s, and Bond was considered a “rough” character even in that context. I can completely understand why the Connery Bond’s treatment of women may be a deal breaker for some (especially in light of comments made by the actor later in life) but I’ll be reviewing these films as cultural artifacts in their time and place.

Without further ado…

Dr. No (1962)

What’s most startling about Dr. No more than 60 years on from its premiere is how much of the Bond formula seems to have been set right from the beginning.

The pop-art aesthetic, the great music, exotic locales, seduction and high style of the Bond films are all present here, muted as they may be by a smaller budget.

Dr. No is structured for its first two halves as a detective story with Bond groping at an unseen adversary in Doctor No (Joseph Wisemen) whose grand ambition is only suggested by Ken Adam’s legendary set design.

The third act, set on No’s private island of Crab Key, kicks off with the now legendary entrance of Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) in a white bikini that would have been startling in 1962, and ends with a full confrontation between Bond and Noin the very first Bond lair.

The film works because of the immense personal charisma of its star, Sean Connery.

From his laconic introduction with a cigarette dripping from his lip as he intones “Bond. James Bond” right up until he’s letting the rope go on his rescue raft so he can make more time with Honey Ryder, Connery’s Bond is indelible.

Connery moves like a jungle cat in a Savile Row suit and the film gets enormous mileage out of small, quiet scenes where he sweeps his hotel room for listening devices or moves across a crowded airport and marks the various agents watching him. Director Terence Young had a great personal style and love for the good life along with a pitch black sense of ironic humor which he wisely decided to impart to the character of Bond and the result is the ultimate male fantasy, even on a budget.

Extras include commentary, vintage featurettes, a retrospective featurette, and trailers, TV spots, & radio ads.

From Russia, With Love (1963)

The first Bond film made back almost 60 times its one million dollar budget and the production team of Albert R. (“Cubby”) Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wasted no time in getting back as much of the whole crew together for the follow-up, which may be to this day the best of the Bond films.

This time Bond is sent to seduce Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) a Soviet diplomatic attache who works at the consulate in Turkey and claims to have fallen in love with a file photograph of him. The whole thing seems insane, but because she’s promised to bring a Soviet Lektor decoding unit with her, the British send Bond in.

What they don’t know is that the whole operation is a trap from SPECTRE, an international syndicate, looking to discredit the British Secret Service and capture the Lektor for themselves. What follows lacks the pizazz of Dr. No’s Ken Adam production design but is in every other way a superior collection of sex, death, and Cold War action set pieces.

Robert Shaw plays Red Grant, a psychopathic SPECTRE killer training to kill Bond and Lotte Lenya is Rosa Klebb– a Soviet defector who allows the organization to manipulate Romanova. This film uses them to bookend the action with the very first pre-credits sequence and also the very first instance of “the henchman returning for one last fight” both of which would become staples of the series.

This entry may be the only film in the series to really capture the sweep of Fleming’s prose as it moves Bond from Istanbul to the Orient Express and finally a climatic showdown in Venice. An absolute classic– an improvement on the original in every way.

Fans of the series returning to this classic may be surprised by the highly serious tone for the series and the excellent crew of supporting players. From Russia, With Love remains to this day one of the most respected Bond pictures on a technical level with director Terence Young drawing in influences as disparate as Hitchcock and German Expressionism to create a highly credible and exciting chase across Eastern Europe.

Extras include commentary, vintage featurettes, a retrospective featurette, and trailers, TV spots, & radio ads.

Goldfinger (1964)

 If From Russia, With Love set the formula into stone, Goldfinger exploded it into myth.

This film is one of the very few to stand with Star Wars in terms of instant cultural explosion.

After 1977, every studio developed science fiction projects for film and television for the remainder of the 1970’s.

After Goldfinger there was a four year run where super spies became absolutely ubiquitous in all media and the accoutrements of Bond entered the public mind forever.

In his third outing, Connery’s Bond is sent after Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe), a worldwide gold commodities dealer who is suspected of smuggling. He’s got the invincible henchman in Oddjob (Harold Sakata), who kills with a steel brimmed hat; he’s employing gorgeous pilot Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman); and he’s got a brilliant and audacious master plan to topple the world economy by setting off a nuclear weapon in Fort Knox.

Every beat of this film became cultural shorthand: the laser cliffhanger; the beautiful woman killed by being painted in gold paint; the pitched battle between the villain’s forces and the Army; the villain explaining his entire evil scheme via a detailed presentation; the villain and Bond dueling at a game of chance to prefigure the main fight between them; Oddjob as an implacable, invincible foe; Q and Bond trading barbs over incredible gadgets.

Speaking of gadgets, the film introduces Bond’s Aston Martin DB5– which the franchise trades on to this very day. This is both the first film to provide a true blow away gadget and the first film to get the dynamic between Q (Desmond Llewyllyn) and Bond completely correct, giving the series one of its most reliable mainstays.

Ironically Bond is pretty ineffectual in the actual flow of the story.

One of the reasons it works is that the film establishes Goldfinger as a brilliant opponent who is always one step ahead of Bond (who himself has been so well established in the first two films that he never looks weak here, his disadvantage only makes the villains look strong).

Goldfinger hit the magic spot between Dr. No and From Russia With Love– marrying the latter’s increased scale with the former’s strong art direction and visual flair. It lightened the tone and repurposed Bond as a more fantastic, lighter character. The form of the classic Bond film was set and would not be broken away from until arguably 2005’s reboot Casino Royale.

It is a cultural touchstone for a reason.

Extras include two commentary tracks, vintage featurettes, a retrospective featurette, and trailers, TV spots, & radio ads.

Thunderball (1965)

Thunderball came out at the height of the cultural mania Goldfinger created. It had always been conceived as the first James Bond film but legal issues between creator Ian Fleming and the screenwriters Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham with whom he wrote the script he cannibalized to create the novel prevented the book from being filmed until 1965.

This time Bond is sent to a health farm in the English countryside at the same time SPECTRE agents are there to execute a daring plot to steal nuclear warheads from a NATO bomber and hold the world at ransom. Bond picks up a clue that leads him to Domino Derval who is living as a kept woman with SPECTRE second in command Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi) in the Bahamas.

Thunderball marks the return of original Bond director Terence Young but it was firmly made in the tone and spirit of Goldfinger. It is easily the most difficult film to review in this set because all of Connery’s work is first rate, and the film is the most stylish of all the Bonds to this day.

However, it is bogged down in excess: every story beat is designed to top the extravagance of Goldfinger and this is the first point at which the series began to experience diminishing returns from the “bigger is better” philosophy of filmmaking.

It also used a revolutionary technique for filming sequences underwater that perhaps the producers were a bit too in love with, and many of the action sequences (the finale included) suffer from being performed underwater and thus, in slow motion.

Thunderball in many ways marks the end of the first sequence of Bond films.

Bond’s character, particularly his ability to manipulate women through sex, would be toned down in future films that embraced pure fantasy and a campier tone. Thunderball contains a great Bond film within it somewhere, but it’s overextended, flabby, and sluggish.

It’s worth a first watch just to see Sean Connery at the absolute height of his powers, but it does not live up to the previous three films.

Extras include two commentary tracks, vintage featurettes, a retrospective featurette, black & white commercials for Bond merchandise, and trailers, TV spots, & radio ads.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

The fifth film starring Connery as Bond essentially ended the spy boom of the 1960’s and features probably the most imaginative and polished work from composer John Barry and production designer Ken Adam that the series ever got.

The final set, Blofeld’s lair inside a hollowed out volcano, cost as much to build as all of Dr. No cost to produce.

Behind the scenes, Connery was sick of the part and announced that this film would be his last as James Bond.

Contract disputes, never ending media attention and a fear of typecasting all contributed to his exit early in production and the film has the feeling of finality: Bond “dies”; Bond finally comes face to face with SPECTRE head Ernst Stravo Blofeld (Donald Pleasance); he “marries”; there’s an incredible duel in attack helicopters over a volcano; the plot is so large it involves space travel.

This is a film designed to wow.

After an opening where Bond is apparently killed in the line of duty we soon find his death has been faked so he can travel to Japan and investigate who is capturing American and Soviet orbital craft before it sparks World War 3. Bond works with Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba) the head of the Japanese Secret Service and his beautiful agent Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) to investigate Osato Chemicals before realizing they’re a front company for SPECTRE who have undertaken a contract to start a war between the US and USSR.

You Only Live Twice is the first Bond film that feels silly in places. Connery seems less invested, the supporting players feel like they’re firmly doing schtick instead of character work, and the spectacle has completely overwhelmed suspense. This is a film with a volcano lair that contains a working monorail and a ninja army armed with rocket guns.

Legendary children’s author (and friend of Ian Fleming) Roald Dahl was contracted to write the script for You Only Live Twice and to dramatically change the action from Fleming’s novel. So the film leans in heavier on the gadgets, especially baby helicopter “Little Nellie”, and on the general atmosphere than in any kind of spy craft.

That said, this is the most gorgeous Bond film of Connery run– sweeping crane and aerial shots along with incredible location photography of 60’s Tokyo mark Lewis Gilbert as a much more visually inventive director than his direct predecessors.

You Only Live Twice is a highly entertaining film but many of the camp sins it committed here would derail later films as the producers became more comfortable with Bond as a figure of general fun rather than a tough spy.

Extras include commentary, vintage featurettes, and trailers, TV spots, & radio ads.

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

After On Her Majesty’s Secret Service wound up a financial disappointment, United Artists insisted that Broccoli and Saltzman pony up to get Sean Connery back for the next film.

In hindsight OHMSS is a great film in full keeping with the spirit of the first four Bond movies, and no new star would be able to recapture the mania of Connery’s last three outings but United Artists was afraid that their most valuable franchise was in danger and pulled the trigger.

After finally killing Blofeld (Charles Grey) once and for all, Bond is set upon a pipeline of diamond smugglers who have been so successful that they could threaten the world market and seem to be killing off their own operatives one at a time.

He makes contact with smuggler Tiffany Case (Jill St. John) in Holland undercover and agrees to smuggle the last shipment of diamonds into Las Vegas for her.

Upon arrival in Vegas Bond is beset by a network of gangsters, killers, and hustlers who all seem to lead to reclusive casino magnate Willard Whyte (Jimmy Dean) – but all is not as it seems.

Connery returns along with Goldfinger director Guy Hamilton, replacing OHMSS director Peter Hunt and unfortunately it’s very clear he’s more interested in getting the film back on safe ground and not taking any chances and it shows.

This was the first Bond picture to be written by a fan of the films (American wunderkind Tom Mankiewicz) and while the script is clear and the structure is strong there’s a self referential camp quality to the proceedings that is ratcheted up from You Only Live Twice almost to the point of self parody.

We get women with names like “Plenty O’Toole” and Blofeld in drag and altogether this seems like an overcorrection from the bleaker, more realistic tone of the previous film in the series.

The film has two stand outs: an incredible car chase through the Vegas Strip with Bond in a Ford Mustang and a pair of gay henchmen Wint and Kidd (Putter Smith and Bruce Glover) who are stalking Bond (and the rest of the smuggling ring) throughout the film.

Other than that this is the first real misfire in the series and a shame that it brings to a close both Connery’s official tenure as Bond and this otherwise excellent box set.

The Final Word

This is the best these films have ever been presented; crisp, cinematic and tasteful in the new 4K transfers and the audio features two options, a brand-new Dolby Atmos remix and a DTS track featuring the original theatrical mono audio.

The films themselves retain their power to excite and surprise and the core fantasy that was Sean Connery’s James Bond: a cocktail of sex, danger, and glamour will always work, even if some of the rougher edges haven’t survived the sensibilities of our time.

This is an easy recommendation and the kind of keystone physical media purchase that justifies upgrading to experience these films with the people you love in their best possible quality.

Recommended.