Amazon.com video review:
Sean Connery casts a long shadow over the James Bond legacy. He created the movie persona
and starred in six of the first seven features, all but establishing the cool cold warrior as the
world's most suave secret agent. The six titles in MGM's third collection celebrate the Connery Bond
with three of his classics, including From Russia with Love, 007's second and perhaps finest
outing. A blond, buff Robert Shaw plays Bond's most ruthless nemesis, and Lotte Lenya and the great
Pedro Armindáriz costar in this sleek, high-energy trip through the Iron Curtain. Connery
travels to the Far East in You Only Live Twice, which introduces the international criminal
conspiracy SPECTRE and its cat-loving mastermind, Blofeld (Donald Pleasence). After a brief
retirement, Connery returned for Diamonds Are Forever, his final "official" appearance in the
Bond series (15 years later he played Bond for a rival studio's Never Say Never Again). This
more tongue-in-cheek adventure takes 007 to Las Vegas, where he battles Blofeld (this time played by
Charles Gray) and his minions--namely, a pair of fey, sardonic henchmen and a team of bikini-clad
karate killers.
Octopussy, a colorful cold war thriller and one of Roger Moore's better Bond outings, stars
Louis Jourdan as a corrupt Afghan prince and Maud Adams (making her second Bond appearance) as the
ringmaster of an all-babe traveling circus team that unknowingly carries a nuclear bomb. Christopher
Walken hams it up under a platinum-blond hairdo while his Amazon bodyguard, Grace Jones, growls
through A View to a Kill, a silly but often visually impressive adventure that made it
obvious Moore was too old and stiff to carry on the Bond legacy. The torch was passed to Timothy
Dalton in The Living Daylights, an attempt to clear away the camp elements of Moore's
portrayal and return to a lean, hard-edged spy thriller for the post-cold war era. It lacks the
larger-than-life characters and spectacle of previous Bond pictures, but Dalton was a tough,
ruthless 007 and a worthy inheritor of the legacy, which was then passed on to Pierce Brosnan.
The DVD editions of the films each feature audio commentary by the director and key members of the
crew, "making of" documentaries, and a host of stills, TV spots, trailers, and other supplements.
--Sean Axmaker
Amazon.com video review:
Roger Moore was nearing the end of his reign as James Bond
when he made Octopussy, and he looks a little worn out. But the
movie itself infuses some new blood into the old franchise, with a
frisky pace and a pair of sturdy villains. Maud Adams--who'd also been
in the Bond outing The
Man with the Golden Gun--plays the improbably named
Octopussy, while old smoothie Louis Jourdan is her crafty partner in
crime. There's an island populated only by women, plus a fantastic
sequence with a hand-to-hand fight that happens on a plane--and on
top of a plane. The film even has an extra emotional punch,
since this time out 007 is not only following the orders of Her
Majesty's Secret Service, but he is also exacting a personal revenge:
a fellow double-0 agent has been killed. Two Bond films were actually
released in 1983 within a few months of each other, as
Octopussy was followed by Sean Connery's comeback in Never Say Never
Again. The success of both pictures proved that there was
still plenty of mileage left in the old license to kill, though Moore
had one more workout--A
View to a Kill--before hanging it up. And that title? The
franchise had already used up the titles to Ian Fleming's novels, so
Octopussy was taken from a lesser-known Fleming short
story. --Robert Horton
