Ultimate Edition

We all know that Daniel Craig helped effectively reboot the James Bond movie franchise in 2006 with the amazing Casino Royale. But let's not forget that Pierce Brosnan was at the helm of the first Bond "rebirth" in Goldeneye. Brosnan was the darling of Bond producer Albert Broccoli in the mid '80s, but was unable to take the role because of his then-current commitment to the television show Remington Steele. Assuming he could have gotten the job back then, he would have followed Roger Moore after A View to a Kill.

Well, after the worldwide success of Dr. No, producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman went back to figure out what to do about a sequel, and following a nod to the series by then-President Kennedy, From Russia With Love was the next candidate in line to be given the Bond treatment from the library of Ian Fleming novels.

In this film, Bond (the returning Sean Connery) has recently vanquished Dr. No, and the organization that he worked for, SPECTRE, decides to try to eliminate Bond, using two things that will lure any well-respecting secret agent, a decoding machine that the Russian government currently is in possession of, and a Russian defector that wants to turn it over to James specifically.

After seeing Casino Royale it's hard to look at a Bond film the same way, and when Roger Moore inhabited the guy who likes martinis, fast cars and dangerous situations, it may have been a little cheesy. Granted, Moore did appear in a couple of notable Bond misses, but in the tenth release of the James Bond franchise, The Spy Who Loved Me stands as one of his best, if not the best Moore film.

From a screenplay by Richard Maibaum (his 7th Bond film) and Christopher Wood (his first) and directed by Lewis Gilbert (his 2nd Bond film), this new situation finds James at first in Austria, being chased by assassins, with everyone on skis.

Synopsis

Of all the Bond films and the various images and gadgets that have come from it through 20 films, the one that probably crystallized most of these images is Goldfinger. You have the awesome Aston Martin car with the ejector seat, machine guns, and the like. You had the female who could kick ass and had a really cool name in Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman, Bridget Jones’s Diary). And you had Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton, Ten Little Indians) experiencing the most creative death to...

Well, there’s nothing quite like your first, and when producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman decided to bring about a barely 30 year old Scotsman named Sean Connery, whose most recent work was as a British soldier in The Longest Day, into the film version of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, who had any idea that Dr. No would become a culture landmark, let alone a movie franchise?

Now, one of the first things that comes to mind when you watch Dr. No, if you haven’t watched it in aw...

It goes without saying that the James Bond franchise is the crown jewel of the MGM and Sony vault. And in preparation for Daniel Craig’s turn as the man who likes his martinis shaken and not stirred in Casino Royale, it was decided to let them run with some things in order to double-dip Joe Q. DVD Buyer. And in the UK, where Bond reigns supreme, these new “Ultimate Editions” of all the James Bond movies have just been released (don’t worry US fans, these are on their way in November).

The UK version ...