The 23rd James Bond movie, Sam Mendes’ SKYFALL, releases tomorrow, so Film Babble Blog has been all about Bond this week with 007-centric posts leading up to my review of the highly anticipated film.
This time out, let's take a look at what I believe is the best car stunt of the series. In THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, Bond (Roger Moore) jumps his car, an AMC Hornet, over a broken bridge and it spins around 360 degrees in mid-air.
The amazing feat was done by stunt driver “Bumps” Willard in one take. It was slowed down with a slide whistle sound effect was added for the final film. You can see the scene below, and there's a sans slide whistle version somebody did, which may be preferable, included:
The stunt was even featured in the cool poster image (by artist Roger McGinnis):
So it goes - a stellar car stunt in a less than stellar Bond movie. Check back here tomorrow for my review of SKYFALL (Spoiler alert: it's stellar).
Just 2 days left until the 23rd James Bond movie, Sam Mendes’ SKYFALL, comes out so let’s continue on the countdown with another 007-centric post.
Starting in the summer of 2010, the Colony Theater in Raleigh, N.C. started showing 35 mm prints of the bulk of the James Bond series, one a month, in chronological order from DR. NO (1962) to DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002). To cap off the canon, last summer they re-screened the first 3 Connery classics to celebrate the series’ 50th anniversary.
I attended just about every screening (I missed one or two of the Pierce Brosnan ones), many of which I’d only seen on TV before, and covered the run for Examiner.com. Here are the links to those posts, back from when the Examiner would pay more for local content (those were the days). Please check them out (because, you know, every click I get at that content farm helps):
Since the 23rd James Bond movie, Sam Mendes’ SKYFALL, releases in 4 days, and also because it's the 50th anniversary of the series, I thought it would be cool to have some 007-centric posts leading up to my review of the highly anticipated film.
First, I thought I'd babble about one of my favorite parts of every Bond movie - the gun barrel opening, created by Maurice Binder. It's a piece of pure '60s pop art that I always love seeing. Check out this cut all of the previous 22 gun barrel sequences together in chronological order into this 9:09 clip from YouTube:
It's fun to see them back to back, because you get a mini-history of the actors who played Bond and see that Sean Connery and one-timer George Lazenby wore hats, Roger Moore mostly wore a tux (they use the same footage of Moore 5 times), and Pierce Brosnan also wore a tux but struck less of a pose than his predecessors.
Incidentally the first 3 gun barrels aren't Connery, they're stuntman Bob Simmons. For THUNDERBALL, they shot one of Connery that was first shown in color, then in reused in black and white in his next 2 Bonds for reasons unknown.
They re-use the same footage of Brosnan throughout his run too, but they add the bullet coming right at you in DIE ANOTHER DAY. Daniel Craig's first film as 007, 2006's CASINO ROYALE, doesn't open it with the gun barrel bit; it comes at the end of the cold opening leading into the theme song.
In 2008's QUANTUM OF SOLACE, it appears at the end of the movie before the credits roll. Will it be back to the beginning of SKYFALL to pay homage to the tradition? We shall soon see.
I also love how the above montage of gun barrels works as a mini-history of how Monty Norman's (or John Barry's, uh, it's complicated) “James Bond Theme” changed to suit the times over the years. Listen how it starts out orchestral, then gets vamped up with surf-guitar, becomes slightly funk-ified in the '70s, and all techno-ized in the '90s.
The gun barrel sequence has been parodied many times, too many to list (though I'm sure a site somewhere does), but here's my top 5:
The Simpsons: “And Maggie Makes Three” (Aired: Jan. 22, 1995)
Monty Python's Flying Circus: “The Pantomime Horse Is A Secret Agent” Film from episode 30: “Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror” (Aired: Nov. 9, 1972)
