Guide to James Bond

In Tokyo, Bond is contacted at a sumo wrestling match by an attractive agent named Aki. She takes him to see local MI6 agent Dikko Henderson, who claims he has evidence that they rogue spacecraft originated in Japan, but is killed before he can say more. Bond chases and kills his assassin. He then disguises himself asat the killer and is driven to the source of the conspiracy, the head office of Osato Chemicals. Stealing documents from the safe, he sets off an alarm. In the ensuing gun battle, Bond is rescued by Aki in a sports car. But she refuses to answer Bond’s questions, pulls to a halt and flees into a seemingly disused subway station. Bond gives chase and falls through a trap door. He then slides down a tube into the office of Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Ssecret Sservice.

Together they examine the documents Bond has stolen. Among them is a manifest carrying quantities of liquid oxygen, a substance needed to power a space rocket. There is also a picture of a cargo ship, the Ning-Po, and a micro dot containing athe message saying that the tourist who had taken the picture had been liquidated for security reasons.

The following day, Bond returns to Osato Chemicals, posing as a representative of Empire Chemicals. When he leaves, the boss, Mr Osato, tells his assistant Helga Brandt to “kill him”. Again Bond is rescued from a drive-by shooting outside the building by Aki in her sports car again. The would-be killers give chase. Aki contacts Tanaka, who arranges for a helicopter equipped with a huge magnet to pick up the car pursuing them and dump it in Tokyo Bay.

Bond and Aki then head to Kobe docks to investigate the Ning-Po. They are attacked by a dockside gang. Aki escapes, but Bond is captured. He awakes in Helga Brandt’s cabin on board, where she interrogates himher. But Bond uses his charm and bribery, he thinks, to turn her. However, when she is flying him to Tokyo in a light aircraft, she traps him in the back and balesbails out, leaving him to his fate. Bond struggles free and manages to crash-land the plane and escape before it blows up.

From surveillance photographs, Tanaka has deduced that the Ning-Po has delivered its cargo of liquid oxygen to an offshore island. Bond decides to take a look in a heavy-armed autogyro called Little Nellie, delivered personally by Q. He finds nothing on the island apart from a fishing village and a volcano, but is attacked by four helicopters. With the help of Little Nellie, he downs them. The question remains: what is so important on the island that it needs such defences?

To find out, Bond is to be disguised as a Japanese fisherman and to infiltrateinfiltrated the island undercover by marrying a local girl, Kissy Suzuki. But first he is trained in the martial arts with Tanaka’s army of ninjas. His mission becomes more urgent. A Soviet spacecraft has also been hi-jacked, though the Americans still suspect the Soviet Union is responsible. Another American space mission is due for launch and the US threatens war if it goes missing.

Kissy mentions that a local woman had mysteriously died after rowing into a cave. She and Bond go to investigate. The cave is the vent of the island’s volcano and is protected by phosgene gas, a man-made poison, again indicating that the island hides an important secret. Bond and Kissy climb the volcano. They see a helicopter disappear into the crater and discover that there is a secret rocket base hidden under the crater floor. Bond slips through the crater door while Kissy returns to alert Tanaka.

Bond finds and frees the captured astronauts. He steals a spacesuit and is about to board the spacecraft when Blofeld, head of SPECTRE, who is running this operation, spots him. For failing to kill Bond, Helga Brandt is dropped in a pool of piranhas that Blofeld keeps in his office.

Bond is taken to see Blofeld. For the first time, we see the face of the cat-stroking SPECTRE nNumber oOne. (Blofeld does not have the trade-mark white cat in the books. However, Goldfinger has a ginger cat which he gives to Oddjob for his supper.) Blofeld explains that he has been contracted to provoke a nuclear war between the US and the USSR, so that they will annihilate each other and allow a new power – presumably Red China – to emerge. Blofeld says he is going to kill Bond. As he has already escaped death once, Blofeld tells himsays: “You only live twice.”

Bond asks for a last cigarette. He takes one from his case, which that has a small rocket inside it, developed by Tanaka. He shoots the guard who operates the door in the crater floor and opens it himself. Tanaka’s ninja army storm in. Battle is joined. Bond joins Tanaka and Kissy, then makes his way back to the control room where there is a button that will below up the SPECTRE spacecraft. On the way he meets Blofeld's large Germanic bodyguard, Hans and, who Bond throws into him into the piranha pool. Then he reaches the control room and blows up the SPECTRE spacecraft in the nick of time. The Americans stand down their nuclear strike force and the world is saved.

Blofeld escapes down a secret passage and activates the base’s self-destruct system. Bond, Kissy, Tanaka and the surviving ninjas escaped down the tunnel vent to the cave. Out atto sea, inflatable lifeboats are dropped. Bond and Kissy are about to consummate their marriage, when their life raft is picked up by the submarine with M on board.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

Sean Connery announced that You Only Live Twice would be his last Bond movie. In his placeInstead Broccoli and Saltzman cast Australian actor George Lazenby, who had a bit part in the Italian-Spanish Bond spoof Espionage in Tangiers in 1965. He would star in the next Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In the opening sceneof OHMSS, he saves the heroine from the waves. Unlike in the book, he beats off the gangsters while she escapesmakes off. Then Lazenby says: “This never happened to the other fella.”

After the title credits, Bond returns to the hotel, where he learns that the girl is the Comtesse Teresa di Vicenzo. That night in the casino, she is losing heavily. Bond rides to the rescue as she has no money. She invites him to her room, saying she hopes it will be worth it. There Bond is attacked by a large assailant, butwho he beats him off. Back in his Bond’s room, Tracy pulls his Bond’s own gun on him. Nevertheless, she sleeps with him. In the morning, he finds she has left the money he paid in the casino and checked out. In the lobby of the hotel, Bond is picked up by two gangsters again carrying his own gun. They take him to see Draco who, again, offers him a million pounds to marry his daughter. Bond refuses, but agrees to continue seeing her if Draco finds out where Blofeld is.

Back in London, M relieves Bond of the mission to find Blofeld. Bond dictates his letter of resignation to Miss Moneypenny. M’s only reactions is to say: “Request granted.” However, Moneypenny has substituted a request for two -weeks' leave. Bond attends Draco’s birthday party. Tracy turns up and forces her father to tell Bond what he wants to know, otherwise she will never see him again, she says. Draco tells Bond that he has traced a Swiss lawyer associated with Blofeld. Bond breaks into his office in Bern and copies a letter from Blofeld to the College of Arms asking for confirmation of his right to use the title Comte Balthazar de Bleuchamp – Bleuville, in the book – the French version of Blofeld. After Bond visits M at this home – annoying his boss, a butterfly collector, with hishe casual expertise in lLepidoptera – he is re-assigned to the hunt for Blofeld.

Posing as Sir Hillary Bray, Bond visits Blofeld’s Alpine allergy clinic and meets the ten young women there. At dinner he wears a kilt and oneon of them, Ruby, writes her room number, 8, on his inner thigh. He visits her room and discovers that the girls are being brainwashed. The following night Bond returns to Ruby’s room to find Irma Bunt in the bed. He is taken to Blofeld, who says that Bond has given himself away with several elementary mistakes. He then explains how he plans to hold the world to ransom, otherwise he will used the brainwashed girls he has sent around to world to spread biological agents that will destroy crops and livestock.

Bond makes a daredevil escape down the cable of the cable -car, then flees on skis. Again he is rescued by Tracy, who lures their pursuers ionto a stock-car race on ice. Leaving the pursuers’ car ablaze they escape, but run out of petrol and spend a night in a barn, where Bond proposes. In the morning, Blofeld turns up on skis, but Bond and Tracy have already gone. There is another ski chase. This time, Blofeld stops them by causing an avalanche. He rescues Tracy, but leaves Bond to die. However, Bond digs himself out. Back in London he learns that the United Nations hashave agreed to Blofeld’s terms. Bond contacts Draco. With a squad of Draco’s men on board helicopters, they rescue Tracy and blow up Blofeld’s clinic. Blofeld escapes on a bobsled. Bond chases after him. After a prolonged tussle, Blofeld gets his neck caught in the fork of a tree which, miraculously, does not kill him.

Bond and Tracy marry. When they are heading off on their honeymoon, Blofeld and Irma Bunt drive by and shoot up their car, killing Tracy. Like the first four Eon films, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is relatively faithful to the book.
Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

Sean Connery returned as Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. The movie begins with him searching all over the world for Blofeld. He tracks him to a facility where he is making look-alikes of himself. Bond drowns a test subject, but is captured by Blofeld. After a tussle, he throws Blofeld into a pool of superheated mud.

The main story begins with Bond being briefed about diamonds, and showing where he shows off his connoisseurship of sherry – again to M’s annoyance. There has been an increase in smuggling and there is thea fear is that diamonds are being stockpiled to be dumped later on the market to depress prices. Meanwhile in South Africa, Mr Wint and Mr Kidd – Spang’s “torpedoes” in the book – kill a dentist bringing the diamonds smuggled out of the mines and the helicopter pilot who is supposed to take them on the next leg of their journey. They then deliver the diamonds to a missionary who is to take them to Amsterdam. She turns up dead in a canal.

Bond is sent to Amsterdam posing as the smuggler Peter Franks. He meets Franks’s contact Tiffany Case at her apartment. However , the real Franks turns up. Bond kills him and switches ID, so that Tiffany thinks that Frankshe has really killed Bond. The diamonds are smuggled to Los Angeles in Franks’s corpse, which is cleared at LAX by Felix Leiter, posing as a customs official. The corpse is then taken to a funeral home in Nevada where it is cremated; and the recovered diamonds are to be handed on to the next man in the chain, Shady Tree. When Bond picks up his $50,000 fee, he is struck over the head and wakes up inside a coffin that is being incinerated. At the last moment, the coffin is flung open and Bond is accused of passing on fakes. The smugglers demand that he hand over the real diamonds. Bond counters by accusing them of giving him fake money as they would hardly burn a genuinea real $50,000. When they give him real money, he says, he will give them the real diamonds. In the mean time, he relaxes in Las Vegas, where Shady Tree is killed by Wint and Kidd.

Bond is paid out on the craps tables at a casino owned by the reclusive millionaire Willard Whyte. Impressed by his winnings, a young lady named Plenty O’Toole invites herself up to his room. As she undresses, she is grabbed by the smugglers and thrown out of the window. Luckily, she lands in the hotel swimming pool. Bond spends the rest of the night with Tiffany Case, who ostensibly agrees to steal the diamonds and share them with Bond. Bond arranges for Tiffany to pick up the diamonds. They are hidden inside a stuffed toy at the Circus Circus Las Vegas casino, where she is under surveillance by Leiter and his men. She gives them the slip.

Bond catches up with her at her home when Plenty O’Toole has been drowned in the Tiffany’s pool. (In a deleted scene, Plenty returnsed to Bond’s room to recover her clothes and takes a card from Tiffany’s purse.) Realizing her life is in danger, Tiffany tells Bond that the diamonds are in a locker at the airport. Heading there, he sees a porter retrieve them and give them to Bert Saxby, the floor manager at Whyte’s casino. Bond follows the diamonds to a research facility owned by Willard Whyte andwhere he discovers laser refraction specialist Professor Metz building a satellite. His cover blown, Bond escapes on a mMoon-buggy. He reunites with Tiffany and is involved in a spectacular car chase around Las Vegas.

They return to the bridal suite of Whyte’s hotel. Bond then scales the building on the top of the elevator and, after a daredevil climb, breaks into Whyte’s penthouse apartment. However, he is expected. He is confronted by two identical Blofelds who use and electronic voice box to imitate Willard Whyte on the phone. Bond kicks the villain’s white cat: itwhich flees into the arms of its master and , who Bond kills him with a shot through the forehead. ButHowever, he has killed the wrong one. Blofeld had also cloned the cats.

Bond is allowed to leave, but is gassed in the elevator. Wint and Kidd then have him sealed in a pipeline that is under construction. He shorts out the machine that automatically welds the sections together and escapes. Q has developed an electronic voice box like the one Blofeld is using. Posing as Bert Saxby, Bond discovers where the real Willard Whyte is and rescues him. Together they work out that Blofeld is using the diamonds to build an orbiting laser. It has already been launched. The laser begins to destroying nuclear missiles in the US, USSR and China, while Blofeld proposes an auction for nuclear supremacy.

Whyte works out that Blofeld is using an oil rig off the coast of Baja, California as his control centre. Bond arrives and switches the cassette that controls the satellite for a music tape. . However, Tiffany, who is being held hostage on the rig, in a misplaced effort to help him, switches them back. As Leiter and the CIA attack, Blofeld tries to escape in a mini-submarine. But Bond takes over the crane used to launched it and uses the mini-sub as a wrecking ball to destroy the control centre.

Bond and Tiffany then set off to England on an ocean liner. But Wint and Kidd are also on board. Posing asa waiters, they try to assassinate the couple. B. But Bond gets the better of them and they end up overboard. The movie closesends with Tiffany looking up at bright spot in the sky and asking how they are going to get the diamonds down again.

Live and Let Die (1973)

In Live and Let Die, Roger Moore – Ian Fleming’s second choice – takes over as Bond. Again, the movie borrows characters and settings from the book, but abandons the plot. The film begins with the murder of the UK delegate to the United Nations. Another man is stabbed atoutsideout the Fillet of Soul restaurant in New Orleans and his body carried off in a coffin, accompanied by a jazz band. A third is killed on the Caribbean island of San Monique, in a voodoo ceremony by a priest brandishing a snakeake on the Caribbean island of San Monique. All three are British and, by co-incidence, the murdered agent at the UN had been sent there to keep an eye on San Monique’s prime minister, Dr Kananga. Bond is sent to New York to investigate.

The CIA send a car to collect him from the airport. The driver is killed on the Franklin D. Roosevelt River Drive. Leiter traces the killer’s car to a voodoo shop, then to a Fillet of Soul restaurant in Harlem. BondHe takes a seat, the booth revolves and he finds himself in Mr Big’s lair where he meets the fortune-telling Solitaire. Mr Big orders his men to kill Bond, who turns to Solitaire and asks her to predict his future. She tells him to take a tarot card. It shows “The Lovers”. Bond says: “Us?”

Two of Mr Big’s henchmen then take him outside. Bond knocks them unconscious, only to be stopped at gunpoint by another black man – who introduces himself as Harold Strutter of the CIA.

Bond follows Kananga to San Monique, where several attempts are made on his life. He meets Rosie Carver from the CIA, who poses as Mrs James Bond. With the boatman Quarrel Jr, they set out to find the place the where the MI6 man was killed. But Bond suspects Rosie is a double -agent working for Kananga. When he threatens her, she takes off into the forest and is killed.

With the help of Quarrel and a boat-towed paraglider, Bond drops in on Solitaire. Again the tarot cards predict that they will become lovers – though, this time, Bond has stacked the deck. By losing her virginity, Solitaire believes that she has lost her powers to see intoforetell the future. NAs now she is no good to Kananga, she hasd not choice but to go with Bond. Pursued by a helicopter, they seek cover under huge camouflage nets that are hiding poppy fields. To escape the island, Bond seizes a double-decker bus. After a car chase, they reach the pier where they are rescued by Quarrel.

Arriving in New Orleans, they are seized by a cab driver whoto deliverstakes them to Mr Big’s private aeroplane. But Bond takes over a two-seater with a trainee pilot – an old lady on board – on board and escapes, at the cost of the plane’s wings. Bond and Leiter then go to investigate the Fillet of Soul restaurant in New Orleans. Strutter, who is outside, is stabbed and his body carried off in a coffin accompanied by a jazz band as before. While Leiter goes to take a phone call, the seat Bond is sitting on disappears into the floor and he arrives in another of Mr Big’s lairs.

Mr Big reveals himself asto be Kananga, wearing a prosthetic mask. He is concerned about the loss of Solitaire’s virginity. Ever the gentleman, Bond refuses to speak on the matter. Kananga also tells Bond aboutreveals his plan to flood America with free heroin to drive out the competition, including the Mafia. Then, when he has the market to himself, the price will go up.

Bond is taken to a drugs laboratory in a crocodile farmer. Mr Big’s one-armed henchman, Tee Hee Johnson, puts Bond in a small island in the middle of a pond of hungry alligators. He escapes by running across their backs to the shore. After luringThen he lures the most savage into the drugs lab, he and sets it on fire. Escaping on a speed boat, he sets off a chase that involves Kananga’s men, the local sheriff J.W. Pepper and the Louisiana state police.

As Solitaire is now no good to Kananga, he decides to have her sacrificed in a voodoo ceremony. Bond rides to the rescue, killing the cult -figure Baron Samedi by throwing him in a coffin full of snakes. Then he sets the poppy fields alight. However, while making their escape, Bond and Solitaire stumble into yet another of Kananga’s lairs.

Kananga has Bond’s shark pistol, which fires rounds filled with compressed air, blowing up the shark. Bond and Solitaire are tied to a hoist, and are about to be dropped into a pool full of sharks when. But Bond uses a magnetic watch provided by Q to attract one of the shark-pistol’s rounds. With He then uses a tiny saw in the watch the then o cuts through the ropes. In a tussle with Kananga, they end up in the water. Bond puts the shark round in Kananga’s mouth. HexHe swells up and explodes.

Leiter puts Bond and Solitaire on the train back to New York, while secretly Tee Hee Johnson gets loaded on in a sack. He attacks Bond, who bests him by cutting the control wire in his mechanical arm. This locks his pinchers on to the window handle. Then Bond opens the window and throws him out. The film ends with Baron Samedi perched on the front of the speeding train, laughing.

The Man wWith the Golden Gun (1974)

While Live and Let Die retains much of Fleming’s plot, The Man wWith the Golden Gun almost throws the book away almost completely. It is not set inon Jamaica. The film begins with Scaramanga on an island we later learn is off the coast of China. He does indeed have three nipples, though the third nipple is not “about two inches below his left breast” as in the book, but rather above.

A Mafia hit man arrives. He is instructed to kill Scaramanga by Scaramanga’s man servant, a dwarf named Nick Nack. However, itthis transpires that this isto be an exercise for Scaramanga’s entertainment. The assassin finds himself fired on by mannequins of a a western gun slinger , Al Capone and his gang, and James Bond. Scaramanga eventually kills him in a hall of mirrors.

A gold bullet arrives in London – in the book Scaramanga uses gold-cored bullets, jacketed with silver. This oneIt has “007” inscribed on it. Bond is asked what he knows about Scaramanga and . He reels off a brief biography that mentioning thats Scaramanga is an assassin who charges $1 million a hit and uses a gold-plated gun – hence, “The Man With the Golden Gun”. The Secret Service assumes that Scaramanga has been hired to kill Bond, so Bond and he is taken off an assignment to find a scientist named Gibson who has discovered a new technique of harnessing the power of the sun that will be critical in solving the energy crisis.

Scaramanga’s last victim is was a British agent in Beirut. Bond retrieves the bullet which is being used as a lucky charm in a belly dancer’s navel. This leads Bond to a gunsmith in Macao who makes the gold bullets. When Scaramanga’s mistress collects his next consignment, Bond follows her to Hong Kong. He catches her in the shower and he forces her to tell him where to find Scaramanga. She tells him to go to the Bottoms Up strip club. As Bond approaches, Scaramanga fires, hitting an man coming out of the club. It is Gibson. In the confusion, Nick Nack steals the “Solex Agitator”, the revolutionary device he has developed, from Gibson'shis pocket.

Bond is arrested by a Lieutenant Hip before the uniformed police arrive. But Hip is working for the Secret Service and takes him to their Hong Kong headquarters which is aboard the liner, the Queen Elizabeth, which capsized in Hong Kong harbour in 1972. On board are M and Q. Bond is now assigned to retrieve the Solex Agitator and kill Scaramanga. He travels to Bangkok to see the entrepreneur Hai Fat, who is thought to have hired Scaramanga. Reasoning that Hai Fat has never met Scaramanga in person, Bond breaks into Fat’s heavily guarded compound and seizes on the invitation of a naked Chinese girl in the pool to take his shirt off, revealing a third nipple – a false one provided by Q. However, Fat has in fact met Scaramanga. Bond is captured and taken to his personal dojo where the students are to kill Bond. But he fights them off with the help of Hip and his two karate-trained nieces, then escapes in a boat chase around the canals of Bangkok. Meanwhile Scaramanga kills Hai Fat, now an unwanted business partner.

After dinner with local agent Mary Goodnight, she comes to his room. They are just about to make love when Scaramanga’s mistress comes incomes in. She reveals that she sent the bullet with “007” on it to London and agrees to get the Solex Agitator for Bond if he will kill Scaramanga. While Mary Goodnight hides in the closet, they make love.

Scaramanga’s mistress agrees to hand over the Solex Agitator at a Thai boxing match. Bond sits next to her, and findsbut she is already dead. Scaramanga turns up and introduces himself. However, the Solex Agitator has fallen out of his mistress’s purse. Bond grabs it and gives it to Hip, who passes it on to Goodnight. She then tries to put a radio beacon on Scaramanga’s car and is locked in the trunk. Bond gives chase in a stolen car with Sheriff J.W. Pepper, a character borrowed from Live and Let Die, at his side. Scaramanga’s car is transformed into a plane and he flies to his island lair with Goodnight.

Bond flies after him. Scaramanga welcomes him and shows him around the high-tech solar energy plant he intends to use to hold the world to ransom. But first, he proposes a duel. This ends in the strange “funhouse” where Scaramanga killed the Mafia hit man at the beginning of the film. Climbing some scaffolding, Bond drops his gun, but finishes Scaramanga off by posing as his own mannequin. Meanwhile Goodnight has pushed the man operating the solar energy plant into a vat of liquid helium and the whole place is about to explode. So But first, Bond must extract the Solex Agitator. Hampered by Goodnight, who backsing on to the activation button, Bond does this at the last moment. They then escape on Scaramanga’s junk and set sail for Hong Kong. Once again theyThey are just about to make love, when the phone rings. It is M. When he asks for Goodnight, Bond says “goodnight” and puts the phone down. They are then attacked by Nick Nack. Bond eventually cages him in a fish keep, strung from the mast.