I think GE really had delved into Bond as a charachter some of the lines are really at the forefront of my mind like
" I might as well ask you if all those vodka martinis ever silence the screams of all the men you've killed... or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect." That line when I hear it today is still extremely heavy. I think Alec was the perfect villain.
Too bad Alec was fooled by Bond at basically every turn. He did every Bond villian cliche. Right down to letting Bond inside the control room. I always thought Bean could have been a fine James Bond but he was a lousy villian.
I thought AT was a great villain. Had a menacing quality about him but also something quite charismatic. The re-introduction of Trevelyan in the cemetary was excellent as was that speech he made to Bond in the control room. ("I might as well ask you if all the martini's etc...). Very hard-hitting as j.blades says. I also like Bond's reaction to it (he looks down in a moment of tragic silence). True he made some classic mistakes (why didn't he disable the eject button beside Bond's head?) but that comes with the Bond villain territory IMO.
The thing is, you'd expect a fellow Double-O who allegedly shared everything with Bond to not be outwitted at every single turn. Trevalyan just has no excuses for that kind of Villain Stupidity.
As for his age thing... well, it's said that his parents survived the Repatriation of Cossacks before killing themselves from torrid survivor's guilt. I don't think Trevalyan gives any clues to when they died, or if he was alive at the time of the massacare. It's possible he was born some time in the years after the killings, which could make him a more beleivable age by the time of 1995.
What age that's supposed to make Bond is beyond me, though. I guess we aren't supposed to think it this hard.
That's a Smith and Wesson, and you've had your six.
Not just that, but of course it was 8-10 years before the film proper, so what's Bond been doing since then? Spent most of his thirties mourning 006? Or is this new, iconic Bond just sort of timeless?
But Glover clearly did not look as old as he was in reality. Topol certaintly did
Both actors were in their mid-forties when shooting FYEO, making them too young to have fought in either WW2 or the Greek Civil War as their characters were supposed to. I disagree that Mr "Glover clearly did not look as old as he was in reality" - he certainly did.
Well we'll have to agree to disagree.
Whick of the following are you disagreeing with, Ricardo C.?
(1) Dates
1935- Julian Glover born
1939- World War Two begins (Glover is 4)
1945- WW2 ends (Glover is 10)
1981- For Your Eyes Only released (Glover is 46)
(2) Information given in film of FYEO
During WW2 Kristatos allegedly worked with the Greek Resistance and was given a medal by the British. It transpires that he was a traitor/double agent and other men died for his medal.
(3) Inference from (2)
Kristatos is therefore at least 60 years of age in 1981. This is certainly debatable by a year or two but there is no way he's 46.
(4) Post from Ricardo C.
"Glover clearly did not look as old as he was in reality". Could you support this remark? He has thinning grey hair and a little beard; a beard is often used to make an actor look older than his years, as for example with a man in his mid-forties trying to look like a sixty-year old. I would therefore argue that Glover was attempting to look older than he was in reality.
Not just that, but of course it was 8-10 years before the film proper, so what's Bond been doing since then? Spent most of his thirties mourning 006? Or is this new, iconic Bond just sort of timeless?
If GoldenEye takes place in 1995, then the Trevalyan's "death" must have been in 1986 which, if all the films take place in the year they were made, was before the events of TLD and LTK, which explains what was going on in that 9 year gap.
That's a Smith and Wesson, and you've had your six.
I thought AT was a great villain. Had a menacing quality about him but also something quite charismatic. The re-introduction of Trevelyan in the cemetary was excellent as was that speech he made to Bond in the control room. ("I might as well ask you if all the martini's etc...). Very hard-hitting as j.blades says. I also like Bond's reaction to it (he looks down in a moment of tragic silence). True he made some classic mistakes (why didn't he disable the eject button beside Bond's head?) but that comes with the Bond villain territory IMO.
Trevelyan didn't come off as remotely menacing, more like just a sleazy jerk. I thought Colonel/General Ormunov was far more intimidating then Trevelyan. And yes, I did like some of the Alec's dialogue but that didn't make him any less of an inept character. This guy was touted as "the man who knew 007" so why all the dumb mistakes ? He should set up something that Bond would have fell for. I remember in the original script Trevelyan knew of Bond's weakness for beautiful woman so he sent Xenia to lead Bond into a trap and a very good one at that. Lastly, I agree with you about the charismatic quality and I reiterate, I thought Sean Bean would have made a better James Bond. Trevelyan had better lines than Bond and he carried himself with far more conifidence and emulated a darker edged than super-model Brosnan Bond.
I don't think Trevalyan gives any clues to when they died, or if he was alive at the time of the massacare. It's possible he was born some time in the years after the killings, which could make him a more beleivable age by the time of 1995.
Bond said he had "a score to settle with the world 50 years later" and Alec said "England will learn the cost of Betrayal. Inflation adjusted 1945". Yeah they were in-directly suggesting that he was more than 50 years old.
"Trevelyan didn't come off as remotely menacing, more like just a sleazy jerk".
I disagree! I think the scene where he says "hello James!" and comes out of the shadows makes him look extremely menacing. Part of that may be due to the cinematography but nonetheless I had no problem believing him as a villain. If anything that issue applies more to JP in TND.
"Trevelyan didn't come off as remotely menacing, more like just a sleazy jerk".
I disagree! I think the scene where he says "hello James!" and comes out of the shadows makes him look extremely menacing. Part of that may be due to the cinematography but nonetheless I had no problem believing him as a villain. If anything that issue applies more to JP in TND.
"Trevelyan didn't come off as remotely menacing, more like just a sleazy jerk".
I disagree! I think the scene where he says "hello James!" and comes out of the shadows makes him look extremely menacing. Part of that may be due to the cinematography but nonetheless I had no problem believing him as a villain. If anything that issue applies more to JP in TND.
What is so menacing about that ? I admire the gloomy atmosphere but there is no real "menace" coming from 006.
Well we will just have to disagree. I thought he was a great adversary for Bond. He just seemed so calm and composed, yet you could tell there was a lot of surpressed anger under there. That along with the gloomy setting makes for an excellent scene.
Funnily enough I've always thought DC would have made a great Trevelyan.
As for the "mistakes", this is a Bond movie remember. Personally I never thought he made any more mistakes than some of the other villains (he failed to disable a helicopter eject button and didn't kill him when he had the chance to at the end).
Truth is in real life he would probably have killed Bond outright in the cemetary but this is James Bond we are talking about. Bond has to win the day and the villain needs to make some mistakes in order for Bond to do so. If anything it was Alec's ego that proved his undoing.
They'd have been perhaps 11 even at the time of the Greek Civil War.
But Glover clearly did not look as old as he was in reality. Topol certaintly did
Both actors were in their mid-forties when shooting FYEO, making them too young to have fought in either WW2 or the Greek Civil War as their characters were supposed to. I disagree that Mr "Glover clearly did not look as old as he was in reality" - he certainly did.
I think both actors were meant to look older than they actually were. Glover had a beard and Topol had a 'tash. Also Tapol says at the end "you're not as fast as you used to be" (to Glover).
As for the "mistakes", this is a Bond movie remember. Personally I never thought he made any more mistakes than some of the other villains (he failed to disable a helicopter eject button and didn't kill him when he had the chance to at the end).
Truth is in real life he would probably have killed Bond outright in the cemetary but this is James Bond we are talking about. Bond has to win the day and the villain needs to make some mistakes in order for Bond to do so. If anything it was Alec's ego that proved his undoing.
Failing to disable the helicopter eject button was not his only mistake. He put him in escapable situations, sent one person to kill him after he crash landed in the jungle and the classic fatal mistake, he let him in the control room. And the whole time he was shocked that his attempts to kill Bond didn't work. Again "The man who knew James Bond". There is no reason why he shouldn't have attempted something unique from the other formulaic Bond villians. Hell Goldeneye itself is pretty much a cut and paste of the Bond series and 90's action thrillers.
I think GE really had delved into Bond as a charachter some of the lines are really at the forefront of my mind like
" I might as well ask you if all those vodka martinis ever silence the screams of all the men you've killed... or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect." That line when I hear it today is still extremely heavy. I think Alec was the perfect villain.
Too bad Alec was fooled by Bond at basically every turn. He did every Bond villian cliche. Right down to letting Bond inside the control room. I always thought Bean could have been a fine James Bond but he was a lousy villian.
If I remember Alec didn't actually "let Bond inside the control room". He tried to have Bond killed outside but in the process Bond escaped and fell into the middle of the dish, entered the control room and killed some of the soldiers before being captured.
I think GE really had delved into Bond as a charachter some of the lines are really at the forefront of my mind like
" I might as well ask you if all those vodka martinis ever silence the screams of all the men you've killed... or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect." That line when I hear it today is still extremely heavy. I think Alec was the perfect villain.
Too bad Alec was fooled by Bond at basically every turn. He did every Bond villian cliche. Right down to letting Bond inside the control room. I always thought Bean could have been a fine James Bond but he was a lousy villian.
If I remember Alec didn't actually "let Bond inside the control room". He tried to have Bond killed outside but in the process Bond escaped and fell into the middle of the dish, entered the control room and killed some of the soldiers before being captured.
And yet when he was restrained, he let him stay in the control room. Sorry, but he let him inside so he could mess things up just like Blofeld did in You Only Live Twice.
I think you are looking a little too much into this (no offence ) The villains making mistakes are what comes with the territory.
As I've said in real life he would have killed Bond in the graveyard by plain simple gunshot...but he didn't. That would be a little boring.
The early films, and Fleming's novels, used to give you a reason why the villians kept Bond alive for so long. Best example by far, From Russia With Love. You couldn't buy ALL of it but still, it wasn't as bad as later day Bond films in which Bond survived strictly because of his gadgets or villian stupidity.
Yeah I will give you that. Bond in the books surivived on his wits - not gadgets - BUT the situations were still against the odds and the villains did give Bond a chance to escape when in real life they probably would have killed him quickly. In LALD Mr Big explains to Bond the exotic death he faces in the corral reef.
In FRWL Bond puts the glasses case against his heart and plays dead. I remember reading it and thinking it was silly. In the film I think it plays out in a more convincing way.
Yeah I will give you that. Bond in the books surivived on his wits - not gadgets - BUT the situations were still against the odds and the villains did give Bond a chance to escape when in real life they probably would have killed him quickly. In LALD Mr Big explains to Bond the exotic death he faces in the corral reef.
The sadism was a convicing way to keep Bond alive longer than he should been.
In FRWL Bond puts the glasses case against his heart and plays dead. I remember reading it and thinking it was silly. In the film I think it plays out in a more convincing way.
Actually it was his cigarette case and yes, it was pretty stupid.
Bond said he had "a score to settle with the world 50 years later" and Alec said "England will learn the cost of Betrayal. Inflation adjusted 1945". Yeah they were in-directly suggesting that he was more than 50 years old.
Not necessarily. He's taken the betrayal personally, sure, but that doesn't imply that he was there. It makes more sense for Trevelyan's birth and his parents' death to have been in the fifties, making him around the more believable 40s mark in 1995. I don't think there's anything in the film that directly contradicts that idea.
That's a Smith and Wesson, and you've had your six.
Bond said he had "a score to settle with the world 50 years later" and Alec said "England will learn the cost of Betrayal. Inflation adjusted 1945". Yeah they were in-directly suggesting that he was more than 50 years old.
Not necessarily. He's taken the betrayal personally, sure, but that doesn't imply that he was there. It makes more sense for Trevelyan's birth and his parents' death to have been in the fifties, making him around the more believable 40s mark in 1995. I don't think there's anything in the film that directly contradicts that idea.
Then why did the father wait ten years for his feelings to finally boil over into a murder suicide ? It still dosen't make sense. It's one thing to kill yourself but this is another extreme.
Then why did the father wait ten years for his feelings to finally boil over into a murder suicide ? It still dosen't make sense. It's one thing to kill yourself but this is another extreme.
Depression can build up and worsen over time. There's nothing unrealistic about a person with Survivor's Guilt living with it for years before reaching a breaking point.
That's a Smith and Wesson, and you've had your six.
"Hell Goldeneye itself is pretty much a cut and paste of the Bond series and 90's action thrillers"
Hmm I don't think that second part is quite true tbh. Granted LTK might have been influenced a lot by 80s action films but I never really thought that about Goldeneye. What other 90s films do you think it rips off?
I think GE does a great job in maintaining the eligance of Bond but brining it into a post cold-war world.
Then why did the father wait ten years for his feelings to finally boil over into a murder suicide ? It still dosen't make sense. It's one thing to kill yourself but this is another extreme.
Depression can build up and worsen over time. There's nothing unrealistic about a person with Survivor's Guilt living with it for years before reaching a breaking point.
But to kill an entirely innocent party ? You have to be pretty sick or something in recent history had to have in order for you to take someone elses life. When people commit suicide, something had to have happened fairly recently in order to make that decision. No, it still dosen't make any sense. I would have, just barely, bought this story if the father killed himself but the mother too ? That's too much to believe.
"Hell Goldeneye itself is pretty much a cut and paste of the Bond series and 90's action thrillers"
Hmm I don't think that second part is quite true tbh. Granted LTK might have been influenced a lot by 80s action films but I never really thought that about Goldeneye. What other 90s films do you think it rips off?
I think GE does a great job in maintaining the eligance of Bond but brining it into a post cold-war world.
Terminator 2 heavily comes to mind on Servenaya and the attack on the facility. Jurassic Park is another such as everything in Cuba; The jungle and the underground base. The weird cinematography in Goldeneye is pretty much the same from Martin Campbell's 1994 film No Escape. Lastly the Eric Serra score is Serra ripping off himself from The Professional. Yes, Goldeneye is very much a 90's timecapsule of popular action films at the time.
I have thoroughly enjoyed all the posts on the topic of who the best "Fleming Film Bond" is.
I have been a great fan and have studied everything on Fleming and his works, as well as the films. The first film I saw was Goldfinger in 1964 when my father took me, and the first novel I read was of course Casino Royale when I became a teenager.
I loved Connery in the films, but after reading and digesting all the novels and researching everything on Fleming, I realised that Fleming had been right when he thought Connery was not correct for the part as Fleming saw it. I know that he enjoyed the first two films and their interpretations of his novels as well as Connery's performance. but when he was quoted as saying that if he would have written the novels after seeing Connery and he would have made him like Connery's character, I think he was probably just being charming and kind. It's mentioned he made Bond a Scot because of Connery. I don't think that's really true.
I believe he had Bond being a Scot the entire time, since Fleming's family were Scots, and Bond was just Fleming in disguise.
When he conceived the character, it is obvious that internally Bond was mostly Fleming with
the physically tough parts coming from the commandos that were his "Red Indians". As far as Bond's appearance, all his descriptions in the novels reflected Fleming's own (though idealized) appearance when he was a young man. When he had to come up with a real person to compare with, he referenced "sort of like Hoagy Carmichael". I have photos of a young HG, and he didn't look anything like Fleming of course. Fleming liked his music and Carmichael was a clean cut, handsome gentleman in the 1940's and '50s. I think Fleming used HG just to give readers "some" image of what Bond might look like. HG actually has a very undistinctive look - like the average professional business man of the time - the type that would not stand out in a crowd of other professional men.
When it came to actually pick an actor to play Bond, Fleming tossed out David Niven for the same reason he chose HG - he knew him and enjoyed his films. However, I personally think that if they had made the films in the '50's with Fleming actually coming up with the script ideas and someone like Hitchcock directing them, then I thought his choice of Stewart Granger would have been the film ideal. Ignore the Westerns and other costume films he made and search out the lesser known films he did which were contemporary where he wore just suits and ties. Not only did he have the "romanticised look" of Fleming, he could have nailed the character in the novel.
Lazenby was given short shift for a long time, but I actually enjoyed his performance, and thought he carried off the light side and dark side of the character very effectively.
Moore too me was always too light. Even when he was forced to do the darker side of Bond, it never seemed to come across as genuine.
Dalton was great - he got the real Bond in the novels, and could even do the more "playful" side, but the scripts weren't ready for him. There were still shreads of Moore hanging in them. He would have done great in Casino Royale and QOS.
Brosnan was a good balance. He could also do the dark side as well as be flippant, but the scripts were still relying on gadgets and spectacle.
It bothered me that Craig was blonde and average height. After I saw his performance, none of that mattered. He really nailed Fleming's Bond - from his fierce toughness to his light charm.
About the images at the top of my post: I want to point out that if a proper bio film of Fleming had been done twenty years ago, Geoffrey Rush would have been great - it's spooky how much he looks like Fleming. As with the image of Fleming and Craig, you might see how I feel that Craig has that sort of "battered" look that Fleming had.
Comments
I thought AT was a great villain. Had a menacing quality about him but also something quite charismatic. The re-introduction of Trevelyan in the cemetary was excellent as was that speech he made to Bond in the control room. ("I might as well ask you if all the martini's etc...). Very hard-hitting as j.blades says. I also like Bond's reaction to it (he looks down in a moment of tragic silence). True he made some classic mistakes (why didn't he disable the eject button beside Bond's head?) but that comes with the Bond villain territory IMO.
As for his age thing... well, it's said that his parents survived the Repatriation of Cossacks before killing themselves from torrid survivor's guilt. I don't think Trevalyan gives any clues to when they died, or if he was alive at the time of the massacare. It's possible he was born some time in the years after the killings, which could make him a more beleivable age by the time of 1995.
What age that's supposed to make Bond is beyond me, though. I guess we aren't supposed to think it this hard.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Whick of the following are you disagreeing with, Ricardo C.?
(1) Dates
1935- Julian Glover born
1939- World War Two begins (Glover is 4)
1945- WW2 ends (Glover is 10)
1981- For Your Eyes Only released (Glover is 46)
(2) Information given in film of FYEO
During WW2 Kristatos allegedly worked with the Greek Resistance and was given a medal by the British. It transpires that he was a traitor/double agent and other men died for his medal.
(3) Inference from (2)
Kristatos is therefore at least 60 years of age in 1981. This is certainly debatable by a year or two but there is no way he's 46.
(4) Post from Ricardo C.
"Glover clearly did not look as old as he was in reality". Could you support this remark? He has thinning grey hair and a little beard; a beard is often used to make an actor look older than his years, as for example with a man in his mid-forties trying to look like a sixty-year old. I would therefore argue that Glover was attempting to look older than he was in reality.
I thought that's what I said.
And what I agreed to disagreed is that Glover's actual age is such a nuisance.
Trevelyan didn't come off as remotely menacing, more like just a sleazy jerk. I thought Colonel/General Ormunov was far more intimidating then Trevelyan. And yes, I did like some of the Alec's dialogue but that didn't make him any less of an inept character. This guy was touted as "the man who knew 007" so why all the dumb mistakes ? He should set up something that Bond would have fell for. I remember in the original script Trevelyan knew of Bond's weakness for beautiful woman so he sent Xenia to lead Bond into a trap and a very good one at that. Lastly, I agree with you about the charismatic quality and I reiterate, I thought Sean Bean would have made a better James Bond. Trevelyan had better lines than Bond and he carried himself with far more conifidence and emulated a darker edged than super-model Brosnan Bond.
Bond said he had "a score to settle with the world 50 years later" and Alec said "England will learn the cost of Betrayal. Inflation adjusted 1945". Yeah they were in-directly suggesting that he was more than 50 years old.
I disagree! I think the scene where he says "hello James!" and comes out of the shadows makes him look extremely menacing. Part of that may be due to the cinematography but nonetheless I had no problem believing him as a villain. If anything that issue applies more to JP in TND.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOpQxp7gHXY&feature=related
What is so menacing about that ? I admire the gloomy atmosphere but there is no real "menace" coming from 006.
Well we will just have to disagree. I thought he was a great adversary for Bond. He just seemed so calm and composed, yet you could tell there was a lot of surpressed anger under there. That along with the gloomy setting makes for an excellent scene.
Funnily enough I've always thought DC would have made a great Trevelyan.
Truth is in real life he would probably have killed Bond outright in the cemetary but this is James Bond we are talking about. Bond has to win the day and the villain needs to make some mistakes in order for Bond to do so. If anything it was Alec's ego that proved his undoing.
I think both actors were meant to look older than they actually were. Glover had a beard and Topol had a 'tash. Also Tapol says at the end "you're not as fast as you used to be" (to Glover).
Failing to disable the helicopter eject button was not his only mistake. He put him in escapable situations, sent one person to kill him after he crash landed in the jungle and the classic fatal mistake, he let him in the control room. And the whole time he was shocked that his attempts to kill Bond didn't work. Again "The man who knew James Bond". There is no reason why he shouldn't have attempted something unique from the other formulaic Bond villians. Hell Goldeneye itself is pretty much a cut and paste of the Bond series and 90's action thrillers.
If I remember Alec didn't actually "let Bond inside the control room". He tried to have Bond killed outside but in the process Bond escaped and fell into the middle of the dish, entered the control room and killed some of the soldiers before being captured.
And yet when he was restrained, he let him stay in the control room. Sorry, but he let him inside so he could mess things up just like Blofeld did in You Only Live Twice.
As I've said in real life he would have killed Bond in the graveyard by plain simple gunshot...but he didn't. That would be a little boring.
The early films, and Fleming's novels, used to give you a reason why the villians kept Bond alive for so long. Best example by far, From Russia With Love. You couldn't buy ALL of it but still, it wasn't as bad as later day Bond films in which Bond survived strictly because of his gadgets or villian stupidity.
In FRWL Bond puts the glasses case against his heart and plays dead. I remember reading it and thinking it was silly. In the film I think it plays out in a more convincing way.
The sadism was a convicing way to keep Bond alive longer than he should been.
Actually it was his cigarette case and yes, it was pretty stupid.
Then why did the father wait ten years for his feelings to finally boil over into a murder suicide ? It still dosen't make sense. It's one thing to kill yourself but this is another extreme.
Er... no.
You said "Glover clearly did not look as old as he was in reality" - ie, he looked younger than 46. And clearly, too.
I meant that he, as in Glover as Kristatos, didn't look as young as Glover actually did in real life.
Hmm I don't think that second part is quite true tbh. Granted LTK might have been influenced a lot by 80s action films but I never really thought that about Goldeneye. What other 90s films do you think it rips off?
I think GE does a great job in maintaining the eligance of Bond but brining it into a post cold-war world.
But to kill an entirely innocent party ? You have to be pretty sick or something in recent history had to have in order for you to take someone elses life. When people commit suicide, something had to have happened fairly recently in order to make that decision. No, it still dosen't make any sense. I would have, just barely, bought this story if the father killed himself but the mother too ? That's too much to believe.
Terminator 2 heavily comes to mind on Servenaya and the attack on the facility. Jurassic Park is another such as everything in Cuba; The jungle and the underground base. The weird cinematography in Goldeneye is pretty much the same from Martin Campbell's 1994 film No Escape. Lastly the Eric Serra score is Serra ripping off himself from The Professional. Yes, Goldeneye is very much a 90's timecapsule of popular action films at the time.
I have thoroughly enjoyed all the posts on the topic of who the best "Fleming Film Bond" is.
I have been a great fan and have studied everything on Fleming and his works, as well as the films. The first film I saw was Goldfinger in 1964 when my father took me, and the first novel I read was of course Casino Royale when I became a teenager.
I loved Connery in the films, but after reading and digesting all the novels and researching everything on Fleming, I realised that Fleming had been right when he thought Connery was not correct for the part as Fleming saw it. I know that he enjoyed the first two films and their interpretations of his novels as well as Connery's performance. but when he was quoted as saying that if he would have written the novels after seeing Connery and he would have made him like Connery's character, I think he was probably just being charming and kind. It's mentioned he made Bond a Scot because of Connery. I don't think that's really true.
I believe he had Bond being a Scot the entire time, since Fleming's family were Scots, and Bond was just Fleming in disguise.
When he conceived the character, it is obvious that internally Bond was mostly Fleming with
the physically tough parts coming from the commandos that were his "Red Indians". As far as Bond's appearance, all his descriptions in the novels reflected Fleming's own (though idealized) appearance when he was a young man. When he had to come up with a real person to compare with, he referenced "sort of like Hoagy Carmichael". I have photos of a young HG, and he didn't look anything like Fleming of course. Fleming liked his music and Carmichael was a clean cut, handsome gentleman in the 1940's and '50s. I think Fleming used HG just to give readers "some" image of what Bond might look like. HG actually has a very undistinctive look - like the average professional business man of the time - the type that would not stand out in a crowd of other professional men.
When it came to actually pick an actor to play Bond, Fleming tossed out David Niven for the same reason he chose HG - he knew him and enjoyed his films. However, I personally think that if they had made the films in the '50's with Fleming actually coming up with the script ideas and someone like Hitchcock directing them, then I thought his choice of Stewart Granger would have been the film ideal. Ignore the Westerns and other costume films he made and search out the lesser known films he did which were contemporary where he wore just suits and ties. Not only did he have the "romanticised look" of Fleming, he could have nailed the character in the novel.
Lazenby was given short shift for a long time, but I actually enjoyed his performance, and thought he carried off the light side and dark side of the character very effectively.
Moore too me was always too light. Even when he was forced to do the darker side of Bond, it never seemed to come across as genuine.
Dalton was great - he got the real Bond in the novels, and could even do the more "playful" side, but the scripts weren't ready for him. There were still shreads of Moore hanging in them. He would have done great in Casino Royale and QOS.
Brosnan was a good balance. He could also do the dark side as well as be flippant, but the scripts were still relying on gadgets and spectacle.
It bothered me that Craig was blonde and average height. After I saw his performance, none of that mattered. He really nailed Fleming's Bond - from his fierce toughness to his light charm.
About the images at the top of my post: I want to point out that if a proper bio film of Fleming had been done twenty years ago, Geoffrey Rush would have been great - it's spooky how much he looks like Fleming. As with the image of Fleming and Craig, you might see how I feel that Craig has that sort of "battered" look that Fleming had.