Connery definitely has screen presence from Doctor No through Thunderball after that its like watching him in Zardoz. Roger Moore is after with his very confident portrayal in LALD which he then lost in MWTGG but kicked it back in through OP. Lazenby was good but seemed unsure of himself which works in OHMSS. Brosnan had a brilliant first movie performance & seemed to coast in the rest. Daniel Craig was brilliant in CR & One Note in QOS, Skyfall was whatever. The last is Timothy Dalton who I think is great and looks cool but he doesn't have the "it" cinema presence or charisma for a general audience to really enjoy. My 3 cents worth.
Just watched Infamous (film about Trueman Capote) Craig has a significant part in it. I watched it almost by accident and didn't even realise that Daniel is in it. Anyone familiar with my contributions here will be awagre that whilst appreciating his many superb qualities that I'm far from a DC fanboy (Mrs Zaphod is actively anti) We both thought his performance was mesmerising,really intense brooding and magnetic. With Dark Hair I could see a young Connery. He had a tough job as he had to make an unsympathetic brutal Killer at least Human. He pulled it off with real aplomb. I have seen other performances from him and he is never less than very good, in this however it's the performance of a lifetime. If you have not seen it I urge you to seek it out. A fine film, and a truly splendid nuanced performance.
Of that of which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence- Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Connery easily has the greatest screen presence, but nods also have to go to Moore -- who owned the role in his own way -- and Lazenby, perhaps the most maligned actor to play Bond. When you watch the film, he is often not given as much to work with as his predecessor -- Hunt often films him at oblique angles or from a distance. Connery is allowed to dominate pretty much every scene he's in. Yet, Lazenby still comes across as Bond, just a different incarnation.
About Craig. Except for the limited emotional range, he was brilliant in Casino Royale, as spectacular in a debut role as any actor taking over a franchise. His physicality matches Connery's except in being relaxed. The films that follow don't really use him as much because they have weaker scripts and directors, who don't really capitalize as much on Craig's presence so much as on Bond as a character.
Dalton and Brosnan try, and both succeed to various levels. I actually liked Dalton slightly better. In his first outing, he did his best to bring something crisp and dangerous to the role, an interpretation we hadn't quite seen before Brosnan, to me, never quite figured out what he was doing with Bond and mostly gets by on his looks to be a predictable James Bond and more like an avatar than the actual guy.
Connery easily has the greatest screen presence, but nods also have to go to Moore -- who owned the role in his own way -- and Lazenby, perhaps the most maligned actor to play Bond. When you watch the film, he is often not given as much to work with as his predecessor -- Hunt often films him at oblique angles or from a distance. Connery is allowed to dominate pretty much every scene he's in. Yet, Lazenby still comes across as Bond, just a different incarnation.
That's an interesting point about how Peter Hunt filmed Lazenby. To my mind he's trying to use one of George's best assets - he looked good on the move, with some of that cat-like grace of Connery. A newcomer like Lazenby was never going to dominate scenes opposite Telly Savalas, so Hunt, who was apparently more a technical director than one who liked working with actors, found technical solutions to make his leading man look good on screen.
Connery easily has the greatest screen presence, but nods also have to go to Moore -- who owned the role in his own way -- and Lazenby, perhaps the most maligned actor to play Bond. When you watch the film, he is often not given as much to work with as his predecessor -- Hunt often films him at oblique angles or from a distance. Connery is allowed to dominate pretty much every scene he's in. Yet, Lazenby still comes across as Bond, just a different incarnation.
That's an interesting point about how Peter Hunt filmed Lazenby. To my mind he's trying to use one of George's best assets - he looked good on the move, with some of that cat-like grace of Connery. A newcomer like Lazenby was never going to dominate scenes opposite Telly Savalas, so Hunt, who was apparently more a technical director than one who liked working with actors, found technical solutions to make his leading man look good on screen.
I think that's a lot of it, along with some experimentation going on at the end of the 1960s. New Wave directors had made low-budget "naturalistic" films vogue, with handheld cameras and on-location filming, and by the end of that decade, a lot of mainstream directors were scrambling to do unusual things to keep up. Thus came kooky markers like the quick zoom and superfast cuts that until Quentin Tarantino brought them back, immediately placed a film in the late 1960s to mid 1970s. Until then, the Bond films had always been very traditional in how they were directed and filmed -- what set them apart technically was their high production values, which resulted in stunningly good visuals and sound, among other things. These were supported by directors who knew how to block actors and frame scenes to make the most of it.
In the waning years of the 1960s, you can see American and British directors who were "old school" casting about to figure out how to appeal to Baby Boomers, then in their teens and early adult years. They were the counterculture, and cheap movies like Easy Rider would go on to such box office success they influenced an entire generation of directors and producers. A good example of those caught in the middle is Stanley Donen. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he made colorful, well-crafted musicals like Singing in the Rain and Funny Face. As early as 1963's Charade, though, he's already starting to play with form, even as that film is a pastiche of Hitchcock. By 1967's Arabesque, he's going whole hog on being experimental and pretty much embraces the new schools from Two for the Road on.
You can see how Donen is employing some of these techniques -- rather like Hunt does -- in this advertisement for Arabesque:
Compare all that to, say, Indiscreet, made a decade earlier, where the actors are blocked and the scenes shot more traditionally -- the takes are longer, and the emphasis is on the performances and not the director's oblique camera angles or creative setups:
I suspect that even if Connery had starred in OHMSS, Hunt would have tried to use at least some of the same techniques, though Connery might not have stood for it. He came up in a more traditional period and was likely of the opinion that audiences paid to see the leading man and woman and not the visual pyrotechnics of the director. After OHMSS, the Bond series returns to the more traditional forms, though by the 1980s, with unimaginative John Glen at the helm, things seem tired and formulaic.
Comments
Shady Tree we just adored your act, what taste...style.
About Craig. Except for the limited emotional range, he was brilliant in Casino Royale, as spectacular in a debut role as any actor taking over a franchise. His physicality matches Connery's except in being relaxed. The films that follow don't really use him as much because they have weaker scripts and directors, who don't really capitalize as much on Craig's presence so much as on Bond as a character.
Dalton and Brosnan try, and both succeed to various levels. I actually liked Dalton slightly better. In his first outing, he did his best to bring something crisp and dangerous to the role, an interpretation we hadn't quite seen before Brosnan, to me, never quite figured out what he was doing with Bond and mostly gets by on his looks to be a predictable James Bond and more like an avatar than the actual guy.
Connery
Lazenby
Dalton
Moore
Craig
Brosnan
That's an interesting point about how Peter Hunt filmed Lazenby. To my mind he's trying to use one of George's best assets - he looked good on the move, with some of that cat-like grace of Connery. A newcomer like Lazenby was never going to dominate scenes opposite Telly Savalas, so Hunt, who was apparently more a technical director than one who liked working with actors, found technical solutions to make his leading man look good on screen.
Connery
Moore
Lazenby
Brosnan
Dalton
Craig
In the waning years of the 1960s, you can see American and British directors who were "old school" casting about to figure out how to appeal to Baby Boomers, then in their teens and early adult years. They were the counterculture, and cheap movies like Easy Rider would go on to such box office success they influenced an entire generation of directors and producers. A good example of those caught in the middle is Stanley Donen. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he made colorful, well-crafted musicals like Singing in the Rain and Funny Face. As early as 1963's Charade, though, he's already starting to play with form, even as that film is a pastiche of Hitchcock. By 1967's Arabesque, he's going whole hog on being experimental and pretty much embraces the new schools from Two for the Road on.
You can see how Donen is employing some of these techniques -- rather like Hunt does -- in this advertisement for Arabesque:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2ukkcSaXpU
Compare all that to, say, Indiscreet, made a decade earlier, where the actors are blocked and the scenes shot more traditionally -- the takes are longer, and the emphasis is on the performances and not the director's oblique camera angles or creative setups:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USltTQ_WHRY
I suspect that even if Connery had starred in OHMSS, Hunt would have tried to use at least some of the same techniques, though Connery might not have stood for it. He came up in a more traditional period and was likely of the opinion that audiences paid to see the leading man and woman and not the visual pyrotechnics of the director. After OHMSS, the Bond series returns to the more traditional forms, though by the 1980s, with unimaginative John Glen at the helm, things seem tired and formulaic.