Bovie Movie

Terence Young directed this first of a long line of screen adventures with Ian Fleming’s unflappable British Secret Service Agent 007 in a fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek style that set the tone for the rest of the popular series. Sean Connery sets the standard by which all future takers must measure themselves as the insouciant and devil-may-care James Bond. The story concerns Bond being sent to Jamaica to investigate the murders of a British agent and his secretary. During his investigation, he comes into contact with the evil and unscrupulous Chinese scientist Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman) who, living on an island called Crab Key, is hard at work in a nuclear laboratory. Dr. No’s scheme is to divert rockets being fired from Cape Canaveral off their charted course and to blackmail the United States to get their rocket launches restored to normal. Helping Bond is Ursula Andress (mostly undressed in a bikini throughout most of the film), as well as bad gals like Zena Marshall, who almost leads Bond to his death in her bedroom, and Eunice Gayson, a Bond pickup in a London gambling house who proves herself a greater adversary than even James Bond can handle.

After George Lazenby portrayed James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Sean Connery returned to the tux, gimmicks, and catchphrases of Secret Agent 007 in his penultimate Bond outing, Diamonds Are Forever. Fragments of Ian Fleming’s original 1954 novel remain, including the characters of the alluring Tiffany Case (Jill St. John) and fey hitmen Wint (Bruce Glover) and Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith). The remainder of Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz’s script diverges dramatically from the novel, involving Bond in a scheme by the insidious Ernst Blofeld (Charles Gray) to force the world powers to disarm so that he can take over the globe. Folksinger Jimmy Dean shows up briefly as a Howard Hughes-like reclusive billionaire, while Lana Wood (Natalie’s sister) participates in one of the film’s edgiest cliffhangers. Agreeing to make Diamonds Are Forever only because of the money offered him, Sean Connery parted company with the role for 12 years after this film; he returned to the role once more in 1983, for Irvin Kershner’s underrated Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again.

A popular video game comes to the screen with this big-budget adventure starring Angelina Jolie as a buxom heroine recalling equal parts Indiana Jones and James Bond. Jolie is Lara Croft, a proper British aristocrat groomed at schools for the children of the elite. Croft leads a double life, however, as an acquirer of lost antiquities through questionable means, highly trained in combat skills with the help of a robotic opponent called Simon. Despite her exciting profession and a life of wealth and breeding, Lara pines for her father, Lord Croft (Jon Voight), whose passing left her orphaned. On the eve of a celestial event that will also mark the anniversary of Lord Croft’s death, Lara comes up against an ancient organization called the Illuminati, represented by the sinister Powell (Iain Glen), who’s in pursuit of an ancient relic with power over time and even death itself. With the aid of her high-tech support team, Lara travels to some exotic locales in search of the artifact, including a foray into a decrepit Asian temple guarded by lethal stone apes and other creatures that spring to life. Filmed at various locations in Great Britain as well as Iceland and the Angkor Wat temples of Cambodia, Tomb Raider co-stars Noah Taylor, Chris Barrie, Daniel Craig, Rachel Appleton, Leslie Phillips, Mark Collie, and Julian Rhind-Tutt.

James Bond heads East to save the world (and to learn how to serve saki properly) in this action-packed espionage adventure. When an American spacecraft disappears during a mission, it’s widely believed to have been intercepted by the Soviet Union, and after a Russian space capsule similarly goes missing, most consider it to be an act of American retaliation. Soon the two nations are at the brink of war, but British intelligence discovers that some sort of UFO has crashed into the Sea of Japan. Agent 007, James Bond (Sean Connery) is sent in to investigate. After staging his own death to avoid being followed, Bond, disguised as a Japanese civilian, teams up with agent Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba) and his beautiful associate Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi). With their help, Bond learns that both the American and Russian space missions were actually scuttled by supercriminal Ernst Blofeld (Donald Pleasance) in yet another bid by his evil empire SPECTRE to take over the world. As he battles the bad guys, Bond finds time to romance both Kissy Suziki (Mie Hama) and Helga Brandt (Karin Dor). You Only Live Twice was one of Sean Connery’s last outings as James Bond. The next Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, would star George Lazenby as 007, and while Connery would return for Diamonds Are Forever, in 1973, Roger Moore took over the role. (Connery would play Bond one last time, in 1983’s Never Say Never Again, which was produced outside the official series.)

It wasn’t as well received at the box office as the pictures that preceded it or followed it, but Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the finest of the James Bond movies and also arguably the last truly great movie in the series. James Bond, portrayed here by George Lazenby (in his only performance in the role) has spent nearly two years trying to track down Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas), the head of SPECTRE. He has been taken off the case by his chief (Bernard Lee), an action the pushes him to the point of considering resigning from Her Majesty’s Secret Service, just as he opens a possible new avenue of attack on his quarry. Whilst in the field, Bond has chanced to cross paths with the Contessa Teresa Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), a beautiful but desperately unhappy woman, whom he rescues from one apparent suicide attempt and an embarrassing moment at a casino gaming table — the Contessa, who prefers to be called Tracy (”Teresa was a saint”), is the daughter of Marc Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti), an industrial and construction magnate and also a crime boss, who is impressed with Bond personally as well as professionally, and would like to see him marry his daughter. Bond is, at first, unwilling to involve himself with a woman — any woman — on that level, but Draco’s underworld contacts give Bond a vital clue to Blofeld’s whereabouts that get him back on the case and hot on the man’s trail. Journeying incognito to Blofeld’s mountaintop retreat in the Swiss Alps, Bond finds the criminal mastermind posing as a would-be nobleman and also as a philanthropist, running a clinic devoted to the treatment and eradication of allergies. It’s all a front for a surprisingly sinister (and scientifically valid) plot for international blackmail that would make any previous Bond villain quake in fear. And in the process of staying alive long enough to have a chance of stopping Blofeld, Bond discovers the Tracy is truly like no woman he’s ever known before — one special enough that he finds himself willing to give up his life as a free-living, free-loving bachelor.

The third installment in the widely beloved Spielberg/Lucas Indiana Jones saga begins with an introduction to a younger Indy (played by the late River Phoenix), who, through a fast-paced prologue, gives the audience insight into the roots of his taste for adventure, fear of snakes, and dogged determination to take historical artifacts out of the hands of bad guys and into the museums in which they belong. A grown-up Indy (Harrison Ford) reveals himself shortly afterward in a familiar classroom scene, teaching archeology to a disproportionate number of starry-eyed female college students in 1938. Once again, however, Mr. Jones is drawn away from his day job after an art collector (Julian Glover) approaches him with a proposition to find the much sought after Holy Grail. Circumstances reveal that there was another avid archeologist in search of the famed cup — Indiana Jones’ father, Dr. Henry Jones (Sean Connery) — who had recently disappeared during his efforts. The junior and senior members of the Jones family find themselves in a series of tough situations in locales ranging from Venice to the most treacherous spots in the Middle East. Complicating the situation further is the presence of Elsa (Alison Doody), a beautiful and intelligent woman with one fatal flaw: she’s an undercover Nazi agent. The search for the grail is a dangerous quest, and its discovery may prove fatal to those who seek it for personal gain. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade earned a then record-breaking $50 million in its first week of release.