James Bond has always been a cunning linguist, just ask Miss Money Penny. From the very first moment that Sean Connery first looked up from the Monte Carlo casino table in Dr. No, nonchalantly lit up a cigarette and uttered the immortal line “Bond, James Bond”, it was obvious the super spy’s tongue knew its way around a silky sentence. The irascible Scot gifted 007 with a devastating line in debonair wit, often used to slay the bad guys and lay the ladies.
Way back in 1964, in the Bond film Goldfinger, Connery was slaying it. After using his latest female conquest as a human shield in a very ungentlemanly act of self-preservation, a brutal fist fight with one of Goldfinger’s henchman ends with the bad guy being knocked into a full bathtub and a splashy demise ensues as Bond throws an electric lamp into the water. Before you can say “frying tonight”, 007 adjusts his dishevelled shirt and leaves the room uttering the immortal line “shocking, positively shocking” as the bad guy is left broiling.
Bond’s rapier-fast line in repartee ensured that films like Thunderball (“I hope we didn’t scare the fishes”), You Only Live Twice (“Well now, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”) and Diamonds Are Forever (“Well, I’m afraid you’ve caught me with more than my hands up”) are full of wit, much of which is dodgy in these PC-times but seen through the machismo lens of a tough guy era some outrageous conversations occur. At the beginning of You Only Live Twice, Bond is in the bed with Ling, a Chinese woman, when the following outrageous conversation takes place:
After George Lazenby’s brief tenure (“Just a slight stiffness coming on”), it was Roger Moore’s take on the world’s most famous spy that littered the dialogue with japes and more double-entendres than you can shake a stick at. From his debut in the blaxploitation spoofing Live And Let Die onwards, slapstick humour was brought to the fore. Especially when the slack jawed redneck Sheriff Pepper (Clifton James) is on his tail in the legendary high-speed boat chase through the New Orleans Danube. At the end of Live And Let Die, when Yaphet Koto’s villain has just exploded after swallowing a gas pellet, Bond’s response is: “He always did have an inflated opinion of himself.”
Since Moore’s departure the films of Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan have tried their hand at comedy, no matter how treacherous the scenario they find themselves in. Even serious Dalton, who starred in The Living Daylights and Licence To Kill had a line in kill quotes, “he got the boot!”. And who can forget Brosnan’s immortal line in The World Is Not Enough after sleeping with Denise Richard’s nuclear scientist Dr Christmas Jones, “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.” Only po-faced Daniel Craig, ever the tough guy, has failed to crack up his audience, but his Bond films are awesome so we let him off.
James Bond has always delighted quipping with the best of them. Whether “just keeping the British end up, Sir” or knocking back a martini, “shaken, not stirred”, Bond remains an instantly quotable killing machine and as the song says, nobody does it better.
Do they stand the test of time? Judge for yourself – every single James Bond film is on Stan. But you’re going to need a lot of martinis.