The cinematography of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the only of the non-Feldman Bond film I’d never seen on the big screen before, is strikingly edgy and beautiful, particularly in its opening, haunted pre-titles scenes set on a beach at sunset, and during the twilight ski chase down from Piz Gloria.

All should be so lucky to have this experience: Every crease of Bernard Lee’s suit jacket and forehead wrinkles in his icy first scenes as “M” are stunningly sharp in NO, as are the beads of sweat on Connery’s forehead during that tarantula scene.

The early Bond films, particularly Doctor No, are exceptionally stunning in these big-screen, digitally remastered renditions. (Sometimes we say never again, and we goddamn mean it.) To get to that count, Gateway incorporated two non-Eon productions, the rogue Connery comeback and Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again -a did-see re-watch, and quite stunning in restoration a superior film in every retrospective respect to the then-competing Octopussy, which is a lukewarm mostly Goldfinger-remake- and the original Charles Feldman-version of Casino Royale, which after a one-time viewing about thirty years ago, I swore off forever. Hell, the quality of this summer’s large-screen 007 versions are light years beyond that of any of the remastered VHS tapes or DVD’s I’ve bought in the many years since.Īs a James Bond aficionado and a novelist who not so long ago published his own 007 pastiche ( Death in the Face, Betimes Books, October 2015), this summer’s film series has proven impossible to pass up.Ĭonfession here: I didn’t see all 26 films. That’s right: starting back on July 1 with 1962’s Doctor NO, and every fourth day since, a subsequent “classic” Bond film has been screened at a level of visual and audio quality far eclipsing that of the ABC Sunday Night Movie versions I grew up on in the late-1960s and early-1970s, or even the films I saw upon first-release on the big screen starting with (here I date myself as cinema Bond and I came into the world together in 1962) You Only Live Twice, at the tender age of five. The very cutting-edge Gateway Film Center located on The Ohio State University campus has been presenting, “For the first time ever, all 26 James Bond films in order of release, restored in crystal clear 4K!” This summer, I’ve been privileged to savor what’s been billed as a revolutionary, world-exclusive Bonding experience.

Today’s guest post is by Craig McDonald, author of the superlative Hector Lassiter series of novels.

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