George Lazenby slyly acknowledges the switch in the film's opening scene ('this never happened to the other fellow!'), and then gives a terrific performance in one of the most complex and underrated Bond films in the series.

George Lazenby: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)Īn adaptation of the first novel Ian Fleming published after the film series began, Albert Broccoli recast the main character after Sean Connery expressed an interest in leaving the franchise.

But the producers uppsed his salary and convinced him to stay on, even as they began a search for a replacement.

Sean Connery: You Only Live Twice (1967)īy the fifth Bond film, Connery has tired of playing the spy, and worried about being typecast.

While the film is certainly not considered canon for the remaining films' Bond mythology, it's a unique and funn little adventure that also features high profile roles for David Niven and Peter Sellers, both of whom also play characters named James Bond. This weird little movie was produced by MGM as a spoof of the Bond films, in which none other than Woody Allen plays Jimmy Bond, James' nephew and the head of a terrorist organization called SMERSH. In the film's famous sequence in which Bond infiltrates Largo's lair via a pool-cum-shark tank, Connery's life was endangered when a shark passed through the Plexiglas partition that was meant to separate them him from them. Goldfinger ranks among the most successful and beloved of all of the Bond films, not the least of which because it provided a narrative template for many of the films that followed it. No introduced the world to Bond, this film introduced what would become essential components of its cinematic mythology: a pre-title sequence, the Blofeld character (referred in the film only as 'Number 1'), a secret weapon gadget for Bond, a helicopter sequence (repeated in every subsequent Bond film except The Man with the Golden Gun), a postscript action scene after the main climax, a theme song with lyrics, and the line 'James Bond will return/be back' in the credits.īy the third film, Connery was comfortably established in the role of Bond, even as the franchise continued to work out its formulas. Sean Connery: From Russia With Love (1963)Īfter Dr.

Despite his reluctance to commit to a film series, the Bond films in which he appeared catapulted him to stardom. Sean Connery was a relative unknown before he took the role of James Bond in 1962. Image Credit: Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures

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