All Movie Talk, Episode 4

Show contents, with start times:

• Controversial Take: Movie Theaters (1:20)
• Trivia Question: Orson Welles Movie (11:46)
• Series Spotlight: James Bond, Part 2 (12:44)
• Film Buff's Dictionary: Cut (28:48)
• Top 6: Definitive Adaptations (34:51)
• Film Spotlight: The Third Man (47:57)
• Closing: Trivia Answer, Preview of Next Week (61:28)

Show Notes:

• The fifth James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (1967), begins the tradition of sending Bond to exotic locales. Recurring set designer Ken Adam does some of his best work in this one, and the villain Blofeld, played here by Donald Pleasence, shows his face for the first time.
• The success of the Bond franchise inspires parodies and knock-offs that start cropping up, most notably Our Man Flint (1966) and a comic adaptation of Casino Royale (1967). In a testament to the longevity of the Bond franchise, the most succesful of the Bond parodies (Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery) is not released until 1997, a full 35 years after Bond made his big-screen debut.
• Sean Connery leaves the role of Bond, and model George Lazenby is hired for the sixth movie, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), one of the best movies but a commercial disappointment. Lazenby opts out of doing further movies, a decision he later regrets.
• The studio pays through the nose to woo Sean Connery back for Diamonds Are Forever (1971). The transition between actors hurts the franchise a bit, however, as On Her Majesty's Secret Service was intended to introduce elements that would carry over to the next film, but the filmmakers backed off on this a bit after the poor reception of Lazenby's work.
• Roger Moore is hired to fill the role for the eighth installment. His first outing, Live and Let Die (1973), suffices and is perhaps notable for how little fanfare the movie makes about switching lead actors.
• Moore's second film, The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) marks a series low. It fails on almost every level, with flat action scenes and wasting the talents of Christopher Lee who is cast as the film's villain.
• After Golden Gun, longtime producer Harry Saltzman bails out and sells his part ownership of the franchise, leaving Albert R. Broccoli to produce future installments on his own.
• Even after three films without him, Bond still hasn't established itself as a viable franchise without Sean Connery. Can the series endure? James Bond will return in All Movie Talk, Episode 5.

• Cut functions as both a verb (to cut a movie is to edit it; refers to the days when editors literally cut pieces of film and pasted them together) and a noun (a cut is the abrupt change in scene or camera shot that comes from editing two different shots together).
• The very earliest films of the 1890s consisted of unbroken shots that were very short. Around the time films started telling slightly more complex stories in the early 1900s, filmmakers began cutting together different shots and cutting out extraneous pieces of story.
• The early director D. W. Griffith pioneered cutting as a visceral part of filmed narratives. His 1915 film The Birth of a Nation famously used cross-cutting -- showing one group of people under attack, cutting to a different group of people riding to the rescue (unfortunately these rescuers were members of the Ku Klux Klan), and then cutting back to the group under siege -- and it remains a textbook example of how to create action by cutting.
• In the 1920s and '30s, Soviet filmmakers including Sergei Eisenstein would study editing and the psychological impacts of cutting on an audience, developing a comprehensive theory of film editing which we will discuss further in Episode 6.
• Many film scholars dislike too many cuts in a film, as they can be disruptive to the flow of a film. On the other hand, modern action directors like Michael Bay use this disruptive nature of cuts to inject a sense of excitement and chaos into fast-paced scenes.