Oddities and anachronisms noted in [supposedly] the best Bond film ever, which I suspect would be jeered at Cannes in this continuity-focused day and age:
- Squealing tire sounds upon fast acceleration of Bond’s Aston Martin. On a beach.
- Squealing tire sounds upon fast acceleration of Contessa Teresa’s red convertible Cougar. On the side of a beach.
- Caviar. [Does this even exist any more?! Forced to admit, though, that Bond's casual line "Mmm. Royal Beluga... north of the Caspian." upon trying the caviar, after beating up the random henchman in the Contessa's room, is one of the smoothest lines in all of Hollywood.]
- Manhandling / slapping of Contessa Teresa (“Tracy”) as foreplay. Distasteful, disrespectful, distressing. How was that ever OK in a script??
- Bond’s orange mock turtleneck under a beige zip-front sportcoat with matching slacks, which he chooses ‘the morning after’. Dude, for a guy sporting perfectly pegged tailored tux shirts earlier, that program is weaksauce. Only Kim Jong-Il would look good in that getup.
- Bond: “I have a bachelor’s taste for freedom!” [If this line were to ever be spoken in 2011 in a movie, it would solely serve as a an ironic trope for the benefit of the audience.]
- Bond kissing his boss’s Administrative Assistant, Miss Moneypenny, on the lips as gratitude for saving him his job.
- Double ascots!
- Ascot with a gold tie clip!!
[Editor's sidenote: Every single extra in the spanish bull-fighting scene looks so damn smooth that it kills me. Can I get a sportcoat in any of those cuts/fabrics these days? Why do those dudes' shirts all look so fly? This scene alone makes me wish I was a rich guy living in 1968 in northern Spain.]
- A safe. [What would be in a safe anymore? A backup hard-drive? Krugerands? Larry Page's brain?]
- A safe-cracking device that looks like a mini-rotorooter with analog number dials. [Maybe that's how movie-viewers of the future will judge the CG characters in 'Avatar', too...]
- “This is a photostat letter I found in…” [I love that. 'Photostat'. I'm going to start calling all of my hard copies of stuff I receive and print at work 'photostats'. My team will just think I'm being quirky and trying to coin a new term.]
- Bond’s tweed Sherlock-Holmesy capecoat, upon arrival in Switzerland.
[Editor's sidenote: A helicopter serves as an indicator of wealth and eccentric removal for Blofeld. Helicopters still serve this purpose today in movies. Amazing that, 40 years on, we don't have any cooler futuristic forms of travel yet. Where my hovercrafts and jetpacks at, yo? C'mon scientists!!!]
- “What will you drink, Sir?” “Malt whiskey and branch water, please.” [OK, still awesome.]
- Dry ice smoke emerging from Blofeld’s lair’s shadowy depths.
- Glass walls and chrome fixtures all up in Telly Savalas’ pad. With unstained wood walls. Blech. [Blofeld's upper-mountain lair doesn't look powerful, it just looks San Bernadino. He does have a gilded old-school rotary dial telephone with the cradle and the showerhead earpiece on his desk, though, in the scene where he's trying to prove his ancestry to Bond-fake-ancestry-approver-guy. THAT thing would now be the height of cool, featured in a Wallpaper full-page spread or a The Selby post.]
- The artwork in Blofeld’s mountain retreat is all framed in chrome, natch. These days it would all be oak.
- Blofeld: “Cassette Number Seven. Number Eight….”
- All the smoking. Blofeld is supposedly an allergies institute director, but he enjoys a smoke at 5000 meters. Ok, I get it.
- The night-skiing sequence is done at dawn, daybreak, dusk, and throughout with some kind of Sears alpine backdrop behind it. And how exactly is it possible there is a Yosemite Half-dome-sized cliff that henchmen numbers one and two fall off, in the middle of a mountain resort?
- OK, how did Tracy get her Cougar to the upper Alps? [And who really believes a ginormous 1960's era Mercedes sedan could keep up with 450cc's of American muscle steel in a frozen car chase, anyway?!]
- Why would Blofeld send his three henchmen into avalanche range, then fire off an avalanche over them? If the avalanche was his gameplan, wouldn’t he just ask those guys to hang out until he fired his avalanche-inducing flare or whatever? Doesn’t make any sense.
- Jiggling smoky test tubes in Blofeld’s laboratory. Why does jiggling and smoky equal deadly?
- Um, if you’re going to have Draco count down “Five, four, three, two, one, now!” and hit the blow-up-the-Blofeld-mountain-lair-switch, you gotta show us Blofeld and Bond jumping out of the secret escape hatch before “one”, Peter.
- The first and last time a live-action bobsled-based fight ever featured prominently in a dramatic movie.Must be tricky to film effectively. Even once.
- Why is Blofeld wearing that funky neckbrace when he does in Teresa at the end? Doesn’t a supervillain recover from routine cranial injuries before hatching his revenge?
[Editor's note: Having finished all 2.5 hours of this thing, now all subsequent Bond spoof movies make perfect sense...]
