The Increasing Strangeness of James Bond Titles

I prefer the titles that refer to characters or operations or locations, ie. Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, OHMSS, Octopussy, GoldenEye, Skyfall, etc. When you get to the titles that feature "die", "kill" or "live", some are cool, but there are too many of them! Still, the only titles I would've changed would be Licence to Kill (it's just four years after A View to a Kill!), Tomorrow Never Dies ("Lies" would've been better), and Die Another Day. QOS is a bizarre one - it understandably refers to Bond's post-CR mood, but then the villain's organization happens to be named Quantum too. Awkward circumstances, with predictable confusion from moviegoers.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

Another tremendous Fleming title would be The Fierce Possession.

I like it, but I think it would need some explaining - and as we saw with QUANTUM OF SOLACE, the press know that "New James Bond Title is WTF LOL" makes for a better headline that "New James Bond Title Means This ..."

Harmsway wrote:

FieldsMan wrote:

The Elegant Venus

Can you honestly picture that on a Bond poster? It's not a Bondian title. At all.

There's an element of mystery to it. I like it.

Sounds like porn.

Give or take a letter or two...

Louis Armstrong wrote:

Sounds like porn.

But very classy porn.

FieldsMan wrote:

Harmsway wrote:

FieldsMan wrote:

The Elegant Venus

Can you honestly picture that on a Bond poster? It's not a Bondian title. At all.

There's an element of mystery to it. I like it.

James Bond, art critic!

Perilagu Khan wrote:

Louis Armstrong wrote:

Sounds like porn.

But very classy porn.

It would be classy porn only if Babs is producing the movie. Then you just know she'd have to hire an Oscar-nominated writer and director to work on the film.

Harmsway wrote:

I think it sounds like a video game. Fits with such "meh" titles as NIGHTFIRE and BLOOD STONE, titles that attempt to evoke the mystique of the Bond franchise's one-word titles, but ultimately aren't all that mysterious or vivid.

The biggest problem with the title is that it is incredibly short. It's two syllables long (same as Nightfire and Blood Stone), and no Bond film previous has suffered such a slight name. It's also not an unexpected or unlikely compound word. Thunderbolt? No, Thunderball. Skyfall? Oh, okay. Sounds normal enough. Things in the sky often do fall, and the sky falling is a common notion. Boring.

I think Blood Stone has potential. It's somewhat evocative. Although I prefer Blood From a Stone as a title.

The trick with original Bond titles is that it's often quite difficult to find something that is sufficiently clever and sufficiently Bondian. It's altogether far too tempting to simply through "death" or "die" somewhere in some recognizable expression and think the result quite clever (ala, say, ONE DEATH TO DIE, which is as rubbish as it gets).

The trick of a great Bond title is to be something at once both pulpy and poetic, with a touch of the surreal. GHOST OF A CHANCE, perhaps? At the very least, it sounds like something Fleming might have conceived of and later rejected, ala THE ROUGH WITH THE SMOOTH. Same goes for, say, DEATH HAS TWO FACES, which isn't altogether too terrible, provided the story had a good enough explanation for it. A SPY FOR A SPY? Now we're just getting silly.

And then there's the one-word titles. They can be pulled off by folks who aren't Ian Fleming (Gardner's novels gave us two good ones in ICEBREAKER and BROKENCLAW, though SEAFIRE leaves a great deal to be desired), but they're the hardest ones to pull off. SKYFALL doesn't quite cut it. I'm still waiting on EON to use SHATTERHAND and/or SHAMELADY.

Nice copy n paste there. ;)

Sharky wrote:

Nice copy n paste there. ;)

I pride myself on my laziness.

Shatterhand would be fantastic!

I've never liked Shatterhand. And Shamelady's worse by a factor of five.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

I've never liked Shatterhand. And Shamelady's worse by a factor of five.

Mileage may vary.

I prefer them both to SKYFALL by a factor of ten. ;)

Perilagu Khan wrote:

I've never liked Shatterhand.

Neither. I never liked the way Fleming used it as an alias for Blofeld in YOLT - it was obviously fake.

I do like SHAMELADY, though.

Whom Fortune Favours

Hmmm...Shamelady....sort of like me in my campus years.... :face:

I came up with a title years back with "death". DEATH IS AN ALLY. That's all I got when it comes to "death". Though I think Benson's NEVER DREAM OF DYING isn't the crappiest one I've heard.

SHATTERHAND makes me think of a hand full of... well.

I wrote part of a Bond short story years back about Bond in an icy environment titled DANGER, ON THE ROCKS. But that would be at best a short story title.

Had a movie idea called SHADOW OF THE GUN, but the original Star Trek series had an episode called "Specter of the Gun".

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Though I think Benson's NEVER DREAM OF DYING isn't the crappiest one I've heard.

It's my favorite Benson title. Very elegant.

Thunderball = nuclear blast

Oh shit, you're right. I'd even about read that before.

Mrs Aural Sects wrote:

Hmmm...Shamelady....sort of like me in my campus years.... :face:

God be praised! You've brought back your nice avatar. I assume Tiffy's forgiven?

Harmsway wrote:

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Though I think Benson's NEVER DREAM OF DYING isn't the crappiest one I've heard.

It's my favorite Benson title. Very elegant.

It's not bad, although I'm firmly in the camp that supports a 50-year moratorium on the use of death and all its cognates in Bond film titles.