|  | Home James Bond Ultimate Edition - Vol. 1 (The Man with the Golden Gun / Goldfinger / The World Is Not Enough / Diamonds Are Forever / The Living Daylights) | |
|  | |  | | | James Bond Ultimate Edition - Vol. 1 (The Man with the Golden Gun / Goldfinger / The World Is Not Enough / Diamonds Are Forever / The Living Daylights) | | | | | SKU:
| | In Stock | | Availability:
Usually ships in 1 business days | | | | | | Disc 1: *Goldfinger (1964) THE COMPLETE SPECIAL FEATURES LIBRARY: MISSION DOSSIER Audio Commentary Featuring Guy Hamilton Audio Commentary Featuring Cast and Crew Disc 2: **Goldfinger Bonus Disc DECLASSIFIED: MI6 VAULT Sean Connery From the Set of Goldfinger Screen Tests On Tour With the Aston Martin DB-5 Honor Blackman Open-Ended Interview 007 MISSION CONTROL Interactive Guide Into the World of Goldfinger The Making of Goldfinger The Goldfinger Phenomenon Original Publicity Featurette MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA Original Trailers, TV Spots, Photo Gallery & Radio Communications Disc 3: *The World Is Not Enough (1999) THE COMPLETE SPECIAL FEATURES LIBRARY: MISSION DOSSIER Audio Commentary Featuring Director Michael Apted Audio Commentary Featuring Peter Lamont, David Arnold and Vic Armstrong Disc 4: **The World Is Not Enough Bonus Disc DECLASSIFIED: MI6 VAULT Deleted Scenes and Alternate Angles With Introductions by Director Michael Apted Alternate Angle, Expanded Angle Scene: The Thames Boat Chase James Bond Down River - Original 1999 Featurette Creating an Icon: Making the Teaser Trailer Hong Kong Press Conference 007 MISSION CONTROL Interactive Guide Into the World of The World Is Not Enough The Making of The World Is Not Enough Bond Cocktail Tribute to Desmond Llewelyn Garbage 'The World Is Not Enough' Music Video The Secrets of 007 MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA Original Trailer & Photo Gallery Disc 5: *Diamonds Are Forever (1971) THE COMPLETE SPECIAL FEATURES LIBRARY: MISSION DOSSIER Audio Commentary Featuring Director Guy Hamilton and Members of the Cast and Crew Disc 6: **Diamonds Are Forever Bonus Disc DECLASSIFIED: MI6 VAULT Deleted Scenes Sean Connery 1971: The BBC Interview Lesson # 007: Close Quarter Combat Deleted Footage - Oil Rig Attack Satellite & Explosions Test Reel Alternate & Expanded Angles 007 007 MISSION CONTROL Interactive Guide Into the World of Diamonds Are Forever Inside Diamonds Are Forever Cubby Broccoli - The Man Behind Bond MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA Original Trailers, TV Spots, Photo Gallery & Radio Communications Disc 7: *The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) **The Man With The Golden Gun Bonus Disc Newly Recorded Audio Commentary Featuring Sir Roger Moore THE COMPLETE SPECIAL FEATURES LIBRARY: MISSION DOSSIER Audio Commentary Featuring Director Guy Hamilton and Members of the Cast and Crew Disc 8: DECLASSIFIED: MI6 VAULT Roger Moore and HervÃ(c) Villechaize - The Russell Harty Show On Location With The Man With the Golden Gun Guy Hamilton: The Director Speaks Girls Fighting American Thrill Show Stunt Film The Road to Bond: Stunt Coordinator W.J. Millian Jr. 007 MISSION CONTROL Interactive Guide Into the World of The Man With the Golden Gun Inside The Man With the Golden Gun An Original Documentary Double-O Stuntmen: A Look at the Greatest Stunts and Stunt Performers in the Bond Films MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA Original Trailers, TV Spots, Photo Gallery & Radio Communications Disc 9: *The Living Daylights (1987) THE COMPLETE SPECIAL FEATURES LIBRARY: MISSION DOSSIER Audio Commentary Featuring Director John Glen and Members of the Cast and Crew Disc 10: **The Living Daylights Bonus Disc DECLASSIFIED: MI6 VAULT Deleted Scenes With Introduction by John Glen Happy Anniversary, 007 Silver Anniversary Featurettes Timothy Dalton: The New James Bond/Vienna Press Conference Timothy Dalton: On Acting Dalton and d'Abo Interviews The Ice Chase Outtakes - Deleted Footage With Director John Glen Narration 007 MISSION CONTROL Interactive Guide Into the World of The Living Daylights Inside The Living Daylights Ian Fleming: 007's Creator a-ha 'The Living Daylights' Music Video The Making of 'The Living Daylights' Music Video MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA Original Trailers, TV Spots, Photo Gallery & Radio Communications | | | |
List Price:
| $59.98 | |
Our Price:
| $39.99
& this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
| |
You Save:
| $19.99 (32%)
|
| | |
|
| | Product Details | | Actors: | Roger Moore, Christopher Lee, Timothy Dalton, Maryam d'Abo, Sean Connery | | Director: | Guy Hamilton | | Format: | Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC | | Language: | Arabic, English, French, German, Russian, Thai | | Subtitle: | English, Spanish, French | | Number of Discs: | 10 | | Studio: | MGM (Video & DVD) | | Run Time: | 614 minutes | | DVD Release Date: | November 07, 2006 | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 88 reviews |
| |
| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
James Bond Series May 30, 2009
James (Bind) Bond debonair,suave and sophisticated. The volume 1 is a very good DVD. Delivery was prompt.
 The Gold Version Apr 15, 2009
This is the most popular version of the James Bond Collection set as far as saleswise. The movies listed in the set are The Man with the Golden Gun / Goldfinger / The World Is Not Enough / Diamonds Are Forever / The Living Daylights. As a whole, the collection is wonderful mostly because of the bonus features. You get behind the scenes, interviews, tributes to various Bond family, documentaries, audio commentary from directors, cast and sometimes Bond (Roger Moore), music videos and much more!!
What is interesting about this collection is the only GREAT Bond film is Goldfinger. The World Is Not Enough was a let down. The Living Daylights was okay. The Man With The Golden Gun was unforgettable. Diamonds Are Forever was Sean's last and less inspiring Bond outing. Buy this volume is you are a Bond collector, a fan, and if you want great features, but don't expect too much.
Great James Bond Collection Mar 11, 2009
It was ship quickly In great working condition. the set comes with Goldfinger,the man with the golden gun,diamonds are forever,Living daylight and the world is not enough all the disc are in great working condition and are digitaly remasterd. Great set if your a fan of the James Bond films.
 Watch out if you order whole series Mar 02, 2009
I ordered all 4 of these box sets recently from Amazon during one of their sales. There's nothing wrong with these discs if you get a good copy. But two of my sets were tainted with a defective disc - movie disc (haven't watched any of the bonus discs). I guess I should have done "20 Days of 007" like TBS used to do years back when there was only 14 or so movies. Bottom line is that if you order these, watch them quickly to be sure you don't have any defective discs and miss Amazons short no-charge return window. I'm giving Amazon 3 stars, not the movies. I'd give the movies 5 stars.
Four different Bonds in five different Bond movies Feb 06, 2009
Appropriately enough the first of the series to have a really imaginative use of colour, Goldfinger is in many ways the most visually sensual of the films, the unforgettable image of Shirley Eaton's golden girl reflected in a golden glow to much of Ted Moore's cinematography. It's oozing with striking and surreal imagery, from Oddjob's menacing shadow on the hotel room wall, to the little old lady with machine gun or Bond making his entry by unzipping his wetsuit to reveal an evening one underneath. Ken Adam's production design is his possibly his finest hour, genuine architecture of the imagination that is at once both fantastic and strangely credible, maintaining a sense of scale and verisimilitude by his use of ceilings on the smaller sets.
It's also the one that set the Bond formula in stone, something that would later become more a hindrance than a help to the series before something more radical was attempted with Casino Royale. Aside from establishing the trend for irrelevant but enjoyable pretitle sequences, it is from here on that the gadgets begin to assume a more prominent role. However, unlike most of the Roger Moore efforts, they are no match for Bond's own wits - even the famed Aston Martin DB5 does not save him. After putting it through its paces, he is left to his own initiative.
There is no getting away from the overtly sexist approach here ("Dink, say goodbye to Felix - man talk."). Even Blackman's villainy seems inextricably linked to her lesbianism ("You can turn off the charm, I'm immune") but one good one from Bond and she's on the side of the angels.
As with all Bond films, many of the cast are dubbed - in this case, Frobe was dubbed by actor Michael Collins. Regardless, his Auric Goldfinger is easily the best of the Bond super-villains, and comes equipped with the best line in the series as Bond, strapped down in front of the laser beam (in the novel it was a chainsaw), asks if he expects him to talk: "No Mr Bond, I expect you to die." And for possibly the only time in the series, you think that maybe Bond really has had it. Incredibly enjoyable and one of the best-paced entries in the series, it's not hard to see why this is many people's favorite Bond film. It may be formulaic, but then the formula still worked wonders.
While all the extras from the original single-disc release have been carried over, there are not as many new features as you might expect on this repackaged two-disc Ultimate Edition. Most interesting are Theodore Bikel and Tito Vandis' screen tests as Goldfinger, but there are also somewhat awkwardly presented archive interviews with Connery and Honor Blackman as well as a featurette about the Aston Martin DB5, though perhaps the most enjoyable remain the radio spots from the original release.
Connery's last Bond film for Broccoli and Saltzman is very familiar stuff. Diamonds Are Forever is one of those once popular Bond films whose reputation among the faithful seems to drop every year as OHMSS's rises. Certainly it makes for a poor follow-up and the weakest of the `Blofeld Trilogy.' Its biggest sin is the incredibly lazy pre-title sequence of Bond tracking down and disposing of one Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Aside from the lazy TV-movie look, this isn't a man hunting the murderer of his wife but someone having a bit of a laugh at work. The sequence only really makes much sense if you regard it as a sequel to You Only Live Twice that's determinedly pretending OHMSS never happened after Lazenby incurred the producers' wrath by walking out on the series.
Once you can get over the massive shift in tone from the previous film, or the fact that the film rarely makes much of an effort in its determination to part you from your money, it's still moderately entertaining in its very undemanding way. But there's no disguising the fact that after the first half the film becomes increasingly reliant on Connery's starpower, leaving a shoddy patchwork of half-hearted setpieces and weak puns as the filmmakers imaginations dry up. Unfortunately Connery walks through it all with the satisfied laziness of a man who knows he's being paid too much and is on triple-overtime while Guy Hamilton directs like a man determined to finish on the dot of 6:00pm come hell or high water rather than lose those restaurant reservations. It's particularly telling that when Bond trips slightly when walking with M after the title sequence they didn't even reshoot the scene - too much of the film has a "Nah, that'll do" feel to it.
It's also one where the rejected motive for the film's diamond smuggling - to stockpile enough to perpetually blackmail all the diamond companies with the threat of flooding and destabilizing the market - is rather more promising than the giant space laser-weapon that they opt for instead. It's not helped by the distinctly unthreatening villains, who take camp to new lows. Despite having a few good quips, by turning Charles Gray's Blofeld into a virtual standup comedian it's hard to take him seriously long before he turns up in drag, while the film's pair of camp killers, Wint and Kidd, are an even more unmenacing pair, played purely for cheap laughs. The sight of Putter Smith shuffling towards the camera with a pair of burning kebabs in the post-plot murder attempt that became a regular feature of Moore's outings and which here looks seemingly tagged on as if an afterthought, certainly qualifies as one of the series lowpoints. Still, there are a few nice moments like the opening smuggling montage or the fight in the elevator, John Barry delivers a nice score and there are a couple of nice Ken Adams designs - particularly the Slumber Chapel of Rest, designed like a stained-glass diamond. Connery's worst Bond film is still better than Moore's worst, but you really need to dial your expectations down low for this one.
This repackaged two-disc Ultimate edition boasts a fairly modest upgrade in extras from the original release - a 1971 BBC interview with Connery, a featurette on the elevator fight, a few alternate and expanded angle scenes, some test footage and an additional couple of deleted scenes.
The Man With the Golden Gun was producer Harry Saltzman's last hurrah before selling out his share in the Bond series to United Artists to ensure the maximum inconvenience to his detested partner Cubby Broccoli. It's certainly not premium Bond: at times it threatens to turn into an episode of The Avengers, what with Scaramanga's funhouse, his midget servant Nick Nack, its human statues or the off-kilter angles of MI6's Hong Kong HQ located in the rusting wreck of the Queen Elizabeth, not to mention Roger Moore's more Steed-like Bond. Although there are hints of the lows to come in Moore's tenure - Bond being saved by a pair of schoolgirls or defeating a villain by pretending to be a tailor's dummy - this is still recognisable an old-school Bond film, with thankfully few gadgets, although it's disappointing that the producers provide Scaramanga with an island lair and super-weapon to give Bond something to blow up at the end (a rather half-hearted effort to be sure: instead of a private army, Scaramanga simply has Herve Villachaize and a maintenance man). Britt Ekland's irritating `typical silly woman' comic relief was a bit hard to take in 1974 and gets worse with each passing year, but Christopher Lee's Scaramanga is one of the more interesting Bond villains, not least because of his imagined empathy with his prey - he regards himself as Bond's moral and professional equal, the kind of pathological snobbery Fleming's books were full of but the films increasingly abandoned.
Unlike many of the repackaged 2-disc `Ultimate Editions,' this is a fairly substantial upgrade from the original single-disc issue, carrying over all of the original features and adding plenty more - a new commentary by Roger Moore, behind the scenes footage, interview with director Guy Hamilton and an amusingly cheesy extract from a British TV interview with Moore and Villachaize. The only disappointment is that the deleted Molotov Cocktail sequence from Bond and Scaramanga's duel that featured heavily in the teaser trailers has not been located and included.
As with George Lazenby, the brevity of Timothy Dalton's tenure as Bond - due to years of legal problems and lawsuits between EON and MGM/UA - has led to history merrily being rewritten by the press that once hailed him. Dalton, not the lawyers, was lined up as the fall guy with Pierce Brosnan the man who saved the series from disaster (even though Dalton's first Bond saw a massive increase in takings over Moore's last film). Those who are quick to dismiss him would do well to check out The Living Daylights.
Much of the scapegoating of Dalton seemed to come from the confusion of actor and role. At the time Dalton's Bond was the closest to Fleming's creation - more so than Connery, even - and given the right script he proved outstanding in the role. After Roger Moore's 12-year, seven-film tenure as Bond finally came to an ignominious end with A View to a Kill, as with OHMSS, Live and Let Die and Casino Royale, the producers broke in their new Bond with a more low-key, low-gadget approach, resulting in the best Bond since the Sixties, with Dalton initially looking the first Bond to seriously rival Connery. Where Connery had the danger and Moore the class, Dalton managed to combine both, with Bond's self-assurance that verges on the arrogant down pat, reclaiming the character from the increasingly comic-strip approach of too many of the later Moore films.
The film isn't without its faults - Caroline Bliss isn't up to much as Moneypenny, Maryam D'Abo's a bit of a wet leading lady while Jeroen Krabbe lacks the menace he brought to No Mercy - but it looks and feels like a classic Bond film, has little truck with gadgets and is less in thrall to silly jokes. Best of all, it's got a plot (involving a dubious defection, Mujahadin opium smuggling in Afghanistan and a re-activated Stalinist spy assassination programme). The political background may have dated - this was filmed when the Communists still held the USSR together and when the Mujahadin were the good guys - but it still comes up remarkably fresh. This is Bond with all the stops pulled out but without the overkill. The production values are superb and visually it's a treat, especially in widescreen, with John Barry making his final Bond score his best in years. The action scenes are often outstandingly good, with a return to the kind of good old vicious punchups that vanished in the latter Moore years and as well as some amazing stunt work involving a Russian troop plane and it has one of the series' best pre-title sequences, with a security exercise in Gibraltar turning into the real thing. The makers even have the confidence to remove Bond from one of the key setpieces - a superbly staged kidnapping from a safehouse, which runs nearly a full reel. John Glen's direction is so spot-on here it's hard to see why it would go so horribly wrong on Licence To Kill.
The extras package is excellent, including audio commentary, an extended scene and the infamous deleted `magic carpet' sequence, a bad idea that feels like a holdover from the Roger Moore era that was thankfully dropped due to the stunt looking distinctly unimpressive. There are enough new features on the two-disc Ultimate edition to make an upgrade worthwhile for the more ardent Bond fans - several promo featurettes from the original release, a press conference held in Vienna and 47-minute TV special `Happy Anniversary 007.' All the features from the original DVD release have also been included.
After the disappointment of Tomorrow Never Days, it perhaps shouldn't have been too surprising that, as per the usual EON pattern of alternating good and bad Bond films, The World is Not Enough turned out rather well. It helps that it has a stronger plot this time round as well as some attempt at an element of mystery - along with For Your Eyes Only this is the only Bond where the identity of the real villain is withheld for the first half of the movie. It's also more character-based than usual, with some interesting dialogue that takes on a different dimension once you know who's on the side of the angels and who isn't. The Maguffin is an oil-based variation on Goldfinger's big scheme, but the execution is very different and rather more grounded. Brosnan has the best character writing of his tenure but isn't always up to it: the moments of ruthlessness convince but he's one of those actors who can't stand still and just be and always has to do something, making him seem somewhat ADDS in some scenes and leads to a couple of strange bits of gurning. Yet it can still lay claim to being his best performance in the role, and the presence of Sophie Marceau and Robert Carlyle helps raise the acting bar enough so that even Denise Richards' hot pant wearing nuclear scientist - in-joke casting at its finest - isn't quite as bad as she's been painted.
There's a slightly schizoid feel to Michael Apted's direction at times seeming a tad uncertain and stylistically very different from Vic Armstrong's action scenes. It's certainly not difficult to tell who shot what, and not just because Armstrong seems better at hiding the significant height difference between Brosnan and Carlyle. While still variable (the opening boat chase has a few too many sight gags and the helicopter/chainsaw sequence doesn't work as well as it should), the action scenes are much better handled this time round and much better integrated into the story. Despite some awful wisecracks, this feels less like an attempt to hang plenty of setpieces on a flimsy plot and more like the action is being dictated by the story. Definitely one of the better modern Bond outings.
There's not much new in the two-disc Ultimate Edition to justify an upgrade though. While the extras from the previous release have been carried over, there's only a Hong Kong press conference and a few deleted and alternate scenes. Of these - including Renard's very unimpressive original entrance, more tomfoolery in Q's lab and a line about madmen in hollowed out volcanoes filled with large breasted women threatening the world with nuclear war ("It only takes one") among them - only a visually striking scene in the abandoned oilfields seems good enough to have kept.
| |
| |
| |  | |  |
|
| You may also like ... |
