“Inaccurate, insensitive, inflammatory”: the only James Bond movies banned from release
While some of the franchise’s earlier instalments haven’t aged too gracefully when viewed through a modern lens, for the most part, James Bond has always been a fairly inoffensive series.
The hero gets the girl, defeats the bad guy, and saves the world, so it’s never been high art. 007 has been obligated to adapt and evolve with the times, because you can guarantee the character wouldn’t have survived as long if he continued acting like 1960s-era Sean Connery and trying to get away with it.
Some of the more recent outings have faced problems with the censors, but that was more to do with lowering the levels of violence to secure a PG-13 rating than anything else. However, when the first three Bond flicks were released on LaserDisc in 1991, Eon Productions no doubt wished it had kept a closer eye on what was going on behind the scenes.
When Dr No, Goldfinger, and From Russia with Love debuted on the format, they came accompanied by what’s sadly become a lost art in the modern era: a commentary track. Directors Terence Young and Guy Hamilton, regular scribe Richard Maibaum, and editor Peter Hunt were all present and accounted for, but they let themselves off the leash a little too much.
In fact, when the Eon hierarchy caught wind of what the filmmakers were revealing on the commentary tracks, they made a direct complaint to Criterion about the “inaccurate, insensitive, inflammatory, or potentially libellous” discussions that happened therein. In response, the company recalled all unsold editions of those three Bond adventures on Laserdisc, making them an ultimate collector’s item.
What did they say that left the producers so aghast? Quite a lot, to be honest, and some of it wasn’t very family-friendly. Young admitted that he’d “entirely stolen” scenes from North by Northwest and Last Year at Marienbad for his films, Maibaum called Ian Fleming “a bit of a snob,” and Hunt described Connery’s 007 as having the innate quality of being able to “walk into a room and fuck anybody.”
Hamilton also confessed that he “screwed up” the car chase in Goldfinger, saying he “hates the whole thing,” and revealed that Connery wanted to cut the scene where Oddjob crushed a golf ball with his bare hands, declaring that “it’s rubbish.” You might think that doesn’t sound too bad, but things got worse.
“Whatever it is, if a girl could do it, a girl did it, you know, and especially a pretty girl,” Young explained of the casting process for female roles, and summed up From Russia with Love actor Lotte Lenya, who played Rosa Klebb, as being “about 70 there, and she was screwing like mad when she was about 80,” which was information nobody, not just Eon, needed to know.
They wouldn’t have been happy with Hunt regaling the story of how a camera operator had their foot amputated after a stunt gone wrong on the picture, either, never mind Maibum explaining how the “women’s lib people hated” Connery’s characterisation of Bond as a mad shagger. The LaserDiscs may have been pulled from release, and the commentary tracks hidden away, but this is the age of the internet; they’re not hard to find if you feel the need to look them up.
