Hollywood hues
Bond babes

With rumours afloat about Freida Pinto being named as the latest Bond girl,
Ervell E. Menezes goes down memory lane with those sizzling women

BOND, James Bond, the British super spy has been around since the early 1960s. The suave, super-cool agent 007 has, by now, become a cult figure equally at home grappling with his foes as at charming women. There have been six Bond heroes since then beginning with Sean Connery in Dr. No (1962) to the current Daniel Craig in nearly 30 films. When the Bond creator Sir Ian Fleming died, scripts were written especially for the later films.

Guns, girls and gadgets, that described these Bond films and Britisher Sean Connery was the first Bond, the film Dr No which set the trend for these, sophisticated, amorous, action-packed escapades which, at once, caught the public eye. Good racy scripts, great gags, snazzy automobiles were the order of the day but with our Indian actress Slumdog Millionaire heroine Freida Pinto being named as the latest Bond (Sam Mendes is the director) girl, it is time to go down memory lane with those oomph, voluptuous women in his life.

The first and possibly the most memorable is Ursula Andress (also referred to as Undress) coming out of the sea in a bikini, water dripping from her shapely figure. This shot has very nearly become immortal, repeated in any number of Hindi films to say nothing of the ad clips and hoardings.

Here’s how one magazine described it: "Bond (Connery) awakened to the sound of a girl’s voice singing "Underneath the Mango Tree" on the Crab Beach rising Venus-like from the water with great sea-shells she was poaching, Bond has his first view of Honey Ryder, an innocent, carefree, voluptuous native island girl/diver wearing a sexy white bikini and hunting knife, water dripping from her body." Brilliant. It could well be one of the most telling shots in cinema history.

That Dr No set the trend of the Bond films is academic but it also launched Ursula Andress’ career like John Travolta’s opening walk to the music of "Stayin Alive" in that hit musical Saturday Night Fever. As for the name Honey Ryder, it set the tempo for the sexually suggestive names that followed like Plenty O’Toole, Pussy Galore, Patricia Fearing, Miss Mary Goodnight and Dr Holly Goodhead.

That Honey is the daughter of a zoologist killed by the evil genius Dr No is part of the plot and not surprisingly our man Bond has to go about doing what he does naturally, no prizes for guessing correctly. Another common gag in these films is that just when he’s about to score with one of the girls, he gets a call for duty. It had almost become a trademark.

In the next Bond film From Russia With Love was the blonde Danielle Bianchi as Sgt Tatiana Romanova and it gave a new dimension to romance at the height of the Cold War. Equally interesting is the fact that when the film was released, the Censors insisted that its name be changed to From 007 With Love. How puerile, the lengths we go to prove our closeness with the Soviet Union.

In Goldfinger, Bond had two women to court Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore and Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson. What’s more Shirley Eaton had to do the scene nude but painted with gold colour. These were some of the gimmicks used in Bond films. Or suddenly you found our hero Bond darting out of an aeroplane only to see the parachute unfurl with the Union Jack. Spectacular. Another trick sequence was having a car to careen on two wheels only to through the narrow space. And this was before the now familiar "impossible is nothing" line in today’s ads.

Octopussy was shot partly in India and we met Roger Moore in the early 1980s in which Kabir Bedi plays a miniscule part, almost like a "dharwan." Just for the record, Moore had come to Goa before that for the shooting of The Sea Wolves. The two actresses in Octopussy are Maud Adams and Kristina Weyborn.

Since the inception of Bond, there have been six actors who have played him with Sean Connery heading the list with the number of films and also being the best followed closely by Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan. And it is hard to keep count of the number of women he had around him.

Grace Jones is the only black but she’s a villain named May Day in A View to a Kill and involved in a fighting sequence with Bond which surely was in poor taste. Bond films have launched many of today’s renowned actresses so our own Freida Pinto may well be following in their footsteps.

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