Las Vegas Weekly

The Bond Awards

The Bests and The Worsts

Best Bond Girl to Take Away for the Weekend: Claudine Auger’s Domino in Thunderball, who may look even better in a bikini than Ursula Andress.

Best Bond Girl to Settle Down With: It didn’t work out so well for Bond, but Diana Rigg’s Tracy di Vincenzo has it all: smarts, complexity, courage, a sense of humor, and killer looks.

Bond Girl You Wouldn’t Even Tell Your Friends You Hooked Up With: Tanya Roberts’ Stacy Sutton, in A View to a Kill, a squealing mannequin.

Best Villainess: We must break our own rules to acknowledge to Barbara Carrera’s impossibly sexy femme Fatima Blush in Never Say Never Again. Then again, redhead Luciana Paluzzi, playing essentially the same role in Thunderball, is a bad girl for the ages.

Villain You Wouldn’t Want to Meet in a Dark Alley: Robert Shaw’s blond-haired assassin, Donovan Grant, is perhaps the only bad guy in the franchise who measured up physically to Sean Connery.

Most Condescending Villain: Doctor No (Joseph Wise) set the standard for villains who talk Bond to death instead of simply killing him.

Most Entertaining Villain: Gert Frobe’s Goldfinger, easily. Other Bond villains come off as snobs and bores, but Goldfinger’s enthusiasm for his own genius plan is endearing.

Villain You Could Easily Beat at Thumb Wrestling: Charles Gray’s feminine Blofeld would make a great host at your Scattergories party, but not as a megalomaniac out to take over the world.

Best Villain’s Lair: Blofeld’s volcano base in You Only Live Twice

John Barry’s Best Score: Take your pick: Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Worst Score: Eric Serra’s weird electropop score to GoldenEye goes a long way to taking the starch out of the movie.

Best Chase, Car Division: Unfortunately, Bond movies tend to favor spectacle over bone-crunching fury, a situation forcefully remedied in Quantum of Solace.

Best Chase, Ski Division: The ski chase in For Your Eyes Only, which culminates in Bond skiing down a bobsled run, while a guy on a motorcycle is in hot pursuit.

Best Henchman: Oddjob.

Worst Henchman: Jaws. Great idea gone wrong.

Best Fight: The Connery-Shaw fight in From Russia With Love remains unmatched, though the Bond v. Odd Job showdown in Goldfinger is also stellar.

Fight That Looks as Silly Now as it Must Have Then: Roger Moore packs up a pint-size Herve Villechaize in The Man With the Golden Gun.

Sexiest Bond Song: “Thunderball” is great, but top prize goes to “Diamonds are Forever.”

Most Tone Deaf Bond Song: “GoldenEye.” You’d think Tina Turner singing a tune by Bono and the Edge would be great. You’d be wrong.

Best Bond Poster You Never Saw: Famous illustrator Bob Peak (Apocalypse Now), did an early poster for License to Kill, Dalton’s second outing as Bond (back when the film was to be titled Licensed Revoked.) Against a blood red backdrop, an illustration of a tuxedo’d Bond, face grim, gun at the ready, swoops through the frame. More bad-ass than the movie itself.

Worst Bond Poster You Did: The final poster for License to Kill, featuring Dalton in a bland and stock “James Bond Pose,” while two box show inset photos of the Bond girls. Completely unimaginative, and clearly less bad-ass than the movie itself.

Best Gadget You Could Actually Get Through Security: Bond’s old school attaché in From Russia With Love is still a winner, packing tear gas, a folding sniper’s rifle, a knife and 50 gold sovereigns.

Gadget That Most Marks You as a Tourist: The Living Daylights: Bond surveils a target with a pair of glasses upon which are fixed small binoculars. Looks as ridiculous as it sounds.

Greatest Stunt: Rick Sylvester’s parachute ski-jump off a mountain in The Spy Who Loved Me remains the standard bearer.

All-in-All Best Action Sequences: Bond’s assault on Blofeld’s mountaintop stronghold in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and the high-flying construction site fight in Casino Royale.

All-in-All Worst Action Sequence: Lots of possibilities, but the Venice gondola chase in Moonraker is a true jump the shark moment.

Action Scene That Goes From Great to Terrible the Quickest: Bond is shoved out a plane without a parachute to open Moonraker—an amazing stunt in 1979 that is ruined when steel-toothed Jaws shows up mid-air, fails to open his parachute, crashes into a circus big top…and pops up later in the movie.

Best Bond Movie for One-liners: Put on any scene from Thunderball and wait 30 seconds.

Worst Bond Movie for One-liners: Most any line uttered by Halle Berry in Die Another Day.