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NEWS
Immortalising Bond's gadget-laden cars
UK's most famous motoring museum celebrates 50 years of fictional spy's exploits on film – and the cars involved'Bond in Motion', a commemorative exhibition at the UK's National Motor Museum, Beaulieu, marks the 50th anniversary of the very first James Bond feature film, 'Dr. No'.
Being a motor museum, Beaulieu is naturally focusing on the cars that Bond and his villainous antagonists flogged around in the perennial fight between good and evil. 50 cars comprise the exhibit, including the Aston Martin DB5 from 'Goldeneye', the Lotus Esprit S1-based submarine from 'The Spy Who Loved Me', and the Jaguar XKR driven by Bond nemesis Xao in 'Die Another Day'.
The exhibit is claimed by the museum to be the largest of its kind, and features not only the cars that appeared in the films, but also motorbikes, jets – and vessels too, using the Lotus as an example. To date, the exhibition has drawn in visitors from former Bond cast and crew, including Sir Roger Moore, Britt Ekland and Eunice Gayson – Bond's girlfriend in the first two films.
Some of the best car chase sequences in the Bond films were choreographed during the Roger Moore period. Who could forget the spiral jump in an AMC Javelin for 'The Man With The Golden Gun', that unlikely escape machine, the Citroen 2CV in 'For Your Eyes Only', or the Alfetta GTV6 power-oversteering through West Germany in 'Octopussy'? But the cars were often memorable for their gadgets too – with the remote-controlled BMW 7 Series in 'Die Another Day' a case in point.
Bond drove all sorts of cars on film, including Aston Martin DB5, Lotus Esprit, Ford Mustang and different BMWs at one point, but in the books Bond always drove an original Bentley Continental.
The anniversary of Dr. No is really the 50th anniversary of Eon Productions – the company founded by Cubby Brocoli and Harry Saltzman – but 007 had been the protagonist of an earlier TV adaption of Casino Royale, which has thus been filmed three times, including the David Niven satire in 1967. Sean Connery was actually the third actor to play Bond, after Barry Nelson in 1954 and Bob Holness who provided the voice for a South African radio play based on Moonraker.
Connery himself played Bond in numerous Eon films, but later appeared in Never Say Never Again, which was based on a screenplay subsequently adopted by Ian Fleming for his own Bond story, Thunderball. One of Fleming's screenplay collaborators, Kevin McClory, sued and won the right to film the story he originally penned with Fleming. McClory produced the original version of Thunderball and earned a credit accordingly, with permission from Eon, but then re-adapted the story for a remake, which was Never Say Never Again – Connery's last outing as Bond.
Contrary to the view of Aussie actor George Lazenby's manager, the Bond film franchise shows no sign of diminishing. 50 years on from Dr. No, the latest instalment, Skyfall, has just finished production.
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