Tag: MGM

4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY REVIEW:

Street Date 6/10/25;
Warner/MGM;
Action;
$109.99 UHD, $139.99 UHD Steelbook;
All Films Rated ‘PG.’
Stars Sean Connery, Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell, Desmond Llewelyn, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord, Pedro Armendáriz, Lotte Lenya, Robert Shaw, Daniela Bianchi, Gert Fröbe, Honor Blackman, Harold Sakata, Cec Linder, Adolfo Celi, Claudine Auger, Luciana Paluzzi, Rik Van Nutter, Donald Pleasence, Tetsurō Tamba, Mie Hama, Karin Dor, Charles Gray, Jill St. John, Lana Wood, Jimmy Dean, Norman Burton, Bruce Glover, Putter Smith.

While the debate over which actor was the best to play James Bond will likely continue to enthrall fans for the foreseeable future, the usual consensus is that it was the first man to take on the role for the big screen, Sean Connery.

With his mix of charm and brute force, Connery seemed the perfect embodiment of Ian Fleming’s literary secret agent. Connery played Agent 007 for the first five films from Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman’s EON Productions, and six of the first seven: 1962’s Dr. No, 1963’s From Russia With Love, 1964’s Goldfinger, 1965’s Thunderball, 1967’s You Only Live Twice and 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever.

The gap in his tenure comes with 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when George Lazenby took on the role what ended up being a one-off when stardom got to his head and he rejected a long-term deal.

With the films having started to become increasingly outlandish starting with Goldfinger, OHMSS sought to bring Bond back to basics a bit by making the character less reliant on gadgets and gimmicks. Between that and an all-star cast assembled to make up for Lazenby’s acting inexperience, OHMSS is considered one of the better Bond films, though it was a box office disappointment in its initial run.

Thus, Connery was coaxed back to the role for Diamonds Are Forever for a considerable contract. The film, while still highly enjoyable, is undoubtedly the goofiest of Connery’s run and sets the stage for the campier adventures to come starring Roger Moore.

Connery would return to play James Bond in the rival (non-EON) production Never Say Never Again in 1983, though that film isn’t included here.

Still, the six original Connery Bond films make for a great collection on 4K disc and are an excellent starting point for fans to either rewatch or be introduced to the franchise. This is because the films, while maintaining individual storylines that make them effective on their own, tell an overarching story of Bond’s battle against the international criminal syndicate SPECTRE, led by Ernst Stavro Blofeld (who is played by a different actor in each appearance).

This level of interconnectedness, while minor, wouldn’t really be seen again in the franchise until the Daniel Craig era.

The exception among the Connery films is Goldfinger, which makes no mention of Blofeld or SPECTRE, but is nonetheless a classic for establishing what came to be the tried-and-true formula for a Bond film as an action franchise after the first two films were closer in spirit to conventional espionage capers.

Thunderball is also noteworthy given that this is its 60th anniversary year, it was the first Bond film shot in Panavision widescreen, and its source material became the source of constant legal nightmares for the Bond producers, since the story rights were controlled by one of Fleming’s former collaborators, who kept promising for years to make his own Bond films (and did with NSNA, which is just a Thunderball remake). The rights issues remained a quagmire for decades, until some studio maneuvering and legal rulings consolidated all the Bond properties under EON and MGM. This allowed EON to use Blofeld and SPECTRE again as villains for the Daniel Craig films.

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However, the Connery set can’t be considered a complete telling of the original Blofeld arc because of the absence of OHMSS. While YOLT is probably the most definitive of the SPECTRE films in terms of its iconography — not only Blofeld’s signature look as a scarred bald man with a white cat (the template for Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil), but also the grandiose rocket base hidden in a volcano — OHMSS is probably the most significant in terms of the storyline.

OHMSS finds Bond distracted from his battle against SPECTRE by a love story that makes him rethink his career, only for Blofeld to shatter Bond’s dreams of settling down. Thus, Bond is very much focused on revenge at the beginning of the next film, Diamonds Are Forever, despite Connery’s return to the role. Thus, despite the films being able to stand on their own, the flavor for that larger storyline is missing if one were to just marathon the films on this set. (And it’s not as if the inclusion of just one more movie to make this the Connery/Lazenby-era set would have made much a difference).

Still, the movie presentations look exceptional with their new 4K masters with Dolby Vision HDR. While some of the visual effects look wonky now owing to the techniques of the day, the films look every bit the classics that they are.

Each film is accompanied by a slew of legacy bonus materials from earlier DVD and Blu-ray releases, delving in great detail into the making of each film. Each film also includes an informative audio commentary spliced together from interviews from key cast members and filmmakers. Goldfinger and Thunderball also have a second commentary from the films’ director. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of how long some of these extras have been around that many of the participants have passed on in the interim (including Connery).

The regular edition of the Connery collection includes six discs packaged together in a standard plastic case, one film presentation per disc. The deluxe version includes an individual Steelbook case for each disc, housed in a larger case.

The digital copy insert includes a single code to redeem the set as a whole. The codes are redeemable through Warner or individual retailers, but not Movies Anywhere since the films are controlled by MGM, which is not linked to that service (despite MGM owner Amazon’s Prime Video being so).