DVD Review: Mad Mission 3: Our Man From Bond Street (1984)

DVD Review: Mad Mission 3: Our Man From Bond Street (1984)

In this 1984 entry in the goofy celebration of stunts and effects–Hong Kong style–known as the Mad Mission series (or the Aces Go Places series depending on your geography), director Tsui Hark turns his attention full-on to one of the obvious influences on the series: the James Bond films. As the movie begins, our hero is in Paris (we don’t know why) when a beautiful woman in Geordi La Forge glasses suddenly tries to kill him with a missile. He chases her up the Eiffel Tower, where he encounters Jaws and Oddjob. (As you do.) They all fight, then Oddjob leaps off with a parachute. Jaws tosses his parachute off the tower, and for some reason the hero (whose name is Sam) jumps after it, grabs ahold, and fights Oddjob while they’re dropping. But why did he have to jump after the parachute? He wasn’t falling from a plane like Bond when he fought Jaws in freefall; he was standing on solid footing! Oh well. If you’re the sort of person who constantly asks those kinds of questions, then the Mad Mission movies aren’t for you. Surprisingly, all this Eiffel Tower action happens a year before 007 himself does it in A View To A Kill!




Sam’s escape from Oddjob takes him under the Seine, where he’s immediately devoured by a giant submarine with a SPECTRE space capsule-style mouth adorned with pointy shark teeth. Inside the cavernous shark submarine, he meets someone who claims to be James Bond while carefully avoiding any copyrighted phrases. Fake James Bond is played by a Sean Connery impersonator who perpetually wears a white dinner jacket and actually looks a little bit like Never Say Never Again-era Connery in certain light. Sometimes. He’s aided by the Oddjob lookalike we already met (who really likes to laugh and goes the real Oddjob one better by having a metal arm in addition to a deadly derby) and the Jaws lookalike, who’s named "Big G" and who’s actually played by the real Richard Kiel. Rounding out Fake Bond’s motley crew is the beautiful seductress/assassin who fired the initial missile at Sam, Jade East, and a woman who appears to be Queen Elizabeth II. Yep, it’s that kind of movie, and this scene really has to be seen to be believed. Fake Bond introduces himself with a very clever "fake arm" gag, and the "Queen" appears to emerge from a painting. All inside a giant mechanical shark, you’ll recall, with Jaws and Oddjob looking on. It’s an Avengers level of delightful spy surrealism.

For those just joining the series, or even those who have forgotten what’s gone before (it’s easy to do), we learn at this point that Sam is a famous jewel thief. "Bond" and "the Queen" convince him to steal the crown jewels for them, claiming they’ve already been stolen and his job is to get them back. The jewels are on display in Sam’s home city of Hong Kong. Sam thinks he’s doing this for James Bond and the Queen of England, so how can he turn them down? What we learn soon enough, however, is that Fake Bond is really a notorious international thief only posing as 007–and that the so-called Queen is really a notorious Queen impersonator! (Sam doesn’t realize any of this, though.)

There are so many spy movies with dull Bond-clones in the lead that it’s a very refreshing take to cast the Bond clone as a villain. And I just love the fact that a measly thief travels the world in a giant shark submarine with a Queen impersonator. I know I’m repeating myself, but this is stuff that bears repeating!

Peter Graves, meanwhile, plays the real "man from Bond Street," specifically from "Bond Street Exports," whose telephone exchange ends in "007." Fake Bond may have avoided potentially litigious terms, but in this case, "Bond Street" and "007" are mentioned again and again by the telephone operator connecting Graves. Other than hitting us over the head with the number "007," the whole phone call is rather superfluous, given that Graves receives his orders via exploding tape recorder, as he once did on Mission: Impossible. (And would again, for that matter, a few years later on the 80s revival of his signature series.) Unfortunately for him, though, the five second self-destruct delay doesn’t give him much time to escape the rickshaw he’s riding in, and the dead-serious Mr. Phelps (ah, that is, "Tom Collins") ends up the butt of a predictable physical gag. He then sits out the bulk of the movie until the finale. Presumably, the film’s producers could only scrounge up enough Hong Kong dollars to lure Peter Graves for a few days’ shooting at most.

Upon his return to Hong Kong, Sam quickly meets up with his old partners, police people Kodyjack and his wife Nancy. Sam and Jade East concoct an elaborate scheme to use Kodyjack as his alibi while Sam swipes the first of the jewels. Like many of the best moments in this movie, it involves fake arms, as well as Jade East’s seductive skills. While much of the humor falls flat to my modern, Western tastes (whether it's because its Hong Kong humor, because it’s dated 80s humor, or because it was never really that funny to begin with I cannot say), this alibi trick does lead to one of the movie’s genuinely hilarious scenes. Thinking he’s caught onto Sam’s trick, Kodyjack questions his old friend with the aid of a lie detector. Nancy operates the machine, and Sam carefully calculates all of his responses to incriminate Kodyjack ("You were too busy with that beautiful woman!") in front of his wife until she storms out, ending the potentially dangerous interview.

The bulk of the movie consists of a number of unnecessarily elaborate heists (utilising a lot of very early CGI) and lots of cool stunts, governed for the most part not by the laws of physics but by the laws of extreme silliness. We get personal jets (watch for the wires), car chases, dirt bikes ridden by Santa Clauses (yes, that's a plural), and dune buggies aplenty manned by leather-clad punks. Let’s discuss that phenomenon for a moment. It’s easy to underestimate the perplexing amount of influence Mad Max had on a generation of filmmakers. For some reason, though, no 80s action movie could resist leather-clad punks riding motorcycles and dune buggies and wielding medieval weapons, even if they’re totally out of place—which they always are, of course. Mad Mission III: Our Man From Bond Street falls into the leather punk trap as easily as so many of its contemporaries.

Eventually, Sam realizes he’s been duped thanks to Peter Graves, and he begins collaborating with Nancy and Kodyjack against Fake Bond. Fake Bond arranges to sell the crown jewels Sam stole for him to a wealthy Arab sheik who’s already tried to purchase the Statue of Liberty. The exchange it to take place on the sheik’s yacht. Graves leads a team of helicopters to intercept the exchange, though, and uses powerful magnets to lift the Sheik’s yacht out of the water. A British submarine then surfaces, flips over and reveals itself to be a duplicate yacht on the other side! This fake yacht replaces the real one. All this leads to a couple of finales, an imperiled baby, and a final showdown with Fake Bond. They also manage to work in one final celebrity impersonator: Ronald Reagan. (Unlike the others, I think he’s supposed to be the real Reagan.) Yes, I realize that my summary doesn’t make a lick of sense, but neither does the movie. And that doesn’t matter one iota. The Mad Mission movies aren’t about sense-making; they’re about the crazy stunts, which I can’t really do justice to in mere words. If you have a soft spot for inanity and the bizarre, and if there’s even a part of you that smiles at over-the-top Hong Kong action, I promise you’ll get a kick out of Mad Mission III: Our Man From Bond Street. It’s surprisingly one of the only Bond parodies of its era, and one of the more enjoyable entries in that subgenre.

Movie Review: A Man Called Dagger (1967)

Movie Review: A Man Called Dagger (1967)
Here’s another movie, like Dimension 5, that can only be described as “American Eurospy.” This low budget Bond ripoff (or, more accurately, Flint or Helm ripoff) is as sluggishly paced as Dimension 5 (I have to confess, it took me three nights to get through its eighty-some minute running time), its hero is less likable, and it doesn’t bring anything new or original to the genre the way Dimension 5 did, but it does offer more memorable setpieces and more humor, putting the two films on roughly equal footing. Director Richard Rush, who would later earn an Oscar nomination for The Stuntman, a bona fide masterpiece with Peter O’Toole, stretches his micro budget very creatively. In the best example of that, he and his art director manage to turn one tiny set into a vast, futuristic underground villain’s lair in one of the movie’s most exciting sequences.

After having rescued a damsel in distress, secret agent Dick Dagger leads her through a corridor that’s actually a series of cube-shaped rooms with large garage doors that slam down behind them as alarms blare. The pair stay one step ahead of each shutting door, and even though this requires only one and a half cube-shaped sets, it gives the impression of a much larger space and maintains a breakneck pace for their escape. When the girl falls behind and a door separates her from Dagger, they both end up sealed in their cubes. Suddenly, a different wall of Dagger’s cube opens up, revealing the villain and his colorful minions waiting in an ornate stateroom. It’s a very clever piece of budget-conscious set design.

Another visually cool moment has Dagger and the villain orchestrating a prisoner exchange from opposite ends of an escalator. Suspense builds as one prisoner rides up the up escalator toward Dagger, passing the other one heading down the down escalator to the bad guys. The camera impressively swirls around this whole spectacle, once again turning a bland scene in a very mundane setting (it’s just an escalator!) into a strikingly executed setpiece–and even adding a new spin to a familiar convention of the genre. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for every scene in the movie.

A Man Called Dagger starts off with a boring fight scene where all the action seems to happen off-screen. We hear gunshots and punches somewhere, and the improbably awesome score by comedian Steve Allen (owing way more than a bit to John Barry’s Bond scores of the period) alerts us that what’s happening is supposed to be exciting... but all we see on camera is star Paul Mantee charging up some stairs in a lame eyepatch disguise.

Mantee is the movie’s single biggest liability. He’s really one of the worst spy heroes of the era. Sporting an awful, awful receding Paul Simon haircut, he simply doesn’t look like a leading man, for starters. Furthermore, he displays none of the animal magnetism called for in a character who prompts one conquest to breathlessly comment, “I’ll bet your women have their work all cut out for them. No hobbies, no pastimes... just you.” Really? Him?

Despite possessing none of the necessary charm, he has no trouble conveying the requisite loathsomeness and misogyny demanded by the genre. In a scene apparently intended to make him look suave but backfiring horribly, Dagger tortures a woman for information by turning up the heat in her shower to excruciating levels and not letting her out. When she finally talks, he turns on the cold and tells her to keep her cool. Nice guy.

Luckily, the hero’s shortcomings are more than offset by the villain’s strengths. Paul Mantee fails to make even a dashing secret agent charming, but Jan Murray manages to conjure up charm to spare playing a Nazi! Now that takes skill! His urbane, wheelchair-bound Dr. Koffman is the sort of villain who happens to keep replicas of famous dictators’ headgear around his office. They make handy props when he gives a speech to his minions about why past would-be world conquerors all failed. (Hitler forgot that “nice guys” finish last.) Koffman holds court with a motley assortment of colorful underlings, including a young–and very funny–Richard Kiel, essentially playing a toothless Jaws. Koffman talks down to his associates with an amusing condescension that prefigures Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor... or echoes Michael Dunn’s Dr. Miguelito Loveless from The Wild Wild West. Yes, Dagger’s rogues’ gallery would be right at home on that show.

Murray still charms even when behaving badly. When his moll successfully seduces Dagger and feeds him the misinformation she was supposed to, she asks Koffman if she did a good job. “No,” he snaps, striking her. “That’s for the three hours it took you to tell him!” And when Dagger asks him point blank how he disposes of the victims of his unsuccessful experiments, Koffman calmly replies, “In a very amusing way.”

Dagger himself could take lessons. His quips leave a lot to be desired (when Koffman tells him he uses a machine to brainwash people, Dagger asks, “Washing machine?” Groan!), and he’s got little patience and an unpleasant temper. Thrusting some sort of doohickey at a woman, he sharply orders her, “Swallow this.” When she’s understandably a tad reluctant and merely asks what it is, he snaps and repeats, “SWALLOW IT!” in a nasty bark. Only after this embarrassing outburst does he take the time to explain that it’s a homing device.

Some of his cohorts on the side of the angels aren’t much better. When a beautiful woman named Joy sneaks into Dagger’s hotel room (seeking his help), her magnificent decolletage is sadly offset by the fact that she appears to be... mentally challenged. I suppose she’s meant to be a bimbo, but Maureen Arthur’s utterly childlike delivery gives the impression of a serious handicap. The notion that the slimy Dagger is about to take advantage of such a person is enough to make the skin crawl. And her apparent condition makes it weird that when he turns around she’s suddenly naked, in the shower. “I like showers,” she explains simply, and it doesn’t sound seductive; it sounds childlike. Like she really does just like showers, and routinely gets into random people’s showers because she doesn’t know any better.

Despite setbacks like this, though, the movie builds to a pretty cool finale. Once he starts kicking ass to the chords of some great spy music, even Dick Dagger starts to seem kind of cool. And his showdown with the toothless Jaws (during which he makes the same mistakes 007 makes a decade later, finding that his punches have no effect on the human giant) is nothing compared to his showdown with the crippled Koffman! Koffman’s wheelchair comes equipped with flame throwers, extend-o-spears and all sorts of cool stuff normally reserved for Aston Martins. On top of that, though, it turns out he doesn’t even need the chair! He was faking, leaving him free for a terrifically surreal knife fight in a meat locker, in which the urbane, tuxedoed Koffman slashes at Dagger with a meat cleaver! (Dagger himself sports a dagger, naturally enough.)

The movie eventually comes to a spectacularly sleazy conclusion, in which Dagger ends up with not one, but two of the movie’s buxom babes. We zoom in on their bikini-clad bottoms, the words “The” and “End” stamped on each one, and sub-Bassey wailing about “A Man Called Dagger” kicks in on the soundtrack. And it’s exactly the song I’ve been hearing in my head ever since I first laid eyes on the movie’s incredible poster a decade ago!

Overall, the movie you get isn’t nearly as awesome as the movie promised on that poster (how could it be?), nor as the movie you’d see in your head listening to Allen’s jazzy score. (I still can’t believe Steve Allen wrote a great spy score!) But it is entertaining, with flashes of brilliance in the direction. And a splendid villain and villainous entourage more than make up for a less-than-beguiling hero and a total lack of chemistry between him and his ladies.

For another (altogether less favorable) opinion on A Man Called Dagger, check out David Foster’s recent review. You can also watch the trailer on his blog, Permission to Kill.

DVD Review: The Wild Wild West: The Third Season

DVD Review: The Wild Wild West: The Third Season

The first two seasons of The Wild Wild West followed the Avengers formula, albeit in a more compressed time-frame. Season One, in black and white, was a slightly grittier, slightly more realistic secret agent show set in the Old West and populated by eccentrics. In Season Two, the eccentrics took over–literally! The season premiere–and first color episode–saw Jim West face off against a nefarious cabal called "The Eccentrics." The landscape was no longer recognizable as the Old West, but a highly fictionalized–and stylized–version of it, just as the color Avengers seasons take place in a highly stylized fantasy version of Sixties Britain. The threats faced by West and his partner, master of disguise Artemus "Arte" Gordon, became more science fiction in nature, no longer grounded in ordinary secret agent stuff. This was largely thanks to diminutive recurring villain Dr. Miguelito Loveless (Michael Dunn), whose increasingly far-out schemes for world domination came to involve elements of pure fantasy, such as a method of teleporting oneself into and out of paintings in order to steal crown jewels! Another one of his plots shrank West down to a few inches tall, the same fate that befell Steed in the Avengers episode "Mission: Highly Improbable." The Avengers never came back down to earth after venturing so far out (in fact, the series ended with Steed and then-partner Tara King blasted out into space!), but The Wild Wild West does, in Season Three.

The colors, like Jim’s electric blue suit, are still as vibrant and bright as in the second season, but the Western landscape has been tamed. There are no signs of shrinkage or jaunts into paintings this season. In fact, Dr. Loveless is limited to just one appearance, after four in each previous season, effectively neutered in the weird science chaos he loves to cause. It’s as if the producers felt they’d stretched credulity as far as they could in Season Two, and had no choice but to reign themselves back in. However, the eccentric villains are still in place, ensuring that The Wild Wild West never becomes a run-of-the-mill Western. In fact, the most traditional Western storylines, as the one found in "Night of the Iron Fist," are made more fantastic by the inclusion of a bizarre villain, in that case a Serbian nobleman with a literal iron fist. The villains are usually the last person you’d expect to encounter in the Old West–a sheik or knight or an Indian rajah, often embodied by a major guest star. And they ensure that The Wild Wild West won't be mistaken for any other Western.

Another trait that separates The Wild Wild West from that genre is the gadgetry. Jim’s spy gadgets go a long way toward keeping one spur-heeled foot distinctly in the realm of espionage. He’s still outfitted with a quick-loading rig up his sleeve that surreptitiously delivers a Derringer into his hand at the twist of a wrist. This season, the tiny pistol has been modified to accommodate a Batman-like piton trailing some lightweight rope strong enough to hold Jim. That apparatus comes in handy time after time, as does Jim’s "Rosa Klebb" boot, which springs a knife from its toe, as well as one-off gadgets like a nifty glass-cutting ring. And Jim and Arte still ride around in their 19th Century Aston Martin–a customized train car equipped with all sorts of useful spring-loaded gizmos.

The glass-cutting ring appears in the season premiere, "Night of the Bubbling Death," which nicely establishes the back-to-the basics formula by evoking the series premiere. Following an updated credits sequence, Jim and Arte venture into an entire lawless town that’s against them (a source of contention between the United States and Mexico) in order to ferret out the villainous Victor Freemantle, who’s stolen the Constitution. In keeping with past seasons, Arte is introduced in disguise–just in time to save Jim from a hulking, shirtless henchman (decked out in bandoleers) named Clint Cartwheel. We get to see the inside of Arte’s jacket, and it’s lined with enough gadgets to make Q jealous. Arte also supplies a 3D scale model of the Freemantle’s hideout (an old conquistador fortress), enabling Jim to virtually retrace his blindfolded steps and infiltrate it later, bypassing the titular "bubbling death" (acid, naturally) via his piton gun. As usual, there is a beautiful woman, Carlotta. Her treachery sets the tone for this season. In seasons past, about half the time Jim was able to seduce such vixens onto the side of law and order, but this time around the women are far more often treacherous than trustworthy. Jim rarely gets the girl in Season 3, instead awkwardly ending up with a random floozy as arm candy for the tag scene.

“Night of the Firebrand” features an exception in the form of Vixen O’Shaugn-essy (played by Diamonds Are Forever’s Lana Wood), who despite the most treacherous of names is convinced to give up her lawless ways... but not by Jim’s charm. The strong-willed young woman (the titular “firebrand”) is a senator’s daughter who’s run off from Miss Primwick’s Finishing School to stand up for her (admittedly misguided) political ideals. She hasn’t been brainwashed like Patty Hearst; she’s doing what she thinks is right. Yet she’s treated as a comical character for her beliefs, and becomes the victim of a running gag in which Jim shuts her up whenever she goes off on a rant by knocking her out with the touch of a pressure point. In the end, once she’s seen the error of her ways, she starts talking about all the good she can do in the world, standing up for the oppressed, only to fall victim once more to the old pressure point trick. It’s all pretty chauvinist, even for the Sixties. Still, the same episode offers some good action, like Jim taking another page from 007's book and rigging his covered wagon with a smoke screen during an exciting chase, or Arte proving he’s handy enough with throwing knives to join the Eccentrics himself.

Loveless’s one appearance finds the troublesome doctor faking his death and then impersonating his own “uncle,” a celebrated Swiss neurologist who exhibits a striking family resemblance. (Yes, Jim actually falls for that, somehow.) The whole scheme falls short of the criminal mastermind’s most diabolical ploys of the past, with the simple goal of revenge. Loveless does, however, retain his flair for the absurd, and the episode provides some of the season’s most Avengers-ish moments, like the doctor’s “recording” of his will, squawked out by a trained minah bird! He’s also still got style (delightfully Sixties style), accessing his cliff-side clinic via an ornate elevator lined in purple silk. Missing (and decidedly missed) once more is the fantastically love-crazed Bonnie to Loveless’s Clyde, Antoinette (Phoebe Dorin). A character named Triste fills a similar role, but it isn’t the same.

There aren’t many bad episodes in Season 3, but there also aren’t nearly as many outstanding ones to highlight, either. Most of the plots are pretty standard-issue Western or spy (with the occasional clever twist, like an OPEC-like Arab consortium trying to corner the market on cotton), but contained therein are a number of memorably off-kilter moments and striking images. Samurai warriors attack Jim and Arte in downtown San Francisco! Arte battles it out in the middle of a horde of Kubrickian mannequins! All we see of a mysterious villain is his arm on the armrest of a large chair, but when Jim turns the chair around, it turns out all there is is a disembodied arm... and a phonograph speaker issuing the voice. Jim follows some Mexican henchmen through into an Adobe hut that turns out to house a harem chamber out of the Arabian Nights, complete with a lounging Cleopatra-like consort. Mutated boll weevils get it on. Masked bandits broadside a bank with a cannon mounted on their armored wagon. Jim is lured into a stagecoach by a beautiful woman, only to have the windows suddenly shut and gas pumped into the coach, Number Six-style. And so on and so forth. Great moments instead of great episodes.

The aforementioned “Night of the Iron Fist” best exemplifies how the show’s producers tailor more traditional Western plotlines to meet their needs. It’s essentially a remake of 3:10 to Yuma, with Jim transporting the criminal Count to prison while Arte lures his gang away by impersonating the nefarious nobleman. Along the way, they encounter a lot more stock Western characters (roughnecks and bumpkins) than traditionally populate The Wild Wild West, but the fun lies in watching how sophisticates Jim and Arte deal with these types, because it isn’t usually how Marshall Dillon does it. Arte, though dressing more and more like a cowboy this season, generally does so through disguises. But, frankly, he’s no Rollin Hand, and it’s usually easy for the audience, at least, to see through them. Arte also gets to show off his tough side a bit, saving Jim’s hide more times than in the past.

It’s not all the same old thing in Season 3, however. The final disc of this set contains the season’s two best episodes, both cut from horror movie cloth. “Night of the Undead” is a good old-fashioned Southern Gothic in the guise of a zombie story. It’s got lost love, faked deaths, and revenge from beyond the grave, all served up with the creepy atmosphere of the classic Universal shockers. From its unsettling beginning (Jim interrupting a Voodoo ritual, ala Live and Let Die, and shooting a “zombie” in the heart without killing him) to its evocative bayou finale, this one’s a real treat. It also provides one of the season’s best surreal moments when a phrenologist talks to the mapped, bald model of a human head on her shelf. Suddenly the "head’s" eyes open, and the shelf itself opens up, revealing it to be a person! It’s a bizarre image, and an effective jolt. (Though it makes no sense.) The ending, with glowing, radioactive zombies enslaved by the mad Dr. Articulus, reminded me quite a lot of Mark Gatiss’ novel The Vesuvius Club. I wonder if Gatiss saw this episode?

“Night of the Simian Terror”* may tip its twist too much with that title, but it serves up another very atmospheric horror, this time mimicking the then-contemporary product coming out of England’s Hammer Studios rather than Universal. The boys visit the isolated Kansas estate of a senator who hasn’t been seen in D.C. in some time. The constant wind blowing on the eerie exteriors paints Kansas like Conan Doyle’s Dartmoor, and sure enough, there’s an inhuman creature on the loose killing people. It continues as a classic “Old Dark House” style mystery, with dark family secrets and forbidden rooms. Jim uses a stethoscope and a periscope to spy through some floorboards, and Arte dons one of his best disguises as a humorously simian ape expert. All of this leads to a very dark finale, with Jim fighting both Richard (“Jaws”) Kiel and, of course, a brutish gorilla. (At one point, the gorilla actually flings a barrel at him! Could this be the origin of Donkey Kong?) This very effective pair of atypically horrific episodes (which, somewhat distractingly, share a few sets as well as their tone) provides a satisfying conclusion to Season 3, and the hope that Season 4 (due on DVD this March) will benefit from this home-stretch burst of creative energy.

If you’re a Cathy Gale Avengers fan, give this season a miss and pick up The Wild Wild West: The Complete First Season for starters. If you prefer Emma Peel, go straight to the sublimely surreal Season 2. But if you’re already a dedicated follower of Jim and Arte’s exploits, then by all means pick up Season 3. It’s not the best, but there’s more than enough great material to make it worthwhile for fans of the series.

*When watching this episode on my DVD player, the disc inexplicably skipped an entire, crucial chapter. Suddenly Jim was fighting Jaws! The only way I was able to watch that chapter was to rewind; I couldn't skip back to it. Irritating, though I have no idea if this flaw is specific to my brand of player or universal.

Roger Moore Receives Star On Walk Of Fame

Sir Roger Moore was honored today with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Fans crowded the street to witness an impressive ceremony presided over by Honorary Mayor of Hollywood Johnny Grant. As former James Bond co-stars like Richard Kiel, Lois Chiles and Gloria Hendry mingled with other showbiz types and signed autographs for eager onlookers on the other side of the barriers, Moore's Escape To Athena co-star (and girl from U.N.C.L.E.) Stefanie Powers (of whom Moore speaks quite fondly on his Live And Let Die DVD commentary) introduced the man of the hour. Two-time Felix Leiter David Hedison (who very graciously signed lots of autographs before the ceremony) then spoke warmly about his friend, recalling the first time they met, in Cairo, long before the pair acted together on The Saint, Live And Let Die or Ffolkes.

Hedison claimed that Moore had gotten him more acting jobs over the years than his agent or manager, and without demanding ten percent. Actress Ruta Lee, who worked with Moore on his pre-Maverick TV series The Alaskans in 1959, joked about her lifelong crush on the actor, praised his wife Christina, and lauded Moore for his extensive charity work with UNICEF and other organizations.

After being presented with some sort of proclamation and a loaf of bread by a local politician, Sir Roger himself addressed the crowd, in his usual charming, self-deprecating manner. "I've had a love affair with Hollywood for many, many years," he confessed. "Which is why I'm thrilled that I have this star down here that people can walk on." He told a few choice stories about his early years in Hollywood, then recalled his tenure as James Bond: "I did seven and then, sadly, I had to retire from the Bond films because the girls got too young. Or maybe I got too old... I can't remember which, but either way, it was disgusting." Yes, Sir Roger is as funny in person as he is on his DVD commentaries, and presumably will be in his recently announced autobiography (for which I can't wait, even if it is being ghost-written).

Moore's well-deserved star is appropriately located at 7007 Hollywood Blvd (outside a touristy trinket shop whose windows are lined with tiny porcelain crucifixes and movie star photos), a block west of the famous Graumann's Chinese Theater and a little over a block east of Pierce Brosnan's star. His sidewalk neighbors are Rory Calhoun and Bugs Bunny. Much was made of the address, and of the year in which the ceremony occurred.