Goldman good but not that bad

By Julian Delasantellis

I've seen every single James Bond movie, a few on their opening morning in the theatres, but as for the eternal debate as to who - Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan or Craig - was the best Bond, I couldn't care less. I watch for the villains.

What a glorious gang they are. Suave, sophisticated, well spoken, all-powerful, all-seeing and all-knowing in their incredibly dastardly and ambitious plots, they seem quite the contrast with actors in today's world, Peter Principle incompetents who couldn't bomb the water even if they fell out of a boat. My favorites are Thunderball's Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), a man so evil that he seemed to have an offscreen orchestra follow him around continually playing ominously threatening sounding overtures (also, I liked the part that he was called the "guardian" of Domino, Claudine Auger-yeah, right), and Alex Trevelyan (Sean Bean) of Goldeneye. Putting a rare bit of actual history in the plot lines, Trevelyan's story was that he was a descendent of the so-called Liensk Cossacks, nationalist, anti-communist Russians who fought for Hitler during World War II. This group was betrayed back to Stalin's most untender mercies by the West after the war, and Trevelyan, a former MI-6 agent, still burns for horrible revenge against a British society that gave him its class, manners and refinement in exchange for the murder of his parents.