"You're Watching it Wrong"

Matt Zoller Seitz was disappointed with a recent audience's inability to appreciate From Russia With Love because of its age:

It’s up to the individual viewer to decide to connect or not connect with a creative work. By "connect,” I mean connect emotionally and imaginatively—giving yourself to the movie for as long as you can, and trying to see the world through its eyes and feel things on its wavelength.

That wasn’t happening here.

I heard constant tittering and guffawing, all with the same message: “Can you believe people once thought this film was daring? It’s so old-fashioned.” The arch double-entendres; the bloodless violence, long takes, and longer scenes; the alpha male attitudes toward women and sex; John Barry’s jazzy, brassy, borderline-hysterical score: all these things elicited gentle mockery. They laughed at Sean Connery’s hairy chest. They laughed at some obvious stunt-double work. When Bond flirted with the secretary Moneypenny and put his face close to hers, a guy a couple of rows in front of me stage-whispered to his friend, “Sexual harassment!”

I have seen every James Bond film (and can say, albeit with some degree of shame, that I own on DVD every Eon adaptation of Fleming's novels). But whenever people watch the older Bond films, particularly, they seem to have a dismaying propensity to behave in a dismissive manner. One might consider this a consequence of the genre: an action film, though of course requiring suspension of disbelief, capitalises on the best technology available at the time of production to create illusions. Eventually those tricks don't work so well. Audiences become savvier. And as technology becomes better, we simply expect more.

But that doesn't disqualify the older films. As Seitz put it so well, "From Russia With Love isn't unsophisticated. You are."