I've seen most James Bond movies.  When I was a kid, they appealed to me as action-adventure tales, with Sean Connery playing the part, I thought then, to perfection.  During the 1970s, Bond films were, like other theatrically released movies, shown on network television.  Most people didn't have VCRs, so one had to watch the movie, with commercial breaks, as it broadcasted.  This wasn't a bad circumstance--it planted the viewer's ass in front of the TV during specific periods.  When Roots, the super-popular mini-series aired, toilet flushing across the country was at a highly elevated rate at certain times corresponding to that show's commercial breaks.
     Decades after enjoying the Connery Bond films, I read some of Ian Fleming's Bond novels.  I was struck by how little Fleming's Bond resembles Connery's.  Eye color wrong, demeanor wrong, and Connery is a bit too warm at times, and glib.  Fleming's Bond is cold, very English, his eyes stony and gray.  This appearance fits with the most recent Bond, played by Daniel Craig.  I can't write much about the Craig contribution to the series, having seen only Casino Royale, which I liked, as much for the presence of the most beautiful actress in the world, Eva Green, as for anything else in the movie.
     Pierce Brosnan as Bond seemed wrong, his screen persona too Cary Grant-like to be convincing as a secret agent.  I think Brosnan's a pretty good actor, given the right part, as he showed in the TV series Remington Steele, but the necessary Bond coldness loses out to his cool smugness.
     Timothy Dalton did a better job as Bond, coming across as a man of action, if not portraying the role with much depth.  When he had the job in the 1980s, the Bond franchise was faced with the imminent end of the Cold War, the central background of the series in previous films and in the novels.  Dalton's two Bond films are straight adventure stories, one of them taking place in Afghanistan, with bad and dusty Russians providing targets for his bullets.
     Someone asked, "Who's your favorite Bond actor?"
     My answer surprised him: "Roger Moore."
     Did I reply this way because I tend to be quirky?  Moore had a long career in Hollywood and Britain before becoming Bond in 1973's Live and Let Die.  He was the star of the TV series, The Saint, a role similar to his Bond performances, in which he seems breezily unattached to life's dark depths, even while delving into them.
     He was most ready among the Bonds (though Connery did this, too) with clever quips and bad puns after killing someone or watching a henchman fall to his death.  After Moore had made several Bonds, his quips had become expected, but this overlooks an important aspect of his performances, the very reason why he's my favorite Bond: he has the Bond coldness described by Fleming.  His Bond's smoothness as a gentleman comes from the same source as his ability to cold-bloodedly kill his adversaries; the jokes he makes betraying the contempt he feels for human specimens who serve evil masters.
     A stony look comes over Roger Moore's face at times when he plays Bond; the chill of that mask--the death dealer--harkens best to Ian Fleming's creation, a man who kills for Queen and Country, and does so feeling nothing from it because it's a habit.  Moore's characterization of lightness--the bad puns, et cetera--covers the darkness propelling him, without which he has no purpose.

                                                                             Vic Neptune