Movies, Movies, Movies!

[Rath Darkblade]

Question: If James Bond and Jason Bourne had a fight, who would win?* This is the same argument we had as kids when we were debating about whether Batman and the Phantom would win in a fight.. Later generations, of course, would argue about who would win... Data from Star Trek or the Terminator.

*Answer: If the James Bond was the Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, or Timothy Dalton version, then Jason Bourne would win. If Bond was the Daniel Craig or Sean Connery version, I'd put my money on them instead.

If James Bond was played by Sir Christopher Lee (don't laugh - I'm just conjecturing), then I'd put my money on him. Sir Christopher fought for the RAF in WW2, and was attached to elite units like the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) at various times. He used his language skills for missions and was involved in intelligence gathering and tracking down Nazi war criminals.

To use Hollywood parlance, Christopher Lee was "proper badass".

Then again, Sean Connery was no slouch either. He didn't fight in WW2, but he served as a naval gunner for three years and used that experience in the Bond films.

 

[JLT]

If James Bond was played by Sir Christopher Lee (don't laugh - I'm just conjecturing), then I'd put my money on him. Sir Christopher fought for the RAF in WW2, and was attached to elite units like the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) at various times. He used his language skills for missions and was involved in intelligence gathering and tracking down Nazi war criminals.

I agree. Lee's service with the SOE put him in touch with Ian Fleming, who also worked in British intelligence. He may have been one of the inspirations for James Bond.

Peter Jackson talks about a conversation he had with Lee when they were filming Saruman's demise scene. When Sir Peter told Sir Christopher that he didn't think that the Saruman's groan didn't seem realistic, the actor replied that he knew exactly what sort of sound a man would make when he was stabbed in the back.

There's a very interesting book on the SOE called Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks. Marks's area was cryptography and he was in charge of training agents in code work. The title of the book comes from an argument he had with the people who were supplying the silk used in printing maps. When the suppliers complained that there wasn't enough silk to allocate for that purpose (most of it going to parachutes), Marks replied that if he couldn't get silk, the only alternative was to provide the agents with cyanide capsules, because paper maps would have been found too easily.