Did Ayn Rand make any comments on James Bond? I think she did, but am having trouble remembering.

See her essay "Bootleg Romanticism" in The Romantic Manifesto. She liked the books and the first movie (Dr. No), hated the movie of From Russia with Love.

Thank you.

I think she saw Goldfinger but I suspect she would have hated it.

The only Bond movie I have watched is Casino Royale. It seems that most Bond fans still regard Connery as the best Bond. I mainly watched that particular Bond flick because of Eva Green.

What Bond does have is the clear defined battle of good and evil. Rand often appreciated that element in fiction.

I'm also curious regarding Rand's opinion of Connery as an actor.

I have DVDs of all the Bond films and have watched them several times. I do not have Rand’s *Romantic Manifesto* at hand, but I seem to remember that one of her big criticisms of the film version of *From Russia with Love* (1963), Sean Connery’s second time in the role, was that it portrayed Bond as visibly showing fear, implying that Connery’s first Bond movie, *Dr. No* (1962), did not.

But if you watch *Dr. No* (one of my very favorite Bond movies) again, you can see Bond showing quite intense fear. The instance I am talking about is in the middle of the night when he discovers something moving under his sheet – and I am not referring to a sexual situation with a woman in bed with him. (I am trying to avoid spoilers since you have not seen that classic yet.) The profuse sweating might or might not be attributed to the tropical setting. But Bond seems a bit shook by the event, as most of us would be.

I fully expect some folks to register disappointment after seeing the second Daniel Craig film, in the same way some folks did about Connery’s second. And I can understand that to some extent, because quite often an actor’s exciting debut in a role can influence a viewer’s personal expectations of any later reprise of the role.
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-Ross Barlow.

From the Objectivist Newsletter, January 1965:

The social status of thrillers reveals the profound gulf splitting today's culture-the gulf between the people and its alleged intellectual leaders. The people's need for a ray of Romanticism's light is enormous and tragically eager. Observe the extraordinary popularity of Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming. There are hundreds of thriller writers who, sharing the modern sense of life, write sordid concoctions that amount to a battle of evil against evil or, at best, gray against black. None of them have the ardent, devoted, almost addicted following earned by Spillane and Fleming. This is not to say that the novels of Spillane and Fleming project a faultlessly rational sense of life; both are touched by the cynicism and despair of today's "malevolent universe"; but, in strikingly different ways, both offer the cardinal element of Romantic fiction: Mike Hammer and James Bond are heroes.

Bill P (Alfonso)

Also from the January 1965 Objectivist Newsletter article:

If you think that the producers of mass-media entertainment are motivated primarily by commercial greed, check your premises and observe that the producers of the James Bond movies seem to be intent on undercutting their own success.

Contrary to somebody's strenuously spread assertions, there was nothing "tongue-in-cheek" about the first of these movies, Dr. No. It was a brilliant example of Romantic screen art—in production, direction, writing, photography and, most particularly, in the performance of Sean Connery. His first introduction on the screen was a gem of dramatic technique, elegance, wit and understatement: when, in response to a question about his name, we saw his first closeup and he answered quietly: "Bond. James Bond"—the audience, on the night I saw it, burst into applause.

There wasn't much applause on the night when I saw his second movie, From Russia with Love. Here, Bond was introduced pecking with schoolboy kisses at the face of a vapid-looking girl in a bathing suit. The story was muddled and, at times, unintelligible. The skillfully constructed, dramatic suspense of Fleming's climax was replaced by conventional stuff, such as old-fashioned chases, involving nothing but crude physical danger.

I shall still go to see the third movie, the current Goldfinger, but with heavy misgivings. The misgivings are based on an article by Richard Maibaum who adapted all three novels to the screen (The N.Y. Times, December 13, 1964).

Bill P (Alfonso)