Roger Moore part of TCM Remembers 2017

Turner Classic Movies has unveiled the 2017 edition of its TCM Remembers video, honoring actors and crew members who passed away during the year.

Roger Moore, who played James Bond in seven 007 films from 1973 to 1985, was part of the video. At around the 3:10 mark, the video includes a clip of Moore from 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me.

Other notables in the video include:

–Martin Landau, who played a henchman in 1959’s North by Northwest (used for one of two clips in the video) and gained fame in the Mission: Impossible television series.

–Veteran character actor Clifton James, whose many credits include playing redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper in Live And Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun.

–Fred Koenekamp, an Oscar-winning director of photography who had earlier honed his craft photographing 90 episodes (out of 105 total) of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. television series.

–Daliah Lavi, an actress whose credits included the first Matt Helm film, The Silencers, and the 1967 Casino Royale spoof.

–Bernie Casey, a busy actor who, among other things, played Felix Leiter in 1983’s Never Say Never Again, the non-Eon 007 film starring Sean Connery.

You can view the video below.

Bernie Casey dies at 78

Bernie Casey, as Felix Leiter, with Sean Connery and Kim Basinger in Never Say Never Again

Bernie Casey, who co-starred with Sean Connery in 1983’s Never Say Never Again, has died at 78, TMZ and The Hollywood Reporter said.

Casey was the first African American actor to play CIA agent Felix Leiter. Prior to that, the screen Leiter had been portrayed by white actors.

Never Say Never Again was not part of the Eon Productions 007 series. It featured Connery’s return to the role of James Bond, a dozen years after his last appearance in the Eon series in Diamonds Are Forever.

Eon, in the 21st century, made the same move by casting Jeffrey Wright as Leiter in 2006’s Casino Royale and 2008’s Quantum of Solace.

Casey played in the National Football League for eight seasons as a wide receiver with the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams. After he turned to acting, he generated almost 80 credits between 1969 and 2007, according to his IMDB.COM entry.

007 press kits part I: Never Say Never Again

In this digital age, press kits seem almost quaint. They were intended to spur movie critics of local newspapers to write and/or review upcoming movies. We have a few press kits for James Bond movies, so here’s a look at a few.

First up: the “unofficial” 007 movie Never Say Never Again, which hit U.S. theaters in the fall of 1983. It was unofficial only in that Eon Productions didn’t produce it. But it had Sean Connery as James Bond, 12 years after his final “official” Bond film, and had a budget comparable to the 13th “official” Bond film Octopussy, which came out in the summer of 1983.

The Never Say Never Again press kit was modest. The folder had a color photograph of Connery/Bond but it had a single publicity still inside, again of Connery/Bond.

Part of the press kit included a 12-page biograph of Connery that began thusly:

Sean Connery checked his diving equipment for the last time, adjusted his mask and slipped under the cool inviting water of the Bahamas. Fifty feet below him, on the sea bed, waited an army of highly skilled underwater film technicians. Blazing lights lit up the murky depths and were reflected back in tiny sparkles off the iridescent shoals of fish that swam with regularity past the cameras. The fish swam in safety. The day before, they would have been more uneasy, as the filmmakers had been wrorking with an all-too-real 12-fot shark — a real killer.

Sounds like somebody wanted to emulate Ian Fleming’s writing.

From another article in the press kit, running a modest 26 pages and itended to give the press critic a feel for the film, began like this:

James Bond, British Secret Servie Agent 007, is dangerous.

In a world dominated by computers and bureaucracy, he is a man whose greatest strength lies in his own intuitions, a man who allows his hunches to take him straight to the heart of the danger and who has the courage and the skill to face the greavest perils — and survive.

So when SPECTRE (Special Executor for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) holds the world to ramsom with a devastating act of nuclear terrorism, only Bond is able to cut straigh through to the rotten core of the operation.

Of course, the real name for SPECTRE is the Special EXECUTIVE for Counterintelligence, Revenge and Extortion, but hey, it’s an engrossing tale and who are we to quibble?

Other contents included biographes of Klaus Maria Brandauer, Kim Basinger, Max Von Sydnow, Barbara Carrera, Bernie Casey, Alex McCowen and director Irvin Kershner, who was fresh off directing The Empire Strikes Back.

Kershner prepared for the film by re-reading much of Ian Fleming’s work. There he found the key to the tone and texture of Ian Fleming’s work….In the James Bond books, Fleming was very interested in the characters and wrote wonderful dialogue. Those discoveries influenced Kershner’s work on the script.

Also, in the Kersner bio, we were told this:

“Never Say Never Again” will be a Bond picture with its own unique style based not in reality nor in a cartoon world, but in a world where characters operate from a psychological base that is real,” he explains.

Reading it after 26 years, it didn’t seem the quote marks were all in the right place so we present them as they appear in the press kit.