The air is electric at this posh London casino. A beautiful woman is losing big at chemin de fer. How can the stranger across the table keep drawing better cards out of the shoe? Desperately, she borrows more to cover her bets, and the stranger says, "I admire your courage, Miss . . ."
"Trench," the brunette answers. "Sylvia Trench." She appraises her rival with an envy edging toward lust. "I admire your luck, Mr. . . ."
"Bond." The silver cigarette lighter snaps shut to reveal a face of elegant cruelty: dimples welded like scars, incredible long whips of eyebrows, a full mouth ready for any challenge -- to spit out a witticism, to commandeer a kiss, to sip from the cup of revenge. To say his name. "James Bond."
Moviegoers first heard that terse exchange in a London theater on Oct. 6, 1962. The same week Johnny Carson became host of the Tonight show, and Pope John XXIII adorned the cover of TIME. Two weeks later, Khrushchev and Kennedy would go eyeball to eyeball in a dispute over Cuban missiles. So who cared about the world premiere of the first James Bond film, or the introduction of * Sean Connery as Her Majesty's hunkiest secret servant? Who knew?
It has been six U.S. Presidents, five Soviet leaders -- and four actors playing 007 -- since Dr. No opened to no special acclaim. But the spy created by Novelist Ian Fleming is still in business: saving the world from megalomaniac crime masters, heartless femmes fatales and indifferently prepared vodka martinis. It's a big business too. The first 14 Bond films presented by Albert R. ("Cubby") Broccoli have earned something like $2 billion around the world. (Broccoli did not produce the 1967 parody Casino Royale or Connery's free-lance return to the role in 1983's Never Say Never Again.) Now, on the series' silver anniversary, Broccoli offers a new Bond film, The Living Daylights, and a new Bond hero, English Actor Timothy Dalton. Both are taut, dark and handsome, suggesting that 007 is good as new. Anyway, good as 1962.
To a world disturbed by cold war ultimatums and distracted by Camelot dazzle, Bond gave the traditional action hero modern attitudes and equipment. He brought a killer's lightning instincts to Sherlock Holmes, a suave caress to crude Mike Hammer, the microchip age to Dick Tracy's gadgets. His films were comic strips with grown-up cynicism, Hitchcock thrillers without the artistic risks. He was an existential hired gun with an aristocrat's tastes -- just right for a time when class was a matter of brand names and insouciant gestures. "My dear girl," Bond tells a new conquest, "there are some things that just aren't done. Such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above a temperature of 38 degrees F. That's as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs." Minutes later the dear girl's body is lacquered to death by Auric Goldfinger's Korean manservant.