James Bond film formats

[Spencer Draper]

Longtime lurker here and I had to sign up just to post here as a lifelong Bond fanatic not to mention cinema diehard.
I think the IB prints were through at least DAF in the US but probably continued in the UK a little longer. The constant reissues were running original prints over and over until there was nothing left before striking new prints if any as far as I understand it. (Sadly almost all of the theatrical reissues happened before my lifetime so I’ve only been able to see some of the first 16 Bonds properly on the big screen a few times)
In my own researches into the films in both their exhibition and video histories I’ve come across some mentions and musings of possible magnetic stereo runs for some of the films in addition to the handful of titles never confirmed of having 70mm blowups.
For magnetic prints it is thought they could have been mono or stereo on certain titles for any of the first nine films. I think Dr. No is out because it was a low budget production, and likely FRWL as well. It’s possible on Goldfinger but I think unlikely. The one cool note about GF is that the 003 bomb timer did make it into certain prints which seem to be the initial December 1964 UK prints and by the time of the 1965 US and other territory releases the Harry Saltzman 007 timer idea had been inserted.
Thunderball is the really confusing one. TB was excessively rushed to theaters and barely made its already pushed back Christmas 1965 date. Peter Hunt was editing like mad and had to get the four hour rough cut down which meant most of the second act was drastically hacked down. Eventually the film was released in scope 35mm mono but you’d think such a big event would have had a blowup version. (Cubby Broccoli apparently didn’t like the roadshow system.) What did happen was that two distinct audio mixes appeared with dialog and music differences. For years I’ve tried to figure out why this is and what happened. At first I thought perhaps one was an abandoned 70mm mix but my best guess is like GF above that there was a second mix done later for the US and other country releases that had the differences and the first was used in the UK. On video all we ever had was a mono track that ends with a Thunderball instrumental. Eventually for the big CAV 1995 anniversary Laserdisc boxset someone at MGM wanted to do the film in stereo and they pulled some stems. They then inserted John Barry’s score in full stereo around the mono mix and turned it into a ProLogic affair which was later bumped to 5.1 and is still on disc today. The interesting thing is whatever source they pulled was this second mix with differences and ends in the original 1962 James Bond theme. Since this was MGM/UA in Los Angeles I assume it must be a master of what I think is the US mix. The older mono from prior video releases then went unheard for years until it resurfaced on the latest editions as a secondary track labelled “original mono”.
You Only Live Twice is the one rumored to have an unconfirmed 70mm blowup possibly only played in Japan. Freddie Young reportedly with Lewis Gilbert asked to use Super Panavision 70 to better shoot the massive volcano set but was refused by EON. Their budget mindedness is why mono upheld for so long and why I found the rumors of mag runs so surprising.
OHMSS is the tipping point. I first read I think on the home theater forum somewhere about possibly the 70’s films having mag stereo runs and that was it. Then when reading John Glen’s autobiography “For My Eyes Only” he details having to tear apart and install new sound equipment for the OHMSS premiere because it had been mixed in magnetic stereo and the venue was apparently only rigged for mono-and this was days before the premiere!
Diamonds Are Forever has a good mono mix already so I’d love to hear a stereo mix if it exists.
Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun are the two films where I’m convinced if any were done in mag stereo it would be these. They already display a very healthy increase in fidelity and dynamics and are so good they almost sound stereo in places but remain mono. On LALD I would buy a magnetic run being done since you had both the Wings title song and George Martin doing the score. Then they would have likely repeated the practice for the next film. Another fun fact is that on the earlier video releases of Golden Gun where they went with a 1.33 opening up of the 1.85 frame the source is a print with cues and the sound is an okay mono. But when they finally did it letterboxed on Laserdisc in 1994 (the last to finally be letterboxed on video) while the source element was the same (this time matted) the sound is suddenly MASSIVELY improved and while still mono is so full bodied you’d swear it was stereo.
Realizing this it’s likely these were perhaps magnetic mono runs. The only other note I have is the rumors of the LALD title song existing in some sort of quad mix. The score did get released as a quad 8 track which I’d love to find someday. Some have said in the (otherwise atrocious 5.1 remix) they tried to make the song sound like the quad mix in the title sequence.

The first officially to have anything other than mono was The Spy Who Loved Me but it has no Dolby credit as that was first used on Moonraker two years later. However, Spy turned up with a four channel LCRS surround encoded mix for the first time on the 1991 letterbox Laserdisc release. I’m pretty sure what happened was that a four track (perhaps magnetic?) mix was done for premiere engagements but that it wasn’t Dolby since it was after Star is Born ’76 but before Star Wars took the world by storm and made Dolby famous. It’s possible it could have been Dolby but there’s no official documentation everywhere. In the end all the main release prints for Spy were seemingly mono and now that mix is the rare version. It graced all early video releases, but the LD was pan n scan and time compressed. I tracked down the old CBS Fox VHS tape and it’s mono. The mix in LCRS is quite impressive for the time if a bit limited. On that LD it’s a little noisy in spots but a healthy listen with a very faint trace of dialog panning in some spots. They’ve since remixed it a number of times as 5.1 for later releases. Spy is rumored to have gotten some 70mm blowups but it’s still unconfirmed.
Moonraker was the first in Dolby Stereo and the mix is pretty good though John Barry reportedly hated how his score was treated and felt they didn’t go far enough with the technology. As with Spy it is thought there might have been some blowups made. Eventually the 2.0 was remixed into 5.1 but the purist in me feels that with both films and the ones to follow that the 5.1 loses something from the original.
For Your Eyes Only has a nice and robust 2.0 Dolby Stereo track.
Octopussy was Dolby Stereo 35mm and is the one film confirmed to have 70mm blowups from this period though not many. It was likely done to compete with the rival Never Say Never Again released the same year which did have 70mm blowups made. While Octopussy is the much better film the one category where there is no contest in terms of a winner is the sound design. OP has a very good surround track for 1983 whereas NSNA is at times almost like glorified mono. It’s very pitiful which is a shame.
A View to a Kill has a very nice and warm 2.0 Dolby Stereo track with very impressive low end that can be felt in the pretitles and title sequence.
The Living Daylights has an even better 2.0 Dolby Stereo track that is I think one of the best of the era.
Licence to Kill while being a production fraught with issues and cutbacks did not skimp on the final sound mix and has a very impressive mix that was the first of the series to be released in Dolby SR. It manages to hold its own in a year that had Last Crusade, Batman and Glory.

I think some of the Brosnan era films had some SDDS showings but I never did get to experience SDDS growing up.
Goldeneye was the first of the digital sound era and had at least Dolby SR 2.0, SR-d 5.1 ac3 and DTS 5.1. The noticeable difference on the video side is that the Dolby mixes both have a very heavy bass boost to them that some have felt it must’ve been a mistake. This bass heavy track made it to the initial DVDs but was later remixed. I jokingly call it the “Goldeneye club mix” and it’s a fun listen that I presume must have been done theatrically to differentiate the Dolby from the DTS. However the DTS Laserdisc beats it with an even more refined powerful listen that has better detail without the heavy bass. The Blu-ray hdma track comes close but I still think the DTS LD audio is the best home experience.
Tomorrow Never Dies is the lone late film that did get a 70mm blowup but this I think was only shown in Europe once or twice. I rave about GE’s sound above but TND is a sonic powerhouse and still one of the best mixes ever done in my opinion. The Dolby and DTS home editions sound identical this time with DTS having greater range. The DTS Laserdisc again is the best home experience but all versions sound good. I still remember this film sounding great in the theater to this very day.
The World Is Not Enough is a more intimate film so the sound doesn’t get quite as bombastic. Every revisit though I come away feeling disappointed with the mix and while it was the first to be released in Dolby EX the extra center rear info is just kinda there and the mix doesn’t do anything with it.
Die Another Day is a film everyone likes to complain about but you can’t complain about the wonderfully aggressive sound mix. This film sounded huge on the opening week in a very big new hall running DTS and almost as good the other times I saw it in a smaller hall in Dolby. The mix is quite booming and still sounds good in home theaters to this day. It did has Dolby EX and the first DVD included a DTS ES track which I presume would have been on the prints. The info is matrixed in so it’s still there on the Blu-ray 5.1 hdma.

[Spencer Draper]

After this we get to the modern era which I really can’t stand. Casino Royale ‘06 and Quantum of Solace I saw on 35mm and the others have been digital.

The only other film I didn’t mention was the unofficial Casino Royale ’67 spoof film which I really adore as the mad ball of fun it is. It did get a 70mm blowup in 1967 which I would LOVE to one day hear the audio of as the score is so astoundingly well recorded. The mono mix is quite good but the 5.1 on discs is seemingly a kind of remix that upmixes mono and drops in stereo music cues.

If you love the Bond films and are an audio fanatic the films on Laserdisc (in their letterboxed form) can’t be beat. The digital PCM tracks aren’t subject to noise reduction and overzealous cleanup. While the films GE and onwards still sound good on Blu-ray you lose the heavy bass GE track and the amazing DTS LD audio of GE and TND.
Even the Dolby stereo titles I think sound better on LD than the upmixes.
Perhaps most of all the mono films sound so much better it’s not even funny. As I’ve found with many titles you can get a better audio presentation on a LD pcm track because they mostly left the audio alone and pulled master materials to transfer back in the day!

[Allan Young]

OHMSS is the tipping point. I first read I think on the home theater forum somewhere about possibly the 70’s films having mag stereo runs and that was it. Then when reading John Glen’s autobiography “For My Eyes Only” he details having to tear apart and install new sound equipment for the OHMSS premiere because it had been mixed in magnetic stereo and the venue was apparently only rigged for mono-and this was days before the premiere!

John Glen must be misremembering. This was mentioned upthread, but to reiterate - the premiere was held at the Odeon Leicester Square, which would definitely have had magnetic stereo capabilities at the time. Why they had to do any work on the sound system is anybody's guess, particularly as only one reel (with the avalanche sequence) was in stereo.

[Spencer Draper]

That seems much more likely. I remember reading the book and stopping dead at that passage thinking: "Really?"

The last prints made were from the Lowry Digital remasters that were plagued with issues, color timing problems and sound remixes. It pained me to see these on the big screen magnifying the issues I loathed on DVD and then Blu-ray.

A few years ago news started leaking about the 4K remastering project and then a handful of screenings of certain titles happened in the UK as 4K DCPs. Further evidence was that of the Blu-rays only TSWLM had a brand new uncredited master that was head and shoulders above the others-and Spy was the one film that had never been re-transferred over the years. The new 4K masters have been released to streaming services and presumably will hit disc tied to whenever NTTD finally comes out. So far despite the limitations of streaming there are some noticeable improvements over the Blu-ray editions on titles.

[Per Hauberg]

I'm not sure the first scope film was Thnderball. I seem to recall the second, From Russia with Love was Scope.

"Thunderball" was definitely first scope 007. ## 1-2 and 3 were 1,75:1
5, 6 and 7 in scope, and then it was 1,75 or 1,85 for "Live and let Die" and "Golden Gun". After that everything scope.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

As to the "scope" aspect ratios, I agree with what Per Hauberg said above. However the "flat" aspect ratios were actually 1.66 although here in the USA they would have been cropped in the projector to 1.85. I say this not because the IMDB says so, but because up until last year when they were sold, I had access to domestic original release IB (dye transfer) 35mm prints of the the first seven James Bond films, and I was the projectionist when my friends got together to run one. This is fresh in my mind.

As to sound, you cannot use any vhs//dvd/bluray/television source as a reference. The sound mix may have been altered on any of them. For example there was an official VHS release of YOLT where background music was missing from a few scenes. And of course, there is the infamous ABC Television version of OHMSS where they reordered the entire film, opening with the escape from Piz Gloria and someone narrating with voice overs so that the rest of the film would be presented as flashbacks of how Bond got into that situation.

The first James Bond that was officially released in stereo (in the USA) was Moonraker (Dolby A Stereo). Yes, Spy Who Loved Me premiered in London in 4 track magnetic stereo, but my understanding has been that it was done mag interlock with an external synced dubber (a common studio preview method at the time). That would also explain why the venue would have needed modification even though they were mag stereo capable.

Thunderball was always mono. The music was recorded in stereo and the lost master tapes turned up in the 1980's and were released on CD at that time. The actual film, to my knowledge, was never remixed into stereo. There was rumored to be some magnetic mono prints (yes, that was a thing), but I have never personally seen one to verify if this is indeed true.

Oh, and yes, most of the re-issue prints looked terrible. Most of the Blurays, with the exception of Dr. No, noticeably did not look as the original release 35mm prints.

[Allan Young]

Yes, Spy Who Loved Me premiered in London in 4 track magnetic stereo, but my understanding has been that it was done mag interlock with an external synced dubber (a common studio preview method at the time). That would also explain why the venue would have needed modification even though they were mag stereo capable.

Are you confusing The Spy Who Loved Me with the discussion about the stereo premiere of On Her Majesty's Secret Service? Because the suggestion they used a mag interlocked system for the latter would make sense; presumably it would have been more expensive to produce a single mag sound print for the premiere screening. And as you say, it would explain the extra work required at the venue.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

Allan, sometimes my fingers hit “post” faster than my brain thinks. There should have been a last sentence that read:

Although I am personally not aware of any theatrical stereo showings of OHMSS, perhaps the same thing happened with the OHMSS premier as with SWLM, sync’d mag dubber.

Unrelated, back in the 1980’s Albert R Broccoli had new prints struck of all the Bond films up to that point and donated them to the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City. The museum ran them all in their theatre for a few weeks on weekday afternoons. Me along with a few of my friends called in sick to work to go into the city and watch OHMSS. The entire robbing of Gumbold’s safe was missing. The entire audience made such a ruckus that they stopped the show. About 10 minutes later someone from the museum came in to the auditorium to announced that the print was struck that way, no splices in the reel. He conjectured that perhaps this was struck from the British version of the film. I always thought that this was a questionable explanation since the scene’s essential to the plot. Since this forum has members world wide, I have to ask the question as to if this scene was, or was not in the British version.

[Allan Young]

It's from imdb, so it could be bollocks...

When the British Film Institute struck new prints of the first six films, they mistakenly used a heavily cut negative for OHMSS despite the film having been then-recently restored. This cut version is the print they now hold in the National Film and Television Archive as it was deemed too expensive to strike a new print from the complete negative.

Perhaps the MoMA print was produced from the same "heavily cut" internegative?

[Spencer Draper]

OHMSS was shortened in various territories during the release and aftermath. Most of the early video versions are thus also cut in various places. Peter Hunt in the commentary bemoans that in most prints Gumbold’s office was one of the things cut to get closer to two hours.
This also appears to have happened on Thunderball where on some foreign versions scenes were eliminated to shorten the film and thus never dubbed into other languages.

It’s strange the MOMA prints have this but were likely made from materials without checking. I’ll bet they used the master designed for the primary British release version which was shortened from the original 142m.
One day I’d love to do a proper inventory of EON’s vaults. I’m sure mag tracks if they exist are sitting somewhere along with the Moonraker score.

The first fully uncut letterbox release of OHMSS was the 1991 USA laserdisc. In the UK they finally got a vhs boxset a few years later proclaiming it as the uncut version when in actuality it was a vhs port of the LD but in pal. Funnily enough the special edition dvd was sourced from the same elements but in the process accidentally dumped some lines.

[Spencer Draper]

My question to anyone with Thunderball prints or experience handling them: what audio mix did it carry?

I’m almost positive one was a UK mix and the alternate was a USA mix but I can’t be for sure until I can get some sort of confirmation.

[Thomas Hauerslev]

"Freddie Young reportedly with Lewis Gilbert asked to use Super Panavision 70 to better shoot the massive volcano set but was refused by EON. Their budget mindedness is why mono upheld for so long and why I found the rumors of mag runs so surprising."

65mm was indeed used on the Volcano set in November 1966. In fact it was shot by 2nd unit, with a 50mm lens in D-150 - no less.

[Spencer Draper]

"Freddie Young reportedly with Lewis Gilbert asked to use Super Panavision 70 to better shoot the massive volcano set but was refused by EON. Their budget mindedness is why mono upheld for so long and why I found the rumors of mag runs so surprising."

65mm was indeed used on the Volcano set in November 1966. In fact it was shot by 2nd unit, with a 50mm lens in D-150 - no less.

Really?? That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of this let alone D150. Where’d you come across this? The only confirmation of 70mm even being thought of is in the Some Kind of Hero book which is where I got the information on Young and Gilbert asking the producers to use Super Panavision 70 and getting turned down.