James Bond and Cigars

[El Presidente]

Quick but good read  

https://cigarlifeguy.com/james-bond-and-cigars/

"Moore was such a cigar aficionado, that he had a contract with a clause for an unlimited number of Montecristo Number 3‘s on the set at all times." 

[Ken Gargett]

1 hour ago, El Presidente said:

Quick but good read  

https://cigarlifeguy.com/james-bond-and-cigars/

"Moore was such a cigar aficionado, that he had a contract with a clause for an unlimited number of Montecristo Number 3‘s on the set at all times." 

that is quite famous. the producers thought, sure, a couple of bucks will keep him happy. they had no idea, even back then, the cost. they were apparently truly mortified when they got the bill. moore smoked a lot of cigars. 

[JohnS]

There's that famous scene in 1972's "Live and Let Die" where Roger Moore as Bond vanquishes a foe with a flame torch used for lighting a cigar. The cigar in that scene is very long...it wouldn't surprise me if Roger ordered Montecristo A's whilst shooting the movie also. 

[Ken Gargett]

2 minutes ago, JohnS said:

There's that famous scene in 1972's "Live and Let Die" where Roger Moore as Bond vanquishes a foe with a flame torch used for lighting a cigar. The cigar in that scene is very long...it wouldn't surprise me if Roger ordered Montecristo A's whilst shooting the movie also. 

john, this is off the top of my head but i think he killed a snake with the flame. and i don't think it was a flame torch. just an ordinary aerosol can. he used the cigar to light it. i will confess, back when i was in my twenties, bulletproof and even more stupid, i used to do it at parties. a really stupid thing to be doing. but it was fun. 

[NSXCIGAR]

I need to start working this in to all my contracts...

[MrBirdman]

18 minutes ago, NSXCIGAR said:

I need to start working this in to all my contracts...

Hear hear 

[JohnS]

28 minutes ago, Ken Gargett said:

john, this is off the top of my head but i think he killed a snake with the flame. and i don't think it was a flame torch. just an ordinary aerosol can. he used the cigar to light it. i will confess, back when i was in my twenties, bulletproof and even more stupid, i used to do it at parties. a really stupid thing to be doing. but it was fun. 

Yes, that's right. The snake and the voodoo magic of that film!

[mprach024]

Roger was a class act and gentleman.  I enjoyed him as Bond very much.  Even though he’s the third best Bond, he was still very good and defined an era.

[Fuzz]

1 hour ago, Ken Gargett said:

john, this is off the top of my head but i think he killed a snake with the flame. and i don't think it was a flame torch. just an ordinary aerosol can. he used the cigar to light it. i will confess, back when i was in my twenties, bulletproof and even more stupid, i used to do it at parties. a really stupid thing to be doing. but it was fun. 

Correct.

Some sources say it was a Montecristo Especial No.1.

[helix]

2 hours ago, mprach024 said:

Roger was a class act and gentleman.  I enjoyed him as Bond very much.  Even though he’s the third best Bond, he was still very good and defined an era.

2nd to Connery IMHO very subjective. Here's the Bond actors in no order. Tom Hardy may be next. Liam Neesen would have been great.

Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, but also Barry Nelson (Casino Royale, 1954), David Niven (Casino Royale, 1967) and Christopher Cazenove (in a 1973 semi-dramatic review show called British Hero.)

[Ken Gargett]

26 minutes ago, helix said:

2nd to Connery IMHO very subjective. Here's the Bond actors in no order. Tom Hardy may be next. Liam Neesen would have been great.

Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, but also Barry Nelson (Casino Royale, 1954), David Niven (Casino Royale, 1967) and Christopher Cazenove (in a 1973 semi-dramatic review show called British Hero.)

i think we have more 'who is the best 007?' threads than best cigars! 

craig last? oh dear. 

craig is the only one to challenge connery. i like that you have both lazenby and dalton higher than most do (i'd have dalton ahead of lazenby). then brosnan shades moore - my reasoning for that is that i thought brosnan kept getting better after a fairly ordinary start while moore just went downhill from a good start. 

[mprach024]

Connery, Craig, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan and Lazenby you could throw a blanket over.  The rest don’t get rated, 

[Ken Gargett]

7 minutes ago, Ken Gargett said:

i think we have more 'who is the best 007?' threads than best cigars! 

craig last? oh dear. 

craig is the only one to challenge connery. i like that you have both lazenby and dalton higher than most do (i'd have dalton ahead of lazenby). then brosnan shades moore - my reasoning for that is that i thought brosnan kept getting better after a fairly ordinary start while moore just went downhill from a good start. 

sorry, just saw that you said no particular order. 

[mprach024]

13 minutes ago, Ken Gargett said:

i thought brosnan kept getting better

Interesting.  I’m the opposite, I really like Brosnan as an actor, I just don’t rate him well as Bond because I think his last bond flicks were 2 of the worst in the series.

[Fuzz]

My order of Bonds:

Connery, Moore, Brosnan, Dalton, Lazenby.

 

[Ken Gargett]

1 hour ago, Fuzz said:

My order of Bonds:

Connery, Moore, Brosnan, Dalton, Lazenby.

 

craig doesn't even make it? 

sorry but anyone who dressed up as a clown or a gorilla as bond gets the bottom rung. no ifs, buts. moore is last. 

[Fugu]

9 hours ago, Fuzz said:

Correct.

Some sources say it was a Montecristo Especial No.1.

right, could very well be an L1

[Fuzz]

46 minutes ago, Ken Gargett said:

craig doesn't even make it? 

sorry but anyone who dressed up as a clown or a gorilla as bond gets the bottom rung. no ifs, buts. moore is last. 

Sorry, but nope, Craig didn't even get his foot on the first rung of the ladder. For me, if  you swap the character name, his films are just generic action movies.

And yeah, I have to agree about Octopussy. There were some pretty dumb moments in the film.

[Chibearsv]

I actually fell asleep watching Live and Let Die last night.  In one of the early scenes, a cigar he was smoking looked very Davidoff, white oval label.

 

7 hours ago, Ken Gargett said:

craig doesn't even make it? 

sorry but anyone who dressed up as a clown or a gorilla as bond gets the bottom rung. no ifs, buts. moore is last. 

Moore at least showed a little wit although Octopussy and Moonraker were god awful.  He must have really wanted his free cigars to sign on for those crappy productions.  I thought Dalton was just a trigger pulling mope - he gets the bottom rung for me.

[SCgarman]

16 hours ago, Ken Gargett said:

that is quite famous. the producers thought, sure, a couple of bucks will keep him happy. they had no idea, even back then, the cost. they were apparently truly mortified when they got the bill. moore smoked a lot of cigars. 

How much could a box of Monte3 cost in the early 70's? Surely a fraction that it fetches today.

[Bijan]

27 minutes ago, NYgarman said:

How much could a box of Monte3 cost in the early 70's? Surely a fraction that it fetches today.

Even assuming $300 a box and 25 cigars a day (one box) and 90 days of shooting, that's still "only" around $30,000.

[AusDyer]

Fun tidbit: In the very first novel, Casino Royale, James Bond is first introduced as working under the cover of being a cigar merchant from Jamaica. This is the cover he uses to send and receive cable messages from HQ, and his funds for the utterly ridiculous, nonsense assignment he's on are referred to in terms of Havana cigar production numbers rather than francs.

Oh, and for me the best James Bond after early Connery (yes, later Connery was a tubby, bumbling, lazy joke) was Timothy Dalton by a country mile. Even though early Connery was my favourite portrayal of the character, my top 2 Bond films are in fact Licence to Kill and Goldeneye. Just far better and more rounded films than the rest, which are largely very lame and many even just plain comedies and self-parodies. I thought Daniel Craig was great in Casino Royale and had a lot of promise, but I found after Royale he rapidly became incredibly dull, robotic, stiff and even plain awkward in the role. I also just still can't see him as James Bond, despite trying. He just seems like some weird ugly Russian henchman masquerading as 007 ? For me, On Her Majesty's Secret Service was an amazing Bond film, but Lazenby was a really bland James Bond with quite a number of cringeworthy deliveries (sorry Aussies). To give Lazenby his credit though, considering he wasn't even an actor at all he did a damn good job of muddling through as an adequate enough 007, which 99.99% of people could never pull off. Like Pierce Brosnan would have been a pretty weak Bond without that absolutely incredible head of hair (I swear to god, that's the only reason he was so loved), George Lazenby would have been an awful Bond if he hadn't been so good at the fighting.

In terms of the original character in the novels, the closest to that character is somewhere right in between Connery (circa Dr No and From Russia With Love) and Timothy Dalton. That's if you ignore how astonishingly vile and racist he was in the books. That's not even PC millennial rubbish, this is an exact quote describing James Bond's own thoughts on Korean people (from the novel "Goldfinger"): "Those terms included putting Oddjob and any other Korean firmly in his place, which, in Bond's estimation, was rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy." There are many other examples throughout the books, including the chapter title, "Ni**er Heaven" in Live and Let Die, in which Fleming also describes black people as second class human beings and portrays them as weird and often evil weirdos involved in crime and voodoo cults etc.

 

[Ken Gargett]

6 hours ago, Bijan said:

Even assuming $300 a box and 25 cigars a day (one box) and 90 days of shooting, that's still "only" around $30,000.

probably true but my understanding was that they were thinking this might cost a few bucks at most. (and remember he did 5 or 6 films so that becomes $100,000 to $180,000). so $30,000 would be a shock. 

 

22 hours ago, mprach024 said:

Roger was a class act and gentleman.  I enjoyed him as Bond very much.  Even though he’s the third best Bond, he was still very good and defined an era.

class act and a gentleman for sure. not sure that fleming's bond was either, though. moore took it in a campy silly direction and was not helped by the writers. 

 

9 hours ago, Chibearsv said:

  I thought Dalton was just a trigger pulling mope - he gets the bottom rung for me.

i might be wrong but i always thought that dalton was a classically trained shakespearean actor who was brought across for this. 

[Bijan]

5 minutes ago, Ken Gargett said:

probably true but my understanding was that they were thinking this might cost a few bucks at most. (and remember he did 5 or 6 films so that becomes $100,000 to $180,000). so $30,000 would be a shock. 

Hahaha. Very true.

But I was assuming the worst case. I doubt Moore chain smoked 25 cigars a day instead of acting. Probably smoked maybe 5 so $6,000 per film. Still a lot for the time. But not astronomical.

[SCgarman]

Moore is smoking a huge cigar in Live and Let Die. Definitely not a Monte3