Quality craftsmanship; Kevin McClory's credit missing

Rating: Null/10 (7 December 2015)

I salute the craftsmanship of "Spectre", certainly a quality production ($245,000,000 buys a lot of value on screen, not counting product placement $) and have enjoyed it - I've been going to Bond movies since catching "Dr. No" back in my hometown of Cleveland in 1963. I was surprised to see no Kevin McClory credit, but perhaps I should know better.
Not really a case of vendetta or getting even -you can read briefly about the S.P.E.C.T.R.E and Blofeld litigation in the notes for the film on IMDb. I interviewed McClory 30 years ago in my capacity as a Variety newspaper reporter in NY, as he was fighting Eon regarding the rights to such material. He had worked with Ian Fleming on screenplays and claimed creation rights to some Bond material (he ultimately produced 2 Bond films).
So no credit at all, after the rights were finally cleared 30 years later? Seems vindictive to me, but like all legalisms, there may have been a good reason, akin to those good old "gag orders" we read about all the time, or nondisclosure agreements when cases are finally settled.
Under the supervision of the heirs to the Broccoli fortune and franchise, director Sam Mendes has done a commendable job though where being a traffic cop ends and creativity begins is unknown on a project of this scale. It's easier to blame the director for a fiasco (similarly budgeted and to me even more highly anticipated "The Golden Compass" from the great Philip Pullman's novels, also starring Daniel Craig, for example). But the clockwork precision of "Spectre" is worth examining.
Mendes works with a classic tension & release formula, well-adapted to the Bond genre. The sadism that Ian Fleming popularized in pop culture (building on the perhaps unfortunate inroads made earlier by Mickey Spillane with his Mike Hammer novels) remains, particularly in the stock Blofeld scene of a committee of bad guys sitting around an out-sized conference table, so that film's lead goon can gorily kill one by gouging his eyes out. Bond himself is tough and rugged in Craig's interpretation, without meting out as much unmotivated violence as his licence permits.
The travelogue nature of the franchise, established early on with exotic globe-hopping settings, is maintained here, even throwing the viewer a bone every once in a while with a panoramic shot worthy of "Lawrence of Arabia". Problem of course, is that unlike a David Lean film the material is paper-thin, not adding up to much thematically despite the attempts of the screenwriters to inject elements (villain Waltz and hero Craig as sort of step-brothers) into the mix.
But the meticulous nature of the build-up to each segment's derring-do payoff is admirable, and shows a Hitchcockian expertise at using the film medium to manipulate the audience. I prefer more subtlety, but I certainly recall my youth when being manipulated by the thousands of movies I sat through was pleasurable in an escapist way.
Again as an adolescent I was drawn to the sexiness of the Bond pictures, Ursula Andress being such a wonderful starting point, but it seems that is a Fleming element that has been squeezed out of the current formula, likely to maximize returns. Sad fact is that in a world drowning in pornography, no one need turn to James Bond for skin (other than the obligatory suggestiveness of the opening credits' sequence, here very well done by Dan Kleinman), so where a shooting script might have listed "Insert sex scene here" we merely get an ellipsis when Bond is ready to get down with all- time great sex symbol Monica Bellucci, or even the leading lady Lea Seydoux. As a fan of storyline pornography I'm well aware of the difficulty of maintaining any sort of pacing AND including a lengthy sex scene in a movie, but Mendes's solution of eliminating the sex scenes altogether is quite disappointing. He does gift us with a few seconds of Judi Dench's "M" character from beyond the grave.
One last footnote - though Bond is quintessentially British it is worth reminding folks that technically the productions are American, since (I refer you to Alexander Walker's excellent industry book "Hollywood, England" for details) all the British studios and production houses turned down the original Bond projects, with the honchos at United Artists funding and giving the green light, making "Dr. No", with UA and its successor companies like MGM (though now Sony through Columbia is distributing the pictures), produced by Broccoli and Saltzman from a UK base. The backing was always from Hollywood.