The James Bond Collection, Volume 3
Sean Connery casts a long shadow over the James Bond legacy. He created the movie persona  and starred in six of the first seven features, all but establishing the cool cold warrior as the  world's most suave secret agent. The six titles in MGM's third collection celebrate the Connery Bond  with three of his classics, includingFrom Russia with Love, 007's second and perhaps finest  outing. A blond, buff Robert Shaw plays Bond's most ruthless nemesis, and Lotte Lenya and the great  Pedro Armindáriz costar in this sleek, high-energy trip through the Iron Curtain. Connery  travels to the Far East inYou Only Live Twice, which introduces the international criminal  conspiracy SPECTRE and its cat-loving mastermind, Blofeld (Donald Pleasence). After a brief  retirement, Connery returned forDiamonds Are Forever, his final "official" appearance in the  Bond series (15 years later he played Bond for a rival studio'sNever Say Never Again). This  more tongue-in-cheek adventure takes 007 to Las Vegas, where he battles Blofeld (this time played by  Charles Gray) and his minions--namely, a pair of fey, sardonic henchmen and a team of bikini-clad  karate killers.Octopussy, a colorful cold war thriller and one of Roger Moore's better Bond outings, stars  Louis Jourdan as a corrupt Afghan prince and Maud Adams (making her second Bond appearance) as the  ringmaster of an all-babe traveling circus team that unknowingly carries a nuclear bomb. Christopher  Walken hams it up under a platinum-blond hairdo while his Amazon bodyguard, Grace Jones, growls  throughA View to a Kill, a silly but often visually impressive adventure that made it  obvious Moore was too old and stiff to carry on the Bond legacy. The torch was passed to Timothy  Dalton inThe Living Daylights, an attempt to clear away the camp elements of Moore's  portrayal and return to a lean, hard-edged spy thriller for the post-cold war era. It lacks the  larger-than-life characters and spectacle of previous Bond pictures, but Dalton was a tough,  ruthless 007 and a worthy inheritor of the legacy, which was then passed on to Pierce Brosnan.The DVD editions of the films each feature audio commentary by the director and key members of the  crew, "making of" documentaries, and a host of stills, TV spots, trailers, and other supplements.--Sean Axmaker