In anticipation of tomorrow's trailer debut, MGM have released six new character posters for No Time To Die. They include Ana de Armas as Paloma (above), her Knives Out costar Daniel Craig as James Bond (sort of channeling GoldenEye Pierce Brosnan in his combat gear), Lashanna Lynch as Nomi, Ben Whishaw returning as Q, SPECTRE's Lea Seydoux returning as Madeleine Swann, and Rami Malek as Safin. No Time To Die, the 25th official James Bond movie (and Craig's fifth) opens in April. The first trailer will debut tomorrow morning on Good Morning America.

It's here! The trailer we've been waiting so long for! And our first lengthy look Daniel Craig in action as James Bond since SPECTRE in 2015. (I'm a little surprised at how direct a sequel to that movie No Time To Die appears to be.) Check it out:

Wow! We're so close to the release of a new Bond movie now that a new James Bond theme song has been released into the world! Listen for yourself to Billie Eilsish's title track to the twenty-fifth EON 007 movie, No Time to Die. Eilish recently won all the Grammies, pretty much, and performed at the Oscars. It seems pre-ordained that this track will shoot to the top of the charts. Eilish reportedly wrote the song with her brother, Finneas. Hans Zimmer composed the film's score.

The spy genre has lost a Great today. The Guardian reports that Honor Blackman has passed away at the age of 94, "of natural causes unrelated to coronavirus." It's crushing to lose two of the key Bond Girls in a matter of months, Blackman's death coming on the heels of Thunderball's Claudine Auger in December. And while she will probably be best remembered for her definitive portrayal of Pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery in Goldfinger, Blackman's mark on the spy genre is far greater. For me, she'll first and foremost always be Cathy Gale, John Steed's first regular female partner on the UK TV classic The Avengers.

Cathy Gale was ultimately overshadowed by Steed's more famous subsequent partner, Emma Peel (played to perfection by another future Bond Girl, Diana Rigg), but Gale's and Blackman's place in television history cannot be overstated. Cathy Gale was television's original badass, leather-clad female spy, paving the way not only for Mrs. Peel, but for Honey West (producer Aaron Spelling was inspired to create the show by Avengers episodes he saw in England, and reportedly first offered the role to Blackman, who turned it down), The Bionic Woman, Alias's Sydney Bristow, and every other leading lady of espionage to throw an attacker over her shoulder, as well as non-spy heroines like Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Quite simply, there had never been an action-oriented female protagonist on television before Honor Blackman's groundbreaking performance. She changed the game. In part, this was due to Blackman inheriting scripts that had been originally written for another male partner for Steed (following his first season foil, Ian Hendry's Dr. David Keel), which were hastily rewritten for her, but kept the character involved in the action in a way women hadn't been previously on TV. But in a larger part, it was due to Blackman's undeniable and very physical presence: she played Cathy as a woman definitely not to be trifled with! And she learned judo for the role, impressively dispatching stuntmen twice her size on a regular basis on episodes that were at the time taped live. Her obvious talent even led to the publication of a book, Honor Blackman's Book of Self-Defense.

Prior to playing Cathy Gale, Blackman was known for glamour more than ass-kicking. But she'd already racked up a pretty impressive roster of spy roles. Foremost among them was a regular role on the 1959-60 ITC wheel show The 4 Just Men (review here), in which she played Nicole, secretary to Paris-based Just Man Tim Collier (Dan Dailey). That was a series very much of its time in all respects, so Nicole was no Cathy Gale, but Blackman nonetheless imbued her with the quick wit and spark that would later define her more famous character alongside her martial arts skills. She also made pre-Avengers appearances on other ITC series like The Saint, Danger Man,  and The Invisible Man, as well as U.K. spy and detective series like Top Secret (sadly lost), Ghost Squad, and The Vise, while also turning up in spy movies like Conspirator (with Elizabeth Taylor), Diplomatic Passport, and the original 1953 TV movie version of Little Red Monkey (penned by wartime BSC spy Eric Maschwitz and adapted two years later into a feature film version). Other notable film roles during this period include Jason and the Argonauts (1963), the Eric Ambler-penned Titanic drama A Night to Remember (1958), the Dirk Bogarde suspense drama So Long at the Fair (1950), and the Hammer noir The Glass Tomb (1955). Following the international success of Goldfinger, Blackman surprisingly didn't make many more spy appearances. The notable exceptions were the superior 1968 Goeffrey Jenkins adaptation A Twist of Sand (a movie in dire need of a Blu-ray or at least DVD release!), opposite Deadlier Than the Male's Richard Johnson, and a 1983 TV adaptation of Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence mystery The Secret Adversary. In the late Nineties, Mike Meyers dreamed of getting Blackman and Connery to play Austin Powers' parents, but that didn't happen and Michael Caine ended up playing his dad. While not playing spies, though, Blackman continued to have a robust post-Bond career, including a re-teaming with Connery in the 1968 Western Shalako, a pair of 1970s cult horror movies, Fright ('71), and Hammer's final genre flick of that incarnation, To the Devil a Daughter ('76), opposite Christopher Lee, and, more recently, a very memorable comedic turn in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001). She also continued to make her mark in television, too, with recurring or starring roles on Doctor Who, The Upper Hand, and Coronation Street, and guest appearances in Columbo, Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible, Midsomer Murders, and New Tricks.

Her early fame from The Avengers brought her an unlikely career milestone in 1990 when an infectious novelty single she had recorded with Patrick Macnee in the early Sixties, "Kinky Boots," became a dubious Top 10 radio hit at Christmastime. Some have described it as "embarrassing," but as far as I'm concerned both of those stars had enough infectious charisma to pull it off even if they're not really singers! (I'm also partial to the B-side, "Let's Keep It Friendly," about the characters' platonic relationship on the show.)

Blackman has also had a successful theater career, including productions of "The Sound of Music," "My Fair Lady" and "Cabaret," and a couple of touring one-woman shows. It was one of these performances that brought her into my out-of-the-way neck of the woods when I was in high school in the mid-Nineties. I took in the show, which was amazing, and then managed to meet her backstage. Blackman was the first Bond celebrity I'd ever met, and she did not let me down. She seemed genuinely happy to meet with fans, and gladly signed a Goldfinger trading card for this starstruck teen while regaling me with stories from her days on The Avengers. She even weighed in with a decidedly non-PC answer on a debate I'd been having at the time with a friend about whether Bond and Pussy's roll in the hay was truly consensual. "Darling," she told me, eyes sparkling, "it was Sean Connery. Any woman would have wanted it!"

That sparkle remained ever-present as she remained a public figured right up to the end, always reliable for some media appearances whenever a new Bond movie came out. She never turned her back on the franchise, or publicly showed any resentment for the "Bond Girl" label that followed her throughout her career. She also continued to be a cheerleader for The Avengers, despite having left the series just before its transition to film and color... and the American broadcast that cemented its global fame.

In Blackman's final episode of The Avengers (after her Goldfinger casting was already public news), Steed bade farewell to Cathy Gale with a typical request of a favor, beginning, "And as you're going to be out there anyway, pussyfooting along those sun-soaked shores..."

"You thought I might do a little investigating," she finishes, knowing him all too well. She demurs, asserting her well-earned right to a vacation. "You see I'm not going to be pussy-footing along those sun-soaked shores," she corrects her partner, "I'm going to be lying on them." Pussyfooting or lounging, Honor Blackman has certainly earned her trip to those sun-soaked shores. While more terrestrially, the modern spy genre forever owes her an enormous debt. Blackman was a true trailblazer, who transformed the role of women in the spy genre from femme fatales who relied exclusively on their sexuality to equal participants in the action, undaunted by superior force and unmatched in combat skills.

This week MGM has ramped up the campaign for Daniel Craig's long awaited and highly anticipated fifth James Bond movie, No Time To Die. And as fans are painfully aware, this is actually the film's second campaign. No Time To Die had a whole advertising campaign back at the beginning of this year leading up to a hoped for April release, including many posters and even the much publicized, chart-topping release of the movie's excellent theme song by Billie Eilish. But, as we all know, the global pandemic came along and the April release was scrapped. Since then the film has been set for a November release, though even that has been uncertain given the unpredictable nature of the novel coronavirus. Now it certainly looks like EON, MGM, and distributors United Artists and Universal are doubling down on that November release! The date is proudly proclaimed across this brand new poster (frankly a little uninspired compared to the less typical previous campaign's 1-sheet) and in the brand new second trailer. And it's quite a trailer! As far as I can recall, this marks the first time a Craig Bond movie has had this kind of text tagline: The mission that changes everything begins! 

Theodore J. Flicker's 1967 James Coburn satire The President's Analyst is one of my very favorite spy movies. (It's also Coburn's best spy movie... Sorry, Derek Flint.) When describing it to people, I always say that the comedy holds up surprisingly well today... sadly. America is still facing many of the same social  issues Flicker sent up over fifty years ago (from institutional racism to monolithic Big Tech), and it's easy to imagine a remake. Now, Paramount is imagining one... with The Daily Show host Trevor Noah on board to produce and potentially star. According to The Hollywood Reporter, former Obama White House staffer Pat Cunnane will write the script. The premise, about a psychotherapist burdened with all of the President's top secret stresses, will obviously be familiar ground for him! According to his publisher, Cunnane served as "President Barack Obama’s senior writer and deputy director of messaging at the White House, where he worked for six years in many roles."

No sooner has Anthony Horowitz completed his trilogy of excellent, period-set James Bond novels than the next iteration of Ian Fleming Publications' literary continuations appears on the horizon via HarperCollins: Double or Nothing, by Kim Sherwood. And this one forsakes 007 (for the moment, anyway) to put the crosshairs on 003, 004, and 009... and the whole Double O Section! It should be unsurprising, given the name of this site, that I find that prospect tantalizing. Since I was a kid, I've been very curious to read about the adventures of the other 00 agents! 

Usually when we meet them in the movies, they're already dead or just about to die. The only other active agents we've ever really gotten to know well were Suzie Kew and Briony Thorne in Jim Lawrence's Daily Express James Bond comic strip, Nomi in No Time to Die... and I suppose we ought to also count Scarlett Papava in Sebastian Faulks's thoroughly disappointing Devil May Care. (Read my review here.)

Now, I know. You might ask, "What's the point of a James Bond continuation novel without 007?" To which I would point out that this has actually worked very successfully in the past! Some of my very favorite Bond continuation novels ever are Kate Westbrook's (aka Samantha Weinberg's) Moneypenny Diaries trilogy. (Read my review of the second one, Secret Servant, here, and read my in-depth interview with Weinberg about writing the series here.) Weinberg put the spotlight on Moneypenny, and created thrilling and original narratives in the familiar setting of Fleming's Secret Service. 

Kim Sherwood has already demonstrated her bona fides in her Twitter feed and on her website, and it sounds like she knows her spy stuff. (Not only is she well versed in Fleming, but she's also a Modesty Blaise fan!) I can't wait to see what she does with Fleming's supporting characters and the new 00 agents she creates in her Double O Section trilogy! The first book, Double or Nothing, is due out September 1 in Britain. A signed edition with stenciled page edges is also available exclusively from Waterstones (pictured below). No U.S. publication date has been announced so far, but Sherwood recently hinted on Twitter that such an announcement might be imminent. 

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