It’s a ‘first look’ review: we’ve managed to borrow a copy of the 4K remasters of the Sean Connery 007 blockbusters. The average reader mostly wants to know what the new remasters look like, so we’re skipping a lot of the review-essay business. We’ve seen them all on screen and in every possible video configuration, and have some thoughts about the new transfers, which are loaded with pleasant surprises. One feature has an original alternate soundtrack. What’s it all about, CineSavant?  How do they hold up?

007 James Bond: Sean Connery 6-Film Collection 4K
4K Ultra HD
Amazon MGM Studios / SDS
1962-1971 / Color / 2:35 + 1:85 widescreen / Street Date June 10, 2025 / Available from Amazon / 99.00
Starring: Sean Connery with Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord, Bernard Lee; Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Armendariz, Lotte Lenya, Robert Shaw, Lois Maxwell; Gert Frobe, Honor Blackman, Shirley Eaton, Harold Sakata, Desmond Llewelyn; Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Luciana Paluzzi, Martine Beswicke; Tetsuro Tamba, Donald Pleasence, Mie Hama, Akiko Wakabayashi; Jill St. John, Charles Gray, Lana Wood, Jimmy Dean, Bruce Glover, Putter Smith.
Composer: John Barry
Produced by Albert R. Broccoli & Harry Saltzman (5), Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ian Fleming (1)
Directed by Terence Young (3), Guy Hamilton (2), Lewis Gilbert (1)

There are a lot of self-styled James Bond ‘experts’ floating around, and sure, we’re just as opinionated as any of them. OO7 has fared pretty well on home video. Back in the VHS days the only MGM/UA Home Video title that sold better than a Bond was Clint Eastwood’s  The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; around 1999 we worked on the first DVD releases, which were stacked with extras culled from the Danjaq vaults. Most of those were carried over to later Blu-rays and are present on these new releases.

All of the Daniel Craig series has been released on 4K disc, but revamping the vintage titles is a different proposition. The last go-round of remastering for the United Artists 007 library was partly engineered by a company called Lowry Digital, which made a big deal of scanning the films and then ‘optimizing’ them with digital tools. They began with the Sean Connery films as well. We weren’t displeased with the results on those first six films, although some titles fared better than others, and the encodings for the later non-Connery series entries tended to be ‘one look fits all.’ When they got around to  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the favorite that always gets worked on last, they brought its light levels up to that of a Roger Moore entry … spoiling the darker look and the special lighting of many scenes.

But that is for the future. Here in the ‘roaring 20s’ most film management culture acknowledges that a remaster of an old title deserves an attempt to match its original on-screen appearance. The experts in charge of the United Artists library are now under a new company logo, Amazon MGM Studios. It looks as if the effort here was to start from scratch, make the films look like they did when new, and to work on presentation ‘issues’ that have cropped up on earlier releases.

007 James Bond: Sean Connery 6-Film Collection is also being released in a more elaborate steelbook box. The package we perused is the more reasonable but still-pricey standard 4K Ultra HD + Digital option. It’s six discs in a fat keep case. There are no Blu-rays; the video extras amassed for each title are on the 4K disc as well, not upgraded to 4K, of course. We only had a chance to look at a couple of items; the menus go on forever and on this short notice we didn’t have time to list them.

The same generic menu page is on all six discs. It’s not fancy but it is a lot more friendly than the frustrating interface on the original Blu-ray releases 15 years ago. We get to the content a little faster.

Here’s what we saw, along with some subjective reactions. … being a big Sean Connery fan, I will defnitely want to catch up with all of these.

Dr. No

The earlier Blu-ray for this first James Bond picture looked great, possibly because it was the ‘audition’ title for Lowry Digital. In its theatrical reissues Dr. No always showed up in beautiful Technicolor prints, so we have strong memories of how it looked back in the day. Amazon’s remaster is slightly different, and very pleasing. Colors are a touch warmer and contrast a tad higher, which enhances textures and gives objects and people a slight feeling of depth.

The locations are beautiful. The broader contrast range allows the colorist to let Connery and Ursula Andress dodge into the jungle shadows, without brightening the whole shot. The nighttime scenes with the ‘dragon’ can be properly dark, with the blasts of flame lighting up the screen. Some older video transfers gave the impression that Bond and Quarrel were stupid not to see the dragon for what it is.

The added texture also flatters Ken Adam’s sets — No’s hotel-like underground complex again seems luxurious. The rear-projection of No’s ‘giant’ aquarium actually looks better than it did in the theater. Then there’s Sylvia Trench’s red dress at the baccarat club. How can we judge if it’s the right shade — even in stills the shade of red is different.

That’s as close as our video descriptions get to ‘subtle.’ The difference between the 4K and the projected Technicolor I remember is minor. One other thing we were curious about were the logos. Would it be possible for Amazon to re-unite the movies with their original UA logos?  I was reminded that the first few Connerys didn’t carry UA logos — the first thing we saw as the curtain opened were the moving dots of Maurice Binder’s gunsight animation. But the later shows did have UA logos, which have been replaced with modern logos. Asking a rights holder to keep flying another corporation’s flag is not easy … we’re happy that Universal restored the original Paramount logos to their acquired Alfred Hitchcock classics.

From Russia With Love comes across as vastly improved. When theatrically reissued with Dr. No, the second film in the series appeared in so-so Eastmancolor prints that pointed up every flaw in the show. Rear-projection scenes were particularly weak, a problem only partly alleviated in the Lowry Blu-ray revamp.

From Russia with Love is now much more dynamic. The image feels cleaner too, especially during opticals. Some of the rear-projection scenes no longer look like R-P at all. I’m thinking of the Bond’s meet-up with Tatiana Romanova on a ferryboat. On old laserdiscs the coloration between foreground and background was way off.

Some of the mystery anomalies on these earlier films will persist. A disc producer once explained to me that Danjaq had its own secret archives, and that he had seen some of its contents but had promised to remain mum about it all. We certainly don’t want to see the films revised to any big degree, but there is at least one censor (?) cut to From Russia that deserves to be fixed … in the gondola in Venice is a jump cut covering a line that was cut out, with Bond reacting to the images on the 8mm blackmail film taken in Istanbul. That will hopefully be restored some day.

The Aspect Ratio Police may want to take notice: at some point it was decided that the first three ‘flat’ Bonds should be formatted at the 1:66 ratio, which was assumed to be the standard for the U.K. in the 1960s. These encodings break with that, and format them at 1:75, now accepted as the authentic OAR.

We also didn’t keep up with changes to the end title sequences on the films. Some dropped their ‘James Bond will be BACK in ____” text somewhere along the line; I think I remember one DVD disc where the picture ended several seconds before the audio. Is it important?  Yes and no.

Goldfinger is the title we’ve seen the most, bought the most, and have memorized the best. It was very good but not terrific on the Lowry Blu-ray, and the improvement here is noticeable too. The picture is more crisp, the colors better, the focus sharper. We can read the street signs on the roads around Fort Knox now. The R-P scenes with the Flying Circus no longer look dull. Connery, Honor Blackman, Shirley Eaton and Bond’s other playthings all look extremely attractive. Ken Adam’s fantastic Fort Knox set, especially its interior, gives 007 his most extravagant, bigger-than-life arena to square off against his most impressive foe.

As with the Blu-rays, some very obvious wires have been removed from miniatures of the jets we see. The wider contrast range enhances the animated opticals of Auric Goldfinger’s industrial laser … the rays now look brighter.

James Bond movies of the 1960s had a rich Technicolor look unlike modern digital features; we’re glad that the marching orders for the restoration were not to make them look like the new content we see on streaming. It can be argued that 4k is a visual revision, that just using that extra contrast range makes the films look different than what we saw back in the day. Then again, we also remember how some projection cheated on the illumination, to knock down the power bill. In second-run bookings, different reels would pop up with color temperatures that didn’t match at all. If these films settle into ‘final’ versions that look like this we won’t complain.

Thunderball has the most things to add to this report. The restorers had big headaches with the first Panavision Bond because it went out in at least two parallel versions. The differences were on the soundtrack; the Amazon restoration team did their homework for this encoding, because both soundtracks are present. Some underwater skirmishing is sound effects-only on one track, and on the other we hear a repeat of the early music cue from Bond’s fight with the fake widow in the chateau. In other scenes, Connery voiceovers add different ‘offhand quips.’ The entire end credit music cues are different as well.

Almost all of Thunderball has always looked fine. There are some weak composites in the final fight on the bridge of the hydrofoil Disco Volante, which use ratty blue screen (a guess) and maybe some rear-projection as well. These have been cleaned up. The ditching of the Vulcan bomber off Bermuda is improved too. Those animated lights on the water are still not good, but wires have been removed. The darkening of the sequence adds greatly to the realism. In the theater, we thought a real airplane was sinking slowly to the sandy sea bottom.

On a big monitor the spectacular ‘conversion’ of the Disco Volante, where the ship splits in two, is almost as impressive as it was on the big screen. It was a huge ‘wow’ back at Christmas of 1965, even though this was the first Bond that vaguely disappointed in some ways. We were never in love with the undersea battle, but now must applaud the ambition of filming such a big scene underwater. It must have taken forever.

The experts tell me that release prints of Thunderball all skipped the text credit saying that Bond will be BACK in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.’  We can see how where it was removed in the very abrupt fade-out. It was never in any version that played in theaters. If the books had been filmed in a different order, we wouldn’t have the discontinunity issue of Bond meeting Blofeld face-to-face in Japan, followed by them failing to recognize each other later, on top of a Swiss Alp.

You Only Live Twice reaps a big benefit as well … Freddie Young’s gorgeous Panavision vistas of Japan look so good that the filmmakers allowed them to slow the thriller down to a loping pace. Just the same, the new remaster improves many composite opticals. When Kissy Suzuki sits up in a pearl boat against a blazing sunset, audiences laughed at the artificial paste-up look. They look clean-here. The careful work done on all the blue screen opticals also improves the illusion of 007 flying in the mini-copter.

The travelogue material isn’t exactly exciting, but we’ve always enjoyed the grandiose final act in Ken Adam’s monstrous set of a missile hangar hidden in a volcano. Ain’t it swell how Blofeld managed to construct such an installation in complete secrecy?  The mass ninja drops into the crater were awesome back in the day, just for the scale of the action. But you’d need a hefty video projector to get the same effect in a home setup.

With this title and the next all we can really comment on are things that come with the format — a 4K scan is sufficient to resolve pretty much everything on a 35mm negative; the difference is what the colorists do with their tools. All of these remasters look as though earlier transfers were referenced, and possibly archive prints as well.

Diamonds are Forever is of course Sean Connery’s return-to-the-grind 007 film, made after the failed attempt to carry on the series with George Lazenby — a ‘failure’ now considered one of the best films of the whole franchise. It may be the least inspired of the series as well, with a script that leans so heavily on so-called Tongue-in-Cheek humor, that most scenes were played for laughs.

It certainly looks fine in this remaster, with the punch of 4K and HDR of course enhancing the scenes in Las Vegas, especially all those neon lights reflecting off the hood of Bond’s Mustang Mach 1, the one that pulls off the two-wheel balancing trick. Don’t let our lack of enthusiasm get in the way … we like Lana Wood and Marc Lawrence too, in between the moon buggy nonsense, the gay jokes, the lesbian jokes, and Jill St. John with a cassette tape tucked into her bikini.

Amazon MGM Studios’ 4K Ultra HD of 007 James Bond: Sean Connery 6-Film Collection will please the home theater and 4K-capable fans. I don’t offhand see a Blu-ray set yet being offered of the new remasters.

Home Theater aficionados should note that all six films have new ATMOS mixes, but also each film’s original mono track. We learned long ago that split tracks (dialogue / music / effects) were no longer available for the first three films, so we presume that some sophisticated digital processing was directed toward them.

We understand that the whole production setup for the Bond franchise is changing, with the producers that have been running the show for decades stepping down and Amazon taking over. Bond has big profit possibilities in lots of directions, although for this viewer the appeal is still the nostalgia factor in the early films. Even before the concept of woke, segments of the public were rejecting 007 the way they once shunned John Wayne — not because of the series’ political conservatism (dissing the Beatles, c’mon!) but for things that were standard in ’60s movies — sexist, racist and homophobic attitudes. I’ve repeated more than once my experience with the women home video executives at MGM in the 1990s, that rejected close-ups of Bond girls over outdated, unacceptable eye makeup.

But there’s no denying that Goldfinger is an almost perfect sensation machine, and that Thunderball became a meaningful part of England’s worldwide culture & commerce push. John Barry’s music is still fabulous, and Ursula Andress was a vision like Venus on the half shell. 007’s editors punched up fight scenes with up-cut jump cuts, and the moviegoing public laughed at foolishly absurd moments as if they had been let in on a private joke.

Collectors certainly like improved versions of their favorite pictures, and for many fans these Connery Bonds qualify as all-time favorites. They are improved on 4K, some of them a great deal.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

007 James Bond: Sean Connery 6-Film Collection
4K Ultra HD rates:
Movies: Great as they Ever Was
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent — New ATMOS mixes + original mono tracks

Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: 6 4K Ultra HD discs in Keep case
Reviewed: June 4, 2025
(7338conn)

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