BOND AMBITION

Spotlight

There should be a war memorial to fallen Bond Girls. First they fall from the straight and narrow, then they fall for Bond, and finally they fall under a train, or into a great white's lap pool. They are a martyred regiment of women who have been awarded the greatest accolade of the bikini-and-dagger genre: a really memorably gruesome death. Jill Masterson was painted gold—bling'd to death. Helga Brandt was fed to piranhas. Aki was poisoned by a ninja assassin while in bed with Bond. Tracy Draco, played by Diana Rigg, married Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and, upon saying "I do," was machine-gunned—but then, you couldn't have Bond married to a Tracy. Plenty O'Toole barely survived defenestration. And Plenty introduces us to a general theory I have about Bond Girls: the more obscenely embarrassing their names, the more likely they are to have to live with them. Pussy Galore (not even a pun—a single entendre). Honey Ryder. Holly Goodhead. Octopussy. Perhaps the greatest of all Bond Girls had the most unerotic of names (she dies): Rosa Klebb, the toad-like enforcer in From Russia with Love, played by Lotte Lenya, the wife of Kurt Weill and the great Weimar diva. Her name will be sung forever in "Mack the Knife": "Look out, Miss Lotte Lenya." Who better to fascinate the great brand of capitalist exploitative cinema than the last star of Communist theater? So here is Olga Kurylenko, the latest in a noble line, who this fall stars in the 22nd Bond. It's called Quantum of Solace. She's called Camille. Grab an eyeful now. She may not be long for this world.

A. A. GILL