In film (as in the books), James Bond is portrayed as highly intelligent and educated. In Goldfinger, he calculates how many trucks it takes to transport all the gold in Fort Knox. In You Only Live Twice Bond asserts having a First in Oriental Languages from Cambridge University; in the film, The Spy Who Loved Me, an acquaintance identifies him as a Cambridge graduate; in the film Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond visits Oxford to study Danish. In Casino Royale, he is shown to have skill at calculating probabilities of draws from a deck in a Texas hold’em tournament in Montenegro. Bond is shown to be a polyglot yet Ian Fleming’s stories, the films, and the post–Fleming continuation novels contradict each other about which languages he speaks; these include German, French, Russian, and Japanese.

Cinematically, Bond’s smoking habit has been off and on usually going with changes in society.

Cinematically, Bond’s smoking habit has been off and on usually going with changes in society. During the films starring Sean Connery, George Lazenby, and Timothy Dalton, Bond was a smoker of cigarettes. During Roger Moore’s and Pierce Brosnan’s tenure he smoked cigars instead of cigarettes. In Brosnan’s second portrayal of Bond, in Tomorrow Never Dies, he remarks upon a Russian who is smoking by saying “Filthy habit”. The last time Bond smoked on film was in 2002 in Die Another Day. In Daniel Craig’s tenure, he has yet to be seen smoking.

In more recent films, Bond’s attitude toward women have softened somewhat; he respects the new, female M, while a few female characters, such as Elektra King and Paris Carver, have gotten under his skin. When the film canon was rebooted with Casino Royale, James Bond’s sexual appetite had somewhat cooled though he somewhat jokingly admits to an attraction to married women, reasoning it “keeps things simple.” His pursuit of Solange Dimitrios is merely for the purpose of collecting information on her husband, Alex, to stop a terrorist plot. Once he retrieves the information, he leaves her immediately without having sex with her. As in the source material, James falls deeply in love with Vesper Lynd to the point of considering quitting the spy business to be with her.

The cinematic Bond’s attitude towards killing has changed through the years. Connery’s Bond in Dr No outdoes his literary counterpart by killing Professor Dent in cold blood. For You Only Live Twice, screenwriter Roald Dahl was told Bond could kill any amount of people as long as he didn’t do so sadistically. Later, Dalton’s Bond states he only kills professionals in The Living Daylights. GoldenEye suggests the brutality of his job troubles Brosnan’s Bond while he admits cold-blooded killing is a filthy business in The World Is Not Enough. Nonetheless and as always, he kills when needed, and in The World Is Not Enough, commits murder in shooting the unarmed Elektra King. Critics of Craig’s Bond say he seems to enjoy killing unlike Fleming’s Bond.

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