The best of the Connery Bonds hits 4K disc

By Jim Bray
June 16, 2025

If you're one of the many people who think Sean Connery was the best James Bond, you're in for a real treat with Warner Brothers' new 4k disc set of all the "official" Connery Bond movies.

By "official", I mean that Connery's second return to the franchise in Never Say Never Again, which was never acknowledged as a "real" Bond movie to my recollection (I liked it, though), isn't included in this set, which covers Connery's original outings as Agent 007 plus one when he returned to the franchise for one more kick at the cat (in this case, Blofeld's Chinchilla Persian…).

So, we have the first five Bond movies – Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice – then, the set skips over On Her Majesty's Secret Service and lands at Diamonds are Forever, the flick for which Connery was lured, coerced, bribed (or whatever) to return to the role after George Lazenby's single Bond outing in OHMSS.

It's hard to argue that these aren't six of the best Bonds. Sure, it could be argued there were a few other gems in the series, such as the Roger Moore outing The Man with the Golden Gun, Timothy Dalton's The Living Daylights, Pierce Brosnan's Goldeneye and Daniel Craig's Casino Royale – but it was the first movies and the first Bond (theatrically) that set the direction and the tone for the series and they did it very well.

So here we have brand new 4K editions, scanned supposedly from the original camera negatives. They also feature new, remastered Dolby Atmos audio that sounds very good indeed, as well as the original audio in lossless DTS-HD 2.0 Master Audio format.

If that isn't enough, each disc comes with a selection of interesting extras (though I don't believe any of them are new) to sweeten the deal.

It's great!

For those of us who've been living under a rock for the past 60 plus years, here's a quick rundown of the films:

DR. NO – here we join Her Majesty's agent as he's sent to Jamaica to find out why that country's MI-whatever-it-was-back-then representative has disappeared. His investigation uncovers a James Bond movie-like super villain (well, duh!) with designs on messing with the Americans' space program. It's also the first time we hear about SPECTRE, though I seem to remember there was no such organization in the book.

It's a pretty low budget affair, but producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli manage to put a lot of action and fun on the screen – and who can forget Ursula Andress as one of the franchise's first Bond Girls. Connery sings a bit, too, which probably surprised everyone who hadn't already seen Darby O'Gill and the Little People.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE – Well, not really Russia per se, we learn. No, it's those pesky ragamuffins from SPECTRE again, this time using "Russians" to mount a plot to kill James Bond by tempting him and his organization into sending him to Turkey to seduce a woman so he can score a stolen, top-secret coding machine.

Robert Shaw is the blunt instrument meant to do Bond in, but he works for Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya), who defected from the Soviets to take a new gig with SPECTRE.

GOLDFINGER – Many consider this the best Bond and I find it hard to disagree. Gert Frobe plays the title role of a, well I guess we call them oligarchs now, who's so heavily into gold bullion that he comes up with a plan to not only make his personal stash more valuable, but to make the Americans' (thanks to the repository at Fort Knox) less valuable.

This is where we get introduced to Bond's glorious Aston Martin DB5, a classic British GT car into which Q Branch has installed all kinds of nifty weapons, including the famous ejector seat.

THUNDERBALL – This is the first Bond film I ever saw. My Dad told me he'd enjoyed Goldfinger, so I sallied forth to the fourth Bond film as soon as it came out. And I've never looked back despite some less than great installments over the years.

This one includes a really cool rocket pack that really existed, some very cool diving sequences including a big fight at the end, a classic Vulcan bomber, and the Disco Volante, the bad guy's convertible yacht. And, yes, it's SPECTRE again.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE – this one, set in Japan and written by Roald Dahl, is kind of where the slide to silliness began, though this is still one of my favourite Bond outings.

Here, SPECTRE is stealing Russian and American space ships from orbit and doing it in a manner where each side accuses the other, bringing the world close to open war. We get to meet Ernst Stavro Blofeld in person here for the first time, and the role is played by long time character Donald Pleasance, though Klaus Schwab would have done a fine job here as well, merely by playing himself.

I love the gadgets here, from the gorgeous and unique Toyota 2000GT sports convertible and the autogyro "Little Nellie" the good guys deploy to help discover the outrageous enemy lair Blofeld has had built inside a hollowed-out volcano. The Simpson lampooned this episode really well, too!

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER – the franchise returns to its roots, kind of, with Connery as Bond chasing down a fortune in stolen diamonds. As it turns out, SPECTRE is behind it and they intend to hold the world hostage with a space-based laser weapon the stolen diamonds have been instrumental in helping build.

Jill St. John is a terrific Bond girl, and we get to see a great chase through the much smaller downtown Las Vegas of the day. The film also includes the funniest "continuity correction" I can think of, as Bond drives a rented Mustang on two wheels going into a narrow slot between buildings, but is driving it on the other two wheels when they emerge. I laugh every time I see this, especially with the lame shot in the middle that tries to make the mistake look deliberate.

All six movies look very good in their 4K disc presentation, with excellent colour and deep blacks. Aspect ratios vary from 1.75: to 2.35:1 and 2.39:1, so purists should be pleased there was no fudging as we've seen sometimes in the past with movies (remember pan and scan?). There's plenty of filmic grain, but overall, it looks natural and not manipulated digitally – a nice thing if you want the releases to be as originally released.

I thought at first glance that the movies looked a tad soft compared to the Blu-ray verisons, but by the time I was through with the set I was happier with the 4K versions than the BD's because they look more natural, and isn't that the way it should be?

I auditioned the discs using their remastered Dolby Atmos versions. I only have a 5.1 system, but Atmos is backward compatible to Dolby TrueHD so it becomes moot if you don't want to shell out for the Atmos stuff.

The remastering is really great! Fidelity is better than I'd hoped for, much in the way that Warners has done with such other 4K classics as 2001: a Space Odyssey (a 4K disc that's worth owning just for the audio, let alone its incredible 4K picture), with good dynamics and surprisingly good (considering that surround sound didn't really exist back then) use of all the home theatre channels (depending on the film…).

Each disc also has a selection of supplements, including commentaries and looks at various aspects of the productions. As mentioned above, I don't believe any of these are new but they're still worth watching and quite interesting – whether they're talking weaponry, locations, screen tests, what have you.

It would've been nice to see some new stuff in there with the set's marvelous new clothes, but what can you do?

Bottom line? If you love the Connery Bonds (sans the Thunderball remake "NSNA") and want to see them at their best, this is the way to do it.