JOHN NOLTE: No Time to Die Director Smears Sean Connery’s Bond as Rapist.

The scene this goddamn simpleton is talking about is in Thunderball, where Connery’s Bond is recovering at some sort of rest spa and seduces a luscious therapist into a tryst.

It’s not rape. It’s nothing close to rape. It’s doesn’t even graze rape. What it is is a complicated, adult, nuanced, and sexy seduction. And it is also a seduction that’s making a much larger social point.

Bond and the therapist obviously want one another, and the only reason she’s all “No, no, no” is because having sex with the customers is just not done. So this scene is not about James Bond forcing a woman to have sex with him. It’s about what much of the sixties was about, and that’s overcoming your sexual inhibitions.

Bond isn’t raping this woman. He’s not forcing himself on her. He’s sexually liberating her.

No, really, he is.

Dummies.

Are people really this stupid?

Or are they so insecure and neurotic, so desperate for approval that they just spout these simplistic moral bromides that make Joe McCarthy look like Timothy Leary?

The makers of the James Bond films have been trying to get back to the Connery days since The Spy Who Loved Me. Those films are considered the gold standard of the Bond franchise. Why on earth would the director of its latest chapter trash the man who started it all?

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