In "You Only Live Twice" (which features the most beautiful of the series' theme songs, Nancy Sinatra's one indisputable moment of glory) a solarized background of an erupting volcano gives forth the skeletal outlines of Japanese parasols that burst from the hot lava like fireworks, or emerge from the eyes of geisha beauties. The voluptuous black women in "Live and Let Die" (the crudest film in the series, with its voodoo baddies encompassing two overlapping stereotypes: blaxploitation badasses and the restless natives of Tarzan movies) are what every teenage boy of a certain era hoped to find in National Geographic. In "For Your Eyes Only" (featuring a wet, red close-up of what Binder called Sheena Easton's "70-millimeter lips") a naked (natch) girl runs through a background of color provided by a looming close-up of a fiber optic lamp. In "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," a phalanx of naked girls surround a Union Jack as if they had become the lions of Britannic crests.

That picture (along with "You Only Live Twice," the best film in the series) features one of Binder's most ingenious sequences. Binder had to prepare the audience for a new Bond (George Lazenby, who acquits himself much better than he's generally given credit for). His solution was to use images from the previous five films pouring like sand through a martini-shaped hourglass while, on the other side of the screen, a Bond figure dangles like Harold Lloyd from the hands of a clock running backward. In many ways, "OHMSS" finishes off the Bond saga that began with "Dr. No" (it's also the only openly emotional Bond film), and in retrospect the hourglass is a prescient image, a hint that, for Bond, time was running out.

With a few exceptions the Bond series has never again been the consistent delight it was in the '60s. Pierce Brosnan, fine in "The Thomas Crown Affair" and absolutely first-rate in "The Tailor of Panama," has never gotten the swing of the character, which, while Clive Owen and Rupert Everett are around, seems a waste of time. (And hasn't anyone taken notice of lovelies like Drew Barrymore, Charisma Carpenter and Kylie Minogue for Bond girls?) The director's chair has been occupied by a revolving series of hacks. And the movies themselves have been reconceived as run-of-the-mill action movies instead of continuing to be swanky daydreams of sex and violence.

It's a sad, sputtering state of affairs for the longest continuously running movie series and one that holds a special place in the affections of moviegoers. It's somehow tragically fitting that the last Bond film Binder worked on before his death from lung cancer was also the last to show 007 smoking, and even featured the surgeon general's warning in the end credits. (My God! What next? Bond stopping to slip on a condom, or giving up martinis and switching to a low-fat diet?)

It's amazing that given the declining quality of the series -- the last few Roger Moore entries ("For Your Eyes Only" and the absolute nadir of the series "A View to a Kill") and the gray, indifferent blur of the two Timothy Dalton entries -- Binder's work continued to be first-rate. His masterpiece came in 1977 with his work on "The Spy Who Loved Me," not just the best of the Moore Bonds but one of the best entries in the series, an example of the wit and grace and sprightliness of craft that can exist in big-budget filmmaking. Binder was always alive to the erotic potential of hands. The girls in his title sequences are always beckoning like belly dancers, as if they were conjuring the fantastic images and vivid colors from their fingertips.

The opening sequence of "The Spy Who Loved Me" ends with Bond ski jumping off a mountain slope. The music cuts out and we see his figure falling through the air and kicking off his skis, before finally opening a parachute that blooms into a Union Jack. A silhouette of a woman's hands rises from the bottom of the screen to cradle the parachute as the first tinkling of "Nobody Does It Better" (the wittiest of Bond theme songs) begins. What follows is a sly joke on the phallic imagery of Bond films.

A huge gun barrel appears on the left side of the screen, which serves as balance beam and parallel bars for naked women to cartwheel along or swing from. A cutout of Moore is encircled by bejeweled hands, each holding a gun, until Bond has turned into a many-armed Indian icon. Images of Bond and some young lovely running are repeated and laid over each other in a slow-motion reverie of perpetual action. A slight push from Bond's finger topples a line of rifle-bearing beauties in Cossack hats. The mellifluous flow of Binder's work was never as erotic or as funny as it is here. He seems to be playing a relaxed game of "Can you top this?" -- daring himself to come up with more inventively racy images and effortlessly pulling them off. It's the work of a peerlessly worldly conjurer.

The particular mix of sex, adventure and luxury of the Bond movies has never been matched. It says something about the essentially disreputable appeal of movies that the Bond series, the most sophisticated disreputable films ever made, can seriously be spoken of as beloved. And not just the movies but the people who took part in them: So many of those people have left us. In addition to Binder there is Bernard Lee who played M, and most recently Desmond Llewelyn as Q, who made perpetual irritability seem like a state of comic grace. (Lois Maxwell, who played the Miss Moneypenny, before being fired from the series, is, thankfully, still with us.) It would be enough for anyone in the movies to earn an audience's pleasure. It says something about the work Binder and his colleagues have left behind that it has earned our love.

This story has been corrected since it was first published.