The first story is From a View to a Kill, in which Bond is investigating the robbery and murder of a dispatch rider who was travelling from the Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE) in Versailles to the MI6 Station F in Saint-Germain.
A View to a Kill is the title of the fourteenth entry in the film franchise, released in 1985. However, it does not utilise anything from the short story other than part of the title and a Paris setting. That said, Bond does fantasise about a woman named Solange, who later appeared in the film version of Casino Royale.
Next we have the so-called feature presentation, For Your Eyes Only. In this one, Bond is sent to Vermont to assassinate Herr von Hammerstein, a former Gestapo officer who escaped to Cuba and served as a counterintelligence officer in Fulgencio Batista's regime (Batista had been overthrown at the beginning of 1959, so presumably this story had been written before then). Von Hammerstein's accomplice, Major Gonzales, had attempted to buy a Jamaican estate from Colonel Timothy Havelock and murdered him and his wife when he refused. As the Havelocks are old friends of M, the head of MI6 offers an assassination mission to Bond. However, he soon encounters the Havelocks' daughter Judy on her own revenge mission.
For Your Eyes only would become the twelfth Bond film, released in 1981, and does utilise elements from the short story at the beginning. In the film, Sir Timothy Havelock is a marine archaeologist hired by the Secret Service to search for a missing spy ship in the Ionian Sea. He and his Greek wife are killed by Hector Gonzales, a Cuban hitman. Bond is sent to question Gonzales in Madrid, but is captured. He escapes when Havelock's daughter Melina shoots Gonzales with a crossbow as he dives into a pool (she kills von Hammerstein in the short story this way, albeit with a bow and arrow). Von Hammerstein has been removed from the film, but Bond later identifies Emile Leopold Locque as the man who paid Gonzales and searches for him in Cortina. As this was adapted from a short story, they had to make some of these changes to better suit a larger story. This includes incorporating another short story from this collection.
The third story, Quantum of Solace, is supposed to be a pastiche of the works of W. Somerset Maugham. Bond is attending a function at Government House in Nassau, after completing a mission in the Bahamas. He is then related a story by the governor about the gradually declining marriage of a civil servant named Phillip Masters and a flight attendant named Rhoda Llewellyn. Quantum of Solace was the 22nd film, released in 2009, but like A View to a Kill, it doesn't use anything from the source material other than the title.
Risico follows Bond as he travels to Italy to take down a drug smuggling ring. He meets a CIA informant named Kristatos, who points him in the direction of a smuggler named Enrico Colombo. Bond is eventually captured by Colombo, who is in a long-standing feud with Kristatos, learning that Kristatos is behind the scheme and was using him to silence Colombo.
The events of Risico were also utilised in the film adaptation For Your Eyes Only, but the setting is changed to Greece. This includes Colombo's raid on Kristatos' warehouse in Albania, which gets blown up. In the short story, Kristatos tries to escape afterwards, but is shot by Bond while driving away. In the film, this is changed to Locque, so Kristatos can be dealt with in the third act. The film version of For Your Eyes Only also borrows from Live and Let Die, using a scene in which Bond is dragged across a reef to serve as shark bait.
Finally, we have The Hildebrand Rarity. Bond is having some down-time in the Seychelles after a mission, when his local contact, Fidele Barbey, invites him on a local expedition with Milton Krest, an uncouth American millionaire. Krest takes them aboard his luxury yacht, the Wavekrest, on the pretence of searching for an exotic fish for the Smithsonian, the eponymous Hildebrand Rarity.
Like Risico, The Hildebrand Rarity did not get its own adaptation, but some elements were utilised in Licence to Kill, released in 1989. The character of Milton Krest appears as a high-raking member of the drug cartel headed by Franz Sanchez, and his marine research vessel, the Wavekrest, serves as a front for his operations. The film also has Sanchez beating his mistress with a stingray tail, similar to how Krest treats his wife in the short story. Krest's demise is different in the film; he's framed for embezzlement by Bond, and is killed using a decompression chamber which causes his head to explode. In the book, he's choked to death on the rare fish he'd sought, and Bond dumps him overboard to make it look like an accident. Again, because this was a short story, I guess there was a need to expand things. Especially because the film wasn't a direct adaptation.
Phew, that took a while.
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