The year was 1962. Our planet was held hostage by its two superpowers, locked in a mad dance of mutually assured destruction. The Bay of Pigs Invasion had flopped, splattering the CIA with mud. The Cuban Missile Crisis pushed political tensions to the brink of nuclear armageddon. America had increased its military advisers in Vietnam from 700 to 12,000. What the world needed now was a hairy-chested, Scottish love god named James Bond to grip the globe in his manly hands and seduce it into submission.

Sit through a few of the movies in Film Forum’s “Vintage 007” retrospective, and you will quickly realize that if there is a good-looking woman in a geopolitical hot-spot wearing too much hairspray then she’s probably already been conquered by 007. All Cold War movies are overheated affairs — “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Dr. Strangelove” come to mind — but the Bond movies are so far over the top that the top is the new bottom. Audiences could forget about race riots, the Kennedy assassination, or the economy in the haze of the 007 ritual.

The martinis, the Aston Martin, Moneypenny, Q and M, the casinos, the tuxedos, the girls (Holly Goodhead, Kissy Suzuki), the gadgets, the supervillains with their hidden headquarters and color-coordinated henchmen — Bond movies regularly delivered soothing familiarity. The threats were so nutty (destroy the world and repopulate from underwater city: “The Spy Who Loved Me”; irradiate all gold in Fort Knox: “Goldfinger”; use supermodels to distribute a killer virus: “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”) that they represented no actual threat at all. To distance the films even further from real-world worries, politically neutral Spectre replaced the Soviet Union’s counterintelligence agency, Smersh, which had menaced Bond in Ian Fleming’s 007 books.

And no matter how rude Sean Connery’s Bond was to women (“I hope the carpets match the drapes,” he says to one in “Diamonds are Forever”) or how bizarre his sexual technique (rubbing a delighted female with a mink glove) he’s also the least threatening horndog in motion pictures. Insatiably corny, he actually says, “Do you come here often?” in “Thunderball” — twice.

But “Dr. No” is still hot because the formula wasn’t in place and Mr. Connery’s Bond is downright rude. A babe offers to cook him dinner: “Forget it,” he snaps, and calls a taxi. He greets the half-Asian Dr. No with the classy, “With your disregard for human life you must be working for the East.” Meow!

By the time we get to “Goldfinger” the party’s over, or just getting started, depending on your point of view: It’s the movie that put the franchise formula into overdrive. Shirley Bassey bellowing “Goldfing-GAH!” seems downright subdued compared to Pussy Galore, Oddjob’s razor-sharp hat, the castration by laser, or the endless quips: “Shocking!,” “I think he got the point.” Many fans claim that the Bond series ended with the emotional flame-out of movie no. 6, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” and the theory makes sense because after that James Bond became that reanimated wax figure, Roger Moore.

Roger Moore: the man incapable of mustering an expression beyond “ruffled,” the man who can’t deliver a line without winking at the camera, the man who managed to make the Bond franchise both ridiculous and boring.

Consider “Octopussy.” When the lesbian octopus cult is fighting pirates and trying to smuggle phony Faberge eggs through an East German circus protected by knifethrowing twins, you’ll probably fall asleep. But even a broken clock is right twice a day, and Mr. Moore’s “The Spy Who Loved Me” is one of the best Bond movies, a colorful, stylish romp that feels like a sexy, classy comic book for adults.

The Bond films unleashed a flood of spy pictures featured in Film Forum’s supplemental series, “60s Spies A-Go-Go.” But Dean Martin is dire in “The Silencers,” Raquel Welch is wasted in “Fathom,” and James Coburn looks like a man who’s waiting for his check to clear in “Our Man Flint.” Michael Caine, however, is magnificent in “The Ipcress File,” and while “Billion Dollar Brain” starts off standard issue, by the time an evangelical, anti-communist, gun-loving Texas oil tycoon is plotting to invade the Soviet Union at his Nuremberg Rally BBQ, there’s nothing standard about it.

Surprisingly, the best movie in both series is also the most reviled — 1967’s “Casino Royale.” A parody of the Bond films starring David Niven, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, and Woody Allen, it’s the big budget Monty Python movie that never was. Niven plays the real 007, a celibate, stuttering gentleman lured out of retirement to redeem his good name. Truly psychedelic and deeply anti-establishment, this flick parodies the murder-happy, sex-crazed Bond series and the murder-happy, sex-crazed world that spawned it. Somehow, despite its legions of Highland bagpipers, its Kim Il-Sung impersonation (courtesy of Mr. Allen) and its far-out depiction of the Berlin Wall coming down, “Casino Royale” manages to be the only Bond movie actually engaged with reality. It’s so surreal that 40 years later it feels real.

Through May 17. “’60s Spies A-Go-Go” begins Sunday and runs through May 14 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).