You know the script, and savor every bit

THE release of a much-polished and feature-laden series comprising the complete James Bond film oeuvre is a reminder that it’s part of our common pop cultural birthright to know a few things by simple osmosis -- e.g. that lots of people hate the damn Yankees, that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings, and that James Bond likes his martinis ... well, you know.

For many among us, there are further codicils that spring up as we await “Casino Royale,” No. 21 in a series that boasts cinema’s richest box office franchise. We know each Bond film will start by putting the suave British spy through a sprawling, self-prolonging action set piece. (Many are partial to the madness on the Thames in 1999’s “The World Is Not Enough.”) Then there will be a graphically slick title sequence (often with a torchy title song, for which Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” set a brassy standard) and soon, of course, comes a visit to chief gadget engineer Q’s lair for some prefiguring of later high-tech wizardry.

By now we’ve met a super vixen. (Sophie Marceau, again in “The World Is Not Enough,” was perhaps the best combination of acting chops and lusciousness.) The vixen is spirited but generally not exactly hard to get, which puts her in the same camp as an array of curvy, innuendo-inspiring women collectively known as “Bond girls.” The preponderance of these femmes end up with a bloody bodice, oftentimes courtesy of the inevitable Walther PPK handgun, demonstrating that our hero will kill when he has to, whether with a scornful half smile (Sean Connery smirking “I think he got the point,” after a spear gun execution), a grimace (Pierce Brosnan, who didn’t ungrit his teeth until his third time out in “Die Another Day”), or something in between (Roger Moore, who sought to be subversively droll but never achieved the compelling archness that the nonpareil Connery developed).

The tally since “Dr. No” debuted the series in 1962 with its cinematic touchstones -- exotic, tourist-fantasy settings that seem always to have a high-tech secret lair where the villain can, say, clap his artificial hands together with wicked glee -- is 44 years and six Bonds.

Beyond the fairly universal preference for the Sean Connery Bond over all other aspirants (it was on to guest spots on Baywatch for the biggest flop, George Lazenby of 1969’s “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”), there’s no quick summarizing the span of Bond films and robust special features offered on these four volumes, in which each film boasts two discs.

Even an uncelebrated place filler (in this case on Vol. 4) like “Octopussy” has an accompanying behind-the-scenes film by master documentarian Ric Burns, and all the footage has been restored frame by frame with, for the home theater crowd, 5.1 audio tracks. (Forced to choose one set, with a rocket-propelled grenade pointed at my Aston Martin, I’d probably opt for Vol. 1.)

It was with 1964’s “Goldfinger,” third in the series, that the public’s Bond infatuation truly (and deservedly) took hold. By contrast with two earlier efforts from director Terence Young, Guy Hamilton established that the films would find the absurd fun in the larger-than-life world of Bond. Gert Frobe’s title character with his Teutonic eccentricities leads to “You Only Live Twice’s” Ernst Stavro Blofeld (and of course Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil). Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore was perhaps the handsomest and most capable (a judo expert and pilot) of the Bond girls.

Emphasizing that Bond and his enemies played on the world stage for the biggest of stakes, Goldfinger suckered America’s crime bosses, just as Bond unfailingly (and these days, all the more believably) snookered Felix Leiter and the CIA. There’s no surprise that former spy Ian Fleming’s creation would operate in political spheres, but it’s an added drollery that a Brit was always saving America’s bacon (or space program, or gold reserve or about-to-be obliterated population) from the plottings of SPECTRE, that worldwide conspiracy that nowadays feels uncomfortably like a high-tech preview of current terrorist threats. We only live twice, indeed -- perhaps the shadow life comes not in dreams but in explosion-laced nightmares.

Against such paranoia, Bond, M (Judi Dench), and the heirs of Q stand as a formidable imaginative bulwark. There’s something relentless, and notoriously, fearless about James Bond. He’s no Everyman, but he is a self-made aristocrat, a catalog of expensive tastes worn definitively but lightly. His unflappable example comforts us when we bed down in a strange town. No bullet, no tarantula, no crazy little chambermaid (operative Rosa Klebb, played by Lotte Lenya!) with a poisoned blade on her shoe can end his quest for a serious martini and casual sex.

So live and thrive, James Bond, and as when you outsmarted the fake agent while musing, “Red wine with fish -- that should have told me something,” always keep your self-preserving punctiliousness.

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Make this one a double: 007

Two volumes of the Ultimate Bond collection will be released Tuesday. Here are the films in each set:

* Vol. 1: “Goldfinger,” “The World Is Not Enough,” “Diamonds Are Forever,” “The Man With the Golden Gun,” “The Living Daylights”

* Vol. 2: “Thunderball,” “Die Another Day” (below, with Pierce Brosnan), “The Spy Who Loved Me,” “A View to a Kill,” “License to Kill”