Moore and More - In Depth Critiques

chrisno1

007 on screen from 1981 - 1985

This series follows my other occasional forays into the world of film criticism:
Timothy Dalton's Bond:
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/36656/tim … critiques/
The Seventies Bond:
https://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/38282/the-seventies-bond-in-depth-critiques/
and my 2008 review series
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/31479/two … e-reviews/

I first begun my review series way back in 2008 as a challenge to myself, as a little bit of fun if you will, and it then became something a little more serious when I was unemployed in 2011/12 and had a ton of time on my hands.
I always intended to finish the "in depth" series of critical analysis, but something always got in the way - work, play or my own fledgling writing career.
The recent passing of Sir Roger Moore led me to revisit his Bond movies one by one with the result I have decided to reignite the "in depth" series.
I will admit my taste for topic titles has improved dramatically - I mean, Timothy Dalton's Bond, The Seventies Bond, Two Weeks of Bondage - who on earth is ever going to find these reviews?

If you prefer the literary Bond, I have a series of critical summaries listed below:

https://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/33508/bond-novel-reviews/
https://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/34464/bond-continuation-novel-reviews/
https://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/36035/bond-continuation-novel-reviews-vol-2/

Christoph John
Author of the Jon Drago adventures

Steel Wolf

http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=3737
Gilgamesh

http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=4298

chrisno1

For Your Eyes Only

For Your Eyes Only opens with James Bond visiting his wife’s grave. This is a neat link to the past, one which aficionados of the franchise can appreciate and which newcomers can use as a pointer to the central character’s basic make up. What isn’t explained at any point is how Bond really feels about the death of his wife, nor why a mysterious bald headed man in a wheelchair who strokes a white cat and is encumbered by a neck brace should want to kill him or even offer him shares in a delicatessen.

Admittedly we are only six minutes into the adventure but this nod to Bond’s cinematic history feels contrived, as though the producer wants to lay to rest all that has gone before, right up to our hero being shot into space and enduring ‘Star Wars’ style laser battles in the outer atmosphere. Back in 1969, when EoN wanted to follow up the outlandish volcano sequences of You Only Live Twice, they also chose something more intimate and were rewarded with one of the best episodes of the series with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The efforts to ground OO7 in more or less the real world of 1981 doesn’t quite succeed to the same degree, but For Your Eyes Only certainly feels a more realistic adventure. If ultimately it lacks the flash and dash of its immediate predecessors, this movie does reward the viewer with a tougher, less self-absorbed, more vulnerable and altogether more believable James Bond.

Roger Moore doesn’t always receive plaudits for his acting, but his performance here is worth more than a passing mention. We know he’s good at humour and the one-liners trip off his tongue with elegance and style, yet he also gives us one fine example of pathos and several moments of sheer bravado and viciousness which make this particular version of OO7 his most level-headed and realistic to date. Early on in the film Bond attempts to comfort the heroine, Melina Havelock, a beautiful archaeologist whose parents have been murdered by a Cuban hit man. He quotes a wise proverb: “Before setting out on revenge, first you must dig two graves.” This is an actual Chinese teaching and Moore delivers it with the empathetic gravitas the line deserves. His character must have dwelt long and hard on this particular muse, although Bond’s exact motives are unclear; he has a job to perform and Melina is in the way, yet we sense he may also be speaking from the heart. The problem – if you are not over familiar with Bond lore – is that the link between this scene in this movie to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Blofeld and the pre-title sequence is never made explicit. It is implicit and relies on prior knowledge. As good as Moore is, he can’t help but leave the line hanging, burdened by unspoken history. Melina, driven by her own agenda, explains that “Greek women, like Electra, always avenge their loved ones.” Thus a different template, one specific to For Your Eyes Only, is set. You feel an opportunity has been missed.

Four years earlier, in The Spy Who Loved Me, Barbara Bach’s desirable and knowledgeable, KGB agent Anya Amasova relates Bond’s potted biography. Moore abruptly cuts her short when she mentions his dead wife. There is nothing so telling in this movie. Indeed the whole pre-title sequence, which should essentially finalise matters with Bond’s prime antagonists SPECTRE, is curiously soulless, lacking even a mention of who the bald man is and why he wants to kill Bond. I know we know it is Blofeld, but that isn’t my point; others less knowledgeable may not. Because there is no time to recap and explain Bond’s equal motive for killing the bald man, it becomes merely an exciting exercise in suspense and airborne hi-jinks played out over the East London gas works. Yet it is completely disconnected from the adventure itself. A similar problem of detachment befell the start of Diamonds Are Forever before that film took itself off into the realm of OO7 fantasy.

From shaky and uncertain beginnings however, For Your Eyes Only manages to remain both grounded and very entertaining. It also explains itself much better than some Bond movies. You wouldn’t expect that after the outlandishness of the immediate two previous episodes penned by jovial screenwriter Christopher Wood for even more jovial director Lewis Gilbert, or indeed the general tomfoolery of the whole seventies output. Once we pass the pre-title scenes the movie suddenly becomes very serious. The spy ship St. Georges has been accidentally sunk when her fisherman crew, an effective local cover story, wheel in a still active World War 2 mine. As in real life, you pay for mistakes and the St. Georges goes down with all hands inside Albanian waters, precipitating a covert salvage operation by the marine archaeologist Sir Timothy Havelock. He’s been charged with recovering A.T.A.C., the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator, a gizmo which in the wrong hands could lead to British nuclear submarines attacking their allies or even themselves, so it’s vital the A.T.A.C. is recovered. The Russians are also aware of this and General Gogol is seen instructing his staff to contact his agents in the local area, an order which results in the assassination by Hector Gonzales of Havelock and his wife. It’s interesting to note that the first few scenes of the movie proper were originally intended for the prologue, which would have made this as low key an entrance as 1963's From Russia With Love.

This is no mistake for the narrative to For Your Eyes Only, like its forerunner, is remarkably, bleakly Cold War and puts us solidly back in the era of Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. For all Bond’s posturing about Queen and Country in the sixties and seventies, he never actually dealt with a villain whose direct master was the Soviet Union. Occasionally, as in The Man with the Golden Gun, the Chinese appear to be brokering behind the scenes, but Bond never faces anyone from China. General Gogol’s previous appearances had been as an ally, if a benign one. Here he is behind the whole affair and while he isn’t ‘in the field’, as it were, it is Gogol’s agents who Bond confronts. This gives the film an edge missing from the spectacles which came before. Blofeld and SPECTRE were non-nationally identified adversaries hence they posed no direct threat. Revenge, extortion and terror were their game. The KGB’s desire for the A.T.A.C. suggests a more disciplined, political and military objective.

From Russia With Love was steeped in the Cold War. The movie is set in Istanbul, the front line of East-West spy-dom and the plethora of villains are Russians who have abandoned communism for the SPECTRE regime; Bond is seeking a code breaking machine called the Lektor; a beautiful Russian attaché wants to defect. It’s fair to say For Your Eyes Only resembles Connery’s classic in several ways. It has a McGuffin – the A.T.A.C. even looks like the Lektor; there’s a vulnerable heroine; a robust supporting character; an East Europe setting; a mute killer who orchestrates chaos; covert spies disguised as businessmen; secret messages; secret hideouts; clandestine meetings; a blonde muscle bound KGB killer. The only thing missing is a train. Ian Fleming would certainly have approved of the opening set-up which anticipates the deadly game of spies about to unfurl up and down the Aegean coast.

The author’s original short story is brought to mind by the murder of the Havelock’s. While he set the action in Jamaica and Vermont, the writers transpose this to Corfu and Spain. They also don’t bother with the socio-political angle Fleming dwelt over, but revenge is uppermost in their minds. In the book M was a friend of the Havelock’s and he sends Bond on a ‘dirty’ mission to eliminate the assassin Von Hammerstein. It is a purely personal assignment from M to OO7, which is why he inscribed it as ‘Eyes Only.’ As he approaches Von Hammerstein’s lair Bond runs into Judy Havelock, a daughter out to do what M could not, avenge the death of her parents. So Judy becomes Melina, swapping blonde for brunette, but not losing her specific objective. Carole Bouquet is only partially successful as Melina Havelock. She’s rather passive, even when involved in the physical stuff. You don’t sense any warmth to her character. At times she seems icily efficient rather than hot blooded. Fleming described Judy as having “a wild face with soft obedient eyes” but Bouquet lacks both of these qualities. It doesn’t help her lines are dubbed so at times she looks almost cartoonish when she speaks. At the outset however director John Glen chooses to show her reaction to sudden, shocking orphan-hood in silent close up, focussing keenly on her eyes as they stare after the departing monoplane: we know her thoughts already, the rippling twist of strings provided by Bill Conti’s orchestra adds the necessary dramatic accompaniment.

Conti provides a striking musical motif for Melina's plight. He’s less successful during an ensuing chase through Spanish olive groves where, saddled with a slow moving Citroën 2CV, Bond and Melina flee Gonzales’ villa to the strains of a mariachi band. This unusual chase is another indication Bond won’t have everything his own way and may have to rely on his wits to get out of each predicament. For once the gadgets have back fired: his Lotus is blown up thanks to the excessive burglar proofing fitted by Q Branch. The 2CV is a goofy car. It serves its light hearted purpose well, releasing the tension between OO7 and Melina, two strangers thrust reluctantly together by dangerous circumstance. Perhaps though it would have been more thoughtful of the writers to place the dialogue of this scene into a later one – that in Melina’s hotel room where the ‘Two Graves’ speech occurs.

A second Fleming short story (Risico) is transported from Venice to Corfu, but reproduced more faithfully, including as it does the two battling war veterans, Kristatos and Colombo. As impersonated by Julian Glover, Kristatos is a sleek, slick, wiry antagonist, a man used to issuing instructions rather than taking direct action. This is never more obvious than when he lets his henchmen do the fighting as he escapes to collect his prize. If anything Glover’s performance is underwhelming and while we’ve been told he’s a powerful man there’s no indication of that on screen. Dressing up in natty cardigans doesn’t help.

Topol’s Colombo is much more effective. A huge personality, the Israeli fills out his role with deep rumbling vowels, massive grins of satisfaction and the snap and crack of teeth shattering pistachio nuts. For many he’s a poor-man’s Kerim Bey (also of From Russia With Love) and that is a fault in the source novel too. The comparison is very obvious. Yet on screen Colombo is far more garrulous and much more active. He’s operating outside of the law, yet has moral Western standards not adhered to by his arch enemy Kristatos. Because of Colombo’s elusiveness, the audience doesn’t initially realise he is one of the good guys; all the clues about him, particularly the White Dove ensignia worn by several baddies, suggest he’s the monumental villain. It takes a moment of courage for us to change our minds. In one of the movie’s best scenes Colombo offers Bond a loaded gun, knowing OO7 could end his life. It is this intuitive judgement which leads Bond, and therefore the audience, to trust him. Moore and Topol play this scene brilliantly. It’s well written, lifted mainly from the pages of Fleming’s story, but their facial reactions offer much more insight than the dialogue, creating warmth and comradeship. There is nothing so genuine when Bond and Kristatos meet. Instead they exchange cold facetious deliberations over an expensive and ego flattering dinner.

At the climax of Risico Bond has destroyed Kristatos’ smuggling operation and Colombo offers OO7 his mistress, Lisl, by way of thanks. In the movie this rather masculine misogynistic turn is omitted, chiefly because Lisl [a short role for Cassandra Harris] has already been written out, killed during a well-constructed dune-buggy shoot out on a Corfu beach. Instead Colombo mentions that his "heart is heavy after the loss of my beloved Lisl.” This of course ties him closer to Bond than the predatory sub-paedophile Kristatos, a man who appears to have no emotions except indignation and refuses even to shake hands with those he considers beneath him.

There’s an equally undemonstrative heavy in Emile Leopold Locque. Michael Gothard is a silent henchman, filling out the role Krilencu played in From Russia With Love. He’s probably one of Moore’s best opponents, deadly and furtive. Locque doesn’t have to say anything, his actions speak volumes. Bond first comes into contact with the notorious enforcer for the Belgium underworld when he witnesses him paying Hector Gonzales’ blood money. Melina is all for killing him, but Bond’s restraint wins her over. He traces Locque by using Q’s new gadget, the Identigraph – an update of Fleming’s Identicast which OO7 used in the novel Goldfinger. This is another good scene which provides some light relief after all the chaos in Spain and also allows Roger Moore to shine, once again displaying that his tongue in cheek tendencies’ can be held in check.

Locque must have a similar machine for he’s identified OO7 and issues a fake telegram from Bond to Melina asking her to meet him in Cortina D’Ampezzo. The intention is to have the almost mute psychopath Erik Kriegler kill them. John Wyman’s KGB / Stasi assassin is another copy of Robert Shaw’s Red Grant. As with all the other copies, he’s less successful. Even with his motor cycle riding entourage – who include a young Charles Dance – he’s not big enough to best Bond. Unfortunately the only recipient of death is Luigi Ferrara (John Moreno), Bond’s Italian contact, whose throat is viciously cut. The Italian scenes are something of a diversion, but what they do excellently is entrench our perception of these shadowy, uncommunicative hit men as thoroughly evil.

When Bond finally confronts the enforcer they embark on a game of ‘chicken’ which Bond wins, shooting out the windscreen of Locque’s car, injuring him and sending him slithering to a cliff edge. In yet another earnest moment, Roger Moore enacts retribution for the murder of Ferrara by tossing a White Dove badge at his adversary before defiantly kicking the car over the precipice. Moore looks slightly uncomfortable doing this, but I like that; it displays Bond’s distaste for cold blooded killing, although I rather feel, given the gun battle which has just taken place, that this is a hot blooded assassination.

You’d think with all this tough stuff going on that there’d be no place for slapstick in For Your Eyes Only, but the movie actually features two very obvious attempts at that comic genre. During the coda comedienne Janet Brown impersonates Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister of Great Britain, and engages in a flirtatious phone call with Bond, who is being impersonated by a talking parrot. It was funny in 1981, but makes little sense to a modern audience, who lack a contemporary context. It’s always a misstep to include actual personalities in a film for it will unavoidably date it.

Added to this mix is one of the oddest contretemps of this or any other Bond epic: the introduction of a new character, Bibi Dahl, a teenage figure skater and Kristatos’ protégé. Bibi appears to lust after every man except her sponsor, who she suspects of desiring her. For his part, Bond untidily rejects Bibi’s obvious sexual overtures. This is one of the low points of the whole series. I wouldn’t blame the actress; Lynn Holly Johnson does the best she can with a ridiculous Lolita-lite role. No. I blame the writers. I simply can’t imagine what they were thinking. The main problem with the scenes between Bond and Bibi as written is how they draw attention to the age gap – not between the characters, for Bond is always supposed to be in his late thirties and Bibi in her late teens, but the age gap between Johnson and Roger Moore. It’s as if Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson suddenly said: “Roger’s too old to be bedding young women, let’s poke fun at him for it.” Yet they completely forget it isn’t Moore’s age they should be considering but Bond’s. It is after all established quite clearly that Bibi is an experienced sexual creature. Johnson may look young, but she isn’t a nymphet. Consider though the role written for Carole Bouquet. Melina is presented as a fully fleshed, mature individual therefore she appears to be much older than Bibi. In reality the two actresses were only a couple of years apart in age. This curious unfulfilled romantic liaison feels hugely out of place in a Bond film, particularly in this sparse, genuine presentation.

Generally the screenwriters do a sterling job of dragging Bond back down to earth and giving him and his cohorts some fine dialogue and even finer emotive scenes. The movie is peppered with examples, small instances of tenderness, acts of brutality and revealing emotional insight. They do seem bogged down [snowed under?] by the scenes in Cortina. They may evoke fond memories of those great snow bound stunts in The Spy Who Loved Me and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but there’s really no reason for Bond to go there at all. The exercise is purely designed to provide an excuse to include Willy Bolgner’s barnstorming ski chase down a bob-sled run. Generally though, the Italian scenes don’t harm the film; the plot is developed effectively if spread quite thin, there’s plenty of violence and one horrific death. There’s even time for some good old fashioned spy craft among the Alpine hotels.

Bond doesn’t do much spying in Corfu where he turns into something like a treasure seeker, armed with a map and diving suits. Most of the spying there is done by Colombo and Lisl with their table top tape recordings and interrogation-by-seduction techniques. Bond remains unruffled until a group of spear fisherman rough him up and throw him to the ubiquitous lion, Colombo’s perpetually grinning smuggler, where upon violence once more rears its unstoppable head and won’t let up for the remainder of the narrative.

After his sojourn with Colombo to Albania, Bond returns to Corfu and finally starts to hunt for the A.T.A.C. and the sunken St. Georges. James Bond always looks good underwater and there are some taut scenes below the waves: a prize fight with a man in a J.I.M. diving suit, a battle between two undersea submersibles and a gruesome bout of keel hauling, the latter lifted directly from the pages of Live and Let Die. Al Giddings directs and photographs these superbly, all menacing dark blues broken by brilliant furious white bubbles when the action kicks in. Bond gains and then loses the A.T.A.C., but a slice of ingenious luck leads him to Meteora and the monastery of St. Cyril’s, perched on a 600 foot rock pillar, where Kristatos is awaiting General Gogol.

OO7’s assent of the rock is another of his great cinematic moments; when he’s unceremoniously kicked off the summit your heart leaps up to your mouth. Stuntman Rick Sylvester deserves many plaudits once again for his highly professional and daring work. If it all seems a little improbable, you can forgive the movie that, for at least the improbabilities are earth bound and don’t involve a megalomaniacs scheme to destroy the world. This time, even if his feet aren’t actually touching the ground, you feel Bond’s soul has returned there. The final confrontation isn’t between Melina and Kristatos, or Kristatos and Colombo, but between Bond and General Gogol, allies no more, but polite and philosophical in their combative conduct. In fact Bond’s relationship with Gogol seems quite mature, if cheeky, while, in the absence of M, he encounters a brusque Chief of Staff (James Villiers) and an impatient Minister of Defence (the returning Geoffrey Keen; no longer ‘Freddy’ to OO7, now definitely ‘Minister.’) Bernard Lee sadly died before filming and his loss is acutely felt in the scenes at S.I.S. headquarters. To compensate Q goes gallivanting to Greece for no reason but deliver an empty message and a single brilliant one line joke: Bond, “Father, I have sinned,” Q, “That’s putting it mildly, OO7.”

Behind the scenes Bill Conti has added a zippy synthesiser inspired music score which, like many similar compositions from the eighties, has faded a little in the memory. I recall it with some affection. Given I was so used to John Barry’s lush orchestrations, this score felt very modern at the time. It accompanies most of the action perfectly well and he’s assisted by Sheena Easton’s excellent vocal performance for the Oscar nominated title song. It’s a romantic theme he reprises often and to good effect.

The designer was Peter Lamont and he does an okay job without ever suggesting he’s in Ken Adam’s class. He doesn’t however have to produce anything as stunning as the interior of a space station or Fort Knox. A dilapidated monastery is his remit. Alan Hume’s above water photography is a bit muddy. Because of this the movie looks less spectacular than much of what has gone before. The sun doesn’t appear to shine very often during this production. There’s a lack of glamour too; a casino scene is shoe horned into the narrative but Bond spends most of his time out of his tuxedo and roaming less dreamy European locations, like the Albanian coast and the olive groves of La Mancha. This isn’t a bad thing.

First time director John Glen is good with the action and brings much needed steeliness to the proceedings. He’s not so good with the romantic interludes and the comic possibilities seem to leave him cold. Partly that’s the writer’s fault and while Maibaum and Wilson, in their debut collaboration, have striven to return Bond to his roots, they have had a humour failure and most of the witticisms when not inappropriate are too obvious to be more than chuckle inducing.

For Your Eyes Only was big hit when released and garnered generally positive reviews. For many years it was frequently voted one of the top ten best Bond films, chiefly based on its less fantastical merits. Time doesn’t appear to have been as kind as I’d like to hope, but for all that it’s great to see a still slim Roger Moore battling the odds with both a grin and a grimace while still managing to extend his acting chops. He’s got good support for the most part both in front and behind the camera. Best of all OO7 is finally confronted with realistic Cold War villainy and at last, after a decade of decadence, Ian Fleming’s hero, his foibles and persuasions seems to be eking off the page and onto celluloid.

caractacus potts

awesome analysis! I think this is a chewy film, more to think about than the average Moore-era film

chrisno1 wrote:

He quotes a wise proverb: “Before setting out on revenge, first you must dig two graves.” This is an actual Chinese teaching and Moore delivers it with the empathetic gravitas the line deserves. His character must have dwelt long and hard on this particular muse, although Bond’s exact motives are unclear; he has a job to perform and Melina is in the way, yet we sense he may also be speaking from the heart. The problem – if you are not over familiar with Bond lore – is that the link between this scene in this movie to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Blofeld and the pre-title sequence is never made explicit.

I never made the link at all, went right over my head. Bond doesn't seem intent on revenge in the precredits sequence, just trying to outlive another villain's trap. And I don't believe he was seeking revenge in either the beginning or end of Diamonds are Forever. The tone is all wrong in all three instances: light comedy. I think the filmmakers had regarded OHMSS as a failure and went for most of decade without referencing it at all. We never do see Bond in revenge mode until Licence to Kill.

I think the anonymous Blofeld appearance at the beginning of this film was included primarily as an F.U. to McClory, who was threatening to make his Thunderball remake round this point, and had prevented them from using Blofeld as a proper villain in the Spy Who Loved Me. You're right, this dialog should reference Bond's vengeance following Tracy's death, and makes sense if we assume that, but this is something that never ever happened in the films, just the books.

chrisno1 wrote:

Melina, driven by her own agenda, explains that “Greek women, like Electra, always avenge their loved ones.”

now this stuck out to me last time I watched the film. As you note, the filmmakers dropped the personal-connection-to-M angle. But that connection does occur in The World is Not Enough. M's friend is assassinated in her office, and she feels a responsibility to her friends daughter, so sends Bond off to protect her and find the killers. It's often noted the end of that film is loosely modeled on Colonel Sun, but I've gotten to thinking the beginning is loosely modelled on Fleming's FYEO story. One of those things where once I see it I cant unsee it, even if its all in my imagination. But now I've got that stuck in my head, its conspicuous Melina mentions the name Elektra.

chrisno1

caractacus potts wrote:

awesome analysis! I think this is a chewy film, more to think about than the average Moore-era film

chrisno1 wrote:

He quotes a wise proverb: “Before setting out on revenge, first you must dig two graves.” This is an actual Chinese teaching and Moore delivers it with the empathetic gravitas the line deserves. His character must have dwelt long and hard on this particular muse, although Bond’s exact motives are unclear; he has a job to perform and Melina is in the way, yet we sense he may also be speaking from the heart. The problem – if you are not over familiar with Bond lore – is that the link between this scene in this movie to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Blofeld and the pre-title sequence is never made explicit.

I never made the link at all, went right over my head. Bond doesn't seem intent on revenge in the precredits sequence, just trying to outlive another villain's trap. And I don't believe he was seeking revenge in either the beginning or end of Diamonds are Forever. The tone is all wrong in all three instances: light comedy. I think the filmmakers had regarded OHMSS as a failure and went for most of decade without referencing it at all. We never do see Bond in revenge mode until Licence to Kill.

I think the anonymous Blofeld appearance at the beginning of this film was included primarily as an F.U. to McClory, who was threatening to make his Thunderball remake round this point, and had prevented them from using Blofeld as a proper villain in the Spy Who Loved Me. You're right, this dialog should reference Bond's vengeance following Tracy's death, and makes sense if we assume that, but this is something that never ever happened in the films, just the books.

chrisno1 wrote:

Melina, driven by her own agenda, explains that “Greek women, like Electra, always avenge their loved ones.”

now this stuck out to me last time I watched the film. As you note, the filmmakers dropped the personal-connection-to-M angle. But that connection does occur in The World is Not Enough. M's friend is assassinated in her office, and she feels a responsibility to her friends daughter, so sends Bond off to protect her and find the killers. It's often noted the end of that film is loosely modeled on Colonel Sun, but I've gotten to thinking the beginning is loosely modelled on Fleming's FYEO story. One of those things where once I see it I cant unsee it, even if its all in my imagination. But now I've got that stuck in my head, its conspicuous Melina mentions the name Elektra.

Thanks for the feedback.
I agree Bond certainly doesn't appear to be out for revenge in DAF. That is my assumption - given that up to this point the movies ran more-or-less along a consecutive timeline [another discussion point, perhaps... ]. Also, he certainly doesn't appear out for revenge in FYEO, which is exactly my point, and as you say the tone is all wrong, very light-hearted and fun.

I've read on other sites about the Elektra King and Electra, how some people think this is an interesting connection, but it isn't a connection at all, merely one line in FYEO. In TWINE the character's name is deliberately such to emphasise the revenge motive, although [correct me if I'm wrong] I'm not sure this is ever specifically mentioned.

The M / TWINE / literary-FYEO connection never occurred to me. Now you mention it, its rather obvious; the difference of course being that Brosnan's Bond recognises her personal motives and doesn't agree with the sanction, even stating so publicly, while in the novel, he carries out the assassination almost as a favour.

heartbroken_mr_drax

Excellent review. Looking forward to OP and AVTAK.

heartbroken_mr_drax

I also noted a strong connection to TWINE and was expecting your review to highlight that narrative running throughout the series...

IcePak

Another awesome review, Chrisno1. I find your observations accurate. You've reinvigorated my interested in the film.

chrisno1

heartbroken_mr_drax wrote:

Excellent review. Looking forward to OP and AVTAK.

Thanks. OP should be up tomorrow. It may not please everyone; my views on that film are fairly well documented here.

Dirty Punker

chrisno1 wrote:

heartbroken_mr_drax wrote:

Excellent review. Looking forward to OP and AVTAK.

Thanks. OP should be up tomorrow. It may not please everyone; my views on that film are fairly well documented here.

Negative? We shall see. (as in your view on it, not that they are not documented here)

heartbroken_mr_drax

chrisno1 wrote:

heartbroken_mr_drax wrote:

Excellent review. Looking forward to OP and AVTAK.

Thanks. OP should be up tomorrow. It may not please everyone; my views on that film are fairly well documented here.

Well your negative-ish reviews aren't that negative - unless I am in for a shock )

chrisno1

Octopussy

1983 was the year of the battle of the Bonds. Sean Connery was back in an independently produced remake of Thunderball, cryptically entitled Never Say Never Again. Meanwhile EoN producer Cubby Broccoli had been toying once again with replacing his current lead actor and embarking on a new era for cinema’s favourite secret agent. The threat of a rival movie featuring his own original Bond sent him scurrying back to the welcoming arms of Roger Moore who gladly undertook a sixth outing as OO7 for a substantial sum.

While Connery’s film brought back SPECTRE and Blofeld, something and someone Moore had only recently consigned, presumably dead, to the bottom of a gas chimney, the latest official production reintroduced the Soviet Union and their foreign operatives, who had been such an effective shadowy nemesis in For Your Eyes Only. The movie was called Octopussy after the lead title of Ian Fleming’s posthumously published collection of short stories. The three literary adventures are all rather slight, so slight they are hardly included in the film at all.

In the middle story [The Property of a Lady] Bond is sent to Sotherby’s auctioneers to observe the sale of a rare Faberge egg. The proceeds of the lot will be received by a traitor inside the S.I.S; M knows this, but wants to catch the tiger as well as the tail, so Bond must identify the real seller, a man who will be upping the bid in an effort to reward the traitor within. It’s an intriguing few pages of observational prose which was originally submitted to Sotherby’s in-house magazine. Fleming was never pleased with the story and it is little more than a footnote in the Bond literary legacy. On screen this slim premise is blown up into a globetrotting tale of fake jewels, beautiful smugglers, mad generals, nuclear bombs, terrorism, murder and mayhem in Udaipur and a deadly circus in Berlin. None of this bears any resemblance to anything written by Fleming. The movie could easily have been entitled The Property of a Lady without altering a single element of the story bar one: the heroine’s ancestry. This is alluded to midway in the film when the titular Octopussy – a female master criminal – explains that her father was Major Dexter Smythe, a man Bond had once allowed to commit suicide rather than face an embarrassing trial for stealing a cache of gold bullion. Other than a ruse to make Octopussy sympathetic towards Bond, this grubby little piece of personal history remains irrelevant to proceedings on screen. Fleming’s original tale i]Octopussy[/i featured a man reflecting on his life, his joys, his sins and regrets. After Bond’s offer of a honorary death, he expires in the suffocating embrace of his eight-limbed pet, ‘Octopussy’. None of this is featured in the movie, although there may be some regret from the film makers about the final product.

The movie kicks off with a few minutes of nonsense in Cuba where Bond is attempting to destroy an air force base manned with heat seeking Exocet missiles. This was quite a topical piece of weaponry in 1983 as Britain’s air and naval forces had several encounters with Exocets during the Falklands Conflict. The writers construct an opeing sequence whose template is the prologue to Goldfinger – Bond infiltrates a secret base, plants a bomb, has a fleeting moment with a gorgeous girl which leads to sudden violence. Unlike that classic piece of action there are so many implausibles it’s hard to take the thing seriously. So we don’t. It particularly grates that Bond makes good his escape, aided by an almost half naked female assistant, and promptly orders her to catch their escape flight home while he, for some inexplicable reason, chooses to travel by one-man AcroStar jet hidden in a horse box. In actuality, the AcroStar chase isn’t as daft as what precedes it and really deserves longer than its two minutes of fame; it’s pulsating good, the heat seeker getting closer and closer to Bond until at the very last he is able to evade it and destroy his target. The unnecessary “Fill her up!” petrol station pun takes the edge off a thrilling moment of drama and is indicative of things to come.

As in For Your Eyes Only returning director John Glen gives us a second prologue immediately after the titles. Also like For Your Eyes Only it features the killing of a British agent. OO9, disguised as a circus clown, is being chased by knife wielding twins and eventually reaches the British embassy in Berlin, whereupon he collapses, dead, and a Faberge egg rolls from his hand. This is an excellent sequence which puts us firmly in the thick of the Cold War, exactly where Fleming’s third short story i]The Living Daylights[/i was set, both in location and psychology. The writers return OO7 to Berlin for the climax but don’t use any of the source material; that would have to wait for another time and another Bond.

When the jeweled egg turns up in London Bond is dispatched to seek its seller. Unknown to him and M – a freshly recruited Robert Brown, more irascible than Bernard Lee, but equally believable as an ex-Admiral – the Russian’s need the jewel back as a snap audit of the Kremlin’s vaults is due before the replacement arrives. The man responsible for manufacturing the copy is Kamal Khan, who’s just about the smoothest, slickest, most debonair Bond villain of all time. Played with just the right amount of diffidence by Louis Jourdan, Khan is a magnificently dressed, unruffled, upper class, new generation bad guy, a man whose money speaks for him, whose ambition is shrouded in haute couture finery. He lives like a prince. In fact, he is one and has a palace and entourage to match his station, including a fierce body guard, Gobinda, and a duplicitous mistress, Magda. At Sotherby’s Bond picks him out with ease, chiefly because Magda (Kristina Wayborn) cuts such an attractive figure despite a permanently turned down smile. Like the AcroStar chase, the auction isn’t given the time it deserves because in the grand scheme of things it’s virtually an irrelevance such is the convoluted plotting of this saga.

Khan has a partner in crime, a rogue Russian general who dreams of a world dominated by Communism. He reveals his master plan to the Soviet Security Council amid stunned silence. The arguments surrounding nuclear reprisals, unilateral disarmament and personal warmongering were very relevant in the early eighties and they still resonate today. They’re presented in a grand conference hall which resembles Ken Adam’s war room set from Doctor Stangelove. I’m sure that’s not a coincidence from designer Peter Lamont, for Stephen Berkoff’s General Orlov is as crazed as any of the politicos who inhabited Kubrick’s classic black satire. Sadly Orlov lacks all humour. Even a tad might have made him bearable. Instead he’s a postulating, overblown, inflated man, too keen to hear his own voice, quick to anger, yet equally fast to sulk when chastised. He’s demonstratively infantile and while his mania bothers you – as would any military man wishing to invade Western Europe – his demeanour doesn’t. He’s not much of a threat to Bond. The two barely meet. When they do Roger Moore delivers a speech full of righteous indignation, one of the best he delivered in the whole series: “I suppose it doesn't matter a damn to you that thousands of innocent people will be killed in this little ‘accident’ of yours?” Orlov won’t be swayed. It’s the only time Berkoff’s eyes, permanently crazed, are in synch with his dialogue. The General considers the death toll as justified for he will become a hero of the Soviet Union. Our old friend from the KGB, General Gogol, prefers détente and would rather preserve the peace than destroy the world.

As the story progresses, the Kremlin jewel heist become a grand McGuffin. Orlov and Khan have a far greater plan to hatch than stolen Faberge eggs. They’ve been utilising a travelling circus to smuggle the real jewels out from behind the Iron Curtain and the fake replacements back in. This operation is run by the fabulously wealthy international female criminal known only as Octopussy. The profits are cut equal ways. Now Orlov plans to use the circus to detonate a small scale atomic bomb at a U.S. Air Force base in West Berlin, thus precipitating a disarmament accord and creating his opportunity for unopposed military aggression. Khan will get to keep the jewels and Octopussy, poor lass, will be killed. The plot comes at you piece meal, so the audience forgets one bit before the next arrives; Bond spends the majority of the film chasing shadows, or eggs, if you like.

From the auction OO7 follows Khan to India. He cuts quite a figure in Udaipur, being what appears to be the only male guest at his hotel, which is populated by gorgeous bikini clad women. Even Bond’s bellhop is a woman, lowering her eyes seductively and offering her clichéd assistance: “Anything at all?” This feels like an identikit reshaping of Hector Gonzales’ villa from the previous adventure, also bedecked in bikini clad flesh, and like that other homage to the harem it simply feels a little over the top and therefore unusually embarrassing. The camera seems to be behaving lecherously, following these admittedly beautiful forms across the screen. In his commentary to Bond on Bond Roger Moore refers to this scene as obligatory, but it only became such after Drax’s space cadets lined up in Moonraker and imitates On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s ‘Angels of Death’ at Piz Gloria. The difference is that those moments were central to their respective story. These are not. And it doesn’t stop at the hotel. There’s a whole island full of ladies just waiting to be explored. Bond even finds time to leer at a Q Branch secretary. This wearisome chauvinistic treatment of women sinks to such a low a point that Bond can’t even be bothered to seduce his conquests.

First he’s openly toyed with by Khan’s mistress. Magda also acts as Octopussy’s right hand girl so the audience is never entirely sure exactly whose side she’s on. It is only in the final reel she makes her choice; up to then she appears to be motivated by nothing more than luxury. Magda and Bond share an extravagant meal, but he’s not enjoying it. Moore’s expression resembles that of a condemned man. Even though he flatters her with the line: “Of all Khan’s associates you’re by far the least lethal and much the prettiest” it is Magda’s intentions that are excruciatingly obvious. Her pillow talk mind is blandly docile. Bond too is going through the motions. “It was a pleasure,” he says, searching for compliments; “You’re too kind,” she replies. We know they are both lying, you can sense it, but not from any erotic frissom, rather from embarrassment. Magda does however have a neat escape trick to avoid any awkward post coital breakfast chit-chat.

Later Bond gets to stay a few days on Octopussy’s island – actually the Palace Hotel situated in the middle of Lake Pichola and one of the better sites the location scouts discovered, its white and blue marble opulently shining. This time the seduction technique is the roughest Bond has ever employed. Octopussy offers him employment, mocks his low pay and loyalty to Queen and Country and in a fit of pique he forces himself on her. The heroine falls melodramatically into his arms. It’s Mills & Boon with a Walther PPK. Q likens OO7’s behaviour to “adolescent antics.” ‘Cave man tactics’ would be more appropriate.

The whole premise of the Octopus Cult and the all-female retinue has a potential which is never exploited. The returning screen writers Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson choose to only flirt with the idea. They’re more interested in the travelling circus. Here I sense the hand of George MacDonald Fraser, who penned an original draft of the story and has perhaps taken the term ‘Bond girls’ to extreme. Despite being a master criminal and leader of a legitimate and illegitimate business syndicate, Octopussy comes across as a charmless character who also carries little menace or even malice towards Bond. He feels so safe when they first encounter each other that Roger Moore spends the whole scene with a hand in his bomber jacket pocket. Connery would never have been as remiss. Director Terence Young, who coached him so brilliantly in Doctor No and From Russia With Love, wouldn’t have let him; no man would ever stand like that, especially not one trained to kill at the slightest provocation. Yet here Moore is simply too laid back. His attitude rubs off on Maud Adams who offers a dull portrait of the heroine. It doesn’t help she’s not central to the plot and while Octopussy is capable her capabilities are never utilised. When finally called upon to take action she’s easily bested and has to rely on OO7 for rescue, the same as every other Bond heroine. This is disappointing given that early on she is able to deliver a consummate brush off to Kamal Khan and repeats this feat in front of Bond, who seems to take a schoolboy's pleasure in the Prince’s discomforted servility.

Khan’s behaviour is very odd for such a powerful member of the elite caste. John Glen really ought to recognise this. As director and storyteller he seems not to understand that if you remove the malevolence from your villains you remove most of the tension. He does try: when Bond arrives at his hotel in Udaipur he makes a half-hearted attempt to check his room for bugs by inspecting the underside of a telephone; Gobinda (Kabir Bedi) makes an impressive muscular Sikh bodyguard; the knife bearing twins are an unusual and deadly addition; there is much conspiracy among the rogues’ conversations. But none of this is expanded with any finesse and neither is Khan’s pivotal role. Take the casino scene where Bond announces his arrival by roasting Kamal Khan at backgammon. This demonstration of his crooked ethics should tell us something of the antagonists’s inner nature, but it’s spoilt by Glen’s lack lustre direction. On the crucial rolling of dice he offers snapshots of everyone’s facial reactions when the only ones we should be concerned by are Khan’s and Bond’s.

Compare this simple case of one-upmanship to a similar gambling scene in Thunderball and you can see how effective Terence Young’s medium length shots are. Bond and Largo remain centre stage of each frame. As a viewer you focus on their actions, yet on the periphery of your vision you pick up the subtleties of the audience reaction: how Domino smokes her cigarette, how still and statue like is Vargas, how the people behind Bond crane forward to view the turn of the cards. Glen’s choice of cutting is decidedly second rate. You begin to wonder exactly what he learnt from all those years in the editing suite. Equally when Gobinda crushes Khan’s loaded dice you wonder why the writers want to so idiosyncratically replicate a powerful scene from Goldfinger. Have they run out of ideas half an hour into the action? Glen is hampered by the lack of narrative clarity or character sophistication in the script and sadly he isn’t experienced enough to trick his way out of it in the manner Young or Lewis Gilbert may have done with equally troubling screenplays. Roger Moore clearly agrees and by way of apology offers his quizzical raised eyebrow expression.

He has plenty of opportunity to practice it as time and again he’s thrown into farcically constructed situations, at Q branch, at dinner with Magda, in bed with Magda, at Khan’s palace, sharing Khan’s banquet with a sheep’s head, travelling to Octopussy’s island in a crocodile submarine. Things don’t start getting serious again until his assistant in India, Vijay (a miscast Vijay Amrataj), is slaughtered in horrific fashion. This time Peter Davies and Henry Richardson provide an excellent edit to heighten the tension. Next a quartet of thugs wielding a saw-blade yo-yo attack Bond and Octopussy . This fight is very well staged and is not for the squeamish, which might explain why it works so well, that scent of old fashioned danger and excitement mixed with a certain amount of devilishness. Bond doesn’t pause in his escape; he’s already thinking about Berlin and Karl Marx Stadt – a clue so swiftly observed if you blink you miss it.

These few tense pieces of vicious unarmed combat are not indicative of the majority of the action up to this point. Most of it has been played for laughs. There’s an early chase scene through the streets of Udaipur with OO7 delivering quips during every stunt. When he’s imprisoned in Khan’s Monsoon palace what should be a moment of suspense as Bond escapes his cell and prowls the rooftops and cellars is spoilt by a joke involving a hairdryer. Later he’s fleeing the palace and Khan sets up a tiger hunt to flush him out of the jungle. Here there is a glaring time lapse: Gobinda is told to find Bond sometime around midnight, yet he enters Khan’s office in the morning and declares Bond missing. What’s he been doing for the last few hours? Then a full blown tiger hunt is organised in seconds. What really rankles though is Bond impersonating a ghost, a lion tamer – actually a dog handler called Barbara Woodhouse, but I won’t dwell on contemporary references – and Tarzan to evade the rampaging elephants. He’d have been better off using his skills to infiltrate Octopussy’s circus.

In fact the action becomes more fearsome when we reach Berlin. The best phase of the film is an extended chase on roads and rail tracks, including some death defying stuff hanging off trains. A few times you can see the back projection but it doesn’t hurt. Often tense, always enjoyable, these chaotic moments of spine jerking rough and tumble are as tough as the pursuits in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The only fault lies in a ridiculous scene where Bond, trapped in a railway carriage full of circus costumes, manages to dress both into and out of a gorilla suit without being noticed by the henchmen. The fact he achieves the latter in seconds is bemusing and while it’s fine every now and then to accept the baddies might not notice some discreet camouflage, it isn’t acceptable to deprive the audience of a miraculous costume change such as this. I can’t tell you how cheated this makes me feel. Usually, even with the odd daft gadget, you can believe Bond might just be able to wangle his way out of a tricky situation, but this sort of hocus-pocus defies belief. You end up sitting there thinking ‘How did that happen?’ instead of ‘Wow! Look what happened!’ It doesn’t feel like James Bond. It’s more the sort of silliness you’d expect from one of his countless sixties imitators.

It’s no surprise that OO7 convinces Octopussy of Khan’s betrayal in the nick of time. Luckily he’s seen this type of bomb before (in The Spy Who Loved Me) and has no difficulty defusing this one with seconds to spare. I ought to add he saves the day disguised as a clown, but most readers will know this. That particular costume change used to bother me, but it’s less of a problem than the lack of authoritative tension, much of the climax being disturbed by heavy handed big top slapstick. This is a shame for the mysterious death of OO9 which began the film so strongly suggested we’d be experiencing something altogether darker and more sinister at this circus.

Unbelievably there is still more to this tale and proceedings start to run a little dry. The final lap really does feel like an ‘add-on’. Octopussy’s troupe invade Khan’s palace. We’re not sure if she wants to kill him or steal back the jewels, but either way it’s an excuse for scantily clad gymnasts to knock over gun toting guards. Khan at last gets the better of his female counterpart and kidnaps her. “She’s our ticket out of here!” he yells, but given he’s already a prince, has got a ton of money, the stash of jewels and a private plane on standby that seems unlikely. Bond saves the girl, of course, arriving by hot air balloon – probably his slowest rescue attempt ever – and giving chase by horseback. The bad guys perish after more hijinks, this time across the wings of an airborne turbo prop monoplane. It’s another moment of amazing stunt work whose finale is let down by the cartoonish double takes expressed by Louis Jourdan and Kabir Bedi. “Get him!” orders Khan, finally losing all patience and control; “Out there?” replies the incredulous bodyguard. You can hardly blame the man.

The cast list is huge. The production values are admittedly up to par. It’s particularly well costumed by Emma Porteus. Alan Hume delivers much better photography this time out. India is bright and beautiful and full of warming colours, Berlin dank and dull, although English locations substituted for German ones in that section of the movie. John Barry’s music score is okay; the central theme is a bit turgid. The external locations in India are very exotic and the designers and set dressers make their imagined interiors look fabulous. No, the problem isn’t really with the back room boys so much as the driving force behind the venture: the producers, director and writers, none of whom seem to have a strong hand on the tiller. The film weaves its way blindly from set piece to set piece, the stunts and jokes becoming more important than the characters and the plot. For instance at one point, at the precise moment Bond [therefore the audience] gets to hear a snippet of vital information his ears are taken from him [us] by a combination of poor editing and that hairdryer skit. This kind of slip doesn’t help clarify matters and all the audience has left to consider are a daredevil cycle of stunts, the gadgets and the self-flattering merriment. The actors do try, I guess, but you sense they’re only giving it half a heart. The other half is running to the bank with the money. There was plenty of it; the movie was one of the most popular of the year and easily matched the takings of For Your Eyes Only. It’s not that you can’t enjoy Octopussy, you do, but through a clenched knowing smile.

Midway through the movie Kamal Khan remarks: “Mister Bond is a very rare breed, soon to be made extinct.” The line rather sums up what’s happening to Roger Moore’s interpretation of OO7. After the hard edge provided by For Your Eyes Only the battle for this Bond is how to marry humour with suspense; the former far out weights the latter and not successfully. For most of its overlong running time Octopussy isn’t trying to be a James Bond film, it’s more like something George MacDonald Fraser would write, a Boy’s Own adventure, sub-Rudyard Kipling. By the short insignificant coda we have a hard time remembering the precious few scenes surrounding Sotherby’s auction house and a Faberge egg for Ian Fleming and his tempered hero have almost vanished.

Dirty Punker

I read through your review not getting what you are trying to say.
I understand it...but I just don't get it.
Octopussy, for me, is the last hurrah for Roger Moore's era before things get a bit dumb. Well-made and fleshed out, a very enjoyable film for the right reasons. Never seen in the way you describe it, with a clenched knowing smile. It's the end of an era before LTK.
Had Bond films not been played for laughs, they would've been limited to a very limited audience. It would've been odd for anyone to sympathise with literary Bond's values. Bond is now an anomaly amongst action heroes of that era...and I don't find that to be a bad thing. A symbol of an older time, still going strong yet not as remarked as in Skyfall (old dog etc.).

Octopussy doesn't come across to me as a "charmless character".
She's half naked and has little care about Mr Bond having his pistol aimed at her head. She knows why he's there. An intelligent woman. "Doesn't carry malice", you say. Well, the "I have no country no price on my head" line begs to differ. She falls into Bond's arms after he's been forced on her. It's the same thing as Pussy Galore in the stud. They are not two of a kind. Far from it as I understand.

Also he carries a P5, as did Sean in NSNA.

heartbroken_mr_drax

You warned about some of us not liking the review and you certainly didn't disappoint! I really think you've missed the mark a bit on a few points!!

The first half of the film is all about adventure, the unknown, the elite and sex. In some respects I think Bond does an excellent job of sticking himself in the middle of a bunch of weirdos to get to the point. They've taken the GF format here and not the TB/YOLT/TSWLM/MR give away the what, not the who. The dinner scene at the palace plays this perfectly. Bond is really starting to question why he's there, but he's trying to be as polite and gentlemanly as possible. Under all this Moore plays this impeccably and subtly portrays being freaked out. "At risk of making light dinner conversation, may I ask, exactly why I'm here?"..."Let me guess, thumb screws and hot coals." It's not until Orlov arrives that the look on his face is basically "sh*t just got real". Even at this point he's still perplexed, and this is when the mission truly kicks off and we are intrigued just as he is to find out what's next. I even note that Barry's score changes gear too. The question is, what the hell does he do next?

I feel that you've missed the layer of intrigue between Octopussy and Bond, and especially at their meeting. Bond at this point now has an understanding of Khan and Orlov. But he's got no idea whether or not Octopussy is involved - and probably assumes that she has some part, but isn't sinister. Hence why he's got a hand in the pocket...I was actually expecting you to highlight the brilliance of Moore here and unrelenting "I want to know why an agent was killed" and solid recall of the history of the Dexter Smythe case. Bond plays Octopussy perfectly in the way he knows she knows she's essentially a petty thief and proud of it, but naive in the sense that she's being taken along with a couple of nutters. She's an ally, but not a traditional one and he deprecates himself to her level with full understanding that she holds power over Khan.

Octopussy has its errors as you point out (the gorilla suit, the Tarzan yell, the raid on the palace) but strikes a brilliant balance of the well used formula, the talent of the lead actor, the late Cold War outliers and oddity, adventure and entertainment. I must also mention that the serious moments of the film and tension are some of the best in the entire series - something that FYEO and OP do well. It's a fully layered Bond film that watches well again and again.

chrisno1

Thanks for your feedback. I generally don't reply to my reviews. It leaves me open to backtracking.

Dirty Punker, I'm glad you understand my arguments; that tells me its a good well reasoned review. Whether you agree or not, well, that's personal taste and opinion and debate.

I know Bond films all require humour, which deflects the impact of the violence, seen or suggested, on screen. My point, clearly made, is that this film more so than any other so far is led by the humour, not the other way around. That is a big misstep for a franchise which should be primarily about the action, mystery and tension.

Mr Drax, first I refer you to my reply to Dirty Punker.

I'd take issue with you over the Monsoon Palace dinner scene. I did mention it very very briefly. For me, it's not a good scene. Given Bond has just been pursued by Khan's henchman through the streets of Udaipur, I'd expect him to know exactly why he's been kidnapped. What the scene unfortunately does is reinforce the substandard plotting. Khan has already retained the egg so he doesn't need to capture Bond. Once he discovers the hidden microphone is the moment when he should do so, not before. The story is all ass-about-face, the writers know this and try to cover up proceedings with pithy conversation. It feels as if Bond [Moore] is questioning the narrative as well - and not only just here - which is what I was commenting on.

I will accept my comments about the character Octopussy are perhaps not well explained; it's more to do with Maud Adams' performance than the role itself which isn't poorly written, there just isn't enough of it. Adams isn't a great actress, I think we can all accept that, and this role needed someone with a more solid grasp of technique than she has. Her facial expressions are bland, her delivery unaffected. It isn't a bad performance, just not a very erudite one.

As I pointed out at the very beginning of the review I don't think calling the movie Octopussy helps very much. She hardly registers in the film, perhaps half a dozen decent length scenes, and other than the circus, which she herself terms 'diversification', her international all-girl crime organisation isn't used at all. Hence the film could have worked equally well if Khan ran the circus and abandoned Magda to be fried in an atomic catastrophe.

heartbroken_mr_drax

^ thank you for coming back with your comments, I don't disagree with anything you've said there. -{

Dirty Punker

^^ thank you for taking the time to reply to one of your reviews.
Though I still don't agree :v, it made your opinion a bit clearer and better understood to me.
-{

Joshua

I have just seen the Roger Moore James Bond films for the first time. They were shown on the TV. I cannot give the critique as said because I do not know the correct words to use in many times but all I say is that I enjoyed them all from The Man With The Golden Gun to A View To A Kill. I think that Roger Moore was too old in the last film but he still entertained me. I think he was a very good James Bond actor.

IanFryer

Joshua wrote:

I have just seen the Roger Moore James Bond films for the first time. They were shown on the TV. I cannot give the critique as said because I do not know the correct words to use in many times but all I say is that I enjoyed them all from The Man With The Golden Gun to A View To A Kill. I think that Roger Moore was too old in the last film but he still entertained me. I think he was a very good James Bond actor.

Did you see Live and Let Die, also? What did you think of that one?

chrisno1

My take on Never Say Never Again will be posted in the next couple of days.

Joshua

IanFryer wrote:

Joshua wrote:

I have just seen the Roger Moore James Bond films for the first time. They were shown on the TV. I cannot give the critique as said because I do not know the correct words to use in many times but all I say is that I enjoyed them all from The Man With The Golden Gun to A View To A Kill. I think that Roger Moore was too old in the last film but he still entertained me. I think he was a very good James Bond actor.

Did you see Live and Let Die, also? What did you think of that one?

I am sorry, I made the mistake. I should have wrote live and let die insted of the man with the golden gun. Yes I enjoyed this film. It was exciting and funny and a very good start from Roger Moore.

chrisno1

Never Say Never Again

While Octopussy was becoming a 1983 summer blockbuster, the competitor in the Battle of the Bonds was enduring a lengthy post-production which ran to several reshoots and several million dollars over budget. The history of Jack Schwartzman’s Never Say Never Again is long and convoluted and I don’t have the time to delve fully into that saga for this review [read The Battle for Bond, by Robert Sellers for that]. Suffice to say that while Cubby Broccoli’s movies tripped easily off the conveyor belt it became increasingly difficult for anyone to envisage making a rival James Bond film. It was a notable achievement that this thriller saw the light of a cinema projector at all. That the result is something of a return to solid espionage is equally surprising. Yes, the OO7 tongue is still firmly in its cheek, but it’s no longer contemptuous of its audience and is prepared to rely on character and dialogue to involve us, not simply one bang and crash and jest after another, although there too is plenty of that.

Fore-mostly Sean Connery is back in situ. Some may say this is his rightful place. Certainly there was much anticipation over his return to the Bond-fold, even in an unofficial adventure. He can’t be welcomed with a gun barrel sequence and a pounding James Bond Theme, but he can climb trees and buildings and crawl through mangrove swamps in an attempt to rescue a kidnapped politician’s daughter, wiping out assorted well-armed soldiers as he does so. This ‘teaser sequence’ of introductory violence accompanies the credits, emblazoned in vivid, defining red, backed by a fallow theme song. It was never going to be easy to reproduce the John Barry magic so composer Michel Legrand and his co-producers Herb Alpert and Sergio Mendes don’t try. Lani Hall’s vocals have a quintessentially eighties timbre and the film itself relies very much on its contemporary frame.

Sean Connery meanwhile says nothing; he doesn’t even utter the epic three little words: ‘Bond, James Bond.’ He doesn’t need to. He’s instantly recognisable and recognisable as OO7. When he does talk there’s no attempt to disguise his accent; in the looks department he seems trimmer than he did in Diamonds are Forever and the twelve years between outings have been kind to his tanned and gently weathered face. This is a James Bond of experience. He doesn’t appear weary or scurrilous, nor does he condescend. He’s a little old fashioned, perhaps stuck in his traditional ways. His new boss believes he must change his lifestyle. The kidnap was actually a training exercise and the ending bogus: Bond has been knifed and M considers his leading ‘Double-O’ agent to have failed the test. Indeed this M is most decidedly a new man for a new age: “Too many free radicals… toxins that destroy the body and the brain, caused by eating too much red meat and white bread, too many dry martinis.” Bond resolves to cut down on the white bread. Unimpressed M dismisses him to Shrublands to get a healthy dose of bizarre food and fitness fad tender loving care. On Bond’s arrival, a porter gazes lovingly at his 1937 Bentley. “They don’t make them like this anymore,” he remarks. The audience is tipped the wink; we know he’s really referring to Sean Connery’s James Bond. “It’s still in pretty good shape,” replies the star and by God he is.

Connery’s performance is a pleasure to watch. He graces the screen with his presence. He knows it’s only been possible to make this movie with his co-operation, star power and investment pedigree, so he injects his playing with comforting reminders of those far gone 1960’s epics the audience and the money men expect. Hence he’s muscularly physical during the action, elegantly presented, verbally persuasive, dexterous in mind and deed. Just as in the old days he’s seducing us with consummate ease, charming the on-screen heroine and being suitably watchful around the villains, measuring them by the cut of their cloth, the flinch of their smile or the magnificence of their yacht; I’m sure if the writers had thought to include it he’d have rumbled them by the choice of their wine. He’s capricious with the ladies, his superiors and his underlings. Best of all he actually appears to be enjoying himself, something which can’t be said of his nervy, slightly earnest debut in Doctor No. This is the unflappable, confident, arrogantly anti-establishment secret agent we encountered in Goldfinger, the supreme advert of Connery’s interpretation. His performance though bears no relation to Ian Fleming’s literary material, for this is OO7 as created by the cinema.

In the late 1950s the movie maker Kevin McClory helped develop the early drafts of what became the basis of Ian Fleming’s ninth novel. The ensuing legal dispute gave McClory exclusivity over the film rights to Thunderball and at the height of Bond-mania he was allowed to hitch a ride on Broccoli and Saltzman’s bandwagon and produce the resulting movie, although how much influence he really had over the finished product is pure conjecture. McClory was obliged to wait ten years before he could embark on another stab at the OO7 universe. His coup was to get Sean Connery’s involvement from the outset. The subsequent script, penned in part by thriller writer Len Deighton and entitled James Bond of the Secret Service, veered too far from the original narrative outline of Thunderball, which by legal definition was the only story McClory owned. Hence when Orion Pictures and Jack Schwartzman entered into a production deal, the movie had to become a more faithful re-tread of the 1961 book and 1965 movie. Some elements of Deighton’s script were retained, like the undersea cavern climax and the remote controlled sharks, but the skeleton of the saga is eminently familiar.

We start with some good-natured larks at Shrublands health clinic. Bond looks bemused and a little ego-damaged as Prunella Gee’s physiotherapist, Patricia, manhandles him into shape. Unlike Roger Moore in Octopussy, Connery doesn’t need any leading [pleading?] dialogue or clever opportunistic set up to catch his prey, his impulsive smooth talk is pure animal magnetism. When he delivers the cliché: “Your place or mine” we know Patricia’s fate is sealed. This Bond’s extravagant meal comes hidden in a secret compartment in his suitcase: “Beluga caviar, quails eggs, vodka, foie gras” – from Strasbourg, no less – probably the best worst diet ever. The audience enjoys this, for we too would rather live the high life than suffer the indignities of dandelion salad and herbal enemas.

Jack Petachi, a nervous wreck of a man fleshed out by Gavin O’Herlihy, isn’t enjoying his stay at Shrublands so much. His nurse maid is the bitch black widow Fatima Blush, a vicious psychopathic assassin whose kink is to make love to her eventual victims. Petachi receives the tough love treatment because he’s been the recipient of a false eye in order to undertake the first phase of SPECTRE’s operation, the Tears of Allah. Both these characters did not feature in Thunderball, being traded for Francois Derval and Fiona Volpe, but they were central to the original McClory / Fleming / Jack Whittingham screen treatment and are revived here, possibly for legal reasons. Similarly SPECTRE operative Count Lippe returns in the hulking form of Pat Roach, although he’s only named in the credits.

Bond has observed Petachi testing his false eye which is a replica of the U.S. President’s and, using a nifty piece of portable equipment, will allow him to access the arming facility for Tomahawk Cruise missiles at a U.S. Air Force base replacing test warheads with live ones. Bond is easily discovered. Like the audience Fatima Blush recognises OO7 instantly, even using his code number, for he’s so well known of course, just like the actor who plays him, a rather fawning in joke. Lippe has been sent to eliminate the opposition. He shares a good fight scene with our hero. Bond is in all sorts of trouble and has to uses his wits and dexterity to survive a bruising encounter – exactly the sixth sense he had tried to explain to his boss. If the end is a bit naff at least the naff joke is at the end, releasing the slow build of tension.

When Bond presents his findings to M, a forever disgruntled Edward Fox, he’s met with complete cynicism. Of course modern passport technology is catching up with the futuristic ‘eye print’ mechanism created here and makes the sci-fi of 1983 seem rather prophetic. Fox meanwhile retains his bluster and scepticism. I like this tetchy M. Unlike Bernard Lee, or even Robert Brown, he’s someone you’d want to rebel against and the audience sympathises with Bond every time they meet. Presumably M is persuaded the serendipitous clues his agent witnessed – the false eye, the Flying Saucer matches, the SPECTRE flag – have significance or else there’d be no reason to deposit him in the Bahamas. It’s a disappointing narrative slip which curiously duplicates an exact same issue from Thunderball.

The audience of course knows this background having been introduced to the new, glossy SPECTRE by following the swaying hips of Barbara Carrera’s Fatima Blush as she stalks into Blofeld’s underground meeting room. Carrera is a fabulous villainess. Suitably sultry, she makes a tremendous entrance and keeps making them, her hard, chiselled features matching those deep stone steady eyes. Her smile is a mixture of joy and hate painted bright vermillion. She’s easily as dangerous and sensual as her forbear, Luciana Paluzzi’s gorgeously desirable hellcat Fiona Volpe. She’s dressed well too, in Fendi leather, furs and feathers. When Carrera meets Connery’s inquisitive Bond, their mating is as guaranteed as the one between Roger Moore and Kristina Wayborn in Octopussy. The difference is Fatima works to her own agenda; she’s empowered and independently deadly, while Magda is an employed pawn for others. Every so often Carrera takes the role to extremes, but she’s always watchable.

In comparison the other two heavies seem to be window dressing. Max Von Sydow is a perfectly acceptable Ernst Stavro Blofeld. He doesn’t have much to do except sit on a throne and pontificate, so he rather phones in the performance. He isn’t on screen long enough for that to be a problem. His SPECTRE is a streamlined bookish looking affair, so the leader of the world’s foremost terror organisation is attired in neat, slim cut lounge suits. In fact, most of the cast are well dressed; Charles Knode doesn’t have to work too hard on most of the wardrobe.

He hasn’t done much for Klaus Maria Brandauer’s Maximilian Largo however and this accomplished German actor finds himself kitted out like a vacationing member of the jet set, all jumpers and slacks, open necked shirts and big dark sunglasses. I’m hot and cold on this Largo, a multimillionaire industrialist with a possessive streak and an unquenchable thirst for money and power. At times Brandeur, like Connery, plays the charm card, but his brand is repulsively disturbingly affectionate and you sense his amore, Domino, reeling. When he lets Largo’s psychopathic tendencies take over Brandauer is very menacing. We get a measure of this early on when, after being asked by his mistress the consequences of a break-up, he melodramatically stamps on her piano keys. “Then I’ll cut your throat,” he says with a time honoured finger drawn across his neck. Later on, when her question comes true, his reaction is to go on a furniture smashing rampage. Brandauer is no better or worse than the majority of Bond’s antagonists, but he seems to drop in and out of step with the film. He also lacks any humour, which brings us nicely back to Connery and Carrera, verbally sparring with each other before making love and sharing a shark infested scuba dive with life threatening consequences for our James.

Assassination by shark foiled, Fatima next tries to kill Bond with a bomb beneath his bed, but the energetic fifty-three year old is in someone else’s arms – Valerie Leon’s to be exact – making that two conquests in a day. I shall take off my metaphorical hat. Fatima should have put her pet python in his bed. This animal mysteriously vanishes after being used to kill Jack Petachi; perhaps she couldn’t afford the quarantine fees. No matter. Up to this point things have gone fairly well and Alec McCowan’s prediction has come true: “I hope we’re going to have some gratuitous sex and violence,” says Algernon, a different Q, who I also like. This one’s buried in a laboratory bunker deep beneath HQ and is so short of man power, budget and ideas he’s recycling gadgets off the CIA. Pamela Salem’s Moneypenny feels more like the secretary Lois Maxwell used to be, devoted to duty, but always on Bond’s side. “I’ve got to eliminate all free radicals,” he tells her, dead pan serious; “Do be careful,” she pines.

Things don’t go quite so well in Monte Carlo. Bernie Casey arrives as Felix Leiter to do very little. Ditto Saskia Cohen Tangui as Nicole, the French help with an impenetrable accent. There’s a very long casino scene punctuated by an Atari designed computer game called Domination which, as voiced by the Cylon from Battlestar Galactica, now feels extremely old hat. At the time it seemed a clever update on the usual gambling scenarios, those British preserves of the chemmy table, the eighteenth tee or the backgammon board. Here fatal electrocution is the outcome for the loser. Connery and Brandauer can’t do much with this imaginative yet tensionless exercise as the game’s electronic noises have to carry the action while the protagonists merely sit and grip the shooting triggers.

This scene, in fact almost all the scenes in Monaco, are actually to do with the heroine, Domino Petachi, the late Jack’s sister, and how Bond weaves his way into her life and under her skin. I mentioned in my review of Octopussy that there were scenes which ogled the female form and Never Say Never Again has one of its own at an exclusive spa where Bond tiptoes his way past bikini clad girls and into Domino’s massage suite where a nude Kim Basinger, modesty saved by a towel, awaits. Really! Just what is it about the early eighties Bond films and half naked women? It goes without saying that Basinger is gorgeous whether she’s wearing clothes or not, the rest of the flesh is tantalisingly superfluous.

Outside of the ogling, the tete-a-tete between Bond and Domino is excellent. He gains the information needed in a pleasant and playful manner. It’s all cheeky eroticism. When Basinger’s character realises she’s been tricked – and that she enjoyed it – the gentle change in facial expression, ending in a satisfied half-smile, is quite brilliant. Thanks surely must go to director Irvin Kershner for coaxing the reaction and the writers (a much larger team than implied on the credits) for suggesting the whole scene. Originally the script used Fleming’s own introduction of Domino, accosted by Bond as she buys cigarettes, but this was one of the reshoots and is probably better for it. Later, at the casino, first over a drink – double Bloody Mary with Worcester Sauce for her, disarmingly ordinary Vodka for him – and then during a nicely orchestrated tango, Bond wins her over. This occurs much earlier than in Thunderball and places Domino in the very peril she feared: will Largo really slit her throat? When SPECTRE’s Number One interrupts the dance and reveals the depth of his betrayal, Basinger’s expression depicts sudden turmoil: pain, love, terror and emotional estrangement cut across her face in confusion.

As far as Largo is concerned, Domino is only one of his many treasured possessions, treasures he treats with contempt. During the Domination game all three major players are well aware that Bond and Largo are not really competing for the electronic Rest of the World, they are fighting for Domino. Unlike Adolfo Celi’s piratical Emilo Largo, Brandauer’s Maximilian doesn’t attempt to retain his mistress by his side. Domino is not an affirming feature of his life. At the charity function in the casino they aren’t even seen together until the Domination game commences. She is disposable to him and later he proves it. In this regard Largo is very similar to Khamal Khan in the year’s other Bond epic, a man who is quite willing to sacrifice the working relationship he’s built with the titular Octopussy and with his own mistress Magda so as to escape with some fabled jewels. Largo’s feelings are interpreted by that cold hearted demon Fatima Blush. Hushed in the shadows of the gaming room he asks: “Do you actually imagine that I could lose a woman to an underpaid British agent?” She already knows it. “I think you have lost her… [Bond] will have your Domino turned over… Why torture yourself over that kind of woman?” He insists that when necessary Fatima can administer any fatal blow to his mistress, a thought she finds entirely amusing. It’s another minor moment of character depth conjured by the director.

Irvin Kershner had recently helmed The Empire Strikes Back, so he knew a thing or two about making blockbusters, but the direction, despite the emotive touches, isn’t particularly invigorating. He’s not very flashy. Workmanlike sums him up. He’s at his best with his actors in close up in conversation, like the massage or dance scenes. As soon as there’s any uplift in tension he’s slow to generate the tautness involved. This isn’t true of Nicole’s death scene, a beautifully photographed montage of interiors, shot at odd angles, eerie and fascinating, gaining suspense as Bond wanders around his villa. Cameraman Douglas Slocombe works wonders here too; everything is bathed in morning shadows and burnt tangerine sunlight.

Most of the action is shot by the second unit crews or Ricou Browning’s underwater team. There’s a distinct hardness to these proceedings not really matched elsewhere. Yes, there may be a throwaway line or two deflecting the nastiness, occasionally stunt work intervenes, but in the main the violence of Never Say Never Again is precisely that: violent. The car chase, up, down and along the streets of Monte Carlo, is a case in point. It has none of the buffoonery or quips associated with the EoN productions of the era; it’s a straightforward pursuit, Bond on a jet propelled black Yamaha motorcycle, Fatima in her red Renault 5 Turbo. It’s all the better for it. The chase ends gorily, the villainess torn apart by an exploding pen, but not before Barbara Carerra has one last ménage with Connery, almost but not quite besting him in the acting stakes. Her smoking shoes remind us of the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz, a neat picture for cinefiles.

While the film is well presented and performed, the action really only comes in spurts. We’re a hefty chunk into the movie and not a lot has happened to keep us on the edge of our seats. You’d like to think Kershner and his main author Lorenzo Semple Jr would want to pick up the pace as we reach the last forty minutes, but they don’t. While Never Say Never Again is a good watch, it does tend to drag. Sometimes it’s simply too talky. There’s another raft of scenes at Palmyra, Largo’s Moroccan castle estate, which seem to slow time to a crawl. Brandauer’s madness manifests itself at last and his low key playing exudes all the menace you’d expect from a dangerous, unhinged maniac. He has to deliver it this way for the dialogue is very poor. Kim Basinger has occasionally been good, but here her protestations carry little intensity. Brandauer deserves a better foil and a better script, for when he’s good, he’s very good.

There’s nothing he, Basinger or Connery can do about the slow pacing. It perks up briefly. Bond gets to use his laser wrist watch to escape a prison cell overrun with vultures and saves the heroine from the clutches of a band of cut throat Berber tribesmen by riding a horse over the medieval battlements. When I write over, I mean over. Unfortunately what should be a spectacular plunge into the sea is ruined by poor special effects, bad even for the eighties. You wonder why Kershner opted to film it this way as the result is almost laughable. After his stint on Star Wars, you’d expect him to be more creatively demanding.

Like Thunderball before it, and like Octopussy a few months earlier, Never Say Never Again doesn’t seem to know how to stop. We return at last to Ian Fleming territory with Bond on a U.S. submarine shadowing Largo’s yacht, the Flying Saucer, waiting for a nuclear warhead to be ferried to its firing position. Bond figures out that the Tears of Allah is the location of one bomb by deciphering the pattern on Domino’s necklace. A neat touch but one the audience figured out after the first twenty minutes. Kim Basinger looks suitably bemused, especially as she hasn’t been wearing the pendant for a while. To reach the Tears of Allah Bond and Leiter use a rehash of Thunderball’s jet pack, a pair of XT-7B transporters.

The production design, by Philip Harrison and Stephen Grimes, has been nothing to write home about. They have a chance to impress here, but the recreation of a Muslim temple preserved in an underground cave might as well be Indiana Jones on the cheap, all papier mache and arc lighting. A noticeable factual error has the décor include human image statues which never feature in Islamic architecture. The ensuing gun battle lacks clarity and tension and ends on something of a damp note. Editor Ian Crafford, who has been no more than functional throughout, really flounders during his contribution to a wet squib of a spectacle.

The climatic confrontation also suffers from indefinite editing. Largo has completely lost control of his sensibilities and having already divulged the location of one bomb, he as good as incurs suicide by trapping himself in an underground river with the second. Maximilian’s commitment to the cause is certainly as fanatical as Emilio’s was in 1965. His underwater tussle with Bond comes in a sudden confused rush. The music doesn’t help and seems to overpower the on screen heroics. Generally Michel Legrand has been spot on with his light, breezy score, but he can’t do dramatic tension and this spirited dirge anticipates the villain’s demise. Domino, behind her mask, appears believably distraught.

Never Say Never Again had a long gestation and a troubled production. Uncredited British comedy duo Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais provided chunks of dialogue, rewrites and most of the jokes. Ultimately the upstart Bond did not win the Battle. While it’s a solid product and gains much from Sean Connery’s recall and a low key storyline, it lacks the overall pizzazz of the EoN stable and seems slightly jaded in comparison. This is purely a matter of experience in presentation. Cubby Broccoli, whatever his faults, could always be guaranteed to deliver a splendid, fully loaded, well publicised slice of entertainment. Of course if you prefer your spying with only a whiff of the exotic , an appreciative nod to fantasy, but with a hefty dose of character psychology and sophisticated contretemps, this brand of Bond may be for you. It certainly has less obvious problems than the ‘official’ movies that surround it.

None-the-less, Never Say Never Again wasn’t to everyone’s taste. It’s often forgotten that after a shaky start, Roger Moore became exceptionally popular. By 1983 both in the U.K. and stateside he’d become for many millions the epitome of James Bond. McClory or Schwartzman can’t rely simply on Sean Connery’s charisma to debunk the myth. Despite energetic, honest and endearing performances, the pedigree of Never Say Never Again is too slight. The fault lies perhaps in the multitude of writers or the slack direction and editing; perhaps it needed more support than mere money, it needed creative drive and genuine ambition, intangibles which as the movie’s inexorable malaise sets in are comprehensively mislaid. It’s a great pity for what is good here is well worth an admission price.

During the film’s epilogue, embassy attaché Small-Fawcett (a grovelling Rowan Atkinson) tries to persuade Bond to return to the fold: “Without you in the service [M] fears for the safety of the civilised world.” Connery’s “Never again” seems finally final. Thankfully for us while the star may want to give up old habits, OO7 certainly does not, whether in this roguish antidote to EoN or one of Cubby Broccoli’s own extravaganzas. Sean Connery’s parting wink to the audience lets us know we’re still in on the joke and James Bond, literary or cinematic, whoever acts or writes him, will always be in our safe keeping.

chrisno1

A View to a Kill

I’ll say upfront and with honest regret that I don’t consider A View to a Kill to be good entertainment. While I love James Bond, particularly the original novels and the earliest films, and recognise the indolent attractions of his later steps onto the cinema screen, this episode has a plethora of problems to overcome. Most disappointingly it lacks a lead actor able to adequately represent Ian Fleming’s secret agent.

The literary James Bond inhabits a world where he remains permanently in his late thirties. Even though Fleming hints his hero is aging there’s no discernible change in his physical being; those tend to occur through injury or self-harm (e.g. excessive drinking). Essentially Bond is approaching middle age but vital and virile, even if he isn’t exactly healthy. You can believe his brusque charm and Hoagy Carmichael looks will land him the ladies. You can believe he’s stone-faced at the gaming tables and equally unflinching when facing down his enemies. The James Bond presented by EoN had always aspired to this descriptive remit, perhaps best exemplified by Sean Connery’s initial few forays and then George Lazenby’s one-off venture, where the actors seem svelte, active and gorgeous enough to be a lover, fighter and a shadowy, callous, straight talking spy. Those performances seem to encapsulate what we as readers gleaned from Fleming’s novels. Roger Moore’s OO7 has never quite been provided the opportunity to shine in such a way.

I’ve never been over susceptible to Moore’s self-effacing portrait of James Bond. It isn’t that he’s a bad actor; far from it in fact. His performances as Bond do have moments of emotional insight and occasional spasms of premeditated ultra-violence, but the talents he too frequently uses are the ones least taxing his skills. There’s always something of the cheeky-chappy to these interpretations. He’s easy on the eye and smooth talking – Moore rarely rasps or barks in the way Connery and later Timothy Dalton or Daniel Craig are able to – and he’s equally amiable in his exploits. Early on in his tenure there were real efforts to give Moore the steeliness inherent in Ian Fleming’s descriptions. These were not entirely successful. The Man with the Golden Gun is a good case to view. It is the most aggressive of his portrayals. This Bond is very self-centred, short tempered and frequently ugly in manner. He’s also rough as houses, as likely to hit a woman as kiss her. His attitude towards the villain, Scaramanga, is categorically single minded. Although Moore acquits himself surprisingly well, you do sense he isn’t enjoying these facets of his character’s make-up; he is eminently more comfortable joking with Clifton James in the car chase or making excuses to his exasperated boss.

The writers, first Tom Mankiewicz, then Christopher Wood and lastly the duo of Maibaum and Wilson recognised this, alluding perhaps to the actor’s television persona as the face of a trio of heroes spun in Moore’s genial manner: Beau Maverick, Simon Templar and Brett Sinclair. They provided a series of scripts which replaced the throwaway, caustic lines of tension busting wit with a steady flow of puns amid a long list of incidents which appear designed to make us laugh not gasp. The result is that when Moore has to deliver a line of stern seriousness, his speech seems over earnest and rather out of place. This failing was noticeable in his previous outing, Octopussy, but becomes such a problem here that the character of James Bond is hardly given a resolute slice of dialogue to utter. The knowing wink to the audience – lines like “Shocking, positively shocking”, “Wait until you get to my teeth” and “Gate crasher. I’ll leave you to tidy up” – have been replaced by a full on shameless smirk. But it isn’t only the writers, and by extension Roger Moore himself, who share the blame for this conceited and frankly egotistical swamping of Ian Fleming’s inimitable character; we should also look at the director, editor and producer, who combined have failed to grasp the fundamentals of good film making: authenticity, tension and subtlety. There is hardly an iota of any of these present in A View to a Kill. Nobody has attempted to disguise the film’s shortcomings. Instead they’ve chosen to bury them under fatuous, tiresome mirth and trust the audience will forgive and forget.

Let’s take the opening few minutes, the normally reliable pre-credit sequence. The best of it is the title song, an excellent piece of new romantic pop from Duran Duran, who famously won the gig when a drunken John Taylor asked Cubby Broccoli: ‘When are you going to get someone decent to do one of your theme songs?’ It’s accompanied by a shoddy title design that seems to have been inspired only by the opening scene, featuring as it does silhouettes of skiers. This is by far Maurice Binder’s least attractive work and makes his previous effort, itself a blatant rip off of From Russia With Love, look like genius. It follows an equally slack teaser which has OO7 deep in Siberia recovering a microchip from the buried body of OO3. So, yes, it’s another ski chase, this one fixated on the motifs we’ve come to love and know: skiing on one blade, menacing helicopters, ski-sticks shot in half, crevasses, Union Jack emblems to give the British involvement away. It’s only enlivened by a moment of innovative snowboarding accompanied incongruously by a cover version of the Beach Boys’ California Girls. At the end of this hokum Bond reveals he’s not only had time to retrieve the microchip but also to do a bit of personal shopping: the best Beluga caviar and a bottle of Smirnoff – all he needs for five days of seclusion with his comely assistant. Bond’s silly iceberg-disguised submarine is set to autopilot. So is Roger Moore whose delivery is as shallow as his lines.

Moore of course had a less complicated relationship with James Bond than his predecessor Sean Connery. He never loathed the role and was always grateful to the series for launching his bona fide cinema career. He clearly enjoyed the silliness fostered on him by successive writers and accepted that Fleming’s secret agent, certainly the one witnessed in the cinema, was something of an unlikely hero:

‘To me, the Bond situations are so ridiculous, so outrageous. I mean, this man is supposed to be a spy and yet, everybody knows he's a spy. Every bartender in the world offers him martinis that are shaken, not stirred. What kind of serious spy is recognized everywhere he goes? It's outrageous. So you have to treat the humour outrageously as well. My personality is entirely different than previous Bonds. I'm not that cold-blooded killer type, which is why I play it mostly for laughs.’

This quote reveals a lot about how Moore helped transform the character and the accompanying films during his thirteen years of Bond-age. While the franchise always appealed across generations, the earliest films were aimed squarely at the adult market; by 1985 they had virtually become family fare with markedly less emphasis on the nastiness, the death, the sheer Mephistophelian coldness of Bond’s demeanour. The plots too started to hint at the outrageousness of which Moore is speaking, hence it is the most far flung of his episodes (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker) that seem to best epitomise how Moore foresaw the role. Both these films however never forget that Bond is very human, has emotions and can get hurt. At times he also behaves remarkably like a trained killer, although often the mask slips and Moore will finish a coup de grace with a faint, almost apologetic smile. But by the time we reach A View to a Kill, the rot of ‘outrageousness’ had transformed James Bond into little more than a stooge for successive and not always successful witticisms and pranks. Back in 1974 there may have been hope for a debonair Bond who hides a jagged, edgy inner self, now there is little more than the debonair and even that is starting to slip as Moore’s urbane appearance, a mainstay of his seventies output, has started to desert him.

For Moore’s performance in A View to a Kill isn’t simply about the actor’s perception of the role and how it has been tailored to his own preferences, there is also a prevalent visual issue, one which could be construed as being ‘ageist’ but is actually more complex than that. To demonstrate we need look no further than the main briefing scene which unusually takes place at Ascot race course. The scene is peppered with familiar faces: Moore, Robert Brown, Desmond Llewellyn, Lois Maxwell (in her swan song), Geoffrey Keen and Patrick MacNee (as special operative Sir Godfrey Tibbett). Everyone on of these actors is pushing or already over sixty and it doesn’t matter how well suited they are to morning dress the years can no longer be disguised. When the hero agent is looking the same age and even dressing in the same style as his superiors, all sense of authority becomes lost. So when Moore’s Bond proceeds to crack jokes with Q or poke fun at Tibbett, he’s no longer having a dig at the establishment, as Connery’s 1960’s performances suggest, he’s actively become part of it, at least in age and sartorial elegance. Because of this, his repartee ceases to be witty and descends to the plain rude. Patrick MacNee’s Tibbet seems to recognise this and when the story decamps to France he casts scornful glances at OO7 whenever Bond issues him with an instruction or delivers a put down.

The two-some have infiltrated the villain’s fabulous country estate, the real backdrop for which is Chantilly. This feels like a location and situation James Bond, or some incarnation of him, ought to treat with obsequious respect. The version we get here regards the whole exercise with disdain. Bond and Tibbett act out a very public master and servant role reversal, including switching on a pre-recorded tape of their bickering to foil any eavesdroppers, allowing them to discuss investigations in private. This is a neat touch, but the mucky dialogue and the physical jokes of the deception, have a tremendously old fashioned air to them which only emphasises the age of its protagonists and flirts with the memories of its audience, who might be reminded of Laurel and Hardy shorts or Carry On comedies.

MacNee’s supporting act has probably come too late for him. In the sixties and early seventies he fancied himself as a replacement for Sean Connery and if you watch some of the earliest episodes of The Avengers you understand why. His playing of John Steed in those pre-Diana Rigg seasons was tough, obtuse, almost offensive; he’s certainly not the charmer Mrs Peel knew. The future Mrs Bond must have smoothed the roughness out of him. Apparently MacNee considered A View to a Kill a lost cause and did not enjoy working with the OO7 crew. You don’t notice this on screen where his discomfort transfers itself to a learned take of a put-upon member of the gentry full-filling a place beneath his status and begrudging Bond’s [Moore’s, the two have become inseparable] incessant crowing.

As if the attitude and apparent age of the hero wasn’t problem enough, there is also a more graphic generational issue. Let’s go back to Ascot and cut across from the stands to the paddock where the audience is introduced at distance to the bad guy, Max Zorin, his bad-ass girlfriend May Day and to his racing scam – the last a plot lifted discreetly from John Gardner’s successful 1981 reinvention of the literary James Bond License Renewed. Here the issue of Bond’s [or rather Moore’s] age becomes startlingly obvious. Zorin and May Day, as depicted by Christopher Walken and Grace Jones, are prime physical specimens, youthful, good looking, athletic. Bond/Moore is not. Even through the deepest of rose-tinted spectacles, you’re always aware of this. The film makers try. The cut of Moore’s clothes are loose; he wears a track suit for an extended raid on Zorin’s laboratories, in other scenes a bomber jacket; where possible he seems to have been advised to keep his hands in his pockets to disguise his expanding paunch. That may mask the flab, but there’s little to be done about the increased use of stunt doubles or the fifty-seven years of worry lines on Moore’s face, lines chiselled in by all that good natured smiling and eye brow raising.

The stunt men really work hard to inject some danger into proceedings. Yet A View to a Kill has some truly dreadful action sequences, some of which are bad enough to compete for the title ‘worst ever this or that’. For instance in Paris Bond/Moore learns nothing from lunch with a pompous informant except that butterflies are deadly and that assassins can base-jump from the Eiffel Tower. The ensuing chase, daft in the extreme, ends with OO7 obliterating a wedding cake. Later he’s on horseback being menaced by overzealous stable jockeys and mechanically heightened fences during a steeplechase which Zorin has no intention of losing. Soon the action transfers to San Francisco, a city about as far removed from the beauty of Chantilly as you can get, but the violence remains soporific: City Hall catches fire trapping Bond/Moore in an elevator, there’s a car chase involving the local fuzz and a fire engine which seems to happen at a pedestrian velocity and during the film’s wretched climax Bond/Moore hangs from the tow-line attached to Zorin’s airship, dodging skyscrapers as he attempts to thwart the baddies. These are the sort of crass happenings which would proliferate in the Police Academy comedy series or The Naked Gun trilogy and you wonder how Bond could sink so low that the action here is actually anticipating these hapless movies. Even the fist fights, once the preserve of genuine excitement, have become little more than lame gestures, being badly edited and badly executed. The biggest sin is how embarrassingly perilousless everything feels. You never consider OO7 to be under serious threat. Throughout the action the sound editor has Bond/Moore making disgorging noises as if he’s in agony from every blow. This doesn’t remind us punches hurt; all it does is suggest Bond/Moore can’t take the heat, not at this advanced age. The real brawn comes in the forms of Walken and Jones, karate kicking the s*** out of each other as a prelude to rudely interrupted passion. Bond/Moore becomes Zorin’s substitute in May Day’s bed, but like the fighting, this is one of the worst love scenes of the entire series. Grace Jones is so aggressive Roger Moore looks petrified to find himself in bed with her.

There is of course a proper heroine, the seismologist Stacey Sutton. As played by Tanya Roberts, Stacey marks a return to the damsel in distress, although it’s fair to say Bond’s dames have never been quite as distressed as she. We first meet her during an elaborate summer cocktail party at Zorin’s estate. We’re meant to be intrigued by Stacey’s shady dealings with her host, but she cuts a clueless figure, lacking sophistication and grace. Her posture is frumpy. Her diction is awful, as if she’s chewing glue. Later on, in San Francisco, she becomes changeable, uncertain at times, forthright at others. Not once does Miss Roberts give her character any authority. What defines her most is her scream. She’s certainly the most vocal of Bond girls.

Stacey, poor lass, doesn’t even get a decent love scene with Bond/Moore. He discovers her living in an empty sprawling mansion, a scene which has the tiniest touch of Hitchcock to it, but lacks all the finesse. Bond/Moore fights off the baddies, cooks a fattening quiche and they drink two bottles of wine; no wonder OO7’s getting worry lines and gaining weight. In the past this type of evening would be a prelude to a swift sexual conquest, but our hero is somewhat fatherly, tucking Stacey into bed and sleeping in an armchair. Moore’s expression is one of complete consternation. Even he’s ashamed of Bond’s splendidly chivalrous behaviour.

The problem with Stacey as a character is that while we’re told she’s educated and principled, she simply doesn’t come across as practical or even sensible. She has none of the capabilities of Fleming’s original heroine, a field operative called Mary Ann Russell, who features in the short story From a View to a Kill. Mary Ann can drive fast, make decisions, is intelligent and can handle a gun. Bond is impressed with her attitude. She prefers his English straightforwardness to a Frenchman’s fussy wooing. Their eventual pairing is inevitable, even before she rescues Bond by shooting a gunman primed to kill him. It is disappointing Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson couldn’t have moulded Stacey into someone more like Mary Ann; they could at least have used her name. As it is the only things the writers do use are the Parisian locations and a truncated title, toe-curlingly crammed into a nonsensical line spoken jointly by Walken and Jones.

Any assessment of the screenplay must acknowledge that A View to a Kill is a crafty rip off of Goldfinger. Max Zorin has been stock piling magnetic pulse resistant microchips. He plans to flood California’s Silicon Valley, thus dramatically increasing the value of his stock. The chip OO7 recovered from Siberia suggests the Russians have aided Zorin Enterprises remarkable business growth. Indeed they have and General Gogol (Walter Gotel, another aging standby) turns up with the warning “No one ever leaves the KGB.” But it appears you can for bound up in Zorin’s entourage are a bunch of Soviet bio-engineered genetic mutants, men and women with high IQs and super-strength allied to a psychotic tendency, people like Zorin, May Day and their security chief, Scarpine. This hackneyed diversion even features the cliché of a doddery, grey haired, batty old scientist (Dr Mortner, played by Willoughby Grey). He’s a Nazi scientist of course and it is never explained how he roams freely around the world without Mossad arresting him for war crimes and genocide. To be frank the whole genetic angle is an irrelevance, an excuse merely to shovel in the KGB and explain away Zorin’s mood swings, which become more vicious, violent and unpredictable, usually accompanied by maniacal laughter. Walken is a good actor, we know that, he’s won Oscars, but his performance here is dreadful, being much too affected and clumsily cheerful.

Zorin unveils his scheme in a manner not unlike Goldfinger’s introduction of Operation Grand Slam, only this time it’s called Project Main Strike and the scene takes place on an airship over the Atlantic, which allows a swift exit for those who no longer wish to remain on board. This plan is so secret, so important that when Bond and Stacey do some sneaky detective work at San Francisco’s City Hall, they find a hand drawn geographical diagram with the words ‘Main Strike’ printed on it. At this point, about two thirds in, I gave up hope of any redemption.

I don’t know if I should keep flagellating this picture further. There really is very little to recommend it. Bond has avoided being drowned in a Rolls Royce and escaped some nightmarish nastiness on an oil pumping station. This is about as good as the movie gets. David Yip’s CIA agent is called in to help and gets killed almost instantly. The KGB appears and disappears again and contributes nothing except an excuse for Bond/Moore to crack semi-obscene jokes in a Jacuzzi. The action eventually holes up in a hole underground, a vast network of mines wired for cataclysmic detonation. There’s slaughter on a huge scale. Roger Moore’s quizzical look becomes a parody of itself. Zorin grows madder and madder. May Day saves the day. Even when you think things are getting serious, the actors are having too much fun to treat it so: Walken and Patric Bauchau (Scarpine) chortle with undisguised abandon as they machine gun hundreds to death in the mines. Finally we reach another airborne climax, this one atop the Golden Gate Bridge where Zorin eventually falls to his death. He finds the moment amusing enough to laugh at his impending doom. The whole cumbersome, bloated saga makes for an appalling spectacle.

I do feel aggrieved to be treating this movie so harshly, but there really is very little excuse for laziness in the entertainment industry and A View to a Kill is a tardy exercise, right from its conception as a feeble update of Goldfinger. Director John Glen seems disinterested in his actors as well as the action. Peter Davies edits with no panache. There’s a complete lack of genuine suspense. It’s a very flat, ordinary, unflashy experience. Even a worthwhile John Barry score can’t save this one. The orchestra is probably delivering the best performance of the whole film. Emma Porteus’ usually reliable costumes are outflanked by Azzedine Alaia’s stunning personal outfits for Grace Jones. I won’t mention the writing again, suffice to say Richard Maibaum in particular ought to know better for there’s almost nothing recognisable on display from Ian Fleming’s James Bond. This OO7 doesn’t even use his licence to kill.

Certainly Bond/Moore harms a few people, but he never delivers a direct fatal shot or blow from start to finish. Roger Moore is on record as saying he really disliked the violence in this film, particularly the massacre in the mines. While it may be fair comment to prosecute that scene, I can’t understand how Sir Roger can bemoan the whole film when his character hardly raises his Walther PPK in anger. Max Zorin offers his opinion of Britain’s favourite secret agent thus: “If you’re the best they have, they’ll more likely try to cover up your incompetence.”

Damn right.

Overall though it is producer Cubby Broccoli who needs to take the heftiest dose of criticism. Stalwarts of the Bond franchise often remark on the family atmosphere Cubby created, that he looked after actors and craftsmen, giving them opportunities and encouragement. He was happiest dealing with people he knew and understood. Yet with A View to a Kill this reliance on the ‘family’ and the ‘familiar’ has roundly backfired. Too many contributors are treading water and this started at the summit with the decision to invest in a tired looking Roger Moore. Regretfully his appearance as well as his performance underpins what is a very negligent chapter in James Bond’s cinematic cycle. This time, whatever his previous merits, Moore simply isn’t up to the task. Both star and producer later admitted his casting was a huge mistake.

Absurdly, watched in isolation, I found it quite easy to forgive A View to a Kill its shortcomings: the casting, the acting, the leaden direction, the outrageousness, the ham-fisted humour. I can’t explain why, for this really is a miserable travesty of OO7. Perhaps it’s guilt or a fondness for pleasurable youthful memories. I can tell you that writing this review gave me no pleasure what so ever. I love James Bond, I really do; but not like this, not at all.

Loeffelholz

Great stuff all, chrisno1...but your AVTAK dissection is particularly (sadly) spot-on.

Sir Hillary Bray

chrisno1, you have nailed the overarching problem with AVTAK -- laziness. Every once in a while, the whole team -- producers, director, writers, repeat cast members -- seems to fall into a collective state of "fat and happy". This leads to the appearance that no one is trying very hard, but rather just going through the motions. This malaise permeates just about every aspect of AVTAK, and you have noted numerous examples. In my view, the same problem befell DAD (at least post-Hong Kong) and to a lesser extent Spectre, which leaves me a bit fearful for Bond 25.

Anyway, thanks for these thoughtful commentaries. I happen to agree with you on AVTAK, but even when I don't, I love to read them.