BOND-A-THON: For Your Eyes Only

With the proviso that you turn off the DVD at 1:58:22, thereby saving yourself an excruciating scene in which Margaret Thatcher (Janet Brown) conducts a flirtatious telephone conversation with a parrot she believes to be agent 007, ‘For Your Eyes Only’ is the high point of the Roger Moore years with a back-to-basics aesthetic that atones in a most welcome fashion for the excesses and idiocies of ‘Moonraker’. (Parenthetically, John Gardner’s turgid 1989 continuation novel ‘Win, Lose or Die’ has Bond in the role of counter-terrorist, safeguarding Thatcher and George Bush at a summit conference. Which is strange because he usually finds himself pitted against crackpot megalomaniacs hellbent on world domination.)

‘For Your Eyes Only’ marks two notable firsts in the franchise: it’s the first Bond to feature a writing credit for Michael G. Wilson, and the first to be directed by former editor John Glen. Both men would continue in these roles for the next four movies. At what point in pre-production and who banged the drum for it the loudest I can’t say, but the decision was made to back away from the outlandish spectacle of ‘Moonraker’ and take the character (and, to a greater or lesser degree, the series) back to basics. Less gadgetry, tighter action sequences, more focus on narrative. ‘For Your Eyes Only’ strikes the right balance, delivering what is basically a thriller while remembering that Roger Moore is the punster Bond and allowing him to toss off the requisite amount of audience-friendly quips.

The plot is a magnificent piece of MacGuffin deployment, cheekily revisiting the race to recover a gizmo that threatens the safety of British nuclear submarines scenario of ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. Here, the device is still within the wreck of a British naval vessel; a spy-boat of sorts operating in foreign waters and therefore unable to benefit from an official salvage operation. When Sir Timothy Havelock (Jack Hedley), an oceanologist with ties to the government, is murdered in front of his daughter Melina (Carole Bouquet) by a hitman identified as Hector Gonzales (Stefan Kalipha), Bond is sent to intercept Gonzales and find out who he’s working for.

Bond’s briefing is given by MI6 Chief of Staff Bill Tanner (James Villiers) and the Minister of Defence (Geoffrey Keen), during which it’s mentioned the M is “on leave”. It’s a subtle and graceful acknowledgement of Bernard Lee’s passing and I’m glad that they didn’t replace him immediately. Robert Brown would take up the mantle for the rest of the Moore years and during Timothy Dalton’s short-lived tenure, before Dame Judi Dench made the character her own in ‘Goldeneye’.

Bond discovers Gonzales – who, for such an infamous and supposedly deadly hitman, is (a) crap at hiding his identity and (b) really easy to track down – hosting the kind of pool party that wouldn’t be out of place in an Akon video. Before he can brace the pistol-packer (or hit on any of the chicks), Melina pops up with a crossbow and gets some payback. An awesome moment courtesy of an awesome actress. Bouquet is never less than fabulous whatever she’s in. The scene where Melina witnesses her parents’ murder is the best bit of screening acting by anyone in any Bond film, and DoP Alan Hume is wise enough to zoom in on Bouquet’s piercing eyes. The look she projects right into the camera – an expression knife-edge between heartbroken and vengeful – is powerhouse.

Added to this, Melina is easily the best-written Bond girl in the series to date; there’s no simpering, no swooning, no floundering around waiting to be rescued by Bond (in fact she saves his ass at one point, the only Bond girl to do so since Claudine Auger’s Domino in ‘Thunderball’). Nor is she paired up with 007 for the whole movie. During the first half particularly, she drifts in and out of the narrative as Bond flits from Spain to Italy to Corfu, always a striking presence, her cold-blooded agenda giving the film a real edge.

It’s tempting to wrap the review up here and now with a simple reiteration: this movie is a rattling good unpretentious thriller and Carole Bouquet brings her A-game. But that would be to rob a few other luminaries of some well-earned words of praise. Moore delivers in this one; he hinted at it in ‘Live and Let Die’, but here he plays Bond with gravitas. Indeed, he comes as close as he ever would to the brutal Bond of Connery circa ‘From Russia with Love’, particularly when he despatches an assassin who’s garrotted a colleague. The assassin’s Mercedes, its escape route interrupted by Bond’s bullet, teeters on a cliff edge; Bond coldly walks up to it, tosses in the dove pendant (the killer’s calling card) taken from his friend’s body, and lands a hefty kick against Merc, sending it plunging. A Falstaffian Bond he may be in virtually every other film, but in this one scene Roger Moore is badass.

A raised glass to Topol. As Milos Columbo, a former freedom fighter now enjoying life as a smuggler, Topol is evidently having a blast, cracking nuts, packing heat and looking way cooler in a leather jacket than a paunchy middle-aged guy with a grey-haired comb-over has any right to. Topol’s flamboyance contrasts nicely with Julian Glover’s rigidly controlled characterisation of Aris Kristatos. And it’s a change to have a Bond villain who’s not a world domination obsessed sociopath with a penchant for monologues. Here, Kristatos is basically a businessman looking to do what all businessman do – make a fuckton of money, albeit by murderously obtaining an intelligence item which he can sell to the Russians (in the form of M’s opposite number General Gogol, played again by Walter Gotell).

Weak points? The score is pretty horrible (when Sheena Easton’s title song can be said to be the high point musically, then you know something’s wrong), any and all scenes involving Kristatos’s Olympic protégé Bibi (former skating champion Lynn-Holly Johnson) are borderline embarrassing, a snowbound chase scene that runs almost ten minutes gets fairly tedious very early, and there’s another one of those protracted underwater sequences that the Bond movies are so fond of.

But mainly, though, the problem with ‘For Your Eyes Only’ is well … the bookends. It starts with a sequence that I’ve sat through half a dozen times now and which still strikes me as odd in its tone and utterly out of place with the rest of the film. Bond is visiting a churchyard, where he places flowers on a headstone. The inscription reads “Teresa Bond, 1943 – 1969, beloved wife of James Bond. We have all the time in the world.” Thus, ‘For Your Eyes Only’ – one of the few post-‘OHMSS’ entries that acknowledges Bond as a widower – starts on a reflective, slightly melancholy note. A priest hurries over and tells 007 that his office has sent a helicopter for him; some kind of emergency. Bond clambers into the whirlybird, only to see the vicar making the sign of the cross. Soon enough, the pilot’s been electrocuted and the helicopter is being flown remote control by an individual in a wheelchair with a bald head and a white cat on his knee.

This character – who is absolutely not Ernst Stavro Blofeld if a lawyer representing Kevin McClory happens to be present, and who patently is if you’re Albert Broccoli and you’re wanting to make a mono-figured gesture to the aforementioned Mr McClory – has great fun sending the helicopter spiralling and plunging through the sky and Bond struggles to wrest back control of the machine. He eventually does, and turns the tables on his nemesis in memorable fashion. All of which is exciting/suspenseful/attention-grabbing on paper, only it’s staged against an abandoned gasworks so grim in its architecture and emptiness that the high-flying hi-jinks just don’t gel. It’s an anodyne approach to criticise a Bond film for having a pre-credits sequence that has sweet FA to do with the actual plot, but when that selfsame sequence is also so stylistically at odds with the rest of the production, it rankles.

And then there’s the last scene. Which we mentioned earlier and will not be extrapolating any further, other than to say it’s horrible and excruciating and unfunny and makes the Bond-chases-a-midget ending of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ look like Tarkovsky.

A much more satisfying conclusion – SPOILER ALERT – is after the climactic assault on Kristatos’s mountain-top stronghold, Bond finally recovering the device only to find General Gogol and a machine-gun packing minion ready to take it off him. Bond flings the gizmo out across the precipice. It shatters (to the accompaniment of a crap sound effect) and Bond gives Gogol a sheepish grin. “Détente, comrade,” he declares, “you don’t have it and we don’t have it.” Gogol responds with diffident shrug and grins back as if to say suits me, pal; you went through all that for nothing, I enjoyed a day out of the office. (SPOILERS END) It’s a nice little moment, underplayed and without any of the smugness generally inherent in Moore’s Bond. It’s also one of the rare moments where a Bond film manages to make an actual comment on the nature of espionage, no matter how moribund.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The New York Ripper

Early in Lucio Fulci’s censor-baiting controversy-magnet ‘The New York Ripper’ – that staple of the BBFC and DOP hit lists, a film that remains so infamous that even mentioning the title gets you filthy looks in most social situations (try it; five points for talking about it at work, ten at the kids’ playground, fifteen in front of your mother, twenty in church) – there’s a scene where pathologist Dr Jones (Giordano Falzoni) performs an autopsy on a young woman who has been brutally murdered by the eponymous nut job, and describes his findings to Detective Williams (Jack Hedley). The murder weapon: a fucking big knife. The application thereof: “He stuck it up her love trail.”

Allow me to repeat that, just in case you didn’t pick up on the subtleties and nuances on a first reading:

“He stuck it up her love trail.”

Ladies and gentlemen, abandon your sense of aesthetics, put your aspirations to classy entertainment in cold storage, mothball your morality and drape the dust covers over your finer feelings. We’re about to submerge ourselves in 93 minutes of sleaze, depravity and nastily sexualized violence. (Well, what else were you going to do on a Sunday afternoon?)

An old man out walking his dog finds the mutilated corpse of a young woman. Williams pegs it as the same modus operandi as the killing of a hooker some weeks earlier. A cyclist in hot pants has an altercation with a motorist and is brutally assaulted and killed on the Manhattan ferry shortly thereafter. Jane Lodge (Alexandra Delli Colli), the sexually provocative wife of respected academic Dr Lodge (Laurence Welles) attends a sex show after which one of the performers is murdered by way of a broken bottle applied to her nether regions. Jane’s taste for the seedier side of life brings her into the orbit of Mickey Scellenda (Howard Ross), a small time thug who might know more about the “Ripper” case than he’s letting on.

Meanwhile, troubled student Fay Majors (Alamanta Keller) has a narrow escape from a stalker on the subway. She’s the only witness Williams has, but with the taunting phone calls he’s receiving from the killer, and his somewhat seedy private life about to go public, can Williams hold it together, nail the “Ripper” and keep Fay out of danger? And does Fay herself have something to hide? Will her milquetoast boyfriend Peter Bunch (Andrew Painter) be able to defend her? And why does cynical psychologist Dr Paul Davis (Paolo Malco) so eagerly respond to Williams’s invitation to help profile the killer?

On the one hand, ‘The New York Ripper’ has all the elements of a clinically efficient giallo, ticking all the boxes as regards sleaze, nudity, protracted death scenes, cod-psychology and a pass-the-parcel red herrings game in which most of the major characters have good reason to invite suspicion at one time or another. Add to this the presence of Lucio Fulci – a man who, for all his notoriety, was a highly capable director who knew how to generate tension and keep a film’s narrative going, even when the script was no great shakes – and there ought to be enough here to mount a sterling defence of ‘The New York Ripper’ as a minor classic, undeservedly tainted by the smug, hyperbolic moralizing of the chattering classes.

But for one small problem.

It is fucking nasty. It is, in fact, one of the nastiest, seediest, grubbiest and downright unpleasant pieces of work I’ve seen. I’d make a case for the artistic integrity of ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ over ‘The New York Ripper’. ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ at least reserves its journey into the most joyless recesses of the human psyche for the last half hour or so – and delivers its catalogue of cruelties in the service of a statement about the manipulation of the medium and whether “civilized” man is actually more reprehensible in his actions than the so-called savage.

‘The New York Ripper’, however, presents an interminable succession of women being murdered and sexually objectified, usually at the same time. Even scene that don’t end in slaughter treat the female characters like so much meat. Case in point: the narratively redundant but gratuitously lingered-on moment (for “moment” read “about ten minutes”) when Jane wanders into a pool hall and gets frigged by a latino thug’s toe. (Which is not a sentence I imagined myself typing when I got up this morning.) It’s a scene that serves no discernible purpose (it’s already been established that Jane likes it kinky), yet Fulci’s camera gloats over it like a voyeur.

Moreover, there’s none of the visual brilliance of ‘The Beyond’, ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’, ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ or ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’. In fact, the only commonality with that straight-up giallo classic is the duck-like voice the killer adopts prior to offing another poor woman or making a “you can’t catch me” call to Williams. Subject of whom, for all that Hedley tries to imbue him with some world-weary characterization, there’s no backstory to the cop, no motivational factor, and no indication of why the “Ripper” targets him when he rings the cops to bait them about his latest atrocity. In fact, this entire element seems to have been included purely as parallel to the actual Jack the Ripper case, where JtR wrote provocative letters to the press, mocking the police’s inability to catch him.

I’m not sure whether Fulci took the decision from the outset to make the film as visually dreary as possible, but he certainly succeeds in painting one of the unloveliest cinematic pictures of New York.

So, with an arguably deliberate anti-aesthetic, little to no emotional investment in the characters, and the procedural aspects of the story purely an exercise in mechanics (even the race-against-time finale is blandly by-the-numbers), all that is left are the killings themselves. All of which of have an explicitly sexual imperative. When the defining shot of a film is a close-up of a straight razor being applied to a woman’s breast, that pretty much tells you all you need to know.

There’s a lot of hate for ‘The New York Ripper’ – and it’s been earned.