BOND-A-THON: A View to a Kill

Beware the temptation of the snap judgement. Particularly when undertaking a movie-thon whose entries you’re watching sequentially rather than ruminating upon retrospectively. And particularly when you haven’t seen some of those entries in quite some time.

I, dear reader, was not wary. Thus, from my review of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ on 12 June 2012: “ ‘TMwtGG’ is the franchise’s nadir,” an opinion that occasioned the redoubtable Tim of Antagony & Ecstasy to comment “the series' nadir? Now, that's at least one ‘Star Wars’ knock-off and one Chris Walken Nazi superman away from happening.”

And – lo! – reviewing ‘Moonraker’ on 1 July 2012, I was forced “to reappraise my earlier opinion of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ as the series’ nadir. Although perhaps ‘TMwtGG’ is more bitterly disappointing because of the flashes of potential it displays – ‘Moonraker’ simply starts bad and stays bad.”

And now I find myself squaring up to ‘A View to a Kill’, compared to which ‘TMwtGG’ and ‘Moonraker’ are not just great Bond movies, but masterpieces of world cinema. Indeed, compared to ‘AVtaK’, ‘Moonraker’ is ‘Citizen Kane’ with spaceships.

You can’t even say of ‘AVtaK’ that it starts bad and stays bad. It’s too desultory to attain the quirky degree of badness that can actually work, perversely enough, in a film’s favour. Only in its wildest dreams does ‘AVtaK’ aspire to being ‘so bad it’s good’. The cold, unavoidable fact of the matter is that it’s simply dull. John Glen’s direction is pedestrian. Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson’s script is a lame retread of tropes and character traits from earlier, better, entries. The action scenes are not only few and far between but lacking in dynamics, credibility and excitement.

As with ‘For Your Eyes Only’ and ‘Octopussy’, the title is from one of Ian Fleming’s short stories, but not a trace of the original tale survives. The pre-credits sequence actually has something to do with the film proper, as Bond (Roger Moore, pushing 60 and looking tired) retrieves a microchip from the body of 003 in the frozen wastes of Alaska while the Russkies close in on him. There follows a ski/chase scene (yup, another one) which ends with Bond ski-boarding to the strains of the Beach Boys before sailing off with a buxom beauty probably young enough to be his granddaughter in a mini-submarine disguised as an iceberg.

Then fucking Duran Duran kick in on the soundtrack, and Maurice Binder serves up arguably his most salacious and outright sexist title sequence yet – which is saying something for a guy who made a career out of projecting movie credits onto the gyrating silhouettes of naked women. If you’ve never seen the film before and these first six or seven minutes make you want to eject the DVD and go clay-pigeon shooting with it … friend, I wish you a steady hand and a good aim.

If you make it past the credits, this is what you get: M (Robert Brown) and Q (Desmond Llewellyn) identify the microchip as being manufactured by Zorin Industries and, worried that the KGB might have someone on the inside who has to access to a new type of chip that something something impervious to a nuclear pulse yada yada – the exposition is an exercise in what-the-fuckery and the science is so bonkers it makes your average Edgar Rice Burroughs ‘Barsoom’ opus look like Neal Stephenson – send Bond to infiltrate Zorin’s organization.

Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) is an American industrialist with designs on San Francisco’s silicon valley, so Bond naturally makes contact with him in Paris where he’s auctioning off some racehorses to be put out to stud because, y’know, he also owns some gee-gees. Let’s pause for a second here and contemplate two things.

One: I likes me some Christopher Walken. I like Christopher Walken when he’s reining it in and delivering carefully controlled character work (e.g. ‘The Dead Zone’), I like him when he’s being utterly undisciplined and chewing on the scenery like he’s not had a square meal in weeks (‘King of New York’, ‘Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead’), I like him when he’s doing nothing more than transfixing the camera and drawling a monologue (‘True Romance’, ‘Pulp Fiction’), and I think he’s pretty awesome and able to rock an off-the-peg suit when he soft-shoe-shuffles through an empty hotel in a Fatboy Slim video. So it fucking kills me even to think about how awful his performance is here, let alone write about it. The deal with Zorin is this: he’s the product of Nazi experimentation, a born sociopath, later groomed by the KGB and then allowed to carve a capitalist career for himself in the decadent west. (I’m not saying this film is ideologically confused, but what the fuckety fucking fuck???) Walken’s characterization of a sociopath is: laugh contemptuously, strike a pose somewhere between John Wayne pre-gunfight and a man who’s just shit his pants, deliver a line reading notable only for its grammatically appalling diction, then laugh maniacally until the director yells “cut”. I can only assume John Glen was delayed in yelling “cut” on a few occasions, because there are several scenes in which Walken laughs maniacally, looks embarrassed, barks out a bit more maniacal laughter and my will to live ebbs a little more.

Two: as a purpose of comparison between the literary and filmic incarnations of Bond, the books generally present tighter and more claustrophobic narratives than their big screen counterparts, with the bulk of the action usually occurring over a comparatively short period of time and confined to a single locale or a very limited arena of activity – ‘Casino Royale’, ‘Moonraker’ and ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ are good examples. Ergo, the three-quarters of an hour in which Double-OAP – sorry, Double-O Seven – goes undercover at Zorin’s Parisian pad, snoops around, uncovers evidence of conspiracy, tangles with both Zorin and his feisty second in command May Day (Grace Jones), and has his mettle tested in a rigged steeplechase, is probably the closest any of the movies have come to a cinematic representation of the novels’ mise-en-scene. And you know what? It makes for a pretty damn boring viewing experience.

It’s during this exegesis in ennui that Bond comes into contact with American heiress Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts), our Bond girl du jour – not that she really comes into play until the last forty minutes or so – and here we come to the next bone of contention. Roberts had won the hearts and hormones of a generation of teenage boys courtesy of her roles as Julie Rogers in the 1980-81 seasons of ‘Charlie’s Angels’ and as the scantily clad heroine in ‘Sheena’. Embodying all-American girl-next-door looks and the kind of figure that could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window, Roberts was always going to be Bond girl material. However, while thespian talents aren’t always a prerequisite for Bond girl iconography, Roberts’ acting style is akin to a deer caught in headlights but concentrating so hard on reading off a cue-card that it hasn’t realized the headlights are so close and, oh fuck, attached to a speeding truck.

Then we have the terminally unlovely Grace Jones. Her acting style is more like a rabid dog caught in headlights. There’s a scene where she makes out with Walken. The fact that my eyes were rigidly on Walken throughout says nothing about any latent preferences on my part.

Then we have Fiona Fullerton as a Russian agent with whom Bond enjoys a brief interlude. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a stunner … but her attempt at a Russian accent makes the guy who played Schultz in ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ sound like Bruno Ganz.

Then we have Patrick Macnee. Just as there’s an academic paper to be written on the Bond/giallo correlation – Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celli, Barbara Bach, Barbara Bouchet (albeit in a non-canon Bond role) and former 007 George Lazenby all having appeared in notable examples of the genre – a study of the crossovers between James Bond and ‘The Avengers’ (Steed/Peel version, not Marvel comics) similarly awaits authorship. Honor Blackman (Catherine Gale from 1962-64) essayed Pussy Galore in ‘Goldfinger’, while Diana Rigg (the iconic Emma Peel between 1965 and 1968) and Joanna Lumley (Purdey in ‘The New Avengers’, 1976-77) both appeared in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. Guest stars included Christopher Lee, Vernon Dobtcheff, Julian Glover and Geoffrey Palmer, all of whom memorably contributed to the world of 007. So it was probably inevitable that Steed himself, Patrick Macnee, would eventually get a role in a Bond movie. Tragic that he got it – and such a thankless role at that – in this one.

A young Dolph Lundgren makes a small appearance. Mainly because he was Grace Jones’s consort at the time and visiting the set when Glen found himself missing an extra. I mention this purely to illustrate my desperation in finding things to say about ‘AVtaK’.

Ultimately, this is a sloppy piece of filmmaking. The ridiculous lengths to which Zorin goes attempting to dispose of Bond makes the average Saturday morning serial with its cheating cliff-hangers look like an example of documentary realism; the over-elaborate set pieces (notably an assassination at the Eiffel Tower) swiftly become ridiculous; the schism between the jokey portrayal of Bond and Zorin gleefully machine-gunning helpless people who were about to drown anyway are irreconcilable in terms of tone and context; and there’s at least half an hour’s more running time than there is plot.

Any saving graces? Not the finale, which is so ludicrously staged and badly edited as to make the “off” button leap from a remote controller in a paroxysm of audio-visual mercy killing. Nor the gadgets, which are limited to a remote control camera that Q employs for state-sanctioned voyeurism in the final scene. Nor the nods to previous Bond movies, including the villain-as-cheat gamesmanship already embodied by Auric Goldfinger (likewise Zorin’s briefing of his criminal brethren is an unashamed copy from that film) and Kamal Khan, as well as the reappearance of the stolen Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington as referenced in ‘Dr No’. This latter is inexplicable even as an in-joke since the painting was returned in 1965, twenty years prior to Eon Productions shunting their lamest Bond movie yet onto the cinema screens of the world.

BOND-A-THON: Octopussy

“You know what I like about you Brits? ‘Octopussy’! I must have seen that movie … twice!” – Homer Simpson

I’m probably one up on the redoubtable Mr Simpson. I’ve seen ‘Octopussy’ three times. Once at the cinema when I was eleven. It made the kind of impression on me that anything in ‘Scope and with a notable quotient of buxom women would have made on me at that age. Second time, it was on TV when I was probably in my late teens or early twenties. I thought that Roger Moore looked kinda old and the back projection was dodgy. Sliding the DVD into the player a few nights ago, I wasn’t holding out much hope. “It’s the clown one,” I remember saying desultorily to Mrs F; “see you in a couple of hours.”

Turns out third time was the charm. With only a couple of minor quibbles, I really enjoyed ‘Octopussy’: it strikes a decent balance between the globe-trotting élan audiences had come to expect of Bond movies and a (for the early-to-mid 80s) timely Cold War narrative. John Glen, helming the second of his five consecutive 007 opuses, retains much of the grittiness of ‘For Your Eyes Only’ and again keeps the gadgets to a minimum (though he does throw in a painfully laddish scene where Bond uses some of Q’s surveillance equipment to check out a nubile young woman’s décolletage).

Like its predecessor, ‘Octopussy’ takes an Ian Fleming short story as its starting point; well, two actually. Bond’s attendance at a Sotheby’s auction, attempting to sniff out the buyer of a fake Faberge egg is a fairly faithful rendition of ‘The Property of a Lady’, while the short story ‘Octopussy’ provides the backstory that connects Bond and the mysterious jewel smuggler and circus owner of the title. Fleshing out these disparate elements, the script – ‘Flashman’ legend George Macdonald Fraser throwing in his talents with Richard Maibaum and Michael G Wilson – divides its time between India and Berlin as Bond unravels the connections between rogue communist General Orlov (Steven Berkoff), playboy millionaire Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan) and Octopussy (Maud Adams) herself.

Anyone who’s read my review of ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ will be aware of my issues with the casting of Charles Grey, just two films after he appeared as an ally of Bond’s in ‘You Only Live Twice’, as the agent’s arch-nemesis Blofeld. I will have a similar thing to say about Joe Don Baker’s transition from baddie to goodie between the Dalton and the Brosnan episodes. For now, let’s just say that I find Maud Adams’s reappearance in the franchise, after being killed off in the earlier ‘Man with the Golden Gun’, equally as distracting.

Other niggles: the horrible “Tarzan” moment; the stunt casting of tennis champion Vijay Amritraj (necessitating a visual pun that you can see coming like the QE2 on a duck pond); a slight slackening of the pace during the India sequence; and the overplotting that links the jewel smuggling, the faked objets d’art and Orlov’s plot to detonate a nuclear device on an American air force base in Germany, make it look like an accident and thus force Europe’s hand over unilateral disarmament, thereby leaving the borders open for Russian invasion.

If I were being über-critical, I’d also mention the film’s inability, at least for its first half, to settle on a villain. Is Khan the puppet of Orlov while Octopussy is the eminence grise behind the whole operation? Or is Khan allowing Octopussy to believe she’s the prime mover and equally manipulating Orlov? Or is Orlov one step ahead of both Khan and Octopussy? And likewise which is the fake or the real Faberge egg at any given point in the movie? And why do Orlov and his forgers go to so much trouble creating fakes of incredibly famous jewels that would surely be pegged as ersatz, or at the very least have their provenance subjected to the most exacting scrutiny, the moment they came up for auction, when their must be infinitely similar ways of raising capital for black ops? And if the knife-throwing twins (David and Tony Meyer) who are one of the acts in Octopussy’s circus are already working for Orlov, why does he need to involve Khan and Octopussy in his nefarious scheme?

But this really is me being picky. That a Bond movie – moreover, a Roger Moore Bond movie – can be this bothered with plot, character interaction and the tangled-web machinations of its villains is something to be applauded. The fact that it can do this whilst retaining the arch and slightly camp humour that best suited Moore, as well as permitting him a genuinely badass moment comparable to the Mercedes/cliff face moment in ‘For Your Eyes Only’, just adds to the enjoyment. In this regard, the pre-credits sequence sets the tone nicely: it starts low-key with 007 disguising himself in order to infiltrate a military base, ups the stakes with his capture before he can complete his mission, develops into an audience-pleasing large scale action-fest, all duelling planes and big explosions, and concludes with an archetype Roger Moore nod to the gallery and a one-liner that manages not to be as groan-inducing of most of humour in a Bond movie of this era.

This balance is well maintained throughout. The action scenes are solid enough, with only the back projection during Bond’s fight with Kahn’s hencemen on the roof of a speeding train letting the side down. Chases – on foot, by car or in motorised rickshaws – predominate, and a last-reel attack on a fortress by Octopussy’s army of women provides action and eye-candy in roughly equal measure. It’s nice to see M back, even through Robert Brown’s characterisation doesn’t quite have the curmudgeonly gravitas of Bernard Lee, and it’s refreshing to have a Bond movie which doesn’t conclude with quarter of an hour of things blowing up in a secret hi-tech base. 


And yes, Moore is a bit long in the tooth for all this; and yes, the cynicism of Orlov’s plot is sugar-coated somewhat by the (quite literal) three-ring circus that goes on around it; but ‘Octopussy’ is never less than entertaining. It was Moore’s penultimate appearance, and it’s a shame really that he didn’t bow out on it. Then we’d have either had ‘A View to a Kill’ configured around a younger actor or been spared it altogether.

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.

BOND-A-THON: Moonraker

Memory can play tricks on you. It had been a while – actually, a good decade or so – since I’d last seen ‘Moonraker’ and I recalled it as being dumb but fun. Mrs F had the same recollection and, though she’d not participated in any of the viewings for the Bond-a-thon beyond a couple of the Connery titles, sat down to watch it with me. We groaned, face-palmed and talked sarcastically over the movie for two solid hours.

The trickery of one person’s memory may be considered unfortunate, two people’s smacks of conspiracy. “Why did I waste two hours on that piece of shit?” my wife enquired as the end credits rolled. I could offer no answer. It may be of some cold comfort that at least she doesn’t have to write this fucking review; one, moreover, that forces me to reappraise my earlier opinion of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ as the series’ nadir. Although perhaps ‘TMwtGG’ is more bitterly disappointing because of the flashes of potential it displays – ‘Moonraker’ simply starts bad and stays bad.

How bad? Even allowing for the extravagancies and unsubtleties that are emblematic of the Roger Moore opuses, ‘Moonraker’ is god-awful. The pacing is leaden, the action scenes perfunctory, the humour sub-juvenile, the plot meaningless, the gadgets dull, the Bond girls duller and the villain dullest of all, Michel Lonsdale not even attempting to act but delivering a series of monotone line readings with all the conviction of an automaton.

Let’s spend a few hundred words finding out why, wrap this up as quickly as possible, and in ten days’ time we can enjoy ‘For Your Eyes Only’ which at least has Carole Bouquet, Topol, some nice scenery and no fucking idiotic space battles.

‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ ended with the promise “James Bond will return in ‘For Your Eyes Only’”, however producer Albert Broccoli – his antennae, as always, attuned to what was bringing in the biggest box office bucks at any given moment – realised that audiences were responding to sci-fi spectaculars. ‘Star Wars’, released the same year as ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, had left 007 standing in terms of ticket sales (and ‘TSWLM’ was no flop either, earning its budget back at least ten times over). ‘For Your Eyes Only’ was put on hold and ‘Moonraker’ was rushed into production.

The biggest rush job was arguably the script. If Christopher Wood took more than a weekend over it, I’d be amazed. Wood was the chap Lewis Gilbert brought on board to add a dash of humour to Richard Maibaum’s script for ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. Earning himself a solo writing credit for ‘Moonraker’, Wood basically rewrote ‘TSWLM’ substituting “up in space” for “under the sea”. Hence we have reclusive billionaire Stromberg who wants to destroy earth and rule a new master race under the sea reimagined as reclusive billionaire Sir Hugo Drax who wants to destroy earth and rule a new master race in the stars; sexy helicopter pilot Naomi replaced by sexy helicopter pilot Corinne; the plot kickstarter of a stolen submarine rehashed as a stolen spacecraft (deepening levels of self-plagiarism here, with ‘Moonraker’ essentially ripping off ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ which essentially ripped off ‘You Only Live Twice’); Bond’s emergence from the sea in a car/submarine occasioning a nearby drinker to glance at the bottle and shake his head in disbelief restaged as Bond’s transition from canal to piazza in gondola/hovercraft occasioning a nearby drinker to … well, you get the picture.

A musical gag is also repeated: a snatch of Maurice Jarre’s score to ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ as Bond crosses a desert in ‘TSWLM’; a bit of Elmer Bernstein’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ theme as Bond rides a horse dressed in western gear. Elsewhere, a security keypad plays the famous motif from ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (Spielberg repaid the homage by featuring the Bond theme in ‘The Goonies’, which he produced), and a hunt is opened by horn players sounding the opening notes of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’, the Richard Strauss tone poem forever associated with ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Just one of these would have maybe provided a cute little touch; stuffing them all into the film, along with its plentiful self-borrowings, turns it into a tedious plod through a decaying mulch of unoriginal material.

Jaws (Richard Kiel) returns, ostensibly in Drax’s employ but helping Bond during the mind-numbingly horrible space station battle at the end. His reversal of sympathies was due to Broccoli receiving tons of mail from kids whose imagination had been captured by the steel-toothed giant in the previous and had written to ask, in so many words, “Please mister, we think Jaws is dead cool, can’t he be a goodie this time and help Bond?” And so their requests were fulfilled; ergo a little more kerr-chinggg at the box office. Also, the big dude gets a girlfriend [insert “Jaws scores” pun here] and is allowed to deliver his only line of dialogue (“Here’s to us”).

By this point in the franchise, putting the words “Some Actor isJames Bond 007 in ‘Totally Interchangable Title’” over a big ballad and some naked women gyrating in silhouette was a guarantee in and of itself of at least $150million in box office returns, and for me it’s this foregone conclusion of profitability that makes ‘Moonraker’ such a depressing thing to watch. Every bit of it is a cynical calculation with a dollar bottom line that’s so unabashedly obvious it swamps even the faintest smidgin of technical ingenuity or entertainment value. More depressing is the fact that it worked; for all that ‘Moonraker’ took a deserved kicking from the critics, it made $210million from a $34million investment (double the budget of ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’).

Still, columns of figures are not the yardstick for this Bond-a-thon; these are tentpole movies whose mainstream appeal should be based on how entertaining they are; how much fun to watch. And ‘Moonraker’ delivers very little in the entertainment stakes. Everyone involved seems to be going through the motions: Gilbert’s direction is pedestrian, Moore’s performance is perhaps his most wooden turn in the franchise, Corine Cleary and Lois Chiles – saddled with underwritten characters – just phone in it, Lonsdale as mentioned earlier merely reads his lines and leaves it at that; the action scenes lack any frisson, with a potentially exciting speed boat chase reduced to a yawn-inducing a few minutes of padding and the explosive finale managing by some weird reverse alchemy to be as OTT as it is boring.

There’s not much else to say about the whole fiasco – at least not without getting into an overlong diatribe on how little sense the plot makes, even by the logic-starved standards of your average Bond movie, and I really don’t want to waste any more time or words on ‘Moonraker’ – except that it marks Bernard Lee’s final appearance as M. Which is a bloody shame. He deserved a better swansong.

BOND-A-THON: The Spy Who Loved Me

 

‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ is the first Bond movie that has absolutely nothing to do with its source novel apart from the title. Coming late in the 007 canon, Fleming’s novel is something of an experimental work, narrated by the heroine and with Bond himself not showing up till a good half way through. Oh, and it’s set principally at a motor court in the middle of nowhere. Not the stuff that block-busting action cinema is made of.

It’s also the first hyper-budgeted Bond movie. From ‘Thunderball’ in 1965 to ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ in 1974, the productions had generally cost between $7million and $9million. ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, released in 1977, cost $14million. Although given that your average Bond movie, by then, was enjoying ticket sales of $100million plus, it wasn’t really that much of a gamble for the producers.

The enhanced budget was mainly due to the sets – another epic of bad guy kitsch courtesy of Ken Adam, of which more later.

 

The three year gap between the film and its predecessor was due to a series of production difficulties. Firstly, the partnership between Albert R Broccoli and Harry Saltzman came to an end. Saltzman sold his half of the partnership to offset financial difficulties; at the same time, his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Battling depression, Saltzman all but retired from the movie business. He made only two returns to producing, with ‘Nijinsky’ in 1980 and ‘Time of the Gypsies’ in 1988.

The script was arrived at but a circuitous route. Broccoli, perhaps trying to emulate Roald Dahl’s iconoclastic work on ‘You Only Live Twice’, approached writers as diverse as Stirling Silliphant, Gerry Anderson (yes, that Gerry Anderson), John Landis, Derek Marlowe and Anthony Burgess. (The thought of Burgess, in ‘Clockwork Orange’ mode, penning a Bond movie is priceless:

007: What’s it to be then, sir?
M: This malchick Stromberg is hatching some like cally sort of plan.
007: You want me to tolchock the starry-eyed old veck, sir?
M: I want you give it to him in the yarbles, 007, if he’s got any yarbles. Now get off and viddy what Q’s got for you.
007: Lovely lovely gadgets to slooshy the old ultra-violence with, sir?
M: Quite so, 007. Viddy well.)

 

In the end, it was series regular Richard Maibaum who was called upon to provide the screenplay. His first draft opened with the intriguing concept of SPECTRE overrun by a rival terrorist organisation and Blofeld ousted. Kevin McClory (remember him from the ‘Thunderball’ saga?) got to hear of this and threatened legal action. The SPECTRE angle was dropped. By now, the production had a director attached – Lewis Gilbert, returning for the second of his three Bond movies – who brought writer Christopher Wood on board. The script, shorn of all references to SPECTRE and Blofeld, and with oceanographer Karl Stromberg as Bond’s antagonist was finally credited to Maibaum and Wood.

Gilbert was contracted after Guy Hamilton turned the film down – he’d been offered ‘Superman’; in what must have been the most galling moment in his career, he was then passed over in favour of Richard Donner. Broccoli also considered Steven Spielberg, but decided to hang fire and see whether ‘Jaws’ did any real business at the box office. We’ll move politely on and let hindsight be the judge of that one.

Onto the story: in what is essentially a rehash of ‘You Only Live Twice’, but with submarines instead of rockets, naval vessels are being mysteriously hijacked, and when a British sub with a couple of Polaris missiles is captured, M (Bernard Lee) gets Bond (Roger Moore) on the case. In Russia, M’s opposite number General Gogol (Walter Gotell) gives his best agent – Triple X, a.k.a Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) – a similar brief.

 

The only clue either agent has is the appearance on the black market of the plans to the tracking system from one of the submarines, which is being auctioned by Egyptian club owner Max Kalda (Vernon Dobtcheff). Working initially in competition, then – reluctantly – in collaboration, Bond and Anya tangle with a seven-foot steel-toothed slab of anti-social behaviour named Jaws (Richard Kiel), finally get their hands on the plans and discover another clue that points them towards the reclusive Stromberg (Curt Jurgens) and his research facility in Sardinia.

The plot is a join-the-dots exercise in sending Bond to as many exotic locations as possible, and the central conceit – as mentioned before – is a rehash of ‘You Only Live Twice’, right down to Ken Adams’ set for Stromberg’s submarine base with its monorail and its upper level control station. When Adams voiced to Broccoli his concerns that there wasn’t a soundstage, at any studio in the world, big enough to incorporate the sets he’d envisaged, the producer’s response was: “Then build it one.” The result was the 007 stage at Pinewood.

The finale, in which Bond frees a group of incarcerated submariners and leads them into battle against Stromberg’s troops, is – again – ‘You Only Live Twice’ with sailors instead of ninjas. Additionally, there’s a hand-to-hand fight in a cramped train compartment – which had already been done twice: in ‘From Russia with Love’ and ‘Live and Let Die’. The gadgets are more outlandish, and while there’s nothing as awful as the flying car in ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, the Lotus that turns into a mini-sub comes pretty close.

 

‘The Spy Who Loves Me’ also marks the point at which the franchise became entrenched in an infantile mindset that would dog the films for another decade. Case in point: the pre-credits sequence. M, concerned over the missing sub business, buzzes Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) on the intercom and demands, “Where’s 007?” “On a mission, sir, in Austria,” Moneypenny replies. “Well, tell him to pull out,” snaps M. Cut to: Bond in log cabin making whoopee with a nameless bit of eye candy. A ticker-tape message scrolls out of Bond’s watch. He gets dressed and heads for the door. “But James,” protests the nameless bit of eye candy, “I need you.” “So does England,” Bond parries, and takes off on skis. Some gunmen are waiting for him. There’s a downhill chase laden with some dodgy back projection, then Bond skis off a precipice. He tumbles through the air, his skis detaching. A parachute flares out – in the colours of the Union Flag – and Bond floats to safety. Double entrendres and in-yer-face jingoism. Whoop-de-fuckin’-doo.

There’s a deficiency in the villain department, too. While Jaws presents a threat by dint of his sheer physicality, Stromberg – for all that he wants to destroy the world in order to establish a new society under the sea – isn’t much of an antagonist. Portly and grey-haired, he looks less like a power-crazed sociopath than Dr No’s granddad.

 

In the Bond girl stakes, Major Anya Amarova suffers from Tiffany Case Syndrome: like Jill St John in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, she spends the first half of the film being smart-mouthed and resourceful before the filmmakers decide to tug the leash and make her a simpering captive for the big finale, leaving all the tough guy stuff to Bond while she’s tied to a chair in an outfit that shows off her cleavage. (I can’t help but wonder how come Stromberg had that little number in his wardrobe.)

It doesn’t help, either, that Bach’s acting prowess is one-note. More infuriating is that B-movie goddesses Caroline Munro and Valerie Leon – both equally gorgeous and both better actresses – are relegated to minor roles (although, damn, Munro makes hers count!)

 

‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, for all that I’ve given it a bit of a kicking in this review, is a big improvement on ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’: it’s pacier, more exotic, a hell of a lot more fun to watch. But it seems to serve the same purpose in the Moore filmography that ‘Goldfinger’ does in the Connery canon. It fuses the elements that audiences identify with Bond movies – guns, girls, gadgets, globe-trotting and gratuitous one-liners – and, in defining the formula, emerges as an exercise in the formulaic. And, also like ‘Goldfinger’, it leaves me with mixed feelings: I like it a hell of a lot as a piece of mainstream entertainment, but it remains a paeon to the indulgences that mar the franchise rather than the elements that invigorate it.

BOND-A-THON: The Man with the Golden Gun

 

12 January 2012, Nottingham, England. Yours truly decides to host a Bond-a-thon on The Agitation of the Mind. I can only assume the rationale floating through my mind went something like this: Yeah, cool, I get to watch the Connery films, I get to re-evaluate the Timothy Daltons, there was that one with Brosnan that had a pre-credits speed boat chase along the Thames, and I get to wrap the whole thing up with Craig’s reinvention of the franchise. Woo-hoo! This is going to be so cool. Bartender, bring me a vodka martini, shaken not stirred.

I cannot recall, during this moment of deluded enthusiasm, whether it ever crossed my mind that, discounting Connery’s reprisal of the role in ‘Never Say Never Again’ as non-canon, Roger Moore has made more James Bond films than any other actor. And if even the vaguest consideration of the Moore years did cross my mind, there was probably another rationale to hand, something along the lines of: ‘Live and Let Die’ is pretty decent, ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ co-stars Caroline Munro and Valerie Leon therefore eye-candy a-go-go, and ‘For Your Eyes Only’ marks something of a return to form. Hell yeah, let’s do this thing.

If, on 12 January, someone had whispered in my ear: Yo, Fulwood, you’re also going to have to watch ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, ‘Octopussy’ and ‘A View to a Kill’, there might have been second thoughts. I might have re-envisage the project as a best-of-Bond-a-thon. In fact, if that rhetorical whisperer had put in an appearance, there would have been no need for them to mention ‘Octopussy’ or ‘A View to a Kill’. They’d have had me at ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’.

‘TMwtGG’ is the franchise’s nadir. Just looking back at my review of ‘Live and Let Die’ and the issues I had with it throws ‘TMwtGG’ into sharp relief. Bog awful theme song? Sir Paul McCartney, I apologise: your three minutes of widdle-wank is fucking Mahler compared to Lulu’s execrable effort. Racism? The treatment of black characters in ‘Live and Let Die’ is an exercise in race relations compared to the wholesale stereotyping of Asians. How bad is the racism? Let’s put it this way, there is a ludicrous amount of screentime, just after the halfway mark, where Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), holidaying in Bangkok, repeatedly lambasts the locals, calling them “little brown pointy-heads”. Between this and the flying car, watching ‘TMwtGG’ is a two-hour exercise in losing the will to live. Yeah, there’s a flying car.

 

It would be twenty years and ‘Die Another Day’ before the 007 saga gave us anything as face-palmingly stupid. And, oh Christ, I’ve got that motherfucker to watch before this whole moviethon is over.

The annoying thing is that ‘TMwtGG’ could have good. It could, conceivably, have been fucking great. For all that the films have drastically departed from the books, often to their detriment, one genuine improvement is made in this case. Ian Fleming’s novel, written just prior to the author’s death, was published in its first draft without his customary revisions; consequently, it’s a thin and sketchy piece of work and suffers from the lack of an interesting villain. Scaramanga, in the novel, is a grubby little mobster whose much-hyped facility with a pistol barely compensates for his lack of personality. In Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz’s script, Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) is Bond’s equal – indeed, the opposite side of the coin to 007: a gourmand and a sybarite who lives well and has no qualms about what he does for a living. 

Christopher Lee was Ian Fleming’s cousin and would probably have made a chillingly amoral Bond (in the alternative universe where Sean Connery accepted Matt Busby’s offer of a contract to play for Manchester United and became a footballer instead of an actor, I’m still undecided as to who would have made the most interesting Bond – Christopher Lee or Patrick McGoohan). As Scaramanga, however, Lee exudes serpentine charm and menace in equal measure. I’ve never known Lee not to be magnetic whenever he’s onscreen, and ‘TMwtGG’ is not exception.

 

The film also flirts with topicality in its choice of McGuffin: the “Solex Agitator”, a device that ramps up the efficiency of solar power. The energy crisis was big news as the film went into production, and still in the news at the time of its release. Scaramanga’s designs on the Solex, essentially setting himself up as auctioneer to the super-rich with unlimited energy and its conversion process to electricity up for grabs by the highest bidder, elevates him from mere assassin (albeit one who pulls down a cool million per hit) to the kind of über-villain audiences had by now come to associate with the Bond movies.

The presence of Christopher Lee and the inclusion of a newsworthy subject, however, are all ‘TMwtGG’ has to offer; and the filmmakers seem perversely determined to offset these things by as many stultifying creative decisions as possible. We have mentioned Lulu’s theme song (“the man with the golden guuu-uuu-huuu-uuun”) and Sheriff Pepper’s xenophobia. Let us also consider a ludicrous kung-fu sequence where two schoolgirls beat the shit out of a gang of tough customers (the fact that neither actress seems to have any facility for the martial arts just makes the whole thing even more laughable); an otherwise fine car chase ruined by comedic sound-effects; Britt Ekland’s simpering performance as Mary Goodnight, easily the dippiest Bond girl ever to don a bikini, (particularly annoying since the much more engaging Maud Adams – as Scaramanga’s kept woman Andrea Anders, is cavalierly disposed of); and the painfully unfunny Bond vs midget final scene.

Oh, and the potentially engaging business about the Solex? It comes down to a big laser that blows things up.

 

Towards the end, Scaramanga challenges Bond to a duel, declaring that “it will be a battle of titans”. “There’s a handy four-letter word,” Bond replies, “and you’re full of it.” Watching ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, it’s hard not to feel a certain affinity.

BOND-A-THON: Live and Let Die

With Connery’s return for ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ a strict one-off (at least until he made the non-canon ‘Never Say Never Again’ in 1983), the producers found themselves back where they were after ‘You Only Live Twice’: they needed a new Bond. This time, they avoided the pitfall of casting a male model who’d never acted before. This time they went for someone who not only had twenty-five years experience before the camera, but came complete with a significant fan base courtesy of his hugely popular turn as Simon Templar in the TV series ‘The Saint’.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Roger Moore. Not, however, that he was the first choice. The producers initially approached Clint Eastwood, hot off ‘Dirty Harry’ (its sequel ‘Magnum Force’ was released the same year as ‘Live and Let Die’), who politely declined on the grounds that Bond should be played by a British actor. Clint Eastwood – respect! Julian Glover and Jeremy Brett were considered – and the mind boggles at the idea of the guy who would later essay the definitive Sherlock Holmes (despite what it cost him) playing Bond – before they settled on Roger Moore.

When ‘Live and Let Die’ was shot in 1973, Moore was already in his mid-forties. He’d play the character for another twelve years, ending his tenure as a paunchy and vaguely ridiculous Bond, pushing sixty, in ‘A View to a Kill’. During those dozen years, the franchise would become increasingly bloated, parodic and self-indulgent, with ‘For Your Eyes Only’ (excepting its cringingly embarrassing final scene) representing a back-to-basics for the 007 aesthetic.

Still, ‘Live and Let Die’ – directed by Guy Hamilton; the third of his four Bonds – is a solid first outing for Moore, and a decent action movie to boot. It has its flaws, particularly in its tapestry of ethnically stereotyped villains, but it’s a more cohesive work than ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and, with one exception, doesn’t go haring off into the realms of the stupid as gleefully as the next few productions would.

‘Live and Let Die’ opens with a pre-credits sequence notable for (a) actually having something to do with the rest of the movie and (b) not featuring Bond. Apart from ‘From Russia with Love’ – which kind of features Bond and kind of doesn’t – I think it’s the only pre-credits sequence in the whole saga in which the agent doesn’t appear. What does happen is that several British agents are killed, one at a United Nations conference which is being attended by Kanaga (Yaphet Kotto), the ruler of a Caribbean island called San Monique; one during a stakeout in New Orleans; and one on San Monique itself during a voodoo ceremony.

M turns up at Bond’s apartment (predictably he has female company), gives him a terse brief – Bernard Lee was ill during filming, which perhaps accounts for how succinct the scene is – and it’s off to Harlem for 007 to probe the dealings of a local Mr Big (named, uh, Mr Big) and try to determine the connection with San Monique and Kanaga. Let me mention again that the film was made in 1973. Albert Broccoli was nothing if not a canny popularist and it hadn’t escaped his attention that blaxploitation movies were cleaning up with mainstream audiences. Hence the first third, where Bond gets into it with pimps and pushers against a backdrop of urban decay. ‘Live and Let Die’ gives us some of the least glamorous moments in 007’s entire career. In fact, you’d probably have to fast-forward to Bond’s capture and incarceration at the start of ‘Die Another Day’ to get any grungier. Ladies and gentlemen: Bondsploitation.

When, however, the scene shifts to the Caribbean and then to Louisiana, a more typically Bondian sense of scale comes to the fore, with gliders, light aircraft, speedboats and a wonderfully out-of-place London Routemaster bus being pressganged into the service of high speed chases and wanton destruction. “What are you, boy,” hick sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James) demands after Bond has wreaked havoc the length and breadth of his parish, “some kinda one-man doomsday machine?” There’s a contingent of Bond fans who don’t like Sheriff Pepper (and utterly despair of his reappearance in the next movie), seeing the character as more at home in something like ‘The Cannonball Run’ than a Bond movie. Personally, I like the way his red-faced sweaty bluster, drawling accent and tendency to spit tobacco juice like a gunslinger in a western movie provide a nicely vulgar foil to Bond’s implacable Britishness. It also gives us a stereotypical dumbass white character, which – while not exactly expiating the incipient racism elsewhere – at least begins to redress the balance.

So: we have Roger Moore acquitting himself well, Yaphet Kotto giving us one of the great Bond villains (he manages to be suave, infectiously enthusiastic in his villainy, and completely ruthless – often all at the same time), and some very well staged action scenes. We also have a sympathetic and likeable Bond girl in the enigmatic but vulnerable Solitaire (Jane Seymour), not to mention top-notch supporting villains in Tee Hee (Julius Harris) and the batshit crazy Baron Samedi (Geoffrey Holder). The voodoo aspects of the plot, although revealed as (at least partially) a knowing exploitation by Kanaga and co. of local superstitions, add something different to the formula.

On the minus side, we’re deprived of Q (although the resultant low gadget count paradoxically works in the film’s favour); Paul McCartney’s theme song – with its excruciatingly ungrammatical reference to “this ever-changing world in which we live in” – is fucking horrible; and – as divisive as Sheriff Pepper – Bond’s escape from a crocodile farm. If by some chance you’ve never seen ‘Live and Let Die’ (and I do know several people who’ve never seen a Bond movie outside of the Connery entries) I won’t spoil the silliness for you: just think “jumping the shark” but with crocodiles.

While it’s by no means as egregious a moment as some of the later instalments would trade in, it nevertheless points to what the Moore Bonds would become. And it wouldn’t take them long to dig towards that nadir. The rot started setting in on the very next film.