BOND-A-THON: Licence to Kill

‘Licence to Kill’ presents us with a plethora of firsts and lasts. It’s the first Bond film not to take its title from a work by Ian Fleming (although the script incorporates elements from the novel ‘Live and Let Die’ and the short story ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’), and the first to gain a 15 certificate. It’s the first Bond movie where a previous actor reprises the role of Felix Leiter – David Hedison, who essayed the role in ‘Live and Let Die’. It’s Michael G. Wilson’s first as co-producer, a role he took on after Albert R. Broccoli took ill during filming.

It’s the last to feature Timothy Dalton as Bond, Caroline Bliss as Moneypenny and Robert Brown as M, the last to feature a credits sequence designed by Maurice Binder, the last to be directed by John Glen and the last to be produced by Broccoli. Richard Maibaum co-scripts for the last time, and editor John Grover and cinematographer Alec Mills similarly bow out from the franchise.

‘Licence to Kill’ feels like it ought to be an autumnal, elegiac work. Instead, it’s full throttle action thriller, with a viciousness not seen since the early days of Connery and a hard-edged depiction of 007. When those who dislike the Dalton films complain that they don’t feel like Bond movies, it’s ‘Licence to Kill’ they point to specifically. There’s no uber-villain, merely a Colombian drug lord. There’s no world-threatening scheme, just a clever means of transporting cocaine. There’s no briefing from M – Bond goes renegade for personal reasons. Gadgets are kept to an absolute minimum, although – ironically – Q (Desmond Llewellyn) gets his most expansive role. Likewise, the Bond girls are (in different ways) survivors rather than wallflowers. And the pre-credits sequence acts as a prologue to the film proper rather than being a show reel for the stunts team.

Let’s start with this sequence. Bond and Leiter are en route to the latter’s wedding, Bond on best man duties, when the Coast Guard inform Leiter that a drug baron he’s been investigating, Sanchez (Robert Davi), is on American soil and therefore arrestable. Sanchez has made a risky incursion in order to wipe out a rival who’s stolen his girl, the sultry Lupe Lamora (Talisa Soto). Leiter, seemingly forgetting the impending nuptials, goes tearing off in hot pursuit, inviting Bond along in an observational capacity only. Predictably, Bond doesn’t do observation and when it seems like Sanchez is about to fly out of US airspace, Bond engages in a dangerous in a dangerous stunt with a helicopter to put paid to Sanchez’s plans. This done, the pair of them parachute out and Leiter gets to the church on time, if rather dramatically. Roll opening credits. 

The curtain-raiser over and done with, Act One delivers some nasty business: Sanchez pulls off an escape, his goons kill Leiter’s bride-of-a-few-hours and dump Leiter himself in a shark pit. Bond, on his way to the airport and in something of a maudlin mood after a chance remark at the reception puts him in mind of the late Teresa Bond, nee di Vicenzo, hears of the escape and heads back to Leiter’s home on an instinct. Here he finds Leiter in a body bag, severely lacerated and barely alive. Bond’s mood changes from maudlin to righteously pissed off and he goes out for revenge.

Working his way through Sanchez’s chain of associates, from corrupt DEA official Ed Kilifer (Everett McGill) to marine research head honcho Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe), Bond’s blunt tactics attract the attention of Leiter’s CIA colleagues who haul him in for a little chat. M is in on the act and gives 007 a royal bollocking for neglecting an assignment. After a terse exchange, Bond effectively resigns, gives the CIA goons the slip and goes renegade, his licence to kill revoked. (The film originally went into production as ‘Licence Revoked’, but the title was changed after doubts that audiences wouldn’t know what “revoked” meant. This is more than a little bit sad.)

En route to his final confrontation with Sanchez and the drug lord’s borderline psychotic protégé Dario (Benicio del Toro in only his second film role), Bond enlists the help of Leiter’s contact, pilot Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), introduced in a splendid scene in a dockside bar where she deters an aggressor by ramming the business end of a double-barrelled shotgun in his groin, holds her own in a barroom brawl and blows a hole in the wall to facilitate a quick exit. Pam is tough, resourceful, saves Bond’s ass at one point and also looks glamorous as all hell. And kudos to Wilson and Maibaum for a script that doesn’t compel her to do something stupid or have to get rescued in the final reel. Lowell is definitely one of my all time favourite Bond girls and her contribution to the canon still remains undervalued.

Lupe Lamora, on the other hand, is cut from the same cloth as Domino in ‘Thunderball’ or Andrea Anders in ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’: the kept woman of a dangerous antagonist who sees Bond as her way out of an otherwise insoluble situation.

Davi plays Sanchez for what he is, a ruthless businessman whose business just happens to be narcotics; it’s a performance as far removed from the cartoon villainy of most Bond villains as it’s possible to get. Del Toro, however, doesn’t get to do much more than sneer and strike macho poses – there’s certainly little hint of what he would go on to – but the suggestion of a homoerotic subtext between Sanchez and Dario is something of a throwback to the casual homophobia of ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and the one unfortunate element in a film that otherwise ranks very high in my personal 007 league table.

The action sequences are impressive, particularly Sanchez’s rescue from an armed convoy, staged to great effect along the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys. Things do get a little over the top towards the end, though, with Kenworth tanker trucks popping wheelies or tilting to drive on one set of wheels to dodge a missile.

But on the whole, ‘Licence to Kill’ works very well as a darker, edgier approach to Bond, shorn of corny one-liners and the first entry in the franchise for fucking ages not to end with some personality-challenged bit of eye-candy gasping “oh, James”. This alone earns it kudos.

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BOND-A-THON: The Living Daylights

There are quite a few people who don’t have much time for Timothy Dalton’s short-lived tenure as 007. Full disclosure: I’m a big fan of Dalton’s work in the franchise and I consider it a damned shame that he didn’t go on to develop the role. Another decade of Dalton would have at least prevented the Pierce Brosnan titles and that alone would have been cause for celebration.

The most commonly cited criticism against Dalton is that his two outings don’t feel like Bond movies. That’s debatable for ‘License to Kill’ – and I’ll have that debate in about ten days time when I review it – but I just don’t see where said criticism can be levelled against ‘The Living Daylights’. If ever a cinematic outing for Ian Fleming’s immortal creation had “Bond movie” written all over it, it’s ‘The Living Daylights’.

Like ‘For Your Eyes Only’, ‘Octopussy’ and ‘A View to a Kill’, it takes its title from one of Fleming’s short stories. Unlike ‘AVtaK’ – and to a considerably greater extent than ‘FYEO’ and ‘Octopussy’ – it retains a fidelity to the source material that hadn’t been seen in a Bond movie since, arguably, ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. Fleming’s story – published as part of a slim posthumous collection – has Bond contracted to the dirty job of gunning down a Russian sniper in order to safeguard a defector. Forced to work with an obsequious head of station, and discovering the sniper to be an attractive woman posing as a cellist, Bond disobeys orders and merely wounds the girl instead of shooting to kill and the story ends with his career in the balance as his superior insists on reporting him.

With a few tweaks to update it from the early 60s to the mid-80s (but with the whole Cold War vibe still very much in evidence), the short story provides pretty much the entire first act of the movie as Bond (Dalton) finds himself in conflict with jobsworth Saunders (Thomas Wheatley) during the extradition of the defecting General Koskov (Jeroen Krabbe). At this point, Richard Maibaum and Michael G Wilson’s script develops in its own direction as Koskov is promptly re-appropriated by one-man-army Necros (Andreas Wisnieski), to the abject humiliation of M15 – “our first major coup in years” as a disgruntled M (Robert Brown) puts it, in tacit admission that Britain is no longer a key player on the world political stage.

Koskov’s snatch-back is assumed to have been authorised by General Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies) and M instructs Bond to terminate him. This is the second affront against British intelligence, following the murder of two Double-O operatives during a training exercise on Gibraltar. (Does all this seem a bit harder and more cynical than the last few outings? Hell yeah, baby!) Bond reluctantly accepts the mission, but first pursues his own investigation by tracking down the glamorous sniper – cellist Kara Milovy (Maryam d’Abo) – whom he wounded but refused to gun down earlier.

Blithely posing as a friend of Koskov’s, with whom he has discovered she is involved, Bond persuades Kara to leave the Eastern bloc with him (prompting an ice-bound chase scene that ends with the rather improbable use of Kara’s cello case and her beloved Stradivarius taking a bullet) as he tracks down Pushkin and discovers that Koskov’s motives are becoming more and more deceitful.

The Bond entries I enjoy the most are those that (a) shitcan the juvenile humour in favour of a harder edge, and (b) feature some actual espionage. It’s a point I’ve made before – it’s my blog and I’ll repeat myself if I want to – but far too many Bond movies forget that their protagonist is a spy. Far too many reveal the megalomaniac villain’s identity and entirely tip the audience off to their plans for world domination way in advance of the halfway mark. The formula thus becomes: M gives Bond a briefing, impressing upon him that something nefarious is afoot and the fate of the free world is in his hands; an early lead tips Bond off to a billionaire industrialist/scientist/jeweler/media mogul [delete as applicable]; Bond rolls up at a casino frequented by said interchangeable bad guy, announces himself as “Bond, James Bond” (way to go, dude; blow that cover!) and then fleeces him at cards or dice and/or sleeps with his girlfriend. Villain dude spends Act Two trying to kill Bond. Bond blows his fully-kitted out secret base to shit in Act Three. This, friends and neighbours, is not spying. This, frankly, is the kind of stuff that would have George Smiley or Harry Palmer laughing their socks off before they pour another cup of tea, spend forty-eight hours studying their nemeses’ files, then pull off a brilliant coup de theatre based entirely on intelligence, fieldcraft and patient enterprise and not even the hint of an explosion or a car chase.

‘The Living Daylights’ lets Bond do some spying. It leaves him in the dark for a while vis-à-vis the plethora of double- and triple-crosses playing out in the background. It keeps him on his feet and tests his wits. These are all positive attributes. And it manages these things while remembering to dish up some big-budget action: the ballsy Gibraltar pre-credits sequence in which Bond’s first bit of hand-to-hand sees him headbutt an antagonist; the aforementioned wintry chase scene involving some ‘Goldfinger’-like modifications to a cool-as-fuck Aston Martin; Bond hooking up with some Mujahideen freedom fighters (essentially making this the ‘Rambo III’ of Bond movies; oh, how the political landscape has changed!) to attack a Russian air force base; and Bond’s vertiginous duel with Necros inside (and outside) a military aircraft with a ticking bomb on board.

John Glen, in his fourth consecutive spell in the director’s chair, makes amends for the tired, sloppy and horribly labored ‘AVtaK’. Maibaum and Wilson invest their script with a seriousness (by Bondian standards, anyway) that ruefully regrets the dumb one-liners and eye-rolling tomfoolery of much of the Moore years. Dalton plays it straight, giving his characterization of Bond a sense of purpose and a hint of ruthlessness that recalls the Bond of the novels.

On the minus side, however, the globe-trotting is excessive (Czechoslovakia, Austria, Tangier, Afghanistan, Bond hopping between locations as if attached to a globe-spanning bungee cord), the plot threatens to get a little too labyrinthine at times, and the film juggles its plethora of villains – including Joe Don Baker as an arms dealer with a war-games fetish – as if indecisive as to which one is 007’s actual nemesis. The final confrontation thus comes as something of an anti-climax, particularly after the extended Bond-goes-jihad/airbase-gets-blown-to-hell/bomb-on-a-plane set-piece. The ushering in of a new Miss Moneypenny is also something of a let-down: no disrespect to Caroline Bliss – she’s easy on the eye and brings an admixture of playfulness and intelligence to the part – but (a) it was never going to be easy stepping into Lois Maxwell’s shoes (Maxwell had been, until ‘AVtaK’, the only person to appear in every official Bond movie); and (b) the script gives her absolutely bugger all to work with. Which is shame, given how effectively Maibaum and Wilson had striven to introduce a new Bond.

The jury’s still out, as far as I’m concerned, on Maryam d’Abo as a Bond girl. Kudos to all concerned for breaking with tradition and not only making Kara integral to the plot rather than just window dressing but presenting her as a genuine romantic heroine. A pawn first in Koskov’s machinations and then equally duped by Bond as he drags her along in his pursuit of the defector, Kara is for all intents and purposes the innocent betrayed. Maybe this accounts for d’Abo’s unfailingly annoying repertoire: frightened mouse, fluffy bunny, kitten with its claws out, and deer wondering what those two rapidly approaching luminescent orbs are. And before the film’s out the otherwise commendable script pulls a barrel-scraping rehash of the last act reduce-the-heroine-to-brainless-bimbo volte face that scuppered Jill St John’s character in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and Barbara Bach’s in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’.

Perhaps the most telling thing about ‘The Living Daylights’ is the post-credits assurance that “James Bond will return”. That’s all it says. For the first time since ‘Dr No’, there’s no teaser of the next film’s title. It set a trend; no Bond movie since has trailed it’s successor’s title. There’s a sense here of the producers hedging their bets. They needn’t have worried; pulling in $191million from a $40million budget, Bond was still box office. He’d be back.

ADDENDUM: Since I went live with this review, it's been pointed out to me that 'A View to a Kill' was actually the first Bond movie not to trailer the next film's title. My bad. I'd ejected the disc as soon as the credits rolled on 'AVtaK' and taken myself off to a public house to wash the memory of the film away. The paragraph of strikethrough above essentially leaves this review somewhat unconcluded. Ah, well, them's the breaks. The Agitation of the Mind will return ...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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