The Seventies Bond - In Depth Critiques
chrisno1
LondonPosts: 3,234MI6 Agent
007 on screen from 1971 - 1979:
This series follows my comments on Timothy Dalton's era
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/36656/timothy-daltons-bond-in-depth-critiques/
and my 2008 review series
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/31479/two-weeks-of-bondage-reviews/
Diamonds Are Forever
It’s interesting looking back on Diamonds Are Forever to witness the change in James Bond, Britain’s foremost secret agent. Most noticeably, under the restored guise of Sean Connery, he has aged a little. That isn’t to say he lacks charm or good looks, but he’s a little grizzled at the chops and his toupee doesn’t fit quite as smoothly as it did in the mid-sixties. He’s certainly gained some weight and the first smatterings of grey hair are tickling his ears. More importantly, what was once the character’s open, defiant ridicule of his superiors – the attempt to retain his Beretta, the questioning of his orders, the mischief at Q-Branch, the anger at being rendered impotent to save his future wife – has turned into a more equable, dare I say it, respectful, almost jovial tone. It is now M who is disdainful of Bond: “It’s good to see there’s a subject you’re not an expert on” he crows.
If Bond is urbane during his early exchanges with his boss, he’s positively laid back when confronting the villains. While OO7 has always seemed one small step ahead of his opponents, he takes that to extremes in this movie. Infiltrating secret laboratories and hideouts no longer appears to be life and death struggles accompanied by car chases, laser torture and ninja warriors. There were much more sedate affairs on offer in 1971. Certainly there is a beautifully tense and cinematically imposing moment as Bond winches his way to the top of the Whyte House Hotel during a midnight clamber about the Las Vegas skyline, but the eventual confrontation with his nemesis is hardly the stuff to chill your blood, made all the more disappointing by the fact he was so ruthlessly pursuing Ernst Stavro Blofeld during the eerily mysterious pre-title sequence.
But it isn’t only Bond’s looks and attitude that has changed. The paraphernalia surrounding him has altered too. Bond’s journey around the city of casinos is for the most part played for laughs: a funeral parlour of the most sinister kind, a night on the craps table, seducing a good-time girl, swapping diamonds among the bizarre freak show that is the Circus Circus, even fleeing a desert bound research centre; all these escapades have an undercurrent of camp, dark humour, accompanied by even blacker, dead-pan one liners. This James Bond even has time to laugh at himself: having engaged in some vicious fisticuffs in Amsterdam, Bond pretends the victim’s corpse is his own; informed by the ditsy heroine “You’ve just killed James Bond!” he double takes, “It just proves nobody’s indestructible.”
This shift in emphasis can be traced back to the relative failure of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, George Lazenby’s one outing as OO7. While the film made profit, its returns took far longer to accumulate, partly due to the slow box-office in America. Deciding the franchise was best served financially by ensuring a strong showing stateside, the producers opted to ‘Americanize’ James Bond. This meant they chose not only to base the next outing almost wholly in the USA, but also to supply a new ‘American Bond’. After many screen tests, the lucky actor was John Gavin; not a household name, but a good looking competent performer with enough big screen experience not to be phased by the histrionics surrounding any ensuing fame. Having chosen their Bond, it was decided (partly for tax reasons) to film the majority of the movie in the states as well. The team had never actually been to the United States, except for some minor location shots for Goldfinger, and Broccoli and Saltzman were well aware that by making their next film there, they could restart the James Bond juggernaut in earnest.
Subsequently, the producers chose to adapt Fleming’s most American novel, Diamonds Are Forever, but the hackneyed gangsters-come-wild-west plot wasn’t suitable for the cinema. The best bits of the novel were probably too horrific to attempt to portray on screen and like all Fleming’s work it is relatively humourless. Instead the producers elected for a fresh storyline, intending to pay tribute to Goldfinger, their first big American success, by making the main villain his twin brother. Unfortunately Richard Maibaum’s original script attempts simply didn’t cut it. Maibaum was something of an Anglophile. His replacement, Tom Mankiewicz, was not, and it is Mankiewicz who brings the American theme, its locations and characters to life.
The plot has Blofeld’s revitalized SPECTRE launching a space borne laser which has the ability to destroy military installations. He uses it not for peace, but for blackmail, inciting a bidding war with the prize being total nuclear supremacy. This is effectively a stand-off between SPECTRE, the USA and the USSR and as such, James Bond’s involvement is hardly a requirement. He happened to fortuitously start at ground level and has climbed this pyramid of events to its apex, going well past his original operational remit. The script doesn’t need a British Bond; it merely needs someone to inhabit his suit, as Blofeld says: “Your pitiful little island hasn’t even been threatened.”
Moreover all the intrigue comes not from the confusing narrative but from the people that surround James Bond and they are, almost to a man, a nasty, cynical bunch of Americans who could have easily grown out of the cesspit of the Las Vegas underworld. There is nothing particularly exotic about this adventure. Even the brief sojourn to Amsterdam involves Bond contacting a brassy American. The days of bikini clad nymphs wading through water, beautiful Russian cipher experts and doll-like Japanese heroines seem all to be forgotten.
In fairness, Fleming’s novel is completely American as well and it’s worth noting that while Maibaum jettisoned much of the book, Mankiewicz brought many of the original story’s incidents back, although not necessarily in context or order. What both book and film do get right is the sense of tawdriness and opportunistic desperation that pervades Las Vegas. Everyone is out for a piece of something bigger and the ultimate price for many of them isn’t bankruptcy, it’s death. Among the bright lights of the city’s famous Strip and its neon lit casinos, Bond strides like an angel, clad in white, among the dark characters who assail him. The havoc he wreaks is more akin to an agent of destruction and it is during the Vegas interludes that Sean Connery takes on more of the devil-may-care attitude we are used to – seducing the ladies, roughing up the baddies, roughing up the ladies, putting one over the straitlaced CIA and wrecking lots of cars.
To that end, the Las Vegas locations are the perfect accompaniment to this brand of espionage. They seem to encapsulate the ridiculousness of the luxury among the grime of James Bond’s profession. He stays in gorgeously designed bedroom suites. He is distracted everywhere by scantily clad women. He wins at craps. He loses the blessed diamonds. He fights a pair of deadly gymnasts at a hilltop retreat fit for a king. He steals a moon buggy and careers around the desert pursued by trikes. The star looks, throughout it all, positively unruffled. One wonders how John Gavin would have fared if he’d needed to deal with this material.
But of course he didn’t, for the coup to Diamonds Are Forever, the reason why it was instantly loved by many critics and fans, is one simple factor: Connery was back. It took a lot of money to get him, but the gamble was worth it. Truth be told, once Connery’s name was above the title, the gamble ceased to be such; the film was always going to be an odds-on box office smash. But even with the star in place, the feeling pervades that something new is afoot.
The movie begins in Japan. This may be an attempt to wipe away the memory of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, to leave it as a standalone film, which over the years it pretty much has become, and continue the series where You Only Live Twice left off. Bond is violently seeking Ernst Stavro Blofeld, although exactly why isn’t made clear, which leaves it open to interpretation: is he seeking revenge for the death of his wife or is he hunting down the villain after his attempt to start World War Three? Blofeld is clearly taking him seriously and is paying volunteers to undergo reconstructive plastic surgery to emerge as his double. This is an outlandish premise that serves very little purpose to the story, other than to provide, as Blofeld so succinctly puts it, “a mock heroic gesture.” None the less it does introduce the theme of deception, for nothing is what it appears to be in Diamonds Are Forever.
Early on a dentist is shown to be, in reality, a diamond thief, the first link in a long chain. Aged spinsters, dreadful comedians, crematorium managers, corpses and vanished multimillionaires are just a few of the people whose external façade hides a different life all together. Add to that a curious shape-changing circus act, an operations centre disguised as an oil rig, a fake moonscape being filmed for supposedly fake newsreel footage, a heroine who changes sides as often as her hair colour and even James Bond impersonating the smuggler Peter Franks by using false fingerprints, and you can see that life is not to be taken at face value.
Curiously it is the strange homosexual killers Wint and Kidd who, as portrayed by Bruce Glover and Putter Smith, carry most of the honest realism and earthiness. They share a nice line in black humour but, like their literary namesakes, these two assassins are deadly and wholeheartedly menacing. Like our man Bond, they are unruffled by failure and unexcited by success. They remain aloof to the main action, while clearly part of it, and enact a sinister dance of death around OO7, never quite succeeding to eliminate their quarry, but ably murdering all others who cross their path. Unlike Blofeld their passionless demeanour carries much weight of terror, even down to the ordinary drabness of their wardrobe. To them, the fulfillment of a contract is all: “If at first you don’t succeed – Try, try again” they trill. Even after their employer has met his end, they continue their mission, and confront Bond in an amusingly nasty coda aboard the QE2.
Yet the fire and brimstone to which the killers succumb is not indicative of the film. Yes, the pre-title teaser is tough and Bond is possibly at his most ruthless ever during these brief scenes; yes, there is a well-choreographed and satisfyingly realistic fight in an elevator; yes, Wint and Kidd deal death with scorpions and canals; and yes, Bond is almost incinerated in a coffin; but these incidents are in the first twenty five minutes of the telling and the remaining action seems to be played for laughs. Take Bond’s confrontation with the female bodyguards Bambi and Thumper. This should have been an opportunity for Bond and two physically statuesque women to engage in some serious fisticuffs, but in Guy Hamilton’s soft directional hands it is an almost playful romp and Bond subdues them in a swimming pool as if they are naughty children.
Ditto the two long and inconsequential chases. The moon buggy sequence is simply bizarre; there is no better word to describe it. It lacks tension. The action is extremely slow and repetitive. Even John Barry, whose incidental score is once again marvelous, struggles with this one and resorts to a series of jittery jingles that highlight the farcical nature of the scene. The car chase in Las Vegas suffers from the same fate and Barry doesn’t even bother to score this one. There is a monumentally bad edit during the climatic two-wheeled stunt which calls into question the capabilities of Hamilton’s editors, Bert Bates and John W. Holmes, who otherwise do sterling but unimaginative work. The chase is most interesting now for offering us a foretaste of Tom Mankiezicz’s creation Sheriff J.W. Pepper, for this county clown and the next one [in Live and Let Die] are interchangeable.
Despite the idiocy, there are moments to hold your breath: the aforementioned coffin roasting, elevator fight and climb up the Whyte House to name three, but they are few and far between. There may be underlying adult themes and risqué dialogue, but there is also a lot of wholesome clean fun going on here, which curiously is not symptomatic of American cinema in the early seventies. It is however quite redolent of US television. One thinks the producers were gauging their audience very carefully. Indeed their lead actress was better known for her occasional ‘guest star’ slots in TV programs like ‘Batman’ than she was for her movie roles.
For all the faults inherent in Diamonds Are Forever, I do have a huge soft spot for the heroine Tiffany Case, as created by Jill St John. Alternately sassy and scared, clued up and clueless, she is also sexy, independent and single minded. Ultimately, she really wants the diamonds, or at least the riches they represent, and is quite prepared to use her feminine wiles to get them. St John is a good comedic actress and she recognizes the potential in her character’s lines. She gives Tiffany an edge missing from most Bond Girls. When she spars with Connery you can almost see the screen crackle. It is disappointing she has little to do towards the climax of the film and becomes a conventional dumb bimbo in a bikini. This is an American invention; all the heroines in the previous six movies added depth to their characters as the films progressed, either by motives or actions; Tiffany regresses to stereotype. She seems in dire need of rescuing from her own foolishness rather than her enemies. Having said that, Jill St John looks fabulous in bikinis – and just about everything else she wears or almost wears – and I’m all for a woman looking fabulous.
Likewise Lana Wood makes an instant and unforgettable impression as the party girl Plenty O’Toole, who snares Bond at the casino and tempts him with her more than ample charms. She’s barely on screen for five minutes, but she inhabits the part as easily as the dress slips off her shoulders. Her role was curtailed in the editing room, though Plenty’s fall from grace couldn’t be more unexpected and is one of the movie’s highlights.
It would be nice to say that Charles Gray makes an effective Blofeld, but he doesn’t. He lacks the brooding, muscular menace of Telly Savalas and is armed with no more than a doppelganger and an increasingly slick array of caustic quips. There’s an air of calm sophistication about him but that doesn’t transfer easily to villainy, you almost expect him to slip on a smoking jacket, twirl his cigarette holder and pour a gin sling while he dishes out death. His flight from the penthouse hideaway occurs in hideous, unsettling drag and one can’t help feeling Gray has turned into something of a pantomime villain.
As Bond’s on hire help, Norman Burton makes little or no impression as Felix Leiter and country and western singer Jimmy Dean gives an able, but distinctly one-note performance as the Howard Hughes-esque Willard Whyte. Latterly Desmond Llewellyn’s Q drops in to provide more gags. So the girls win the acting stakes, which is probably fair enough given the glossy glamour of the primary setting.
For it is really Las Vegas which ultimately lends its character to Diamonds Are Forever. Fleming was fascinated by the town and the producers similarly so. While previous movies showed an audience some decorous foreign locations, they tended to ignore most of the genuine tourist sites. Not so here: the scenes along Amsterdam’s canals include lingering shots of the ‘Skinny’ Bridge, Bond lands at the new space-age looking Los Angeles airport and the rest of the film trips around the forest of casinos and hotels in the gambling capital of the world. It’s a free advertisement – indeed I remember visiting Vegas with my family in 1980 and being amazed to discover all the casinos and hotels you saw in the movie were really there! The shine of all those lights rubs off on Ted Moore, who lights the film effectively, and Ken Adam, who presents another set of outrageous interiors that sparkle and glisten with the power and sleaze of their surroundings.
John Barry provides a stupendous soundtrack which features signature notes for every character and wallows in the flashy show-off world of Las Vegas. He hasn’t forgotten either that evil can be beautiful and saves one of his best moments for the unveiling of the satellite’s laser shield, a shower of strings to accompany the diamonds. The theme song is suitably haunting.
There are certainly many things to admire about the film, but the roots of its problems are at its helm. Guy Hamilton, who so ably managed Goldfinger, does only adequate work here. He isn’t over interested in the action and often forsakes thrills for laughs. He is rather good at building suspense, but what tight moments there are dissipate unsatisfactorily instead of reaching an explosive climax. He seems even less concerned with the actors and is quite happy to let them play at being fools. As the film progresses it gets more and more amusing and less and less tense, so much so that the eventual conclusion is slow and rather flat. The scene ends abruptly and the audience doesn’t even know if Blofeld has been killed. All in all a very lacklustre finish.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh. We should be thankful Sean Connery returned for what was expected to be his last hurrah. Had he not, the franchise might well have taken another direction all together. As it stands, Diamonds Are Forever is an entertaining and diverting two hours. It doesn’t stand as one of the best examples of Bond-age, but it has many of the prime ingredients for the soup of success, and it set a new template for Eon Productions, one of picture postcard glamour and diffusive wit, ultimately a template that would continue to serve them well throughout the seventies.
This series follows my comments on Timothy Dalton's era
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/36656/timothy-daltons-bond-in-depth-critiques/
and my 2008 review series
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/31479/two-weeks-of-bondage-reviews/
Diamonds Are Forever
It’s interesting looking back on Diamonds Are Forever to witness the change in James Bond, Britain’s foremost secret agent. Most noticeably, under the restored guise of Sean Connery, he has aged a little. That isn’t to say he lacks charm or good looks, but he’s a little grizzled at the chops and his toupee doesn’t fit quite as smoothly as it did in the mid-sixties. He’s certainly gained some weight and the first smatterings of grey hair are tickling his ears. More importantly, what was once the character’s open, defiant ridicule of his superiors – the attempt to retain his Beretta, the questioning of his orders, the mischief at Q-Branch, the anger at being rendered impotent to save his future wife – has turned into a more equable, dare I say it, respectful, almost jovial tone. It is now M who is disdainful of Bond: “It’s good to see there’s a subject you’re not an expert on” he crows.
If Bond is urbane during his early exchanges with his boss, he’s positively laid back when confronting the villains. While OO7 has always seemed one small step ahead of his opponents, he takes that to extremes in this movie. Infiltrating secret laboratories and hideouts no longer appears to be life and death struggles accompanied by car chases, laser torture and ninja warriors. There were much more sedate affairs on offer in 1971. Certainly there is a beautifully tense and cinematically imposing moment as Bond winches his way to the top of the Whyte House Hotel during a midnight clamber about the Las Vegas skyline, but the eventual confrontation with his nemesis is hardly the stuff to chill your blood, made all the more disappointing by the fact he was so ruthlessly pursuing Ernst Stavro Blofeld during the eerily mysterious pre-title sequence.
But it isn’t only Bond’s looks and attitude that has changed. The paraphernalia surrounding him has altered too. Bond’s journey around the city of casinos is for the most part played for laughs: a funeral parlour of the most sinister kind, a night on the craps table, seducing a good-time girl, swapping diamonds among the bizarre freak show that is the Circus Circus, even fleeing a desert bound research centre; all these escapades have an undercurrent of camp, dark humour, accompanied by even blacker, dead-pan one liners. This James Bond even has time to laugh at himself: having engaged in some vicious fisticuffs in Amsterdam, Bond pretends the victim’s corpse is his own; informed by the ditsy heroine “You’ve just killed James Bond!” he double takes, “It just proves nobody’s indestructible.”
This shift in emphasis can be traced back to the relative failure of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, George Lazenby’s one outing as OO7. While the film made profit, its returns took far longer to accumulate, partly due to the slow box-office in America. Deciding the franchise was best served financially by ensuring a strong showing stateside, the producers opted to ‘Americanize’ James Bond. This meant they chose not only to base the next outing almost wholly in the USA, but also to supply a new ‘American Bond’. After many screen tests, the lucky actor was John Gavin; not a household name, but a good looking competent performer with enough big screen experience not to be phased by the histrionics surrounding any ensuing fame. Having chosen their Bond, it was decided (partly for tax reasons) to film the majority of the movie in the states as well. The team had never actually been to the United States, except for some minor location shots for Goldfinger, and Broccoli and Saltzman were well aware that by making their next film there, they could restart the James Bond juggernaut in earnest.
Subsequently, the producers chose to adapt Fleming’s most American novel, Diamonds Are Forever, but the hackneyed gangsters-come-wild-west plot wasn’t suitable for the cinema. The best bits of the novel were probably too horrific to attempt to portray on screen and like all Fleming’s work it is relatively humourless. Instead the producers elected for a fresh storyline, intending to pay tribute to Goldfinger, their first big American success, by making the main villain his twin brother. Unfortunately Richard Maibaum’s original script attempts simply didn’t cut it. Maibaum was something of an Anglophile. His replacement, Tom Mankiewicz, was not, and it is Mankiewicz who brings the American theme, its locations and characters to life.
The plot has Blofeld’s revitalized SPECTRE launching a space borne laser which has the ability to destroy military installations. He uses it not for peace, but for blackmail, inciting a bidding war with the prize being total nuclear supremacy. This is effectively a stand-off between SPECTRE, the USA and the USSR and as such, James Bond’s involvement is hardly a requirement. He happened to fortuitously start at ground level and has climbed this pyramid of events to its apex, going well past his original operational remit. The script doesn’t need a British Bond; it merely needs someone to inhabit his suit, as Blofeld says: “Your pitiful little island hasn’t even been threatened.”
Moreover all the intrigue comes not from the confusing narrative but from the people that surround James Bond and they are, almost to a man, a nasty, cynical bunch of Americans who could have easily grown out of the cesspit of the Las Vegas underworld. There is nothing particularly exotic about this adventure. Even the brief sojourn to Amsterdam involves Bond contacting a brassy American. The days of bikini clad nymphs wading through water, beautiful Russian cipher experts and doll-like Japanese heroines seem all to be forgotten.
In fairness, Fleming’s novel is completely American as well and it’s worth noting that while Maibaum jettisoned much of the book, Mankiewicz brought many of the original story’s incidents back, although not necessarily in context or order. What both book and film do get right is the sense of tawdriness and opportunistic desperation that pervades Las Vegas. Everyone is out for a piece of something bigger and the ultimate price for many of them isn’t bankruptcy, it’s death. Among the bright lights of the city’s famous Strip and its neon lit casinos, Bond strides like an angel, clad in white, among the dark characters who assail him. The havoc he wreaks is more akin to an agent of destruction and it is during the Vegas interludes that Sean Connery takes on more of the devil-may-care attitude we are used to – seducing the ladies, roughing up the baddies, roughing up the ladies, putting one over the straitlaced CIA and wrecking lots of cars.
To that end, the Las Vegas locations are the perfect accompaniment to this brand of espionage. They seem to encapsulate the ridiculousness of the luxury among the grime of James Bond’s profession. He stays in gorgeously designed bedroom suites. He is distracted everywhere by scantily clad women. He wins at craps. He loses the blessed diamonds. He fights a pair of deadly gymnasts at a hilltop retreat fit for a king. He steals a moon buggy and careers around the desert pursued by trikes. The star looks, throughout it all, positively unruffled. One wonders how John Gavin would have fared if he’d needed to deal with this material.
But of course he didn’t, for the coup to Diamonds Are Forever, the reason why it was instantly loved by many critics and fans, is one simple factor: Connery was back. It took a lot of money to get him, but the gamble was worth it. Truth be told, once Connery’s name was above the title, the gamble ceased to be such; the film was always going to be an odds-on box office smash. But even with the star in place, the feeling pervades that something new is afoot.
The movie begins in Japan. This may be an attempt to wipe away the memory of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, to leave it as a standalone film, which over the years it pretty much has become, and continue the series where You Only Live Twice left off. Bond is violently seeking Ernst Stavro Blofeld, although exactly why isn’t made clear, which leaves it open to interpretation: is he seeking revenge for the death of his wife or is he hunting down the villain after his attempt to start World War Three? Blofeld is clearly taking him seriously and is paying volunteers to undergo reconstructive plastic surgery to emerge as his double. This is an outlandish premise that serves very little purpose to the story, other than to provide, as Blofeld so succinctly puts it, “a mock heroic gesture.” None the less it does introduce the theme of deception, for nothing is what it appears to be in Diamonds Are Forever.
Early on a dentist is shown to be, in reality, a diamond thief, the first link in a long chain. Aged spinsters, dreadful comedians, crematorium managers, corpses and vanished multimillionaires are just a few of the people whose external façade hides a different life all together. Add to that a curious shape-changing circus act, an operations centre disguised as an oil rig, a fake moonscape being filmed for supposedly fake newsreel footage, a heroine who changes sides as often as her hair colour and even James Bond impersonating the smuggler Peter Franks by using false fingerprints, and you can see that life is not to be taken at face value.
Curiously it is the strange homosexual killers Wint and Kidd who, as portrayed by Bruce Glover and Putter Smith, carry most of the honest realism and earthiness. They share a nice line in black humour but, like their literary namesakes, these two assassins are deadly and wholeheartedly menacing. Like our man Bond, they are unruffled by failure and unexcited by success. They remain aloof to the main action, while clearly part of it, and enact a sinister dance of death around OO7, never quite succeeding to eliminate their quarry, but ably murdering all others who cross their path. Unlike Blofeld their passionless demeanour carries much weight of terror, even down to the ordinary drabness of their wardrobe. To them, the fulfillment of a contract is all: “If at first you don’t succeed – Try, try again” they trill. Even after their employer has met his end, they continue their mission, and confront Bond in an amusingly nasty coda aboard the QE2.
Yet the fire and brimstone to which the killers succumb is not indicative of the film. Yes, the pre-title teaser is tough and Bond is possibly at his most ruthless ever during these brief scenes; yes, there is a well-choreographed and satisfyingly realistic fight in an elevator; yes, Wint and Kidd deal death with scorpions and canals; and yes, Bond is almost incinerated in a coffin; but these incidents are in the first twenty five minutes of the telling and the remaining action seems to be played for laughs. Take Bond’s confrontation with the female bodyguards Bambi and Thumper. This should have been an opportunity for Bond and two physically statuesque women to engage in some serious fisticuffs, but in Guy Hamilton’s soft directional hands it is an almost playful romp and Bond subdues them in a swimming pool as if they are naughty children.
Ditto the two long and inconsequential chases. The moon buggy sequence is simply bizarre; there is no better word to describe it. It lacks tension. The action is extremely slow and repetitive. Even John Barry, whose incidental score is once again marvelous, struggles with this one and resorts to a series of jittery jingles that highlight the farcical nature of the scene. The car chase in Las Vegas suffers from the same fate and Barry doesn’t even bother to score this one. There is a monumentally bad edit during the climatic two-wheeled stunt which calls into question the capabilities of Hamilton’s editors, Bert Bates and John W. Holmes, who otherwise do sterling but unimaginative work. The chase is most interesting now for offering us a foretaste of Tom Mankiezicz’s creation Sheriff J.W. Pepper, for this county clown and the next one [in Live and Let Die] are interchangeable.
Despite the idiocy, there are moments to hold your breath: the aforementioned coffin roasting, elevator fight and climb up the Whyte House to name three, but they are few and far between. There may be underlying adult themes and risqué dialogue, but there is also a lot of wholesome clean fun going on here, which curiously is not symptomatic of American cinema in the early seventies. It is however quite redolent of US television. One thinks the producers were gauging their audience very carefully. Indeed their lead actress was better known for her occasional ‘guest star’ slots in TV programs like ‘Batman’ than she was for her movie roles.
For all the faults inherent in Diamonds Are Forever, I do have a huge soft spot for the heroine Tiffany Case, as created by Jill St John. Alternately sassy and scared, clued up and clueless, she is also sexy, independent and single minded. Ultimately, she really wants the diamonds, or at least the riches they represent, and is quite prepared to use her feminine wiles to get them. St John is a good comedic actress and she recognizes the potential in her character’s lines. She gives Tiffany an edge missing from most Bond Girls. When she spars with Connery you can almost see the screen crackle. It is disappointing she has little to do towards the climax of the film and becomes a conventional dumb bimbo in a bikini. This is an American invention; all the heroines in the previous six movies added depth to their characters as the films progressed, either by motives or actions; Tiffany regresses to stereotype. She seems in dire need of rescuing from her own foolishness rather than her enemies. Having said that, Jill St John looks fabulous in bikinis – and just about everything else she wears or almost wears – and I’m all for a woman looking fabulous.
Likewise Lana Wood makes an instant and unforgettable impression as the party girl Plenty O’Toole, who snares Bond at the casino and tempts him with her more than ample charms. She’s barely on screen for five minutes, but she inhabits the part as easily as the dress slips off her shoulders. Her role was curtailed in the editing room, though Plenty’s fall from grace couldn’t be more unexpected and is one of the movie’s highlights.
It would be nice to say that Charles Gray makes an effective Blofeld, but he doesn’t. He lacks the brooding, muscular menace of Telly Savalas and is armed with no more than a doppelganger and an increasingly slick array of caustic quips. There’s an air of calm sophistication about him but that doesn’t transfer easily to villainy, you almost expect him to slip on a smoking jacket, twirl his cigarette holder and pour a gin sling while he dishes out death. His flight from the penthouse hideaway occurs in hideous, unsettling drag and one can’t help feeling Gray has turned into something of a pantomime villain.
As Bond’s on hire help, Norman Burton makes little or no impression as Felix Leiter and country and western singer Jimmy Dean gives an able, but distinctly one-note performance as the Howard Hughes-esque Willard Whyte. Latterly Desmond Llewellyn’s Q drops in to provide more gags. So the girls win the acting stakes, which is probably fair enough given the glossy glamour of the primary setting.
For it is really Las Vegas which ultimately lends its character to Diamonds Are Forever. Fleming was fascinated by the town and the producers similarly so. While previous movies showed an audience some decorous foreign locations, they tended to ignore most of the genuine tourist sites. Not so here: the scenes along Amsterdam’s canals include lingering shots of the ‘Skinny’ Bridge, Bond lands at the new space-age looking Los Angeles airport and the rest of the film trips around the forest of casinos and hotels in the gambling capital of the world. It’s a free advertisement – indeed I remember visiting Vegas with my family in 1980 and being amazed to discover all the casinos and hotels you saw in the movie were really there! The shine of all those lights rubs off on Ted Moore, who lights the film effectively, and Ken Adam, who presents another set of outrageous interiors that sparkle and glisten with the power and sleaze of their surroundings.
John Barry provides a stupendous soundtrack which features signature notes for every character and wallows in the flashy show-off world of Las Vegas. He hasn’t forgotten either that evil can be beautiful and saves one of his best moments for the unveiling of the satellite’s laser shield, a shower of strings to accompany the diamonds. The theme song is suitably haunting.
There are certainly many things to admire about the film, but the roots of its problems are at its helm. Guy Hamilton, who so ably managed Goldfinger, does only adequate work here. He isn’t over interested in the action and often forsakes thrills for laughs. He is rather good at building suspense, but what tight moments there are dissipate unsatisfactorily instead of reaching an explosive climax. He seems even less concerned with the actors and is quite happy to let them play at being fools. As the film progresses it gets more and more amusing and less and less tense, so much so that the eventual conclusion is slow and rather flat. The scene ends abruptly and the audience doesn’t even know if Blofeld has been killed. All in all a very lacklustre finish.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh. We should be thankful Sean Connery returned for what was expected to be his last hurrah. Had he not, the franchise might well have taken another direction all together. As it stands, Diamonds Are Forever is an entertaining and diverting two hours. It doesn’t stand as one of the best examples of Bond-age, but it has many of the prime ingredients for the soup of success, and it set a new template for Eon Productions, one of picture postcard glamour and diffusive wit, ultimately a template that would continue to serve them well throughout the seventies.
Comments
Oh, I think Wint and Kidd are almost unique being henchmen who we never actually see meeting Blofeld (or any boss at all), maybe that would become too camp. Of course, it's the pipeline theory carried over from the book, that you don't hang out with the guy at the end of the connection. Offhand, I can't think of any other examples.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
-Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
Thanks. Yes, it will. But bear with me; these essays take a while to construct, tricky stuff!
I consider Grey's Blofeld the best in the series. Here is a ruthless man, cool, confident, and self assured. While physically he is no match for Bond, he doesn't need to be. There is something to be said for the class and confidence Grey brings to the role. He is a lot more than a simple thug.........
I am not surprised. I admire your patience and the way you constructed this particular essay.
As for Telly Savalas and Charles Gray. I agree with Blackleiter regarding Savalas, but I do not necessarily agree that Gray was the weakest link in Diamonds Are Forever. For example, I do enjoy the confrontation between Bond, Blofeld and his double at the Whyte House. The dialogue is good, there is some edge to it, and Gray does portray menace when Bond is warned not to use (an item which I cannot remember) as a weapon.
Not only is it insightful but very well realised and so well written (well, typed)
Seriously - well done
10 out of 10 and thank you
I will go back and read the other reviews which you have linked at the top
I have a real soft spot for DAF. In a way, it is the bizarro OHMSS, in that it turns everything about the earlier film on its ear (plot, tone, location, casting) yet does so in a manner that is internally consistent in every way. Never does it waver from its lightness, its absurdity, its brassiness, its "in-your-faceness". Some may argue -- and many do! -- that those traits don't belong in a proper Bond film. That's a debate worth having, but what should not be in question is the consistency with which DAF's core traits are applied, which is something to respect about the film.
Where DAF really falls down is in some of the execution, most notably in editing. Of course, the switching-side car wheelie is the most egregious micro-example. But the macro-editing is the real problem -- most notably in how Plenty goes from swimming pool to swimming pool with nary an explanation, and especially in the death(?) of Blofeld. These major editing flaws -- storyline flaws really -- combine with the film's comedic tone to give the impression that the filmmakers didn't take DAF seriously. Even though that's probably not the case, it's a poor job to even allow an impression like that to be formed.
Nice reply, Sir Hilary.
It find it very difficult to narrative appraise editing without knowing what was there before. But you are correct - the two instances you name look like very obvious 'running time savers'. There is a deleted scene which shows how Plenty found her way to Tiffany's pool, but I don't like that version either, the link is far too tenuous. It would have been easier simply to write her out after the hotel scene and re-script Bond's eventual confrontation with Tiffany. As I am sure you know, the end of the movie was originally meant to be much longer and did show Blofeld being killed, but the producers ditched it as too long winded... and knowing Cubby's love of playing it safe they probably thought they could bring Blofeld back at a later date if they kept him 'alive'.
As for Case, well, women have a dual side to their personality and I guess any hardbitten drug smuggler might switch personas upon walking into James Bond's world.
And as for logic, I think Plenty's death is only a mood changer rather than a plot device, that way of signifying to an audience that it's not all fun and games and things are about to step up and get serious, like Aki's death in YOLT.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
This series follows my comments on Timothy Dalton's era
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/36656/tim … critiques/
and my 2008 review series
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/31479/two … e-reviews/
Live and Let Die
Most challenging for the James Bond audience of the 1970s was the appearance of a new OO7 in the refreshing person of Roger Moore. It’s fair to say that Moore had been auditioning for the role ever since Sean Connery first took his bow, as he’d been playing Simon Templar, aka ‘The Saint’, for Lew Grade’s television show since 1962. He seems remarkably bankable now, but that wasn’t quite so in 1973. If anything, he was seen as lightweight.
Hence, there is a change in emphasis, one which began in the previous outing Diamonds Are Forever, but one which is wholly complete here. There is a distinct lean towards Roger Moore’s preferred acting style: fusty violence laced with off-hand comedy. The producers accept this from the outset. It is worth looking again at Moore’s entry into the world of OO7. Unlike the much maligned George Lazenby, there is no cleverly scripted entrance, no grand orchestral sweep of strings, no sudden burst of violent action, no Bond Theme. For Live and Let Die, the producers decide all the audience needs to explain this is James Bond is a confrontation with the irascible M.
It takes place in Bond’s own home, an open plan ground floor flat, and we initially find our hero in bed with a beautiful woman. Dressed in his pajama trousers, Moore looks fitter and younger than Connery did in Diamonds Are Forever. He’s actually older, but he certainly doesn’t look it here – no grey hair, no paunch, hardly a crow’s foot. He’s also a dab hand in the domestic department, brushing up a fresh ground coffee for his boss. There is another change too, one that is very subtle and buried beneath the chirpy dialogue: Bond is embarrassed. He has been making love to a co-operative Italian agent and his efforts to conceal his duplicity are pure slapstick. Bond tries to ensure M stays out of his bedroom, the girl hides in the wardrobe, the superior is a grumpy old so-and-so, Moneypenny becomes complicit and saves the day, leaving Bond questioning her odd behaviour. While the scene is well scripted, amusingly played and is an effective low key introduction to Moore’s interpretation of Bond, there is a distinctive shift in comedic material. While previous movies offered throwaway one liners and a sly wink at the audience to tell them it is all a bit of fun, this brand humour is of a traditional, almost music hall style. We are entering the realm of the drawing room farce, of Carry On, of Brian Rix with his trousers at his ankles.
So, it has been made quite clear that we have a different James Bond. Moore doesn’t offer an impersonation of Connery and he isn’t the Saint either, he is clearly a new and very sprightly Bond. He has all the cunning tongue twisting quips, he moves and fights well, he’s suave and sophisticated and dresses splendidly: he is very much the gentleman spy. That cannot be said of Connery or Lazenby, both of whose masculinity overpowered the screen. Moore gives a less testosterone fuelled performance. It is one that relies on his charm and wit, his underplaying of a situation.
He doesn’t have to try too hard to achieve this, but when called upon he works exceptionally well. The early scenes in New York are very good. The brief car crash scene, the visit to an occult shop, the trip into Harlem and the Fillet of Soul bar and the initial meeting with Mister Big is Moore at his best. He’s breezing through the screenplay, very natural, yet still focused. You sense this is an agent at work, but also a man who isn’t going to be ruffled by a few minor scrapes. Look at how Moore’s expression changes from serenity to panic when his chauffeur is shot, or from surprise to intrigue when tricked by the revolving booth. He’s as shocked as the audience is delighted by these subterfuges.
Later during a difficult seduction scene, Moore’s slick playing allows the audience to accept his bedding of a virgin. When called upon to act it straight and serious, he does just that. He’s good enough to display a cutting edge when questioning the duplicitous Rosie Carver and later on this tough interpretation of gentlemanly conduct serves him well during Bond’s own interrogation by Mister Big. Some of the pillow talk and the many comedic interludes are less successful and frequently plumb the depths of tastelessness, but that is more a fault of the screenwriter than the actor. It is also true that Moore lacks the total ruthlessness of his predecessors, but his solid, savvy performance is gratifying.
He is given able support. The young and delicately beautiful actress Jane Seymour plays Solitaire, the High Priestess of a voodoo cult, whose Tarot readings underpin much of the action. While there is some nervousness in her performance, this actually fits rather well with her character, the only Caucasian in the villain’s outfit and a virgin to boot. She is profoundly aware of her destiny. We learn that her life is already mapped and that it will be her Master who takes her chastity. Bond’s appearance alters her future and from their first meeting she is jittery and frightened, because she understands the inevitability of her future. It is a well-developed persona. The script allows Seymour to effectively interpret the role because, while she is passive in terms of action, Solitaire is vital to the plot: the villain’s whole ethos is based on her ability to read the cards, when that fails him, he makes a series of mistakes that force his downfall.
There is also the tricky business of Solitaire’s virginity. While Bond clearly manipulates her into bed, the preordained future that Solitaire has seen allows her [and the audience] to forgive him. Preceded by beautifully photographed shots of Bond’s arrival by hang glider, the initial seduction scene is very good. Seymour displays genuine helplessness as the certainties of her life unfold. Moore’s Bond is a little too sure of himself, both before and after the event and here a little contrition may have helped, but he isn’t given the lines. Overall, Moore’s Bond doesn’t come across too well in the love-stakes; he’s hardly the gentleman suitor with any of his conquests. It’s a backward step from the very adult, believably dependent relationships Bond had with Tracy and Tiffany Case.
Yaphett Kotto is the chief villain, a dual role: Kananga is the island politician, ruler of San Monique, and Mister Big is his alter ego, a Harlem gangster who operates an all-black criminal organization. Kotto is a fine actor and he is excellent as the impulsive Kananga, a man in thrall to the powers of voodoo. The villain’s sudden bursts of energy, when angry, when overly hospitable during the finale, when cruelly taunting Solitaire, give the impression of a man living on the edge of madness. Kananga’s sartorial elegance hides the ruffian beneath; much as Mister Big’s deathlike skin-mask hides the real criminal mastermind lurking in the background.
It is puzzling however, that Mankiewicz saw fit to indulge in the dual role. While I can quite understand a politician wouldn’t want to be identified as a gangster, I think it would easily work the other way. The problem with the script is that Kananga is a politician. Why? It’s an irrelevance. At no point is Kananga’s political clout put to any use. The only time it serves a purpose is during the startling ‘reveal’ scene, and then it is only for shock value.
Kotto is aided by a marvelous brood of heavies. Julius W. Harris is the forever grinning Tee Hee, armed with a pincer hook; Earl Jolly Brown is the rotund almost mute Whisper; Tommy Lane is the tough lieutenant Adam. Best of all is Geoffrey Holder’s Baron Samedi, the embodiment of evil, the male equivalent of Solitaire’s High Priestess. Holder is a dancer and choreographer. A tall man, his slim, athletic build is perfect for the wild voodoo dances and he has a benign, eerie, other worldly look to him. He doesn’t say much, but his presence is very powerful.
Samedi cannot read the Tarot, but he holds sway over the proceedings, appearing at odd moments in the film, as if he is watching everybody, guiding their lives. Is he the same person each time? When Bond and Solitaire meet him in a graveyard, she shows no recognition of who he is. Similarly he finds his way miraculously to Harlem, dressed in natty clothes, and issuing Kananga with silent instructions as though he is in control of events. At the climax it even appears that Samedi, or a version of him, is still alive, haunting Bond and Solitaire on the Silver Phantom express train to NewYork.
While Bond is aided by David Hedison as Felix Leiter and Roy Stewart as Quarrel Jr., they don’t have an awful lot to do.
Ditto the chief victim, Rosie Carver, a hopeless role for Gloria Hendry playing a completely useless and exceedingly annoying CIA agent who has been turned. Her death isn’t the most poignant in the series; we’re rather glad to see the back of her. We’re equally glad to see the back of Sherriff J.W. Pepper, a clichéd bigoted Southern policeman, who provides light relief during a very long speed boat chase. This is one role among very, very few in the series, which I really wish had been left on the cutting room floor.
So the players are pretty much fine. The difficulty with Live and Let Die isn’t the cast, it’s that the film makers haven’t found anything original for his brand spanking 1970s James Bond to do. I’m possibly exaggerating a little. Nonetheless the sense does pervade that the Bond films of the sixties were genuinely innovative. Occasionally they were outrageous too, but that added to the fun and the originality. Other film makers wanted to imitate the James Bond of the sixties. Yet by the time Roger Moore stepped into the shoes, Broccoli and Saltzman were becoming the imitators.
It would be easy at this point to hark on about ‘blaxploitation’ and that the producers jumped on the band wagon of a current popular trend, but I’m not. Fleming’s novel was always going to be controversial to adapt, but here the black characters are very real, very intelligent (Rosie Carver aside) and not all of them are villains. There is no type casting here and no clichés. The script could easily have been played by white actors and the locations shifted to accommodate that. But instead we have a reasonably faithful representation of Fleming’s people, minus some of the warts. No; the point I’m making is deeper than that.
There simply isn’t enough meat on the bones of Live and Let Die to make it a wholly successful project. Thrillers in the early seventies, both in the UK and the USA, were unrepentantly tough. Think of Get Carter, Prime Cut, Dirty Harry, The Wicker Man, Shaft, The Anderson Tapes, The French Connection and keep thinking. These are violent, dark crime stories. The world of James Bond had always been glossy, with an undercurrent of viciousness, yet Live and Let Die seems to miss them both. At the very moment the franchise needed to explore the darker side of Bond, utilizing one of Ian Fleming’s most violent novels, it turned instead to the cardboard cut-out world of the television crime show. This is more Jim Rockford and Hawaii Five O than Clint Eastwood or Richard Roundtree.
It is tempting to blame writer Tom Mankiewicz, who revitalized Diamonds Are Forever but seems to have come a cropper here. The original novel is peppered with brutal incident, yet Mankiewicz jettisons almost everything of interest in the book and retains a bare few characters, some locations and the voodoo theme. It is significant that several of the novel’s best moments were utilized to great effect in later Bond films. One can’t help but wonder what might have been. As it stands, Live and Let Die seems to suffer compared to its ancestors. The big sets have all but disappeared bar one underground cavern at the climax. The music is a below par dirge. The fights are short. The stunts are telegraphed, orderly and lack tension. The grand international schemes of SPECTRE have been replaced by a bland American drug smuggling operation. Even the pre-title sequence lacks excitement, as three British agents are systematically, bizarrely and dourly murdered.
Most curious is the element of repetition that hangs over the piece:
We see a triplicate of murders early on [there is no need for three murders];
The agent Baines is killed by a snake, Bond tries to buy a stuffed one, later on he kills another, there is a coffin full of them at the voodoo ceremony;
The bus loses its top deck, the plane loses its wings;
A car ends up in a lake, a motor boat ends up in a swimming pool;
Alligators are deployed to eat Bond, sharks are deployed to eat Bond;
There is a revolving booth to capture OO7, there is a disappearing chair to do the same;
We see the San Monique sacrifice twice;
We see the Jazz Funeral twice;
And so on. Add in the extended boat chase, which essentially repeats the same stunt again and again in a slightly different fashion, and the viewer is rewarded with a very slow product. The majority of these repetitions are squarely the responsibility of the screenwriter. The interesting elements of Mankiewicz’s script, such as the inevitability of fate – displayed in the Tarot cards – and the sophisticated voodoo set up employed by Kananga as a cover for his heroin fields, hardly get a look in.
Much of the pacing however is down to director, Guy Hamilton, and his trio of editors Bert Bates, Raymond Poulton and John Shirley. The early energy, eventually kick started by the voodoo ceremony and an effective title sequence to accompany Paul McCartney’s brilliant pounding theme song, is sustained through the New York sections, but is all but lost by the time Bond reaches the Caribbean. Here any suggestion of suspense and intrigue gets buried under mirthless fun. This is a pity, for Fleming’s original story was very unsavoury, and many of Mankiewicz’s characters are equally so, yet whenever the filmmakers seem heading for a gruesome event, they burden it with humour.
For instance, when Bond seems about to be ‘wasted’ in Harlem, he escapes with the merest of effort and some idle banter. When Rosie Carver is terrorized by the effigies of Baron Samedi, we aren’t very surprised because her character has been made out to be a buffoon. Bond is equally non-plussed; his expression is so blasé, he’s bored by the tedium of it all. Later, when we ought to be enjoying an exciting boat chase, Sherriff Pepper’s antics are interspersed with the action and constantly reduce the tension. Not even a daring leap over some alligators and splendid overhead camerawork can save this long winded episode.
Like the editors, composer George Martin doesn’t know what to do with these scenes and sensibly stays quiet for most of it. He’s at his best scoring the romance and his gentle love theme saves the mawkishness of the central seduction. Generally though, he doesn’t seem as in touch with the product as John Barry was. A good score will improve a below par film, but this is a below par score and it doesn’t support a lacklustre movie.
Live and Let Die passes on its merry way without ever stretching the imagination or skills of the writer, producers, director or production team. While it has several good performances, a smattering of talking points and features some notoriously innovative and spectacular stunt work, the whole doesn’t quite seem to glue together. Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die had a hard, sharp edge to it and that seems to have been totally blunted and eroded by the filmic version.
Critical responses were variable in 1973 and most were lukewarm towards Moore, who seems a solid choice now. The most notable success was at the box office, where the film was one of the top ten grossers of the year. It could do with that harder edge. Moore seems to require it; the flippancy he often displays doesn’t sit easily with the darkness of the story’s background. Ian Fleming probably wouldn’t have approved, but audiences didn’t seem to mind.
I personally think that McCartney had an awful lot of help "orchestrating" the title track to make it sound the way it did. Big credit to Martin here from me.
I have mixed feelings about the film; it's a wonder of my childhood and a standout, thanks to the amazing boat stunts. The voodoo theme makes it unique.
Recently I found Moore to be just too arch, and he's given that English stuffed shirt dialogue that Lazenby struggled with, only Connery had the tone where he could say those lines and sound like he's sending the whole thing up, being wry. Moore deflowering Solitaire is quite painful (ahem! to watch I mean!)
But it's a good Sunday afternoon flick, and it moves along thanks to the nice set pieces. Of course, some have said it's a retread of Dr No, and the two have much in common. I wish most actor's debuts followed this sun, sea, sex blueprint, I guess CR went for that a bit.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Yes, he is the gentleman adventurer, and moves about with a certain breeziness...so when a look of panic or worry emerges on his face the effect, by way of contrast, is oddly compelling - whether he's being cornered in FYEO, trying to avert nuclear disaster in OP, or being thwarted in his pursuits of May Day (AVTAK). (Always felt that John Glen exploited this quality in Moore most effectively.)
This series follows my comments on Timothy Dalton's era
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/36656/tim … critiques/
and my 2008 review series
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/31479/two … e-reviews/
The Man with the Golden Gun
1973’s Live and Let Die was accused of jumping on the bandwagon of Blaxploitation cinema. While that accusation doesn’t hold much water, there is a scene in the middle of The Man with the Golden Gun where the producers have quite clearly chosen to imitate Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu epics: James Bond is knocked out and wakes up in a karate school where he witnesses a fatal sword fight before accepting a fighting challenge himself. This is entirely reminiscent of the set up used for Lee’s best films, Enter the Dragon and Fist of Fury
Taken by itself, this should not be a problem. It’s a well-choreographed fight. It lacks some tension, but this is due more to the audience’s realization that Bond has been spared an earlier death simply to allow the fight to take place. It also stretches our imagination that 007 has suddenly become a martial arts expert; he never showed much inclination before, not even during his sojourn to Japan. His escape is also remarkably easy. But there is another problem. Chased by a whole school of karate killers, Bond is rescued by his colleague Hip and Hip’s nieces, two chattering school girls. Is this supposed to be funny - the world’s greatest secret agent saved by teenage girls? Roger Moore certainly thinks so, standing adrift and bemused on the sidelines while hordes of pajama suited men are knocked unconscious. It is an unforgiveable waste of time, an excuse to poke fun not at Bond, who is almost impervious to parody, but at the Kung Fu cycle. It is openly mocking that genre. Capping all, Hip, having spent the night searching for 007, promptly drives off without him – the worst rescue mission in Bond history.
It’s no wonder M is unimpressed with the performance of these bumbling agents, who, aided by an incompetent female assistant, spend most of their time hashing things up. His bewildered expression after Bond later tries to explain how he was eluded by a flying car, sums up his frustrations. M is clearly not in love with Britain’s best agent. When Bond reels off a list of facts about the chief villain, M, bored with the display, coldly concludes “Anything else?” and when a defecting scientist is killed he’s apoplectic with disbelief and anger. Perhaps his best line is when Bond innocently enquires who could possibly want to kill him: “Jealous husbands!” rasps M, “Outraged tailors. The list is endless.”
While Desmond Llewelyn plays Q ever more as the over grown school boy and is given a metallurgist assistant called Colthorpe to spar with, Bernard Lee is probably delivering his best turn as M, excepting perhaps the relaxed authority he gave in Goldfinger. He’s more caustic than ever, but retains a sly manipulative edge; witness how he sows the seed for Bond’s initial unofficial investigation. When Bernard Lee finally departed the series a few years later, he wouldn’t be adequately replaced until Judi Dench made her bow.
Roger Moore of course had only just replaced Sean Connery as James Bond and it’s worth noting that while the material here is not of the highest quality, his performance shows distinct signs of improvement from the laid back efforts of the previous year. Occasionally he’s still a bit chummy and he shows a tendency to gawp at the camera when not required to be active, but there are several stand-out scenes for his interpretation of Bond, moments of ruthlessness he wasn’t to repeat for some years.
Bond has been sent a golden bullet inscribed with his double-O number. There is only one assassin who uses gold bullets: Francisco Scaramanga. Believing this to be a threat on Bond’s life, M cuts short his current mission to trace a missing Solex Energy Agitator and craftily sends him on vacation, knowing full well Bond will instead pursue Scaramanga. The set-up is simple and its early execution is excellent. Bond is suitably roughed up by hoodlums in Beirut and then travels to Macau and Hong Kong where he blackmails Lazar, the world’s greatest gun maker, and Andrea Anders, Scaramanga’s mistress, to achieve his ends.
Roger Moore is excellent in these scenes. Not usually disposed to seriousness, he exhibits a fine turn of callousness. The scene in Andrea’s hotel room begins evoking similar moments from Goldfinger and Thunderball, but ends up quite different, quite violent. Bond is nasty. He understands exactly the type of woman Andrea is and manipulates her appropriately, using both force and stealth. Moore is utterly focused. The charm he first exhibits vanishes in a second: “He’ll kill me if I tell you,” cries Andrea; “And I’ll kill you if you don’t” is the flat reply. This is great acting, very strong, as tough as Connery in Doctor No, as rough as Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s. It is miles away from the half-hearted seriousness of Live and Let Die. He’s aided by an unsentimental, straight script and a good supporting turn from Maud Adams as Andrea.
Equally good is the jaunty stuff in Macau, where the creepy Lazar is at first fawning and then fearful. Detached from his role in delivering death, he surmises that “Bullets do not kill; it is the finger that pulls the trigger” – a line neatly reflected in Bond’s later confrontations with Scaramanga. Again Moore’s ability to switch from the charming gentleman to the devious, heartless spy is compelling. The scene with Lazar is often voted one of Moore’s best moments as it captures everything which is good about his interpretation: black humour, intrigue, calm assurance, fortitude.
Moore doesn’t stop there. Latterly he shares two very good exchanges with Christopher Lee’s titular villain, one at a Thai boxing arena, the other at Scaramanga’s island hideaway. Both times Moore is confident, controlled and unflappable, yet underneath this mask, you sense the danger, the steely violence that lurks in James Bond. It’s a very clever performance.
Unfortunately this refreshingly serious Bond is let down by interludes clearly designed to make the audience laugh. Moore copes adequately with them, it is what you’d expect from an actor who hammed it up with Tony Curtis in The Persuaders, but I longed for more of those small, significant moments of insight - moments which add depth to Bond’s character.
It doesn’t help that our laughter is so strained. The actors seem to be enjoying themselves, but they can’t transmit that enjoyment onto the screen and the middle section of the movie becomes a series of loosely connected action sequences which plod along as slow as the plot: Hai Fat, a multimillionaire businessman, has employed Scaramanga to steal the Solex without realizing the assassin is in league with the Chinese to market this new solar power technology; Bond sets out to thwart them and in doing so uncovers who sent him the gold bullet.
It’s difficult to explain exactly why all the fights and chases and stunts are unsuccessful, but they are. It isn’t only the humour. The screenplay, cobbled together twice by Tom Mankiewicz and once by Richard Maibaum, is a mess and doesn’t seem to ever decide whether it is about solar energy or Scaramanga. The action is inserted into the script simply because it can be, not because it needs to be, and the director, Guy Hamilton, handles it with his customary contempt, an attitude that was sophisticatedly cool in 1964 but is looking distinctly off hand ten years later. Hamilton has lost any ability to create suspense. It’s hardly the most thrilling od movies, excepting the stupendous 360° corkscrew car jump, for the karate fight is spoilt, the sumo fight played for laughs and the dong canoe chase is much too stop-start. Mercifully short, this last episode feels like a re-run of Live and Let Die, even more so when J.W. Pepper, that coarse southern fried sheriff, turns up to wreak his own brand of chaos and mirth. Dear Lord.
From half way in, everyone is having much too good a time. The only one who looks remotely uncomfortable is Maud Adams, who when not threatened by Roger Moore is being menaced by Christopher Lee, and it is commendable she retains a tragic figure. Adams is rather good. A novice actress, she is glacially expressionless, which adds an air of mystery to her; like Bond, we are not entirely sure of her motives. Andrea claims to hate Scaramanga, but she always returns to be toyed with. There’s a wonderfully graphic scene where, having completed his kill, Scaramanga erotically caresses her skin with the still warm barrel of his revolver. Despite her obvious revulsion, Adams is careful to ensure her eyes also register sexual fascination. This psychological interpretation of fear is rare in Bond films and worth applauding.
Sadly our heroine, as played by Britt Ekland, is no more than a ditsy blonde. It’s fair to say this particular blonde is virtually as dumb as they could possibly come. She isn’t completely incapable, but she is prone to lapses that cause more trouble than not. Curiously, while her character is listed in the credits as ‘Mary Goodnight’ no one ever uses her first name, even when making love, Bond addresses her only as ‘Goodnight.’
Already suffering an identity crisis, Miss Ekland, despite her obvious enthusiasm, is on a losing wicket from the outset: like most of the action, there doesn’t really seem to be any need for her character to exist. She is purely a punch bag for bad punch lines. There is a particularly excruciating scene where she hides in a closet as Bond makes love to another woman. Even Roger Moore’s charm can’t pull that joke off. What makes it all the more galling is Goodnight didn’t even have to be in Bond’s bedroom; she’d already turned down his amorous advances and admitting she’s ‘weak’ only underlines her fatuity. Like most of that middle third, the incident seems to take precedence over the plot, and the jigsaw like construction of the narrative does not benefit the end result.
Of the bad guys, Christopher Lee makes a visually impressive Scaramanga. Tall and urbane, he has an inscrutable chilling face and a clipped precise delivery that matches his assassin’s creed. He is coldly efficient, and very effective. Used to playing villains, Lee has the knack of inhabiting a role rather than acting it. You could easily slip a cape on his shoulders and he’d be Dracula or Count Richelieu. If he isn’t quite the very best villain, he can easily blame the script, which doesn’t quite give him enough to do or say. For instance, when Bond tracks him down to his island lair, Scaramanga displays a lack of technological understanding which makes his plans redundant and casts him as a rather unsophisticated megalomaniac; you’d think he’d at least be interested in his own schemes! That he isn’t, and never was, reinforces Scaramanga as a single minded killer, but does nothing to increase our interest in the Solex or Peter Murton’s huge solar energy set. At this point the Solex plot-line begins to feel totally unnecessary.
Ian Fleming’s novel had nothing to do with solar power either, it is basically a shoot-out between Bond and Scaramanga, a modern western set in Jamaica. There are a few worthwhile chapters, particularly the final confrontation in the mangrove swamps, but overall it’s substandard Fleming. The producers and writers didn’t consider there was much meat to the novel and the movie is completely unrelated to its source. Perhaps if they’d thought harder about the psychological aspect of the long distance dual between the two marksmen, we may have been rewarded with a stronger storyline, as it stands the two narratives feel disconnected.
Sadly, Scaramanga’s cinematic demise, unlike the novel, is hardly the stuff to thrill the bones. He meets his end in his own shooting gallery, a practice area nominally called The Fun House which resembles a mad cap ghost train. We have to see this twice, first during possibly the dullest pre-title sequence, and then again at the climax. I have nothing good to say about either scene. They are tensionless moments with pithy musical accompaniment which seems to last eons rather than minutes. It isn’t even clear how Bond manages to trick his way to Scaramanga’s killing ground. That this long winded fairground gallery is orchestrated and commentated on by the strangest heavy in Bond history only shows how low the series has sunk.
Herve Villachaize’s Nick Nack isn’t a bad baddie, he’s actually quite effective, a sort of Oddjob in reverse, being tiny, weak and unthreatening, yet still immaculately presented. Cultured and devious, he stands to inherit his master’s fortune, so you’d think he’d want to send Bond a golden bullet too, but this idea is passed over. It also seems perverse of the little man to confuse both Scaramanga and the people he hires to kill his boss. When Nick Nack eventually confronts Bond it isn’t out of loyalty to his boss, it’s because the destruction of the solar energy complex has just lost him a fortune. Throughout the movie Villachaize never gives less than 100%, but he’s utilized more as a source of fun than any menace. The writers don’t know what to do with the unique gimmick of having a midget for a heavy and Nick Nack turns into an annoying presence rather than a spooky one.
The production values are as to be expected: fine photography, especially when the action moves to Phukett, standing in for Red China; good costumes, courtesy of Elsa Fennel; splendid set design, including the bizarrely lopsided MI6 station inside the wrecked hull of the Queen Elizabeth cruise liner; and a well-imagined ‘Golden Gun’ from Colibri, constructed around a cigarette lighter and a pen. James Bond himself is remarkably gadget free, accepting a false nipple, and it’s nice to see Bond rely on his wits and his fists and his stuntmen to escape situations, even if the situations themselves hardly seem life threatening.
John Barry returns to orchestrate the affair but he doesn’t seem very interested and turns in an underwhelming score that relies heavily on a very average main theme. It’s a drop from height for the usually reliable Barry. Lulu belts out the title song with abandon, but she’s outgunned by the banal lyrics, possibly the worst in Bond-song history.
The whole project is littered with potential claimants to ‘the worst this-and-that’ and even Christopher Lee has mentioned that the car jump was “the most remarkable thing in the movie.” It is very hard to escape the conclusion that The Man with the Golden Gun is a half-baked Bond. For all Roger Moore’s cynicism, for all Christopher Lee’s chilling authority, a hard soul is missing from the film’s centre and those in charge show a lack of originality which hinders from the outset. The actors appreciate the ridiculousness of the situations and play it exceptionally straight, but the end result is a slow burn which hardly ignites and fizzles out long before the climax. A little more care should have been taken. The book was mooted for filming as early as 1966 and the grittiness of the original novel would have suited the sixties more thunderous treatment of violence. The version we’ve ended up with has all the right ingredients, but nothing’s spicing up the potion, so much so I wouldn’t even class it as a brave failure; it’s merely a disappointing one.
Even the poster is a duplicate - but inferior - of LALD, though it does cement Moore's iconic status.
The corkscrew stunt doesn't work imo, because Bond doesn't need to do it, unlike the two wheel drive in DAF. So it's obviously just a stunt, inserted.
We don't even see Beirut, it could be anywhere (but most probably Pinewood haha)
And there doesn't seem much tension or one-upmanship between Scaramanga and Bond. Largely because Scarey doesn't even seem to be after Bond for the first half or more, so it's a wild goose chase.
I suppose it has that mid 70s, relaxed, Pink Panther, Disney with extra sauce vibe.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I originally mentioned Beirut (or lack of it) in the review, but I felt I was rubbing salt into the wound. I wrote something like "they couldn't be bothered to frame it with a long distance city scape." It didn't feel necessary.
Interesting take on the first half of the movie; 007 is persuing Scaramanga - I'd never considered the lack of tension could be because it isn't the other way around!
This series follows my comments on Timothy Dalton's era
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/36656/tim … critiques/
and my 2008 review series
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/31479/two … e-reviews/
The Spy Who Loved Me
Many of the people who worked on Bond movies over the years, among them Lewis Gilbert, Michael G. Wilson and John Glen, consider The Spy Who Loved Me to be the high point of Bondage, the moment the series reached its artistic peak. While I wouldn’t go quite that far, it is a wonderful piece of entertainment that features some iconic 007 images and catapulted James Bond back to the forefront of cinemagoer’s recognition.
Roger Moore’s first two outings were not failures, indeed Live and Let Die was phenomenally popular stateside, but they lacked a spark to ignite them, something which truly set fire to the audience’s imagination. Connery’s era had startling, memorable images – like Ursula Andress in her bikini, Bond about to be castrated by a laser, the Aston Martin, Oddjob, the Thunderball credits, Bassey’s songs, the volcano crater, ‘Shocking, positively shocking’ – I could go on. Moore was lumbered with Nick Nack, J. W. Pepper and a succession of car chases, none of which served the purpose of igniting genuine excitement. Indeed perhaps the most cumbersome aspect of those initial outings was the pre-title sequences, both of which feel redundant to the story and, worse, do not create any sense of what this new James Bond was about. That is whole heartedly put right during the opening salvo of The Spy Who Loved Me.
The movie starts on board a British nuclear submarine. Something unreal, something horrific, occurs. We know this because the chess pieces rattle, alerting us in time honoured fashion to impending peril. Director Lewis Gilbert has played this game before, notably in his previous Bond epic, You Only Live Twice, but here he and his editor, John Glen, are clever enough to not show the enemy. They have whetted our appetite and we want to learn more.
And so do the KGB. What’s this? The audience wonders. So the Russians have lost a submarine too! And they have equally beautiful and sexed up secret agents! Suddenly the story isn’t a small localized affair, which, despite the scope of the villain’s plots, the last two missions always seemed to be; no, this is a worldwide conspiracy and only James Bond can thwart it – except he’s otherwise occupied: skiing.
What the producers next do is give the audience the excitement, the drama, the tension, the tantalizing, thrilling moments they yearn for. There is a ski chase. It isn’t as taut as those in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but it has stupendous photography and a pounding guitar led musical accompaniment. There are a few stunts and Bond has a rocket gun in his ski stick. A KGB agent is killed. Bond skis towards the edge of a precipice. How will he escape? Well, we know how he does, but every time I witness Bond (impersonated by Rick Sylvester) swishing off the edge of the Asgaard, my heart hops into my mouth, as I’m sure it does for many viewers. I’m a great admirer of the first three pre-credit stories, those short, sharp, shockingly violent few minutes that set the ball rolling for the following two hours, but the ski and parachute jump quite simply tops the lot. It’s an audacious, stunning and beautifully filmed few seconds. Roger Moore’s James Bond had finally lived up to the expectations created by his predecessors.
There are a host of true tales attached to how this grandstand scene was created, but there are two which I rank particularly important. Firstly, it was conceived as a stunt for the opening scenes before the filmmakers even had a script. This isn’t unusual in Bond films. Kevin McClory, for instance, had loads of underwater scenes planned for Thunderball and Ken Wallace’s auto-gyro Little Nellie was shoehorned into the You Only Live Twice script, but the difference here is that the stunt and its huge popularity germinated the belief that the action comes first and the plot second. From here on, the Bond producers tended to seek more outrageous and not necessarily better stunts at the expense of storyline. Many, but not all, take place in the air. Secondly, in the era of CGI movie making where the frankly improbably become possible, this stunt was done for real. Someone really did ski off the edge of a mountain and parachute to safety. There would have been no second chance for Sylvester; if his chute had failed to open; death was all that welcomed him. For that alone, the man deserves the recognition he continually receives. Producer Cubby Broccoli gave him a huge bonus, but it can never be enough. The ski stunt at the start of The Spy Who Loved Me is, possibly, the greatest moment in Bond screen history. It is certainly a regular top ten entry when fans or critics compile a list. It also finally provides Roger Moore with his first iconic moment as the parachute balloons open to reveal a Union Jack.
There follows a splendid title sequence from Maurice Binder, whose women get more and more naked, and who also introduced a phantom James Bond into the action. All silhouettes and shadows, guns and bright colours, this is one of his strongest works and fully deserves to accompany the Oscar nominated song, ‘Nobody Does It Better’, sung by Carly Simon. Indeed at this point you wonder if anyone really can.
The Spy Who Loved Me was released to cinemas in the summer of 1977 when kids were glued to Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, two innovative science fiction films that presented a different way of making movies. Could the traditional secret agent compete with these overblown space westerns? Of course he could. The Spy Who Loved Me also returns James Bond back into the world of science fiction, as it is a virtual rerun of You Only Live Twice. In place of Blofeld we have Karl Stromberg, billionaire shipping magnate, marine expert and lunatic colossus. Like SPECTRE before him, he plans to set the world’s superpowers on the path to nuclear war, thus allowing him to take the spoils, though not as we might expect, for Stromberg’s aim is for the survivors to literally live like the fishes in an underwater city.
However, if the plot is similar, the events which surround it are not. There is a new car, a Lotus Esprit, brilliant white, the colour of heroes, which duels with a black helicopter, piloted by a female assassin. There is a new henchman, a steel toothed giant called Jaws whose indestructability also provides cartoon comedy. There is a beautiful female agent, a Russian, an equal to Bond. There are two huge, bright, futuristic sets, one a waterborne scientific laboratory called Atlantis, the other a supertanker, The Liparus. There are exotic locations in Egypt and Sardinia. There is a palpable love story. Above all there is plenty to enjoy, whether it’s the fisticuffs, the chases, the gun battles, the scenery or the wordy byplay.
It doesn’t all succeed and a few duff notes are hit by the orchestra. Early on 007 is briefed at Fasslane by the Admiralty and the Minister of Defence, a man he appears to know personally, and while this works effectively and it’s nice to get 007 out of the office, it’s disappointing M isn’t present. There are just too many people in the scene and it’s difficult to work out who they all are. Immediately afterwards, Bond is seen frolicking in the desert with an old university pal, and this too strikes a dull thud. The information Hosein gives him could easily have been provided at the initial briefing. The interlude is merely an excuse to ogle some female flesh. It’s childish and a bit Carry On.
These two minor short-steps are not aided by the success of the brisk, but courteous, briefing given to Russia’s Agent Triple X in her superior’s sparse crypt-like office and the mid-film interlude in an Egyptian tomb where MI6 has its local headquarters. We finally meet M here, but first Bond is confronted by General Gogol, an austere Walter Gotell, and once again, the audience is served a dish of cold intrigue before the main course is revealed. These two sequences are exceptional, allowing us to compare the threat, the perceived evil, behind the KGB, to the warm, jovial, family atmosphere provided by M, Q and Moneypenny. Agent Triple X is caught in the middle.
It is also fair to say that the heroine’s role is not entirely successful. This isn’t Barbara Bach’s fault. A very beautiful actress, she moves with great delicacy, her voice is calm almost wavering, her face is a subtle allure, her figure one of a goddess; icily efficient both in movement and in emotion, Bach’s Anya Amasova seems to embody the Cold War image of Russia. She’s helped by Rosemary Burrow’s wardrobe, a selection of stunning outfits each clasping her like a silk glove. Inevitably, when Anya slyly interrupts Bond’s attempt to purchase some stolen microfilm, the slippery Max Kalbar remarks ‘the lady’s figure looks most attractive.’ This agent knows how to use all her assets. Later she easily extracts the microfilm from Bond’s grasp and displays a dab hand at entrapment. We also learn she’s never failed on a mission, has infiltrated MI6 to steal secret documents and, unlike Bond, she tends to lead rather than follow. It’s curious then, that she spends much of the movie doing very little, by extension she becomes the model 007 girl, always at Bond’s side, important to the plot and the love story, but eventually becoming someone to rescue, which he does twice. Bach shows ample petulance as Bond sidelines her during their trip to meet Stromberg. Their fledgling and unlikely romance blossoms in atypical Bond fashion [after a fight on a train] and I feel the movie would have been better served by this fanciful dish being left to the very end.
In fact screenwriter Christopher Wood initially envisaged it that way. The novelization he wrote of his original script is radically different to the finished project in several sections. It offers a much more rounded interpretation of Anya and of her relationship with James Bond, touched as it is by the death of her lover, the KGB skier Bond unknowingly, but deliberately killed. Bach’s best scenes are when she’s allowed to be less the attractive sidekick and more her own version of a deadly spy. Stonily cold when told of her lover’s demise, she states blankly to Gogol ‘I would very much like to meet the man responsible for his death’ and when she finally does, she announces to Bond in the same dead tone, ‘When this mission is over, I will kill you.’ Bach is also impressive during the scenes in Egypt. When she and Bond are menaced at Karnack, she’s a step behind physically, but one ahead mentally. The verbal sparring that both precedes her fake seduction of Bond and continues during the briefing at MI6’s HQ is excellent. 007 may have most of the gadgets but he’s more than matched by her wiles.
It’s worth noting that these are also Roger Moore’s best moments in the film. Seldom did Moore look entirely at home with his previous material, but here the hard edges have been eroded into a lighter, more effervescent Bond. Gone are the attempts to turn him into a rough diamond; in The Spy Who Loved Me he’s simply a gem. The witty screenplay suits him and even if those famous quizzical looks start to enter his portfolio of expressions, overall this is a much more assured performance. Moore seems in control of his character while before he was merely inhabiting the clothes.
Take the scene on the felucca, where Bond’s is attempting to seduce Anya, he is charm personified and his intent is clear, but there is none of the awkwardness shown in his scenes with Jane Seymour, Britt Ekland or Gloria Hendry. That may be down to his dialogue, which is immeasurably easier to deliver, but it is also down to his assurance, gained perhaps from the fact he’d become a bona fide box office star by making movies such as Gold, Shout at the Devil and The Wild Geese over the intervening years.
Moore also displays a fine touch of pathos, first when cutting short Anya’s description of Bond’s dead wife and then later as he explains to the Russian how he killed her lover. This particular scene is beautifully constructed and wonderfully written. We share the loss of both characters. This could have been mawkish; that it is not is very much down to Moore who delivers his virtual soliloquy with sorrowful conviction and a hint of anger. I can’t imagine anyone else playing it this way. I expect Connery and especially Lazenby would have given us the anger uppermost.
That isn’t to say there is no thoroughbred nastiness. Bond later enquires deadpan if Anya’s gun ‘has a bullet with my name on it’, he defuses a nuclear warhead with some hesitancy and worry, he deals with the hulking Sandor in a suitably brutal fashion, he is shown eliminating a woman and when he finally confronts Stromberg he exacts punishment in vicious style. The down to earth behaviour isn’t typical of Moore’s tenure, but it blends well with the cheekiness on show, giving a realistic arc to the overall fluffiness of the goings-on.
Most of the lighthearted stuff actually comes from the bad guys, or rather one of them, Jaws. Richard Kiel is an impressive henchman. Seven foot tall, broad and blessed with steel teeth Jaws was an instant hit with audiences. His initial appearances are sinister and all played in the dark. He’s like some huge mute vampire. But at the climax of the Karnack scenes, where he’s survived burying himself under scaffolding only to drop a block of stone on his foot, we’ve gained the impression he’s a dangerously strong but surprising dumb henchman. This is a pity as the build up to that confrontation is excellent and it’s resolved in a welcome scene of genuine terror. Diffusing Jaws’ potential threat with humour was only going to skew Kiel’s performance one way. As the film progresses and Jaws refuses to die, he loses all the visual menace so cleverly constructed around his early appearances and descends into a cartoon character, a sort of silent Wily E Coyote to Bond’s flippant Road Runner. Kiel handles it quite well, especially when after a fight he straightens himself out in a manner similar to Bond, but despite intimidating appearances the role is effectively wasted from half way in. It’s a testament to the character’s enduring popularity that Kiel was invited to reprise the role in the next movie.
Karl Stromberg is played in a relatively flat manner by Curt Jurgens, a great actor who seems to be slumming it. His performance is almost too subtle. He’s hinting at a persona which isn’t there. He also, sadly, looks very old and doesn’t provide any suitable physical threat. Again, it is worth reading Wood’s novel to better understand Stromberg’s motives and his obsessions; the utilized screenplay doesn’t do him any justice. Mostly filmed sitting down or watching television, Stromberg is curiously inactive. We don’t learn a tremendous amount about him and while his scheme is barking mad, we don’t get the impression Stromberg is.
He’s very similar to that other static villain, Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld from You Only Live Twice, for not only has he evolved a strikingly familiar grand plan, but he also likes to drop beautiful female assistants to their death by ferocious fishes, takes pleasure in murder, is supported by a buxom wench [here impersonated by an underused Caroline Munro] and a speechless enforcer, the aforementioned Jaws. While the chief villain remains less than impressive, this hardly matters for he is surrounded by an army of willing technical helpers, most notably production designer Ken Adam.
The magnificent sets are the film’s tour de force. Stromberg’s floating laboratory, Atlantis, rises out of the sea, an aquarium in reverse. It has several huge rooms, most notably a gorgeous Louis XIV salon, where we first meet Stromberg dealing death as he eats dinner. The external scale is difficult to comprehend on the small screen; the cinema presents it much better. Stromberg’s living quarters seem quite claustrophobic in comparison, as if he has crawled under a coral reef and is gazing out at the sea world beyond. All curves and arches, Atlantis evokes an undersea kingdom.
The supertanker The Liparus is an even greater achievement. When the inside of the ship was conceived, there wasn’t a stage set at Pinewood big enough to accommodate what was required. As with the volcano in You Only Live Twice, Adam realized he had to build from scratch, but this time he made the external walls of the tanker the walls of a real and reusable soundstage, using every accessible inch of space to create one of the best designs in Bond history. The audience’s first view of the tanker comes when the lights are switched on following the capture of the submarine USS Wayne. With a water pen big enough to hold third-size nuclear subs, gantries, walkways and a monorail, all lit up in gaudy bright white light, those first shots are another moment that catches the breath. There is no maté painting here, every inch of steel is for real. While being obviously spectacular, The Liparus also provides the threat and menace lacking in Stromberg. The exterior shots were created by intricate model work, so good even experts couldn’t tell the ship was a miniature. For his efforts Ken Adam received an Oscar nomination and may have won had it not been for the competition from Star Wars.
The Liparus set provides a fitting climax to the film. There is a well-staged battle between Stromberg’s forces and the assorted submarine crews and, again as in You Only Live Twice, Bond thwarts the threat of nuclear war at the last second. The coda wraps up the loose ends nicely. The action is well directed and choreographed and John Glen, editing his first Bond movie full-time, keeps it all to a considerable pace. The tension as Bond attempts to attach a bomb to the bulkhead doors shows a restraining hand in the cutting room. Glen doesn’t chop and change too much, allowing us to build the suspense ourselves. We hang on with James Bond. Also, during the scenes at the Mojave Club, Glen intercuts Kalbar’s murder with the whirling dervishes and conjures the heart stopping fear of imminent death.
This particular scene is accompanied by some excellent incidental music. Marvin Hamlisch was a new composer for Bond, and while his score is a little jokey for some [you do cringe at the male voice choir reciting the lyrics of the title song] he deserves credit for attempting to not be John Barry. He’s very good with the romantic themes, introduced a zippy, snappy update of the Bond Theme and provides his own action opus Bond ’77 which matches the zesty fun we see on screen. His wistful moments are sublime, such as when Bond and Anya first approach Atlantis, but he occasionally comes unstuck with the more dramatic stuff. Yet it doesn’t hurt the result for generally he, like Glen, is very restrained. The two seem to have recognized the type of product being created here and their work reflects the fun, the thrills and spills on show.
A word must also be put in for the special effects team, marshaled by Derek Meddings [also Oscar nominated], especially for the explosive climax, the miniature work and the fabulous Lotus Esprit, which needed several working versions to enable it to change into a mini-sub. The film is well photographed by Claude Renoir, who frames his shots with fore and back grounds to give the audience greater perspective. This is never more evident than in the tension filled hunt for Jaws at Karnack, where the camera pans across, up and down the famous hall of a thousand pillars. If Lewis Gilbert directs with nothing more than a steady hand, this hardly affects the result as the pace and structure of the adventure is almost fool proof. He saves his best work for the two central characters and is rewarded with those excellent performances.
It’s a testament to everyone concerned that The Spy Who Loved Me succeeds so impeccably. The attention to detail, from scripting to casting to production planning, is laudable. Cubby Broccoli had many problems leading up to the premier of this movie. First he had to reluctantly buy out Harry Saltzman’s share of the Eon or risk losing control of the franchise. Secondly the production team had to create a completely new adventure, for Ian Fleming had stipulated that only the title from his original novel could be used [probably a good thing; it isn’t a great novel]. Third he faced a legal challenge from Kevin McClory, whose proposed Thunderball remake, Warhead, featured several copywrite infringements. Lastly the film opened at the height of summer in competition with two of the biggest, freshest movies Hollywood had made in years. Was James Bond going to be good enough? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Despite all the obstacles, Cubby Broccoli and his team prove that, when it comes to James Bond, if it’s done well, nobody does it better.
The car copter chase scene is similar to that in Danger: Diabolik, a cult Italian film from the mid 60s, except the (anti) hero had an E Type Jag.
Chase is at 9 mins 30 roughly
Roger Moore 1927-2017
The Spy Who Loved Me may not be the best Bond film, but for me it is without question "Bond's Greatest Hits". With the possible exception of Goldfinger, no entry in the series packages all the classic elements -- tension, humor, action, savoir faire, villains, women, chases, witty dialogue, beautiful scenery, the "Fleming Sweep" -- with such balance. Any time I am asked to recommend a Bond film to someone who has never seen one, TSWLM is always the one I suggest.
This series follows my comments on Timothy Dalton's era
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/36656/tim … critiques/
and my 2008 review series
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/topic/31479/two … e-reviews/
Moonraker
I think it’s important for me to make a confession before I begin this review. I am an unashamed fan of Moonraker. This does not mean I am blind to its defects. However I am not in the habit of ‘Moonraker-bashing’ on spurious grounds, because for each moment which might make us cringe, there is one which leaves us open mouthed in wonder.
Moonraker was the first Bond film I saw in the cinema and it left an indelible impression on me. For the record, I think it’s worth recalling that in 1979 Moonraker was the most expensive Bond film ever made and yet, in pure dollar returns, it was also the most financially successful. Every penny of its $32million budget is up there on the screen. At times, Jean Tournier’s photography, Ken Adam’s sets and Jacques Fonteray’s costumes, seem to positively drip with the spend. Yes, it’s outrageous, silly and at times annoyingly childish, but it is never boring, it is never banal and it is never less than entertaining. Occasionally, movies need to be made which are like that: True Lies, anybody? Total Recall? MI 1,2,3 or 4? Moonraker is an adventure on a grand spectacle that has seldom been matched in the world of OO7.
For all the heartfelt praise, when I watch Moonraker, I can’t help but feel I’m watching an interpretation of ‘James Bond’s Best Bits.’ Famously producer Cubby Broccoli was quoted as referring to the ‘Harry Houdini Syndrome’ when specifically talking about Moonraker; that you give the audience more of what they love. He and his team certainly do that. Right from the opening teaser sequence, when Bond miraculously survives a sky-dive fight by pulling open his parachute, a la The Spy Who Loved Me, the audience – certainly a discerning one – gets the impression they’ve seen this all before.
In fact, superficially the whole movie is something of a re-run of its immediate predecessor. The villain, Hugo Drax, is planning to wipe out the population of the world and save a special few in his orbiting space station; Bond is put on the case because a space shuttle, on loan to the British, has been hijacked and disappears; he’s aided in his fight by an icily efficient foreign agent, this one from the USA; Jaws makes a comeback; the emphasis is on fun spiced with danger rather than vice versa.
Dig a little deeper however and you will find a whole raft of incidents that reflect earlier Bond epics. The Minister of Defence is wheeled in to give extra weight to the briefing as he was in The Spy Who Loved Me; the centrifuge scene and the pheasant drive revise Thunderball’s tension rack and clay pigeon shoot; Bond revisits Venice; the gondola chase is a retread of the dong chase from a few years back and even features the same boat splitting stunt; the Glastron boat is another version of the Aston Martin and features in a river chase familiar from Live and Let Die; Bond cracks a safe; M has a secret HQ in a foreign country; we have derring-do on cable cars from On Her Majesty’s; Bond experiences a scenic helicopter ride just like his one to Piz Gloria. There are more, but I won’t go on. It’s noticeable that the movie shows most of its genuine originality at the point where it becomes most daft, as Bond is flung into outer space to save the world, although even here the movie makers blatantly rip off the climax to Star Wars.
Does it matter? Well, on the face of it, and to most audiences, no, the pace of the film is so fast they probably don’t notice. When Moonraker was made of course, we were not watching OO7 at home on endless TV repeats, Blue Ray and DVD and audiences memories probably didn’t stretch far enough back to make these repetitions noticeable. It is disappointing though that there is precious little true fresh grit on display and the film succeeds because in the main, unless you’re exceptionally well versed in Bond history, everything is so well-presented, so well-disguised, it does feel unique and exciting.
This newness comes from the off. As with The Spy Who Loved Me we are treated to a gun barrel theme that anticipates the zippy action which follows as well as the driven incidental music score. There follows a brief moment of horror as a space shuttle is hijacked, its afterburners torching the crew of a Boeing 747. Then James Bond is thrown out of a plane minus a parachute. The fantastic stunt, a vertigo inducing fight in mid-air, played out to the music of rushing air, is jaw-droppingly impressive. It is no surprise to learn it needed over 80 jumps to collect the footage. It was directed and edited on site by John Glen, who would soon be helming the whole show himself, reward for excellent work all round on both this and the previous epic. While the scene sadly dips into cartoon humour after an unnecessary appearance from Jaws, it still remains one of the highlights of the series, not least because when utilized, John Barry’s music captures the drama and tension magnificently.
Barry works wonders on his return to the world of OO7. He started the decade with a marvelous score for Diamonds Are Forever and he ends it with this equally distinguished opus. He gets fully into the spirit of the movie, upping the tempo at appropriate moments of violence, remaining silent at others. He has Shirley Bassey to deliver a strong title song that doubles for the romantic interludes and which he adapts as Bond wanders through the Amazon to a beautiful deserted Mayan city. He introduces a heartbeat-like suspense theme, brilliantly used during a fight atop a cable car, and the haunting melody that accompanies the reveal of the space station shares both the beauty and the awe of evil.
I mention the music now because it is central to the success of the film. Barry’s score is so good it elevates potentially awkward or insouciant scenes and allows the audience a barometer to measure the action by. For instance, while we anticipate Bond wants to seduce Corinne Clery’s young helicopter pilot (conveniently named Corinne) and she clearly anticipates it also, it isn’t the dialogue that eases us into the copulation, for that is functional at best, but the delicate background music. Corinne’s death scene is also beautifully scored, a slow march of terror before she is torn apart by Doberman Pincers, and here it blends harmoniously with the tolling bells of St Mark’s Square in Venice. It is rare in Bond movies for music, sound and film editing to align so spellbindingly well. Later, as two scientists are gassed by a lethal concoction, Barry’s strings match the tone of the squealing lab rats, who scurry unaffected by the poison. Terror-laced, this is bravura post production film making again. Roger Moore’s expression is suitably pained.
The Venice scenes are probably Moore’s most consistent in the film. He does some orthodox espionage around the Venini Glass Works, saying very little, but moving svelte like among the display cabinets, scorching ovens and, at night, the laboratories. He’s athletic in the fight scene and tense during the gondola chase. He enjoys the rather obvious witticisms and has a convincing, authorative head-to-head with M. Unfortunately throughout the remainder of the movie, while he does the formula Bond stuff fairly well, Moore’s performance begins to show too much of the cheeky schoolboy and not enough of the deadly spy. There’s an early scene that’s a good example of this. Bond has dallied with the obscenely named heroine Doctor Holly Goodhead and been left to experience G-Force on a whirling centrifuge. He’s so conceited she seems rather glad to be rid of him. The fact he isn’t sure whether she’s in cohorts with Hugo Drax is almost lost among the mirth. The torture scene itself is very tense and well edited. It has real power. At the end, Moore’s Bond is exhausted, but he’d be lucky if the audience remember; he was having such a good time earlier that when it arrives, the suspense, its cause and effect, becomes almost an irrelevance. Time and again the film hovers close to this particular edge, seemingly about to tip over it: even when Bond hangs from a cable car he has time for a quip that almost destroys the intense build up to that fight scene.
The arrival of Richard Kiel’s Jaws doesn’t help matters. Jaws was a good foil in The Spy Who Loved Me, but he’s become a buffoon here and is even saddled with a chalk-and-cheese love affair. It’s very difficult to take seriously a henchman who flaps his arms like a bird when falling to his probable death or isn’t strong enough to bundle through a crowd of Mardis Gras revelers to catch his foe or who falls for a tiny bespectacled pigtailed moppet of a girl. Bond, or Moore, doesn’t even take him particularly seriously, constantly pulling faces as they engage in pointless fist fights. Worse, Jaws isn’t even necessary to the storyline except at the climax and any ugly looking muscle man could have occupied that role. Once again, this is more to do with perceived continuity, that appreciation comes from familiarity, and that isn’t necessarily so.
Lois Chiles is only adequate as Holly Goodhead, a virtual clone of Anya Amasova, from the same starchy manner to the equally decorous wardrobe. Haughtily composed, Chiles never seems to warm to the task. She’s good sparring with Moore, cutting him to size, but less convincing when required to do anything emotional. Seduced by Bond, Holly’s acceptance of his advances is calculated; she’s a woman unencumbered by feeling. She doesn’t display any of the vulnerability of Anya, nor is she ever angry or animated. Chiles doesn’t quite have that model poise either, a tantalizing immeasurable that elevates the impact of many Bond heroines. What she does have, which Barbara Bach’s Anya lacked, is a central role to perform. When Bond is shot into space, it is Holly who takes over. Already a NASA trained astronaut she has all the experience and knowledge Bond lacks. During the space scenes, she’s more authoritative, not simply toying with Bond, she’s leading him because he has to ask the questions. Sometimes, in Christopher Wood’s novelization, Holly is given the lines which Bond delivers in the movie and a little more of that would have gone a long way to making Holly Goodhead a worthwhile investment.
Christopher Wood is nominally the script writer but his work is so buried beneath the stunts and thrills and special effects, it’s hardly worth worrying about. It lacks much of the depth of his novel and all of the emotive pull which the love affair evoked in The Spy Who Loved Me. While there are many jokey lines and a smattering of throwaway insight, there isn’t a lot for any of the cast to really get their teeth into. The women come and go, the henchmen are mute and the MI6 staff are suitably brusque. Here Q is fiddling funny and Bernard Lee’s final scenes show us much of what we’ll miss after his passing. He makes gold of blunt rocks.
It’s left to Frenchman Michael Lonsdale to take the acting honours as billionaire space freak and madness personified Hugo Drax. Something of an American neo-Nazi whose plan involves selective breeding as well as mass extinction, Drax is smooth and assured. Physically, he looks the part of an exceedingly rich and persuasive man, dressed in close cut clean suits, calm, almost eel-like, he seems to slither around his chateau, his Mayan chamber, his space city. He has a slight lisp in his accent, which suggests vulnerability, a man not entirely happy with the cards life has dealt him, a man with an incurable inferiority complex. Hence he mocks the British sense of humour, the ritual of afternoon tea and tries to find entertainment in Bond’s demise: he even tells him what he’s doing: “Mister Bond, you defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you.”
What Drax lacks is any kind of back story and that isn’t Lonsdale’s fault. Wood simply doesn’t bother to expand on his villain’s crazed plot, so we have to take it all at face value; at least Stromberg wanted to create new life from the sea because he saw it as the Earth’s salvation, Drax doesn’t offer us any explanation other than a latent desire to be God. It’s a credit to Lonsdale, as well as the furious pace of the movie, that we don’t really notice, for we know Drax is Bond’s nemesis from their earliest meeting: the affront he considers dealt to him by the British, the sinister play with the Dobermans, the order to cause Bond harm: that is all which really seems to matter.
Ian Fleming of course spent a long time explaining his revenge obsessed German, Sir Hugo Drax, but it’s lost to us here. Lonsdale looks much like the description of the character and that’s about all, we don’t even see him playing bridge, one of the better chapters of the original novel. Nor do we share Fleming’s nuclear missile storyline, which was considered old fashioned in 1979, but was suitable for interest from Rank Pictures in the mid-fifties, an option never developed. The climax of the novel has Bond surviving the launch of the missile by hiding in the offices which adjoin the launch chamber and this is the sole incident recreated for the movie, although Bond’s escape from the space shuttle’s blast off is less than convincing.
What does convince are the production values. Ken Adam’s sets are truly wondrous. It goes without saying that the space city is the most ambitious, but he saves his best work for the smaller stuff. So The Great Chamber, a rerun of Blofeld’s suite from You Only Live Twice, is a Garden of Eden buried beneath a Mayan temple and its adjoining launch centre revels in boldly lit pragmatic cubism. The associated model work for the space sequences is better than fine and the special effects team, led by Derek Meddings and John Richardson, won an Oscar nomination for their sterling work in both building and destroying the space station.
They were also responsible for overlaying film to create the numerous space sequences. These visuals are often compared unfavourably to both current and contemporary effects, but personally I find them exceptional. Obviously I am not an expert, yet I can only spot a few shots where the technique shudders a little, and most of these are during the fiery take off scenes. The scenes shot against the blackness of space, using the stars, the space station or the earth as a fixed point to suggest speed on everything else’s part, stand up very well today. By example, even the redux of Close Encounters has a hazy glow where they split the screen to film the alien craft on glass. There is no shimmer in Moonraker, in fact some of the images are phenomenally powerful and spectacularly beautiful. The approach to the space city, while tipping a big wink to Star Wars, is almost operatic; once again Barry matches his music to the mood sensed on screen.
Neither can I fault Jean Tournier’s photography, which turns Venice, California, Rio and the Amazon into a stunning series of bright and beautiful landscapes. Later on, when confronted with the silver and chrome space sets, he tones down the lighting so the flashy surfaces sparkle indiscriminately. John Glen edits with some panache. The action scenes never disappoint in execution, only occasionally by design, and if the talky bits are quite still then they serves as a breather for the audience too.
The stunt teams do their utmost as always. There are at least three memorable fights to choreograph, two thrilling boat chases to devise and that one moment of torture for our hero to survive. Everything is dressed to perfection and the location scouts discovered a series of eye catching locales that provide the prerequisite taste of exotica. There is also, for the first time since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a genuine bevy of beauties, for Drax has recruited eight gorgeous women to procreate in his god-like environs. They feature prominently everywhere and changed the definition of a Bond Girl, which no longer applied just to the speaking parts. Many of the girls got extra exposure by featuring nude for an article in Playboy magazine [no pun intended, but really...].
On the downside director Lewis Gilbert is in even less in control than he was on The Spy Who Loved Me and the actors seem to be taking advantage by slackening off. I don’t really blame him. The best work on this film was done by the special units. By the time Gilbert gets to actually direct, he’s probably only got half a film to work with. The real drive to succeed in this film comes from the top. This is certainly Cubby Broccoli’s grand gesture of a movie, his chance to act Cecil B. de Mille and give the paying customer what they want, action and sex and comedy, and not always in that order.
I guess then, it’s time to briefly reflect on a few of the things which really don’t work in Moonraker. The whole space station idea is preposterous. Even if masked by radar, the city would be visible from the earth, but that is conveniently glossed over. The destruction of the deadly nerve gas globes stinks of Star Wars, and while it is tense, you always know Bond will succeed. The ridiculous gondola-come-hovercraft is an example of how to spoil a good chase scene; I won’t delve into the music or the visual humour in that scene, none of which works. [It’s a particularly horrid sequence that in 1979 I remember the audience laughing through. I fancy they were laughing at and not with James Bond.] Jaws is now a cumbersome henchman; his turning is rather appropriate as he’s become as mirthsome as the hero. The comic stance taken by the producers, writer and cast too often detracts from the solid machinations which surround the outrageous plot. Perhaps the greatest offence is not that the movie is funny, but that so much of the humour, whether verbal or visual, comes at the expense of character. We learn so little about anyone in this film that it’s hard to share sympathy or loathing. It may be a grand spectacle, but James Bond, or anybody, isn’t given a chance to breathe; like Hugo Drax at the film’s end, they may as well be cast into space.
Does it matter? Not really. Moonraker is a very strong product. Yes, it lacks much, but it also has tremendous energy and an air of the fantastic which makes it, like The Spy Who Loved Me, a much more successful film than the ones that immediately precede it. Yes, it has problems, and not everyone will like it. From a purist viewpoint, it’s an appalling interpretation of Fleming and cinematically something of a rip off from other films, but most cinema goers are not purists and I think Cubby Broccoli understood that. He really has given the audience what they wanted, at least the 1970s one, and as an entertainer you can’t do fairer than that.
Thanks, Blackleiter, suffice to say I am giving it some thought, although I've already dealt with Dalton. Maybe in September for More of Moore.
Thanks
(despite the love) it was hard to praise and not lumber the criticism....
MR is IMO one of the most under appreciated gems of the Bond world - I hope I made that clear...