7/7/77 – who could resist launching a James Bond film on double double sevens? The Spy Who Loved Me opened 43 years ago tonight. Though it’s the first Bond I remember seeing advertised – kids at school had the car-submarine toy! – I was much too young to see it on the big screen. We finally did three years ago, in a UNICEF Benefit double bill with For Your Eyes Only (the first Bond I did see at the cinema) celebrating the life of Roger Moore. They made an unexpectedly successful pairing. When we got in from our night at the Greenwich Odeon, I typed up what I thought about each, and both, and the bits that each film might do better swapping between them…
Now, I know what you’re thinking: that’s a strange choice. Why not The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker? Because that would be like having a massive chocolate gateau followed by an even more massive chocolate gateau. No, scratch that – it is, apparently, World Chocolate Day and that’s making me hungry. I’ll start again. Because that would be like watching the same film You Only Live Twice in a row. Tonally, these do interestingly different things (though I reckon one’s more successful in what it sets out to do). Neither is my favourite Roger Moore Bond film, but they’re the massive success on its own terms, and the critical success that shows his range. And there’s something else: at our showing, the trailers before the double bill were all late middle-aged dreary, and we weren’t interested in any of them. Then, I remember… The very last one starts. Rey’s hand on a rock. John Williams’ music. Into my head comes the thought, ‘Every member of the audience is sighing, “Finally!”’ just as I, too, breathe out with relief. And at that exact moment, Luke Skywalker says, “Breathe.” But the even better trailer came at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me: “James Bond Will Return in For Your Eyes Only”. And for that one night only, he did.
Spoilers follow.
To Begin With…
The Spy Who Loved Me stars Roger Moore as James Bond. Barbara Bach is the Bond woman, KGB Major Anya Amasova, Bond’s competitor and one of the few who’s a proper opposite number. Curd Jürgens is the megalomaniac villain, Karl Stromberg, lurking in his (usually) underwater base, Atlantis. And Richard Kiel is Jaws, the giant hench with the steel teeth. With bonus Lotus submersible car, previous James Bond (voice) George Baker and Doctor Who’s Space James Bond star Edward de Souza. Russian and British nuclear subs have vanished, swallowed by Stromberg’s supertanker with the even bigger jaws in a plan to start World War III… The poster’s justified in saying this is the big one – everything you expect from a Bond film and Moore, with a massive world-spanning plot, sets so huge they had to build the world’s biggest stage, and the biggest, most outrageous ski jump in cinema history, they threw everything into Bond to see if it could still be a blockbuster: they doubled the previous film’s box office.
For Your Eyes Only stars Roger Moore as James Bond. Carole Bouquet is the Bond woman, crossbow-wielding Melina Havelock out to avenge her murdered parents. But which gangster is the villain? Could it be, as first appears, cheery Columbo (Topol)? Or will it be, in a twist, Kristatos (Villainous Julian Glover)? It’s definitely not Ernst Stavro Blofeld, whatever the pre-titles sequence might suggest. With a more interesting role than usual for Walter Gotell’s KGB General Gogol and an early one for Charles Dance. On the surface it’s a Cold War plot chasing a sunken British nuclear submarine ATAC targeting device, but deeper down it’s about the local catspaws, the people who get caught in the crossfire and who’s out for revenge on who. This one gets the critical praise for being the sober, serious Bond film. In theory…
The Spy Who Loved Me
“Just keeping the British end up, sir.”The pre-credits adventure grabs your attention as we’re introduced to new Bond regular General Gogol, the KGB chief who brings charisma and ambiguity to the series as the Cold War comes back (though more often than not with Britain and the USSR in uneasy alliance). Points for the film’s first twist: Gogol calls in his top agent – not Michael Billington’s sexily hairy sub-Bond, who turns out merely to be Major Amasova’s lover. Add sexual innuendo (“something came up”), corniness (“But James, I need you!” “So does England”), a ski chase to great music and an incredible jump off a cliff with a Union Flag parachute, and the movie’s off to an unbeatable start even before the song cuts in.
When you think of James Bond, perhaps it’s the action, the quips, the women, the cars, the villains? For me – well, yes, it’s the villains – a major part what I think of any Bond film is in the music. Give me a bold belter of a theme song with an acid edge, then a brassy, gorgeous score that says ‘What a fantastic vista’, ideally by John Barry. But the music takes a definite swerve for both of these films. Now, you might think, ‘Hit song, but no John Barry, and that’s your problem’. Well… Not quite. The strange thing about The Spy Who Loved Me is that Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better is a massive hit, while Marvin Hamlisch is more disco than the strident, insistent traditional Bond score, but I prefer the score to the song. The pulsing disco of Bond ’77 races along with some serious energy, the eerie, bubbling approach to Atlantis is a great new direction, and this is a composer who gets it – as you might guess from the Bond music documentary in which he was the one who said of Goldfinger’s “Wah wahhh-wah!” opening, “If you’re dead, you wake up for that.” Whereas Nobody Does It Better is a statement of intent with great knowing confidence, but it doesn’t have the bite for me and only lets rip towards the end. The title sequence that goes with it is the first to feature Bond himself, again the statement of intent, though the Maurice Binder naked goose-stepping Russian ‘girlies’ and guns are even more sexist than it sounds.
Odd things I’d never noticed until seeing the film on the big screen: a young, slim Kevin R McNally rushing about on a sub; Stromberg’s underwater-and-sometimes-looming-over-the-water base Atlantis initially being a disappointment, as it should be city-sized but the bigger the picture, the smaller it seems when we first see it rising from the depths. But later, when we get snap-round camera moves and forced perspectives, I believed.
The movie’s other massive special effect – Jaws – is hugely effective. And pretty huge. And though inspired by the book that they weren’t allowed to use (and not allowed to use SPECTRE either, a film that’s so very definitely present but built on absences), he’s part of the pop-culture riffing that’s especially there for the first half (and the Bond film riffing for the whole thing). We see a shark – reference to hit movie Jaws – and a horrible kill. Then we get not the shark but the man named – Jaws. Then he goes up against the shark. And wins! This is Bond saying ‘We are the blockbusters.’ Though even this film’s box office success was nowhere near Jaws’, it’s got the same chutzpah as Nobody Does It Better: enormous confidence in itself after following fashion for two movies, yet never tipping into arrogance, and utterly winning. While after Christopher Lee last time, here we’re really doing a vampire bite. And a massive figure, haunting the pyramids in a big horror movie sequence. He’s Jaws-Frankenstein-Mummy-Dracula!
Disconcertingly, one of the attractions has a voiceover from Charles Gray, as if the film’s haunted by the spectre of SPECTRE – exorcised from it by legal action. “I’m not interested in extortion”; context makes Stromberg’s line funnier. On top of being You Only Live Twice and its threat to the whole world (though closer in plan to Doctor Who’s Warriors of the Deep – which must have been thinking of this, later), I’m getting Goldfinger, too, in the Bond’s Greatest Hits: the amusing car, the obscenely wealthy villain, the memorable hench, the woman who’s impressive in her own right… It really does succeed in what it aims to do, doesn’t it? Because after Goldfinger, this pretty much is the car, the hench and at least one of the best roles for a woman, though not one of the most charismatic actors (Caroline Munro steals it by still flirting as she tries to gun Bond down from a helicopter, and he gives her the feminist compliment of actually killing her as he would any other hench). And a lot of films have tried.
The plot has a deliberate feel of the Sean Connery movies, and firmly underlines Moore as the same Commander Bond after Live and Let Die in particular introduced a different man. For all that, this is also the definitive tongue-in-cheek Roger Moore. It couldn’t be anyone else. It’s all done with great verve, with amazingly huge sets from genius designer Ken Adam, a villain with glowering presence who wants to destroy humanity for nihilism (rather than the ’60s exploiting the Cold War for profit), and while it’s not the most creative Bond, much of it’s great fun, much of it’s a bit crass, and it is indeed “Bond – and Beyond!” I enjoyed it immensely, and though my head says to give it 007 out of 10, the whole experience swept me up to an 8.
For Your Eyes Only
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”This was the first Bond film my parents let me see at the cinema, and I have to separate a lot of baggage from it. The longest-carried is that I had dearly wanted to see Moonraker, for lasers! But was judged too young (though we’d been allowed to watch Bond films on TV). Four decades later, I probably prefer this to Moonraker, but when I was nine the lack of lasers was a cruel disappointment. But that’s only the start. What I expected, what it isn’t, what it does with the lead villain, and right from the beginning, the pre-titles sequence and, oh, dear, the music…
“That’s putting it mildly, 007.”
Where The Spy Who Loved Me wanted to be a big hit and aimed – and squarely hit – You Only Live Twice with a splash of Goldfinger, For Your Eyes Only always feels to me like it really wants to be the taut Cold-War-to-one-side-seen-through-third-country-rivals thriller From Russia With Love, but without the thrasos, as Columbo would say, while it somehow can’t stop casting its eyes to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The pre-titles sums this up and sums up the film’s tonal dissonance. Roger Moore is terrific throughout the movie, less commanding than in his imperial The Spy Who Loved Me but stretched beyond the innuendo and charm to disturbingly psychopathic flashes of chilling coldness and, opening, quietly underplayed grief. He visits Tracy Bond’s grave in one of the most solemnly introspective moments in all of Bond, then is kidnapped by a remote-controlled helicopter which he in turn hijacks in order to drop contractually not-Blofeld, babbling about delicatessens, down a factory chimney. Even when I was nine and tonal dissonance was not the foremost term in my critical vocabulary, that felt like whiplash. Reading the endless backstory of court cases, it feels like a massive ‘Up yours’. Quite literally. Someone’s suing you to make a rival Bond film with Blofeld and defector-Connery? Erase Connery’s last movie and go back to the Telly Savalas incarnation (ish) so they can chuck him in the bin after, and there is no subtle way to put this, using the landing prop of the helicopter to f—k him in the arse first. This does not set the tone most of the film is aiming for.
If you’re having a really frustrating time in court, wouldn’t therapy be cheaper?
Sheena Easton’s For Your Eyes Only was another big hit song, and though it’s terribly unfair, again it’s one that I only quite like, and this time with the double let-down of not just what it is but what it isn’t: it isn’t Blondie. It’s not bad, and it opens with a certain mysterious longing tone, but it’s a little bland and sugary next to the best Bond themes. Bill Conti first approached Blondie, who turned them down when it turned out he only wanted Deborah Harry, not the musicians, and she wasn’t going to be allowed to write the song, just pout for him. Worse news for Sheena Easton: Blondie wrote and recorded their own song on their album The Hunter, and the film’s theme is no match for the punchy challenge sung from a female Bond counterpart with, in Debbie Harry, the most icy-cool voice in pop. But that’s only the second most famous factoid about the title song. The most famous is that, for the first time, the singer appeared in the main titles, Maurice Binder having taken a fancy to Sheena Easton. But, as her lips were to be in a fifty-foot close-up on cinema screens, the famous tacky titles obsessive made one small demand. She could only do it if he could fix her entire head in giant clamps to stop her moving a millimetre. And she did! She looks terrific in the clamps, but I’m afraid I still find myself thinking ‘But she hasn’t got Deborah Harry’s cheekbones. Or voice. Or song.’
Does the rest of Bill Conti’s score make up for losing Blondie? It does not. Far, far too many early ’80s porno funk guitars (though the Bond Theme survives one arrangement here, another makes even that cheesily near-unlistenable) and piping little ‘pah pahs’ instead of proper brass. Of all of the films, the music for this one has dated horribly. Close your eyes and just listen to the score, and you imagine people dancing on ice in neon-toned legwarmers. Open them, and discover to your horror that it’s not far from the truth. All right, there are some swirling strings when Melina shoots someone with her crossbow and more nice strings with a sinister bubbling fade after the ‘Countess’ dies. But, on the whole, I’d’ve preferred the film entirely re-scored by John Barry, and I’d love to have heard what he might have added to the Blondie song, too. Of all my For Your Eyes Only baggage, the heaviest may be that, while the music boosts several of the weaker Bonds, it drags this one down.
That’s a shame, as much of this is rather good in a low-key way, but even the subdued elements aren’t always well-judged. There’s a feint between two potential villains that partially works, but Topol’s exuberant character comes over rather more strongly than the usually magnificent but necessarily underplayed Julian Glover. Famously, Julian Glover was cast as the villain after producer Cubby Broccoli saw him as Count Scarlioni in Doctor Who – City of Death. That is a fantastic performance. Urbane (“My dear, it was not necessary to enter my house by – well, you can hardly call it stealth – you had only to knock on the door”), deadly on an extinction-level scale, gorgeously dressed with a splash of green. if ever there were an audition for the perfect Bond villain, that was it. Julian Glover might just be my favourite actor. He’s one of very few for whom, on meeting him at a convention, my mask of confidence collapsed into an incoherent babble of it’s Julian Glover!! Doctor Who, Star Wars, Blake’s 7, Quatermass, Indiana Jones, Game of Thrones, four-times-over guest star Villainous Julian Glover in The Avengers – an extraordinary career of all your favourite things. I should be so pleased to see him in this as Kristatos. And I am. Ish. I’m ashamed to say it, but he is a brilliant actor giving a mostly subtle, double-edged performance that isn’t called on to give the rip-roaring, showboating, flamboyant, let’s face it, what I miss is massive ham villain that would probably have been much less interesting to play but, I confess, this feels a bit of a waste. It’s like a reverse Diamonds Are Forever: where Charles Gray gave his usual villain performance, which is an ideal Bond villain but not remotely Blofeld, Glover is given a subdued character part with an accent so, while naturally superb here because he’s a brilliant actor with range, if anyone had charismatic posh perfect ur-Bond villain potential, it was Villainous Julian Glover. Yes, I know: now I’m criticising this film for not being crass enough. I can do tonal dissonance too.
Even the villainous twist they go with lacks oomph. While Julian Glover’s been understated as the fake Bond ally setting up Topol as the bad gangster who Bond must eliminate, there’s not quite been anything bar a bit of music on the beach to suggest wrongness in that, and then – Topol just spills the whole truth, and after a moment of doubt, he shows thrasos and Bond believes him, so rushes in shooting on his behalf. Well, I can believe Bond taking a leap of faith after sizing a man up, but it kills the spy thriller ambiguity stone dead. It’s never ambiguity – just a switch from one state to another. So Kristatos gets one scene where he gets to laugh like a Bond villain, the keelhauling, which is fine, but that’s next to nothing. I enjoy his slipping around the blond idiot hench to grab the goods and make his exit at the end, but that’s a bit of business, not a proper climax. I want the two old smuggler rivals fighting – there’s only a smidgeon of that, and not much drama. I suppose they don’t want to take the attention from Bond, but it means the thing lacks a heart save Melina, and she’s not driven it as much as those two.
The two best lines are both Bond found with priests: the opening, sober, “Some sort of emergency” / “It usually is” followed by the eerie blessing at the graveside and then, as established, ‘with hilarious results’, and the not at all sober but very entertaining reversal of “Bless me, father…” later. As if seeking absolution for the opening chimney dropping on Tracy’s headstone, traces of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service keep glimmering. The exciting ski-and-bobsled-and-extra-bike-chase is more original and more in your face than I’d remembered (marred by truly ghastly music), while Columbo comes across as another take on chummy gangster Draco (and to be fair, Topol is way better in the role), and there’s even a ‘down to earth’ version of the swanky Piz Gloria turned much less glam old abbey for the mountain climax. Bond’s climb is new to the series and very tense – even pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.
One effect of the largely subdued tone is that the film runs short on memorable set-pieces. The climb near the end is gripping, but at the beginning they throw away the terrific ‘hi-tech boat’ lost scene that’s more ‘real’ and even more tense than Spy’s, and the murder of the Havelocks, which they should have got over their urge to stick it to Kevin McClory’s lawsuit and positioned as the pre-credits sequence (it doesn’t help that the script jarringly makes James Villiers, probably the poshest actor in any Bond movie and a nob who’d know, call Sir Timothy “Sir Havelock”). I rather like the aftermath to their murder that sees Gonzales going into his own pool with a bolt in his back, then Loque not only taking the briefcase payment back, its owner no longer able to spend it, but that his henchman meanly snatches back the bundle of notes tossed to one of the women! Unfortunately, that’s followed by the exploding car. It was, I imagine, intended to be symbolic of not relying on gadgets. So it’s ironic that the ‘We’re realistic!’ statement is one of the silliest in all the movies: a car ‘security device’ that blows it up when anyone so much as touches it.
Daniel Craig is, like Timothy Dalton, often seen as a backlash against the ‘silly’ Bond before him (now I’ve got Graham Chapman in my head as M saying, “Stop that, it’s silly,” with Terry Jones as Moneypenny. You couldn’t have John Cleese as Q, though. That would never work). Watching For Your Eyes Only, it’s clear that so is Roger Moore a backlash against the ‘excesses’ of Roger Moore: not only in his underplaying but that his use here of anything to hand to wallop people prefigures Craig’s Bond. The Bond women and his relationships with them are interestingly characterised this time, too: he turns down too-young Bibi; he’s got proper chemistry with Melina, as she genuinely laughs at one of his one-liners and there are a few ‘touristy’ scenes where, unusually, they seem to enjoy each other’s company; and the Countess, closer to his own age, is rather lovely, as both relax and let each other know they’re play-acting. Like – again – OHMSS, but played at high speed, they go from a brutal fight on a beach to tragedy, which in turn leads to Moore’s coldest yet most feeling kill, Loque’s “no head for heights”. Though the Countess’ death creates a jarring note with Topol’s Columbo, charming and scene-stealing as he is, because he’s so jolly that he doesn’t seem to give a toss about his lover. Merely one line where he’s marginally less expansive, quickly over.
Roger Moore is the best thing in this, and holds the film together even when he is unexpectedly being the serious, dangerous part and all around him panics at the thought of getting too heavy. That’s what I have to make of the way that For Your Eyes Only is a meditation on destructive vengeance that before saying “First dig two graves” opens on Tracy’s grave just to set up the Blofeld-McClory revenge gag, or that despite Bond’s impressively ruthless moments and the thoughtful spy thriller elements, it’s hamstrung by a lack of verve and of nerve, edging away from its darker places with crudely ill-judged mickey-taking instead. The exploding car might just be a statement that went wrong, but the film closes on more panicky slapstick that simply undermines the mood. Geoffrey Keen’s grumbling minister gets on my wick in each of his Bond films, but especially this one, where he appears to have defected to Mrs Thatcher’s government. Yes, Mrs Thatcher. The film’s last scene features a parrot saying rude things to a Margaret Thatcher impersonator, and it’s shoddy beyond belief. Finishing on an innuendo makes me smile, but somehow that ending has always put me off the film.
The James Bond Double Bill
Watched in one night as a follow-up to The Spy Who Loved Me, I don’t think I’d ever appreciated For Your Eyes Only more. The two films have a lot in common, but a very different feel, so they made remarkably good companions. Though, first, an aside on the bearers of the bad news: I love Graham Crowden. Another of my favourite ever actors, amazingly tall, especially on a cinema screen, and his gravitas on “Not deep enough, I’m afraid” is so perfect on so very little (no, it’s not a critique of what the film is attempting). But just this once, in the second underwater Bond of the evening, I look to Noel Johnson next to him and my Doctor Who brain exclaims, ‘F—k me! It’s the King of Atlantis!’ [Graham Crowden starred in a differently fabulous Doctor Who take on Greek Myths.]
I’m sure the double bill was chosen for how well both films showcase Roger Moore, but they do have themes that interestingly intertwine. Ski chases to pepper largely secrets underwater affairs and a McGuffin machine that compromises nuclear subs? Check! But it’s that McGuffin that compromises nuclear subs in both films which is the crucial element for me. For Your Eyes Only’s best bit of music comes approaching the St George wreck underwater. But here’s where we get one of the biggest plot holes, too. Kristatos has more resources and has had more time. Why hasn’t he got to the wreck already? There’s a line afterwards about Bond saving them the trouble of disarming it, but it seems like that was handy, not a plan, and a hell of a risk. Because why didn’t Bond destroy the ATAC underwater? There’s no reason at all in the plot. And that would have been that. Between us, walking home after the cinema, Richard and I came up with a simple fix: the British government want the data from the spy-ship’s mission. That’s why it was there. So Bond has been ordered to destroy it only as a last resort. That would only take a line. Or here’s another: the diving-suited killer attacks. Bond and Melina use the self-destruct bomb to kill him (in a Battlefield moment, when the suit blows he visibly starts to say “Shit!”). Just switch that around very slightly: they’ve armed the self-destruct; he attacks; they’re about to die; the only weapon they have is the bomb, so they have to make the choice, tear it free and use it to save themselves, but now need to take the ATAC and find another way of destroying it properly.
Why Bond doesn’t destroy the ATAC earlier in the film is a problem for For Your Eyes Only in isolation. And yet watching the two films back-to-back, the two devices prompted inspiration. Each would be more effective with a little swapped between them. In The Spy Who Loved Me, it’s hugely important that there’s now a device that can track nuclear submarines, but only for the first half of the movie. Then everyone forgets about it. But it should still be a critical Cold War game-changer, and for all that Q is blasé about the theory, should have been definitely finished off with Stromberg. The McGuffin seems more ‘real’ in For Your Eyes Only: an updated Enigma machine, or – one of my From Russia With Love echoes – a reverse-Lektor that the Russians want to get their hands on to compromise the British this time. And yet… Despite this ‘realism’, and being carried all the way through to the end of the plot as Spy failed to, its role in the climax would have made more sense if this machine was instead the machine they had last time. Spy’s device was something new that neither had and could tilt the balance: Bond destroying it would absolutely make his “Détente” line true. Except it isn’t. In this film, it’s not an irreplaceable third-party development but a British device the Russians want. The British keeping it from the Russians is… Actually a British victory and the whole point of the entire movie. Though Moore’s defiant charisma and the ambiguous smile from General Gogol still makes the (anti-)climax rather interesting, that’s the actors, not the script.
I enjoyed For Your Eyes Only on the big screen far more in May 2017 than little me did in 1981. But I still can’t help wanting to fix it. The Spy Who Loved Me thrilled me by succeeding in exactly what it wanted to do, while the second film just doesn’t have the confidence to follow through on its own instincts. I would love this to be the movie it so nearly is and give it 007 out of 10, but I can only say 6.
James Bond Will Return In Octopussy
Just to be contrary, my favourite Roger Moore Bond film is the next along – Octopussy. The title song is adequate but bottles out of using the title-word (“All Time High” swapping one hostage-to-fortune title for another, I fear). With a competing ‘Bond film’ that year, though, John Barry is back to do the score, and it’s terrific. Particularly the forbidding strings for the sinister twin assassins near the Berlin Wall, the rousing mix of Bondian and exotic for the balloon-led attack near the end, and most strikingly the bomb, where a deep, sinister circling beat builds from deceptively soft to powerful strings – all the more effective for saying ‘something big is in reserve’ while Bond is trying to disarm a live nuke. The other main element I love it for is the villain, or rather the villains – three key antagonists, each memorable and with their own agendas, though loosely allied. Octopussy herself is one of the most intriguing and powerful Bond women (with, unsurprisingly, hints of Pussy Galore, greatest of them all), deposed prince Kamal Khan is urbane-but-deadly, looking for money, power and the main chance and tossing out bon mots (“You have a nasty habit of surviving”), yet it’s still stolen by Steven Berkoff’s scenery-chewing Cold War hawk General Orlov (when I’m rushing for a train that I’m just too late for, I always have him shouting, “I must get to that train!” in my head).
The most electrifying sequence does not involve any of the principal villains, but a pair of henches as the titles fade: it’s East Germany, and a clown – in truth, 009 – is running through the woods, only to run into knife-throwing twin assassins, to fantastic music. Mortally wounded, he staggers through the window of the British Ambassador, his outstretched hand (still with a balloon hovering above it) releasing a Fabergé Egg that rolls towards His horrified Excellency. The scene always makes the hairs rise at the back of my neck, and it’s like an Avengers episode wandering into John le Carré. 007, too, will dress as a clown for one of the most tense, gripping pieces of acting Moore ever does. This is not a critically acclaimed film, but like the circus that provides much of the backdrop, if you don’t like one act, another will be along in a minute to make you wide-eyed, and it never fails to entertain me.
This is the fourth of what might be a series of Fragments – not-quite-finished, not-quite-polished, from ideas I’ve written up over time and maybe I’ll share some of them anyway. If you’d like more, please let me know, and if you’d like to help, please ask me, ‘Have you at some point written something intriguing about Story / Series X, and could you find it, consider it and post it?’ You might suggest one that I can (TS;RM [Too Short; Read More]? Here). This one’s for Millennium.
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