Moonraker
WHO IS JAMES BOND? James Bond is a world-famous super-spy. Everyone recognizes him — hey, there goes James Bond, super-spy! I sure hope he’s not investigating me! Why is James Bond world-famous? Why would a super-spy — a secret agent — seek to publicize his existence? The answer, here, is obvious — to better impress women. In the past, Bond, a pathological masher, has spent too much time wining and dining women, and let’s face it, he’s not getting younger — there are still plenty of beautiful women on the planet and if you want to have sex with all of them, you can’t hide your light under a bushel, you’ve got to advertise. My name is Bond, James Bond — we make sexytime now, yes?
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? Hugo Drax is a a multibillionaire with an aerospace industry. He wants to destroy all humanity and create a super-race in space. He has built a space station to house his super-race people, and has developed a potent nerve gas to launch into Earth’s atmosphere, killing everyone.
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? Screw Sherlock Holmes — James Bond is undeniably the world’s greatest detective. Sherlock Holmes has to assemble a series of abstruse clues and somehow deduce the truth that lies behind them — James Bond just kind of wanders around exotic locations, and every time he walks into a room, it magically contains the exact clue he needs to take him to the next location! And you know what? Bond doesn’t even know what he’s looking for! That’s how great a detective he is! He doesn’t even need to look for clues, they just come running up to him like cuddly puppies! Or, to be fair, there are two kinds of rooms in Moonraker; rooms that contain clues and rooms that contain assassins. Sometimes both.
An American space-shuttle has gone missing. Bond is sent to track down what happened to it. No one says anything, anywhere, about a big space-station or a plan to create a master-race in space or a scheme to kill all humanity — Bond just kind of stumbles along, following clue after clue, until Drax finally just explains the whole plan to him.
Get a load of this piece of detective work: As I say, a shuttle has gone missing (hijacked by, who else, a couple of guys in leather jackets). It’s manufactured by Hugo Drax. Bond goes to investigate Drax. Why? Who knows? Bond is the world’s greatest detective; anywhere he chooses to start will inevitably be the correct place to start.
He walks into a room. Who’s room? Who knows? It’s a room, Bond’s in it, it’s bound to contain a clue of some sort.
There’s a clock. He opens the clock-face. The clock rises up off its pedestel — there’s a concealed safe! Aha! A clue! Bond opens the safe — there are blueprints inside! Another clue! He takes photographs of the blueprints (a comparitive rarity in Bond movies — actual spy-work). The photgraphs reveal a diagram with some hexagons in it — hexagons! A clue! I bet it has something to do with space travel — everyone knows that space stuff is all about hexagons.
He travels to Venice. He walks into a glass-blowing factory. A couple of guys are blowing glass cylinders. Bond inspects one — it’s a hexagon! Now Bond is not a master of geometry, so just to make sure he’s not on some crazy wild goose chase, he takes his photograph of the blueprint-diagram out of his pocket and holds it up next to the glass cylinder — yep! Six sides — that’s a hexagon! Another clue! This Drax fellow must be up to no good, he’s working with hexagons! In glass! What devious glass-hexagon scheme must he be involved in?
And it just goes on like that. Bond has Q analyze a liquid in a tube he finds in Venice — it’s a nerve gas — a clue! The nerve gas is derived from a rare, deadly species of orchid — another clue! The rare, deadly species of orchid can only be found in a small area of central South America — another clue! I bet if we go to that remote area of central South America, we will inevitably find The Villain’s secret hideout, which will contain his gigantic underground space center!
I would like to start Moonraker over again, but put Bond in a different room at the beginning — maybe the lobby of the Empire State Building. And he could look at the list of tenants in the lobby — a clue! and discover that one of the tenant’s names is Xard — “Drax” backwards — another clue! And so forth, see if perhaps every room in every city in every country in the world contains clues as to Drax’s evil scheme to eradicate humanity.
WOMEN? Lois Chiles plays Dr. Holly Goodhead. Burdened with a name like that, one might forgive the producers for not finding the best actress for the part. But I am pleased to say that Lois Chiles, while not exactly the next Katherine Hepburn, manages to play her role with great wit and dignity, something I would not have thought possible in this movie, and crushes Barbara Bach like a grape.
She’s also easily as good a detective as Bond is. When they’re inside Drax’s enormous underground space center, Bond says “Which way?” And Goodhead looks around, shrugs, and says “How ’bout this way?” And off they go, stumbling across a rocket ship that just happens to be taking off at that moment.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? I doubt anyone could be actually cool in this movie. Hugo Drax has a French estate that he’s transferred to Los Angeles, which is pretty cool, but otherwise all his attempts at cool come to naught. He’s got a standard-issue karate-master hit man, who walks around his French country estate dressed in his karate outfit, just in case you missed that he’s a karate guy — and you know how the karate guy tries to kill Bond? That’s right — in a centerfuge! Ha! That will show you not to mess with Karate Guy! He’s got Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me, who becomes the Wiley Coyote of Bond Second Villains — except with worse comic timing. He’s got a gigantic Ken Adam-designed space station, which looks great until it’s starts getting blown up, and then it starts looking suspiciously like a plastic model dangling on a string. He’s got the balls to quote Oscar Wilde, Jean Renoir and 2001 in this crappiest of entertainments, which I guess gives him a kind of coolness. He doesn’t have a shark tank, but he does have an enormous-rubber-snake tank. But he’s hamstrung by his role as Bond Villain. Bond has shown up at my estate — as a Bond Villain, it is now my duty to try to kill him. Bond has now made it all the way to my secret space center — in spite of the fact that I’ve been trying to kill him for the past 90 minutes, I it is now incumbent upon me, in my role as Bond Villain, to graciously explain my evil scheme to him. Which is not cool at all.
SCIENCE TIDBIT: When you’re in zero gravity, you do everything exactly as you would in regular gravity — you just do it slower.
NOTES: Before the crackerjack sky-diving stunt sequence at the beginning of the movie, Bond is making out with a woman in an airplane. Suddenly, she pulls a gun on him! Oh noes! And then the pilot comes out of the cockpit, and the cinephile is baffled to see that Rupert Pupkin has been flying the plane. Which cannot be a good sign.
Moneypenny no longer flirts with Bond. Because, let’s face it — she’s old.
Q is back to the stupid goddamn “standard issue” bullshit again. I want to punch him when he pulls that crap.
When Bond goes to Venice (insert “Moore of Venice” joke here) there’s an incompehensibly stupid gondola chase, ending with Bond’s gondola transforming into a hovercraft, and a pigeon doing a double-take. This is, I think, supposed to signify that the filmmakers know that the movie they’re making is incredibly stupid. But one watches sequences like this and wonders why Hollywood bothered making Austin Powers — Bond is already quite capable of ruining his own reputation, thank you.
There are references to Woody Allen, Close Encounters, and Clint Eastwood. Why not the Village People, Pet Rocks or Looking for Mr. Goodbar? The Eastwood reference is particularly annoying as it’s accompanied by the theme to The Magnificent Seven — apparently there are no easily-identifiable music themes associated with Clint Eastwood’s westerns. Here, Moore stops recalling Sean Connery and starts anticipating Leslie Nielsen — hey, you know what would be funny? James Bond dressed as Clint Eastwood!
Moonraker proves, if proof were ever needed, that the James Bond formula is not as easy to replicate as it appears to be. There is a delicate balancing act going on in each one of these movies — he must be dissolute yet motivated, oversexed but not a pervert, a killer but not a brutal killer, so forth. He must be aware that he exists in an absurd, colorful, essentially comic universe, but he must carry that knowledge with coolness and wry dignity. The string that has always held Bond in place was taut to begin with, was stretched too far in The Man With the Golden Gun, and here snaps with an unattractive plonnggg! Bond may be the most supernaturally directed detective in history, but Moonraker’s sense of direction is nonexistent.
Moonraker was the first Bond movie I ever saw in a theater. I’d been hearing about Bond for ten years up to that point and finally had to see what my older brothers were always talking about. Suffice to say, I would not venture to see another one until Goldeneye.
The Spy Who Loved Me
WHO IS JAMES BOND? James Bond is some kind of spy or something. He’s getting on in years, but somehow, in this movie, he wears it well — his age makes him more approachable, he doesn’t seem so prissy. His hair gets mussed, his face is a little puffy, he exists on a more human scale. His smirking sexuality, alas, keeps getting ickier and ickier. He’s still got the crinkly neck-skin thing, but what’s worse is that he’s become a total skeeve. He no longer bothers to seduce women — he just announces who he is and it is assumed that they will then want to screw him. My name is Bond, James Bond, and, as night follows day, we will now have sex — take off your dress. Borat is more charming. And yet, the fimmakers manage to light him better and cut around the uglier moments, and this Bond is quite a bit more elegant and appealing than he was the last time around.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? Karl Stromberg is, essentially, Blofeld meets the Sub-Mariner (his HQ is even called “Atlantis”). He loves the oceans, thinks humanity is killing them, and so has kidnapped two nuclear submarines, with the intention of starting a nuclear war that will wipe humanity off the face of the earth.
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? In this under-water You Only Live Twice, Bond is hired to find out what happened to a missing British submarine. A clue is provided by a piece of Stromberg’s technology, which has been leaked by one of his conspirators (these days I guess it’d show up on eBay). He teams up with Beautiful Russian Agent Triple X, (Vin Diesel) (Barbara Bach), who is likewise trying to track down a missing Russian sub. The trail leads first to Egypt, then Sardinia, then I guess somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. In Sardinia, Bond, for only the second time in his career, pretends to be someone else in order to gain access to the bad guy’s HQ. This time he pretends to be a marine biologist. I support the notion of Bond pretending to be other people (it seems to me that a spy should occasionally do, you know, spy stuff), but the scene between “Dr. Sterling, Marine Biologist” and Stromberg is pointless — little more than Sterling showing up and saying hi. What supervillain would not be suspicious of a complete stranger showing up to your secret HQ just to say hi? Anyway, Bond and Triple X get in an American submarine to spy on Stromberg’s suspicious new mega-tanker, and find themselves kidnapped along with the Russian and British submarines. Here, Stromberg’s evil plan is discovered. Bond esapes confinement, rallies the kidnapped submarine crews (like Blofeld, Stromberg is perfectly happy to destroy the world but cannot abide the notion of killing the crews of his kidnapped ships), and leads a Russian/British/American revolt against Stromberg’s crews. They blow shit up, then Bond leads the surviving crew to go kill Stromberg and blow up Atlantis.
WOMEN? The big news here is that Bond has an actual co-star. The mismatched-buddy idea they’ve been hinting at ever since Live and Let Die is now fully (or thereabouts) explored, with James Bond teamed up with his opposite counterpart, Triple X. (I wonder — is her immediate senior Double X and her immediate junior Quadruple X?) I heartily applaud this idea, and it obviously inspired the screenwriters — they have written a kind of Grant/Hepburn-style sparring romance, filled with bitchy give-and-take and good-natured sniping.
Here’s the thing, though: if you’re going to write a romance fit for Grant and Hepburn? Best to cast Grant and Hepburn. Cast poorly and you have a disaster. BELIEVE ME, I KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT. Roger Moore may, in a pinch, make an acceptable paperback-version of Cary Grant, but Barbara Bach, to put it mildly, is no Katherine Hepburn. Grant and Hepburn could practically come to blows and never lose their charm, but when Roger Moore starts carping at lithe, big-eyed, breathy Barbara Bach you want to punch him.
At the end of Act II, Triple X learns that Bond is the man who killed her boyfriend and we jump to our feet exclaiming “Aha! A conflict!” and wring our hands with worry that the Beautiful Russian Agent will get her revenge before the movie’s over. Of course, between the end of Act II and the end of Act III Triple X will be demoted from “equal” to “chattel” and her vendetta against Bond will be dismissed with a bashful smile.
Sigh.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Curt Jurgens plays Stromberg much more realistically than anyone ever played Blofeld. At first he seems a little disappointing, like he’s not going to be big enough. Then you realize that the actor has chosen (or has been directed) to actually try to ground his character’s absurdly outlandish plan in something like a natural, sober reality. Stromberg lives in a big stupid Legion of Doom dome and drives a submarine-eating supertanker, but he himself seems like the most reasonable man in the world.
Ken Adam-designed HQ — check. Shark tank — check. Monorail — check.
He’s got a bad guy, “Jaws,” who has become one of the most beloved of Bond Second Villains. He’s okay I guess, but he’s a cartoon freak. It sounds petty to accuse a Bond Villain of being cartoonish, but I prefer the more human-scaled Tee Hee or Oddjob — somehow, I believe those guys could exist, whereas Jaws feels like he’s escaped from a Superman movie. Speaking of Jaws, this movie has Spielberg on the brain, with the Second Villain’s name, with the shark tank, with the glossy, transluscent late-70s photography. Bond sneered at the Beatles, but here we are fifteen years later and he’s kissing Spielberg’s ass; how times change.
FAVORITE MOMENT: Mid-way through Act III, it falls to Bond to disarm a nuclear bomb. He’s come a long way since Goldfinger, now it’s all the help who stand there holding their breath while Bond takes care of everything. The Bond Theme thunders on the soundtrack, until we cut to a piece of parallel action, when it abruptly cuts off in the middle of a beat. The implication is that the Bond Theme follows Bond around, or, even better, that Bond actually hums the Bond Theme to himself while he does cool spy stuff. Which, of course, makes total sense. Hell, he probably hums it while he gets dressed or pulls his car out of the driveway.
NOTES: The thing that happens with the Moore Bonds is that we now stop even expecting common cinematic pleasures like logic, flow and causality. Guys jump out of nowhere and attack the protagonist, women take off their clothes and moan with pleasure, stuff blows up for no earthly reason, because, well, because it’s a James Bond movie. In the earlier movies you might have one or two moments of faulty logic (like, for instance, what the fuck is Dr. No’s plan exactly?) but by this point it’s just taken as a given that nothing will make sense, that big guys will menace Bond, that women will fall in his lap, that an abandoned Villain HQ will naturally blow up all on its own. I swear, there’s a moment in Egypt where Bond sees aguy get killed by Jaws, gets an important clue off the dead guy’s body, walks out of the room, sees the pretty girl, and then out of nowhere two guys just run out of the shadows and attack him. Bond polishes them off with a few karate chops and gets on with his night and no one ever says who those guys were or why they wanted to kill Bond. It’s just, well, I’m James Bond, I just kind of expect guys to come running out of the shadows to kill me, it just kind of happens. Why, is it important? I’ve been talking to this woman for five seconds, shouldn’t we be having sex by now?
Let me hasten to add here that, at this point in his career, Bond had gone where no movie character had gone before — ten movies had been made about him. If the producers of the Bond movies were getting confused about how to position the cart and the horse, one can hardly blame them.
Ken Adam is back and making up for lost time. Every single set in the movie is positively gigantic. The Russian M character has an office that must be the size of Red Square.
In spite of its flaws, the movie succeeds in being a lot of fun and has some swell moments in addition to it’s sexual ickiness. Act III, apart from some crappy miniature work and putting the female lead in a room tied to a chair while Bond saves the world, is a mighty impressive piece of mayhem.
FYI: One of the reasons I’ve been watching all these Bond movies is because the new digital transfers and their swanky collector’s editions just hit an embarrassingly low price at my local used-DVD store. Every transfer has been truly impressive, with the exception of The Spy Who Loved Me, which looks terrible for some reason.
The Man With The Golden Gun
WHO IS JAMES BOND? I wouldn’t say that Bond is an “old” man, exactly — but he’s got this wrinkly neck skin that scrunches up every time he goes to kiss a woman and it makes my flesh crawl. There is a marked change in his sexuality — once upon a time, sex with Bond was presented as a generous gift. Now, it’s presented as a threat. If you’re a beautiful woman, it is expected that you will put out for this leering, randy man-boy. He says “My name is Bond, James Bond” and then he possessively puts his hand on your neck as you recoil in horror. The smirk is back, as is the racism and brutalization of women. He is tetchy, snide and impatient, brittle, pinched and smutty — an altogether unattractive package.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? The bad guy is Scaramanga, a high-priced hit man. He has a scheme to corner the world’s energy market, in spite of the fact that, by his own admission, he knows nothing about energy technology. Well, if Dick Cheney figured out a way to do it, why not. Scaramanga, in fact, has gotten control of an energy-technology firm pretty much the same way that Dick Cheney got control of Halliburton — he killed everyone who got in his way of doing so. This energy-technology firm has developed (or stolen, anyway) a high-tech whatsit that will change the future of energy distribution. Scaramanga’s brilliant scheme is to convince the gigantic Chinese technology firm to build an enormous power-plant on his private island, become full partners with the CEO, kill the CEO, inherit his stock, take control of the company, and rule the world’s energy distribution forever. The energy technology he’s gotten his hands on also comes with a heat-ray gun, so he also plans to be a lethal threat to anyone who ever happens to be standing in front of his heat-ray gun. Oh, and he wants to kill James Bond.
Come on, make up your mind, dude. One of the cardinal rules of bad-guy plot-writing is: two motives are weaker than one — three motives are out of the question.
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? Bond gets into this adventure out of sheer self-preservation. Scaramanga, it seems, has directly threatened Bond’s life. He travels to Hong Kong to track down Scaramanga, which leads him to discover that Scaramanga is not actually planning to kill him, but instead is plotting to take over this Chinese energy-technology firm, as explained above. Once Bond tails Scaramanga to his private island, Scaramanga, in the manner of Bond Villains, takes Bond on a gracioustour of the premises. The tour concludes with, oh yeah, and there’s this heat-ray guy. That’s bad news for anyone who happens to be standing on my private beach — watch out, trespassers!
Then, oh yeah, it turns out Scaramanga does actually want to kill Bond after all, and has wanted to do so for a long, long time. So they fight. And Bond wins (oops, sorry — spoiler alert!). Then he grabs the whatsit and blows shit up.
WOMEN? Best not to bring them up in the context of this movie. Every encounter with them is horrifying. First Bond slobbers over the abdomen of a belly dancer, then he sneers and smirks at his partner, then he slaps around the femme fatale. God it’s depressing.
HELPFUL ANIMALS: M and Q have greatly expanded roles this time around — market research must have indicated that audiences felt they weren’t getting enough M and Q action. Or perhaps, since Bond is aging so rapidly, the producers thought it important to surround Bond with as many doddering old men as possible, just so the audience would say “Well, okay, he’s not that old…”
Sheriff J.W. Pepper, from Live and Let Die, is also back, but this time in a different role. Before, he was a comic foil who was in the movie to show just how not-racist Bond was. Here, he fulfills essentially the same function as Don Imus’s producer used to — he’s the one who says all the racist things the star cannot, but would like to.
Bond also explores the mismatched-buddy theme with Mary Goodnight, who is a fellow intelligence operative, in spite of being a blithering idiot. Goodnight exists to show skin, resist Bond’s advances, then give in to him, then not get him once she wants him, then get abused by him, then show more skin, then be a blithering idiot some more, then finally get screwed by Bond. Comedy gold!
Then there is Lieutenant Hip, a Hong Kong, um, police detective, I think, and his two giggling teenage daughters. It’s one thing to feel uncomfortable when Bond puts his oily paws on grown women, but when he leers at the two teenagers in the back seat of Hip’s car, one feels the need to get a restraining order.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Oh, barely cool at all. He has a gun! It’s made out a cigarette lighter and a pen! Oooo! And he’s got a henchman — watch out, he’s a midget! (As it says in my notes, “Nick Nack is no Tee Hee.”) He’s got a terrifying deformity — a third nipple! (wait — does that qualify Mark Wahlberg to be a Bond Villain?) He’s got a flying car! For some reason. He’s got a half-hearted imitation-Ken-Adam HQ inside a house that looks like it was built yesterday in a movie studio. And a fun-house basement that, honestly, looks less like Bond Villain and more like Batman Villain. He wanders around the movie, blithely implementing his nefarious scheme, not thinking about the consequences of anything he does because he knows “hey, I’m a Bond Villain, there must be people taking care of this stuff for me.”
And then there are his motives, which seem haphazard at best and woefully disorganized at worst. I want to rule the energy markets of the world! Or, maybe I’ll just sell the technology to the Arabs, who will bury it. Either way, I’m happy. Oh, and I’ve got that heat-ray gun! Cause, I guess, the energy-monopoly thing isn’t exciting enough, I don’t know. Oh! Wait! I just remembered, I want to kill James Bond, it’s a life-long obsession! How are we supposed to fear and respect a villain who can’t even decide what his endgame is?
FAVORITE MOMENT: To give you an idea of how threadbare this movie is, there is a fight scene at the end where Nick Nack attacks Bond aboard Scaramanga’s luxury junk (Luxury Junk would be a better title for this movie). They tussle around the room, and Nick Nick climbs up on a counter and starts hurling bottles of expensive vintage wine at Bond. The bottles, of course, are props, and shatter on impact, revealing themselves to be, um, empty bottles of expensive vintage wine. So it seems Scaramanga stores empty wine bottles in his collection, just as Goldfinger and Blofeld routinely store large stacks of empty cardboard boxes in their warehouses.
NOTES: Here is where Bond enters the “Elvis movie” phase of his career. A steep dive in sophistication, The Man With The Golden Gun is a cheap, dispiriting movie — slapped-together, uninvolving, without thrill or suspense. Motivations are contrived, contridictory and nonsensical. Action beats are uninspired, and dialogue scenes are presented with less dynamism and panache than a Rex Morgan, MD strip.
Late in the movie, after the bad guy has run out of interesting things to say, he challenges Bond to a duel. He mentions that he is a multi-millionaire hit man while poor-slob James Bond is a poorly-paid government worker. Oh, that’s right — that’s why we’ve always liked Bond — he’s a populist, one of us, a friend of the working stiff. Riiiggghhht.
Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz reportedly gave up before finishing the script, complaining that it felt like he was “writing the same scene over and over again.” That would explain how Scaramanga uses almost the exact same excuse for not not knowing anything about his master plan as Blofeld does in Diamonds Are Forever — “science was never my strong point.”
There is one cool set — the British Secret Service Hong Kong HQ are located inside a sunken ocean liner. But that is hardly enough to save this movie. The special effects are on the level of a late Godzilla picture and the photography and lighting are on the level of a typical Quinn-Martin production.
I am told that Christopher Lee, who plays Scaramanga, was a cousin of Ian Fleming’s. Too bad his familial connections couldn’t get him a better part than this.
Live and Let Die
religion, sex, race, drugs and politics in a surreal head-on collision.
WHO IS JAMES BOND? James Bond is, miraculously, young again, or at least seems to be (although Roger Moore, it should be noted, is in fact three years older than Sean Connery). He has hair again, and he carries his world-saving burden lighter than ever. He’s game, no longer smirking or winking, no longer punching women or minorities (rather the opposite here, as we shall see), seems altogether happy to be here. Good for him!
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? I am pleased to say that Kananga, the bad guy of Live and Let Die, is, up to this point, as far as Bond Villians go, second only to Auric Goldfinger in terms of his complexity, intelligence and fiendishness. Kananga is both the leader of small Caribbean (republic? dictatorship? I didn’t quite catch it) called San Monique. In addition to being leader of San Monique, he also poses as “Mr. Big,” the head of a positively gigantic, incredibly well-organized black crime syndicate. As Kananga, he is the upstanding leader of a small island nation; as Mr. Big, he is the most powerful black criminal in the US. He plans to use his presidential power as a front to make a move to taking over the totality of American organized crime, by introducing two tons of pure heroin into the American marketplace, for free, causing chaos in the street, certain death to thousands, disaster for the currently reigning Mafia, and eventual dominance for both Mr. Big’s sydicate and Kananga’s island nation (where the poppies are grown). Whew!
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? British Intelligence is, for some reason, interested in Kananga’s scheme, and their men keep getting killed in the course of their investigations. Bond is called in simply to investigate their deaths. He travels to New York to investigate Kananga, gets kidnapped by Mr. Big, escapes, travels to San Monique, investigates Kananga there, discovers the heroin fields, follows the heroin trail to New Orleans, is kidnapped by Mr. Big again, finds out that Mr. Big is the same guy as Kananga, is fed to alligators, survives that, destroys Mr. Big’s heroin-processing factory, then travels to San Monique to also destroy the heroin fields. Taken prisoner one more time, he turns the tables on Kananga, fights him, blows him up (rather literally, in one of the few ugly moments in the movie).
WOMEN? Three: an Italian intelligence operative in London, a Kananga/CIA double-agent, and fortune-teller Solitaire, about which more later. Apart from pulling a gun on the double agent (understandably under the circumstances) Bond is unfailingly polite, charming and sweet to these women (if not exactly deeply committed).
HELPFUL ANIMALS: It’s another new Felix Leiter, this time an American man more-or-less the same age as Bond, a little more cheerful than the last one, but again over-burdened with babysitting and make-work. Bond runs around saving the world, blowing shit up and screwing beautiful women while Felix sits in a hotel room, answers the phone and takes complaints from people who have had property destroyed by Bond. All I can think is, what the hell is Felix? An operative, a bureau chief, an operations officer, a political appointee? Why is he going around in public introducing himself? Have we learned nothing from Valerie Plame?
Then there’s Rosie Carver, the CIA/Kananga double-agent. Rosie is new at this espionage thing; she screams in terror when she sees a dead snake or a hat on a bed, but for a time she is Bond’s teammate on this adventure. She presents a comic possibility that goes mostly unexplored in this movie and, to my memory, the Bond universe: the mismatched partner. The idea of Bond teamed up with a green, skittish, black female (essentially, an individual who is everything he is not) is a good one that gets too short shrift here.
And Quarrel’s back! Or, rather, “Quarrel Jr.,” since the original Quarrel got killed by Dr. No’s “dragon.” In Dr. No, Quarrel was the bug-eyed native cowed by the scary man’s voodoo; here, he’s a CIA operative (and fishing-boat entepreneur) who sees through Kananga’s voodoo, knowing there are baser motives to his spirituality. A big promotion for Quarrel; sad that it took 11 years and a generation to make it this far.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? I must say, I find Kananga very cool indeed, especially as played by Yaphet Kotto, who makes him, I will argue, the most complexly-motivated Bond Villain yet, by a wide margin. He is both eerily calm in the enormity of his wealth and power and desperately seething at the thwarting of his gigantic ambitions. In one moment he will be cynically sneer at the predictability of the world, and in the next will tremble at the uncertainty of the spiritual world. For Kananga is more than just a politician posing as a gangster (or the other way around), he’s a deeply religious man posing as a brutal capitalist. He’s not just cynical, he’s schizophrenic; the light/dark schism runs through every fiber of his being (a schism echoed by the makeup of one of his associates, Baron Samedi, pictured above). Kananga’s perfectly willing to enslave thousands of innocents to a life of drug abuse in order to enrich himself and gain power, but he also worries a great deal about the good favor of his fortune-teller-mystic-vestal-virgin-high-priestess Solitaire.
Solitaire, in spite of her ridiculous outfits, garish makeup and standard-issue Bond-girl helplessness, represents a genuine effort to introduce a real, three-dimensional female character into the Bond universe. She’s not just there to be saved and then screwed (or vice versa), she’s got plans and worries of her own, ones that actually tie into the bad-guy’s plot and, further, into more mystical realms. Solitaire, according to her spiritual tradition (whatever that is), will lose her precognitive abilities if she has sex. She does and does, and the sense of genuine loss and sadness that ensues is palpable and affecting. Just as Kananga cannot reasonably expect to be both a crime lord and a spiritualist, Solitaire must also make choices about following her own spiritual path (which involves serving Kananga’s evil plot) or becoming her own woman (which involves, of course, screwing Bond — this isn’t Seven Years in Tibet, folks).
If Kananga’s coolness ended with his rapacious ambition, his schizophrenia and his love/hate relationship with Solitaire, he would still be plenty cool. But it doesn’t! No, he also has whole raftloads of other cool characters surrounding him. First, he has, and this is not an exaggeration, the organized, explicit support of every black person living in Harlem, New Orleans and San Monique. Now that’s a conspiracy! There’s no sneaking around or secret codes or hidden agendas — if a British agent in New Orleans needs to be assassinated, Kananga can just ask a few dozen of his fellow conspirators to stage a mock funeral in the French Quarter, kill the guy in broad daylight, and walk off with the body. If another British agent stumbles up to Harlem, he has literally dozens of operatives tracking his progress through the streets every step of the way. You don’t see this kind of power your garden-variety Italian gangster operations.
In addtion to the support of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, he’s got Tee Hee, a towering fella with a mechanical arm. Played by Julius Harris, Tee Hee manages to be scary, menacing, funny, and the best henchman since Oddjob. (I wish that our cinematic fake-arm technology was what it is now, because Tee Hee could use some of that Pirates of the Caribbean Davy Jones CGI magic.) He’s also got the oddly affecting Whispers, an assassin with what sounds like damaged vocal cords, and the aforementioned Baron Samedi, a voodoo priest (and a mean choreographer of rituals) who has his own unpredictable bag of tricks. Not to mention both an alligator trap and a shark tank! And a monorail! Man! This guy oozes cool!
Minus one point for trying to kill Bond by, again, dropping a poisonous animal into his hotel room. Has anyone ever been killed this way?
NOTES: I must say, this movie took me by surprise. Like any given episode of The Venture Bros, it’s completely ridiculous on its surface, oddly sincere and thought-provoking in its middle, and utterly, deeply weird at bottom. That’s three levels! Try and think of another Bond movie with three levels! You can’t!
Let’s start with the race thing. Putting lily-white Bond in a story filled with black folks (northern urbanites, southerners and island natives) could have been uncomfortable at best and disgustingly racist at worst. And yet Bond navigates this terrain with relative ease. In Diamonds Are Forever, Bond was reactionary and reactive, fending off attacks on his straight-white-British-maleness, but here he’s wise (and generous) enough to realize that he is, in fact, the uncool one, and plays his uncoolness for something actually resembling high comedy. Sure, some ofthe “black language” is dated, but Bond never plays himself as superior to the people he encounters, even when they’re trying to kill him. He’s in over his head, he knows he is, and he adjusts his attitude accordingly.
It might sound racist to suggest that entire black populations of cities would willingly support the murderous scheme of a schizophrenic madman, but Live and Let Die meets the rising black cinema of the day and confronts it head-on. It must have seemed, and not just to whites, that there really was a whole secret black international culture, with its own rules, morality and code of honor. White America certainly wasn’t going to grant blacks power, not without a fight. Why not support a man like Kananga, or a gangster like Mr. Big? Their plans for domination may not be perfect, but at least they address the problem of the dominant white culture.
But Live and Let Die doesn’t stop at examining race problems in America, it goes on to examine religion too. I don’t know enough about voodoo to say how much of the stuff on display here is accurate and how much is total bullshit, and I can’t say I enjoy watching black people go bug-eyed and spooked by voodoo talismans. But the mere fact that a Bond movie, for the first time, incorporates a genuine religious belief into a story at all has to count for something. It’s true that Kananga is using his local voodoo temple as a cynical ploy to dupe the locals, but it’s also true that the mystic holds a great, even crippling, power over both him and his court priestess Solitaire. Baron Samedi, for his part, refuses to stay pigeonholed — every time he is exposed as a fraud, he turns up again with a new, unexplainable miracle.
For instance, at the end of the movie, they do the “but one assassin would not stop” beat, and have Tee Hee show up to menace Bond in a train compartment. And the screenwriter says “Why? His boss is dead, why would he bother?” But then we find that Tee Hee is not working for Kananga, but for Baron Samedi, who has, apparently, magically, survived several assassination attempts and is, even now, riding the locomotive engine, laughing into the onrushing night. With this moment, suddenly the entire preceding narrative is thrown into question, as we realize that Bond may have gotten the wrong man, that all of this is a puppet show put on by a chortling voodoo priest. It’s a creepy, surreal moment that is not easily reconciled.
But wait, there’s more! The 70s car-crash genre was coming on strong, and Bond here steps forward to stake his claim. There’s no mere tilting-a-car stunt here, no: there are three major, impeccably-mounted chase sequences. One is a bus-and-car chase through the jungle, one is the parking-lot chase from Diamonds re-cast as an airplane-and-car chase across an airport tarmac, and one is a stupefying boat-chase-that-will-not die. To top it all, Clifton James shows up as the drawling, mewling, tobacco-spitting redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper. This character, the stubborn, fuming, none-too-bright, impotent southern law-enforcement officer, is one that would be revisited to the point of dead-horse-ness throughout the 70s, but James is so specific in his choices and so vivid in his delivery that J.W. pretty much explodes off the screen and one is sorry to see him go.
All I will say about the title song is that I have a sizable, extensive obsession with the life and career (if not necessarily all the music) of Paul McCartney, which will have to remain a subject for another day.
Roger Moore, I must say, immediately makes an impression as Bond and justly owns the part. If he is not as darkly sexy as Sean Connery was in 1962, he does put his own highly-crafted spin on the part. If he had been playing Bond in Diamonds Are Forever, that movie might have been the light comedy it aspired to. As it is, Moore handles the comedy here quite deftly thank you, and also manages to communicate Bond’s style, resourcefulness, ease and lethalness. His luck with the ladies isn’t as strong; when he approaches, say, Rosie Carver, and suggests they go to bed after mere minutes of acquaintance, he comes off less like a smoothie and more like a creepy masher.
The photography is a big step up from Diamonds, and the use of locations is imaginative. There’s a Ken-Adam-esque airport terminal (real life catching up to Bond Movies), a terrific, crumbling, ash-colored Harlem back-alley, a convincingly run-down island town, and the lush green jungles of San Monique. The special effects are also much better.
There is a scene toward the beginning where M shows up, unexpectedly, at Bond’s house to deliver his assignment. Bond has a bird in his bed and there is some ho-hum comedy wrung from his attempts to keep M from finding the girl. Why, I don’t know, except that M is a father to Bond and one is always embarrassed to reveal to one’s father that one is getting some tail. But then Moneypenny shows up and instantly discovers the girl, and her reaction is both sweet and heartbreaking. She helps the girl hide in a closet, gets her her clothes to preserve her dignity, then trades her usual quips with Bond as though nothing has happened. Her loyalty to Bond trumps her jealousy of seeing the cheap floozy sneaking around the house. Bond is unaware of what Moneypenny has done, and goes on with his boyishly smutty life, while Moneypenny gives him a look and a sigh that tells us that seeing Bond in his element, after years of half-kidding flirtation, has truly crushed her spirit. Bond, she suddenly knows, will never be hers, will never be anyone’s, really, and will never even know, is incapable of comprehending, the depth and extent of her affection for him. It goes by in a mere moment, but it’s a brilliant performance and could be Lois Maxwell’s finest hour.
Diamonds Are Forever
Mr. Wint glowers, Tiffany Case ogles, James Bond calls his agent.
WHO IS JAMES BOND? James Bond is a smug, balding, doughy, middle-aged swinger, missing only the velour shirt and the gold medallion to complete the picture. The only piece of identification he carries is his Playboy Club card. However, it seems he also works for some kind of British spy agency (“British Intelligence,” he burrs, late in the movie, to an American billionaire). By the time the titles begin, he has killed the man he’s been battling with for four movies now, Ernst Blofeld. Bond tracks down Blofeld via a brilliant, time-honored method of detection, punching people in the face. He punches, to be precise, an Asian man, an Egyptian man, and a skinny French woman. Once upon a time, James Bond would seduce a woman in order to get information from her; now he’d just as soon strangle her with her bikini top and then punch her in the face. Once the epitome of cool, Bond has become a smirking, exasperated, reactionary crank, and before this movie is over he will defend his straight-white-male Britishness from simpering gay assassins, Italian gangsters, a Jewish comedian, a bi-racial team of female martial artists, redneck doofus cops, an egghead peacenik and a cross-dressing supervillain. All in a rollicking, “just kidding” tone. In this, he starts to resemble less the Bond of old and more the then-emerging pole-star of aging straight-white-maleness, defending his turf in a changing era, Archie Bunker.
When is this nefarious scheme revealed? I’m glad you asked. An hour and thirty-four minutes into the movie, that’s when.
ABOUT THIS DIAMOND-SMUGGLING RING: Here’s how it seems it’s supposed to work: poor, black South African mine-workers steal diamonds from their mine. They cheerfully hand them over to a dentist, who hands them over to a guy in a helicopter, who hands them over to a little-old-lady schoolteacher, who takes them to Amsterdam and hands them over to comely young Tiffany Case, who hands them over to some guy, who travels to Los Angeles and hands them over to the director of a funeral home and his Jewish comedian friend (it’s a well-known fact that Jewish comedians make the best diamond smugglers), who hands them over to, I guess, this Willard Whyte fella, who could afford to buy them retail. The simpering gay assassins follow this trail every step of the way, killing everyone who comes in contact with the diamonds.
Now then: Bond inserts himself into this ring, killing the “some guy” to whom Tiffany Case hands over the diamonds and taking his place. He hides the diamonds in the dead man’s intestines (digestive humor accounts for at least half the jokes in Diamonds Are Forever) and flies with the body to Los Angeles, posing as the dead man’s brother. In this particular cutthroat diamond-smuggling ring, no one seems to notice or care that their courier is dead and accompanied by a man they’ve never seen before.
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? Once he has “killed” Blofeld before the titles, Bond is bored and resentful when he is asked to investigate a mere diamond-smuggling ring. Why is he investigating a diamond-smuggling ring? Because it’s important to the South African diamond-mine people of course, who apparently hold considerable influence with British Intelligence. Well, if it’s important to South African diamond-mine owners, it’s important to James Bond — anything to help out some fellow privileged, wealthy , powerful racists.
Anyhow, Bond shrugs his shoulders and gamely investigates the diamond-smuggling ring, which leads him first to Amsterdam and then to exotic, mysterious Los Angeles, and then to gaudy, trashy, depressing Casino-era Las Vegas (honestly, I kept waiting for Bond to run into Nicky Santoro — now that would have been a movie!). It seems that the diamond-smuggling ring leads to the penthouse of Howard Hughes-like billionaire Willard Whyte (although it seems counter-intuitive that a billionaire would need to smuggle diamonds — why not just buy them?), but once Bond gets to Whyte’s penthouse, he is surprised to find that Whyte is not Whyte but is, in fact, Blofeld — that guy he hates! Quel coincidence! Blofeld employs his simpering gay assassins to kill Bond by shooting him strangling him running him over with a car putting him inside some kind of pipe. This brilliant, devious scheme somehow fails and Bond manages to free the kidnapped eccentric billionaire (who, being straight, white and wealthy, obviously can’t be all bad) from his vicious, beautiful, bi-racial, bikini-clad captors, make his way to Blofeld’s oil-rig HQ, and blow shit up before Blofeld can do too much damage.
HELPFUL ANIMALS: I’ve lost track of how many Felix Leiters this is so far, but this one is crankier and less remarkable than ever. High-ranking CIA agent? He doesn’t seem to have the qualifications of a local police detective. He’s disorganized and powerless. There’s a scene where he and his team are staking out Circus Circus, and all I could think is that Casino‘s Ace Rothstein would eat this guy for lunch.
WOMEN: Bond seems to be through with them. The first one he meets he strangles and then punches in the face, another gets tossed out a window and into a swimming pool (and then, for no particular reason, winds up dead in another swimming pool). He has sex only with dizzy nudist gold-digger Tiffany Case, and even then can’t keep from carping at her, calling her a “stupid twit” in a moment of anger. He’s gotten angry with civilian birds before, but the insults seem to be a new, unpleasant wrinkle.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Not cool at all! In fact, the narrative demands that he start out uncool, giving him not one but two uncool deaths before the titles even begin. From there, the relatively cool Blofeld of You Only Live Twice is systematically reduced in stature — he is made to imitate a shallow Texas drawl, flee a Las Vegas hotel dressed as a woman, and dangle helplessly from a crane, until he ends his life as an angry, blustering red-faced clown. In fact, one of the primary dubious achievements of Diamonds Are Forever is turning it’s antagonist into what we have come to recognize as a “Bond Villain,” a vain, silly man with no real plan other than “arching” Bond. When Bond finally gets into Willard Whyte’s penthouse and finds Blofeld there, Blofeld is, literally, doing nothing but sitting there waiting for Bond to show up. Think of that — he’s got a satellite to build and launch, he’s got an oil-rig space center off Baja California teeming with what must be a thousand last-minute crises, but tonight he’s got nothing better to do than sit in Willard Whyte’s penthouse waiting for Bond to show up. With his double (oh yeah, there’s a whole pointless, go-nowhere subplot about Blofeld manufacturing doubles of himself). And his cat. And his cat’s double. And what if, by chance, Bond did not show up, I wonder? Would Blofeld have waited there all night? Would he have canceled his satellite launch? Would he have delegated the running of his space center to an underling? “I can’t make it to the world-blowing-up ceremony, Bond hasn’t shown up yet!”
At one point in Act III, Bond asks Blofeld a question about his operation and Blofeld sighs and says “Science was never my strong suit.” This from a man who, two movies ago, figured out a way to design and build a secret aerospace program inside a hollowed-out volcano. What, I wonder, is Blofeld’s strong suit, besides the high-collared tunic he’s been wearing since 1963?
Charles Gray plays Blofeld this time, exposing the meagre all-around cheapness of the production. Gray played helpful animal Henderson in You Only Live Twice (which goes unremarked upon) and would later stake his claim to camp immortality as the no-necked narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which, frankly, is a better use of his talents.
The second villains, the simpering gay assassins, as you may have guessed, I have very little patience for. I don’t know if it’s just the performance of Bruce Glover, who plays Mr. Wint, the more simpering of the two, or if it’s the haircut of Putter Smith, who plays Mr. Kidd, the more clown-like of the two, but these two get my hackles up. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive to negative portrayals of gays in movies (and their “humorous,” brutal deaths), but these two offend in a way that, say, Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love does not. Rosa Klebb indicated her homosexuality exactly once (just in case we didn’t “get” it from her haircut and mannish demeanor) and then got on with the business of being a power-mad killer. Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd remind us in every scene they’re in that they are, in case we forgot, homosexual men. We are plotting to kill a man, says Mr. Wint, and then spritzes himself with cologne (which smells, we are told later by Bond, like “a tart’s hankerchief”*), closing his eyes and swooning with the sensation. We have just blown up a man in a helicopter, says Mr. Kidd, let’s walk off hand in hand. For we are, as you know, homosexuals, and that fact is always uppermost in our minds. Mr. Wint dies when Bond literally shoves a bomb up his ass; Mr. Wint, we see by the look on his face, is conflicted by this experience, because on the one hand he knows he’s about to die, but you know, on the other hand, he greatly enjoys having things jammed up his ass. Because he is a homosexual man, and that’s how they are.
Putter Smith, I have learned without surprise, is not an actor, but a musician someone connected to the production saw onstage in a band and thought would make a perfect Bond Villain. Which he would, if Bond habitually fought hapless clowns, which I’m afraid he will continue to do for a long, long while.
(*It occurs to me now that the cologne might actually be named A Tart’s Hankerchief, and Bond is merely demonstrating his expertise in identifying perfumes, much as he is able to identify fine wines.)
Slightly more cool are Bambi and Thumper, the limber, bi-racial, bikini-clad assassins guarding the kidnapped billionaire. They are ridiculous, of course, but they do bring a cheerfully electric energy to the movie, especially Thumper, who really seems to be happy to be there, and one is sad to see them brought low by the blandly brutalizing Bond.
NOTES: The reader may have deduced by this point that Diamonds are Forever is a comedy. The central twist, where Bond discovers, after an hour of detective work, that the object of his search just happens to be, by utter coincidence, his arch enemy, pretty much defines the comedic (as opposed to dramatic) approach to narrative. It is certainly better appreciated if it is viewed as a comedy. I don’t mind Bond becoming a comedian, but I wish he would be a generous, light-hearted comedian instead of the bored, smirking thug he is here (I am told that the producers briefly considered casting Burt Reynolds as Bond for this movie, and it’s not hard to imagine him playing some of the scenes as written).
There has been a lot of carping in this space about the “Moore Bonds” and how they ruined the franchise. That may be so, but the Moore Bonds, I’m afraid, begin here with Diamonds Are Forever. Everything in Diamonds Are Forever points to taking the piss out of James Bond and his formula, from the silly moon-buggy chase through the desert to the ever-decreasing menace of its antagonists to the rushed, who-cares sloppiness of its climactic battle.
More than the negative portrayal of gays, I’m concerned about the brutalization of women in Diamonds Are Forever. The director, in the DVD commentary, notes how proud he is of the opening-sequence scene where Bond deftly removes a woman’s bikini top and then strangles her with it. It was very important for the film’s success, he explains, to receive a “U” certificate from the British censors, and this is how they did it — by having Bond strangle a woman instead of seducing her. Sex with a woman? We don’t want kids seeing that. Strangling a woman? Punching her in the face? Throwing one out a window? Drowning one two three in a pool? Perfectly acceptable family entertainment.
And, as long as I’m citing petty liberal grievances, I must note that Blofeld’s cat is brutalized again, this time during the title sequence, where it is made to angrily yowl,repeatedly, for no apparent reason.
Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, in addition to being repellent stereotypes, are also terrible assassins. They meet the diamond-smuggling dentist out in the desert, intending to kill him, and choose a scorpion they happen to find on the spot to accomplish that task. What kind of assassin is that? Where is the planning? What is Blofeld paying them for? And of course they pick the largest, darkest scorpion known to humankind, when even a schoolchild knows that the big black ones are actually the least deadly ones. Later, as noted above, they try to kill Bond by placing him, unconscious, into a pipe, which is then laid into the ground, at least twelve hours later, by a construction crew who luckily does not notice the tuxedo-clad Scot in their pipe.
Tiffany Case is flabbergasted when she realizes she is working with James Bond. Why? Well, he is, apparently, world-famous, as all truly successful espionage agents are. This is another example of the reflexive, winking comedy that informs the tone of Diamonds Are Forever, and which does a great deal to deflate whatever narrative tension inherent in the drama.
Sean Connery here stops sounding like James Bond and starts sounding like Sean Connery. Which is fine — who doesn’t like Sean Connery’s accent? — but jars when the movie is viewed too close to his other Bond efforts.
The Howard Hughes-ian Willard Whyte is played by country singer Jimmie Dean, who, it pains me to say, does not remotely begin to suggest the daring, peculiar, brilliant, aging, paranoid, OCD-afflicted Howard Hughes. Hughes, I have learned, was a great fan of the Bond movies and generously offered the use of all Las Vegas (which he owned at the time) for Diamonds Are Forever; I wonder if, after seeing the result, he came to regret his decision.
Diamonds Are Forever holds a special place in my memories because it was the first “new” Bond movie I was aware of. I had seen Goldfinger on television, so I knew who Bond was, and I was even aware that it was somehow special that Sean Connery was back playing Bond (his salary, a then-astronomical $1.25 million, plus 10% of the gross, had made outraged headlines). I clearly remember the commercials contantly playing on TV, emphasizing a stunt where Bond tips a car over on its side to drive through a narrow alley. 1971 witnessed the beginnings of the burgeoning car-crash-movie genre, and I remember my older brother being oh so excited by this new Bond movie and its exciting, special car stunt (I was ten and too young to see something as “adult” as Diamonds Are Forever. Ha!). That stunt now goes by in a ho-hum matter of seconds and seems utterly unworthy of note.
In the middle of Act II, Blofeld turns the tables on Bond and orders him out of his penthouse at the point of a revolver. And I thought “wait a minute, Bond can take on a volcano full of bad guys, why is he acquiescing to a guy with a revolver?” But then I realized that, having punched through the stratosphere with You Only Live Twice, there was, in 1971, no place for Bond to go but to comedy. Bond and Blofeld are play-acting now, just kidding, players on a stage who do what’s expected of them for the entertainment of adolescents and their aging fathers. Diamonds Are Forever is the point where Bond Movies turn from being thrillers to being pageants, if not pantos.
The production, I should note, is quite substandard, especially for a Bond movie. The photography is unremarkable, the lighting high-key and punishing (the better to indicate comedy, I suppose), the supporting players obvious and shrill, the special effects hurried and wan. Perhaps this comes from its lower-than-usual budget (most of which got soaked up by Connery’s salary), perhaps it comes from moving production from England to Hollywood, perhaps it comes from choosing crass, ugly Las Vegas as its prime location. By the time Bond has a car chase up and down Fremont Street (and then up again, because Fremont Street, let’s face it, isn’t that long), outwitting a redneck sheriff and his bumbling cops, he stops being a class act and starts anticipating nothing less than Smokey and the Bandit.
You Only Live, twice
I got so wrapped up in all the excitement surrounding my analysis of You Only Live Twice that I forgot that I had actually addressed the subject once before about a year ago. The context was somewhat different, and I hadn’t seen the movie in years, and so unfortunately conflated Blofeld’s retarded scheme in You Only Live Twice with Blofeld’s retarded scheme in Thunderball, but those of you who are new to my blog may enjoy this vintage slice of Bondage whilst waiting for my scintillating analysis of Diamonds Are Forever.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Ernst Stavros Blofeld and James Bond do not recognize each other. I wonder why?
WHO IS JAMES BOND? Well, funny story, one that does not need to be recounted here. Suffice to say, James Bond is young again, which counts for something. He’s dapper, classy, amused and amusing, can still fight fiercely and kill without remorse. Because the year is 1969, he’s even now anti-authoritarian, going “off the res” to get the bad guy. Because the year is 1969, he is also deeper and more complex than before. It’s bad enough for poor George Lazenby that he had to follow Connery, who owned the part from the first shot of him in Dr. No, but Lazenby also need to reinvent Bond as a thinking, feeling, loving human being. He’s not unlikeable as Bond, but let’s face it, he’s not good enough to make us forget the man he refers to as “the other fella.”
we have all the time in the world — 2 hours and 20 minutes, to be precise
You Only Live Twice
A middle-aged James Bond caught between the visions of two evil geniuses — Ernst Stavros Blofeld and Sir Ken Adam.
WHO IS JAMES BOND? If this was the first James Bond movie you ever saw, you would be correct in assuming that Bond is a middle-aged fantasy, a balding, vain, stocky, aging Englishman (although his Scottish accent begins to assert itself here) who, in spite of falling apart physically, can still pilot a toy helicopter, jump onto a pile of empty cardboard boxes and, occasionally, bed beautiful women, although it’s never as much of a done deal as it has been in the past. It’s only been two years since Thunderball, but Bond has gained at least twenty pounds — not enough to shudder in horror, but enough that he needs a double for his wetsuit-scene. His toupee starts out bad and turns dramatically worse before the movie’s over.
In spite of carrying the burden of an entire generation’s fantasies of manhood, Bond is sprightly here again after moping his way through Thunderball. He’s clearly middle-aged now, but he’s not raging against the dying of the light — there’s something like acceptance and grace in his behavior. Women pass him by as often as they give in to him in You Only Live Twice, and that seems perfectly okay with him — as though he’d just as soon get some sleep.
With Bond’s arc of “middle-aged guy getting used to Japanese culture,” You Only Live Twice resembles nothing less than Lost in Translation, but with car chases and helicopter fights. With his two bad wigs, his expanding belly and his slowly collapsing face, the middle-aged Bond is starting to feel less like a sex symbol and more like a dirty old man. It makes perfect sense that Connery would want to stop doing these movies at this point. However, it’s also worth noting that, for a moment in Act II, the narrative slows down, Bond gets married, and just for a bit, You Only Live Twice starts to take on a different dimension, something a little more character-driven, subtle and, well, something more like a “real movie.”
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? We finally meet SPECTRE #1, Ernst Stavros Blofeld (he uses all three names, as apparently Ernst Blofeld is a common name throughout the world and he doesn’t want anyone to mix him up with Ernst Blofeld the conceptual artist, Ernst Blofeld the Prime Minister of Turkey, Ernst Blofeld the champion racecar driver or Ernst Blofeld the comedian). Blofeld’s ambition has returned — he wants nothing less than to spark a nuclear war between the US and the USSR. He’s going to accomplish this by — I’m sorry, what now?
Let me get this straight. Blofeld wants to spark a nuclear war between the US and the USSR. He’s going to do this by sending a series of rockets up into space and “kidnapping” both American and Soviet spacecraft, returning them to his secret underground lair, where the American and Soviet astronauts will be held in a detention cell, until — um — until the world is destroyed. And then SPECTRE can take over.
Um, okay. Ernst? May I call you Ernst? No? Sorry. Mr. Blofeld.
Mr. Blofeld, this plan — I — I — why? You’ve got a secret underground rocket base, and that’s a good thing. You want to take over the world, and that’s a good thing. I, I just, I have to ask you — please, take your hand away from that button please, for a moment — I have to ask you, is this the best plan? If you don’t mind, I have some suggestions.
1. Your space technology is far in advance of anything the US or the USSR currently has. Why not take up a career in aeronautics? McDonnell-Dougles and Hughes Aircraft rule the world in ways you cannot possibly imagine. You, your lesser numbers, and your cat could all be very happy in such a world, and you could get that awful scar fixed.
2. Why are you “kidnapping” the American and Soviet spacecraft? What does that do? You’re trying to start a nuclear war — start a fucking nuclear war! Are you telling me you can design, finance and build a private space program, complete with spacecraft-eating technology, but you can’t just drop a bomb on Washington? Why are you “kidnapping” spacecraft? Blow them out of the fucking sky! What, do you have a soft spot for astronauts?!
3. The “Monday Morning” question: do you know for sure that kidnapping spacecraft will lead to nuclear war? What if it does not? What happens then? Have you thought about that?
4. “Nuclear War” is a little risky — it tends to spread. Have you though about that? Let’s say you kill, oh, ten percent of the world’s population — three hundred million people or so. How do you know that you won’t be one of them? And let’s say you survive the nuclear war — how do you know that people will turn to SPECTRE to lead the post-nuclear world? What if they put two and two together and figure out that you’re actually the one who killed everybody? Do you think they’ll let you rule the world then?
Remember Auric Goldfinger? He had a plan. He’d thought it through. You, you’re a, you know what you are? You’re a movie villain. You know what a Movie Villain is? A Movie Villain is the guy who thinks the story’s over when he gets what he wants. And there’s a freeze-frame and a fade-out and it says “The End.” But in real life, Mr. Blofeld, the story goes on. You know who a Movie Villian is? George W. Bush is a Movie Villain. His “Mission Accomplished” speech on the aircraft carrier was his “The End” moment. But you know what, Mr. Blofeld? The story kept going on, and now look where he is.
Don’t be a George W. Bush, Mr. Blofeld. Don’t be a Movie Villain. Think, Mr. Blofeld. You’re a super genius, you should be perfectly comfortable doing so. Please, for your own good, for the good of SPECTRE and for the world.
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? A good balance is struck here between detective work, heroic acts, defending himself and screwing women. The movie starts out as a real nuts-and-bolts detective story and gradually, even gracefully, builds into a surreal, gonzo, sci-fi/action spectacular.
HELPFUL ANIMALS: This Bond has a longer view of life, it seems, than his earlier selves — he knows when he needs to act alone and he knows when he needs help. Helpful animals are numerous in You Only Live Twice, and for the first time they are compelling in their own right. First there’s Tiger Tanaka, who is the head of some kind of Japanese good-guy spy team, then there are not one but two capable, comely Japanese spy-girls who Bond gets to know better, then there is a whole army of ninjas — and as soon as someone says “ninjas,” the pulse of the whole movie picks up. Ninjas! They explode out of the screen, a whole new (to Bond) cool world of flying bodies, wild stunts and anarchic possibilities. There’s a scene in Act II where Bond is shown around the Ninja Academy, and you can actually watch as Bond becomes obsolete before your eyes, standing there haplessly watching the future of action films unfold before him, looking suddenly pathetically square, in a pink shirt no less.
A NOTE ON Q: for the first (and I’m afraid, only) time, imho, the relationship between Bond and Q is exactly right. Q’s not showing up and foisting his toys on Bond as Bond stands there looking bored; Bond needs something specific (a gadget-laden helicopter), demands it from Q, and is professional and even bossy with him when Q delivers. I can’t tell you how much more I enjoy this version of Bond’s relationship with Q. Q is always, for some reason, this stern father figure (or perhaps uncle-figure), this stick-up-his-arse fuddy-duddy who’s always giving Bond toys but forbidding him to play with them, and it makes no sense. As I discussed earlier regarding From Russia With Love, spy toys aren’t created in a vacuum, they are invented because agents need them. When Q shows up and piles a bunch of crap on Bond, Bond is then obligated to use that crap, whether he wants to or not, and the narrative always shows the burden of that expectation — oh, we can’t go home yet, we haven’t used the exploding talcum powder. It’s so much more logical and satisfying that Bond would encounter a situation, requisition the items he needs to navigate the situation, then deal with Q as an equal instead of as a whining, wrist-slapping authority figure.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? For the first two acts of You Only Live Twice, Blofeld is still “that guy with the cat in his lap.” There are so many shots of the cat while Blofeld is talking that I began to suspect that the cat is actually SPECTRE #1, a feline criminal genius and a ventriloquist to boot. Come to think of it, when I consider the flaws in Blofeld’s plan, perhaps I’m not giving him enough credit. It’s an awe-inspiring plan, for a cat.
Once he shows up, Donald Pleasance does not disappoint as Blofeld. His scar is icky, he pulls off the SPECTRE uniform, he’s clearly insane: 1 point for appearance. 1 point for the piranha tank. 10 points for the jaw-dropping, Ken Adam-designed volcano stronghold. Even with his childishly retarded plan, Blofeld is a bad guy second only at this point to Goldfinger.
QUESTION: Bond is sent to Japan to find this volcano stronghold. He is put in touch with Tiger Tanaka, who is a great deal of help. There is some kind of bullshit ticking clock installed in Act II that requires Bond to be fully trained as a ninja, and married, and convincing as a Japanese man (yeah, right) before he can go blow shit up. Here’s the question: why does James Bond have to do this? Any one of the ninjas we see training looks already qualified enough to handle the task, why wait for Bond to become Japanese?
DON’T BOTHER ME WITH YOUR TECHNICAL MUMBO-JUMBO: During the stupefying climax of You Only Live Twice, Bond is required to blow up the spacecraft-gobbling rocketship before it gobbles up another spacecraft. How will he do it? Well, as it happens, Blofeld has thoughtfully devised a remote-control self-destruct mechanism for just that purpose. What is the name of this mechanism? “The Exploder Button.” With tech-heavy jargon like that, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Blofeld also owns a laser called a “Bright-Light Thing.”
FAVORITE MOMENT: There’s another moment in the climax, before Bond gets to the Exploder Button, he and Blofeld and a million bad guys are standing around in Blofeld’s control center when an explosion goes off. All the humans are fine, but Blofeld’s normally cool-as-a-cucumber cat, quite naturally, freaks out like you wouldn’t believe. Blofeld must forcefully restrain the cat, its eyes bulging in abject fear, to keep it from leaping, terrified, from his arms. This little bit of business is notable to me because, if the actor playing Blofeld is holding onto the cat that hard in this take, that means there was at least one take earlier where the actor was not able to restrain the cat from leaping, terrified, from his arms. That means that the production staff knew that the cat was in dire straits during this shot, and did nothing about it, except for advising the actor to hold on tighter. Now, You Only Live Twice is a gargantuan production, and even the most brilliant production manager can’t think of everything, but Sweet Hopping Jesus, the actor’s back is already turned to the camera, give him a fucking prop cat.
NOTES: It’s hard not to think about the career of Ken Adam during this movie, because he clearly owns the picture. In fact, a darker plan than even Blofeld’s starts to form in my mind — all this is happening because of Ken Adam. I mean, face it, he’s the one element that all these different people share. He designs enormous volcano strongholds for SPECTRE, and he designs the offices of the Japanese industrialist working for Blofeld, and he designs the private train of Tiger Tanaka, and he designs the opera-house-sized makeup room for Bond’s Japanese transformation, and he designs the Russian space center! He’s everywhere, every room has the same tilted ceilings, the same hard, bold lines, the same creamy, mid-sixties palette, the same invisible, recessed lighting — what kind of security clearance does this guy have? Didn’t anyone notice — hey! SPECTRE’S volcano stronghold looks just like the Russian space center! (and Dr. No’s underground lair, and Goldfinger’s house in Kentucky, and SPECTRE’s boardroom) All of this unpleasantness could have been easily avoided if they had just sent Bond after Ken Adam! When you consider that Adam also designed the War Room in Dr. Strangelove, it’s a wonder the world ever made it out of the 60s alive — the man was obviously a dangerous double-agent, contracting for both sides! Blofeld’s plan even starts to take on a cold kind of logic when you remove Blofeld and insert Ken Adam: Ha ha! The Americans and Russians will blow each other up, and then they will hire ME to rebuild everything — I’M THE ONLY CONTRACTOR THEY KNOW! HA HA HA HA HA!
Thunderball
Largo: I demand $100 million dollars. Bond: Ah shit, now what.
WHO IS JAMES BOND? For the purposes of Thunderball, this is the $64,000 question. Bond has undergone a personality change. For three movies he attacked his job with the same mischievious, adventurous spirit. There was a glint in his eye and a spring in his step. If he got pissy it was because some innocent person (usually a bird) was dragging him down while he was trying to do his job. Once the job was over, he went back to existing in what he considers man’s natural state: drinking, smoking and screwing on an indefinite timetable. But something has changed in Thunderball: Bond starts the movie grumpy and out of sorts, and never comes out of his mood. He can still charm the birds and he can still play Baccarat, but he doesn’t seem to get any joy out of it any more. In Dr. No, he postpones his trip to Jamaica to have sex with Sylvia the Lady Gambler; in Thunderball he interrupts his massaging of his nurse companion with a mink glove in order to go investigate a mysterious delivery in a spa. Work used to take a distant second to pleasure in Bond’s world, now it seems like he can’t pass up the women fast enough to get back to work, even inventing work if he has to to get the ladies off his back.
Goldfinger
Bond contemplates necrophilia while Goldfinger says hello to his grandmother back home.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? One of the chief joys of Goldfinger is the bad-guy plot. Goldfinger’s scheme is logical, surprising and utterly horrifying and evil. Goldfinger trades in gold, but instead of robbing Fort Knox he plans to set off a “dirty bomb” inside it, killing tens of thousands of people, making America’s gold worthless and his own ten times more valuable. On his way to achieving this goal, he’s willing to kill just about anybody he feels like, even his own financiers and allies.
WOMEN? Four: a fiery Latina before the titles, good-sport “Dink”(!) in Miami, poor doomed Jill Masterson in the hotel, and then the more challenging Pussy Galore. In general, the sexual politics in Goldfinger are more complicated than in the previous two movies. Not all women simply jump into bed with Bond any more — some are femmes fatale, some are easy pickings, some aren’t interested in sex at all (and don’t get it), and some are classy, independent thinkers who must be, um, persuaded.
FRIENDLY ANIMAL Felix Leiter is back, but has been re-cast as older and frumpier (don’t tell me they couldn’t “get” Jack Lord). But it’s still the same Felix Leiter, Bond even refers to their Jamaica adventure. Maybe the past few years have been tough on the CIA, what with the Bay of Pigs and the assassination of Kennedy and all.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Goldfinger is a riveting and fascinating character, played with startling realism by Gert Frobe. He’s not a moustache-twirling bad guy, he’s a disgusting slob with a dyspeptic grimace, but an extremely wealthy and powerful one, which makes all the difference in the world. Speaking of Cold War villains, he reminds me of no less a personage than Col Tom Parker. Goldfinger is so evil, the Italian mobsters assembled at his home in Kentucky come off like a bunch of yahoos and cheeseheads (and this is back when the Italian mafia was a true force to be reckoned with). How cool is Goldfinger? He’s responsible for not one but two urban legends about ways to die: the “getting painted to death” legend and the “getting sucked out of an airplane window” legend, both of which, we now know, are total hogwash. How sick is Goldfinger? He has a prison cell in the basement of his Ken Adam-designed house and not one but two peepholes into the bathroom of his private jet. He gets -1 point for hustling gin games in Miami Beach, 1 point for ultra-cool henchman Oddjob, 1 point for living in a Ken Adam set, 1 point for killing a woman by painting her gold (you can’t tell me that’s Oddjob’s job) and 100 points for his brilliant, devious plan.
NOTES: This is the first Bond movie to offer the pre-title sequence. Let’s run through this one: Bond swims through the ocean to a dock with a fake gull taped to his head. He climbs over a wall to a field of oil tanks. He goes to a specific tank, throws a secret switch and goes inside. The inside of the oil tank is someone’s secret living quarters (designed by Ken Adam — he was everywhere in the 60s). This person’s secret living quarters are lush, spacious and well-appointed. In addition to the swank furnishings, there is a pile of red oil drums marked “NITRO.” Because hey, you never know when you need a pile of gigantic oil drums filled with nitro. Bond plants a bomb in the nitro, escapes from the secret living quarters, sheds his wetsuit to reveal a white dinner jacket, then goes to hang out in a local bar while the oil field explodes and the town’s economy evaporates. Later, he goes to visit a local exotic dancer, who, it turns out, doesn’t appreciate him bombing the hell out of her town, and before you know it he’s got to kill a guy. Just a day’s work for our pilot-raping super-spy.
Apart from the rape thing (and Bond’s stated abhorrence of the Beatles), this is by far the best script in the series up to this point. It’s like the filmmakers have finally found their voice or hit their stride or something. It’s a real detective story with plenty of twists and surprises, actual clue-sorting and legwork, and Bond interacts with the bad guy from the very beginning. Oddjob is still killer stuff 43 years later, brutal and implacable, although I can’t for the life of me figure out how his hat works. I get that it’s got some kind of razor-sharp blade in, but I can’t figure out how he could possibly throw it hard enough to cut a cable or behead a statue (or a lady sharpshooter).
I understand why Goldfinger needs a big laser, but I can’t understand why it needs a coiled blue neon light on it.
I note that the air squadron is called Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, and I wonder if perhaps, on some level, the name Monty Python is meant as a kind of reply to Pussy Galore.
I also note that Bond (or, rather, a Bond-rehabilitated Pussy) alerts the CIA to Goldfinger’s plot, and wonder if Fort Knox actually falls within the CIA’s jurisdiction. Would Kentucky not be the FBI’s territory? I also wonder what, exactly, the CIA would do with a warning from a woman named Pussy Galore, when they couldn’t bring themselves to respond to a memo titled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike Within US.”