WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? General Orlov wants to start a conventional war between the USSR and Eastern Europe. To do this, he intends to set off a nuclear bomb on an American Air Force base in West Germany. He believes the detonation of a nuclear bomb on an American Air Force base will be seen as an accident and will therefore cause, presto! nuclear disarmament. And then the USSR can invade a helpless Eastern Europe.  Can’t miss!

General Orlov is played in a Kubrickian fashion by Kubrickian actor Steven Berkoff. Which is fitting, as Orlov recalls no one so much as General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove. And that is probably the last time you will ever see anyone use the word “Kubrickian” in a discussion of Octopussy.

Now, it turns out that Orlov is not the “A Villain” in Octopussy. That honor belongs to Kamal Khan, played by Louis Jourdan. I have told you the “B Villain”‘s plot instead of the “A Villain”‘s plot because, frankly, I can’t for the life of me figure out what the “A Villain”‘s plot is. Khan knows Orlov somehow and is connected to him via a smuggling operation (Orlov is smuggling priceless artifacts out of the USSR in order to, I think, finance his nuclear-bomb scheme. But we see in Act III that Orlov’s got both his bomb and his priceless artifacts, so what did he sell to whom and why, and what does it have to do with his bomb plot?)

Anyway, Khan is a fabulously wealthy ex-prince or something who lives in Delhi and helps Orlov smuggle his priceless artifacts out of the USSR. He does this with the assistance of Octopussy, a similarly fabulously wealthy woman who has a private island where she supports an army of beautiful young smugglers who are also circus performers. You can tell how dedicated they are to their work because they wear their circus costumes every day. Octopussy, as one might imagine, has an extremely high self image, as one must in order to carry around a name like “Octopussy.” Especially when one learns that she got this nickname from, gulp, her father. Octopussy is played by Maud Adams, who looks great since being shot dead in The Man With the Golden Gun.

Um, so Octopussy is a smuggler who runs a gigantic, hugely profitable smuggling operation out of her circus.  Because you know, if you’re smuggling priceless artifacts, the last thing you want to do is attract attention to yourself, and people generally flee in terror from a circus.  (The plot begins with a circus clown being beaten and stabbed to death in the midst of a German forest, and all I could think is “Man, I’ve dreamed this a thousand times.”)

WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD?  The nicest thing I think I can say about Octopussy is that it evokes fond memories of Moonraker.  In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that Moonraker is freaking North by Northwest compared to Octopussy.  I can’t say I really blame the screenwriters — who would bring their “a-game” to a movie called Octopussy?

For the third or fourth time, Bond is hired to check into a smuggling ring.  Why?  Because the clown we see murdered in the opening is a 00 agent, and is found clutching a stolen Faberge egg.  It is discovered that a number of stolen Russian artifacts have been showing up at auction houses and this is somehow the business of the British Secret Service.

Now then: the 00 clown is found dead in Germany, murdered by a pair of circus performers, so it’s reasonable to suspect that the 00 agent was undercover in a circus (as opposed to just happening to be dressed as a clown), and I can’t imagine that there were any other circuses in town besides Octopussy’s, and one doesn’t readily forget a circus named Octopussy’s Circus, and yet it takes James Bond, World’s Greatest Detective, over an hour to trace the bad-guy scheme to Octopussy and longer still to realize that she has a circus that is somehow central to this plot.

No, first he goes to an auction for this stolen Faberge egg, where he meets this Khan fellow, who’s buying the stolen egg, then follows this Khan fellow to Delhi, then falls into Khan’s clutches.  Only then can he escape Khan, make the connection from Khan to Octopussy, from Octopussy to Octopussy’s circus, and from Octopussy’s circus to General Orlov and his nuclear bomb plot.  Phew!

But then we’re not done!  No, after defusing the bomb and saving the world, Bond must then go after Khan, because, um, because —

— well —

because —

— because otherwise he might get away with — um —

— well, like I say, I never figured out what Khan was getting out of all this.  He’s not helping Orlov for money, he’s not helping Orlov for political gain, he’s not helping Orlov in order to spend time with Octopussy, he’s, he’s —

— well anyway.  Screenwriters take note: One villain with one goal is ideal.  One villain with two goals is weaker.  Two villains with one goal is okay, but two villains with two goals is weak.  Two villians, one with a goal and one without, weakest of all.

WOMEN?  Roger Moore is okay in my book until he starts putting the moves on the ladies; then he just screams skeeviness.  In Octopussy there is a stick-insect femme fatale and Octopussy herself.  Neither seduction is remotely believable.

HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY?  Remember how Goldfinger took time out from his evil scheme to destroy the world in order to hustle some gin rummy in Miami?  This is even less cool than that: Khan takes time out from his ill-defined scheme to do whatever the fuck he’s doing in order to hustle backgammon in Delhi.  Backgammon!  A backgammon hustler!  What’s next, shuffleboard?  And don’t get me started on the tiger hunt.

He also makes a common Bond-villain choice, one that makes no sense to me.  Once he knows Bond is onto him, he hires two competing teams of assassins to kill him.  Now, I’m no supervillain, but it seems to me you hire one team of assassins to kill a guy, and if they fail you might have a second team standing by, but why would you send both teams out at the same time?

For that matter, how many different people would a guy have to kill in a week that he has two separate teams of assassins on his payroll?

Khan also wears the classic “Dr. No” Nehru jacket, but let’s face it, Khan is no No.

FAVORITE MOMENT: Bond stumbles out of the woods, looking for a ride to the circus.  A bunch of kids in a sports car come by and slow down, waving for him to get into the car.  As he approaches, they laugh and speed off.  The image of the aging James Bond being literally left behind by a bunch of laughing teenagers is heartbreaking and the truest moment in the movie.

NOTES: To say the least, a major step backwards for James Bond after For Your Eyes Only.  It suffers from a nonsensical plot, an interminable Act II, and a motiveless villain.  It contains both a fight scene ended by a fortuitous crocodile and a thug with a circular-saw yo-yo.  The last half-hour of the movie, everything past the point where Bond is required to dress up as a clown to save the world, is just one jaw-dropping travesty after another.  The big climactic set-piece involves a team of circus performers storming the bad-guy’s fortress in their circus costumes, including a team of women in leather bikinis toting tranquilizer guns.

No wait, I almost forgot, before Bond dresses up as a clown he must dress up as a gorilla.

For some reason, the title song is not titled “Octopussy.”  Rather, Rita Coolidge sings a soft-rock number called “All Time High.”  To sing as song titled “All Time High” for a movie titled Octopussy strikes me as either the definition of hubris or the epitome of faith.

CONTEST! I invite my readers to come up with a title more childishly offensive and stupid than Octopussy. It must involve (a) a pun, (b) a Latin word for a number, and (c) a vulgar name for genitalia (male or female will do). I’ll start: Septemember. (I had another involving the word “Prime” but it was too disgusting even for this journal.)

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.

WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT?  Blofeld, now with hair (the better to battle the ever-balding Bond, I suppose), has a plan to take over the world.  Well, at least he’s recovered his ambition after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where he was planning to hold the world hostage until it gave him a title.  After faking his death (at the hands of James Bond), Blofeld goes to Las Vegas, kidnaps reclusive, eccentric Texas billionaire Willard Whyte (easy peasy), takes over his aerospace empire, uses his team of engineers (and a ringer) to design and build a satellite with a big laser-beam on it capable of, yes, destroying the world.  Once he has demonstrated the awesome power of this satellite, the world will simply turn over all the power to him.  Because that’s how the world is.

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.