Octopussy

Octopussy, I find, is the wild card of Bond movies...I can never tell where it's going to end up on a person's list. It always seems to end up fairly high (really?) or low (really??) amongst people's rankings of the Moore films. Me, I'm Goldilocks today...it's pretty much square down the middle.

Which is not to damn it with faint praise. Octopussy is fun, and entertaining. Sure, it borrows from other Bond movies, and sure, after the realism of For Your Eyes Only they ran scurrying back to gadgets and big set pieces. But that can't really be a surprise, given that Eon was going up against the rival Never Say Never Again, and against the ur-Bond himself, Sean Connery. It would be unrealistic to expect them not to play up the elements the public seemed to love the most in such circumstances.

And mostly, Octopussy is well done. Great stunts, exotic locations, nuclear threats, decent villains, a gorgeous leading lady, some of the best non-Ken Adam sets ever, a new M...like FYEO, Octopussy rarely flags in energy, and is gorgeous to look at.

On the flip side, though, many of those elements I listed above could have, and should have, been done better. A lot of potential is wasted (my god, a crime circus!!), the locations aren't used very well, the leading lady really has nothing to do, and the film is about 15 minutes too long. And the entire middle of the film is a vast wasteland--lots of stuff is happening, but nothing that actually advances the plot!

A lot of the problems come down to the problematic script. Last movie's team of Richard Maibaum and Michael Wilson return along with George McDonald Frasier. All are credited as "screen story and screenplay." And it's hard to believe that the (mostly) same team that put FYEO put together a screenplay so shapeless and full of holes.

Of course, if you've been reading my reviews you know that I've found there's usually a pretty direct correlation between the amount of Ian Fleming's work used as a basis for the script, and how successful the movie is. The problem is, we're now starting to scrape the bottom of the Fleming barrel. Like FYEO, Octopussy uses two separate Fleming short stories. Unlike FYEO, though, these two stories are a very weak peg upon which to hang an entire movie. In addition, the writers do a poor job of crafting connective tissue to make it all hang together.

The story Octopussy is used, but done with in about 30 seconds. The story Octopussy tells about her father--British officer and agent, went rogue and stole a cache of gold and retired to an incognito high life, Bond tracks him down and gives him 24 hours to put his affairs in order, which he uses to kill himself and preserve his honor--is the entirety of the short story. That's it. The story Property of a Lady is also fairly intact. In that story, a KGB paymaster is auctioning off a Faberge clock to pay a (known) double agent in MI-6. The KGB agent would undoubtedly be at the auction to bid up the price, to better reward the traitor, so 007 attends to see if they can figure out who the KGB actually is. What follows is an incredibly fun and tense scene (much better than in the movie) as Bond breaks orders to bid on the clock, in order to ferret out the spy's identity. If you don't believe an auction scene can be thrill-packed, you haven't read this story...seriously. But again, not a lot to base a whole movie upon.

So unlike FYEO, where the short stories give us the two major underlying plots for the whole movie, in Octopussy we only get 45 seconds of spoken exposition and one 3-minute scene. Which means all of the conflicts, all of the plot, virtually everything had to come from the writers. The basic underlying plot isn't a bad one, albeit a bit Tom Clancyish: a mad Russian general plans to set off a nuke in Berlin, watch the Europeans blame America and unilaterally disarm, and then the Soviets move in with their conventional superiority and conquer Western Europe. The problem is, they have to come up with the rest of the plot, how to get from point A to B and then C...and there's not much there.

They cover it gamely enough. The first step is to borrow a lot structurally from Goldfinger. They camouflage it fairly well, but follow the bouncing ball. Both films start with a teaser completely unrelated to the main movie, in which 007 smashes the secret lab/hanger of some Latin American bad guy. In the main film, Bond meets the villain and out-cheats the cheater at golf/backgammon...and the response of the strong mute henchman is to grind the golf ball/dice into dust. The villain uses the mundane crime of robbery/smuggling to place a nuke to damage western interests, with the help of an all-female crime group. Bond disarms the nuke, but the villain gets away. Bond dispatches him during a battle on an airplane. Oh, it's not an exact copy, and enough of it works in the new context that you don't mind the borrowing (unlike, say, Moonraker xeroxing The Spy Who Loved Me).

The second thing is to fill the screen with colorful characters. No one rises to the level of a Columbo or Kerim Bay, but Bond interacts with an awful lot of fun characters...Octopussy, Magda, Kamal Khan, Gobinda, Vijay, Orlov, Gogol, Mischka and Grischka, jugglers, acrobats, the general at the U.S. base, dudes with yo-yo saws...the movie keeps throwing more and more people at us, effectively bedazzling us when we should be noticing some of the gaping holes instead.

The biggest problem with Octopussy is that there is no "there" there. Between the time Bond susses out Khan at the auction, until the time he discovers the flier for Octopussy's circus performing in East Germany, the plot doesn't advance one iota. Oh, lots of stuff happens. Bond flies to India, beats Khan at backgammon, Khan's goons chase Bond through the streets, Q shows up, Bond has dinner plus benefits with Magda, she takes the egg and leaves and Bond gets taken prisoner, Khan visits the still-shrouded-in-mystery Octopussy, Bond wakes up at Khan's crib, has a gross dinner, escapes, overhears a non-helpful conversation, is chased in a lengthy tiger hunt, back to Q, a visit to--and a dalliance with--Octopussy, Vijay is killed, the Floating Palace is attacked by Temple of Doom extras...all this takes almost exactly one hour, and in that time the ONLY advancement of the plot is that Bond knows a Soviet general is involved, and that something is up in Karl-Marx-Stadt. Bond could have learned that sitting at his desk in London, backtracking 009's movements. But we are suddenly an hour and a half into the movie, and we still have no clue what the villains' plot is, what their relationships are, what the stakes are. The movie has given us lots of action, lots of characters, but aside from learning how much of a bastard Khan is, nothing is accomplished.

The second biggest problem with Octopussy is a villain mismatch. Obviously the head bad guy is General Orlov: it's his goal to set off the bomb and set off WWIII. Khan is essentially just a financier... He's helping to smuggle the bomb in for ample financial reward, but he's no ideologue. He's never shown with any particular desire to upset the balance of power in Europe--he's just a henchman, essentially. Without Orlov, there is no movie! So you would think that the focus of the movie would be on Bond getting Orlov. But you would be wrong--Bond barely even meets Orlov! They share a grand total of a minute and a half together on screen; as far as we can tell, they never even learn each others names!! Bond has nothing to do with Orlov's demise, and Orlov is never so much as mentioned again after his death!

Instead, the movie spends all of its creative energy on Kamal Khan, making him the big bad, despite the fact that it's not even his plan!! Khan gets about 15 times the screen time Orlov does, gets his own henchman, gets all the dialogue and moments. I realize that Louis Jordan is a bigger star than Stephen Berkoff, but in terms of what the movie's plot is, the decision to emphasize Khan over Orlov really makes no dramatic sense...especially after the bomb is defused. Khan's a smuggler and forger, Orlov's a mass murdering war monger...but Khan is treated as the worse villain. Strange (and not the only time in the series that we'll see such villain confusion...).

Not that there is anything at all wrong with Louis Jordan's performance. He was always one of my favorite Columbo villains, and he triumphs here, too, oozing a smarmy, evil charm that makes him immediately disagreeable yet compelling. His performance is as far away from the monotone blandness of Stromberg and Drax as you can possibly get...Jordan clearly understood the dynamic that must exist between Bond and his villain, and played it up appropriately. He takes what could have been just a Golfinger knock-off role and makes it his own. It is largely due to his portrayal of Khan that we get swept away in that "lost hour" in the middle of the movie, not realizing that nothing is actually happening.

John Glen's direction also helps to cover Octopussy's plot deficiencies. In many ways, I think this might be his best direction job of his 5 Bond movies. He always has the camera moving in interesting ways, and finds lots of unusual camera angles to keep the viewer engaged. Two scenes serve as good examples of Glen's skill. The hunting of 009 through the woods is very well done. Mostly without score, Glen takes an inherently ridiculous scene--a guy dressed as a clown pursued by knife-throwing twins!!--and makes it into one of the best scenes in the series' history. Secondly, watch the auction scene. Look at the surprise on Jim Fanning's face when there is a new bidder on the egg at 425,000 pounds...and then the shock and horror as he sees it was Bond bidding, as simultaneously with the camera pulling back and left. The audience discovers the truth along with Fanning. Masterful. The movie is full of little directorial touches like that, that keep us smiling and willfully playing along.

Also great fun is Peter Lamont's production design. When he have to compete against a rival Bond, you'd best channel Ken Adam, and he does, especially with the Soviet meeting room, complete with spinning conference table:


and Octopussy's bed:

Lamont's sets just blow away what we're given by Never Say Never Again. As I said in my review of that film, despite having almost identical budgets, Eon always seems able to do more with the money...

The teaser is largely mediocre. Fun fact--perhaps because of the Castro look-a-like who lusts after Bianca, I always assumed that this was set in Cuba. Nope--the credits clearly identify those folks as "South American officer" and "South American V.I.P." The action of the teaser is not terribly compelling. Watching a man flying alone, even while doing some aerial stunts, just isn't that fascinating...Bond's never in any real physical danger (reference Tomorrow Never Does for how to make it work better). Question--why assume Colonel Toro's identity if he was going to be there? Or did he just show up unscheduled? Sloppy intelligence, either way...The "comedy" ending doesn't help. Good heavens, if the mini-plane burns fuel that fast, it was hardly suitable for this mission, was it?? And we never find out exactly what it is Bond is trying to destroy...

I was pretty hard on Rita Coolidge's "All Time High" in my song rankings. Let me make my thought process clear: this is not a bad song...actually, I think it's sorta decent, in a 1980's Adult Contemporary type of way. But it IS a bad Bond song. It sooo wants to be "Nobody Does It Better," but it falls short. It does nothing to describe or symbolize the action of the film, it's not about Bond or the villain, and it's practically useless when it comes to being worked into the score in a meaningful way. Plus, several demerits for failing to use the movie title in the song. Sorry, Rita.


Maud Adams is as lovely as she was a decade earlier. But unfortunately, the script really gives her nothing to do. Seriously, her top girl, Magda, gets more to do than she does. Aside from one scene with Khan where her identity is obscured, we don't meet her until over an hour into the film. Despite all this talk about her being a master smuggler, we don't really see it, do we? After Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever, we know something about smuggling in the Bond universe...and hiding some jewels in a cannon, while nice, doesn't reach the level of cleverness we'd expect from someone supposedly so gifted. When the actual operation occurs, Khan and Gobinda and the Twins do all the work, while she just stands around watching.

She gives us some exposition about reviving the "octopus cult" (?) and gathering lost girls, but we expect a little more...especially from our title character. Why women? What cult? If you're independently wealthy now, why smuggle? Sadly, none of this is dealt with at all--the writers just wanted some hook to hang a Pussy Galore clone on, and didn't bother to develop it any further. It's not Maud's fault, but Octopussy is never anything more than a cardboard cut-out who looks great on the posters. Which is a shame, because this character had so much potential...heck, we never even find out her real name!!

Roger Moore mostly hams it up, but still shows some ability to display the fire needed (as in his confrontation with Orlov--why, oh why, weren't these two given more screen time together?!?). But to battle Never Say Never Again, the producers upped the "crowd pleasing" silliness quotient. So after the earnestness of FYEO, we're back to animals doing double-takes, Bond embarrassingly telling a tiger to sit, Bond embarrassingly swinging and yelling like Tarzan, Bond making jokes and puns practically every time he opens his mouth...sigh. Under those circumstances, and with that script, we pretty much get the Moore performance we expect, don't we?

I mentioned the large supporting cast earlier, and most of them shine. Vijay Amritraj, a professional tennis player with no prior acting experience, makes an amiable sacrificial lamb. Krisitna Wayborn is fun as Magda, although her all-too-obviously dubbed voice rarely seems to match up to her physical performance. Kabir Bedi isn't given much to do except look big and menacing as Gobinda--Mission Accomplished. Lots of smaller character actor parts--Major Smithers, Jim Fanning, Sadruddin, Yo-Yo Thug...there are a lot of people to watch in this movie.

The location usage is fairly disappointing, though. We don't see a lot of India, and most of it consists entirely of cliches. Market places full of fakirs, mockery of the food, hordes of villagers on tiger hunts...there's nothing at all of the vaguest interest or originality here, and nothing that wouldn't be in an India movie set in 1883, let alone 1983. (Between this movie and the following year's Temple of Doom, India's public image in the West was set back decades, if not more) Berlin and East Germany don't come off much better...yes, I know they weren't really there, but the plot possibilities of James Bond in East Germany are completely ignored.

So what is the verdict on Octopussy? It's clearly not the best Bond film out there. The plot is missing from the middle hour of the movie;, the Bond Girl (and title character!!) is just boring; Bond ends up chasing the wrong bad guy; the movie goes on too long as everything after the bomb is defused is complete anti-climax; and the plot holes are so numerous the movie is constantly in danger of becoming Swiss cheese (more an that it the notes).

And yet...charm can go a long way. The film is quite well directed; the sets are great; there are more good characters than you can shake a stick at; lots of great stunt work (even if the Roger Moore insert shots are becoming more and more obvious); and even though they up the jokiness, they never go over the top, and never coast (a la Moonraker). Everyone is clearly having such a good time, we gladly go along for the ride, and willingly forget many of the flaws until later. So in my book, Octopussy gets a thumbs up. Not the best of the Moore Bonds, but far, far from the worst. It's an enjoyable (if imperfect) romp...and we all need those sometimes.

SNELL'S RANDOM NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS:

**Welcome, M! Robert Brown (formerly seen as Admiral Hargreaves in TSWLM) takes over MI-6. I only wish he had been a little smarter. Look--009 was found in Berlin in a clown costume. Wouldn't the VERY FIRST thing you do be to research what circuses or carnivals were in the area? Maybe follow up on what mission 009 was on?? How can you say "there's not much to go on?" Unless 009 was on vacation at East German clown college and just happened to stumble upon the smuggling ring, retracing 009's steps make at least as much sense as following the egg. But Bond and M don't even think of that until after they discover Octopussy has a circus...

**So Bond eavesdrops on Khan and Orlov discussing their plan, but all he hears is "one week from today" and "Karl Marx Stadt." He escapes, apparently goes to Octopussy's palace that night, spends the night there, stays another night and beds Octopussy, they're attacked that night and he leaves...So what, exactly, do Bond and MI-6 do for the next 4 or 5 days?? Nothing?? Bond shows up in East Germany the same day as their performance in K-M Stadt...

**When Bond escapes from the palace disguised as a corpse in a body bag, instead of taking the still running jeep that he's laying in, he gets out and takes off on foot through the jungle even though there's a massive hunting party looking for him. Bond being stupid, or just vamping to fill time during the "missing hour" in the middle of the film.

**Orlov and Khans' plan was pretty much a non-starter. The Kremlin auditor discovered the forgeries in all of 2 seconds!! So regardless of the bomb, both would likely end up being hunted by the KGB for life...(and I hope the quality of Khan's forgery was better on those counterfeiting plates he escapes with at the end...). Seriously, the very first step of their plan, and apparently it's completely incompetent!!

**It is seriously, seriously impossible to believe that James Bond couldn't find a god damned phone anywhere near West Berlin. After the train fight and killing the twin, Bond has almost an hour and a half left. That close to Berlin, I can't believe he's more than an hour-and-a-half away from civilization. After he's dropped off by the Volkswagen, instead of waiting for the woman to finish her call (and thus call M with over an hour left on the countdown), he steals her car (in front of policeman!) and decides to drive all the way there (a 45+ minute drive at top speed, if we believe the shots of the bomb's timer). We are really, really, really into idiot plot territory here.

**James just happens to end up in EXACTLY the same clown outfit as 009??

**It's a good thing that James has substantially improved at disarming nukes since Goldfinger...

**Khan goes back to the Monsoon Palace to grab his stuff and go on the lam--and once he found the bomb didn't go off, he presumably made top speed. Yet somehow, Octopussy and all of her acrobats make it to his crib at virtually the exact time he arrives!! I know this was pre-Patriot Act, but somehow I think that a group who had smuggled a live nuclear weapon onto a U.S. military base, even if unknowingly, wouldn't be leaving any time soon. Certainly they would be detained long enough that they couldn't catch up to Khan (and don't get me started on how many borders Khan had to cross to get home...wouldn't the U.S. put out a pretty big APB on him once they were told of his involvement?

**M makes Bond sign a chit for the real Faberge egg, because it's "government property now." Orlov smashes it to bits later...does that mean Bond owes the Crown half a million pounds? He's got a chit with no egg...(by the way, M, since that egg was STOLEN from its legitimate buyer, is it really government property now?) (and good luck to Gogol getting the Romanov star back from MI-6, given M's interpretation of "finders, keepers)

**Speaking of which, when Bond swaps the eggs at the auction, it's the most obvious and least-believable slight of hand EVER. Is it really that easy to steal priceless treasures from Sotheby's, even when everyone in the room is looking right at you????

**The Iron Law of Bond Movies: Hotel clerks are HOT for Bond!!

**Yes, the fake alligator is pretty silly...but is it really any sillier than Connery's seagull hat in Goldfinger's teaser?

**Another gambling moment mistake. Both Bond and Khan seem to think that Bond can only win with double sixes...but look at where Khan's pieces are:

They're on the 3 and 4 points, which means that even if Bond didn't get double 6's, there's any number of rolls (3-1, 4-2, 6-2, etc) that Khan could get that would still leave James with another chance. Of course, Khan would have cheated again, but still, they should at least state things accurately...

**Know-it-all Bond is back: now he's an expert on Faberge eggs, identifying which one it is on sight (one change with the new M--he's pleased, not annoyed, by Bond's showing off!). Bond also can expertly identify a specific genus of octopus and all its traits, just from a tattoo on a woman's butt.

**The whole bit with Bond stowed away on the train is just physically impossible...it's a TMWGG problem again. With both Grischka and Gobinda in the cramped train car with him, Bond somehow manages, silently and unnoticed, to get into the gorilla suit. Then later, once Gobinda knows he's in there, he manages to get out of it, silently and unnoticed...unless he's the Flash or can turn intangible, uh-uh, no way.

**Nice to see Bond become a crack shot again...he takes down 3 straight commie soldiers with one shot to the head each...

**I would never suggest that Spielberg was at all influenced by the "feeding the guests disgusting 'Indian' food" scene. Nope, nothing like that ever turned up in Temple of Doom a year later...

**Bond Score: 3. Bianca, Magda, and Octopussy. Cumulative Bond Score: 37

And, as always:

Well, that's actually one word too many...we'll be back next week with Moore's last hurrah.

Second Trailer For QoS

We interrupt this broadcast to present to you:



As my friend Siskoid has been known to say, SQUEEEEEEE!!!!

Man, I wish that countdown timer were moving faster...Is it November yet??

For a larger version click here.

Connery Vs. Moore

If you grew up in my generation, whenever you had a conversation about James Bond, it ALWAYS eventually boiled down to one question:

"Who do you like better, Connery or Moore?"

Such a casual question, so innocent seeming. But it was really a landmine. Because in the 70's and early 80's, this was a question that defined you as a person.

This was Coke vs. Pepsi. Michigan vs. Ohio State. Boxers vs. briefs. Matter vs. anti-matter.

This was a time of binary decision making...it had to be one or the other. You weren't allowed to straddle the fence. Make a choice, and be forever defined by it. And at the time, there were no other choices.

No one had ever seen Barry Nelson, and George Lazenby was a footnote most people hadn't seen but had heard terrible stuff about. Nope, you only had two choices...and for a lot of people, Connery vs. Moore became the stuff of arguments, fist fights, jihads (OK, I exaggerate slightly). If you took a position you were suddenly in somebody's enemy camp, and they would spend hours trying to convince you why "their" Bond was better. But that was still preferably, in those days, to trying to say you liked both--than both sides would harangue you for being an idiot.

And when Octopussy and Never Say Never Again came out in the sane year, well, those arguments and debates went into overdrive.

Here's the thing, though. As the years have gone by, new perspectives--and respect--have crept into this discussion. Some of it is just that we're all (slightly) more mature now, and able to get away from our simplistic black & white view of this (and other) issues. Some of it is the arrival of several other Bonds during the intervening 25 years; it's no longer merely a binary Coke vs. Pepsi world. We have a lot more choices, and that in turn has caused us to be more careful consumers, more thoughtful of our choices, and less disdainful of people making different choices.

But the biggest thing may be availability. Up until the mid 80's, most of us only had memories of these movies to go on, or the once-every-few-years-cut-up-to-include-commercials network viewing. Now? Any Bond fan who doesn't already own all the films herself can just hop over to Blockbuster or wait for Netflix to ship it. Plus, just about all of the movies turn up on basic cable stations at least 3 or 4 times a year. In this brave new world, we don't have to rely on hazy memories...and we can see that some things we thought we terrible really aren't so bad, some stuff we thought wonderful maybe looks a little less so, and lots of shades of grey have crept into our "X is better than Y" debates.

Which is a long-winded way to say that, upon my mammoth rewatch-one-Bond-a-week project, I've come to something of a greater appreciation for Roger Moore than I had before. Full disclosure: I'm a Connery man, always have been. And I still am. But in my re-viewings, Moore comes across better--sometimes much better--than my memories had be believe.

Aside from the above reasons, there's also my greater awareness of how the movies were made, and who made them. As my reviews have me paying more attention to writers and directors than I ever have before, I realize that some of what we in the past have disdained Moore for may not have been anything he could control. It's a chicken or the egg problem: Did they write most of his movies as "less serious" affairs because that's what he wanted, or did he just play it that way because that's how they wrote them? Were they writing to his perceived strengths, or was he molding himself to the scripts? Were Moore or the writers just trying to give the public what they wanted? Was Sir Sean the better ruthless killer type, or did the writers just give him more scenes in which to do it?

I come up empty on many of these questions. Sadly, on this go around I don't have time to listen to all of the commentary tracks (3 on some of the DVDs!) or do tons of research on the behind the scenes scuttlebutt. So I don't know how much input Sir Roger had over scripts, and stunts, and how Bon d was portrayed. But we can't hold him responsible for "stainless steel delicatessens," can we? Moore didn't write his own scripts, didn't decide to do Moonraker after The Spy Who Loved Me because space was "hot," and didn't pick Rita Cooledge's "All-Time High" as the theme song for Octopussy. As the visible front man for the franchise, therefore, I think it's unquestionable that Roger Moore took too much of the blame for things that people didn't like about that era (and, unquestionably, Sean Connery gets too much credit for the things people like about his run).

So what DID each actor bring to the role? Can we separate the actor from his movies, from his screenwriters and directors?

Sean Connery's biography reads much like what his portrayal of Bond came across as. A kid from a hard-scrabble background, thrust into a world much more upper-class than he was used to. (Note that this is consistent with the way Daniel Craig's Bond was portrayed in Casino Royale (2006), as an effective agent, but one who had to be taught about how to mingle and fit in among the "higher" classes). Connery's performances seem to carry with them a certain zest, giving us a Bond who enjoys the woman and liquor and gambling all the more because he hadn't been exposed to them before. He's comfortable at the baccarat tables, he looks good in the tuxedo. But to some extent that's just camouflage, to cover up what's beneath, the hard man who can drop the veneer and kill immediately.

As a middle-class American, I may be poorly positioned to judge English class warfare issues, but I do see some of it there. From the very first movie, when Dr. No disses Bond as "just another policeman," there's an undercurrent of snobbery amongst the Bond villains, a "we're better than you working class schlub" attitude towards 007. Perhaps that's one of the reasons Americans have latched on so hard to the Bond series: we love to see the snobs put in their place by the regular joes. And in some way I can't define, Sir Sean manages to project "regular guy" in his Bond performances.

Roger Moore, however, comes across as anything but a regular guy. Better educated than Connery, his Bond is definitely from the upper classes. He comes across as if he had been born into that upper class world; he's not a visitor, and therefore can't be as much of an audience surrogate as Connery was. Note in TSWLM he can have a casual conversation with the Minister of Defence and call him "Freddy." It's a surprise they don't whip out the secret handshake and compare school ties. His gait is usually slow and measured, his posture ramrod straight. His delivery, whether purposely or not, often sounds condescending to this American's ear, as if explaining things to those not as well educated as himself.

I could be misreading this, or making too much of it, but this is the comparison that always leaps to mind for me: Connery is like a panther, sleek but partly hidden, always stalking...Moore is a lion, walking proud and upright, showing off its power.

Another take on this is the in-depth knowledge each possessed. Connery's Bond loved to show off his knowledge of liquor, but that type of snobbery didn't extend to other areas. He was admittedly clueless about gold and diamonds, and was often just as bemused as the audience at some of the outrageous villains plans, or Q's gadgetry. Moore, however, was a goddamned know-it-all, often interrupting the person he was talking to in order to deliver a lecture designed to show off how much smarter he was. Orchid genealogy? Expert. Solar power plants? Expert. Obscure submarine control systems? Expert. The way that Moore/Bond has to lecture Scaramanga on what Scaramanga's own plan is perhaps the quintessential moment for this incarnation of Bond, as 007 is now more knowledgeable and sophisticated than the villains. Again, this may explain why Moore is less popular among some, because if there's one thing we Americans hate more than a know-it-all, it's a snobby upper-class know-it-all, and we're definitely not used to that type being our hero.

Sexuality is also a difference between the two Bonds. Connery shagged more birds than Moore, and seemed to enjoy the sex more for its own sake. Connery would make love to a woman first, and then worry about what she wanted afterward. Maybe it was a 60's thing, but Sean was a Playboy Bond, where sex was separate from the mission (unless, of course, he's "converting" Pussy Galore).

But Moore was more of a cad, a user. One of my biggest surprises when re-watching the movies in order was how often Moore, especially early on, would merely use sex to get what he wants. In Live and Let Die, he enjoys his opening romp with the Italian agent. But he makes love to Rosie Carver just as an interrogation tool, and he's ready to get dressed and drop Solitaire after it's clear that she doesn't have any information he needs (he relents when she offers more sex, of course). In TMWTGG, he's an absolute bastard to Andrea Anders in their first meeting, and in their second he won't make love to her until he secures her promise to get the solex. In TSWLM he's again using the promise of sex just to get information from Felicca. Later in his tenure, he does became much more of a bird-dog, practically hounding Anya and Holly Goodhead for sex. But overall, Moore scored less often than Connery, and did it for pure pleasure much less often. For Connery, the sex was a fringe benefit...for Moore's Bond, it was more often a tool.

Connery has the reputation of being much more ruthless and dangerous...it's the panther/lion comparison, again. From day 1 Sir Sean was a ruthless son of a bitch, to sure. The extra bullets he pumped into the already dead Professor Dent showed us something we hadn't seen in our movies before. But how much of his reputation is merely from our memories? One is hard pressed to find many more examples of Connery killing when it wasn't in self defense. And, stunningly, Connery almost never got to administer the coup de gras to the villain in his movies! He pushes Dr. No into the reactor water, but his drowning is more a result of his fake hands than Bond's doing; Tatiana kills Klebb; Domino kills Largo in both version of Thunderball; Blofeld gets away at the end of YOLT, and we never see his death in DAF. Even Goldfinger dies in an accident caused by his own gun! Sir Roger, by contrast, gets to deliver the final blow to all of his villains except Kristatos.

Certainly, when called upon, Moore could be as vicious as Connery. His kicking Locque to his death, slapping Sandor to his death, shooting Scaramanga in the back, torturing Anders to get information...these are all actions that rank up their with anything Connery did. Sadly, the scripts didn't call on him to do so that often. Allowing Knick Knack and Jaws (twice) to live, going without a gun for the entirety of Moonraker...too often Moore was written as an action hero rather than a secret agent with a licence to kill. Whether or not that's Moore's fault we may never know. But certainly, the way Moore played the role most of the time, accentuated the problem. Unlike Connery, he rarely let his facade of urbane Britishness crack enough to let someone more dangerous peek out. Connery showed us the killer underneath more often than Moore.

The "death quip" is another good area of comparison. There's a balance in delivering these, which Sir Sean had and Sir Roger rarely acquired. Yes, they were jokes, but Connery never delivered them as jokes--they were ironic taunts at a fallen foe, a tension breaker. With rare exceptions, Moore usually delivered them as jokes...so of course they fell flat. Compare his delivery at Locque's death--"He had no head for heights." That's bitter and nasty and the equal of anything Connery delivered. Sadly, that was the exception. Blame the actor, blame the directors, but too often Moore plays it as a joke, and it falls flat.

There are other things to talk about...Moore's Bond very rarely gambles; Connery is given many more driving sequences; Connery's relationship with Monneypenny is very different than Moore's. It's tempting to try and wring meaning from every little difference, but I'll stop now.

With hindsight, with fresh viewing, "Connery vs. Moore" isn't the slam dunk case I'd always thought it to be in my youth. Oh, I'm still a Connery man, and I'll always think he embodied my vision of the role better than Moore did. But a lot of the differences between the two really weren't up to the actors. And in a lot of ways, I have a much better appreciation now for Moore than I did when I was younger.

And really, would we have wanted the next Bond to play things exactly the way Connery did? It's no longer a Connery vs. Moore world. It's now Connery vs. Moore vs. Lazenby vs. Dalton vs. Brosnan vs. Craig, and what the hell throw in Neslon and Niven world. There's a lot of flavors of ice cream out there, but even if there are some I like better than others, they're all still ice cream, right? I'll take a scoop of each, please (OK, not the Niven--even I have limits).

Never Say Never Again

I have to admit it--I'm at something of a loss of how to approach my review of Never Say Never Again.

I can't approach it exactly like the Eon Bond films, because it's not Eon...it's produced by another production group/studio, so comparisons to other Bond aren't necessarily valid...or fair.

Then again, the makers of Never Say Never Again desperately wanted this to be seen as a legitimate Bond film, and perhaps the start of a rival franchise. So does it become fair game to compare sets and stunts and other factors to the "real" Bond franchise?

And, for convoluted legal reasons, they only had various versions of the Thunderball story to use--so the movie had to be, by definition, a remake. So how much of my review do I spend comparing it to the Eon Thunderball??

Oy, the headaches. I think I'll vamp for time by explaining (to those of you who aren't already familiar with story) how this rival Bond came about. Allow me a couple of caveats: I'm no lawyer, and many of the facts of this matter are still disputed 50 years later. Many, many sources can't even seem to agree on the most basic facts. So please, take what I'm relaying here as a layman's understanding of the story, and not a legally informed judgment.

After having sold the right to Casino Royale (which was made into an uninspiring U.S. TV one-hour movie) and Moonraker (which resulted in nothing), Ian Fleming was approached by producer wannabe Kevin McClory, who convinced him that the best cinematic future for Bond was in original movies. Working with screenwriter Jack Whittingham, they went through many drafts of a movie alternately known as "Warhead" or "James Bond of the Secret Service." The storyline that eventually evolved was what we would recognize as the book and movie Thunderball, introducing Blofeld and S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and the stealing of nuclear warheads for blackmail. Reportedly there were as many as 15 drafts, with major and minor variations.

The project collapsed, as McClory was unable to find financing. But then Fleming decided to re-write the material into a new Bond novel, Thunderball. No credit was given to McClory and Whittingham for their contributions, so they sued Fleming. Nine days into the trial, there was a settlement: aside from monetary damages, all future printings of the book would carry the line "based on a screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, and Ian Fleming." Most importantly for our purposes, McClory was given the film rights to the Thunderball story.

Still unable to find financial backing, he reached a deal with Saltzman and Broccoli to "collaborate" on a Thunderball movie. McClory would be named producer and got a share of the proceeds. In return, McClory agreed not to make another movie from his Bond materials for at least 10 years.

Well, unsurprisingly, McClory came back, threatening lawsuits over Eon's use of Blofeld and S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (which was one of the reasons there was a longer than usual break between The Man With The Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me), and eventually finding financial backing to make his remake of Thunderball, helped in no small part by the promise of having Sean Connery back on board.

And so we have Never Say Never Again (a great Flemingesque title, taken from what Sir Sean's wife replied when he had said after Diamonds Are Forever that he would never doing Bond again). In a year that Eon was scheduled to release their own "real" Bond movie, Warner Brothers (via Orion) we were scheduled for a head to head "battle of the Bonds." Octopussy beat NSNA to the screen by a few months, but still, for the first time, Eon's James Bond had a direct competitor.

So what do we have here? A curious creature that wants so so desperately to be Bond, but because they seriously hoped that somehow this could be the start of a rival series, they had to somehow make it unique and distinguishable from the "real" Bond series. Which was going to be a nearly impossible task, given that it starred the best known and most popular Bond actor in a story that was a remake of the highest-grossing Bond film ever. The producers were sort of caught between Scylla and Charybdis there.

One of the steps they took was to create a hostile work environment for 007. His superiors no longer believed in him, or the Double-Os. We hear several times about budget cutbacks and bureaucracy, about how the CIA is so much better funded. This, I think, is a miscalculation. Part of the fantasy appeal for Bond (and almost any adventure series) is being free of such petty bureaucratic complaints, and having the whole of the English treasury at your disposal to fight evil. Nobody wants to hear Q complaining that he doesn't have enough money to make gadgets and about labour unrest...that's just a sad reminder of our own pathetic lives, instead of the fantasy we crave. Nigel Small-Fawcett is worried that 007 will hurt the tourist trade. Is that really how they expected to make their Bond better--by making everyone else around him worse? Did they really expect to sell their version of Bond by making his life dingy and drab?

Similarly, the decision to make M into a upper-crust jackass with no support or appreciation for 007 is all wrong...it's a trope from an American maverick cop movie, not a James Bond film. Bond should be fighting for his government, not in spite of it. So when Edward Fox plays M as a clueless buffoon who constantly threatens Bond with suspension and dismisses all of his ideas, but then promises Bond lunch at his club when he needs him, the movie becomes too divorced from a healthy Bond/M relationship. We're given a "comedy" relationship that never really succeeds, either in comedy terms or in a dynamic that makes this type of movie work. They make M into Dilbert's boss, which is not a winning strategy. The audience shouldn't hate M, but NSNA leaves us little choice.

Of course, that's also reflective of the biggest problem of this film--everyone is playing at different levels. Whether due to Lorenzo Semple Jr.'s screenplay or Irvin Kirshner's direction, all of our characters are acting as if they're in different types of film. Rowan Atkinson's Small-Fawcett is a character from Casino Royale (1967) or a Pink Panther movie (not to mention, once again playing up the incompetence of the British Secret Service). It's impossible to take a movie seriously that matches up his performance with Bernie Casey's or Sean Connery's. It's completely tonally inconsistent. The same goes for many of the other characters--Fatima Blush is a cartoon character, Largo is a Lectoresque psychopath, Domino solidly grounded in the real world...everyone is playing at different levels of fantasy/seriousness, and it rarely meshes well. Yes, they decided to play up the camp in this movie a bit...but you still need to establish a base level on which all the characters interact, and NSNA fails to find this.

Yes, this movie does camp it up. I suppose that's a good strategy to differentiate yourself from "the other fella." And Sean Connery does a good job at standing at the center of the silliness and winking at us (as he actually does in the last shot). They never push it into farce, as the "comedy" Casino Royale did, but this movie takes itself far less seriously than even the Roger Moore movies do--and that's saying something. The villains are more cartoony, some of the traps just silly even by Bond standards (radio-controlled sharks??), any sense of danger or tension undercut by the direction and the jokiness. It's not a type of Bond movie that I prefer, but they do a decent job with it, by not letting it get too out of hand.

Which brings us back to Sir Sean. And let me be blunt--without Connery, this movie is a complete failure.

The other times we've changed Bonds, we've had the rest of the original cast around, and the situation was the same. This time, we've got a Bond we're familiar with, but everything around him has changed...it's a different universe than the 007 we're used to. And frankly, if some other actor were there, it just wouldn't work. Without the rest of the trappings to tells us this was a Bond film, a new actor would have made this just another spy movie...and not a particularly good one. Not only would a different actor required the removal of about 1/2 the dialogue for its coy (and not so coy) references to Connery being back, but only Sean Connery could bring in the audience goodwill to suspend its disbelief enough to accept this situation as Bond. That audience identification--Connery=Bond--is the only thing that makes this film a Bond movie.

Sir Sean himself is in great form. He's in awesome shape, physically and in performance. He's able to roll with the punches, as it were, by being the only actor on screen who can take his performance to the level required to make the camp successful. He can be wry without being silly; he can wink at us without breaking character; he knows how to look disgusted at some of the shenanigans going on around him, thus keeping the audience on his side. And most importantly, he seems to be enjoying himself.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of the film seems...well, lesser. I don't want to say cheap, because its production budget was only $2 million less than that of Octopussy. But throughout it seems less professional, less polished, and, well, cheaper than the Eon productions. Take the opening scene (no teaser!) of Bond infiltrating a rebel camp, apparently in Latin America. Yes, we later find out it's all a training exercise, but nonetheless its terribly non-involving. Not much stunt work, no clever use of location, no exciting fights...from the way it's shot and presented to us, it might as well be James Bond breaking into a Bronx tenement or a London hostel. There's nothing to approach the "over-the-topness" that we've come to expect from Bond action sets, nothing to excite the audience. It's all very...pedestrian.

(I should note that the sequence isn't helped in the least by the music. The decision to play Lani Hall's rendition of the theme song over that opening scene is pretty disastrous. No matter what you might think of the song, it is completely incongruous with what's supposed to be a tense action scene. And Michel Legrand's score--which sounds like nothing so much as a late-night-on-Cinemax-soft-core-porn soundtrack--has a similar stupefying effect on most of the rest of the film.)

And throughout NSNA, there's an unwillingness to commit to what's needed to make the movie competitive with Eon's Bonds. Some of the special effects, such as the cruise missiles or the horse jumping out of the fortress, are fairly poor, even by 1983 standards. The exterior shots of the submarine are reused from the movie Ice Station Zebra (seriously). The underground temple that leads to the underground river is particularly unimpressive...it's all new and shiny and styrofoamy. Instead of the impressive meeting room from Thunderball, here Blofeld has just a drawing room with a bunch of wooden chairs (I know, Ken Adam is an unfair comparison to anybody, but still...). Instead of the dozens of underwater combatants we get in Thunderball's climax, we get 2. Even the sound effects sound as if they're recycled from other movies. The bomb in Washington is found and defused off-screen, with no help from our hero. The overall air is one of...well, I hate to say it, but cheapness.

NSNA also is lacking in action pieces. Seriously, this is one of the talkiest Bonds ever. And you can count the action set pieces on one hand--the intro, the Shrublands fight with Count Lippe, I suppose you could count the sharks in the Bahamas, the motorcycle chase, the horse running around the fortress, and the battle at the temple/underwater. That's it, unless you want to call Bond and Largo playing Death Pong an action sequence. For Your Eyes Only had more excitement and action in the first half hour than NSNA had for the entire picture (yes, I'm exaggerating, but barely). In between the sparse action, there's a lot of bureaucratic fuddy-duddying, a lot of comic relief, and generally a lot of coasting on Sean Connery's charm (which admittedly goes a long way).

Ah, yes, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Kong. Or rather Domination, as Largo wants to call it. You may remember my reviews of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, where I mentioned that the climaxes involved James Bond watching a view screen, and complained that nobody wanted to watch James Bond playing a video game.

Silly me. NSNA's producers and writer decided that we really did want to watch 007 playing Electronic Risk (with Bonus Pain!). The Video Dominoes battle with Largo is particularly symbolic of this movie as a whole, because a) it's probably not something we want to see Bond doing in a movie (unless it was Guitar Hero, that would be kind of rad to watch Bond whip off a blistering solo), and b) it's not done particularly well. The actions of the competitors' joysticks don't match the on-screen movements; it's impossible to tell what the status of the game is from the visuals (and if there's anything better than watching a video game in a movie, it's having to have the game status narrated to us by the Cylon voice); and by the time we get to Largo's second "perhaps I didn't explain" we realize that it's not much fun to watch a "game" where the rules are being made up as we go along. What's better--they make us watch them play 4 TIMES!!!And Bond's sudden mastery of 3-D Hungry Hungry Hippo--what's up with that? The first 3 times he's trounced, and then he pulls out a complete whoopass on Largo? Was he playing possum, or are his video game learning skills really that awesome? (Or, more likely, just a poorly scripted scene...). Sadly, just like the idea watching the ultra rich hang around a video arcade, the Bioshock '83 game is merely a sad attempt to make Bond look hip while simply looking lame and incongruous.

Barbara Carrera is fun as Fatima Blush, but she's no Fiona Volpe. She's allowed to overplay to such an extent that she becomes a TV Batman villain, chewing the scenery with such relish that little is left afterward. Her uber-camp approach contrasts too strongly with everything else in the movie, putting her on a different plane, so her menace just ends up being cartoony, no more threatening than Julie Newmar's Catwoman or Frank Gorshin's Riddler. Her joyous, bouncy performance, always seeming to dance across the screen, is infectious, her constant costume changes into outrageous outfits fun; but you could say the same about Cher, and who wants to see her as S.P.E.C.T.R.E. #12? The frustrating part is, by allowing her to sail so far above everyone else, Kirschner damages the movie. When Blush dies, it's as if someone let all the air out of a balloon. The rest of the movie flags, all the energy drained...there's no one left to match the camp energy she gave off, so the last 45 minutes of the film becomes drab by comparison.

Klaus Maria Brandauer as Largo is an interesting performance, one I can never make up my mind about. I think my problem has been that it's all very one-note. He excels at the "charming psychopath," tossing off odd gestures and mannerisms. But he never has any other levels: you never really see any inkling of a man Domino could have fallen in love with, of a master planner, of a man capable of building a billion dollar empire. His air of bemused detachment, and the way he always seems to be laughing at some private joke, is fun. But he never drops it, and never engages with the rest of the cast. This is an odd analogy, but it's almost as if he's Rainman, playing in some different movie in his own head. That's not what makes a successful Bond villain. Most of the time, I like Brandauer's Largo better than Adolfo Celi's. I just wish Brandauer had completed the job and created a full-fleshed out character.

Aah, Kim Basinger. Gorgeous, lovely, sexy woman. But this movie doesn't give Domino a lot to do. It's interesting that, in a film that tried to "modernize" Bond in so many ways, they gave us a throwback Bond Girl, one who's function is simply to look pretty and be rescued by James. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does seem a step backward from the more aggressive and helpful women of recent Eon pictures. The way the movie is written, it comes completely out of left field when Domino shows up at the last minute to harpoon Largo. I have no problems with Basinger's performance--hell, she's one of only two Bond women with an Oscar on her resumé--but she's surrounded by camp psychos, and her performance is the most serious, non-camp in the movie, which makes her look less interesting in comparison. Combine that with a script that just has her dancing around and reacting to events the whole movie, and it's no wonder her role is often forgotten.

So what do we have here? An object lesson in what to do--and mostly what not to do--in making an "unofficial" Bond film. Because it's not beyond the realm of possibility that somehow, someday, there might be more "rival" Bonds, or that someone besides Eon will end up with the "official" series. And what lessons does NSNA provide to these hypothetical future producers?

• Don't skimp on the action and stunts (and find someone who knows how to direct them)
  
• Don't make Bond a beleaguered civil servant, don't belabor MI-6's money problems--it's supposed to be a fantasy, not realistic portrayal of an empire in decline
  
• If you're going to do camp, get a writer and director who understand how to do it, and make sure the tone is consistent throughout
  
• Speaking of which, make sure your director is enforcing the vision with the cast, and keep all of the actors on the same page about what kind of movie they're in...this isn't some small town repertory...
  
• Don't date your movie by having Bond participating in something ultra-hip: the Ultra Missile Command sequence didn't work, and neither will what you're planning
• Give your Bond a likable supporting cast, because you're not going to get Sean Connery to carry the load this time
• For heaven's sake, get a freakin' decent theme song and score.
• Don't remake Thunderball again.

I've ragged fairly hard on NSNA, and I'm sure I've been too harsh. It's not a completely terrible movie, and a decent way to pass two hours. But without Sean Connery to support it, it's not really a Bond movie at all, let alone a good Bond movie. It's a movie made by people who had been waiting for years to make a Bond movie, and when they finally got their chance, they didn't seem to know how to actually do it. As such, Never Say Never Again is an interesting footnote in Bond history, but nothing more.

SNELL'S RANDOM NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS:

**What's up with that Arab slave market? Were these guys extras from a remake of Lawrence of Arabia? Given the your plot involves the necessity of protecting the wealthy Middle Eastern oil fields, maybe you might want to portray at least some Middle Easterners as more advanced than the 1914 version we're given here.

**This movie does a poor job of explaining why Bond does what he does. In Thunderball, Bond explains that he saw Derval alive when he was supposedly dead, and he deliberately follows that lead to Derval's sister. In NSNA, we get no explanation...Bond just shows up in the Bahamas. No trail of clues, no speculation, no nothing. Granted, Bond could have put together the clues he had, but wouldn't it have been nice to see some reasoning, instead of showing up in the Bahamas already suspecting Largo?

**Please, movie, can you give me some more dancing?

**Max Von Sydow is completely wasted here. There's not a single shot or inflection that wasn't done just as effectively by "hidden" Blofeld in Thunderball (Not to mention, he looks extraordinarily uncomfortable holding the cat). Why go to the effort of getting a famous actor to portray Blofeld is you're not actually going to do anything with him? (Plus, he keeps up the old "7 days" deadline, which we've discussed before as stupider than stupid)

**Hey, Felix Leiter! First time we've seen him in a decade (since Live and Let Die). Bernie Casey makes a nice, affable Leiter...but as usual, it's not of much consequence.

**Please, film, share some more dancing with us!!

**So Bond is in room 623, and "Lady in Bahamas" is in room 728. They go to her room. Fatima Blush blows up Bond's room. So, given the explosion we see here:

Why is 623 on the complete opposite side of the hotel from 728? (Possible, I suppose, but not in any hotel layout I've ever seen). And why is 623 on a floor ABOVE 728? And how does Small-Fawcett track down Bond in HER room, anyway?

"Lady in Bahamas" is played by Valerie Leon, who also played the hotel clerk lusting after Bond in TSWLM. Glad to see she finally had her way with him...

**OK, is Bond's pretending to be Domino's masseuse at all creepy, or is it just me?

**Changing Count Lippe from a snobby aristocrat to a huge wrestler is one way to approach the story, I guess. But the Shrublands fight makes the Jaws mistake: it's not really fun to watch your hero battle futilely against an unstoppable superman, and then not have him win through wits or skill but a by a fluke (ie joke). Barbells bounce of his chest, boiling water thrown in his face didn't phase him, but Bond's urine sample stops him cold? Er, ha ha, I guess? Seriously, it's cartoon time again...

Plus, the fight lasts forever (more than 5 minutes), and the only payoff is yet another crack about how broke MI-6 is.

**More dancing? Why, thank you, film!!

**So Max is running his little soiree as a fundraiser for orphans...and the big draw is a room full of video arcade consoles (mostly Centipede)? I guess those orphans had better hope that those rich folks had an awful lot of quarters...

**No, that's NOT Timothy Dalton there...

**Maybe it's just me, but it seems that if S.P.E.C.T.R.E. has access the President's retinal pattern, which has to be one of the more secure things in the world, they'd also have access to a lot of other important shit, and wouldn't have to waste time on time-consuming and complicated nuclear blackmail plans.

**On the other hand, kudos to Largo...unlike Thunderball, he had the good sense to move the two nukes far, far away from his home base.

**Was Largo on a suicide mission? After he enters the final cavern, he blows up the entrance behind him. He didn't have any cronies waiting to pull him up through the well...and it's not at all clear he could have gotten up there unaided. Was this always the plan, was he despondent over Domino, or did he have no other choice with Bond so close on his tail? Or did he have some secret way out (and the time to get there before the bomb blew)?

**Bond Score: 4. Patricia Fearing, Fatima, Lady in Bahamas, and Domino (sadly, all of whose counterparts in Thunderball are more alluring). Not bad for an old man, James. It doesn't seem as if he gets a chance to get involved with poor doomed Nicole. No cumulative score here, as this is an alternate universe.

And, as always:

Yo, Adrian!!!

Next week, join as us they scrape the bottom of the Fleming barrel, and somehow manage to make a movie called Octopussy.