Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London - Lauren Elkin

            I picked up Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin shortly after it was published last year, because I assumed that Elkin’s book was yet another in the subgenre I like to call “European Romance”—a subgenre that, for better or for worse, I find unwaveringly irresistible: the story of a young woman who moves to Paris (or, really, anywhere in France) to begin life anew. Despite the initial foibles that come from reorienting one’s existence in a foreign land, there her life is transformed by finding a new passion (whether it’s for cooking, walking, renovating a crumbling farmhouse, or, most often, for a man), and, aided by a cast of charming locals, she begins to live what Oprah would call her “best life,” but with the style and elegance of la vie européenne. At the end, she stays in France, often with her new lover and/or husband, and usually with a baby on the way. I’ve read more than twenty of these books, and while they’re all repetitive and formulaic, I’ll be damned if I don’t love them, and will read them entirely the instant they meet my hot little hands.

            But Elkin’s book is nothing of the sort. This is hardly the story of a woman floundering in America who decides to run off into the Parisian sunset. Elkin went to Europe with a sense of purpose: first, as an undergrad to study abroad, then as a graduate student to receive her MPhil in French literature from the Sorbonne, then as an adult to live. And while Elkin relays some stories of romantic interludes, the relationships she details are all disasters: men who take her away, and not toward, her “best life,” which, she believes, exists squarely in Paris. A relationship isn’t the solution to Elkin’s problems the way it is in so many of this genre; neither is a new patisserie, or a gorgeous pair of shoes, or an even more gorgeous, if condemned, farmhouse. The purpose of Flâneuse is more complicated than that.

            Elkin’s true love is cities, and, more specifically, walking through them. A native of New York from the Long Island suburbs, Elkin came into Manhattan to study at Barnard, and then went to Paris to study abroad, and then had stints in Tokyo, Venice, and London. In each city she walked—to explore, to get what she needed, and to get to and from work, but most of all she walked to get a feel for the city from the pedestrian’s perspective. What she desired most was to gain that slow specific view that comes only from being on the street, that takes in the height of the buildings and the whir of traffic, but also the small moments that are only visible from the ground—the graffiti hidden behind some stairs, the overlooked monument in the overgrown park, the mother and child holding hands as they sit on a bench, feeding the birds.

But Flâneuse has an explicitly political purpose as well, one that jibes nicely with our culture’s recent rediscovery of feminist critique. “Flâneuse” is the feminized version of the French word flâneur, which refers to “one who wanders aimlessly,” and which came about in the first half of the nineteenth century, when Paris’s medieval narrow streets and alleys were being demolished and redesigned by Georges-Eugène Haussmann with the express purpose of creating the vibrant, walkable, wide-boulevarded city that many of us know today. A flâneur was defined as a “figure of male privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention,” who plunges himself into the city’s street life with the implicit understanding of his dual freedoms: a man walking the street can either command respect, or he can wander anonymously, with few bothering him as he walks (3). A bourgeois male, with the implicit means and privileges of moneyed masculinity, a flâneur could come and go, transforming his ambles into art. A woman, Elkin notes, lacks this ability, by the sheer and natural force that she is a “she.”

A single woman wandering alone with no specific destination or purpose in mind—a flâneuse—is, and long has been, an object of speculation: she is immediately coded as either a prostitute or a beggar. Her body is gazed at wherever she goes; Elkin includes the startling photo of a young woman walking through Florence in 1951, leered at by no fewer than eight men. One blocks her path, another shouts at her with a contorted face, his hands unmistakably grabbing his crotch. It is an experience most urban women know well: street harassment, the practice of being a woman in public, means that you are inevitably made subject to the male gaze, and subject to the probing, hyper-sexualized attacks that men feel comfortable enough to bestow upon any passing woman they deem attractive enough to warrant their attentions.

But Elkin also turns this idea around. “Space is not neutral,” she writes. “Space is a feminist issue” (286). Simply being in public—or, more appropriately, simply being—is a feminist act, because it allows for the opportunity to gaze back, to reclaim space and reclaim structure and (finally) claim the ontological nature of existing on a level equal to a man’s. And so she makes the purpose of her book to detail both the cities she has walked in, as well as the women who walked there before her.

The book primarily is set in Paris, the city that Elkin loves the most. In the four chapters set in France, Elkin writes about other female artists who made the city their home, many of them transplants like herself, and all of them artists as well. Jean Rhys, the writer first known as Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, was born in the West Indies to a Welsh father and a Scottish-Creole mother, but came to Paris in 1919, at the age of 29, where she wrote stories of tragic women involved with equally tragic men. George Sand, born Amantine Lucile Arurore Dupin, came to Paris in 1831, leaving behind her husband and two children in Northern France to live a life of culture, novel-writing, and a remarkable number of high-profile affairs. Agnès Varda, the Belgian director, screenwriter and actress, came to Paris for university and never left, and her work in the French New Wave, especially with features like Cléo de 5 à 7, gave a pointedly feminist perspective to an otherwise heavily masculine movement in film.

All of these women were, like Elkin herself, given to wandering around Paris, exploring the city entirely by foot, and finding new things about themselves as they discovered new things about the French capital. Within each chapter, Elkin sprinkles in anecdotes about herself—the failed relationships with a couple of men, how strange her suburban family finds her desire to live abroad. In this sense, the book is part memoir, part cultural history, all of it centered around the idea of urban involvement and emancipation, and the benefits of the lifestyle of flâneuserie, with its emphasis on freedom, speculation, and creation.

There is one city where her desire to walk is heavily curtailed, however: Tokyo, one of the most densely-populated human capitals in the world. Elkin follows a relationship to Tokyo, living abroad from the life she had already made abroad, and finds herself miserable there. Tokyo is too big to cover on foot, and the city is strangulated by major highways, too unfriendly and dangerous for pedestrians to traverse by foot. She wanders through her long-term business hotel, wanders through shopping malls, wanders through her Japanese classes, too angry and disappointed both in her failing relationship and Tokyo’s inaccessibility to connect with the lifestyle there at all. She felt “marooned in Tokyo,” traveling back to Paris without her boyfriend, traveling back to New York to visit family, who now thought her exploits were even more strange (152). She eats at a French restaurant but hates the food, tries to find an English bookshop but can’t locate the store, feels compelled to quarantine herself inside. For a woman who prided herself on her urbane lifestyle, Tokyo was a city too much. She leaves both the city and the relationship, and returns to Paris far happier and more free.

There are other interludes—a section about London and Virginia Woolf, a chapter on Venice and Sophie Calle—but these are distractions from Elkin’s larger mission, which is to detail and celebrate the flâneuse’s long-held, if long-unacknowledged, relationship with Paris, the city that created flânerie, and work to expand it to include the rest of the world. As with much of feminist literature, there is the need to write women back into this history, to replace them where they’ve consistently been written out. And Elkin does this, in her literary way. She writes of women who have traveled the globe—Martha Gellhorn; my beloved Joan Didion—but who continue to thirst for to know more, to see more. “I’ll never see enough as long as I live,” Gellhorn wrote to her then-husband Ernest Hemingway in 1943, the year before he sent her a deeply asshole-ish telegram at the Italian front, begging her to return home (“Are you a war correspondent or wife in my bed?”) (266, 250).

For Elkin, these are woman to be celebrated, not scolded, and the remonstrations from their husbands seem silly and jealous to a fault. But, from her own stories, as well as from the biographies of the women she details, it’s clear that there has long been, and long will be, hesitancy and anger directed toward women taking their public place in the world. It is a brave act to put oneself out there into the world and walk, unarmed and alone, through its streets, and Elkin wants to expand the female sex’s mission to take up space, to find a woman’s place in the world, and to allow her the ability to walk within it, through it, and, one day, beyond it.

But this may require as much a change of mindset for the flâneuse as it does for the rest of the world. Elkin closes with a surprising story: the woman in the 1951 photograph in Florence was named Ninalee Craig, but she went by the nickname “Jinx Allen.” She was single and traveling through Europe alone, exploring and meeting friends along the way—the epitome of the flâneuse. And in 2011, when she was interviewed on NBC’s Today Show for the sixtieth anniversary of her famous photograph, Craig said that the image was being vastly misunderstood. As much as modern audiences want to code the picture with patriarchy, chauvinism, and rampant misogyny, “it’s not a symbol of harassment,” Craig said. “It’s the symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!”

One final thought: I really hate the picture on the book’s cover. It’s the image of a typical flâneur with his top hat, coat, and cane. But laid over this sketch is a fucking ridiculous pink flowy skirt, transforming a bearded flâneur into a poorly cross-dressed flâneuse. For a book as philosophical and intellectual as Elkin’s, this image feels shitty and cheap, a real underselling of the message inside. A clear illustration of how we should literally never judge a book by its cover but, if possible, read Flâneuse with the dust jacket removed. 
- Emily Dufton

The Paris Architect - Charles Belfoure (2013)

I recently changed jobs.  My former boss's wife worked in the office with us and served as our personnel manager (on top of another franchise store she managed).  Near the end of my two-week notice period, she came to speak to me on random matters, likely in an attempt to ascertain why I felt leaving their firm for this new one was a good idea.  Of course, everything was extremely polite and friendly, and near the end, she mentioned that she was reading this book.  She made a number of comments on it, and expressed that it was based on a true story.  I felt that, given her enthusiasm, I should check it out and review it as an homage to them.  So first, let me say, my time spent at my previous firm was quite painful and uncomfortable, but in retrospect was not all that terrible.  I had to sink or swim on my own with little oversight.  Sometimes, oversight opens up criticisms.  I didn't need to contend with criticisms from my boss.  Criticisms were primarily made by opposing counsel, judges and clients, and few were leveled at my own performance.  Given the dozens of cases I handled in a little over 18 months, I only had regrets about the way I handled one or two.  This is not the place to write about my legal career, but as I consider this an homage, I felt a word was in order.

The Paris Architect is a work of historical fiction.  It is about an architect, Lucien Bernard, who is commissioned by a rich businessman, Auguste Manet, to design hidden rooms in which to hide Jewish people in the Vichy-era of 1940's Paris.  It is not based on a true story, but Belfoure admits that its basis in fact is transposed from an earlier historical era, when architects designed hidden rooms for priests that refused to join the Church of England [note I am completely wrong about this and it was in fact the reign of Elizabeth I and not Henry VIII and I am confusing Thomas More with more contemporary counterparts].  Overall, my feeling on the novel is that it tells a pretty good story, but is so far from a perfect novel that I can only half-heartedly recommend it.  There are a few scenes in it that are excellent, but a few great scenes do not make a perfect novel.

For example, Belfoure is at his best when he is describing the "dark embrace before death":

"Geiber slid under the stairway, letting it fall back into place with a heavy thud.  Sliding next to Miriam, he fastened two bolts that locked the stairs in place.  He was breathing so heavily he thought he would pass out.  His back was against Miriam's chest, and he could feel her heart pounding.  He moved the bag up by his chest, laid it on its side, and unlatched it.  Miriam placed her arm over her husband's body and tightly grasped his hand.  She hid her face against the back of his head.  For just a fraction of a second, it made him forget about the approaching danger.
Such a warm, comforting feeling, thought Geiber, like they were back in their big bed at home snuggling under the goose down duvet.  It was mostly airless and pitch black in the cramped space under the stairs, but the mattress they were lying on was quite comfortable, and because the stairs were almost two meters wide, the Geibers could fully stretch out their legs.  The underside of the steps was just centimeters from Geiber's face, so he could smell the wood.  They could do nothing now but wait, seconds passing like hours." (108)

He is at his worst with some of the dialogue and character development.  While I think Lucien's "arc" is one of the best things about the novel, almost every single other character is somewhat one-dimensional (however,  I did believe Herzog was interesting, as I was kept guessing whether or not he was really a "stereotypical good Nazi" character).  Lucien's wife, Celeste, shows signs of being one of the more interesting characters.  However, (I am not giving anything away by spoiling this) Lucien cheats on her, shamelessly, and then the reader discovers that she is also having an affair, and then she leaves him, and that's pretty much that.  Lucien does meet someone new, and the story has one of the happiest endings I have ever read.  It's a nice ending and perhaps my suspicious attitude towards that says something about the books I read.

Recently I heard my youngest sister mention that she had been reading The Zookeeper's Wife and then I randomly saw a preview on TV for the movie, and it appeared to have very similar subject matter to this book.  Seizing on this coincidence, I have asked my sister to review that book, and have given her about a month for a deadline, and we will see if it comes off or not.  But then there is even a zookeeper subplot in this book, briefly:

"He was a zookeeper and told his cousin that Professor Trenet could hide for a while in one of the unused cages in the section of animal houses that were completely shut up.  Despite the food shortages, the zoo was kept up during the Occupation, mainly for the benefit of the German soldiers.  The animals ate better than most Parisians.  Now Juliette was living in a concrete den behind the empty lions' cage at the zoo.  It was the enclosed space where the lions slept and ate when they weren't walking around in the cage in front of the public.  Even lions wants their privacy occasionally, thought Juliette.  Out of her savings, Juliette gave Dauphin five thousand francs, even though the man hadn't asked for payment.  If Juliette was found, the zookeeper would be arrested too, so she had insisted." (183)

Now at a brief glance that book does appear to be more based on a true story than this one, and that one came out in 2008.  Perhaps Belfoure merely intended the scene as a brief, knowing reference, or perhaps it is entirely coincidental, but I had to note it.

In any case, I do not know what else to say about this book.  One of the excellent scenes to which I referred earlier involves a hiding place behind a fireplace.  Anybody who has read this novel will immediately know what I am talking about and remember it as quite horrifying.  This sequence is expertly crafted, and to speak more generally about this story (and this has been a very general review and certainly not one of my finest, but the book is due back in about an hour and these past few weeks have been strange, and difficult to find time to write), it's not a bad story.  There are just a lot of cliches within it.  The pacing is pretty fast, and sometimes certain characters or situations get short shrift, but generally, it's a story about getting into bed with the enemy, while outsmarting them and trying to achieve a greater good.  I can't remember all of the books I have read about the Holocaust (obviously Night comes to mind, and a book called Briar Rose that I had to read in high school) but they are always difficult reads.  Night is obviously a classic, and I seem to remember finding more to appreciate about Briar Rose.  Nevertheless, Belfoure creates a few moments of real menace, and the reader should ultimately be satisfied after being first turned off by Lucien, then rooting for him later.  Even though I am glad there is a happy ending, I do not think it is very realistic.  This also reminded me of Inglorious Basterds--in particular, the opening scene. and some of the scenes in Paris.  I would recommend this book to architects that design secret rooms, and people that sometimes feel guilty about their benefactors.  I did not feel it was a complete waste of my time, but it begs the question whether writers should attempt to write about the Holocaust from a speculative position.  There are few survivors left, and those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and all that with the President we have elected and the alt-right (thankfully the sieg-heiling seems to have died down), but this is not the book to cite as a document relevant to our current socio-political atmosphere.  It's a good old fashioned suspense story, and if you don't expect too much out of it, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised.

 

The Marbled Swarm - Dennis Cooper (2011)

It's not often that I read other reviews of a book before I attempt to write my own.  I used to think that was "cheating" when I wrote film reviews for Washington Square News Weekend at NYU.  It was "cheating" because it was almost like I was afraid to say how I felt about something--or more specifically, afraid that I would praise a film that would be dismissed as a cinematic disaster, or pan a film that would show up on every critic's year-end top 10 list.

We are reaching an important point on Flying Houses.  Recently I applied for a Press Pass for the Pitchfork Festival.  If I get one, it will be the most audacious experience in our history, as I will try to bring in a cameraman and film interviews with the likes of St. Vincent and Beck.  But I won't find out until June and dreams tend not to come true.  Moreover, April 1st will mark our sixth birthday here, and I will post as I have the past couple of years an "MD&A."  After more than 270 posts, one would think I would have the courage to state how I felt about a book without consulting other reviews.  But The Marbled Swarm is one of the more troubling books I have read.  I both liked it, and didn't like it.  It's probably easiest for me to list all of the other books by Dennis Cooper that I have reviewed here and state that I liked it less than all of them.

That's my knee-jerk reaction before even checking all of the others.  But between Closer, Ugly Man,  and Try, I certainly rank it below Closer and Try, and probably beneath Ugly Man too, though maybe I would say it's on par with that.  More importantly from the Ugly Man review, I list and rank all of his books that I've read (six others, three or four of which I would re-read), and from this list I would not put it any higher than #7.

It will be fun to try to explain what this book is about.  First, to continue with the comparison theme, I will say it is most similar to Period in that it is extremely experimental.  I would also say it is better than Period, but maybe I wouldn't stand by that statement if I re-read that book.  But the plot:

The narrator (who is nameless, I am pretty sure) is rich--apparently he is a 22-year-old billionaire (though it doesn't really seem like he is that rich) whose parents were famous French actors.  Well, at least his father, Pierre Clementi, was (I'd need to re-read to check on his mother).  He wants to buy a chateau.  He meets the owners--the father, the mother, and their 14-year-old son Serge--and decides he wants to buy it.  They had another son--16-year-old Claude--who died (Maybe, I think?  For some reason I'm not concerned about spoilers in this review).  Basically, Serge is "interested" in the narrator, and the father seems to think he is a nuisance so he says he will "include him" in the price of the house.  The narrator puts Serge in the trunk of his car and is driven back to Paris (he has a driver, Azmir, of course).  Serge is then raped, murdered, and eaten (Maybe?).  The narrator then starts reminiscing about his younger brother, Alfonse, who was very into Manga and was also eventually raped, murdered, and eaten.  By the narrator and a couple cohorts.  One of those cohorts has a son named Didier who is eventually groomed to look exactly like Alfonse.  Finally, there is the issue of the narrator's father, who apparently dies at some point after Alfonse (though this is confusing, too), and has another property in his will that nobody really knows about in a remote part of France.  There is another story about this house and the people that stayed in it/the reasons why his father built it, that seems to coalesce with the chateau from the beginning of the novel as well as the lofts in which the narrator, Alfonse, and their father reside at in Paris.  Then, the novel ends, and the ending I have to admit is one of the more beautiful endings that Cooper has written.

Why is the ending beautiful?  Because, as may be clear from my plot summary, this book is fucking bonkers and basically impossible to "get."  The most obvious "themes" are younger/older brothers (and this is not the first time Cooper has touched incest--see My Loose Thread), rape/murder/cannibalism (the first two are in nearly every single one of his novels; the last is something new, but seems more "out there" for some reason, and just there to shock), and most conspicuously, secret passageways.  But the ending ties things together as best as it possibly could.

This book is not totally inscrutable.  Cooper does pull back the curtain a couple of times and acknowledges that  he knows that he is not presenting anything close to a linear narrative.  Even so, it is very hard to tell what happened, and I'm not really sure what the whole point of it is:

"The play was set in a chateau whose history of on-site murders, ghosts, and other unexplained phenomena required a lengthy spoken foreword, which Claude's father had recited through the speakers for what would have felt like months were not the bloodthirsty details of this story so custom-made for mordant teenagers.
To cite the most agentive of these details, the couple's older son had either killed himself, been murdered, died by tragic accident, or faked his death within the previous few months.
The anguished man and wife had put the crime scene on the market, and the young Parisian, struck by certain parallels between their son's obituary in Le Monde and the clueless death of his own brother years before, found himself inspired to visit the chateau and then acquire it." (171)

I think I've made most of the points I wanted to make about this book, but it is worth noting that in my search for reviews, I came across an interview that Cooper did for The Paris Review in 2011.  You may find it here.  I highly recommend it, as I do most interviews in The Paris Review, which is probably the most important literary journal apart from The New Yorker (though I find The New Yorker to be pretentious most of the time, and really consider an interview in The Paris Review one of the highest honors a writer can receive).  In it, Cooper had this to say about this novel:

"With The Marbled Swarm, I was trying to write a novel the way a sound technician mixes a song or piece of music into its final form. I’ve been studying recorded music and trying to transpose its principles into my fiction ­going all the way back to my first novel,Closer, where one thing I did was try to simulate the sonic effect of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy album with my prose. In The Marbled Swarm I found a voice that let me do that. I thought about each element of the novel, whether it was a narrative thread or character or reference point or an ongoing motif or tone or rhythm. The idea was that they would all always be there, but they would be emphasized or de-emphasized at different points, mixed into the foreground, middle ground, or background, being moved around constantly so the reader’s attention would be directed all over the place. My idea was that it would give the writing a three-dimensional quality, as the reader is carried along by the musical surface of the novel, but he or she would also be chasing different story lines and recurring ideas as they waver and scamper about and hide inside the prose."

This novel certainly creates that sort of feeling.  Cooper also says in the interview that he wants to write one more novel, and then be done with them, so that he can finish with an even ten.  That makes me sad, but he has been pretty prolific over the past 25 years, and the world of literature is richer for the contributions he has made.  I'm sure some people would take issue with that statement, but one of the factors that makes his work more interesting than 90% of his contemporaries is its divisiveness.  While this is not my favorite book by him by a good stretch, it was still a worthwhile read, and the ending was very nice:

"I've failed the marbled swarm as I semi-understand its rules and premise, and, although you'll never know the difference, barring errors that weren't meant as an insidious direction, there is nowhere deeper or more intricately stifled by my story than this hotel room, and I'm out of means to keep you waiting for the secret that involved my sleight of hand unless you think a very frightened thirteen-year-old boy who looks vaguely like Pierre Clementi seems magical or promising enough." (194)

I also loved the references to Isabelle Adjani.

Moonraker - Dir. Lewis Gilbert (The Bond Project #11)

Moonraker (1979)

Dir: Lewis Gilbert

OUTER SPACE BELONGS TO BOND!

By Jay Maronde

                

               Sometime after the release of The Spy Who Loved Me, Bond producer Albert Broccoli said to himself, “This Star Wars movie is crazy popular, I should do a Bond in space flick.” Luckily for him Ian Fleming had already written a Bond in space book called Moonraker, which, while bearing almost zero resemblance to what would become the finished film, was originally written to be produced into a movie. Director Lewis Gilbert was contacted, set designer Ken Adams was brought on board, and even though he had originally only signed on for three films, the most recent Bond, Sir Roger Moore was re-signed, and work began on Moonraker. Round about this same time the British Government levied a huge new tax on film productions, so production was quickly relocated to Paris, under the condition that the production team could literally occupy every single soundstage and production facility in the whole city. This greatly irritated numerous French filmmakers, but in the end, money talks. The result of all this is yet another fantastic globe-trotting (and orbiting) James Bond adventure which quite a few of my cohorts claim to be their favorite Bond.

                The plot of this movie is quite simple, even though most of the first half of the film is spent on Bond investigating what is going on. Drax is an evil villain of tremendous character played superbly by the perfectly-cast Michael Lonsdale. Lonsdale exudes a very particular Hitler-like evil: he is almost always seen entertaining not one, but two, extremely lovely and much younger women, he keeps Dobermans almost exclusively to “release” them and torture/murder his perceived enemies, and most revolting of all, he is planning to exterminate the human race and re-populate the earth from his space station with his uber-society of “perfect” people.  Drax is also super mega rich, (as all good villains should be) lives in a French château which has been imported to southern California, and has facilities all over the world (which leads Bond to a few delightfully beautiful filming locations).

Drax is literally crazy evil. He’s not ransoming anyone; he’s just bent on “wiping the slate clean.” Drax also has two extremely notable henchmen: Jaws (with Richard Kiel reprising his role as the near-immortal, monstrously-sized, metal-mouthed assassin) and the-always-kimono-wearing Chang. Chang is notable because during his Kung Fu fight with Bond in Venice, the two literally destroy an entire glass museum.  This scene, which Gilbert had originally planned for TSWLM, turns out to be record breaking (pun intended); as to this day, it is the single most amount of breakaway glass used in any movie ever.

                The character of Jaws is far more notable in this film. The previous film had featured Jaws extensively and the audience had loved him so much that the producers decided to bring him back. In fact, the director received so much fan mail from small children asking him why Jaws had to play a “baddie” instead of a “goodie” that he was eventually inspired to re-work the end of the film so that Bond and Jaws become allies to save the world. Further, Bond’s line towards the end of the film as Jaws is falling back to earth in a shard of the crippled space station of, “Don’t worry, Jaws will be alright, it’s only 100 or so miles back to the earth,” was directly intended to imply Jaws’ survival, and while he doesn’t re-appear in any Bond films, he does make several appearances in the James Bond video games over the years including a prominent role in 007: Everything or Nothing,  which happens to be one of my favorite Bond games.

                Roger Moore finally deserves more than a cursory glance from me in this review as he really seems to have grown into the character of Bond. His suave is unmatched, he’s not going for the rough-and-tumble Bond, but more of a smooth-sophisto-Bond. He only fires one bullet in the entire movie, and he looks, well, a lot less old. It’s apparent that he had some work done in-between this film and last, as his face looks so tight you could bounce a quarter on it.

Next to Bond are cast three very beautiful Bond Girls. First while touring Drax’s compound, Bond is escorted by the lovely Corrine Dufour. The French production location caused the management to choose a French actress/model, the radiant Corrine Clery. Corrine has the distinction of being the only Bond girl ever to have the same name as the actress playing the role. Speaking of names I’m always extremely pleased when the Bond girls’ names are rife with double entendre and this movie might take the all-time cake with Dr. Holly Goodhead. Goodhead is an undercover CIA agent who teams up with Bond to stop Drax. She is played magically by the renowned actress Lois Chiles, who was originally offered the role of Agent XXX in TSWLM but refused, having declared a retirement. Luckily, her retirement was short-lived and by her good luck she happened to be seated next to director Lewis Gilbert on a plane, and he decided that she was perfect for an undercover CIA agent. Also worth a brief mention is Bond’s south American contact, the very beautiful Manuela, played by the gorgeous Emily Bolton, who, while only appearing briefly, is too ravishing to not acknowledge.

                Again however the real stars of this film are Ken Adams’ incredible sets. As I’ve mentioned before most of this film was shot in France or on various other locations to avoid new British taxes. France is not necessarily known for its filmmaking industry so to this day the Moonraker sets are still the largest sets ever built in France. Initially there were tremendous problems with the French set builders union, as the foreman informed Adams and Gilbert that the French do not work overtime in the production of films. After extensive negotiations, the production team managed to convince the workers of the magnitude and importance of the task and hand and the workers relented (for more money of course) and agreed to work on the weekends, under the condition that they were allowed to bring their families to work so as not to miss their weekend family time. In the end the final space station set required more than 200,000 man hours, two tons of nails, over 10,000 feet of steel construction work, and a staff of more than 220 builders.

Attention should also be paid to the special effects coordinator, Derek Meddings, who was nominated for an Academy award for his work on this film. Much like the sets, the effects in this film are otherworldly. To this day the film Moonraker holds the record for most actors in weightlessness (on wires) ever, used during the massive outer space battle at the end of the film. The effects weren’t just limited to outer space, the beginning of the film features an extremely famous scene where Bond is pushed from an airplane with no parachute, he free falls, and then manages to wrangle a chute off the back of a henchman. This particular shot took over 80 skydives to complete as they could only film for a few seconds and the way down, and in fact the actor from whom Bond removes the parachute from was cast to look like the stunt man who had to perform the aerial work. Also of note is that the stunt man was almost killed when he lost his footing on top of the real cable car in Rio while the cameras were rolling.

                Lewis Gilbert delivers a classic in his final Bond entry, and his work is only enhanced by a wonderful cast of actors and an amazing production staff. Moonraker, while suffering from some initial critical complaints about being too “outlandish,” would go on to make more than $210 million dollars, which made it the most profitable Bond until 1995’s Goldeneye.