Octopussy - Dir. John Glen (The Bond Project # 13)

Octopussy (1983)

Dir: John Glen

Bond Goes to India

By Jay Maronde

                 Director John Glen struck cinematic gold for the Bond Franchise in his second Bond film and it couldn’t have come at a more critical time. The movie easily has the best title of any film in the series as it’s the most blatantly sexualized Bond title that I think the censors could ever even tolerate. This could easily be one of my favorite Bond movies as right from the very beginning it’s action packed, full of great gadgets, and completely full of awesome plot twists.

                Let me start right with the pre-credits sequence as I personally feel that it could be one of the most entertaining of the entire series. Bond is in Cuba, posing as a Cuban General, and trying to blow up some sort of fighter jet. He gets captured, which is about typical for the old-ass Roger Moore Bond, but it doesn’t matter. As Bond is being transported as a prisoner, a lady-friend driving a super cool topless Range Rover towing a horse in a trailer distracts the guards. Bond escapes and takes care of his captors, but alas, mission failed….OR NOT. As more Cuban military personnel pursue him, Bond kisses the girl goodbye, and then hops into the horse trailer disconnecting it from the truck. The viewer is like geez, how confused has Roger Moore become in his old age? This isn’t a western—a horse isn’t going to help this situation. But Q branch and Bond have a plan. As Bond enters the trailer, the horse’s rear end is revealed to be a dummy meant only to conceal the real cargo: a mini jet. In true and perfect James Bond fashion, Bond lowers the retractable wings and accelerates directly towards the enemies. At the very last second he lifts off, scattering the hapless Cubans. Bond then continues to kick ass in the way only James Bond can, and flies back over the base he was supposed to destroy, and in a fantastic piece of cinematography, directly through the hangar that was the original target. Then, trailing the surface to the air missile, he destroys the hangar and all the planes and Cubans inside! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! Then just to remain extra suave, Bond lands at a gas station and says, “Fill her up.”

                The movie then cuts away to the title sequence, again, as always, designed by Maurice Binder. The titles are some of the most interesting Bond titles yet, accompanied by the song “All Time High” by the classic Rita Coolidge. The song, while not one of my favorites, did spend almost a month in the number one spot on the adult contemporary charts, and looking back at this film it’s easy to realize why James Bond is at a new “all-time high.” Speaking of all time high, Roger Moore is at his all-time oldest. Granted he would be older in the next film A View to A Kill, but he’s definitely looking his age again in this film. In reality, Moore had wanted to stop playing Bond after For Your Eyes Only (that movie was so bad it would have made me want to quit the role too), and the producers conducted a very public search for a new Bond (there is a special feature on the Octopussy Ultimate Edition DVD  titled James Brolin: The Man Who would Be Bond, and features 3 of his screen tests). I would also like to comment right now that despite his agedness, Roger Moore puts in an excellent performance as Bond in this film, which was lucky, because 1983 also saw the release of Kevin McClory’s rival James Bond tale, Never Say Never Again, which was of major concern to the producers as McClory had secured the original James Bond, Sean Connery. This opposing casting in a very similar movie (actually a remake of Thunderball) is the reason the producers eventually decided to stay with Roger Moore as Bond as they felt it would be a big leap for an audience to also have to deal with a new actor playing Bond when Connery was busy in the next screen at the multiplex also playing an aged Bond.

                After the titles the story picks back up with a clown-suited 009 fleeing from some knife-throwing henchmen. He escapes and spends the last moments of his life delivering a spurious Faberge egg to the British Ambassador. It turns out that the non-counterfeit egg, which this fake is designed to replace, is actually on sale at Sotheby’s in London the very next day. Bond and nerdy type fellow attend the auction in an attempt to glean what the now departed 009 was willing to die for. Here we meet Kamel Kahn, the real evil villain of this film. Kahn is a fantastic villain, played exceptionally well by the actor Louis Jourdan—an exiled Afghan prince with a castle in India and a business association with the film’s title character, the world wide smuggler Octopussy. Apparently there is a Russian general, bent on U.S.S.R. domination of the world, who has been stealing and auctioning rare Russian treasures, and replacing them with fakes. Since this fake has been “misplaced,” the general must now retrieve the original at auction to avoid being caught by an ill-timed inventory. Bond seems to smell Kahn’s need to have the egg and proceeds to bid (with the Queen’s Money) on the egg and drive the cost to a half of a million pounds. In another moment of sheer Bond brilliance, Bond swaps the real egg for the fake right in the middle of the crowded auction, thereby allowing himself an out later when M angrily asks him what he would have done if he had won the auction. All of this is sheer writing and directorial genius as the viewer doesn’t even realize the swap has gone down until the later meeting with M and I had to go back to watch for Moore’s very quick hands.

                Following this new lead, Bond travels to India in pursuit of Kahn and the egg. The Bond producers had long wanted to film in India with its extreme scenic beauty, but it took until this film to find a province whose ruler would grant them permission. It’s well worth the wait as all of the scenes are filled with so much natural beauty and cultural history that the location is definitely one of the biggest stars of this film. There’s a wonderful homage to the film Goldfinger where Bond goes to the casino and beats the cheating Kahn using his own loaded dice. Here in India we also meet Bond’s Station I connection, Vijay, played sublimely by India’s first international tennis star Vijay Amritraj. Amritraj is a great actor, and there are numerous running jokes in the film about him being a tennis player, including a scene where he fights off henchman using a tennis racket. It turns out that the actor’s union had a huge problem with this “tennis star”  being a film actor, so Broccoli pulled some strings and got him a cameo on the television series The Love Boat so that he could earn his SAG card and alleviate the problems.

Bond has some troubles—being captured and escaping from Kahn—before finally meeting Octopussy, who, as it turns out, knows quite well of James Bond and is very excited to have him as her guest on her Floating Paradise full of only women. This is the perfect setting for the super suave Roger Moore and his senility actually works to the film’s advantage here as his age makes the beautiful Maud Adams look even more radiantly young and beautiful. Octopussy tells Bond that she is traveling to Germany for a business meeting with her circus, and so he follows.
                While in Germany, Bond realizes that this whole scheme has very little to do with stolen jewels, and everything to do with this crazy conquest-bound Russian general attempting to start WW3 (also in Germany, if the viewer looks very close they might catch a glimmer of a 16-year-old extra playing a soldier at Checkpoint Charlie, who would go on to make notoriously thorough award-winning documentaries: Ken Burns). Soon after there is a great chase scene where Bond must catch up with Octopussy’s circus train and stop the bomb from detonating in the middle of a US air base. Of course he’s successful, but in the process he defuses a bomb right in front of a circus audience and becomes the hero of the day. If it wasn’t enough that Bond saved the world from nuclear annihilation, he then travels back to India with Octopussy and her team and storms Kahn’s palace.  Desmond Llewelyn gets probably his largest amount of screen time from any film in the entire franchise when he appears with Bond in a union jack painted hot air balloon over the palace to provide air support and back up to Bond. Personally, I think these are fantastic scenes as the battle that is raging is wonderful and for Q to sail in to the rescue makes this already awesome movie even better. The scenes with the army of ninja girls are also Bond classics, and after Octopussy is captured, Bond chases the villains to their airplane where he jumps from a horse to the back of the plane at the very last second. Then, again in true super hero fashion, he grounds the plane from the outside by disabling a motor and then forcing the flaps down with his feet. He climbs into the plane, frees Octopussy, and the two dive to safety seconds before the plane plunges off a cliff. Bond is then shown “recovering” with Octopussy as the movie closes.

                This film has everything that we have come to expect in a Bond film. There is fantastically beautiful scenery, a big globetrotting plot that takes Bond all sorts of places and requires him to literally save the entire world, truly bent and evil villains, cadres of beautiful women, and enough action-packed scenes to keep everyone cheering. Also this film is the only one to be named after a Bond girl—and who could deny that Octopussy is truly deserving of that honor?

 

 

The Man with the Golden Gun - Dir. Guy Hamilton (The Bond Project #9)

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Dir: Guy Hamilton

What Happened?

By Jay Maronde

                Let me start this review by admitting this: film critics love to be critical of movies. I personally try to write about the good parts, and I also happen to really like James Bond (which I why I signed up for this task). But every once in a while you need to get a little crazy and go on and on about how wrong things really are. This being said, I do mean to keep it relatively short, because to be honest, you know a movie is pretty effin bad when the midget is the best part about it.

                Let’s start right there. The midget is the best part about this film.  Herve Villechaize is usually pretty awesome in whatever he appears in, but here, Guy Hamilton cast him perfectly as “the midget Oddjob”, referring to Harold Sakata’s role in Hamilton’s earliest Bond Film, the 1964 Blockbuster Goldfinger. “Nick Nack,” as he’s credited, has some of the most memorable roles in the film* and is the first Bond henchman to be captured. Another great casting in this film is Sir Christopher Lee as Francisco Scaramanga, the super villain million-dollar-a-hit assassin who is Bond’s arch-nemesis in the film. Scaramanga is almost always referred to as one of the best-acted Bond Villains and indeed Lee was asked to reprise the role and do the voicing for Scaramanga in the James Bond video game Rouge Agent. The rest of this film seems to spoil itself.

                Britt Ekland stars as James Bond’s personal assistant Mary Goodnight, and is possibly the dopiest secret agent ever. Ekland had wanted to be a Bond girl since she saw Dr. No, and personally I think that the producers should have cast her about a decade earlier, and then maybe she wouldn’t look so past her prime. Roger Moore is obviously also past his prime, but there’s a lot of stuntman fights to attempt to convince the public otherwise. Worse yet, the production team added parts where Bond throws a child off a boat and threatens to break Maud Adams’s arm in a very weird attempt to make Roger Moore seem like a more “rough-and-tumble” Bond. Moore claims to have hated filming these parts of the movie because he didn’t like what those actions implied upon the character of Bond and would have preferred to charm the woman instead. Maud Adams is more than delightful in this film but drastically under-cast; so under-cast, in fact, that she stars in the later James Bond film Octopussy as Octopussy herself. The only other women in the film are two hideous kung-fu-fighting sisters who save the elderly Bond during a Kung Fu Fighting scene (added in a poor attempt to capitalize on the Kung Fu movie craze at the time) and another actress playing a belly dancer who I also believe was “cast elderly” in an attempt to make Moore look younger.

                The stunt sequences were another good thing that was ruined by supposedly “genius” ideas. This film features the famous car barrel roll jump, preformed in one take only by the famous stunt man “Bumps” Willard. The stunt was also the first film stunt ever to be calculated by computer, as it had been designed at Cornell University years before as a calculation problem for a vehicle physics simulator. The stunt had been being performed for years as part of the American Motors Corporation traveling Thrill Show, but the producers went on to copyright and patent the trick so that it could never appear in another film. Now, this seems like it would be awesome right?  A James Bond car chase with a Barrel Roll, right? Well, you’d be wrong—because the music department decided to add a ridiculous whistle sound during the barrel roll, and the production team put Sheriff J.W. Pepper (who was actually an extremely popular part of Live and Let Die) in the passenger seat with James Bond for comic relief.  Even the title song is goofy as shit, a real toe-tapper, but has been described as “one long stream of smut.” The producers had originally spoken with Alice Cooper about a rock song to have the same title, and in fact his version appears on his “Muscle of Love” album, but the producers chose to use the slightly more “upbeat” version featured here and performed by LuLu.

                The real problem with this movie is the plot. James Bond is removed from duty and asked to resign because a super villain wants to kill him. Why should James Bond worry about a super villain, even if he is the world’s most expensive hitman? Bond deals with villains all the time, that’s his job—he’s James Bond. And this super villain—why, if you are the world’s best paid super villain, with your own private island, and the answer to the worlds energy crisis (this is actually the last Bond Film until Quantum Of Solace to deal with an environmental plot), and a midget to attend to your every need, why would you pay other hit men to attempt to assassinate you?

                The Production of The Man with the Golden Gun was rushed to the market to capitalize on numerous factors present in the era when it was produced: the energy crisis, the rising popularity of Kung Fu, and the popularity of the other films in the franchise. As a result, the film seems like a mish-mash of garbage strung together without much forethought. This resulted in poor ticket sales and almost a three year production delay until the next James Bond film, along with director Guy Hamilton’s dismissal from the franchise. Furthermore, the resulting financial crisis caused longtime producer Harry Saltzman to be forced to sell his half of the James Bond Franchise to United Artists pictures.

*It is unclear to me whether “Nick Nack” plays many roles or one, and so I have left the original language unedited.  - JK