Octopussy And The Living Daylights!

I write these Bond reviews with the expectation that everyone has seen all the movies, if not read the all the books. So, tread as carefully as it seems prudent. 

Octopussy and The Living Daylights close out the saga with a quartet of adventures. "Octopussy" is the story of a WWII British vet who has a golden and deadly secret from WWII and who is found out by Bond. The end is garish to say the least. "The Property of a Lady" is a neat little spy tale about Fabrege jewelry and double agents. 

"The Living Daylights" reveals that Bond's cold-blooded nature is challenged when the target is a beautiful woman, one he has fantasized about to boot. It's a delightful story set in what was to become Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. 

Finally, there's the offbeat very short story titled "007 in New York" which is exactly what it says as we get a small tour of the city as Bond has come to break up a love affair since one of the parties is a foreign agent. It originally appeared in Fleming's travelogue book Thrilling Cities. 

The 1983 Roger Moore offering Octopussy adapted elements of both "Octopussy" and "Property of a Lady". You'd think with Louis Jourdan as the top villain this Bond effort would be better. But it's not that good. Maud Adams returns as the titular Octopussy, after having revived after being killed in The Man with the Golden Gun. The states are pretty high as our baddie seeks to cover up stealing a bodacious amount of very famous jewels by agreeing to start World War III for a corrupt Soviet officer.

 

The elements are here, but somehow the silliness factor is high enough to squash any sense of danger. I thought the equipment being tested in the Q sequence was especially stupid and rather offensive this time out. But you cannot fault the film for failing to provide lots of lovely dames to gawk at, as Octopussy herself commands a bevy of ladies, many with unusual and dangerous skill sets. 

The Living Daylights featured Timothy Dalton in his debut as Bond from 1987. I'm a big fan of Dalton's Bond, though alas it seems the larger public was less enthusiastic. He only made one more Bond film in 1989 titled License Renewed. They took this opportunity to recast Moneypenny as well. All of this was necessary to maintain the illusion that Bond was indeed an effective agent. 

This is a wild plot with Bond refusing to shoot a sniper who turns out to be Maryam d' Abo, a pretty actress who I saw for the first in Conan the Destroyer. Her acting has improved somewhat and she's an adequate love interest for Bond. We get two main villains, a deceitful Soviet officer and a mercenary arms dealer. There's lots of mayhem in this one as it sprawls across the globe and even into Afghanistan which at the time was invaded by the Soviets and we were on the side of the Muslim Mujahadin. There are lots of things I like about The Living Daylights, but I cannot say it has aged especially well. But in an attempt to cleave closer to the headlines of the day, it has not aged as well as other Bond outings which exist in a more fantastical arena. 

And that wraps up my month-long look at Bond...James Bond. Not all the movies were reviewed because not all of them are derived from Fleming's original source material. Goldeneye for instance gets its name from Fleming's Jamaican estate, but that's it. A few more bits of silly spy business tomorrow then in October something completely different. 

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Moonraker!

I write these Bond reviews with the expectation that everyone has seen all the movies, if not read the all the books. So, tread as carefully as it seems prudent. 

The 1955 James Bond entry Moonraker pits Bond against a hidden colony of Nazis who have infiltrated British society and are plotting to blow up the heart of London in the name of their new world order. The finale of this one is a bit hard to fathom in places and Bond surviving is pretty far-fetched actually. It's got a dandy villain in Sir Hugo Drax, a baddie worthy of the serial movies of old.

Hearkening back to Casino Royale we are treated to a multi-chapter card game between Bond and Drax. It seems M has become aware that the mysterious industrialist Hugo Drax might be cheating at cards. And if a gentleman would do that, then what might that desperado do with the rocket he's built called Moonraker. Bond is called in to see if Drax is just lucky at cards and finds out he does cheat. Then we are treated to a contest between playing Bridge in which Bond sets Drax up for a major fall. Drax declares revenge. 

And then it's the next day. Bond is sent to Drax's factory when a security man is murdered in a strange fashion in a pub. The government fears something will happen to the Moonraker project. He finds that in this setting he can even admire Drax, the leader of men. His men consist of fifty Germans who all sport very short hair and prominent mustaches. There is an attack on the life of Bond and Gala Brand, a policewoman who has been inside the Drax operation for months. She discovers the real target of the test flight of Moonraker is London and that Drax and his German scientists are agents of a foreign power. It's up to Bond to save her and London when she is discovered as a spy by Drax. 

A few times when Bond is described in the novels, he is compared to Hoagy Carmichael, but with a somber streak of cruelty. This is not the Bond many of us see in our mind's eye after so many films. Timothy Dalton is probably the closest match in my estimation.  

The movie Moonraker changes the plot up quite a bit. Sir Hugo Drax this time is an uber-rich baddie who plots to winnow the planet Earth of misfits and those who don't fit his profile of ideal human being. (Where have heard this one before?) Drax shuttles for the United States and has been making a few extras to reach a space station he also has kept under wraps. Then he's going to drop a deadly toxin on the planet to kill only people but all of them save those he's preselected for rescue. (They are all pretty much runway models and the like.)

The movie is arguably the silliest Bond movie ever made. The franchise was taking on water and looked to the new trend in science fiction, which was sweeping the cinemas, to raise attendance. This is Roger Moore's fourth outing as Ian Fleming's spy, right in the middle of his run. And it has to be said that he like Connery before him is starting to show his years at over fifty. But with a deft director that can be glossed over. 

The single biggest demerit towards taking this movie even remotely seriously, even within the expansive confines of a Bond movie is the presence of Jaws, a returning villain from the last movie. The part played by Richard Kiel is just too broad a character for the Bond universe. He's nigh indestructible. We do get a particularly savage killing when Drax puts his dogs on an employee he suspects of being too friendly with Bond. And we get perhaps the biggest groaner Bond-Girl name of all time in "Holly Goodhead" played by Lois Chiles. (They will never top "Pussy Galore".)

The movie has an ending which might appeal to video game fans of the time, but is not all that tense. There are echoes of Thunderball in the climactic space battle. In the final analysis this is a silly, silly movie with a dumb plot. But it's still got a bangin' title. 

James Bond Returns in Diamonds are Forever. 

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Live And Let Die!

I write these Bond reviews with the expectation that everyone has seen all the movies, if not read the all the books. So, tread as carefully as it seems prudent. 

Live and Let Die published in 1954 takes Bond to New York to battle a Harlem-based crime kingpin named Mr. Big. This novel features Felix Leiter, Bond's "Man Friday" in many of the stories, who is Bond's guide in the peculiar black underworld of New York. Bond had met Leiter in Casino Royale. 

I was sensitive to blunt racism in this one, but Fleming brushes against it time and again, and ultimately loses his footing. He attributes quite a bit of smarts and acumen to the Negro (still the common term) criminals Bond battles, but nonetheless the very notion of a white man rescuing a lovely white woman from the clutches of a black mobster has a whiff the Klan would be most comfortable with. The attempts to capture the idiom of speech patterns of Harlem and the Black community elsewhere are often jarring on the ear. He puts this mush-mouth jargon only with black characters, not unlike the regrettable movies of some years earlier. 

The "Big Man" himself actually put me in mind of the Spider-Man villain the Kingpin. Change the details of skin color and the descriptions are identical. A great shark scene from this novel was not used in the movie but shifted to the later License to Kill. And the keel-haul sequence gets used in For Your Eyes Only. It's interesting to read the novels as we meet characters out of order often. Unlike its predecessor this book has Bond travel quite a bit, from London to NYC to Florida to Jamaica. In this novel in the Jamaica section, we encounter Strangways and Quarrel for the first time, as in the films of course we meet them in Dr. No. 

One idea that bubbles through these early Bond efforts. Bond dislikes women. Bond likes men. The books are not necessarily homoerotic (I don't discount utterly though), but the only people Bond has any real attachment to are his male allies Leiter and Quarrel. The women in the two books so far -- Vesper and Solitaire -- are objects to be won. When Vesper betrays him, it's the damage to his male ego that bothers him, not the loss of her eternal love. Solitaire is just a hottie he wants to bed. 

Live and Let Die is Roger Moore's first turn as the super-spy James Bond and to my mind his best. Moore still looks quite dashing and a glimmer of the glow of youth somehow still radiates from him as he walks the streets of NYC or dances across gators in the backwoods of Louisiana.  Yaphet Koto is wonderful as the uber-villain "Mr. Big" though the gray bulbous form from the novel is revealed to be a ruse. 

 

The lurid voodoo tropes are maintained, but this time they distract not from a criminal gang stealing pirate gold for the purposes of SMERSH, the Soviet spy network, but a corrupt Carribean politician who run runs a drug empire. "Solitaire" is played by the ravishing Jane Seymour in her breakout film role. Also, on hand is the outstanding Geoffrey Holder as "Baron Samedi", and he almost steals the move with his unforgettable laugh. Julius Harris as "Tee Hee" is a proper villain and gets an ending a proper villain deserves. This one was produced during the "Blaxploitation" era and pays homage to that movie genre with characters like Gloria Hendry as Bond-girl "Rosie Carver". And we get the debut of "Sgt. J.W. Pepper", played by Clifton James. This cracker cop will return in The Man with the Golden Gun. 

This one is a hoot. I always enjoy it bit more than I think I will because I always find some new details I'd missed which adds to the mix. It's too bad that it's a steady decline for Roger Moore after this one. 

James Bond Returns in From Russia with Love! 

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