Octopussy 1983

Keeping to the one from every two years cycle Roger Moore’s sixth outing as James Bond was Octopussy in 1983 a film which cost less than that two years previously and which also showed a further drop in takings to $187.4 m.

Octopussy as might suspected is the female lady of a band of adventurous, trained and skilled women based in India and with a world wide concoction of activities in including a circus. Yet another rogue Russian general is after causing World War III disaffected with the growing entente between east and West. He is replacing Russian jewellery and other treasures with fakes selling the originals on the open market in this instance a Faberge golden egg.

The film in fact begins with death of a British agent in East Berlin clutching a fake of the egg now on sale in London. The problem is that having lost the fake egg the villains need to buy back the original and return to where he it kept before discovery. This sets an interesting challenge for Bond who has been given a purchasing limit by the Brit Government. Bond cleverly swaps the eggs around and forces an Afghan prince (Louis Jordan) to pay half a million pounds for the fake egg ten times its actual market value. One of the princes females associates seduces Bond to get back the real egg and while she is successful he notices that she has the Tattoo of an Octopus. He then discovers the connection between the Prince and the renegade Russian general. Walter Gotell as head of the KGB, Geoffrey Keen as the Minister and the rest of gang are all busy in the background.

Bond also locates Octopussy as the head of the female cult, learns about the trade in real Russian priceless objects D’art via the circus which Octopussy owns and that its next performance is in East Germany prior to a visit to a USSAF base in West Germany. While Octopussy is aware of the trade, she does not know that on this visit the treasures have been replaced with a nuclear warhead to explode at the base. Bond has various adventures before getting to the Base dressed as a clown and persuading Octopussy she has been betrayed and getting her to help him dismantle the bomb.

Together with her forces they launch an attack on the Prince to regain the Russian treasures and after more adventures they are successful returning to the Island home of Octopussy for you know what while the Russians negotiate the return of their treasures and restore the stability between East and West. The film is unimaginative and revealed that the writers were struggling to invest good stories and the Creatives failing to find new visual tricks and delights.

　

For Your Eues Only

If Moonraker was the high point in terms of box office popularity for Roger Moore as James Bond, his fifth film revealed that the public had concluded that you can have enough of a good things with takings dropping to under $200 million in 1981 for the fifth project For Your Eyes Only.

The British spy boat St Georges, which holds the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator (ATAC), the system used by the Ministry of Defence to communicate with and co-ordinate the Royal Navy's fleet of Polaris submarines, is sunk by a clever device the Ionian Sea.

This was the fifth time Roger Moore became James Bond who is ordered to retrieve the ATAC before the Soviets, as the transmitter could order attacks by the Polaris submarines' ballistic missiles. The concern is justified because the head of the KGB, General Gogol played once more by Walter Gotelll and with Geoffrey Keen as the Defence Minister and Bernard lee as M with Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny. Overshadowing the Bond girls this time is Chaim Topol as Milos Columbo a former smuggler whose men help Bond in his search for the missing technology.

A marine archaeologist, Sir Timothy Havelock, who had been asked by the British to secretly locate the St Georges, is murdered with his wife by a Cuban hitman, Hector Gonzales. Bond goes to Spain to find out who hired Gonzales.

While spying on Gonzales' villa, Bond is captured by his men, but manages to escape as Gonzales is shot with an arrow. Outside, he finds the assassin was Melina Havelock, the daughter of Sir Timothy and the two escape. With the help of Q, Bond identifies a hitman in Gonzales' estate as Emile Leopold Locque, and then goes to Locque's possible base in Italy. There Bond meets his contact, Luigi Ferrara, and a well-connected Greek businessman and intelligence informant, Aris Kristatos, who tells Bond that Locque is employed by Milos Columbo, known as "the Dove" in the Greek underworld, Kristatos' former resistance partner during the Second World War. After Bond goes with Kristatos' protégée, figure skater Bibi Dahl who takes a shine for Bond, to a biathlon course, a group of three men which include East German biathlete Eric Kriegler chase Bond trying to kill him. Bond escapes, and then goes with Ferrara to bid Bibi farewell in an indoor ice rink where he fends off another attempt on his life by men in hockey gear. Ferrara is killed in his car, with a dove pin in his hand. Bond then travels to Corfu in pursuit of Columbo

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At a nightclub, he meets with Kristatos and asks how to meet Columbo, not knowing that Columbo's men are secretly recording their conversation. After Columbo and his mistress, Countess Lisl von Schlaf, argue, Bond offers to escort her home with Kristatos' car and driver. The two then spend the night together. In the morning Lisl and Bond are ambushed by Locque and Lisl is killed. But, before Locque can kill Bond, he is captured by Columbo's men, who then tells him that Locque was actually hired by Kristatos, who is working for the KGB to retrieve the ATAC

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Bond accompanies Columbo and his crew on a raid at one of Kristatos' opium-processing warehouses in Albania, where Bond uncovers naval mines similar to the one that sank the St Georges, suggesting it was not an accident. After the base is destroyed, Bond chases Locque and kills him.

Afterwards, Bond meets with Melina, and they recover the ATAC from the wreckage of the St Georges, but Kristatos is waiting for them when they surface and he takes the ATAC. After the two escape an assassination attempt, they discover Kristatos' rendezvous point when Melina's parrot repeats the phrase "ATAC to St. Cyril's". With the help of Columbo and his men, Bond and Melina break into abandoned mountaintop monastery, St. Cyril's. While Bond is climbing, Apostis attacks him, but is killed. As Columbo confronts Kristatos, Bond disposes of the biathlete Kriegler throwing and then retrieves the ATAC system and stops Melina from killing Kristatos after he surrenders. Kristatos tries to kill Bond with a hidden flick knife, but is killed by a knife thrown by Columbo. Gogol arrives by helicopter to collect the ATAC, but Bond destroys it first, saying "Détente, comrade. You don't have it; I don't have it." Bond and Melina later spend a romantic evening aboard her father's yacht. The film is very picturesque!

　

　

　

The 1979 Bond Moonraker

While most of Roger Moore Bond films have become a hazy blur of miscellaneous images, Moonraker did register because of he final sequence in which Jaws and his girl friend escape the disintegrating space station back to earth, safety, and life happy ever after together. This 1979 film marked the beginnings of major expenditure on the films with $34 million but with continuing high reward at over $210 million box office returns

A Drax Industries Moonraker space shuttle on loan to the United Kingdom is hijacked in mid-air and Bond is called back from R and R to investigate. On his homeward journey Bond is sent flying out a plane by none other than Jaws but survive by taking the parachute from the pilot and Jaws lands into a circus tent..

　

Bond proceeds to the Drax Industries shuttle-manufacturing complex where he meets the owner of the company, Hugo Drax, and henchman Chang. Bond also meets an astronaut, Dr. Holly Goodhead and survives an assassination attempt via a centrifuge chamber. Bond is later aided by Drax's personal pilot, Corinne Dufour, as he finds blueprints for a glass vial made in Venice. Bond then foils another attempt on his life, using a hunting shotgun to shoot a sniper.

Upon discovering that Dufour assisted Bond's investigations, Drax has her killed. Bond then heads for Venice where he again encounters Goodhead and there is a splendid is chased through the canals by Drax's henchmen. He discovers a secret biological laboratory, and by accidentally poisoning the scientists there, he learns that the glass vials are to hold a nerve gas deadly to humans, but harmless to animals. As yet he does not know how this is to be used,

Chang attacks Bond and is killed, but during the fight, Bond finds evidence that Drax is moving his operation to Rio de Janeiro. Rejoining Goodhead, he deduces that she is a CIA agent spying on Drax. They promise to work together, but quickly dispense with the truce. Bond has saved one of the vials he found earlier, as the only evidence of the now-empty laboratory, giving it to M for analysis, who permits him to go to Rio de Janeiro under the pretence of being on leave.

In Rio, Bond meets his Brazilian contact Manuela. Drax hires Jaws to finish Chang's job of eliminating Bond. Bond meets Goodhead at the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, where they are attacked by Jaws on a cable car. After Jaws' car crashes he is rescued by an unlikely partner called Dolly , and the two fall in love his bringing about a major change in his character and motivation.

Bond and Goodhead played by Lois Childs are captured by henchmen, but Bond escapes and reports to an MI6 base in Brazil and learns that the toxin comes from a rare orchid indigenous to the Amazon jungle. Bond travels the Amazon River looking for Drax's research facility and again encounters Jaws and other henchmen. Bond escapes from his boat just before it hits the Iguazu Falls, and finds Drax's base. Captured by Jaws again, Bond is taken to Drax and witnesses four Moonraker’s lifting off. Drax explains that he stole the Moonraker because another in the fleet had developed a fault during assembly. Bond is reunited with Goodhead; they escape and successfully pose as pilots on the sixth shuttle. The shuttles dock with Drax's space station, hidden from radar by a cloaking device.

Once on board the station, Bond and Holly disable the radar jamming cloaking device, resulting in the US sending a platoon of Marines to intercept the now-visible space station. Jaws captures Bond and Holly and brings them to Drax.

Drax plans to destroy human life by launching fifty globes containing the toxin into the Earth's atmosphere. Before launching them, Drax also transported several dozen genetically perfect young men and women of varying races, to the space station. They would live there until Earth was safe again for human life; their descendants would be the seed for a "new master race". Bond persuades Jaws and Dolly to switch their allegiance by getting Drax to admit that anyone not measuring up to his physical standards would be exterminated and Jaws attacks Drax's guards.

A laser battle ensues both inside and outside the space station, in which Drax's guards and his master race are all killed. During the battle, Bond shoots Drax with a cyanide-tipped dart, then pushes him into an airlock and ejects him into space.

In order to destroy the three already launched globes and return to Earth, Goodhead and Bond use Drax's personal shuttle - at the same time observing Jaws and Dolly escape from the disintegrating space station. I thought this was the better of the Moore Bonds.

　

　

The Spy who Loved Me 1977

The Spy who Love me cost $14 million to make in 1977 and amassed $185.4 to get the commercial aspects of the series back on track. The film was acclaimed as the best Roger Moore Bond and nominated for three Academy awards but without success.

A British and a Russian nuclear submarine disappears and we the audience learn that they are drawn into a massive super tanker floating dock where the crew are taken prisoner. Bond is having some R and R in an Skiing Cabin in Austria when he is summoned and where he is pursued by a small army of Russian agents who he evades by ski jumping off a mountainside opening a union jack parachute. He kills one of the agents.

He earns that someone has acquired a super submarine tracking system and he and the Russians go in pursuit in Egypt with a ‘Son et Lumiere’ production among the pyramids the setting for a mini adventure involving his Russian counterpart Anya Amasova, They are told to join forces by Walter Gotell as head of the KGB and Bernard Lee as M. Geoffrey Keen debuts as the Minister of defence in a role he continues for five films with Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny and Desmond Llewelyn as Q and his technical tricks. The couple have their first encounter with Richard Kiel as Jaws one of the great Bond characters.

The couple work out that the man behind the submarine thefts is Curt Jurgens as Karl Stromberg who plans to trigger World war III by using the submarines to fire missiles at Russia and West and create a new underworld water civilization and which enables the latest Q car to be used as sports car which also becomes an under water craft. The pair become a couple after Bond saves her from the character Jaws but later she promises to kill him when their mission is over discovering that the agent Bond killed in the Austrian Alps was her boyfriend. The couple visit Stromberg at what appears to be his under water home but later they find that he has an extraordinary underwater Atlantis type of community which can rise above the sea bed to above the water level

The couple board a third nuclear submarine which is captured and in turn they are captured and separated. Bond manages to first rescue the crews of captured Russian, USA and British submarines and then cleverly reprogrammes the two missiles so instead of heading for Moscow and New York they destroy each other’s other submarines. Why the villains only launched one rocket from each submarine remains a fortunate puzzle.

Bond rescues the Russian girl, and Kills Stromberg in the process and they also appear to kill Jaws. The couple escape as the Atlantis is destroyed, The couple are seen having an intimate relationship by their superiors while Jaws escapes from the shark tank. I regarded this fil as OK than good and certainly did not merit Academy recognition depspite its popularity at the box office.

　

　

　

　

The Man with the Golden Gun

The ninth film is The Man with the Golden Gun with Christopher Lee as the Man Scaramanga, Britt Eckland as the Bond girl and Hervé Villechaise as Nick Nack Scaramanga’s height challenged manservant creative accomplice. The film also cost $7 million in 1974 to make with box office totals down to under $100 m at 97.6.

A golden bullet with 007 is received at M16 and is correctly regarded as a challenge to Bond. Her finds that a character called Scaramanga has a Golden Gun made for him and gives up his normal duties to go privately go in search of the challenger.

Bond traces the supply of golden bullets via a belly dancer in Beirut to Macao and Hong Kong and a night club casino run by the Man’s mistress, He finds that the bullet has taken him away from his assignment involving a device to help solve the energy crisis and that this device has now come into the possession of Scaramanga and M and Q have their headquarters in the wreck of British ship in the harbour with Bond ordered to kill Scaramanga and retrieve the device.

Scaramanga is taking over the business of a Thai gangster and although he manages to retrieve the device all his good work is muck up by his stupid assistant Britt Eckland. In a car chase in Bangkok he encounters and is assisted by an on holiday with his wife Sheriff J W Pepper. Bond discovers that the golden bullet was in fact sent by Scaramanga’s mistress because she has been taken as a child and forced to work as a prostitute and wants to kill her employer. She dies.

Bonds assistant Miss Goodnight (Eckland has landed herself in the trunk of Sacramanga’s car which transforms itself into a plane, taking the girl and Nick Nack to his private Island hideaway.

Bond uses a tracking device with Goodnight to locate the island where he finds that the villain is using the energy device for a high tech solar powered plant which he wants to sell to the highest bidder.

The opening of film reveals Scaramanga with the help of Nick Knack using a area of mirrors and projections, The Fun House, to kill off a challenger for a large sum of money. It is now Bond’s turn to go head to head with Scaramanga in his Fun House where outwits the villain killing him. Ms Goonight continues much things up and pushing a henchman into a pool of liquid helium she caused the energy device to explode and blow up the island. The couple manage to escape in junk after another encounter with Nick Nack. The film involves an Asian agent in Hong Kong and Bangkok who ahs his mobile HQ in a train and has attractive daughters assisting, Lois Maxwell played the role of Miss Moneypenny for the 9^th of 14 times.

　

Live and Let Die 1973

It was in December 2012 and January2013 that I viewed all the James Bond films in sequence breaking off from reporting the experience before Live and Let Die, the eight film and the first with Roger Moore who portrayed the character tongue in cheek throughout and was in my judgement the weakest Bond performer although his first film with $7 million budget is recorded as netting $161,8 million which explains why he went to reproduce the role time and time and time again.

Although based on an Ian Fleming book the film was created in the style of the Black exploitation drug culture genre which had become fashionable at the time and there are many racial references and stereotyping which we will not see today or hopefully ever again. The film is set in Harlem, New Orleans and a fictitious Caribbean Island with Bond on the trail of a Mr Big who turns out to be a Dr Kananga dictator of the Island where he grows heroin and where he has been flooding the market with free stuff to put his rivals out of business via his chain of Filet of Soul restaurants. He has killed three agents on his trail.

Kananga ‘s virgin girlfriend, Solitaire. has the power to read tarot cards (Jane Seymour) with unerring accuracy until James gets his hands on her, that is. Bond’s female CIA contact is in fact a double agent working with the dictator and she is killed to stop her telling James the truth after he also got his hands on her.

In New Orleans Bond finds himself about to be eaten by crocodiles in the backwoods and there is a great speed boat race which also involves the local tobacco chewing Sheriff J W Pepper played by Clifton James and who is to appear in another Bond film later.

On the Caribbean island the couple, that is Bond and Solitaire have to encounter voodoo and escape from a shark tank but they outwit Kananga who explodes after a shark pellet is forced into his mouth. They still have to escape the evil designs of Kanaka’s henchman Tee Hee Johnson who has an artificial pincer hand although the film has an ambiguous ending as sitting on the front of the train is voodoo man Baron Samedi another Kananga henchman. Bond’s CIA friend Felix Leitner also has a role in the film. There are some good images , including the last but the film did not lead me to waiting eagerly to see the next or to having any WOW factor moment and only rated about 5 to 6 on my Bond rating scale.