Thunderball

Thunderball

When I was a teenager, I have a very clear memory of rushing into my dad's office and I telling him I had just seen Goldfinger and that it was amazing.  His response has always stuck in my head.  "Just wait until you see Thunderball."

I will never know why I didn't just rush out and see Thunderball immediately.  That's just common sense.  The clips I had seen didn't seem particularly exciting, I suppose, but you would still think I would trust my dad and watch the movie.  Years later, I finally did.

And, boy, was he right!  Thunderball is pretty spectacular and easily one of the best films of the franchise.  After sitting Goldfinger out, Terence Young (who directed the first two Bond films) returned to the director's chair.  And I have a feeling that he looked at Goldfinger, realized that Guy Hamilton had just upped the ante, and responded by saying, "oh, yeah?!  You think you're better than me?  Get ready for a surprise!" Because Thunderball pushes things up to even bigger level - featuring a more interesting story with a true global nuclear threat, armies of scuba divers in a massive underwater battle, and two of the best Bond girls of the series.

An American jet and its nuclear warheads have gone missing.  The culprit?  SPECTRE, making a return appearance in a big way after taking Goldfinger off to lick their wounds.   If the world doesn't pay $100 million, then SPECTRE will use the nuclear weapons to attack a major city.  Bond only has a few days before SPECTRE makes good on their threat and heads to the Bahamas to track the warheads down.  It's a simple enough plot, but the plots rarely matter in the Bond films.  This movie is the franchise firing on all cylinders, from the action to the scripting to the acting.

The villain this time is Largo, SPECTRE's second-in-command.  As played by Adolfo Celi, he is menacing enough and certainly efficient in carrying out his master plan.  But he is overshadowed by his right hand, one of SPECTRE's best assassin, Fiona Volpe (played by Luciana Paluzzo).  Paluzzo is superb, bringing the right balance of sexy and menace to the role.  You know that Bond will eventually beat Largo, but you are not too sure about Volpe.  Like Red Grant in From Russia With Love, you get the sense that she is not only equal to Bond, but possibly even better.  I'm also a fan of the other Bond girl, Largo's trophy girlfriend, Domino.  Though played by a former Miss France (Claudine Auger), Domino is more than just a pretty face, and unlike a lot of Bond girls, is essential to the plot.

I have some friends who are not a fan of Thunderball.  They think it is slow and not particularly interesting.  But I disagree.  I think it perfectly blends the more methodical spy work of the first two films with the over-the-top entertainment of Goldfinger.  The story is interesting, the stakes seem real, and Connery is at the top of his game.  All in all, I think it is a great film.

Sure, if you want me to nitpick, I can.  I can always find something I don't like about a movie.  I've never been a fan of the jet pack gadget in the opening scene, and view it as a sign of bad things to come (invisible cars, anybody?).  I don't care if someone really built a jet pack and used it in the movie.  It's silly.  The underwater battle, though exciting, probably goes on for 5-minutes too long and gets a bit repetitive, and bad rear projection and over-editing almost ruin the final fight on Largo's boat.

But I say "almost" because it's still fun for me and contains two of my favorite individual moments of the film.  SPOILER ALERT.  I love the second Bond bursts into the ship's bridge to kick butt, a badass moment perfectly punctuated by John Barry's score, and I love that Domino is the one who actually kills Largo.  It's fitting, and from a filmmaking perspective, a beautifully framed shot.  Okay, Spoilers over.

In the end, not everyone loves Thunderball.  But I do.  It takes what works best about all the previous films and then pushes the series into even greater heights.  It has to be seriously considered on the conversation as the best film in the franchise.

RANKINGS:
For taking everything Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger did right, while not taking on their weaknesses, Thunderball leaps to the top of the rankings.  Here is how the rankings are playing out so far:

1. Thunderball
2. From Russia With Love
3. Goldfinger
4. Dr. No


BEST LINE:

James Bond, after spearing Vargas to death: "I think he got the point."

MVP:
As good as Sean Connery is, I have to go with Luciana Paluzzo.  She might be my favorite evil Bond girl actually. She is glamourous, edgy, dangerous and ruthless.  But she also represents an important turning point in the franchise.  Dr. No, while not physically impressive, was menacing enough that you worried for Bond's well-being.  Red Grant and Oddjob both represented dangerous adversaries that we weren't sure Bond could defeat.  Fiona Volpe belongs in the same camp as these icons, but she also represents the end of an era.  Her stalking of Bond in the middle of the film marks the last time I felt that the super spy was in any sort of real danger for over four decades.  The series has had its share of great villains with great dastardly schemes, but I never felt Bond was in any danger.  Not even close.  Not until Daniel Craig's Bond was tied naked to the chair and brutally tortured in Casino Royale in 2006 did I feel that Bond was vulnerable again.  I am giving Paluzzo the MVP not only for her great performance, but also because this is the last appearance of a truly threatening presence, the likes of which we wouldn't see again for literally 41 years.  That's pretty crazy.

TRIVIA:
Thunderball has a bit of controversial history.  Originally, the story was conceived in 1959 as a screenplay called James Bond: Secret Agent, co-written by Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory, and Jack Whittingham. For whatever reason, that film did not get made and Fleming cannibalized the plot for his novel Thunderball.  When Saltzman, Broccoli and Eon Productions obtained the film rights to the series, McClory immediately sued.  After years of acrimony, the feuding producers decided to team up and produce this film together.  The result was the most successful movie in franchise history.  But then the partnership dissolved.  While Eon Productions continued with the main franchise, McClory retained the rights to Thunderball and tried to remake the film repeatedly over the decades.  He was constantly stymied by Eon's lawyers and his attempts kept coming to nothing.  He did succeed once, in 1981, when he lured Sean Connery back to the role and produced Never Say Never Again.

From Russia With Love

From Russia With Love

We are continuing our reviews of all the Eon-produced Bond films...and up next is the second film in the series, From Russia With Love, which is universally considered one of the classics.  The original film of the franchise, Dr. No, is also considered a classic, but I found it to have a few considerable flaws that keep it solidly in good, but not great territory - the biggest issue being that everyone seems to be still finding their way with the character (with the huge exception of Sean Connery, who just knocks it out of the park with his first performance of the character).  So what about From Russia With Love?  Does it deserve the title of classic?

Oh, without a doubt.  The film has the same team (including director Terence Young and writer Richard Maibaum), but they showed that they are fast learners and From Russia With Love is an improvement in every way.

With the Cold War at its height, the villainous organization SPECTRE sets out to steal a secret Russian encryption device, called The Lektor, which they will then sell to the highest bidder.  Of course, they will play the Western allies and the Russians against each other, upsetting the delicate Cold War balance in the process.  SPECTRE's intricately woven plan, which involves tricking a Russian agent Tatiana (Daniela Bianchi) into thinking she is duping the British Secret Service into stealing the Russian Lektor, might be a bit overly complicated, but it's also rather ingenious.  And of course, SPECTRE specifically targets the British agent who messed up their operations in Jamaica and killed their lead scientist Dr. No in the previous movie - James Bond.

There's a lot going on in From Russia With Love.  And more-so than any other Bond film, this one feels like a true espionage thriller.  Though there are a few fight scenes, this is not an action film.  Instead, there is a lot of lurking about, snooping, delivering secret passwords, getting fake passports, and other deeds of intrigue you would generally see in a more realistic spy film.  The pace is deliberate, but unlike Dr. No, it never drags.  The cast is terrific - Connery shows yet again why he is the best Bond, and he is ably supported by a solid Bond girl in Bianchi, a terrific ally in Pedro Armendariz (in his last film), and two iconic villains with Robert Shaw as Red Grant and Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb.

Admittedly, I do have a few problems with the movie.  There is an excursion to a gypsy camp that just seems like a sexist tangent, and an excuse to have two Gypsy girls viciously fight it out over a man they both want, conveniently tearing at each other's clothes in the process.  I don't care if the scene is in the book.  It's just strange.  I also was a bit underwhelmed by the climactic scenes.  Minor spoilers here - even if there is not a lot of action in From Russia With Love, it does still contain the greatest fight scene in the franchise, a brutal fistfight between Bond and Red Grant on the Orient Express.  The fight is so good that both the helicopter fight and boat chase that follow pale in comparison.  They just seem a bit limp.  Now, a film professor friend of mine said that I need to put myself in the mindset of the early 1960s.  Audiences were not used to seeing helicopters, not until Vietnam.  So the scene where Bond is running in a field, chased by a helicopter, knocked audiences out of their seats back in the early 1963.  He remembers being knocked out of his seat.  So there is no way the climax of From Russia With Love is ever going to have the impact that it did 50 years ago, and I'll never quite understand why it was so exciting at the time.  But even if I can intellectually admit that, I still can't help feeling letdown after the Red Grant fight.

All in all, these are quibbles.  From Russia With Love is a huge improvement over Dr. No.  It should be said that audiences noticed, too.  It wasn't Dr. No that was the huge hit and cemented the franchise.  It was From Russia With Love (I suppose it helped when President Kennedy talked about how much he loved the book).

RANKINGS:
Easy.  From Russia With Love moves ahead of Dr. No on the list.

So here is the list which is taking shape...

1. From Russia With Love
2. Dr. No

BEST LINE:
Bond approaches the clerk in the Russian embassy.

Bond: Your clock, is it correct?
Clerk: Always.
Bond: But of course. (he walks away, checks his watch, then comes back) Excuse me, you did say your clock was correct?
Clerk: Russian clocks are always - (Bomb explodes in the embassy) 

TRIVIA: 
Lots of good trivia in this one.  Ultimately, I am going to go with a near fatal accident involving director Terence Young.  A helicopter carrying Young during the climactic scene crashed into the water, trapping him beneath the surface.  There was a small air bubble in the helicopter canopy that kept him alive until the crew managed to dive down and save him.  Safely back on shore, his injured arm in a sling, Young just shrugged it all off like it was nothing and went right back into filming. Wow, that is pretty badass.

MVP:
As good as Sean Connery is in this film, he is challenged in the MVP spot by Robert Shaw, playing one of the super spy's better adversaries, Red Grant, a brilliant killer in the employ of SPECTRE.  Grant is every inch Bond's equal...in fact, you could say that for most of the film, he is running rings around Bond.  Shaw embodies the role perfectly.  Audiences who have only seen Shaw as the craggy, grumpy, and dirty Captain Quint in Jaws need to see From Russia With Love so they can see him play the polar opposite.  Clean, tall and muscular, quietly efficient and brutal beyond words, this character is no joke.  People fear him.  I get the sense that even Bond is afraid of him, and that is the most telling thing of all.  Bond?  Afraid of anybody?  To make that believable, you better cast the right actor.  And the producers did.  They got Robert Shaw.  He gets the MVP.

Dr. No

Dr. No
So this is where it all began, one of the longest-running franchises in Hollywood history, the introduction to one of cinema's greatest heroes and the progenitor of the modern action film.

Our first James Bond adventure takes us to the Caribbean.  A British agent John Strangways disappears in Jamaica and James Bond (Sean Connery) is sent to investigate.  Almost immediately, he is targeted for assassination.  The attempts on his life grow more frequent as he closes in on Strangways' killers, signaling that the murdered agent was on to something really big and potentially explosive.  But what does all of this have to do with the mysterious scientist with metal hands named Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman).

I will be honest, it can be a bit difficult to review Dr. No objectively.  After all, this is where the formula originated: the smug and charming know-it-all agent, the women, the fanciful villains...it's a classic!

But is it really?

Well, it must be.  Everyone says so.  But again, is it really?

Look, make no mistake.  Dr. No is a fine film.  I really enjoyed it.  And it is a fascinating piece of cinematic history, but it is hardly a classic piece of filmmaking.  Let's start with director Terence Young, who deserves a lot of credit for making the franchise what it is and for helping mold Connery into what the character could be, but this is hardly visionary directing.  His pacing seems sluggish at times, the fights are rather silly, the dubbing is poorly done, the climax is anti-climactic, and the camera remains detached, contributing nothing to the escalating tension we are supposed to be feeling.  I actually never actually felt Bond was in any danger throughout the entire film except for his encounter with the spider and when he meets Dr. No himself, and that has more to do with the fact that I don't like spiders and because Joseph Wiseman's performance is so deliciously malevolent.

At first, I just figured that it was a different time, with a different standard of filmmaking and I should cut the film some slack.  But then I realized that this reasoning was a bit ridiculous.  Dr. No is lacking even when you compare it to other films made in the 1950s and 1960s.  Look no further than North by Northwest (1959) or To Catch a Thief (1955), both inspirations for the Bond series and both infinitely better.

I was also admittedly uncomfortable with the way Bond treats his black colleague Quarrel, a character whose introduction is badass but who then quickly devolves into a Caribbean stereotype. Bond just bosses him around with colonialist superiority that I could not help but feel a bit offended.

But what I can say is there must have been a learning curve - for the director, the writers, the producers, the composers...really, for the whole darn production team.  And they learned quickly because they came together and made one of the very best films of the series when they produced the sequel From Russia With Love. But they are fumbling a bit in this first film.

Okay, I know this all sounds bad, so now it is time to backpedal a bit.  Remember I said I liked the film?  I actually really do.  I like the fact that it is mostly an investigation, with Bond interviewing Stangways' friends and doing actual spy stuff, instead of bursting into rooms with guns a'blazing.  I love how ruthless and cutthroat the character was in the early 1960s.  They softened him a bit as the franchise continued, but this movie features Bond murdering unarmed men and also having a female enemy spy arrested only after he sleeps with her.  These are reminders that Bond is not a role model. And he's not supposed to be.  But these actions do make him an infinitely more interesting character.

I feel like this review would not be complete unless I mentioned the Bond girl and the villain!  For the Bond girl, you have Honey Ryder, played by the volcanic Ursula Andress.  Most people consider her one of the best, probably because of the iconic moment when she steps out of the ocean in her bikini with a knife strapped to her waist (no better way to capture the franchise's obsession with sex and violence in the same image!).  Andress is fine in the role, but after that first scene she doesn't really have much to do.  So I wonder if the reputation is based less on the character and more on that entrance and the fact that Andress is so explosively attractive.

For the villain, I gotta say I am a fan of Wiseman's Dr. No.  He is cruel and calculating and so unemotional, it is downright eerie.  He also begins the two Bond traditions of having a strange physical attribute (metal hands) and monologuing about what his master plan is.  Though I give credit to Dr. No for actually giving the villain a good reason to monologue - he is trying to recruit Bond to join the ranks of his organization, SPECTRE.  While the final fight between No and Bond is a let-down, it is still a memorable performance and a very cool villain.

So there you go.  I know I spent a lot of this review complaining about Dr. No, but I want to make it clear - this is a solid movie.  I enjoyed it and it is intriguing to watch how everything got started.  And it is very clear from the beginning that there is something cinematically magical about Bond - and especially about Connery playing Bond.  It is no wonder the film was a success.  But let's be careful about calling it a classic.  Because it most definitely is not.

RANKINGS:

So I will be ranking all the Bond films as I watch them. Obviously, there is only one film so far, so we might as well let Dr. No enjoy its brief time in the sun before From Russia With Love comes a'calling.

MVP:
"Bond.  James Bond."

And with that short phrase, two stars were born - James Bond and the legendary actor who played him, Sean Connery.  Connery just owns this role.  Even if he had only made one film, he still would have an easy claim to being the best Bond ever.  Other Bonds generally excelled at one or two of the character traits that are essential to character.  Roger Moore handled the one liners quite well.  He was charming, suave with the ladies, and adept at handling Bond's ambivalence (or pretended ambivalence) to danger.  But I never really believed him in a fight.  Timothy Dalton brought danger to the role, but was completely unbelievable when flirting, Brosnan could handle himself equally in an action set piece and in the bedroom, but the over-the-top antics they put him through kept him from ever being truly believable, George Lazenby...well, let's just skip George Lazenby, and Daniel Craig, who is my second favorite Bond behind Connery, has completely inhabited the role of a brawler who has turned himself into a sophisticated man of the world, but he has yet to show me the nonchalance and the charm that is so essential to the character.  It all goes back to Connery.  He did it all.  He inhabited it all.  Without Connery, Dr. No would have been well received by audiences, it may have even warranted a sequel, but it would be remembered now by only spy film enthusiasts and Ian Fleming fans.  Connery made Bond a legend.  He's the MVP!


BEST LINE:

This is a tie between one of my favorite Bond pickup lines and when Bond ruthlessly kills one of his enemies.  First, the pickup line, spoken just after Honey Ryder comes to shore from the beach.

Honey Ryder: Are you looking for shells?

Bond (clearly ogling her): No, I'm just looking.

And then the great line when Bond kills an enemy whose gun has run out of bullets:

Bond: That's a Smith and Wesson, and you've had your six. (boom)

TRIVIA:
The hunt for Bond was an arduous one.  Connery came late in the search. As fans of North by Northwest, Broccoli and Saltzman first asked Cary Grant, who would only agree to one picture and who also expressed a concern that he was a bit too old for the part (he was in his mid-50s at that point in his career).  Broccoli and Saltzman then asked North by Northwest's villain, James Mason, who also would not agree to a multi-picture deal.  Several actors were thrown into the discussions, such Steve Reeves (Hercules), Roger Moore (who would go on to play Bond in later films), and Stanley Baker (Zulu).  But they liked Connery.  He was manly, a former body builder, but still moved gracefully "like a cat."  Ironically, Fleming did not like the casting at first, but was so taken with Connery's performance that he began to write with him in mind in the later stories.