The last couple of weeks I watched in the weekend a Bond movie:
Live and Let Die, The World is not Enough and The Spy Who Loved Me.
I think this weekend I’ll watch The Man WIth The Golden Gun again.
I actually watched LALD twice, because the first time I fell asleep at the beginning of the bootchase and I woke up again to a laughing Baron Samedi, sitting on the front of the train. So something told me I might have missed some of the movie.
Since May I’ve been doing a 007 Sunday and watching all the Bond films in order. I just finish AVTAK and will be watching TLD next. The highlights this time around have been FRWL, OHMSS, TSWLM and OP. The Spy Who Love Me is just a sheer delight and Octopussy is just so damn entertaining and fun. OP might just be the most underrated Bond film, even by me. Just great Rogertainment. Sad I don’t have any moore of his Bond films to watch.
Great to see some Octopussy love here: Louis Jordan is a first class villain and the stunts are incredible, particularly the 2 aerial sequences that bracket the film. Top moment has to be Roger’s face when drinking champagne in bed with Magda and she turns over and says, “I need refilling.”
Count me on the OP train as well. It is a perfect blend of so many Bondian elements: action, suspense, humor, class. Kamal Khan is probably the most underrated villain in the series, and the rest of the supporting cast are great too. I also really like the locales in this movie, and John Glen shines in the action / suspense departments.
Octopussy is definitely one of the more underrated films in the franchise. It’s always one for me that is always on the back end of the top 10 for me or hovering just beyond it, even though on paper it would seem more like one that I’d have a bit further down on the list.
Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me always seem to get most of the adulation from fans in terms of Roger’s films, but for me, I’ll take his later run of For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, and A View to a Kill as being his best stretch of films.
OCTOPUSSY is a great entry that Eon would be wise to emulate as a template for BOND 26. It‘s got an exotic theatre that’s at once a key player of international affairs and is still hugely underestimated as a factor by many, providing scenic and futuristic locations as well as majestic landscapes and unique treasures of nature.
OCTOPUSSY‘s murky Cold War plotline could be easily updated to fit our chaotic times and fake news narratives of current would-be strongmen. And having a Bond film heading towards Asia and the subcontinent would once more open the series from the rather Euro-centric run of the last few films.
Many of OCTOPUSSY‘s critics mentioned the apesuit/clownsuit sequence, completely ignoring how gripping the circus scenes actually are. Compare the similar nuke detonator scenes from THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and OCTOPUSSY. There’s quite another level of drama involved here. And the fight on the train top was an early forebear of SKYFALL‘s.
OCTOPUSSY has many of the treasured ingredients that make a great Bond film. A return to the spirit of the spy adventure - especially if they avoided showing merely a cardboard version of locales - would be most welcome, hopefully in the near future.
That is the tricky part. The more recent films may have been Eurocentric to a large degree, but at least that was territory the filmmaker’s knew and had an affinity for.
To offer a setting that is unusual without tipping over into cardboard images/colonialist representation is both difficult and expensive.
And the budgets are used up for other things…
Incidentally, I recently discovered the Wyndham & Banerjee mysteries by Abir Mukherjee set in 1920s/1930s India; decent detective mysteries mixed with elements of espionage and political thriller. They are written from an ‘English’ perspective but far from apologetic about the unsavoury parts of the Empire and its profiteering. Mukherjee doesn’t subscribe to bleary-eyed nostalgia nonsense about the nature of the Empire - but neither does he take the bait of taking an entirely modern perspective toward his theme.
If Eon could find a similar approach that would be a winner.
Thanks for this - sounds intriguing!
They sound good. I will look into them.
It would be a great approach, but does a Bond movie have time/room for it? In an interview with Mukherjee, he says he read a good deal of tartan noir growing up in Scotland, and that its meshing of hardboiled plotting with criticisms of Thatcherism influenced him.
But all a Bond film wants is an exotic backdrop (acknowledging that the category of “exotic” is also a colonial invention)–a quick sketch of a locale, which leads OP to have sword swallowers and people lying on beds of nails. India–what a country!
In DAF, being a tourist is incorporated into the Amsterdam scenes, and Hamilton’s gimlet eye is perfect for Las Vegas–the mise en scene functions as a presentation of the locale, and a simultaneous critique of it.
SP gets it right in the opening sequence–spending money and using scores of local artists. In fact it was so successful that while Mexico City had no tradition of a Day of the Dead parade prior to the movie’s making, post-SPECTRE, it does (akin to the establishment of the Sarah Siddons Award in 1952–two years after Joseph L. Mankiewicz invented it in his screenplay for ALL ABOUT EVE. Both Bette Davis and Celeste Holm were awarded it).
If a Bond movie slows down and is nuanced enough not be touristy/exotic, will that interfere with its ability to be a rousing, fast-paced spy adventure? At least with European settings, European filmmakers are looking at/joshing their own culture, e.g., the opera-loving slow driver in SP.
It’s certainly a concern how far in that direction a Bond film can even go in our day and age. I suspect the tourist/exotic perspective is so intrinsic we will not see that dropped.
But it could be the perspective of an informed or interested tourist. Not an essentially pointless documentary view - in a Bond film, a subgenre of the fantasy adventure - but a depiction going beyond the textbook caricatures of an East India Company backyard. Spend some time in the country instead of on the picture postcard of it.
That would be best. But I still think the problem remains that Bond is a visitor to most places, and as such is not there to be “interested” in a locale, but to do his job. Maybe having Bond go undercover would be the solution–where he had to become integrated into a place, rather than just doing a job in it (but avoiding the yellow face of YOLT).
But you are right that
It is present in the novels, and was imported into the films. But people travel a lot more these day, both in actuality and virtually. So the depiction of a foreign locale is not the thrill it used to be, especially when someone can think: “I saw that on my uncle’s Instagram account.”
It is a puzzlement.
The challenge would be to have a reason to have Bond in place, something beyond M saying: ‘Go there and find out about/bring back/put a stop to X/Y/Z.’
I found Fleming’s approach in You Only Live Twice intriguing, a rare intelligence op for Bond in that he is asked to ‘cultivate‘ a foreign intelligence head and secure access to product against US interests.
That was a downright spectacular diversion from Fleming‘s oftentimes simplistic approach. It won’t be possible to replicate this one-on-one in a film iteration. But I would love to see them at least giving it a try with, for example, somewhere in Africa. Instead of just splashing the location onto an establishing shot.
Thanks for this. I never thought about the novel this way, and it may well be part of why I like it so much.
What he said… 
One of my favorite moments from OP is when Kamal’s car doesn’t start. All the planning, all the intrigue, all the forgeries, smuggling and double crossing almost brought down by a dead car battery. The look on Louis Jourdan’s face when the engine does starts. Such a great touch.
Do I remember it falsely (happens with me) or was OCTOPUSSY for a long time considered a lesser entry, cheesy and tired?
In any event, I remember re-watching it after many years, going in with a feeling of “well, at least it has Roger”… and then I was completely hooked and entertained and loved it more than some of the “respectable” Bond films.
Just drop NewBond into a situation, in a place where he is actually a tourist. I said the other day invert North By Northwest. What does the expert do when a situation happens around him ?
Bond on holiday - something happens and he’s immediately in the action in a place that he has to become insconsed in.
That’s how I see to recall it’s reputation being when I was first starting to seriously get into the Bond films. I think a lot of it stems from the clown outfits that make numerous appearances in the film, as well as the gorilla suit that Bond hides in on the train that looks a bit goofy. But even then, those things aren’t there to be silly, they are things that would be perfectly reasonable to find in and around a traveling circus,
The segment of the film where Bond is trying to get to the circus to stop the bomb going off is one of the best stretches of a Bond film in the entire franchise.