Thunderball Yakking: Number Two is Number One

(I'm discovering that I'm getting more hits for my James Bondage than I am for by Game of Thrones readblog. As part of a cynical ploy to garner more pageviews keep my daily output going excuse my laziness, I hereby present the first part of my Thunderball review. Eventually I'll amass the whole thing in one post.)

Conventional wisdom is that Thunderball is a bloated, over-the-top follow-up to Goldfinger that should be roundly condemned for spending 20% of its screentime underwater.  Actually, the biggest change from Fleming's novel is the addition of a character named Fiona Volpe, who never once puts on a scuba mask.  The underwater sequences are long, but nowhere near as gratuitous as, say, the Blue Danube sequence(s) in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And, yes, Thunderball's got a lot of things Austin Powers ripped off: the man-dressed-as-a-lady, the eyepatch-wearing Number Two, the nuclear terrorism plot, the booby-trapped chairs...

Ah well. Thunderball has something going for it that no previous entry in the series does, besides a gun-barrel with Connery actually in it (it's been stuntman Bob Simmons up til now). No, that something is Emilio Largo, The Best Bond Villain, Like, Ever. Let's just run through his introductory scene to show you exactly what I mean.

 At a street in Paris, he rolls into a "No Parking" spot and gives the guard a look that says he owns the place, because he clearly does.

"Do you know who I am? Oh, that's right. I'm the guy who doesn't even have to ask that question, unlike all the other wannabes out there."

 He passes through SPECTRE's front company, a charitable organization. His demeanor instantly changes the moment he's behind closed doors.

"Parasites. I may be evil, but I'm not a Communist."

 Without saying a word, he takes a seat near the head of the table and totally chillaxes as Blofeld terminates another employee in a rather permanent manner.

"Hmm, I see we don't have a budget for sharks with frickin' laser- oh, pipe down and die more quietly, Number Nine. Sea bass, yes, that's an option."

This guy hasn't said one word and he's already ten times cooler than Dr. No, Rosa Klebb and Auric Goldfinger put together. (Not, honestly, that they're much competition; we've had some cool henchmen, but the villains themselves have been seriously lacking.)  If Roger Ebert was really onto something when he claimed that a film was only as good as its villain, our Top Five Bond Film list would be Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The World Is Not Enough, GoldenEye, and Live and Let Die.

He's probably on screen for a good three minutes before he opens his mouth. Even though Blofeld has all the dialogue, Largo owns the scene. Maybe that Soviet filmmaker was onto something when he cast faces and voices separately. No, strike that: he was definitely onto something; like Darth Vader (and Blofeld in this film and From Russia, incidentally), Largo was dubbed by another actor in post.  It's utterly flawless and the result is fantastic. My only question about this scene is why Largo, Number Two, has a remote control labeled "EIGHT." Does SPECTRE have sinister electric-chair-rigged meeting rooms behind at least seven other charitable fronts?