2022 rewatch: THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

 Oh, come on, after The Man With the Golden Gun, we needed something, you know, good.

The Spy Who Loved Me is Roger Moore's third outing as James Bond, his first in Proper Cinematic Widescreen (2.35:1), his first "shaken not stirred" (although of course he doesn't get to say it), and the first time the Bond actor is credited as "Ian Fleming's James Bond" (definitely a lie, it's Roger Moore), has his face appear in the titles, or wears a tuxedo in the gunbarrel. Other than that, it's You Only Live Twice, right down to the choice of director, only now performed through the medium of underwater ballet and Bond doesn't "die" in it. No, wait, I take that back. He does in fact get fake-shot in both.

It's okay that it's not Ian Fleming's James Bond and it's okay that it's Roger Moore. For the third film in a row, he's the only Bond who could pull this nonsense off. I've said before that a franchise broad enough to encompass both Moonraker and Quantum of Solace is a very weird beast, and it's largely Moore's fault that it lasted long enough to do either. (Very annoying that all three of his successors have gone, with varying degrees of sincerity, the Connery/Fleming route instead of the far more entertaining Moore/Gilbert one. Yes, it's true that a Daniel Craig movie with Baron Samedi in it would have been nigh incomprehensible, but so was Spectre, and this would at least be more fun.)

Along for the ride are Curt Jurgens as this entry's Notfeld, Barbara Bach as the cleavage, and Richard Kiel as Jaws. It involves things that are long and hard and full of seamen and Ms. Bach ends up thoroughly wet.

Speaking of Quantum and its presence on one extreme end of the Bond Lunacy Spectrum, watch this film, then pay close attention to the ID card BlondBond gives BowlCut in Quantum, a film where the bad guy hoards a ton of water for nebulous reasons. Maybe he wanted to flood the largest movie stage in the world to convert it into a submarine pen hey waitaminute.

Oh, is that too mundane trivia? Every Bond Fan (Christ, them) knows it? Okay, here's something you might not know: there are three notable Doctor Who guest actors popping up in bit parts here. The bearded member of the two scientists Stromberg blows up at the beginning is Cyril Shaps, beloved by Whovians for overacting his way through multiple death scenes in the early 70s. Max Kalba is Vernon Dobtcheff, the very first actor to utter the phrase "Time Lord." One of Stromberg's sub captains is George Roubicek, who gave us a memorably bad fake American accent in "Tomb of the Cybermen," before working up a better one with which to tell Darth Vader about a missing escape pod in Star Wars. 

Why am I blathering on about trivia about other films? Oh, come now. You know. It's The Spy Who Loved Me, an amalgamation of the previous nine but mainly You Only Live Twice. Shall we traipse down memory lane?

• Dr. No: Villain with some sort of prosthetic, baddie lair has/is an aquarium, Bond ruthlessly executes a baddie with more bullets than are strictly necessary, (to stretch a point) Bond escapes through a flooding tunnel.
• From Russia With Love: Commie-land Bond Girl poses as Bond's wife while they enter Europe by train, where he gets in a fight with the film's Heavy.
• Goldfinger: The third one, where the Bond actor "finds his groove," whatever that means, I think Connery had it in From Russia and Moore had it from the get-go. Villain is a fat European with a mute henchman. Bond gets this iteration's iconic car and does this iteration's most (in)famous seduction, turning a "bad" girl good. Really the big difference is Roger Moore knows how to disarm a nuke and Sean Connery does not.
• Thunderball: Approximately 90% of the film takes place underwater (I said approximately so I'm not wrong). Bond uses a girl as a disposable human shield. The villain steals two cylindrical objects that can cause nuclear destruction. Bond has to tell the leading lady about the death of a guy she cares about.
• You Only Live Twice: Villain with an absolutely stonkingly huge lair steals two vehicles to try to start WWIII. Commander Bond of the Royal Navy bothers to appear in uniform. Bond attempts to have sex at the end in an emergency escape vehicle at sea, only to be interrupted by his superiors (how did they not save the "something's come up" joke for that? Yes they'd have to re-use it for this film, but that's what this film is). Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Oh, and Shane Rimmer shows up to play an American.
• OHMSS: James Bond is allowed to show emotions, goes skiing, and gets personally involved in the murder of a secret agent's significant other. And George Baker shows up.
• Diamonds Are Forever: Uh... villain is/poses as a capitalist, has an elevator of doom, and makes the Bond Girl wear a bikini (or something similar) just cuz, which she's got to wear as his watery lair does a kablooey. (Apparently Rimmer's in this too, but I can't be bothered to watch it - it is dreadful - unless as part of a full marathon.)
• Live and Let Die: Um... Oh! I know: stupendously iconic show-stealing henchmen who implausibly turn up alive at the end.
• The Man With the Golden Gun: "Something came up," the final act occurs because the villain kidnapped the Bond Girl (and stuffs her in a skimpy outfit she's got to wear as stuff starts exploding* - probably an OSHA violation, which is why they made him British, true story), bit of a meditation on the nature of Bond's job. Oh, and someone shoots the top off a champaign bottle. Conspicuous titillation (geddit), if you want to be naughty. Of course you do, it's BondFilm.

*According to Uncle Rog, he had an arm around a bikini-clad Britt Ekland when things went all 'splodey in the climax of Golden Gun, and felt all the tiny hairs on her back singe (can't quite figure out when this would've happened in the finished film, but that doesn't mean he's lying; he's Roger Moore and I'm not). Perhaps due to this, they made sure the water they dumped on Barbara Bach in this one was ice-cold.

So what's original? Certainly not any of the Russian names: Potemkin (the sub), Gogol, Sergei, Ivan, Boris. (Could be worse, as far as names in a Film With Russians And Submarines And Russian Submarines goes. Could have a Political Officer named Putin, Sean.) Erm, the revenge plot, I guess, given that Diamonds Are Forever ran away from such a notion. Oh, and a shark sniffs a girl's crotch (not a euphemism, actually, distressingly - but in line with the early Moorera oral sex jokes, so not too original), and we see a tad more of Ms. Bach's anatomy during her shower scene than the film's rating would suggest. Cor. (Are she and TWINE's Sophie Marceau the only ones to have "how did that get past the censors" moments?* Think so.** Must research.)

*Pussy Galore's name doesn't count because every Bond Fan (Christ, them) knows that one. (All together now:) They took the censor out to dinner.

**To be fair, you have to be looking for Sophie's nip slip to spot it. Or so I heard! Hrm. Does Ursula Andress have a wet t-shirt scene in Dr. No?

Blimey, Rog looks sharp in these. I'm not referring to any hypothetical contrast to later films, where they might start smearing Vaseline on the lenses to hide the wrinkles (back-of-the-envelope math suggests Moore was 49 when they made this, and he's only barely starting to show it). I'm talking about the suits. Most of the Bonds wear them, a few with "such disdain" (Craig being the obvious one from the quote, but Dalton bought off-the-peg and it shows*). Lazenby looks, well, like he's wearing Baby's First Suit, and it's telling that they didn't even try to stuff Connery into a tux in You Only Live Twice (not a fat joke. They're coming, promise). Moore inhabits them. His Bond is a playboy semi-celebrity, as far away from the Fleming creature as I am, but his character is at least distinct, as opposed to the vague amalgamation of Brosnage or whatever mold from the back of Fleming's fridge Craig's playing. What was I saying? Oh, yes, the suits. No wonder the first two Moore films come off as "strange," they've stuck him in short sleeves for part of them. STOP GETTING BOND WRONG! (Actual true fact: Frank Sinatra visited Rog's tailor after seeing Golden Gun. Well, according to Moore, at any rate.)

*Moreso in his second one, which is weird given the amount of work the makeup and costume people had to do to hide his weight gain in his first - not actually an insult (for once), Dalton came to Bond directly from a sweltering Florida shoot and was about 15 pounds underweight. He put it back on during the production of The Living Daylights, but, again, the makeup people did such a fantastic job you probably wouldn't notice unless you watched it with a copy of the filming schedule for reference.

Speaking of secrets I'm gleaning from Moore's delightful book, Bond on Bond (I can only find two inaccuracies in it, one claiming Golden Gun came out in 1980 instead of 1974, and one confusing The Spy Who Loved Me with For Your Eyes Only as far as The One With The Wetbike is concerned - neither of which are really Rog's fault, he was 85 when it was published, and if I'm sharp enough to make only two silly mistakes at 85 I'll consider myself blessed), apparently Barbara Bach kept hitting him square in the eye with the "stun gas." 

In the middle of rewatching this one, I had a stop, popped in the DVD of You Only Live Twice (astonished by the amount of film noise on display - mayhaps the Blu-Ray has a better reconstruction), watched that all the way through, and returned back here. My obeservation is this: Sean Condiment wasn't cut out for the Lewis Gilbert style of BondFilm, and Roger Moore absolutely was. True, other Behind The Scenes Issues may have contributed to Cannery's disinterest in the proceedings (and interest in the buffet - okay, I'll stop, but it was their dumb idea to shove him into a ninja suit that shows off his expanded waistline). Roger gets his own whack at being mis-written, of course; I've already commented on the rudeness in Golden Gun and every time I watch For Your Eyes Only I find myself believing the (likely-untrue) story that it was written for Dalton. 

"James, you're doing it again, blathering on about trivia. Come on, give us the review already." No, it's a rewatch, not a review. And it's The Spy Who Loved Me; every single sentence that could possibly have been written in ode to its brilliance and franchise-saving grace (he says about a film where Jaws drops a giant rock on his own foot for a gag) has already been written. 

But all right, fine, back to my earlier thought on Connery not really being an ideal match for Lewis Gilbert's Theory of BondFilm. That's obvious: he's a very Terry Young Bond, and the fact that Young's the only one of Connery's directors to not do a Moorera film means you can't prove me wrong, ha ha. Moore's as evenly divided as seven films can be between Hamilton, Gilbert, and Glenn, and whatever one thinks of Moonraker (it's fab) you have to admit that Gilbert's average Moorera output is the highest of the three. I mean, the other two are saddled with The Man With the Golden Gun and A View to a Kill, fer Chrissakes. No contest. Gilbert himself is hamstrung a bit by trading Lawrence of Arabia veteran Freddie Young on cinematography in You Only Live Twice for Claude-Renoir-With-An-Assist-From-Stanley-Kubrick here, and there is again no contest, Twice is by far the prettier film, but that's not to say Spy looks bad. It's certainly leagues better than everything the 80s will fling at us (with the possible exception of a few inspired bits in The Living Daylights, and if that's not me plugging The Most Underrated BondFilm and simultaneously damning it with faint praise,* I don't know what is).

*Richly deserved: again, I know Daylights isn't Top Five material but I'm too fond of its first half to jettison it.

Here's something that's different! Bond gets his briefing at the beginning from a bunch of people who aren't M. Well, one will be, eventually. But M and Moneypenny don't show up until we're a good stretch into it. And they've got a base in an Egyptian landmark. Apparently the Egyptians loved this film - weird, that, with its "stench of colonialism" that I'm sure someone (not me) cares about - particularly the "Egyptian builders" gag. Well, fair enough, I'm one of maybe five people in the world who like Quantum of Solace even with all its Reaganite-adventurism-bashing manifested in that Greg Beam character.

It's a Lewis Gilbert BondFilm so Bond must get an audience with the villain (or his industrialist lackey) for reasons that may or may not be explained, and I think this is the weakest part - Bond goes to chat with Stromberg about fish for all of three minutes. (This is thankfully omitted from future "greatest hits" films, where either Bond will have an actual reason to be there, or someone else will conference with the villain on behalf of the audience.) Why did Stromberg allow this? He knows it's Bond, but rather than try to kill him now with the same elevator trick he'll try later, he lets Bond get back to his gadget car so he can evade all the assassins (it's like he knows he's in a BondFilm and those are the rules). In this respect it foreshadows the remainder of the Moorera villainy; they all know he's James Bond and they're not so he'll win and maybe nick their missus while he's at it, so why not just roll with it?

Why am I so fond of this film? It's because this, to me, is James Bond. The scale. The craziness. The somewhat flabby villainy backed up by iconic henchmen. A terribly amusing car. A passing attempt at character introspection that doesn't bog down the whole movie because he's James Bond and has a day to save.

Brilliant.

I do find the decision to give the US submarine the same hull number as USS Thresher - America's worst submarine disaster and the second-worst in history, sunk off Cape Cod around the time From Russia With Love was made - to be in questionable taste. But if I'm reaching that low (pun not intended) to find something to gripe about, the film is very good indeed.