Heavy Bondage: Thunderball

Ken [Adam] breezed into the office one day and said, "We're going to do Thunderball. You'd better learn to swim."
- Peter Lamont, set draftsman

Thunderball
Film: 1965
Novelization: 1961 (9th in chronology)

Irreverent Synopsis: Bond is at a health farm and gets suspicious of another patient, Count Lippe, who will be killed off shortly after we use him as a bridge to meet his buddy Angelo, who has had plastic surgery to look like a man named Derval. Angelo impersonates Derval to steal a NATO jet with nukes, which he lands in the water off the Bahamas. Angelo is then killed, having served his purpose. The gent who wants the nukes is Emilio Largo, who hides them in his yacht, the Disco Volante. Largo works for SPECTRE, which uses the nukes to blackmail the world governments. Even though they are prepared to pay, they send Bond to investigate and get rid of the nukes anyway. Got that? There is the biggest underwater battle ever, with frogmen dying all over the place, and fifty hours later the Disco Volante blows up real good. Oh, and there's a woman in this plot somewhere too.

Major Observations: This film is a special case. The reasons why are complex. (In fact, the behind-the-scenes history of this film is more interesting than the film itself.)

Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, hereafter referred to by the name of their production company Eon ("Everything Or Nothing"), bought the film rights in 1961 to every Fleming Bond property save one: Casino Royale, which had been bought by someone else years before. However, Thunderball was not in that lot. Thunderball didn't exist then - not as a novel, anyway. Thunderball was only a film script. And Fleming didn't own it.

The genesis of Thunderball has been hotly disputed, including several long-running court cases, but it appears to have been a group effort between Fleming, a number of other writers, and a filmmaker named Kevin McClory.

Ť Kevin McClory, exact date unknown.

It originally began as a story that didn't involve Bond, and then it was turned into a Bond script with an idea toward making it the first Bond film - i.e. using an original script for the first Bond film, rather than an adaptation of one of the existing books.

(This discussion took place just before other film rights were bought by Eon, around 1960, which was the year Fleming began the "book of the script" and also published the collection of Bond stories For Your Eyes Only. In my chronology For Your Eyes Only is the eighth book in the sequence and the novelization of Thunderball is the ninth.)

When Eon bought the rights, a telegram and other press they issued indicated that they were still considering the idea that Thunderball would be the first Bond film. However, around this time, McClory sued Fleming for having begun work on the novel. After that, things got messy (and Eon backed away from Thunderball like a hot potato).

The compromise that was eventually reached was that McClory was given the rights to make any films based on the Thunderball script, and Fleming was allowed to sell his book. This was later subjected to more challenges when Never Say Never Again rolled around - this is a direct remake of Thunderball and a non-Eon film (and is not discussed elsewhere in these pages). McClory simply sold the rights to the one Bond property he had, all over again - and the matter ended up back in court.

(I have never met any of the participants personally, of course, and this all comes to me as very indirect information, but McClory strikes me as a pathetic, unsympathetic figure who has spent more of his life, at this point, trying to figure out how to hitch onto the Eon gravy train than developing ideas of his own. On the other hand, I have frequently wished I could see what someone not controlled by Eon would make of these stories - and I've been known to say, "Damn, it's a shame that the only script anyone else can ever make is the one which sucks.")

But all that was still in the future. In 1965, meanwhile, McClory eventually realized he couldn't make Thunderball effectively on his own and made peace temporarily with Eon. He got a producer credit, and reportedly a sizable chunk of the take, and the film got made - essentially the way it was originally scripted. The reason I don't feel this film counts as an adaptation of a Fleming novel (and can't be judged for its un/faithfulness to same) is because it was a script first - the book is just a novelization of that script.

So book/film comparisons are futile. But knowing the origin is important, because McClory and pals do things which I believe Fleming would not have done if left to his own devices. Most notable among these is the invention of the supergroup SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion, let it be known) and its boss Blofeld. Fleming, I think, would have preferred to use something a trifle more realistic - see the comments on SMERSH under From Russia With Love. I also credit the influence of non-Fleming hands with the more wretched excesses of Blofeld.

Fleming did use the Blofeld character later on his own - and there's another part of the mess; one McClory claim was that both SPECTRE and Blofeld were concepts that McClory, in essence, owned a chunk of. It's true that, in the chronology of the novels, neither of these had appeared before the Thunderball novelization. Whether they would have come into being without Fleming's contributions to the original script is a matter of debate. It's worth noting, though, that while the films kept onto Blofeld for three more appearances, the SPECTRE-Blofeld connection is increasingly downplayed, and is barely namechecked by the time we get to Diamonds Are Forever.

And the film itself? It's often quite dull and sometimes actively bad. (The later remake is a little snappier but is held to the same plot, by law, and therefore suffers many of the same problems.) Some surprises in the early part (Bond punching the "widow," the sudden destruction of Lippe's car, the appearance of Derval's double) do not make up for the pacing of the latter two-thirds of the film.

Specifically, despite all the hype about the underwater sequences at the time, they are deathly slow, even when they are fast. In the first underwater scene, after the jet lands in the water, it's impossible to tell who is doing what to whom, and the fact that we take nearly five minutes to show the frogmen spreading camo net over the plane - five seconds would have sufficed - is illustrative of the film's problems. The massive underwater battle is as well-photographed as it can possibly be (Ricou Browning, underwater photography specialist and Creature From the Black Lagoon, was involved), but still looks like it is being shown in slow motion - which makes its brutality (spears through facemasks! Bomb traps in enclosed spaces!) either more difficult to watch, or less, depending on whom you ask.

The film is so desperate for pacing that it has to cut back to worried men in London repeatedly to try to create a sense of suspense. It doesn't work.

Bond in this film is no prize either. As far as I'm concerned, Bond's conduct with the nurse at Shrublands encapsulates everything I dislike about the Blunt Instrument method of relating to women; she is wholly immune to his dubious charms, for once ... so he blackmails her, works her into a frenzy, and then leaves. How nice. Later, he surprises Fiona in the tub and she asks him for "something to put on" and he hands her ... a pair of shoes. And then sits back to watch. What a guy.

All the villains save Fiona are wholly uninteresting, the love interest Domino is completely without merit, and even Felix Leiter - the worst of the many Felixes, played by Rik van Nutter as a vaguely Scandinavian refugee from a surfing film - can't hold our attention.

Minor Observations: Claudine Auger, a French woman, is supposed to play an Italian character, whose name is changed from Domino Palazzi to Domino Derval to help explain her accent (and her voice is judged too deep and she gets dubbed by Monica van der Syl anyway). Luciana Paluzzi, an Italian woman, is supposed to play an Irish character, Fiona Kelly, whose name is therefore changed to Fiona Volpe. Still with me?

Adopho Celli is, reportedly, also dubbed for some of the movie by Robert Rietty (he would later also dub Tetsuro Tamba as Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice). Joseph Wiseman, AKA Dr. No, provides the voice of Blofeld in this one.

Charles Russhon, who provided invaluable military-liaison help with From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, here managed to procure the Skyhook rescue hardware used at the very end of the film and also some experimental rocket fuel which was used to blow up the Disco Volante - and, reportedly, shatter windows in Nassau thirty miles away in the process. Russhon appears as an air force officer in the mass 00-section briefing sequence near the beginning of the film.

This film won an Academy Award for visual effects - with Goldfinger's award for sound effects, these are the only two times, to my knowledge, that Bond films have won Oscars.

Tom Jones singing the theme was a last-minute change. Originally the theme song was going to be "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," in honor of the way James Bond was known in Italy. Two versions of this were recorded (with Dionne Warwick and Shirley Bassey), and all the rest of the film's music is scored around it. But the producers decided at the last minute that they had to have the film's title in the song. By the by, Jones passed out in the studio after holding the note at the end.

There are any number of minor continuity gaffes and plot weirdnesses in this film, but this is the one that really throws me: Why is a NATO test run flying with live nukes? And why is no one worried about the fallout (literally) from blowing up those nukes aboard the Disco Volante later?

Next page: A Curious Intermission