Heavy Bondage: The Spy Who Loved Me

"Some day, around 2001 perhaps, the NFT is going to run a retrospective of Bond films," wrote the Sunday Times' Alan Brien on 10 July [1977]. "A new generation will stare aghast at these grandiose, megaloptic visions," he continued. [...] Interestingly, his review completely failes to consider the idea that the Bond series could still be running in 2001; the entire piece is based on the notion that by that far distant date, Bond would be a cultural curio. In its own way, Brien's review is the single most objectively wrong review of a Bond film ever written.

The NFT's Bond retrospective, by the way, was in 1999.
- Smith/Lavington, Bond Films

The Spy Who Loved Me
Film: 1977
Book: 1962 (10th in chronology)

Irreverent Synopsis: Submarines are vanishing mysteriously - one British, one Russian. Each nation sends its best agent to investigate, and the two play a certain amount of oneupmanship (or oneupwomanship) until a "new era in Anglo-Soviet relations" leads them to cooperate with one another. They trace the plot to Stromberg, a fairly lackluster Diabolical Mastermind who wants to provoke nuclear war to force mankind to live in the sea. Honest.

Major Observations: This is the first Bond film where a problem which first surfaced back in the Connery era really becomes untenable: the increasingly extreme measures the scriptwriters have to take to justify the involvement of a British agent in a nuclear era where Britain is, frankly, simply not a player. Stromberg wants to start nuclear war between the US and Russia (as makes sense). So why bother kidnapping a British sub at all? And even if he wants to kidnap it, why steal it before securing the American one? Answer: To have a reason to involve Bond in what, realistically, would not be an operation involving England at all.

The scriptwriters first paid lip service to this issue back in You Only Live Twice, walking around it neatly by having Britain act as a neutral third party in investigating the missing spacecraft. In Diamonds Are Forever, it's not necessary to finesse this, as Bond essentially stumbles onto Blofeld's scheme (and, as Blofeld points out, "your pitiful little island hasn't even been threatened.") It also wasn't necessary to sidestep it in the first two Moore films, which are about other things. In later Moore films, it is reasonably manageable. But in this film, due to the playing-up of the "equal but opposite" relationship between Bond and Amasova, the audience is reminded at every turn that this really should have been a movie about a Russian agent and an American one.

To some extent the large difference in tone in the Brosnan era is because of a need to reconcile the post-cold-war role of Britain with what Bond classically is and does. By then, though, the matter was long overdue for addressing. More on that at Goldeneye.

This film has utterly no relationship to the Fleming book with the same title. This is deliberate: Fleming sold the title on the express condition that the script have no elements from the book whatsoever. The book is an experiment which failed; it is written in the first person, and not from Bond's point of view, but from a female character, Vivienne Michael, whom Bond encounters by chance in the Adirondacks and saves from two thugs. The book isn't as bad as latter-day critics would have it, but it's definitely bizarre, sort of a Mickey Spillane take on a romance novel. It did not sell well, and initially Fleming planned that there would never be any reprints or paperback editions. It's available in the recent set of Penguin reprints, if you're curious.

Many critics consider this movie a "greatest hits" package, and they have some justification: the ski scenes are retreads of OHMSS (complete with Willy Bogner on camera), the train scene is stolen from From Russia With Love, a large portion of the Liparus sequence seems to recall the base in You Only Live Twice, and Stromberg seems to have more than a touch of Dr. No about him. That said, it's a pretty good melange; probably the second-best of the Moore films. At the very least it is consistently striking; designer/visual mastermind Ken Adam is back for this one, and thus we know we will not suffer for eye candy.

A great deal of the film's charm derives from Barbara Bach as Major Amasova, at least for the first part of the film (the character suffers from damsel-in-distress syndrome from the Liparus sequence on, alas). Her delivery is understated and pleasant, and the contrast between her style and Bond's is well-drawn.

In fact, the first portion of the film shows that it's very hard to go wrong with the "get the information before the cleanup man kills everyone who touched it" plot (see Diamonds Are Forever). This is also when Richard Kiel, as Jaws, is actually effective (which is to say, scary). By the time he is ripping panels off the telephone van, though, he is already more of a joke than a horror.

All of the villains in the film need work. Stromberg has interesting ideas but is played very uninterestingly. The best villain(ess) in the film is the duplicitous Naomi (right), who has the audacity to wink at Bond and then try to gun him down from a helicopter. There are any number of not-quite-villainous supporting characters, though, who are excellent: Walter Gotell makes his first appearance as General Gogol, and both go-betweens Kalba and Fekkesh do their part well.

Bond himself is mostly in charming mode, although he does have a rather nasty fight with henchman Sandor which ends with coldly dropping him to his death. The briefing sequence (where he wears his Naval uniform) shows him to great advantage. He speaks at least a moderate amount of Arabic, knows his way around Bedouin customs and Cairo, and knows the Minister of Defense well enough to call him "Freddie." (However, he's back on strictly formal terms of address in Moonraker, so who knows?) A man with style - but the beginnings of the ironic detachment that would all but kill Moore's Bond in later films.

The fight aboard the Liparus, and the business with the bomb, is to my mind one of the more underrated sequences in a Bond film. It's pretty brilliant. By the by, notice that Bond has apparently learned a thing or two about nuclear explosives since Goldfinger ....

Minor Observations: I don't really notice film scores much, which is why I haven't commented on them often here, but if you notice that this film doesn't sound the way you'd expect, it's because it was scored by Marvin Hamlisch. Many commentators seem to feel that this was a mistake, and I agree that the score has considerably more of a showbiz feel to it. On the other hand, 1) I get a little tired of John Barry's dramatic chords and this is a welcome break 2) I'm the kind of person who thinks that quoting "Lawrence of Arabia" in the desert sequence is actually funny, and 3) I happen to believe that "Nobody Does It Better" (with lyrics by Carole Sager) is the best Bond theme song with lyrics. (The best Bond theme of all time has no lyrics - it's in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.)

George Baker, Captain Benson in the naval briefing, was of course Sir Hilary Bray - the real one - in OHMSS. Shane Rimmer (left), who plays the captain of the American sub, pops up in minor roles in both You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever. Robert Brown, who plays Admiral Hargreaves, will reappear in a rather important role to us later on. Milton Reid, the unfortunate Sandor, also played one of Dr. No's thugs.

David Prowse (AKA the body of Darth Vader) was one of several strong silent types considered for the part of Jaws. Lois Chiles was offered Amasova but said she was "temporarily in retirement" (she was actually studying acting in New York, stung by criticisms of her abilities); she reemerged in time for Moonraker.

The book The Bond Files notes "there are at least thirteen significant correspondences between the plots of The Spy Who Loved Me and You Only Live Twice." I'm not sure I notice these correspondences, but I agree that in some ways the films feel very similar, which is surely because they have the same set designer (Ken Adam) and director (Lewis Gilbert, whose name I cannot read without thinking of Revenge of the Nerds).

It's also worth noting that this script went through a lot of authors and changes, with a genesis in a pair of treatments originally intended for Moonraker, one of which resulted in a brief legal action. There are two credited writers for the final script, but at least twelve other people are known to have worked on it at some time or another.

Also, around this time, Kevin McClory and his lawyers woke up (the ten-year nonaggression pact following Thunderball having expired) and this eventually resulted in all references to SPECTRE being thrown out of the script (and reportedly, led to Stromberg getting a name change from Stavros).

Stromberg has webbed fingers. It's obvious in several scenes but is not alluded to in the dialogue. Since they went to the trouble of altering his hands, they clearly meant it for a reason, but besides his not wanting to shake hands, it's not clear what that reason is.

Finally, If you think Michael Billington as Amasova's doomed lover Sergei (right) looks a bit like a Bond clone, give yourself a point; he was a serious contender (some say the leading contender) for the role in June 1972, just before Roger Moore became available.

Next page: Moonraker