Heavy Bondage: Octopussy

It's part parody and part travesty, and it's amiably fatigued.
- Pauline Kael in the New York Times, June 1983

Octopussy
Film: 1983
Book: 1966 (14th in chronology)

Irreverent Synopsis: 009 is killed while bringing a fake Faberge egg across the Berlin Wall. The British government suspects that Russian treasures are being sold as a source of funding for unsavory Russian activities. We learn that one General Orlov, who wants a hawkish future for the USSR, is arranging for the fake ones to be made to cover the theft and sale of the real goodies - but since the fake one was discovered, needs the real one back to pass museum inventory.

Bond assumes they will buy back the real egg at auction, which they do, but not before he swaps the real and fake ones. He then follows the trail to India and one Kamal Khan. He shows Khan that he has the real egg and eventually Khan sends the enigmatic Magda to sleep with Bond and take the egg back. Bond lets her because a tracker has been put in the egg and ....

Eh. Do you really care? Even more so than most Bond films, this is not about plot, and since this film is really several films in one, it's not worth unscrambling the rest. There's a bomb in there somewhere, and a troupe of female thieves/acrobats, and an octopus, and a circus, and ... don't think about any of it too hard. Just go along for the ride.

Major Observations: The strength of this film is in its characterizations, notably Bond (fairly heavily into Gentleman Spy mode in this one); Magda, who appears to be playing both sides of the fence for much of the movie; Kamal Khan, played ultra-suave by Louis Jourdan; and Octopussy herself, played by a Maud Adams much-improved from her Golden Gun days. Oh, yes, and a tennis star. More on that in a moment.

The pre-credits sequence is indicative of the trouble with the late Moore films. We start with a nice tense segment of Bond trying to infiltrate a Central American air base to destroy a plane. It gets rather more improbable, but still fun, when the little Acrostar jet comes out of the horse trailer. If they had stopped the seguence with Bond flying off successfully after leading the missile into the hangar, it would have been fine. But they have to take it one step too far and go for the cheap joke. (And planes don't even run on that kind of fuel.)

In general, this film is okay when it isn't trying to go for the cheap joke. The problem is that it does this a fair amount. In the Indian market sequences there are any number of bad and borderline-racist gags; the whole hunting-on-elephant segment contributes nothing but bad jokes and is worth fast-forwarding past; and when Bond gets to Germany there are cheap jokes on the German characteristics to correspond to the Indian ones earlier on. An equal opportunity offender.

This movie feels like two movies, in some ways; the parts in India and the parts in Germany. In general I like the former one better, and when rewatching, I tend not to give the whole bomb/circus plot my attention, preferring to hurry back to India for the truly lovely acrobatic assault on the Monsoon Palace and the denouement.

One interesting thing about this film is that it's the closest a Bond tale has ever come to being dominated by women. I'm not saying it's a feminist masterpiece - this is Bond, after all - but Magda and later Octopussy are clearly people to be reckoned with, and Bond, to his credit, deals with them frankly and directly.

He has no illusions about why Magda has agreed to come to his room, and neither of them is coy about it. Later, his discussions with Octopussy take the same tone. He treats them more as equals, in other words, than he does Kamal Khan, whom he seems to amiably detest from square one.

Octopussy is portrayed as more than capable of taking care of herself (her facial reaction when she realizes Khan has betrayed her is excellent), and only goes into damsel-in-distress mode for the minimum amount of time necessary. If anything, the weakness of the film is that she isn't given more to do. She has a relatively tiny amount of screen time for a title character!

Some observers say that Michael Wilson can be credited/blamed with the Cold War slant of this film and the one preceding it. At any rate, they both present a surprisingly sympathetic view - not a demonized USSR, but one which has both reasonable people and bad eggs (pardon the joke). In this case the schism is shown very literally, with our old friend Gogol as the definite Good Russian (his eyerolling at Orlov's polemic is great) and Orlov as the Bad Russian. If this doesn't seem radical, contrast it to some of the diatribes coming out of the White House during this era.

Of course, as one of my books points out, the whole concept hinges on a Russia which is far more dangerous than they actually proved to be. In reality by 1983 they were ill-equipped for a ground invasion of anything, but no one in the West knew this ... making this film a trifle dated, but what else is new? Someday people showing this film in retrospect will have to explain that once upon a time, the city of Berlin was divided in half ....

Minor Observations: This movie has some loose connections to the very last of the Bond books, published posthumously and containing three stories that had appeared in various places in Fleming's final years. One of them, "Octopussy," is the same in substance as the story Octopussy tells Bond in the film - Bond confronts Major Smythe, who has retired to the islands, because evidence has surfaced that during the last days of the war he stole some Nazi gold and killed to cover his theft. (The victim was a friend of Bond's - he taught him to ski - and Bond requested the assignment personally.) Bond deliberately tells Smythe he has a week before "someone comes to bring him home" to stand trial. Smythe goes out swimming, in a depressed and possibly drunken daze, and is killed by a combination of scorpion-fish venom and his own favorite "pet" octopus. The tone, throughout, reflects Fleming's own state of mind near the end of his life.

Another story in the book, "The Property Of a Lady," concerns a Faberge egg which has come into the possession of a known Russian agent working for MI6. They have known about her for ages, but let her believe her infiltration is successful so that she can feed the Russians false cipher information. The egg is her payoff for several years' service, in a lump sum. MI6 believe that London KGB operatives will try to bid up the price for it at auction, to make the payoff higher, and they send Bond to watch the sale to see if he can spot the people involved, which he does.

The third story in the book is called "The Living Daylights," so that will have to wait until the film after next.

Lois Maxwell gets an assistant in this one; it's an entertaining sequence, but the idea was not repeated. The part of M is filled from here until the Brosnan era by Robert Brown, who played Admiral Hargreaves in The Spy Who Loved Me. He's no Bernard Lee, but you get used to him. Perhaps because of this, the Minister of Defense gets most of the briefing lines, but we do get a smile from M later on, in Berlin, when he knows Bond isn't looking.

It amuses me that the "poison-pen" remark in the Q equipment briefing is exactly the same remark that gets treated with contempt in the 1966 Casino Royale. I'm far from the only person to notice this, too. We all need lives.

Steven Berkoff's performance as Orlov sounds to me exactly like Frank Gorshin playing the Riddler in the old Batman series. Listen to the hysterical peaks of the verbal rhythm and tell me it isn't so. There's even something of a facial resemblance.

If you would like to see what the doomed 009 looks like under the clown makeup, go back one film and check out the gent who finds that the basket-lift shed is locked during the St. Cyril's assault, so he goes around to the side to look underneath, whereby Melina shoots him. That's Andy Bradford.

There's a lot of griping about the casting of Vijay Amritraj, a real-life tennis star, in this film, and the attendant tennis jokes. I agree about the jokes, but the truth is that Amritraj is extremely likable, does a very good job (especially for a non-actor), livens up any scene he's in, and his death is genuinely nasty and shocking. (The sawblade yo-yo sounds silly on paper, and is one of the scariest weapons in the series in practice.)

I'm less willing to shrug off some of the many racist jokes or remarks Bond makes in the India sequences, with one exception: Some critics dislike the idea of his tossing money into the crowd to block the road and make a distraction. I believe that this is likely what would actually happen and I don't have nearly as much of a problem with this as, say, "That'll keep you in curry for a few weeks"!

One joke has actually been deleted: In the film version as I saw it (and in later broadcasts on cable movie channels), when the thug is tossed onto the fakir's bed of spikes, the fakir's outburst is (crudely) subtitled GET OFF MY BED. On my DVD, the outburst is still there, but the subtitle is not.

The backgammon sequence, with Bond and Kamal being oily to one another, is perfect ... but it's never been made clear to me exactly how Kamal is cheating. It can't be a sleight-of-hand thing or Bond wouldn't be able to do the same trick with Kamal's dice. Oh, well.

Louis Jourdan really is very good. In addition to getting some of the film's better lines, there are two places where his reaction shot is flawless: When Orlov smashes the real egg, thinking it's fake, and for one second escaping the circus when he thinks the car won't start. His henchman Gobinda, by contrast, is largely uninteresting, although there is that moment when Khan orders him to go out onto the wing of the plane ....

It occurs to me that Octopussy's floating palace is basically a variation on a harem - sort of harem-as-women's-shelter. It's a very interesting concept, and Bond, it should be noted, is actually quite restrained when he's there - no innuendo. He knows when to play by someone else's rules, especially when he's a guest.

Octopussy's speech about Bond's morals and hers is quite nice. I can't decide if Maud Adams is better here because she's older and wiser, or just because this script is better than Golden Gun!

Speaking of Adams, if that's not actually her doing the pole-lift stunt at the end, then the cuts are quite well-made. Kristina Wayborn, as Magda, did her own stunts whenever the crew would let her, so one never knows.

We will not discuss how Bond managed to get out of the gorilla suit fast enough.

The ending of this film is reasonably subdued, thank god, with no cheap jokes and a nice wrap-up from Gogol. And Q gets the girls! Well, after a fashion.

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