As we take another step up in the countdown, we come to another film whose financial success was instrumental in ensuring the series continuation. Just as Goldeneye's triumph at the box office rejuvenated the franchise after its financial troubles in the late 80's, The Spy Who Loved Me marked the series return to major profitability after the artistic and financial disappointments of the tedious The Man With The Golden Gun. It's also interesting to note that both films were made in the wake of legal troubles and bankruptcies that threatened to put an end to the series as well. Goldeneye was made after the legal mess surrounding the bankruptcy of distributor United Artists was finally cleared up, and The Spy Who Loved Me was made after producer Harry Saltzman's personal bankruptcy threatened to put an end to production of the series. The legal settlement eventually left Albert Broccoli as sole producer of the franchise until his death in the 90's. Yet while the financial success of both films must be celebrated because they allowed the franchise to survive, their artistic success is another matter. The Spy Who Loved Me is a film that has always left me a bit underwhelmed. It's not a bad movie by any means, but rather it is relentlessly generic. While it touches all the bases, it does so by recycling things we've seen to better effect in earlier films. Not only is it a blatant remake of the earlier You Only Live Twice, but it also marks the arrival of the no-imagination-required female lead. From this point on the female opposite number served as an easy and uninspired way for the screenwriter's choice to introduce a female role to the movie. I believe the author's of the wonderful Bond reference Kiss Kiss Bang! Bang!, Alan Barnes and Marcus Hearn, described this movie best when they called it a greatest hits package. In the last analysis The Spy Who Loved Me is the center of the Bond movie bell curve - an average entry by which all others can be ranked. Lest this seem too harsh let me point out what should be obvious from my ongoing labor of love here. I still feel that average Bond is still far better than practically anything else out there, so the current subject of discussion is definitely worth a look but tends to be only sporadically rewatchable.
While it became commonplace for the filmmakers to throw out the plot of Fleming's novels and script an entirely different story around a series' title, The Spy Who Loved Me is the only one of the bunch for which they were required to do so. In selling the film rights to his novels, Fleming specified that the plot of this particular novel could not be used for the movie version. Fleming's novel was a complete departure for him. The book is narrated in the first person by the female lead and Bond doesn't even put in an appearance until the final third. In truth Fleming was probably hoping for a bit more critical acclaim as a serious author for this book, but when it wasn't forthcoming he again tried to downplay his serious intent as a writer to hide his disappointment. The demand that his version not reach the screen was probably just his way of ensuring that the screen version wouldn't have to be a reminder of that disappointment. Thus for our purposes here, we must once again rehash the plot to You Only Live Twice. The film starts with the capture of a British nuclear submarine by an as-of-yet-unseen means. A cut to the Commies in Russia informs us that a Russian sub has gone similarly missing. General Gogol, a recurring Russkie version of Bond's "M", puts his best agent on the case. His best agent turns out to be a woman, Anya Amasova - code name XXX (oh, brother!). Although I will raise objections later to the implication that she is the best agent in general, I will grudgingly admit that she might be a good choice for the job at hand here. Back in London we see the British putting their best agent - Bond of course - on the case of their missing sub.
Actually what ensues is not exactly an attempt to locate the missing subs from either end of the political spectrum. Rather various unsavory types have offered to sell the plans of a submarine tracking system to the highest bidder. Reasoning that the subs couldn't have been tracked and captured without such a device, Bond and Amasova both head off to make contact with those claiming to have the plans to the tracking system in the belief that it will provide a lead on the missing subs. It turns out that the tracking system plans have been stolen from Carl Stromberg, submarine thief and villain of the piece. Stromberg has gone with the shark tank to dispose of traitorous underlings instead of the piranha-filled pool and after using it to dispose of the one who stole the plans, he dispatches his goons, Jaws and Sandor, to dispose of those trying to sell the plans. The interaction between Bond, Amasova, the crooks trying to sell the sub tracker, and the assassins trying to eliminate everyone involved takes altogether too much screen time. Its ultimate purpose is simply to provide Bond and Amasova a roundabout lead on Stromberg, so the multiple contacts, the fights with both henchmen, and Amasova's ultimate double-cross of Bond could all have been pared back. Amasova's double-cross after they have both gotten hold of a copy of the plans is particularly unnecessary given the fact that they are immediately back working together on the orders of their superiors. The upshot finally comes in the form of a symbol of the Stromberg shipping lines that shows up in the copies of the tracking plans, and Bond and Amasova both head off to snoop on Stromberg himself.
Bond and Amasova pose as a husband and wife team of marine biologist and assistant and gain an audience with Stromberg. There's an eerie moment here when Bond spots what are probably the remains of Stromberg's treacherous underling in an aquarium. Immediately after Bond and Amasova leave Stromberg's aquatic lair, an attempt is made on their lives and they are confirmed in their suspicions that Stromberg is involved with the sub thefts. Stromberg has recently launched an enormous oil tanker called the Liparus of an unusual design that Bond and Amasova decide should be shadowed by submarine. This sub, however, is consequently spotted by the Liparus and captured in what apparently is the same manner as the sub in the teaser. Stromberg identifies Bond and Amasova and he is polite enough to explain his plan to use the stolen subs to them. Stromberg has ordered his flunkies to launch nuclear missiles at Moscow and New York in an effort to precipitate a nuclear exchange. Now as I've indicated, the villain's plan in You Only Live Twice was identical. The difference being that the villain there was working for the ChiComs who hoped to profit from the resulting devastation. Here Stromberg simply has an insane plan to escape the global carnage by constructing a city underwater. If all he wants to do is live underwater, then why doesn't he just move there and leave everyone else alone? Who's stopping him? It might have made a bit of sense had he espoused some kind of environmentalist wacko line about preventing mankind from destroying the oceans, but he doesn't even do that. He just claims mankind will destroy itself eventually so he might as well hurry things along.
For a man ruthless enough to kill millions by instigating a thermonuclear holocaust, Stromberg is surprisingly reluctant to kill the crews of the submarines that he has captured. I suppose it goes without saying that he is even indisposed to having Bond shot, and both these failures of nerve cause his scheme to unravel. After the lecherous Stromberg hightails it back to his lair with Amasova in tow, Bond inevitably breaks free of his guards and manages to release the submarine crews. This proves rather effortless in that guards are standing directly inside the cell doors on catwalks above the captured crews and are just waiting to be shot. I also have to ponder how long it’s been since those crews were taken prisoner. There's nothing in the cells but rows upon rows of benches. It must have been impossible to get any sleep, and I don't even want to think about how they went to the bathroom. It's would have been like being held prisoner in a high school gym. One thing I will give Stromberg; his control room is a whole heck of a lot better protected than Blofeld's was in You Only Live Twice. In one of the film's tensest sequences, Bond employs a nuclear missile's detonator to breach the armor protecting it. I still have to chuckle at the who-else-here-is-almost-dead moment in which the captain of the Liparus manages to tell Bond he's too late to stop the submarines just before expiring from his completely non-visible injuries. In any event, Bond and friends manage to destroy both submarines by ordering Stromberg's submarine crews to fire at each other. I'd still imagine though that those two thermonuclear blasts necessitated a lot of 'splaining on somebody's part.
Bond and the survivors leave the sinking Liparus and are subsequently ordered to torpedo Stromberg's hideout. Bond gets an hour delay from the sub's captain so that he can jet ski over to save Amasova before the sinking. Before freeing Amasova, Bond dispatches Stromberg in one of the franchises nastier comeuppances. Stromberg has some kind of gun rigged below his table and when Bond sits at the end across from him, he fires some kind of charge at Bond's chair. The missile is pretty slow moving, however, and Bond jumps clear. Bond then fires two shots down the muzzle of Stromberg's gun into what has to be Stromberg's groin. While Stromberg groans in agony, Bond fires several more into his chest as the coup de grace. Given that Stromberg has to be one of the series most decrepit villains, Bond's heartless dispatch of the guy makes for some pretty uncomfortable viewing. After an extremely anti-climactic run in with Stromberg's assassin Jaws, Bond finally locates Amasova and the two make their escape via Stromberg's escape pod. Just in case we had any lingering doubts about this being a complete rip-off of You Only Live Twice, they end the film in exactly the same way by having Bond and the female lead picked up at sea while they're smooching away.
One big problem with The Spy Who Loved Me stems from the fact that Karl Stromberg has to be one of the franchise's tamest villains. The filmmakers originally strove to make the rip-off nature of this film crystal clear by having You Only Live Twice's Blofeld return as the main villain. The legal problems surrounding the Blofeld character, however, eventually caused them to abandon that idea and just create the new character of Stromberg. Whether Blofeld would have improved things or not is questionable, but there's no doubt that Curt Jurgens as Stromberg is far too quiet and controlled to be interesting as a heavy. One odd thing I can never get out of my head when watching this film is how closely Jurgens resembles an Israeli prime minister. Just so I'm not misunderstood let me stress that this resemblance has nothing to do with ethnicity or politics. It's merely that it always seems to me that when I see an Israeli prime minister, he's inevitably a slightly stocky, middle-aged, and lightly accented man with white hair just as Jurgens is in this movie. Also, given the @*#& that the Israelis have to put up with everyday, I seldom have anything but the utmost respect for Israel's rulers. Consequently the fact that Jurgens bears a passing resemblance to Ariel Sharon does nothing but make it harder for me to accept him as the villain of the piece. Even setting this aside, however, Jurgens fails as a villain because he frankly just seems too elderly and infirm. Practically all his screen time is spent sitting in chairs of various kinds, and the effort put in arising from them seems to tax his strength. Perhaps the filmmakers would like to think that Jurgens' performance was given to get across the character's profound world-weariness and make his actions plausible. Rather than seeming world-weary, however, Jurgens just comes across as someone badly in need of a nap. Even his occasional instances of anger and irritation make him look crotchety rather than villainous. Particularly absurd is the traditional abduction of the female lead for purposes of immoral advances. What in the world does the aged Stromberg want with Amasova anyway? He doesn't even appear to have the energy to get through lunch without nodding off in his chair, much less the wherewithal to do you know what. As one final annoyance, Stromberg seems to be incapable of saying Bond's name properly. He's always referring to Bond as "Mr. Bund". I know he's got an accent and all but how difficult is it to say "Bond"?
Barbara Bach assays the iconic role of Anya Amasova here and while no one would claim the top spot in the Bond girl pantheon for her, I still think she acquits herself quite well. She's definitely the only one of these female secret agent characters to generate any romantic sparks with Bond. And while her performance is relatively staid in many respects, I'll try to give her the benefit of the doubt and attribute it to her mock Russian stoicism rather than her somewhat wooden acting style. It's too bad that Halle Berry didn't ape Ms. Bach's performance here and spare herself a considerable amount of embarrassment in her role as the laughable Jinx in the execrable Die Another Day. The problem with the female secret agent character stems from the fact that it is just not really all that plausible that a woman would be good at the job Bond does. Now I know we don't go into a Bond film with plausibility foremost in mind, but Bond after all is a bit of a commando. Much of his job consists of killing people in cold blood on the orders of his government. Is this something any society would really need or want to recruit women to do? At least to Ms. Bach's credit here, she remains appealingly feminine by not trying to pretend that she is either capable or willing to perform Bond's job as assassin. While she competently brandishes a small automatic and makes a brief and half-hearted attempt to prepare a judo chop, in general very little attempt is made to try and convince us that she has any really lethal abilities. It's quite mysterious in fact as to how she could possibly serve as the KGB's top agent in most any capacity. At the start of the film when she and Bond are trying to get a hold of plans for the submarine tracking device, I will admit that an attractive woman may have a better chance of charming the plans away from their seller than Bond does. There are certainly real world instances of seductive sirens capable of seducing secrets out of the enemy, but given the fact that Ms. Bach's portrayal in no way suggests that Amasova is some smoldering sex bomb I don't think that seduction is in her job description either. Given that she wears proper business attire and travels with a pair of goons to the pyramids early in the film, perhaps she's simply the KGB's most effective office manager.
The interaction between Bond and Amasova is far better here than in any other appearance of the fem-spy character. Particularly nice work is done by both Ms. Bach and Rog himself during Bond and Amasova's early meeting in a Cairo nightclub. While the subsequent games of one-upsmanship between Bond and Amasova become annoying and tiresome, here Ms. Bach seem genuinely warm and flirtatious in trying to get the upper hand by recalling facts about Bond to him. I like how she quite unintentionally goes too far in this and brings up a tragedy from Bond's past - resulting in a display of evident hurt on the part of Moore. Later after she and Bond fight back an attempt on their lives aboard a train, their subsequent intimacy seems far more plausible in context than usual and makes for a romantic moment despite the cheesy sax on the soundtrack. Just compare and contrast the shared moment together aboard the train here to Bond and Wai Lin's afterthought coupling aboard smoking wreckage in Tomorrow Never Dies to see why I'm so grateful for little romantic moments like this in the franchise. The film also introduces another source of melodrama in the form of a subplot concerning Amasova's former lover. During the film's teaser we saw Bond kill a pursuer while escaping an ambush. It turns out that the man Bond killed was another agent and Amasova's lover. Sadly, I feel that this subplot just didn't really work out very well in the last analysis. While Moore has a strong scene in explaining himself to Amasova, Ms. Bach is just too stiff to pull the confrontation off convincingly. I've already said that Amasova doesn't seem particularly deadly, so when she promises to kill Bond for revenge it just doesn't seem possible that she'd ever be able to get the drop on him. The whole thing devolves into unintentional giggles when the two are lowered together from helicopter to a waiting submarine. Bond is grinning up at her like an idiot trying to get her to loosen up I guess, and Amasova has that really tight-lipped expression you get on your face when you're desperately trying to keep from busting out laughing. The film just devotes too much time to spectacle and set pieces to do this subplot justice. Still, I am going to give credit for the effort here simply because an attempt at bringing character depth itself makes Amasova far more memorable than her subsequent two-dimensional clones.
The Spy Who Loved Me marks the initial appearance of the franchise's most unwelcome and ridiculous character. The enormous Richard Kiel dons a set of metal teeth to play Stromberg's assassin Jaws. If you'll allow me a six-degrees-of-separation type aside, I'll mention that my dad of all people met Richard Kiel briefly while the latter was stranded at the Des Moines (!?) airport. I bring it up because my dad said that Kiel was an extremely personable and friendly guy, and I think that says a lot given the fact that Kiel is so incapable of maintaining a low profile he probably still has to put up with gawking wherever he goes. He's definitely a guy that I hope found his moderate success lucrative and fulfilling. Still, even though it's not Mr. Kiel's fault, we have to face the fact that the character of Jaws is one of the series major miscues. There is no doubt that Kiel could have made a truly menacing strongman had the role been written straight. Jaws, however, is frustratingly and ludicrously indestructible. He's also apparently possessed of superhuman strength. The character Jaws in fact gives a graphic illustration of how important intangibles are to fostering suspense. In a meta- sense for instance, we really know that Bond - being the hero - is never really in any danger of not making it to the end of the picture. Still we can usually manage to forget this in our desire to vicariously thrill to Bond's escapades. When his foe is similarly immune to danger, however, this becomes impossible. No contest between the two seems any deadlier than the run-ins between Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam in an old Warner Brothers cartoon. The contests in fact quickly become tiresome because we become quickly aware that - given Jaws invincibility - each one will end with Bond using some goofy trick to momentarily incapacitate him. We see Jaws buried under a ton of rock and climb out unscathed. We see him smashed into a stone wall by a van reversing at full speed only to have him shake it off and lift the rear of the van off the ground. It's even hard to pin down the most ridiculous bit. Personally, I'd vote for the time that we see a bullet bouncing off his teeth (!), but the scene in which he kills a shark (!) with those same teeth is a close runner-up. The only positive thing that can be said about Jaws here is that he doesn't come as close to single-handedly sinking the entire picture as he does in the subsequent Moonraker.
Given that this film kicked off the period of over-the-top spectacle in the Bond series, I always am surprised on rewatching it to find how light it actually is on the action front. It's actually nearly Brosnan-esque in its reliance on gun battles and vehicle chases. I think it tends to be remembered as being more action packed than it is due to the fact that the opening teaser showcases one of the franchise’s most memorable stunts. Immediately after we see portions of the theft of the British submarine, we see Bond heading back to headquarters after being summoned by the Secret Service. Bond leaves a mountain top chalet on skis and is soon ambushed and pursued by a Russian hit team helmed by what we will later learn to be Amasova's lover. Bond eventually escapes the ambush by skiing over the edge of an enormously high cliff. The stunt itself is remarkable. The stuntman falls and falls for what truly seems like several minutes before finally opening his parachute and floating off to safety. Not only is the footage of the stunt beautifully shot, but the silence that accompanies the fall adds dramatically to the effect as well. The chase music cuts out just as the skier leaves the mountain and starts to fall and only restarts on a Bond theme as the Union Jack parachute opens. Unfortunately, even here I must admit to being a bit of a wet blanket because I've always felt the build up to the stunt was a bit weak. The series' problems with back projection are on glaring display with some very unconvincing attempts to make us believe that Moore is actually on the slopes himself. In addition, the chase on skis that proceeds the jump has always seemed a little too cursory for my tastes. There are some quick shots of men on skis and a few shots are squeezed off at Bond. Bond himself manages to slowly turn around and fire a projectile from some gimmicky ski pole he's carrying, but all these incidents end much to rapidly to build any suspense. It's feels as if the filmmakers were timing the teaser and had to bring it in under a set number of minutes. It also doesn't help that the action is accompanied by a very dated "disco Bond" score that's really only good for laughs all these years later. It's really a shame they didn't lavish a bit more care on the ski sequence itself in order to give the fantastically dangerous jump the lead in it deserved.
After the teaser nothing happens on the action front until Bond finds himself in Cairo trying to contact those selling plans to Stromberg's sub tracker. Bond goes to the home of a man named Fekkesh involved in the sale, but finds him gone. A woman in Fekkesh's home seems willing to put the moves on Bond but when he spots Stromberg's goon Sandor ready to gun him down he uses the woman to block the bullet! He chases Sandor to the building's roof and a hand-to-hand fight breaks out. One of Roger Moore's weaknesses in the role of Bond was always his tendency to look stiff in his fight scenes and his run in with Sandor suffers a great deal from this defect. The actor who plays Sandor, Milton Reid, is a squat well-muscled little guy whose height looks to be equal to his diameter. He may have the stuntman skills to look formidable under other circumstances but here he is forced to slow up to match Moore's lumbering pace, and the two of them look poorly co-ordinated to say the least. Moore's patented move whereby he grabs portions of the roof enclosure, pulls himself up, and launches a kick look particularly ineffectual. Sandor seems to have until the end of the film at least to dodge or prepare himself for that kick. Moore seems to have had several bad days during filming here because another fight later between Bond and a pair of Amasova's flunkies is just as lackadaisical if not more so. In the end what seems most interesting about this sequence is not the fighting itself, but Bond's total callousness. The woman Bond uses to block the bullet screams upon seeing Sandor holding a gun, but Bond lets her die anyway. It's not the least bit clear that the woman had anything to do with the attempt on Bond's life. The scream in fact makes it seem that she was totally taken aback by Sandor's presence. If so, Bond's use of her to save his own skin is one of the cruelest things he's ever done on screen. After the brawl between Sandor and Bond, Sandor finds himself holding on to Bond's tie in order to keep from falling off the roof. After Bond gets information from him, Bond chops the tie out of Sandor's hand so that he plunges to his death. I hope we aren't supposed to think that this cold-blooded killing is payback for the woman, because frankly James that was really your fault.
I've already discussed how tedious the appearances of Jaws become in this film. He engages in several tussles with Bond and the combination of his invincibility and Moore's stiffness assures that each one is ultimately a bore. A typical joke appears early in Cairo when Bond throws a punch and nearly breaks his hand on Jaws' teeth. Bond is forced to drop a ton of rock on the guy to slow him down. Next Bond and Amasova are accosted aboard a train by Jaws. Jaws throws Bond around before beginning to strangle him with a hand the size of a fielder's glove. Bond breaks a lamp and begins moving an exposed light bulb filament slowly towards Jaws' mouth. Even though Jaws has superhuman strength and all the time in the world to grab Bond's arm and make him drop the lamp, he instead stands stock still and lets Bond touch his teeth with the filament. I alluded to the fact way back in my Tomorrow Never Dies review that You Only Live Twice and its remakes all feature a totally anti-climactic fight between Bond and the number one henchman. The final confrontation with Jaws in Stromberg's aquatic lair is the worst of the lot. By this point the filmmakers have abandoned all pretense that Bond can injure Jaws in any way so they conveniently provide Bond with a convenient electro-magnet that he can use to pick up Jaws by his teeth and drop him in a nearby shark tank. Why one would need an electro-magnet in a room full of sharks remains one of the film's great mysteries.
No Bond greatest hits package would be complete without a retread of Goldfinger's gimmicky car chase. In this movie Bond is issued a squat, wedge-shaped Lotus Espirit fitted out with the usual array of gadgets. I've made my low opinion of vehicle chases clear again and again, but at least when Bond's car is tricked out there exists some surprise potential. Here Bond finds himself pursued by a variety of Stromberg's lackeys when he and Anya return from their visit to his ocean lair. First up is someone riding Fiona Volpe's old exploding sidecar sporting motorcycle from Thunderball. When the sidecar fails in taking Bond out, Jaws and a car full of goons step up to the plate. Some gray sludge spewed onto the pursuing car's windshield causes it to crash. Regrettably this makes for yet another demonstration of Jaws invulnerability after the car falls a jillion feet onto some old man's cottage and Jaws walks away unscathed. Next a machine gun armed helicopter takes off after Bond and he is only able to escape by driving the Lotus into the ocean. In what is unfortunately not one of the most implausible surprises in the series, the Lotus reconfigures itself into a submersible and motors away underwater. Actually, I'll give the filmmakers credit up to this point as the onshore chase unfolds crisply. Had they ended the bit with Bond sailing away to safety it would have been an inspired if faintly silly sequence. Unfortunately the chase is prolonged when Bond has to dispatch more of Stromberg's goons that show up underwater in mini-subs and sleds also left over from Thunderball! How many lethally armed assassins does Stromberg keep standing around on the payroll anyway? How many different forms of transportation does he keep gassed up and at the ready? The end is also marred when Bond drives out of the water onto a beach full of people and we are treated to the goofy double takes on the part of animals (a dog here) and drunks that show up periodically in the series to plague us with their idiocy.
After the car chase there remains only one really extended set piece and it takes place aboard Stromberg's oil tanker. No You Only Live Twice knock-off would be complete without the commando style raid on the villain's headquarters and here that raid is carried out by the crews of the captured submarines. All of these large-scale free-for-alls tend to be tedious, so it’s hard to really rank one as vastly better than another. They all consist in most part of a lot of people in conveniently color-coded jumpsuits emptying magazines at one another and bloodlessly meeting their makers. Yet while the gun battle here is woefully Michelle Yeoh free, it is one of the better ones in the franchise. Most of the battle's brunt seems to be borne by the British submarine crew and a couple of those crewmembers are given heroic and distinctive moments. In a scene that actually rivals the pre-credits jump in terms of memorability, Bond has to use the detonator from a nuclear missile to breach the walls of Stromberg's control room. The removal of the detonator from the missile itself is tensely touch and go. After it's out, Bond rides one of the ships observation cameras on its track to the wall of the control room. After arming the bomb, he casts off from the camera and attempts to ride the camera's track to safety. Bond only rolls a few yards away from the bomb and gets stuck in the track. Coming directly after the typically loud and noisy gun battle, this moment serves as graphic illustration of how less is often so much more in thrillers. The tense moments that feature Bond dangling hundreds of feet above the ship's deck while the bomb ticks down to zero right before his face provides immeasurably more excitement than the thousands of rounds of ammunition discharged in the film's preceding minutes.
In looking back at The Spy Who Loved Me, I think that the most succinct way for me to describe it is as a dress rehearsal. Coming after the rather ramshackle affair that was The Man With The Golden Gun, this film was a first attempt at the budget busting spectacle that would end up marking the best of the Moore era films. And yet while its epic scale puts Moore's minimalist and tedious initial outings to shame, it still doesn't quite come up to the scale of Moore's later films. While lavishly funded for the time, The Spy Who Loved Me features nothing in the way of set pieces that hadn't appeared in earlier outings outside of the spectacular initial parachute jump. This film also somewhat schizophrenically serves as a trial run for some of the truly buffoonish and juvenile material that would mar several of his later turns while simultaneously demanding he bring moments of seriousness to the role. Thus this movie just lacks anything in the way of a distinctive personality that would make it stand out from the rest of the series. The film's silliness is not redeemed by much in the way of unique stunt work and the film's more serious side is underdeveloped and character moments tend to fall flat. In a sense The Spy Who Loved Me is the Bond film equivalent of a sports bar and grill's hamburger platter. It is tasty and satisfying while experienced, but it remains essentially indistinguishable from others of its kind.
