Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 3
One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. The Bondathon continues.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Of the Roger Moore Bonds, this is my favourite and has been since I first saw it when I was 10. On a plot level it’s nothing more than a remake of You Only Live Twice (1967), but what elevates it above Moore’s first two entries in the series is the size of the production. This is a classic every penny of the budget is on the screen movie, from the building of the 007 Stage at Pinewood to accommodate “Int. Day. Supertanker Hold Plus Three Submarines”, to the exotic locations. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better, but for once it holds true here. Also, the widescreen Panavision frame makes a welcome return, there’s a kick-ass title song, and it’s all very 1977 Silver Jubilee Britain is best. There is something about Roger Moore’s Bond that needs this amount of scope in a way that Connery’s Bond was better suited to the intimacy of From Russia with Love (1963) than the Spy Who Loved Me trial run of You Only Live Twice (1967).
Burn After Reading (2008) *
The Coen brothers hate repeating themselves, and the chances of them following up the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men (2007) with another critic-pleasing, highly suspenseful, Academy-raiding thriller were extremely small. And so it proves. Instead the film is a callback to one of the Coen’s favourite subjects: idiots and the idiotic things they do, all set in the guise of a sort of spy thriller full of sort of intrigue set in sort of Washington DC. Superbly cast with actors who are enjoying themselves but not in an indulgent way, Burn After Reading is to me more like Tropic Thunder (2008): proper film comedy assembled by filmmakers who know what they are doing. Even though the film has at least a dozen principal performers with complex relationships between them, you are never left confused because each one of these characters and their relationships are properly set up. Writing has been perhaps one of the areas where the Coens haven’t received as much credit as they should, and it is the quality of the film literacy on display here that means this isn’t one of those “minor” Coen films at all. In fact, I fail to be convinced by this lesser and greater Coen film argument entirely, as if because Barton Fink (1991) won the Palme d’Or that makes it a better film than Intolerable Cruelty (2003), a film I liked a lot more than other people seemed to. If you like a director (or as is now the acknowledged case with the Coens directors) you are going to have to take their entire careers on board when it comes to a consideration of their talents.
Moonraker (1979)
And so, inspired by the success of Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), they decided to remake The Spy Who Loved Me in space. Although it can be argued that Bond has already been a bit science fictiony, this remains the only (thank God) full scale attempt to go out there. Even though Moonraker is a lot less fun than Spy, and has rather too much extremely poor comedy (double-taking pigeon, anyone?), it remains a terribly pleasurable watch. The French have a word for it and that word is jouissance, a pleasure that can be too much to bear and a concept that cannot successfully be translated into English. But as a way of coming to terms with a film that is both poor and great, often simultaneously, it’s the best that I can offer.
For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Characteristically, the Eon Production team know when they’ve gone too far in one direction, even though the previous film that’s caused all of the doubts has been wildly successful, as Moonraker was. And so For Your Eyes Only marks a welcome return to a more contained, Eurocentric Bond. A lot of the film is terrific, particularly the action scenes, but they and the film itself are weakened by Bill Conti’s terrible disco hangover score. Unusually, Bond doesn’t bed the young Lynn Holly Johnson (a rare instance in the series where the older man, younger woman thing became too creepy even for the filmmakers), but Carole Bouquet’s Melina is an entirely different proposition; in fact she may be the first proper post-feminist Bond heroine, who remains indifferent to Bond’s advances until the very end of the film after she has avenged the deaths of her parents, and who throughout the film uses a crossbow at key moments to save Bond’s life by dispatching some of his enemies. Melina is the first successful attempt to take on board a “stronger woman” role after two disappointing dry runs with Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) in Spy and Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles) in Moonraker, who were both promoted as “modern” Bond women, but were in the end fatally compromised.
Next week: Bond in the 80’s.