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Roger Moore takes aim in this most low-key of his adventures - and one of his best |
Director: John Glen
Cast: Roger Moore (James Bond), Carole Bouquet (Melina
Havelock), Topol (Milos Columbo), Julian Glover (Aristotle Kristatos),
Lynn-Holly Johnson (Bibi Dahl), Michael Gothard (Emile Leopold Locque), Cassandra
Harris (Lisl van Schlaf), John Wyman (Erich Kriegler), Desmond Llewelyn (Q),
Jill Bennett (Jacoba Brink), James Villiers (Bill Tanner), Geoffrey Keen
(Minister of Defence), Walter Gotell (General Gogol), Lois Maxwell (Miss
Moneypenny), Jack Hedley (Sir Timothy Havelock)
Where could Bond go after he went to space in Moonraker? Another planet? The future?
The producers of Bond decided they couldn’t top that – probably wisely – so for
Bond’s next outing they went back to low-key basics. For Your Eyes Only Bond would find himself in an old-school
Cold-war game of cross and counter-cross, scrambling for the Russians for
ownership of what looks like a cross between a typewriter and child’s cash till
toy.
That toy is the ATAC (though it might as well be called
MCGUFFIN) a ministry of defence system used to co-ordinate nuclear subs or some
such. When the ship it’s on sinks somewhere off the coast of Greece, MI6 and
the KGB swing into gear to be the first claim it from the Ocean depths. So Bond
is off to Greece to investigate, not knowing who to trust: should it be MI6
contact and shipping magnet Kristatos (Julian Glover) or playboy smuggler and
former resistance man Columbo (Topol)? And how will he deal with Melina
Havelock (Carole Bouquet), the long-haired, half-Greek archer intent on revenge
on whoever ordered her parents killed while they (without her knowledge)
searched for the ATAC? Either way it will involve chases, deadly winter sports,
flirtatious teenage ice skaters and a death defying climb up to a monastery at
the top of a mountain.
For Your Eyes Only
is one of those quiet gems of Bond movies that, because it is about something
quite small scale and quiet compared to the films it precedes often gets
overlooked. It’s certainly the point where Moore should have stopped making the
films – when your turning down the advances of someone because she’s too young
(as he does ice skater Bibi) you know it’s time to go – and to be honest Moore
was flagging already here, clearly too old for the action and certainly far too
old for Carole Bouquet, who looks like she could have him for breakfast (she
struggles to muster much sexual interest in him). But it doesn’t really matter
because this is an old-school bit of spy cool, mixed with some decent but
grounded fights and chases and shot with a loving eye for Switzerland and
Greece (with plenty of clichéd visuals and sound cues thrown in from both as
you would expect).
The producers wanted to shy away from the gadget filled
antics of the previous films. As if to make the point, Bond’s car is destroyed
almost immediately, forcing him to make a getaway at one point in a bashed up
Citroen 2CV. The long sequence in the film where Bond is chased around a ski
resort – which takes in cross-country skiing, a ski jump, a toboggan and
several other winter sports is remarkable for nary a gadget in sight, with Bond
relying on his wits and native skill with skis. Even when ascending the
mountain at the film’s end, he uses nothing more than standard climbing
equipment, putting his trust in ropes and hooks. It’s possibly the least tech
heavy Bond film since Doctor No.
There isn’t even a novelty watch and no humorous Q briefing on the gadgets. The
only visit to Q’s lab is to use a cumbersome facial recognition system, that
hilariously uses computer disks the size of stone slabs loaded into something
that today resembles a dishwasher.
Other than that Bond is on his own, and it’s fairly neat to
see him go about an investigation and follow a trail – even if Bond is, as
usual, a hopeless undercover agent who largely relies on waiting to see who
tries to kill him first. The villains, as always oblige, spending most of the
film attempting to off Bond for all sorts of confused ill-defined reasons.
Perhaps it has something to do with our main villain – the rather low-key
Julian Glover, playing possibly the least colourful Bond villain ever, a guy
who just wants to sell the ATAC for some cold hard cash – using so many cut
outs for his operations, speechless goons (including an early appearance from
Charles Dance) and East German skiing champions who seem motivated to kill Bond
purely for larks and the evilz.
The first half of the film though is huge fun, watching Bond
blunder around the ski resort dodging hits, fighting people, punching out butch
hockey players and the like that it hardly matters that most of the plot is
pretty inconsequential. When Bond finally stops mucking around in Switzerland
and heads to Greece the ATAC is found in about 5 minutes flat (Havelock
helpfully left a map with the downed boat coloured in on it, making his
daughter’s ability to translate his cryptic notes pretty much useless), while
the villain immediately takes this chance to comprehensively unmask himself.
After a further elaborately sadistic attempt to off Bond
involving dragging him across coral in shark infested waters (sharks are always
such deadly threats in Bond films), Bond unites with Topol to storm the castle
in an actually pretty gripping and vertigo inducing climb sequence, another
triumph of John Glen’s mastery of the action sequence. It’s a nice touch as
well to introduce the “guest star” of the film not as the antagonist but as a
protagonist ally, a neat twist that must have come as quite a shock back in the
day. Topol plays his role with realish, cracking nuts, gags and heads with
equal glee.
The film also heads into some dark places. For all his
charm, gallantry and debonair wit, Moore does his meanest thing in years here
when he kicks a heavy’s teetering car off a cliff. But that’s a fair repayment
for the brutal running over of his mid-film squeeze (played by Pierce Brosnan’s
real life late wife Cassandra Harris) earlier on by the same heavy. The early
murder of the Havelock’s is surprisingly graphic (and also gives a great
reaction shot for Carole Bouquet as she turns and looks back as the plane
carrying her parent’s murderers jets away, her eyes screaming “I shall have my
revenge!”) and Carole Bouquet’s Melina is determined figure, who does more than
her fair share of the action.
Of course the film can’t endorse too much her need for
revenge. “That’s not the way” Bond, like a disapproval uncle, rather prissily
tells her several times. Which is a bit rich coming from a man who opens the
film by dropping his wife’s murderer down a factory chimney shaft. That opening
sequence by the way is a joy, a neat call back to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (whenever Bond went serious, it
referenced Bond’s status as a widower) as well as a the dispatching of a
it-could-be-anyone bald, scared, cackling villain with a white cat who makes an
ill-advised attempt to kill Bond with a remote controlled helicopter (the film
is so anti-Gadgets, only the baddies seem to use them and they don’t even work
for them). It’s a neat “fuck you” to Kevin McCloy, at that time in a feud with
the producers over the rights to Bond who had refused to allow them to use
Blofield or Spectre again in the films. Keen to show they didn’t need Blofield,
the producers introduced him in all but name to ignominiously kill him off, his
final pathetic words a hilariously meaningless offer to buy Bond a
“delicatessen in stainless steel” if only Bond would let him go.
FYEO is a
crackingly old-fashioned Bond film that, despite being more grounded, has some
great action sequences and a host of actors having a good time. Carole Bouquet
is one of Moore’s best Bond girls and Moore himself certainly should have
stopped here, this film throwing together one of his best mixes of light
comedy, moral uprightedness, playfulness mixed with a dash of cruelty. John
Glen did such a good job assembling this one he directed the next four films.
It’s not got the smash-and-grab of The
Spy Who Loved Me, but it’s an excellent action adventure.
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