As with the aftermath of the Peter Hunt/George Lazenby interregnum, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the period following Moonraker marked another new decade-long phase in 007’s screen career. The old guard of directors (Terence Young, Guy Hamilton, and Lewis Gilbert) was gone, and John Glen—promoted, like Hunt, from editor—helmed a quintet of films spanning the end of Roger Moore’s tenure as Bond and the entirety of Timothy Dalton’s. Each was co-written by series veteran Richard Maibaum and producer Michael G. Wilson, and each, with the supply of Ian Fleming’s novels now exhausted, took its title and/or some of its plot from one or more of his short stories, alternating between the collections For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy.
In retrospect, Fleming’s For Your Eyes Only seems like a breather in between creating the titular villains of Doctor No and Goldfinger and introducing Bond’s arch-enemy, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in Thunderball. The eponymous story and two of the other four, “Risico” and “From a View to a Kill,” grew out of an abortive attempt to create a CBS series following their adaptation of 007’s debut, Casino Royale, on Climax!; never one to waste material, Fleming turned his outlines into short stories. Instead of dwelling on the disquieting prospect of a weekly series (“Next week, on a very special episode of James Bond, Moneypenny faces a difficult decision…”), let us examine the first film that resulted, which welded together “For Your Eyes Only” and “Risico” under the former title.
The teaser is best passed over as rapidly as possible: while visiting the grave of his wife, Tracy, Bond is ostensibly summoned to headquarters, but the pilot of the helicopter that picks him up is killed, and control assumed, by a joystick-operating figure. Patently Blofeld, but unidentified for legal reasons, the villain is in a wheelchair and neck brace, presumably from injuries suffered at the end of OHMSS, and holds his trademark white cat, although his face is not shown. Bond, of course, gets the upper hand by doing an EVA to replace the doomed pilot and pulling the plug on Blofeld’s control; 007 snags the wheelchair with a landing skid and, after offering to “do a deal” by buying him a stainless-steel delicatessen (!), Blofeld is ingloriously dumped into a smokestack.
I recuse myself from any objective critical assessment of Sheena Easton’s title tune, written by Bill Conti and Mick Leeson; the film was released the year Madame BOF and I started dating, and for obvious reasons that soon became our song, in which capacity it has never officially been supplanted after thirty years. Easton (my hometown’s namesake, no less) was the first performer shown singing a 007 theme song, but Conti’s otherwise forgettable score matches Alan Hume’s sometimes grotty photography and Glen’s perfunctory work, outside of the action sequences that made his rep as an editor and second-unit director. Yet while there are many things wrong with For Your Eyes Only, a lack of fidelity to its source material is surprisingly not one of them.
In a deliberate departure from the more lucrative excesses of Moonraker, Maibaum and Wilson not only hewed closely to Fleming’s unrelated stories, but also ingeniously linked them. In “For Your Eyes Only,” Timothy Havelock and his wife are gunned down on their Jamaican estate by a Cuban, Gonzalez; when M, who was at their wedding, sends 007 to administer “rough justice” (which, like “man’s work,” was both a phrase from the story and an early title) to von Hammerstein, Gonzalez’s ex-Gestapo employer, he coincidentally meets the Havelocks’ daughter, Judy, on the same mission. Bond lets Judy kill von Hammerstein with a bow and arrow as he is diving into a lake in Vermont, and after 007 wipes out his underlings (including Gonzalez), they flee together.
Aside from cosmetic details such as the settings (now a boat in Greece and a pool in Spain) and the heroine’s weapon and name (now the crossbow-wielding Melina, played by the aggressively wooden French actress Carole Bouquet), the primary changes are to the identity and motives of her target. In the story, von Hammerstein is the head of counterintelligence for the soon-to-fall Batista regime, and wanted to use the Havelocks’ home as a refuge, whereas in the film, Melina kills Gonzalez (Stefan Kalipha), whom she and Bond see being paid off. Using the Identigraph, a high-tech version of a gizmo Fleming depicted in Goldfinger, 007 and Q (Desmond Llewelyn) determine that the courier is psycho-killer escaped con Emil Leopold Locque (Michael Gothard).
Providing the film with its requisite MacGuffin, marine archaeologist Havelock (Jack Hedley) is killed before he can salvage the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator (ATAC) aboard the sunken St. Georges, a clandestine British spy ship from a long line of doomed vessels at the start of 007 films. Why Gonzalez leaves Melina, whom he has just delivered in his armed seaplane, alive to identify him is anybody’s guess, but the hunt for his employer leads Bond—and the scenarists—into “Risico,” albeit indirectly. Said employer is an intermediary for our Soviet friend General Gogol (Walter Gotell), introduced in The Spy Who Loved Me, who could use the ATAC (clearly a kissing cousin of the Lektor in From Russia with Love) to attack England with its own missiles.
In “Risico,” Bond is sent to Italy to stem the tide of heroin into England (with a nod to a similar mission at the start of Goldfinger) and told to contact Kristatos, a smuggler working as a double agent for the U.S. Narcotics Bureau. Kristatos in turn fingers Enrico Colombo, “The Dove,” and says that he would like 007 to eliminate Colombo, who heads the heroin-smuggling organization. Colombo is, in fact, the padrone of the very restaurant where Bond and Kristatos are dining, and tapes their conversation with a hidden microphone; he then fakes an angry confrontation with his Austrian companion, Lisl Baum, as a way of maneuvering Bond into her company, and she lures him into a trap, whereby 007 is knocked out by Colombo’s minions and awakens aboard his ship.
But, as W.S. Gilbert would say, things are seldom what they seem, and Colombo persuades Bond that Kristatos is the real villain, also confirming the Prime Minister’s theory that the heroin is “an instrument of psychological warfare” backed by the Russians. Much of what Kristatos told Bond about Colombo actually applied to himself, with the deception giving him an opportunity both to deflect attention from his own operations and to destroy a potential competitor. Colombo proves his point by bringing Bond along during an assault on Kristatos’s own ship, from which his men are unloading a shipment of rolls of newsprint filled with raw opium, and after the battle, plus an explosion in the warehouse, Colombo prevails, while 007 shoots the fleeing Kristatos in his car.
To be continued.
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