Eyes Wide Shut, Part II

Continuing our look at For Your Eyes Only on page and screen.

“Risico” is lifted, more or less intact, as the film’s second act, with Topol, best known for his Oscar-nominated role as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, as Milos Columbo and Julian Glover, one of the candidates to replace Moore during his brinkmanship with producer Albert R. Broccoli, as Aris Kristatos. The setting is once again changed to Greece, with the Kristatos/Columbo rivalry given extra resonance by making them former comrades in the Resistance, and Lisl von Schraf (Cassandra Harris, the wife of future 007 Pierce Brosnan) is an ersatz countess from Liverpool. After a tryst with Bond, she is run down with a dune buggy by Locque, and once again it is this hireling who is killed instead, his teetering car coldly kicked off a precipice by the vengeful 007.

The material Maibaum and Wilson came up with to round out their script is the usual mixed bag, especially when they run out the clock with interminable chase sequences (recalling other, better Bond films), one of which, sadly, claimed the life of a stunt man. Most egregious is Kristatos’s protégé, wannabe Olympic skater Bibi Dahl—played by professional skater Lynn-Holly Johnson in a real stretch—who fruitlessly throws herself at 007, only accentuating the fact that he is more than twice her age. But their third act, in which Bond leads an Alistair MacLean-style ascent on Kristatos’s eyrie in a mountaintop monastery, is effective, with Columbo killing Kristatos after Bond warns Melina to forego revenge, and 007 destroying the ATAC before Gogol can obtain it.

Typifying the overdose of humor that had come to plague the series, the escape from Gonzalez’s villa near Madrid is played strictly for laughs, with Bond and Melina fleeing in her increasingly battered Citroen because his Lotus has been destroyed by the world’s dumbest anti-theft device: if tampered with, it explodes. After they do Kristatos’s work for him by salvaging and disarming the ATAC, he tries to kill the couple by towing them across a shark-infested reef in a scene taken from Fleming’s Live and Let Die. And, in yet another “cute” ending, Q sets up a congratulatory call from Margaret Thatcher (Janet Brown), only to have 007 put Havelock’s parrot, Max (which conveniently repeated Kristatos’s destination), on the line while the pair consummate their union.

Glen et alia followed For Your Eyes Only with Octopussy and A View to a Kill, both of which, in this writer’s opinion, rival Moonraker for the dubious honor of Worst Bond Movie Ever. A View to a Kill somehow lost the “From” in its presumed transition from page to screen, but in truth the truncated title and a partial Parisian setting are almost all the script took from Fleming’s story, in which Bond is pressed into service while passing through the city after a failed assignment on the Austro-Hungarian border. Acting more like a detective than a spy, Bond probes the murder of a motorcycle dispatch-rider, who has fallen victim to three apparent Russian agents with a cleverly concealed hideout in the forest, and 007 poses as another dispatch-rider to polish off the assassin.

This was the series swan song for Lois Maxwell (as Miss Moneypenny) and Moore, but standbys Llewelyn, composer John Barry—who provided his usual accomplished score and wrote the title song with rock group Duran Duran—and title designer Maurice Binder stuck around to ease the transition. Rogue KGB agent and psychotic Goldfinger-clone Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) plans to corner the microchip market by flooding Silicon Valley with earthquakes. Grace Jones is May Day, who parachutes off the Eiffel Tower after killing Bond’s local contact; ex-Avenger Patrick Macnee is his “sacrificial lamb” friend; and second-string Charlie’s Angel Tanya Roberts is the typically vapid ’80s Bond girl, while the climax involves a blimp atop the Golden Gate Bridge.

The remaining two stories in For Your Eyes Only had previously appeared elsewhere: “Quantum of Solace” in Cosmopolitan (May 1959) and “The Hildebrand Rarity” in Playboy (March 1960). The former—which, like “From a View to a Kill,” lent little more than its title to the recent Bond film starring Daniel Craig—is essentially the character study of a cuckolded British civil servant and his wife, told to Bond as an after-dinner anecdote by the colonial governor in Nassau. In the latter, rich but boorish American Milton Krest hosts 007 and a friend aboard his lavish yacht, the Wavekrest, and keeps his terrorized wife, Liz, in line with “the Corrector” (the yard-long barbed tail of a sting ray), only to be murdered by having the titular spined fish crammed into his mouth.

Timothy Dalton’s second and last Bond film, the first written specifically for him, Licence to Kill (previously, and better, titled Licence Revoked) has an ostensibly original screenplay, but Maibaum and Wilson pilfered various elements from the Fleming canon, including Krest. The story pits Bond against drug lord Franz Sanchez (an imposing Robert Davi), caught by the DEA—with 007 as an extremely active “observer”—and immediately sprung by a traitor on the very day Bond’s pal Felix Leiter (David Hedison, who had played the role sixteen years earlier) weds Della Churchill (Priscilla Barnes). Bond quits the Service to track Sanchez to the fictional Isthmus City after he kills Della and, in a Fleming sequence omitted from Hedison’s debut, Live and Let Die, maims Felix with a shark (“He disagreed with something that ate him”).

Krest (a suitably abrasive Anthony Zerbe) is a co-conspirator who is popped like a balloon in the Wavekrest’s decompression chamber (another Live and Let Die echo), while the Corrector is wielded by Sanchez upon his errant mistress, Lupe Lamora (Talisa Soto), the “bad girl” to Carey Lowell’s CIA pilot, Pam Bouvier. Barry’s absence is keenly felt, but Gladys Knight’s elephantine theme song goes down easier over Binder’s customarily inventive title sequence, this time with a photographic motif. The up-and-coming Benicio Del Toro is brutal henchman Dario; Pedro Armendariz, the son and namesake of Sean Connery’s From Russia with Love co-star, is President Hector Lopez; and, in an offbeat piece of stunt casting, singer Wayne Newton is televangelist Professor Joe Butcher, fronting for Sanchez.

The outgoing Dalton and Glen were joined by Maibaum and Binder (both of whom died in 1991, the former after working with Wilson on the James Bond Jr. TV series), not to mention Hedison, Robert Brown and Caroline Bliss (the latter-day M and Miss Moneypenny, respectively), leaving Llewelyn as the only visible link to the Connery era. Following a six-year hiatus—the longest to date—Eon’s new broom swept in a fifth Bond (Brosnan), a female M (Judi Dench), and a fresh crop of writers and directors. Brosnan’s four vehicles (GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day) lacked even a nominal derivation from Fleming’s work, which would not be visited again until Craig assumed the role in the 2006 Casino Royale.

Addendum: As with Diamonds Are Forever, which would normally have followed Moonraker, the next four books (Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice) fall under the purview of my Cinema Retro article on Blofeld, and will be covered there instead. But do join me back here in a month or so—barring further lifestyle-shredding hurricanes—when we wrap things up with the posthumously published The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy…and yes, I shall try to post on other subjects in the meanwhile. Bradley out.