Roger Moore’s third Bond is the one where the formula settles into comfort: a KGB rival to flirt with, a giant with steel teeth, a car that swims. Ken Adam’s sets do most of the work and the plot is happy to let them.
A British nuclear submarine vanishes at sea, then a Soviet one, and somebody in Cairo is selling the microfilm that explains how. That is the whole plot of Lewis Gilbert’s film, Roger Moore’s third as James Bond, and it does not pretend otherwise. The story is a corridor between rooms, and the rooms are the point: a pyramid at night, a temple at Karnak, a dining room with a shark tank for a wall, a car that grows fins.
The pre-credits sequence is the famous one. Bond, on skis, is chased down an Austrian mountain by Soviet agents and goes straight off a cliff. John Glen holds the shot. The skis fall away, a small figure drops for longer than seems sensible, and only then does a parachute open, in Union Jack colours. We gasped, then laughed at ourselves, because the film had just told us in one shot what it was going to be: a stunt, followed by a joke about the stunt. Carly Simon’s theme, Nobody Does It Better, takes over, and then Bond is in Egypt.
Ken Adam’s sets carry the middle. Atlantis, the sea base of shipping magnate Karl Stromberg (Curd Jürgens), rises out of the water off Sardinia on legs like a spider’s, and inside it Stromberg eats alone at a long table with sharks swimming behind him. Jürgens plays him as a man bored by everything but fish, which mostly comes out as boredom. Claude Renoir shoots Egypt at dusk, the light show at the pyramids all orange stone and blue shadow, the columns at Karnak by torchlight. The set for the climax we will not describe, except to say it is large enough that the men firing guns in it look like they have lost their car.
Richard Maibaum and Christopher Wood’s script gives Bond an equal, on paper. Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach), KGB, has read his file and recites it back to him, then drugs him on a boat down the Nile and takes the microfilm. Bach delivers every line in the same flat tone, and the film keeps forgetting its own idea; by the second half she is tied up and waiting like everyone before her. What survives is the bickering. The two of them trudging out of the desert after their van dies, while Marvin Hamlisch quotes Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia theme, made us laugh out loud, and it is the film’s best joke because nobody on screen acknowledges it.
Then there is Jaws. Richard Kiel towers over everyone, has steel teeth, and first appears as a shape among the stones at the pyramids. At first we found him frightening the way a shark is: he does not speak and he does not stop. Then the film discovers he is funny, and he spends the rest of it tearing the roofs off vans and falling into things, a cartoon coyote in a suit. It is a PG, and that is about right.
Moore plays Bond as a man who finds all of this mildly diverting, and he is at his best when he goes cold: a straightened tie after a man goes off a Cairo roof, a raised eyebrow while Desmond Llewelyn’s Q demonstrates a tea tray that decapitates a dummy. The Cold War is an office rivalry here. Bernard Lee’s M and Walter Gotell’s General Anatol Gogol share a base in Egypt and behave like colleagues, while Geoffrey Keen’s Sir Frederick Gray fusses.
Gilbert had directed You Only Live Twice ten years earlier, and this is the same plot with submarines in place of spacecraft. What it has is confidence, money spent where you can see it, and Hamlisch’s disco reworking of the Bond theme, which dates it to the week and which we rather like. At 125 minutes it is long; the final shootout between men in coloured jumpsuits went on until we checked the time.
See it on the largest screen in the house. Adam built for one, and on a small screen the climax looks like what it is, a big room full of extras.
