Thunderball

Thunderball is the fourth James Bond film and the one in which the series decides that bigger is the same as better. Terence Young, who directed Dr. No (1962) and From Russia with Love (1963), returns after sitting out Goldfinger (1964), and the poster promises the biggest Bond of all. The promise is kept. SPECTRE steals two atomic bombs, the world is held to ransom, and Bond is sent to the Bahamas to get them back. The film runs 130 minutes and has about a hundred minutes of story in it.

What it also has is Ken Adam. He gives SPECTRE a Paris boardroom with numbered chairs and a raised seat for the man at the top, and he gives Largo a house with a pool full of sharks and a hatch between the pool and the sea. Ted Moore shoots Nassau in colours so saturated the water looks dyed, and under the surface the light comes down in shafts and the divers cast shadows on white sand. John Barry’s score is the best thing in the film. On land the brass swaggers; when the divers go looking for the sunken bomber he slows everything to a swell that tells us this is grave business even when the pictures are only pretty.

Adolfo Celi plays Largo with an eyepatch and a heavy stillness, a man who has people fed to sharks and then goes back to his lunch. Luciana Paluzzi’s Fiona Volpe is better still: red-haired, amused, the first woman in the series who sleeps with Bond and does not change sides, and she tells him so in a scene that is the sharpest writing Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins manage. Claudine Auger’s Domino is photographed rather than directed, and given very little to do until late. Connery is handsome, unhurried and, for long stretches, visibly bored. He wakes up whenever Paluzzi is on screen.

The trouble is the water. Every set piece that happens under it happens at the speed of a man in flippers, and there are a great many of them. The closing battle puts dozens of frogmen in orange and black against each other with spearguns, and it is impressive as an exercise in organisation and dull as drama. We could not tell who was winning, or often who was who, and after a few minutes we stopped trying. We were bored, and then cross about being bored by something this expensive and this carefully made. Peter R. Hunt and Ernest Hosler cut the land scenes with the snap Hunt brought to the earlier films; underwater they resort to speeding up the footage, and it shows, with fists arriving before the arms behind them.

Then there is the shark pool. Bond is dropped into Largo’s pool and has to find the hatch before the sharks find him, and Young keeps the camera at the waterline so we see the fins above and the man below. The sharks are real, the cuts are quick, and for two minutes we forgot the film had been wasting our time. It is the one sequence where the water is a threat rather than a location.

Against the series’ own standard this is a step down. Goldfinger had one villain, one plan and no scene that did not push the story on; Thunderball has the plan and the hardware and then stops to admire itself. The health clinic opening, with Guy Doleman’s Count Lippe and Molly Peters’s nurse, is Young at his best, small and nasty and funny, and the film never quite finds that scale again. Anthony Mendleson dresses everyone beautifully, which is not nothing, but a well-cut dinner jacket is not a second act.

It carries a PG and it is a fine thing to have on in a warm room with a drink, where the colours look wonderful and nobody minds if you talk through the frogmen. Keep the remote to hand for the last half hour. Barry’s music will tell you when to look up again.