Thinking they couldn't go bigger, they chose to go smaller, but at the same time brought back some of the elements of earlier Bond films that had perhaps been lost along the way: the Cold War, baddys who didn't want to take over the world, and, of course, henchmannys that aren't Jaws.
Mew, I'm not sure that last one wasn't a terrible mistaik.
The result was For Your Eyes Only, the fifth of Roger Moore's seven expensive luxury James Bond films.
It starts with Bond putting flowers on the grave of Teresa Bond. The gravestone says
"TERESA BOND 1943 - 1969 Beloved Wife of JAMES BOND We have all the time in the World"
which, apart from the irregular capitalisation which suggests a cat was in charge of the engraving, all but insists that the James Bond of On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the same as the current James Bond, despite the former being played by George Lazenby and the latter by Roger Moore. Unless, that is, the new James Bond is putting flowers on the grave of another manny's wife as part of an elaborate, decades-spanning ruse. Hmm, no, I don't think this proves anything conclusively one way or the other, mew. Also, a full third of the gravestone is taken up with being sarcastic.
A helicopter arrives and Bond gets on it. As it flies away the camera cuts to...
This immediately makes this the most expensive and luxury James Bond film since we last saw Number One in Diamonds are Forever. As usual, he has a new Blofeld with him, who is a bald (classic choice there, Number One!) manny in a wheelchair with a lot of controls in front of him. He uses the controls to electric the helicopter driver and the helicopter starts to crash, but then it turns out that Blofeld has the helicopter under remote control.
Blofeld flies Bond around for a bit while taunting him. Bond gets out of the helicopter and climbs along the outside. He spots Blofeld and Number One sitting on a roof. Bond gets in the driver's seat and unplugs Blofeld's remote control. Number One hisses, because he has realised that Bond is about to turn the tables on this Blofeld so soon he is going to have to start looking for another one. Bond gets control of the helicopter and Number One does a mew. He jumps out of Blofeld's lap and, sadly, that is the last we see of him in this film.
Bond flies the helicopter to pick up Blofeld and his wheelchair. In his panic at being captured, Blofeld improvises a very strange poem:
"Mr Bond! Mr Bond!We can do a deal.I'll buy you a delicatessenIn stainless steel!"
Bond drops Blofeld down a very long, tall chimney (long chimney is long!) and then it cuts to the opening titles.
The title sequence is unusual in that we can see one of the ubiquitous nudey ladies is actually singing the song. Other than that it is pretty standard for the era - there seems to be an underwater theme to it, which if we are lucky means that this will be as expensive and luxury as The Spy Who Loved Me. Or if we are unlucky then it will only be as expensive and luxury as Thunderball.
This would seem to be borne out by the first scenes after the titles, which start with the camera rising out of the sea to show a ship. Some mannys are catching lots of nomable fish, meanwhile inside the ship some other mannys are doing the far less interesting job of secret spy stuff.
The mannys doing the fishing accidentally catch a bomb (silly mannys! A cat would never mistaik a bomb for tasty fish, mew) which explodes and sinks the ship. We might have expected this, seeing as they were British mannys doing spy things but neither Bond nor any other of our regular characters were on board.
The Minister of Defence is visited by the First Sea Lord (played by Graham "Soldeed" Crowden), who has come to tell him how many Nimons electronic surveillance ships they have lost today: one, called the St Georges, which by the law of conservation of narrative details was most probably the one we saw sink in the previous scene. He is accompanied by a Vice Admiral, played by Noel "Charles Grover from Invasion of the Dinosaurs" Johnson, and since they both played baddys in Doctor Who we have to suspect that they are secretly up to no good in this film too.
When last we saw Colonel Preston he was in charge of the British soldiers who were held captive in Colditz castle. Since the war he has moved to Greece to become an archaeologist which, as the film Pimpernel Smith made clear, gives perfect cover for espionage. But somebody has obviously found out his secret, because they shoot him from a plane and then fly away, leaving his daughter Melina (Carole Bouquet) and his parrot Max as surviving witnesses. They don't say how many days he was away from retirement, but I'm guessing it wasn't many.
Bond arrives for his briefing in M's office, where he meets the Minister and the Chief of Staff (as played by James Villiers, an actor so posh that he only rarely condescended to play anybody less important than a lord). They already know who killed Colonel Preston, a hitmanny called Gonzales. Bond's mission is to find out who hired Gonzales.
The Chief gives Bond a folder which says "FOR YOUR EYES ONLY" on the cover. It probably contains the script, lol.
Bond drives to Gonzales's house in an inconspicuously fancy car and then spies on him for a bit. Bond doing actual spy stuff? Well it has to happen sometimes, mew. He sees Gonzales get a suitcase full of moneys from a manny, which may as well be conclusive proof by the standard of most clues Bond normally has to go on.
Bond gets captured, but then another manny shoots Gonzales and he goes
A car chase ensues, with Bond using their car's small size to his advantage over the normal-sized cars of their pursuers. This chase manages to be both exciting while also containing moments played for laughs, and the last car full of baddys ends up stuck in a tree, lol.
Like Bond, Melina has a mission to find the manny who paid Gonzales to kill Colonel Preston, only she has given herself the mission, for revenge. Bond tells her:
"The Chinese have a saying: before setting out on revenge, you first dig two graves."
The Scottish have a similar saying: Before setting out for Perth, you first make two sandwiches.
Bond visits Q to see if he can help him identify the manny he saw paying Gonzales, by using technology. This scene with Q is an outright komedy scene, with Q being portrayed as an absent-minded professor who, while he may have invented all these gadgets, can't actually use them properly without Bond's assistance.
But after some silliness along the way they are able to identify the manny as Emile Locque, a known baddy. Bond sets out to find him. which naturally means going on a skiing holiday. There Bond makes contact with Luigi Ferrara, whose job it is to get killed off in a few scenes' time. Ferrara introduces Bond to Kristatos, played by Julian "Scaroth" Glover, another former Doctor Who baddy who will turn out to be the baddy here as well. One does not simply get Julian Glover in to not be the baddy, even Blakes 7 managed that.
Kristatos pretends to be friendly and helpful to Bond, telling him Locque W-words for Columbo. On the face of it this seems implausible at best, since Columbo is an American police lieutenant and not a Bond villain, but it turns out he does not mean that Columbo.
As they say goodbye Kristatos gives Bond a manly handshake, which is surely a bit racy for 1981. Ferrara also wants a manly handshake but Kristatos evidently isn't into threesomes since he turns away from and ignores Ferrara instead.
Bond turns down an offer of naughtiness from Bibi Dahl, Kristatos's ice-skating "protégé", which might be because Bibi is on the young side even for Bond, or (since that doesn't always stop him) it could be because he only just recently had a manly handshake with Kristatos. She tries kiffing him anyway, but Bond is wise to that old game, having used it himself many a time. They do go skiing together, and while doing that they spot Erich Kriegler, played by John Wyman who was the fake Cancer in Assassin.
Here the twist is that he actually is an assassin, and he shoots at Bond. Bond loses his gun, so he has to escape from Kriegler and his henchmannys on his skis. Locque himself joins the chase, in case it wasn't obvious enough that Kriegler was on his side. This is another great chase sequence, which again mixes the dramatic with the comedic - the latter mainly involves innocent bystanders falling over on their skis, but we also see a manny getting a slapstick cake full in the face, and the blink-and-you'll-miss-it final appearance of Double-Take Manny.
They decided to get him back but not Jaws? Mew!
Bond finds that Ferrara has been killed and a dove badge placed in his paw. This is supposed to be the symbol of Columbo which, very conveniently, the baddys have all started wearing ever since Kristatos told Bond that Columbo was the baddy.
Bond hasn't been to a casino for a while, so he goes there to play Baccarat. Also to meet Kristatos again, to get more manly handshakes clues about Columbo. Columbo is also present, played by Topol "only Dr Hans Zarkov, formerly of NASA" Topol. He has been listening to Bond and Kristatos's dialogue.
No more manly handshakes for Kristatos, next thing we know Bond is after some naughtiness with "Countess Lisl" who he spied arguing with Columbo. The next morning they are walking on the beach when Locque and his henchmannys turn up and attack them. Locque runs over Lisl who goes
Oops, wrong picture!
Columbo tells Bond that Kristatos is really the baddy (what a twist!) who is secretly W-wording for Russia - the biggest baddys of all (except when they aren't). Columbo takes Bond with him to see what Kristatos's evil plan is. This immediately turns into a big fight between Columbo's mannys and Locque's mannys.
Locque tries to blow them all up with a bomb, so Bond chases him and makes Locque crash his car. The car ends up at the edge of a cliff, and before Locque can even say "hang on a minute lads, I've got a great idea" Bond helps push the car the rest of the way off.
"He had no head for heights."
Bond quips, though best not think about that one too hard or you might notice that it doesn't make sense.
Bond visits Melina on her ship and he meets Max. They go looking for the wreck of the St Georges.
They know they have found it when they see a very convenient sign telling them.
Bond wants to go inside in order to stop any secret intelligence that might have been left on board from falling into Kristatos's paws, because then he might give it to his Russian friends. They find the ATAC machine is there, which is a top secret coding machine of the kind that Blake was always trying to steal from the Federation so we know it must be important. Also "ATAC" sounds a bit like "Orac".
They are just in time because the baddys have also sent mannys to try and steal it and they have a fight with Bond. The slow-motion nature of underwater fight scenes mean they are never as exciting as the filmmakers want them to be, but they have obviously learned a lot since the days of Thunderball because these are much better than they used to be in the '60s, with an emphasis on making the baddys visually distinctive so that we can always tell which side is which.
Bond and Melina get away with the ATAC machine, but as soon as they get back to the ship they are captured by Kristatos and Kriegler. They are thrown into the water where Kristatos hopes that sharks will nom them, but obviously they escape and Kristatos is too lazy to check, saying
"Ah, the sharks have them. Make for port."
It becomes clear to us viewers that Kristatos and Kriegler do not trust each other, and Kristatos will not let Kriegler take the machine to Russia until after he has ben paid for it. They agree a neutral place where they will exchange the ATAC for the moneys. But it turns out that we weren't the only ones that saw and heard their plan - Max the parrot also heard it, and he tells Bond and Melina that the baddys will be taking the
"ATAC to St Cyrils."
Max would later be recruited by British Intelligence and we will see him again when he returns in a later Bond film. Just the one so far, sadly, but there is still time for him to get his own spinoff since he is clearly one of MI7's more competent agents.
At St Cyrils, Bond goes to a church where he meets Q disguised as a priest. This is only an excuse for a weak joke:
"Forgive me father for I have sinned.""That's putting it mildly, Double-Oh Seven."
It turns out that this is the wrong St Cyrils. Bond decides that Columbo will be of more help than Q in finding the right one.
Columbo takes them to the St Cyrils that would be the most cinematic location for the film's big climax - he's no fool is this Columbo, perhaps he takes after his namesake?
Bond climbs up the mountain (why is he climbing the mountain?) to get into a fight with Kristatos's henchmannys - one of whom is Ferguson from Smiley's People, the traitor! They try to push him off the mountain but he stays on using a cunning arrangement of ropes and pulleys. Bond is followed up the mountain by Melina, Columbo and some of Columbo's own henchmannys.
They try to be stealthy but inevitably this turns into a big fight. Bond fights with Kriegler until the baddy falls off the mountain. But with General Gogol about to arrive to collect the ATAC from Kristatos, Bond doesn't even have time to make a quip at Kriegler's demise. Or maybe this shows Bond's level of disdain for Kriegler was such that he didn't even consider him worthy of a quip - after all, he was hardly a henchmanny of the same stature as Jaws, was he? Mew.
Kristatos and Columbo have a fight while Bond nicks off with the ATAC. Melina is about to shoot Kristatos when Bond tells her that killing for revenge is not the answer she really wants. This ties back to the way the film opened with Bond at Tracy's grave. He got his revenge on Blofeld by tipping him down a chimney, but he knows that it wasn't the end of the story for him because the film didn't end there and he still had to do a whole other mission afterwards. Melina decides to shoot Kristatos anyway, but then Columbo gets there first when he throws a knife at Kristatos and Kristatos goes
General Gogol arrives and wants Bond to give him the ATAC machine, but Bond smashes it instead, saying
"That's detente, comrade. You don't have it. I don't have it."
Knowing the embarrassment that Bond will shortly cause to the British Prime Minister will easily outweigh any advantages he might get from killing Bond now, Gogol just laughs and goes back to his helicopter. Also, Gogol is by now an established regular character in these films, so killing Bond would be bad for his chances of coming back for the next one.
For the now traditional final komedy scene, Q telephones Bond just as Bond is about to get up to naughtiness with Melina. She says
"For your eyes only, darling."
Clang! Naughty Melina - dropping the title as well as her clothes.
They leave the telephone with Max, so it is Max that ends up speaking to the Prime Minister. For some reason Q, the Minister and the Chief of Staff all mistaik Max for Bond and so they do not stop this from happening. Although another theory might be that they all well knew this was Max and did it on purpose to troll Mrs Thatcher, lol.
For Your Eyes Only has many great moments, including Roger Moore's only encounter with Number One, but somehow the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The relatively low rating that Expensive Luxury Cat gives it should not be taken as a judgement that this film is bad, only that there are several other expensive luxury James Bond films that do it better... and not just The Spy Who Loved Me, lol!
Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Expensive but not Luxury
