Having brought back SECTRE Number One for 1981's For Your Eyes Only, the makers of the expensive luxury James Bond films knew they had to go the extra mile for their next film, the sixth of Roger Moore's seven expensive luxury James Bond films, 1983's Octopussy.
Like with "Pussy Galore" before it, the name "Octopussy" immediately conjures up, in the mind of the viewer, the image of many cats. And, as we all know, the only thing that is better than one cat is lots of cats.
It starts with Bond already doing a mission. He disguises himself as a manny with a moustache, which succeeds in fooling the baddy soldiers right up until he meets the real manny with a moustache. Bond gets captured while he is planting a bomb, which means he can't blow up the place he was trying to blow up, but he very quickly gets rescued by his friend when the soldiers that captured Bond can't help perving over her - naughty baddys!
Bond escapes in a tiny plane and the baddys shoot a missile at him. The missile chases Bond for a bit until Bond flies his plane into the place he was trying to blow up earlier on, and the missile blows it up for him.
Bond's plane starts to run out of petrol, so he lands and drives it into a petrol station where he says
"Fill her up, please."
with a big Roger Moore grin on his face. This is a classic opening scene - a bit of action, a bit of naughtiness, and end on a lol. Cue titles.
The title sequence is a return to the classic nudey-ladies-and-aquariums after For Your Eyes Only's slight variation on the theme. The song promises us "an all-time high" though we will be the judges of that, thank you very much. I mean, For Your Eyes Only had a cat in its pre-titles sequence, while this one didn't, which means that so far this film is behind on points. But it is called Octopussy, so let's not write it off just yet.
After the title sequence it cuts to a circus. Presumably not the circus that Jaws fell on at the start of Moonraker, or did they get the pre-titles sequences for these two films mixed up? A clown runs away and gets chased by another manny with a knife. Wow, he must really have Coulrophobia. The clown keeps unintentionally giving himself away by leaving his hat for the pursuing manny to find, or his balloon bursting. Or perhaps the clown is just such a professional that he can't help it?
It turns out there are actually two mannys chasing the clown, and they are twins. They throw their knives at the clown, and one of them gets him, but he survives long enough to burst into the British Embassy and die dramatically.
The British Ambassador is played by Patrick "Hobson from The Moonbase" Barr, and he picks up a fancy egg that the clown drops.
In London, Bond tries to be smoove with both Miss Moneypenny and her new assistant Miss Smallbone. This is a gently comic scene where the joke is on Bond, as Miss Moneypenny is wise to his ways - she should be, after six thirteen films.
Bond meets the new M (Robert Brown) and the old Minister (Geoffrey Keen) for his briefing, along with art expert Jim Fanning (Douglas "Professor Van Dusen" Wilmer). M has the fancy egg from the previous scene, which is a fake of a real fancy egg that is about to be auctioned on behalf of a mysterious seller, and so M and the Minister want to know who the seller is in case it turns out to be the film's baddy.
General Gogol (still played by series regular Walter "Chief Constable Cullen" Gotell) is at a meeting with other senior Soviet mannys, including Brezhnev and General Orlov (played by Steven "Heavy Electricity" Berkoff). Orlov gives himself away as a baddy when he immediately starts overacting disgracefully, almost from his first line. He wants to invade Europe, but Gogol says
"NATO will counterattack with nuclear weapons!"
showing that Gogol has been playing Civilization recently. Orlov argues that they will not risk using nuclear weapons in case the Russians use their own nuclear weapons, but Brezhnev sides with Gogol. This is a crucial establishing scene that shows us that, while some Russians are the baddys in this film, not all Russians are the baddys.
The next scene shows us Orlov is connected to the fancy egg plot when he meets with one of the knifemannys from earlier, and another henchmanny who has spotted that their fancy egg is missing. Orlov's cunning plan is to buy back the real fancy egg from the auction and use it in place of their fake fancy egg, since that will be quicker than making a new fake fancy egg.
As the auction of the fancy egg begins, Bond immediately suspects the most attractive and '80s-looking woman in the room, and so keeps his eye on her. Naughty Bond!
Bond is nearly right, because she sits next to the real baddy, Kamal Khan (played by Louis "Count Dracula" Jourdan). Bond starts bidding against Khan (not that one), which makes Fanning ask
"Have you gone mad?"
when Bond bids £425,000 for a fancy egg. But Bond is just forcing Khan to pay even more for the egg, and eventually Khan has to pay half a million pounds for it, which is about twice what Fanning told Bond it was worth. Expensive Luxury Cat would like me to point out that this makes the fancy egg both expensive and luxury.
Back in M's office Bond reveals that he swapped the fake fancy egg for the real fancy egg while nobody else was looking (you can actually see Roger Moore do this bit of sleight of paw if you know to watch out for it), so Khan has the fake egg not the real one - Orlov will be pleased! M sends Bond to follow Khan to Mexico India and find out what he wants with this fancy egg.
The sight of the Taj Mahal is as good as a shot of the Eiffel Tower for France or the Temple of Artemis for Ephesus for letting us know we are now in India.
Bond meets up with Vijay, who alerts Bond to his presence by playing the Bond theme music diegetically. Bond wastes no time in going to the casino where he sees Khan and the same henchwoman from earlier. Khan is busy cheating at Backgammon, so Bond approaches the woman to remind her that they already met before in London.
"You have a very good memory for faces.""And figures."
Smoove.
Bond plays Backgammon against Khan for high stakes. When Khan asks if Bond has enough moneys, Bond produces the real fancy egg and says that it "should provide ample security". Bond needs "a double six" to win, which he has just seen Khan get twice with his own dice, so he knows Khan is using loaded dice to cheat. He takes Khan's dice and thus wins, beating Khan at his own game. This is a great scene and one of the film's highlights - even if it is only short - in particular the way Bond knows he has won even before he looks at the dice, letting Khan know that he knows Khan was cheating.
Bond acts smug, as well he might after such a good scene, until Khan's henchmanny takes the dice and crushes them in his bare paws - an obvious call back to when Oddjob crushed the golf ball in Goldfinger, but it doesn't feel crowbarred in just for the sake of a call back.
The henchmanny then chases after Bond and Vijay, with both chaser and chased driving small taxis. There are a number of gags in this chase - both visual and verbal - to do with tennis, such as Vijay fending off baddys with a tennis racquet and saying "Game set and match" when he wins, which only really make sense when you know that the actor who played Vijay used to be a famous tennis player.
Bond meets an unnecessarily browned-up Mark Heap who is juggling sticks that are on fire, and Bond takes one of the sticks to fend off a baddy. Bond then uses the moneys he won from Khan as a distraction to allow him and Vijay to get away.
Bond and Vijay visit Q so that Bond can get some gadgets. Q puts a homing device and microphone in the fancy egg, as well as giving Bond a pen with acid in it.
Bond has dinner with Khan's henchwoman, then they go to bed together. Naughty henchwoman!
Bond notices a tattoo on the woman's back and asks her about it. She replies
"That's my little octopussy."
Clang! It looks more like an octopus than a cat though, mew. We cats are not happy about this. We were expecting at least eight cats in this film, which would indeed have made it an all time high for the series, but now we're not so sure.
In the morning the henchwoman steals the fancy egg and escapes back to Khan. But we know that this is just what Bond wanted, since the egg has Q's homing device and microphone in it. What we don't know is that Khan's other henchmanny is about to knock Bond out with the classic karate-chop-to-the-back-of-the-neck move.
Khan meets with a mysterious superior who we hardly get to see but who has fishy noms in a tank, so we are obviously supposed to conclude that this is SECTRE Number One from the similarities to his first appearance back in From Russia With Love, except that the new Blofeld manny is a woman
with an octopus instead of a manny with an expensive luxury cat. When she hears Khan has captured Bond, she asks for him to be brought to her.
Bond wakes up in Khan's palace and is taken to have dinner with Khan - this is a Bond villain who knows his business, even greeting Bond with the classic
"Good evening, Mr Bond."
Khan finally introduces Bond (and us) to his henchwoman Miss Magda. The dinner Khan serves Bond is "stuffed sheep's head" with eyeballs (we'd prefer the fish), which has a strange similarity to the dinner scene in 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - was there a wider trend for films in this part of the 1980s that were set in India to have their protagonists encounter exotic noms, or was it just these two films?
Bond uses his acid pen to escape in accordance with the law of conservation of narrative detail. This escape is such serious business that Bond only pauses for a brief moment to perv at Magda undressing as he escapes past her window.
When Bond sees General Orlov arriving in a helicopter to meet with Khan he spies a chance to find out more about the plot, and he listens to them discussing their diabolical plot using the microphone in the fancy egg. Er, I mean Bond uses the microphone in the fancy egg to listen to them discussing their diabolical plot, not that their diabolical plot uses the microphone in their fancy egg.
At this point there is a nice little easter egg (a fancy easter egg) for those viewers who have been paying attention to which fancy egg is fake and which is real - Khan attempts to double-cross Orlov by giving him the fake egg and keeping the real one for himself, but Orlov smashes the other egg thinking it is the fake - but he really smashes the real one, lol!
No wonder Khan does a big komedy wince when he sees this. But he also sees Q's microphone, so he now knows there is a chance their diabolical plotting has been overheard.
Khan's henchmanny discovers Bond has escaped so Khan goes out hunting for Bond dressed like a big game hunter. When he sees Bond he says
"Good. Let the sport commence."
Khan is turning out to be an underrated Bond baddy, although he is obviously never going to be as good a baddy as the other Khan. He and his mannys chase after Bond while riding elephants.
The film suddenly gets a lot more expensive and luxury, even more so than it was before, when a tiger appears. This single-pawedly makes up for the lack of eight cats. Bond tells the tiger to
"Sit!"
Silly Bond! That is never going to work on a tiger, you're thinking of doggys...
Oh.
The tiger sits.
Forget Moonraker and Bond going into space, this is by far the least believable thing to have ever happened in a Bond film... and I do include Blofeld turning out to be Bond's adoptive brother in Spectre, mew mew mew.
I can only conclude that the tiger must have been going to sit down anyway.
Bond also has encounters with spiders, and then a snake, which he tells to "Hiss off" lol. This is followed by a rubbish bit with Bond swinging through the trees to escape from Khan and his mannys, while yelling like Tarzan. This is one of the more questionable choices that must have just seemed like a good idea to the filmmakers at the time, a bit like the way the great car stunt (careful now) in The Manny With The Golden Gun was spoiled by the addition of the komedy sound effect. Or possibly it is just the law that mannys swinging through trees in films must be accompanied by that sound, because how else do you explain the same thing happening in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, made 25 years after this film so they must have known it was a mistaik by then.
Bond gets away when he finds some tourists, so Khan cannot shoot him in front of them. He gets back to Vijay and Vijay's boss Sadruddin between scenes, and asks them about the octopus tattoo on Magda... because clearly that was his top priority, naughty Bond! Sadruddin tells Bond about the mysterious woman who uses that as her sign:
"No one knows her real name, but she's known as Octopussy."
Clang! Again. When he hears from Vijay that Octopussy's island is full of beautiful women, Bond goes there immediately - he can hardly even wait for the scene to change, naughty Bond!
Bond arrives at the island disguised as a crocodile and stealths into Octopussy's base, but she sees him on the CCTV.
We only get to see Octopussy's face at the same time that Bond does - a trick that was previously used with Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, but this time without multiple films' worth of build up. Octopussy is played by Maud Adams, who was previously Andrea in The Manny With The Golden Gun (presumably this is her second life), so it is no wonder she recognises Bond.
Actually she knows Bond from the events of the Ian Fleming short story "Octopussy", since the main character in that story was her father. Octopussy summarises it in a few lines of exposition. This is a pretty neat way of incorporating the original story into the film, and we will see something similar when we get to The Living Daylights.
Khan comes in and tells Octopussy that Bond has escaped. Octopussy then introduces Khan to Bond, lol. Khan says to Bond
"You have a nasty habit of surviving."
That might not seem like the best villainous line, but Jourdan does deliver it well. Octopussy does not let Khan kill Bond, but she does keep Bond her prisoner. Bond seduces Octopussy with a couple of rather forceful kiffs - it's not quite Pussy Galore levels of instant conversion, since Octopussy had already hinted at interest before (such as shielding him from Khan) but it is close.
While Bond is getting up to naughtiness with Octopussy, Khan sends some henchmannys to kill Vijay. This disturbs the birdys on the island, and they wake Bond up - a subtle and interestingly original way to alert Bond that something is wrong, but he does not yet know what. The baddys get onto Octopussy's island and attack Bond, leading to a fight. One of the henchmannys gets nomed by Octopussy's octopus, and another falls in the water with Bond and gets nomed by a crocodile. Octopussy thinks Bond has also been nomed, but really he has used this fight as an opportunity to escape.
Bond follows the trail of clues to East Berlin, by combining what he overheard Orlov and Khan talking about with Octopussy's circus, and connecting that to the ded agent disguised as a clown at the start of the film. At the circus we see the knife twins from the start of the film. When Bond arrives we see, at the same time as he does, all the film's baddys are gathered here - Orlov, Khan, Khan's henchmanny, Octopussy, and Magda.
Bond follows them, but then we get a scene that shows us that General Gogol is also investigating the plot from the Russian side. He discovers the fake jewels, just before we see Orlov pawing over the real jewels to Octopussy for putting on her train. Orlov, Khan and Octopussy all then leave, but Khan and Orlov send their henchmannys with the train so they can then secretly load a bomb on board without Octopussy knowing about it. Bond sees the bomb getting put on the train as well as a manny explaining, presumably for the audience's benefit, how the bomb W-words.
Bond gets into a fight with one of the knife-throwing henchmannys and knocks him out with a circus cannon. The komedy inherent to Bond using such an item as a weapon means that Bond doesn't even feel the need to make a quip afterwards. Bond disguises himself in the henchmanny's clothes so that he doesn't get spotted when Orlov comes to remove the jewels.
Bond captures Orlov and finds out Orlov's plan - to smuggle an atomic bomb into West Germany and set it off there, where the NATO countries will not know it was a Soviet bomb.
Orlov says little and lets Bond do most of the talking, but his smile when Bond sees how clever the plan is says enough by itself. Also, whenever Berkoff does talk he tends to go over the top really quickly, so it might be for the best that his dialogue is kept to a minimum here.
Bond gets distracted by a soldier (not like that, naughty cats!) so Orlov gets away, and Bond chases him. But then Orlov sets his soldiers on Bond (I said not like that!) and it is Bond's turn to run away. He gets to Orlov's car and steals it, so it turns into a car chase when Orlov and his mannys pursue in another car. There are a couple of shots of Orlov in his car shouting orders at his mannys, but where we don't hear him shout we can only see it - this is perhaps even more effective than if we could hear Berkoff, because the visual image of him yelling his hed off is more than enough already.
Bond catches up to the train in his car, and there's a pretty good stunt whereby he jumps from the car to the train just before another train smashes into the car, although the quick cutting reveals more than it hides about how this was done. The train passes across the border between East and West Germany without the border guards finding either Bond or the bomb. Or, for that matter, the unconscious knife henchmanny, who is presumably still hidden where Bond left him. It is possible the border guards have been bribed to deliberately not find anything, but the film does not make this clear.
General Gogol and his mannys find the wrecked car and discovers the real jewels inside. They catch up with Orlov at the border, but he runs after the train and gets shot. Gogol still doesn't know about the bomb, so he thinks Orlov's plan was only to steal the jewels.
"A common thief. A disgrace to the uniform.""Yes... But tomorrow I shall be a hero of the Soviet Union..."
Confused Gogol is confused.
Bond tries disguising himself as a monkey, but Khan's henchmanny spots him so Bond escapes onto the roof of the train where he has to do stunts avoiding bridges and things the train passes under, as is traditional for action scenes set on top of a moving train, but you can easily tell that, unlike Sean Connery in The First Great Train Robbery, when asked to do his own stunts Roger Moore said lolno. And probably raised his eyebrow as well.
Bond gets into a fight with the henchmanny, who is now armed with a sword, and the remaining knife henchmanny. Bond and the knifemanny fall off the train and have a fight in a small hut, where Bond uses the knifemanny's own knife to kill him, thus avenging the clown from the start of the film.
Bond races to the circus where the bomb now is, hidden underneath the circus cannon. He hitches a lift with some komedy Germans, and we must be thankful for small mercies that they aren't Sheriff J W Pepper conveniently on holiday again. Bond steals a faster car and immediately gets into a chase with some local police... who we must presume are the German equivalent of Sheriff J W Pepper.
Khan and his henchmanny leave the bomb in place and drive away, so they don't get blowed up by mistaik. They see Bond drive past them trying to get to the bomb, and Khan hopes that the bomb will blow up Bond as well.
Bond arrives at the base and gets chased by both the police and the American mannys who think Bond is a baddy. He hides for a bit and then he disguises himself as...
...a clown, just like the manny did at the start of the film. When the American mannys realise Bond is dressed as a clown, they arrest a real clown instead, lol.
With Octopussy's help, Bond gets to the bomb just in time, and because he saw how to arm the bomb he also knows how to disarm it.
Octopussy is not at all happy at Khan leaving her behind to get blowed up, and she is now on the side of the goodys, so back in India she stealths into Khan's palace with the help of Magda and all the women from her island. But the henchmanny spots the women and does what any sensible henchmanny would do under the circumstances - starts a big fight.
Into the middle of this fight arrives James Bond in a Union Jack Hot Air Balloon, knowing that he doesn't need to be inconspicuous when the fight has already started. The balloon is piloted by Q, leading to a very weak joke that, let's be honest, probably lowers the IQ of anyone who hears it by about ten points.
"I trust you can handle this contraption, Q?""It goes by hot air.""Oh then you can."
Mew. Even Roger Moore and Desmond Llewelyn look like they think this skit is a load of shit as they perform it half-heartedly.
Khan and his henchmanny escape with a captive Octopussy, who has gone from being the leader of the attack on Khan's base to a become a damsel in distress the moment Bond arrived in the scene. Bond chases after them, while Q ends up in the paws of Octopussy's lady henchmannys and is last seen considering attempting a little 're-entry' of his own with Magda, naughty Q!
Khan and his henchmanny reach their emergency escape plane and get on board with Octopussy. Bond has to do a traditional grab-onto-the-outside-of-the-plane stunt as it takes off.
Khan does a great 'whyioughtta' face when he realises Bond is still chasing him even on the plane, so he sends his henchmanny to
"Go out... and get him!"
Perhaps unwisely, the henchmanny does attempt this, but Bond wins the ensuing fight and the henchmanny falls off the plane - luckily for him he acquired a parachute just as he did so, lol.
Bond rescues Octopussy and they jump out of the plane just before it crashes and then explodes. Khan is blowed up, which is a karmically satisfying death for someone who had tried to blow up so many mannys with his bomb plan, but... it just isn't very dramatic, and features no final confrontation with Bond.
The final scene sees General Gogol visiting M and the Minister in M's London office, which seems a bit much even in these days of "Anglo-Soviet relationships." It cuts away before we see the Minister give Gogol a manly handshake. Meanwhile Bond is busy having kiffs with Octopussy. It's not a great ending, but at least it doesn't make us cringe ourselves inside out (not a pleasant feeling, even if you are made from socks) like the final scene of For Your Eyes Only did.
Far from being "an all-time high," Octopussy is a benchmark for a typical, average Bond film - still expensive and luxury, with many enjoyable moments, but there are plenty of other Bond films that are even more expensive and luxury than this one.
Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Expensive and Luxury
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