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When two nuclear submarines - one British, one Russian
- go missing at sea, James Bond finds himself working alongside
a beautiful Soviet agent, Anya Amasova...
It
would appear that the best Bond films are often those that
were born under the most difficult circumstances (see also
this site's review of From Russia with Love). A clause
in EON's rights agreement with the estate of Ian Fleming meant
that none of the characters or ideas from Fleming's novel
The Spy Who Loved Me could be used in a screenplay.
The production of the movie was also hampered by the departure
of co-producer Harry Saltzman, who had run into serious financial
difficulties. Furthermore, filming was delayed by legal wrangling
with the producers of a rival Bond picture (which would eventually
make it to the screen in 1983 as Never Say Never Again)
who, incredibly, claimed that the script for Spy actually
used ideas from their script! Fortunately, this enforced delay
(the movie premiering three years after the release of The
Man with the Golden Gun) allowed the creative team to
refine their pre-production, and the result was a Bond movie
of great panache and sophistication, and Roger Moore's finest
two hours as 007.
The
notion of a third party stirring up East/West hostilities
has been done before, of course, in From Russia With Love
and in director Lewis Gilbert's previous Bond movie You
Only Live Twice. However, here it provides the springboard
for some excellent repartee between Bond and his Russian counterpart
Anya (Barbara Bach). The need to depict a supertanker colossal
enough to swallow submarines also prompted some of the best
work that production designer Ken Adam and visual effects
supervisor Derek Meddings have ever done.
Underscoring
visual delights such as the classic opening ski-jump sequence
and underwater action involving the submersible Lotus Esprit
is a stylish soundtrack by Marvin Hamlisch. Featuring the
unforgettable title track Nobody Does it Better, sung
by Carly Simon, Hamlisch's score also adds a catchy disco
beat to the action scenes, yet somehow manages not to sound
horribly dated!
This
film also establishes two new regular supporting characters,
with Walter Gotell playing Gogol, M's opposite number in the
KGB, and Geoffrey Keen portraying the Minister of Defence,
Frederick Grey. The actors would reprise these roles in every
Bond film up to and including The Living Daylights
in 1987.
The
"making of" booklet accompanying this DVD features a rather
awful reversed shot of Moore, made obvious by the fact that
the actor's distinctive mole appears on the wrong side of
his face. Still, at least this image is not as bad as some
of the appalling airbrushed jobs that appear on subsequent
releases, like the one on the front of the Moonraker
booklet.
Package
design notwithstanding, however, James Bond has rarely been
done better.
Richard
McGinlay
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