Which one is this? The scuba diving one.
Who’s who in this one? Connery (Bond); Lee (M); Llewelyn (Q); Maxwell (Moneypenny); Van Nutter (Leiter).
Where did you first encounter this one? On TV when I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Adolfo Celi as SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo, who wants to ransom the Western world with two stolen nuclear bombs.
Who are the Bond girls? Claudine Auger as Domino, Largo’s mistress, whom Bond romances; Luciana Paluzzi as double agent Fiona Volpe, who romances Bond; and Molly Peters as nurse Patricia Fearing, who has little choice in the matter.
Opening number? Tom Jones belting out the title track with such force he reportedly fainted immediately after recording it, set against Maurice Binder’s title sequence of skin-diving women.
What’s memorable about this one? Underwater photography. The jet pack. Handing a naked woman a pair of shoes.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 4. I was never a fan of this one.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? Still a 4 — a meandering and unappealing soft lob.
I’ve jumped backwards a decade, between the series’ two notable underwater adventures: from 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me to 1965’s Thunderball. I’m relatively sure that up till now I believed that Thunderball was the name of this movie’s villain (it’s not) and that the opening title track was about that villain (it’s not). I’d also forgotten about the presence of SPECTRE and Blofeld in the story, and that James runs afoul of his first true femme fatale here (the villainous Ms. Volpe), one of the few women in the series to treat him the way he treats them. I guess I’ve done my level best to steer clear of Thunderball as much as possible. Even as a child, I found this film unattractive, joyless, and grim.
Thunderball is dark – and I mean visually dark. It’s quite a muddy picture, and if Dr. No made gorgeous Technicolor use of the Caribbean for the majority of its location scenes, Thunderball seems to have been shot in the Bahamas in the middle of winter or upon the approach of some kind of hurricane. The skies are leaden, the colours dismal, and waters dreary. In like kind, neither the key Bond girl (Claudine Auger as scuba-diving mistress Domino) nor villain (husky Adolfo Celi in his unprepossessing wet suit and eye patch as Largo) are particularly vivid, though I do inherently enjoy any of the movies where Bond and villain face off over a friendly game (Goldfinger, Casino Royale), or Bond and Bond girl do likewise (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Goldeneye); and here, Bond does both simultaneously.
The best thing about Thunderball is Connery, who is back in high form after the weirder, less likeable performance in Goldfinger. We open with a bit of business at a sanatorium as Bond recuperates from various missions, and there’s an edge of the sexual compulsive in Connery’s performance. He blackmails sex from his nurse to cover up a mistake he knows she didn’t make; and later, when caught (by the same nurse) chatting with a prettier patient elsewhere and accused of having had enough “exercise” for one night, Bond leads the nurse back to the bedroom with a completely straight face and a grim “It’s funny you should say that.” They say when you stop enjoying it, James….
There’s an entertaining underwater heist, as Largo steals a Vulcan, crashes it in shallow water, and calmly allows it to sink – before extracting its payload of nuclear bombs, which are marked “handle like eggs.” Like all of the underwater sequences in Thunderball, the scene goes on too long, doting on needless detail like the camouflaging of the plane wreck after the heist. This is most likely because of the simple, contemporary “holy shit, wow!” factor around the novelty of underwater photography. Since my iPhone is now equally capable of recording Thunderball’s images as the film’s cameras were, the novelty has worn off, and the pace has become sluggish. Though I doubt more than a total of 30 minutes of Thunderball are spent underwater, it feels like better than half the picture, and quickly becomes boring.
But holy cow, the number of coordinated stunt players in the finale’s underwater fight sequence! The logistics might still be unequalled for scale. It’s hard to tell what’s going on throughout, even with the good guys in orange and bad guys in black, as all are wearing face-concealing masks. The result is fifteen minutes of unidentifiable scuba divers punching each other (and occasionally fighting sharks). Harpoons crisscross the screen and there are occasional gouts of blood. It’s abject chaos, but impressive nonetheless on a technical level. The subsequent scene – where Largo’s ship, the Disco Volante, separates in two, leaving a battle platform behind while Largo escapes in the bow-cum-hydrofoil – gives us one of the series’ more memorable vehicular gadgets.
Besides the scuba diving, though, Thunderball is a Bond film with very few key beats. The bathtub scene with Fiona is one of them – Bond responding to a request for “something to wear” with only a pair of shoes is a great laugh; but more entertainingly, observe the leisurely smirk with which Bond sits in a chair and watches what Fiona’s going to do with his prank. I’m also a fan of Fiona’s death, in a crowd of dancing couples, via a bullet meant for Bond – which Bond has turned her towards at the last second, immediately clutching the wound with his fingers to prevent the telltale gush of blood. But like any (?) modern Bond fan, I find SPECTRE boring, and so the parallel meeting scenes of SPECTRE agents (Largo is, sadly for him, Number Two) and the nine double-O’s (“His wife has lost her cat,” quips Bond after M’s call) feels vain. Concealed Blofeld once again appears – no face, pet cat, and the voice of Anthony Dawson – but it’s a pale copy of the more vivid From Russia With Love. It’s time to get to the big reveal already.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, Thunderball is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on November 3 and 18, and December 24. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.