Which one is this? The one with “pussy” in the title.
Who’s who in this one? Moore (Bond); Brown (M); Llewelyn (Q); Maxwell (Moneypenny).
Where did you first encounter this one? My first Bond! I snuck downstairs one night while the babysitter was watching it on TV, and caught the last reel. Awestruck.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? You’d think it’d be Octopussy, but no: it’s French actor Louis Jourdan as “Afghan prince” Kamal Khan, who wants to blow up an American military base with a smuggled nuclear weapon.
Who are the Bond girls? This time, if you guessed Octopussy, you’d be correct. She’s played by the lovely Maud Adams, who was also in The Man With The Golden Gun. Kristina Wayborn, a walking wall of ‘80s hair, plays Magda.
Opening number? “All-Time High,” one of those “How great is Bond, anyway?” sets of lyrics, belted out by Rita Coolidge. The Binder title sequence has a “lovers” theme, featuring octopus laser outlines written on naked women and a silhouette of James doing some Olympic dance maneuvers with an unclothed partner.
What’s memorable about this one? Fabergé eggs. Knife-throwing twins and buzzsaw-wielding Indians. Bond pulling a plane out of a horse’s ass (you’re damn right literally!) and flying it through the closing doors of a hangar.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 8 as in Octopussy. I loved the ever-loving crap out of this movie when I was a kid.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? It’s really more of a 7.
Having survived the descent into Moonraker I’m finally over the hump on From A To Bond. I now skip forward four years to 1983 for Octopussy, which I approached with equal trepidation to Moonraker, albeit for different reasons:Octopussy is my prima facie encounter with Commander Bond and thereby, one could say, the reason we’re here.
A bit of franchise history: Octopussy is the film that went head to head withSean Connery’s non-return to the franchise in Never Say Never Again; it is also exactly one film past Roger Moore’s chosen stale date, as he wanted to leave the series with For Your Eyes Only. By dint of timing, Octopussy belongs in the same family as Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, i.e. the Big Hollywood adventure serials of the early 1980s, and as such likely bears a kind of nostalgic respect from those who (like me) grew up in that era.
And so, a bit of personal history: Octopussy was my virgin Bond. I snuck downstairs in my pajamas and arrived in the living room just in time to see James Bond slide face-forward down the banister of Kamal Khan’s Monsoon Palace, spraying the room with machine-gun fire before shrewdly shooting off the head of the banister post, lest it connect with his testicles. For an 8-year-old boy – whose entire life revolved in one way or another around machine guns and testicles – Octopussy falls squarely into the heartiest realm of good clean fun. It’s a young male’s pleasure garden of jungle adventure, exotic allure, and AK-47-firing testosterone.
Between Octopussy and Temple of Doom, I guess I also have a perma-crush on the exotic and dangerous India of ‘80s cinema, as nervously embarrassing as its portrayal may now be. For all the real-for-real photography in India (and it is gorgeous), Octopussy spares no expense in putting stereotype after stereotype on the screen, never more so than when Bond runs afoul of a marketplace which contains, all in one place, a sword swallower, a snake charmer, and an old man lying on a bed of nails. Villain Kamal Khan is supported, of course, by one of those emotionless, but evil, Sikh bodyguards at which the ‘80s excelled, while permanently sweaty assassins are sent after Bond wearing nothing more than nappies on multiple occasions throughout the film. But I like Vijay, Bond’s man in Rajasthan, and I flat-out love the sensational and chaotic sequence where Khan – having been bested by Bond in a game of loaded dice – makes James the target of the Most Dangerous Game, chasing the secret agent through the Indian jungle on a trumpeting elephant!
But then there is the title, and titular character: Octopussy. It’s fairly surreal when a barge rowed by beautiful women bears Khan to the Floating Palace at twilight, past masked Amazon guards, and into a water garden of woman warrior smugglers with Octopussy at the center, who is first introduced offscreen in a lengthy dialogue with Khan, and personified instead by a rather spectacular blue octopus. Octopussy’s spandex-jumpsuited personal guards, whose pronounced camel-toes may or may not be an intentional design choice under the circumstances, seem like throwback fantasy creatures belonging in a 1960s Soviet science fiction film. When she finally appears in person, Octopussy becomes the first (and, to date, only) character in the franchise to arrive full-frontal, albeit from a distance; and then when Bond invades her chambers, we are finally met with the face of Maud Adams, who appeared (and was killed) as another character in The Man With The Golden Gun. All these threads leading to Octopussy, and here she is; it’s one of the rare moments in the series where genuine, new energies seem to be brewing.
But to no avail. Octopussy isn’t up to the task of creating a strong female character in Octopussy, which is what the movie wants and so sorely needs at this point. This is 1983, and Octopussy is more a poster image (the graphic of eight-armed Adams wrapping herself around Moore from behind on the one-sheet remains memorable) than a character. Octopussy’s dialogue is terrible and I’m beginning to suspect that Maud Adams can’t actually act, a difficult notion for me to wrap my noodle around given her double-status (in Golden Gun and here) as one of my earliest pin-up fantasies. Octopussy is also barely in her own movie, being sidelined as a dupe and secondary plot device almost as soon as she is brought onscreen, right up to the grand finale, where she gets her personal army to invade Khan’s palace, and yet also manages to get herself kidnapped by the villain, requiring rescue from Bond. “All-Time High,” this is not – although the near-hatred in Bond’s first romantic embrace with the seeming villainess provides a shade far darker than anything we’ve seen from Roger Moore in the series thus far.
If I am a Roger Moore fan, it is largely due to this film and my personal attachment to it as a child; I’m relieved to find, as an adult, that Octopussy continues John Glen’s directorial rebound of the franchise away from the bloated stupidity of Moonraker and towards the darker, modern Bond of License to Kill. Roger looks older here than he does even in A View to a Kill two years later, but he’s cut most of the jokey slack out of his performance and seems to be taking Bond seriously again, perhaps enlivened by the direct competition with his forbear, Connery, in Never Say Never Again. The film is straight enough in tone (yet still containing a few inexcusable gags, like the Tarzan swing) while remaining unabashedly large. It’s closer in theme and storytelling style to the Connery originals, making formidable use of exotic locations, international intrigue, and naughty gamesmanship between hero and villain, all while continuing to view women as delicious, disposable bed-mates.
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, Octopussy is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on November 10, plus a special screening introduced by director John Glen on December 10. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.