"The love I know you need in me, the fantasy you've freed in me": For Your Eyes Only

For Your Eyes Only was a short story collection, and arguably three of its stories were turned into films: "From a View to a Kill," "For Your Eyes Only," and "Quantum of Solace." I'll be watching them in release order, so here we are with For Your Eyes Only, the latest of the Roger Moore films we've seen in this weirdly ordered marathon thus far.

I found it kind of tonally jumpy but enjoyable all the same. It starts out with a real goofy scene where James Bond kills off Blofeld once and for all involving a remote-control helicopter and Blofeld being dumped down a factory smokestack. (Bond is visiting the grave of his dead wife, something that won't be explained for several more films in our marathon.) It's pretty ridiculous. But then we go to a pretty stark scene where the crew of an entire British spy ship is killed off, and then another scene where a woman's parents are brutally gunned down by a Cuban assassin right in front of her. It's like the pre-credits sequence and the following two scenes are from two totally different movies!

I couldn't find a picture of the black car in the tree on Google, but this is pretty good too.

Then we're back to goofiness. Bond goes to find the Cuban assassin, but the assassin is killed by his victims' daughter, Melina Havelock. Bond's car explodes when a goon tries to break in (it's hilariously over-the-top), so Bond and Melina have to use her car, which is introduced with an amazing comedy double-take, and then results in this ridiculous chase sequence through the Spanish countryside that involves inconvenient buses, multiple flips and spins, lots of near misses, and the goons' car getting stuck in the top of an olive tree. I remember thinking the chase sequences in Diamonds are Forever were ridiculous and dumb, but these were ridiculous and sublime. My wife and I were laughing all the way through. The movie continues in this mode for a while, next with a comedy ski-vs.-motorbike chase down an Alp that also involves bobsledding. Amazing! And then it gets even better, when Bond uses a zamboni to defeat three hockey-skating bad guys. (Though, to be honest, I wanted more zamboni action.)

Cool is driving a zamboni and acting like it's NBD.

Then the action moves to Greece and it suddenly becomes serious for the rest of the time. Bond and a Greek gangster (Milos Columbo, who is constantly chewing on pistachios) carry out a raid on the villain's warehouse, which is pretty tense, culminating in a brutal sequence where Bond kicks a henchman's car off a cliff. Then there are some tense underwater sequences where Bond and Melina recover a British encryption device from the sunken ship. Then there's a very tense sequence where Bond has to climb up to a mountain hideout. I mean, of course it's sprinkled through with bits of levity (Q turns up with a fake beard, disguised as a Greek Orthodox priest), but it's never again as overtly comic as the first half of the film, and it's much more serious than the other Roger Moore films we've watched thus far (Moonraker and Live and Let Die).

This might have been awkward, but actually I think it worked. The funny parts were genuinely funny, the tense parts were reasonably suspenseful. I don't know why the filmmakers decided to assemble the film in this weird way, but I guess they got away with it.

Surprisingly few "male gaze"-y photos when you Google Image Search her character.

My wife declared that Melina was the best "Bond girl" thus far, and I find it hard to disagree. Of course she has some damsel-in-distress moments, but overall she's a competent, driven professional who manages to kill some baddies on her own, contributes to multiple fights, and, when the villain tries to drown them, even saves the lives of herself and Bond by remembering that she left an extra air tank underwater, allowing the two of them to stay underwater long enough that the villain assumes they died. She contributed significantly to our enjoyment of the film. I would say it's not in the top tier of Bond films, but it's a solid example of the middle tier.

Other Notes:

• I was surprised at how long the film goes before Bond sleeps with anyone. In fact, Bond turns down the first opportunity he gets, with figure skating star Bibi Dahl. I don't know why she throws herself at him: is 54-year-old Roger Moore really that attractive? He's certainly no Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. I also don't know why Bond turns her down, but him trying to fend her off is hilarious, so I'm okay with it.
• M isn't in the movie; Chief of Staff Bill Tanner (his first real appearance in the films, both in production order and our order) and Minister of Defence Frederick Gray (who appeared in a number of the Roger Moore films) fill in for him. After finishing the movie, I discovered that M actor Bernard Lee had passed away between films (his final performance was Moonraker), and they waited a film to recast him out of respect.
• Graham Crowden has a brief appearance. Thank God it's brief, because after Waiting for God and The Horns of Nimon, I can't take Graham Crowden seriously in anything.
• After the first two scenes, I was wondering if this was one of those Bond adaptations that takes literally nothing from the source material, but then when Malina's parents were gunned down, I recognized some of the essentials from the "For Your Eyes Only" short story: only there, the married couple are killed by a Cuban assassin in Cuba so that a Cuban gangster can possess their country estate. Bond collides with their adult daughter while chasing down the same guy, and in both versions there's a death while swimming and significant use of bows and arrows. But the context for all of this is very different in the film. Weird how little details were maintained despite the big changes.
• I was surprised when about halfway through, some details were combined in from "Risico," a completely unrelated short story also contained in For Your Eyes Only, with the two feuding Greek gangsters, complete with the fakeout that the bad one is pretending the good one is smuggling heroin when it's actually him who's doing it, as well as a scene where the good one records Bond and the bad one discussing him on a tape recorder hidden in a restaurant. Bond and the good one then team up to raid the bad one's heroin-smuggling ship. It's kind of random to include it, but the screenwriters fit it in so well it seems completely natural. Some of the details are swapped around, though; in the book, the good one uses a medal he received from the British government for fighting in the resistance during World War II as proof that he's the good one, while in the film, the bad one is the medal recipient, using the medal as cover.

• Also I was surprised again when a scene from the novel of Live and Let Die (execution by being dragged from a boat in shark-infested waters) suddenly turned up in a totally new context.
• Julian Glover is great as the villain, Kristatos. He was of course in The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and two serials of classic Doctor Who, but I kept thinking what an excellent Master he would have made.
• What the heck is up with that Margaret and Denis Thatcher joke at the end!?

Film Rankings (So Far):

1. Casino Royale
2. Dr. No
3. From Russia with Love
4. For Your Eyes Only
5. Goldfinger
6. Moonraker
7. Live and Let Die 
8. Diamonds Are Forever