I have a friend for whom this is the quintessential Bond film. That's not the case for me, but I can see it. Watching the films in novel sequence, not production sequence, very much jumbles things up, but you can definitely see how Goldfinger and this defined the film formula going forward: exotic locations, charismatic villains, multiple attractive women, high-stakes conclusions, technical wonderment. (I suppose Dr. No fits into this category too but that one is more gritty than the later ones.)In each of these areas, Thunderball succeeds admirably. The Bahamas are a great location for a Bond film, well shown off in a variety of ways: Bond fights sharks, Bond has a chase sequence in a local festival, Bond spends a lot of time underwater. Too much time. The underwater sequences start out nice and creepy (I liked the music when SPECTRE recovered the hijacked plane), but eventually become tedious. The festival chase sequence was good; James Bond films always do well by those kind of things. The shark fights are goofy, but if you don't want to watch James Bond indiscriminately kill creatures who haven't actually done something wrong, then why are you even here?
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| I don't think you were supposed to notice there's a glass pane separating Bond from the shark. Oh well. |
Largo is a good villain, if not a great one. There's a good gambling scene between Bond and Largo (another Bond staple, I suppose). We also get some nice insight into SPECTRE, the organization appearing in its most prominent role thus far (aside from Diamonds Are Forever).
There are four "Bond girls" here; one is Paula Caplan, an American CIA agent that helps Bond and Felix on the case. She doesn't contribute a whole lot (Bond doesn't even sleep with her), which I guess I should have taken as a sign that she was going to die to prove the situation is serious. She's pretty great, though; she commits suicide rather than let SPECTRE get anything out of her. Luciana Paluzzi is also pretty great as Fiona Vulpe, a SPECTRE henchwoman who rides a bad-ass motorcycle, and later seduces Bond. She gets the drop on him, making fun of his belief that he can woo woman to his side by sleeping with them.
The star Bond girl is Domino, who is above average in these stakes. Definitely not one of the super-competent ones, but willing to give things a go to help Bond, and with a mind of her own. Of course, it wouldn't be James Bond without some messed-up sexual politics, and this movie does worse by consent than most. There's an early sequence where Bond is visiting a health clinic and SPECTRE tries to kill him with some of the equipment. Bond allows the physiotherapist to think his near-death experience is her fault, and then encourages her to sleep with him so that he won't tell her superiors about it. Ugh.
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| One of Domino's only outfits that isn't black and white. |
The concluding fight is good, and would be great if it didn't contain the point by which you become tired of underwater stuff. It does get a little implausible how long Largo's yacht is zipping around at unhinged speeds, but it comes down to a man-on-man fight for a adequately plausible reason. I did like the array of gadgets here (even if Q plays little role); a number of them were apparently real, including the rocket jet pack(!) and the raft/balloon rescue system used to recover Bond and Domino at the film's end.
This is one of Connery's better outings. He works best when he comes across as human (at one point he fumbles and drops his gun!), and when the quips are mixed with brutality; when the violence is sanitized, then they're just flip, but when he can really hurt people, you see how the quips keep everything he does at arm's length. The best scene of that is when Fiona Vulpe catches up with an injured Bond at a nightclub. To keep attention away, he is forced to dance with her while an assassin lines up a shot. He notices at the last minute and turns her into the bullet, killing her. That is brutal enough on its own, actually, but then he places her dead body on a chair, telling the other people at the table, "Mind if my friend sits this one out? She's just dead!" One can only imagine what happens later when they realize the person slumped over at their table is a corpse.
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| Looks good no matter how goofy the goggles he wears. |
For me, it's not in the top tier (#1-3 below), it doesn't have that spark. But it does everything I want a Jame Bond film to do, and does it in an entertaining fashion, making it a good example of the mid tier (#4-6).
Other Notes:
- I used to say I liked Felix Leiter, but I actually think Felix is bleh more often than he's not. So maybe I don't. Rik Van Nutter isn't the worst Felix, but like most, he doesn't convince as being an American counterpart to Bond. (The hook-for-a-hand Pinkteron version from the novels is much better; maybe the film version of Felix will finally get better when he's eaten by a shark. Not sure how much longer we have until that happens.)
- As good as a writer Fleming is, he clearly struggles to plot the Bond novels, and Thunderball was more weirdly plotted than most. It opens with a long sequence where M, on a health kick for his agents, sends Bond to a clinic. While there, Bond discovers a member of SPECTRE-- which turns out to be a total coincidence to the fact that he's soon embroiled in a SPECTRE plot. The film streamlines this. In the novel, SPECTRE bribes a pilot to help them get the plane with the nuclear warheads; in the film, they use the health clinic to replace the pilot with a lookalike. It is a coincidence Bond is staying there, but the fact that the pilot is brother to Domino is the whole reason Bond ends up going to the Bahamas to investigate her, so things tie up a little more neatly on screen than in prose.
- At the beginning of the film, Operation Thunderball is of sufficient magnitude that M recalls every 00 agent in Europe for the briefing. There are nine chairs arrayed for this, though there could be other 00 agents on assignment outside Europe, one supposes. (In the novels, the designations go up to at least 0011, as per Moonraker.) Interestingly, the scene is shot so that you don't see most of their faces, though you can make out a couple in profile. (One, hilariously, looks bored to find out that the West is being blackmailed with nuclear destruction. Just another Tuesday in the 00 section, one supposes.) Lots of people on the Internet state one of them is a woman, but I haven't seen any evidence of this. We haven't seen any other 00 agents on film thus far, if I recall correctly, aside from 003's corpse in the pre-titles sequence of A View to a Kill.
Film Rankings (So Far):
- Casino Royale
- Dr. No
- From Russia with Love
- For Your Eyes Only
- Thunderball
- Goldfinger
- Moonraker
- A View to a Kill
- Live and Let Die
- Diamonds Are Forever
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