The Eighties Drought
I hesitate to discuss Bond movies because everyone rates them by a different scale, and every actor who has ever essayed the part is somebody’s idea of perfection. I’m sure there’s an octogenarian out there who believes the series slid into decline after Barry Nelson appeared as “Card Sense Jimmy Bond” in the live television production of Casino Royale.
Terry Frost, who hosts "Terry Talks Movies," one of my favorite YouTube channels, recently rendered what I find a completely sensible verdict on Never Say Never Again, calling it one of the best Bond films of the 1980’s.
Terry, an Australian reviewer who seems to live in a video bunker amid towering stacks of various formats of visual media, stressed that NSNA is the only Bond film which is a remake, a fact that surely gives it an edge in the 80’s Bond sweepstakes.
Being a makeover of a film produced during the first decade of the series also means that it’s loosely based on one of author’s better stories, since the cream of the crop had been adapted by 1970. Thunderball was considered the most cinematic of all, the book having been derived from an earlier screenplay called Longitude 78 West, written by Fleming with a pair of collaborators.
Director Irvin Kershner equipped himself for the task, not just by studying the immediate source material, but picking his way through the whole series of published titles. Kershner found creative ways of suggesting matters that are never addressed directly in the script, layering imagery the same way Fleming does in his novels.
For instance, we are meant to see Fatima Blush as the manifestation of a powerful huntress-goddess, entirely through visual clues: the fur and feathers of her costume, the classical statuary which the camera lingers on in her very first scene, even the impatient tapping of her heels, always eager to break into an unbridled dance of death (which they eventually will).
Often wittily written, impeccably cast, and elegantly directed, the film battled legal injunctions, budget woes and weather delays to drag itself across the finish line late in the year. What survived the chaotic production ordeal resembles a solid rough-cut of a film that still needed one last pass in the edit room and scoring stage, when the money dried up.
Even while facing fewer obstacles, other Bond films of the decade fared little better. The best of the Roger Moore outings, For Your Eyes Only, mixes two parts Alistair MacLean with a leftover splash of Fleming’s Live And Let Die to produce an acceptable aperitif, but hardly a main course. At least someone had the good sense to cast Julian Glover as the villain.
Taking over for Moore, Timothy Dalton makes a terrific entrance in The Living Daylights, and excels in some good scenes early on that carry faint echoes of From Russia With Love. Though that cumbersome battle inside and outside an airborne cargo plane must have seemed like a brilliant idea on the ground, very little from the climactic sortie in the desert of Afghanistan has aged well.
Dalton had been considered for Octopussy, until the film seemed to be headed for a face-to-face showdown with NSNA, which would have tossed a new Bond into the fray against the original 007. Broccoli flinched and kept Moore on board for another two films.
As Terry says, by 1983 “audiences were aching for a good Bond film,” and for many of us, Never Say Never Again, came close enough. Happily, with a Bond who was no longer an amoral young stallion, the remake manages to replace Thunderball’s rampant misogyny with some old-fashioned romance.
Sixty years on, however, no one has dared to adapt Fleming’s actual novel, with its vivid sense of an outmatched Bond embroiled in Greek tragedy, a Bond who is a flawed hero, guilt-ridden by the end and soon to embark on a downward spiral.
Just as well. Would anyone pay to see that film? Maybe someday.