I'm going to miss Roger Moore.
This week in The Series Project: James Bond, we'll be covering the final two films to feature Roger Moore in the iconic role, and the end of an era. Moore has, rather famously, played James Bond the greatest number of times (at least canonically – Connery's Never Say Never Again is not officially considered a part of the series). And while only one of the Roger Moore films qualifies as a legitimate action classic (that'd be For Your Eyes Only, if you recall from last week, his reign as Agent 007 was characterized by a high degree of fun and charm. Most fans I've spoken with talk about the Moore era (1973 – 1985) with a certain degree of ambivalence. Sure, the films were way over-the-top in terms of their silliness and their overpowering number of WTF moments, but they were also incredibly entertaining. Bond himself, of course, has a reputation for globe-trekking, bedding women, making snarky quips at inappropriate moments, and using fancy futuristic gadgets to bring down deranged billionaires, all of whom have some sort of plan to kill millions of people, or at least break the law in new and creative ways. It was Roger Moore who codified this reputation.
A lot of people point to Sean Connery as the best of the James Bonds. While Connery has his strengths, he didn't define the character we know as Bond. That'd be Roger Moore. Moore had the most fun, Moore was the most popular (his films made the most money), and Moore was certainly the most acerbic. Three of the seven films featuring Moore were directed by a man named John Glen, as were the only two films featuring Timothy Dalton. Perhaps Glen’s skill had something do with it.
Sadly, as we discuss the final two Roger Moore films, we have to start with the 1983 feature whose title you're not really allowed to say on television.
Octopussy (dir. John Glen, 1983)
Bond: Roger Moore
Gadgets: A little miniplane. A Seiko digital watch with a TV in it. A pen that squirts acid. A mini-submarine that looks like an alligator. A hot air balloon with a Union Jack on the side.
The Babe: Octopussy, played by Maud Adams.
The Bad Guy: In addition to Octopussy herself, General Orlov, played by Steven Berkoff
Location(s): India, Berlin
Theme Song: “All Time High,” sung by Rita Coolidge
Bond Directly Kills: An entire airplane hanger full of bad guys, torched with a rogue missile. Another guy that Bond flips through the air directly onto a fakir's nail bed. Two German soldiers.
WTF Moments: The title of the film is “Octopussy.” James Bond disguises himself using an MI-6-sanctioned plastic horse butt. When his plan runs out of gas, James merely stops at a gas station to fill up. The film opens with a guy in a clown suit getting gunned down in a sewer. When the clown was floating away, all I could think was “We all float down here!” from It. James Bond encounters a sexy fellow agent at one point – if you look closely, you'll see that she doesn't know how to kiss. Octopussy's henchwomen all wear Greatest American Hero-style red jumpsuits. A car loses its tires and drives on a train track. James Bond swings on a vine, and we hear an old-timey Tarzan yell on the soundtrack. There is a Fabergé egg in the film that gets tossed around like a football. A bad guy has a gigantic razor yo-yo! To meet a contact on the bank of the Ganges, a guy has to play Monty Norman's famous James Bond theme on his snake-charming pipe. The implications of this are staggering.
A brief history of the Fabergé egg: Most of the eggs were small, and could be worn around the neck, but the famous ones, produced by the famous Russian Jeweler The House of Fabergé, which started up in 1842, were large, jewel-encrusted artifacts, often used as Easter gifts amongst the Russian nobility. Some of the Imperial eggs are still on display in the Hermitage in St. Petersberg. I've seen them. They're amazing. They are elaborate, delicate, and worth millions upon millions of dollars. There are so many, and they look so awesome, that it's kind of a wonder that they're not used in action/heist movies more often. Heck, we had a movie a few years ago where Nicolas Cage stole The Declaration of Independence. That's a much more conspicuous theft than a Fabergé egg or two.
Well, watching Octopussy, you sense why. James Bond and several others throw a Fabergé egg, put it in their pockets, run around with it, and shake it up. I was under the impression that these trinkets were fragile and dainty objects, and James Bond practically plays rugby with it. It's hard to show a treasured object getting shunted through the hands of several teams of bad guys when you have to treat it so daintily.
The story of this thing, like many James Bond films, is really hard to follow. The Bad Guy, General Orlov, seems to be a rogue Russian soldier who has been smuggling famous Russian jewelry out of the country. He's also been trying to get his hands on a nuclear bomb so he can blow up an American army base in Germany. He figures if a rogue bomb goes off in an American army base, the world will see how dangerous nuclear bombs are, and disarmament will be the only option. Hmm... Would you sacrifice an army base full of Americans if it meant the entire dismantling of all nuclear programs the world over? Yeah, I’m not sure if I would either, although disarmament is a noble cause. It’s weird, though, and it means he has to smuggle both weapons and jewelry. You'd think one or the other would be enough. This will be a theme throughout the next few Bond films: a bad guy who smuggles several things at once and has an entire rainbow of evil schemes.
General Orlov has been smuggling the jewelry and the bombs on board the trains of an international circus troupe run by Octopussy, played by Maud Adams. Adams, you may recall, played a gangster's moll in The Man with the Golden Gun. She does not play the same character in this movie, and I was a little upset about this. I was hoping for a strange explanation about how a gangster’s moll could, in a few short years, grow to be the head of an international circus troupe with her own mansion in India, moving in the same circles as Russian supercriminals. I am denied such a scene.
Investigating who could be smuggling Fabergé eggs, James Bond goes to auctions and follows the leads to India, where there's a spectacular chase through the streets of New Delhi. James Bond cheats a gambler out of his money. There's a counterfeit Fabergé egg around, and I lost track of which was which after a while. There was a scheme to counterfeit jewelry as well. Whenever someone found a fake, they would crush it with their foot. This seems like a dangerous practice to me. What if you made a mistake?
As a villain, Octopussy is actually the first woman in all of James Bond. True, she's teamed up with Orlov, and there's even a rich Indian prince (Louis Jourdan) helping them out, so she's not truly an independent villainess, but it's nice to finally see a woman getting in on the action. Of course, once she learns she's been double-crossed, she goes rogue. There's a kind of awesome scene near the end where Octopussy and her circus performers use their acrobatic skills to infiltrate the bad guy's mansion to kill him. That's pretty cool.
The film's finale is tense and fun, and works so well thanks to that entirely reliable old action movie saw: the ticking clock. Yes, there's a nuclear bomb set to go off in an hour, and it conveniently has a red digital readout to show us this. James has to chase down a circus cannon (under which the bomb has been hidden) and defuse it. He has to hide on a circus train to do this. As such, he has to dress in a gorilla suit to stay in disguise, and later dresses as a clown. If a bomb were going to explode in less than an hour, no matter how badly I needed a disguise, I don't think I'd spend the time to put on a clown suit, and also do all the elaborate clown makeup involved. Which is what happens. James paints his face like a clown to go unnoticed amongst the circus. It's been said that Roger Moore doesn't have the classy dignity of the previous Bonds. I have defended this claim, but my arguments tend to tatter in the face of James Bond in a clown suit.
Oh yeah. And there's a hired assassin whose weapon of choice is a razor yo-yo. Like in that old video game Rygar. A guy flings a giant round tethered blade at people, and then yanks it back into a metal cradle on his fist. This hardly seems like a practical weapon, but, well, it's actually really damn cool.
Octopussy is a fun romp, and I actually kind of liked how goofy it was, even though the story was classically hard to follow. In terms of Roger Moore-era Bond flicks, though, it's pretty standard. I just wish more treasures were involved. Nuclear bombs are so old hat. At least give us a MacGuffin like a Fabergé egg. But then, if it were rare treasures James Bond were after, he'd be Indiana Jones.
The final film in the Roger Moore era will be equally silly, but will tip into the modern era in an awkward way. The end of Octopussy promised us From a View to a Kill. The title was changed slightly.
