The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) - film review

When British and Soviet submarines armed with ballistic missiles go missing, the two countries assign their best agent to investigate.  This is how James Bond runs into his opposite number, Major Anya Amasova, in Egypt.  Both are on the trail of a man who intends selling the plans to a sophisticated submarine tracking system to the highest bidder.  Although the man is killed, the two spies recover the microfilm in his possession, and this provides their next lead: Atlantis, an ocean research laboratory in Sardinia belonging to the reclusive millionaire Karl Stromberg.   The latter has captured the British and Soviet submarines and intends using them to fire off nuclear missiles that will precipitate a global nuclear war.  Stromberg’s intention is to create a new civilisation, beneath the oceans.  Realising the threat that Bond poses, Stromberg sends his henchman Jaws, so-named because of his lethal metal teeth, to destroy him...

After the supreme mega- disappointment that was The Man with the Golden Gun, EON’s Bond franchise showed a remarkable, and completely unexpected, return to form with its next film, The Spy Who Loved Me.  The film was released in Britain just after the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations, a rare period of sunny optimism and well-being in what was a pretty dismal decade (hence the more jingoistic-than-usual title sequence).  It is not hard to see why Roger Moore rates this as his personal favourite: it had a colossal budget (14 million dollars) and feels like a compilation of all the best bits from the Sean Connery Bond films.  It also had one of the best villains in the entire series (Jaws, the only Bond baddie to be named after a Steven Spielberg film), and what is arguably the best Bond theme song, the chart-topping hit single Nobody Does It Better, sung by Carly Simon.  If EON could produce a film as good as this, just what were they doing with their three previous Bond films?

That The Spy Who Loved Me was a major improvement on what preceded it can be largely attributed to the change in director.  The previous three Bond films had been directed by Guy Hamilton, who had taken the series in a new and far from successful direction, towards comic book adventure seasoned with cheap innuendo-based humour and the kind of jokes that you would only expect to find in a cheap Christmas cracker.  When Hamilton dropped out, hoping to direct the first Superman movie, he was replaced by Lewis Gilbert, who was considered a safe pair of hands after having directed one of the more popular Connery Bond films, You Only Live Twice (1967).

The handover of director was just one of many production difficulties that afflicted The Spy Who Loved Me.  Work on the film was delayed when producer Harry Saltzman decided to end his association with Albert R. Broccoli, for a mix of financial and personal reasons.   To cover his losses in other unsuccessful ventures, Saltzman was compelled to sell his stake in EON, leading to a protracted legal haitus over the ownership of the Bond franchise.  Matters were complicated by the fact that Kevin McClory, who had acquired the rights to Thunderball, was in the process of making his own rival Bond film, and refused to grant EON permission to re-use the character of Ernst Blofeld.  As if that was not enough, the author Ian Fleming only gave EON permission to use the title of his novel The Spy Who Loved Me; the company was not permitted to adapt its contents.  In the light of all this, and with critical reaction to the previous Bond film being generally negative, Albert R. Broccoli could easily have been forgiven for giving up making Bond movies altogether.  But he kept faith and, against all the odds, he defied his detractors by delivering one of the best Bond films in the post-Connery era.  

You don’t have to have the brain of Einstein to spot that The Spy Who Loved Me is a virtual remake of You Only Live Twice.  The basic plot is the same (a madman plans to provoke World War Three by stealing manned missile delivery systems owned by countries on either side of the Iron Curtain), and the set-piece denouement is virtually identical as well.  The one big difference is that far more effort has gone into the screenplay, so that the plot, which seemed ludicrous first time round, appears highly plausible in its second incarnation.  Lewis Gilbert’s direction had also improved with experience.  Whilst action-adventure probably isn’t his natural forte, Gilbert directs the film with the energy and passion of a man half his age, and even manages to regain some of the sorely-missed classiness of the early Bond films (thanks in part to Claude Renoir’s sumptuous cinematography).  The end-result is easily the most exciting, the most stylish and best-paced of the 1970s James Bond films.  Does any other film in the series have such a spectacular opening sequence?  I bet Her Majesty approved of this one.

The Spy Who Loved Me is so good that it pretty well refutes the commonly held view that Roger Moore was woefully miscast as Agent 007.  The reason why the actor failed to make much of an impact during his tenure of the role was largely down to the poor quality of the scripts and the generally sloppy direction of his Bond films.  With a decent script and an energised production team led by a focused director, Moore shows that he is just as capable as any other actor to have played the role, and perhaps better than some.  In The Spy Who Loved Me, the camp humour is still there, but it is now toned down and becomes just one facet of Moore’s portrayal, instead of being virtually all there is.  Here, we can see other sides to the character, including the cruel, almost cynical edge that was so evident in Connery’s interpretation.  If Roger Moore had been lucky enough to have had one or two additional Bond films of this calibre his era would now be considered far more favourably than it is.  Alas, it was not to be.  The turkeys just had to keep coming...

© Chris Alderton 2010

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