For Your Eyes Only (1981, Dir. John Glen):
Now Bond realized why M was troubled, why he wanted someone else to make the decision. Because these had been friends of M. Because a personal element was involved. M had worked on the case by himself. And now it had come to the point when justice ought to be done and these people brought to book. But M was thinking: is this justice, or is it revenge? No judge would take a murder case in which he had personally known the murdered person. M wanted someone else, Bond, to deliver judgment. There were no doubts in Bond’s mind. He didn’t know the Havelocks or care who they were. Hammerstein had operated the law of the jungle on two defenceless old people. Since no other law was available, the law of the jungle should be visited upon Hammerstein. In no other way could justice be done. If it was revenge, it was the revenge of the community.
Bond said: ‘I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute, sir. If foreign gangsters find they can get away with this kind of thing they’ll decide the English are as soft as some other people seem to think we are. This is a case for rough justice – an eye for an eye.’
M went on looking at Bond. He gave no encouragement, made no comment.
Bond said: ‘These people can’t be hung, sir. But they ought to be killed.’
M replaced the stamp and the ink pad in the drawer and closed the drawer. He turned the docket round and pushed it gently across the desk to Bond. The red sanserif letters, still damp, said: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.
— Ian Fleming, “For Your Eyes Only”
Back to basics: every so often you’ll hear that refrain within the James Bond series, especially when the previous film tips over into camp, extravagance, too much of a muchness. Whenever you have a long-running franchise, an occasional switch of gears is necessary. Usually it’s less “reinvention” — with a formula genre like Bond, all the elements remain pretty much the same, the major difference is how they’re emphasized — than it is recirculation, an airing out. When executed correctly, the shift is as smooth and necessary as an Aston Martin hitting top gear.
For Your Eyes Only is a notable shift from Moonraker, but then there was no other choice — given the previous film’s comedic path, the only way to continue down the road would be to turn Bond into a three-ring circus (and circuses would have to wait until Octopussy). Sensing that a return to the series’ early espionage days, most notably From Russia with Love, would shake things up in the right direction, producer Albert Broccoli turned to Peter Hunt, the director of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, to once again bring Bond back to earth. As fate would have it, Hunt was occupied with his own projects (although at this point, his career had diminished to the point where he was directing Charles Bronson in C-grade actioners), and so Broccoli turned to the next logical candidate: John Glen, who had plenty of second-unit directing experience on Majesty‘s, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker. An unassuming, hardscrabble Brit, Glen might have seemed an unlikely person for the job, and yet, he would come to dominate the Bond landscape in the ’80s, directing all five films in that decade (a record that will likely never be broken).
Given Glen’s second-unit experience, the intention was clear: craft a Bond movie that would forsake Pinewood Studios for the rough-and-tumble outdoors, with the story crafted around action beats rather than Ken Adam’s cavernous (and expensive) sets. To that end, screenwriters Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson raided Ian Fleming’s best short story collection, For Your Eyes Only, for guidance on where to go — the first time since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service that a sizable chunk of source material would be used in a Bond flick. In the end, two stories centered around blood feuds were used: “For Your Eyes Only,” a down-and-dirty tale in which Bond teams up with a woman raring to take out her parents’ killers with a crossbow (“Robina Hood,” he muses), and the more expansive “Risico,” where Bond mixes with convivial killers (“In this business is much risico,” a local hood says in a stereotypically thick accent) and big-time smugglers in Italy. Tying the screenplay together is the thinnest of McGuffins: the ATAC, a nuclear targeting system that accidentally ends up at the bottom of the Aegean seas. With both the British and the Soviets in hot pursuit of the device, For Your Eyes Only is all about the spy game. It’s about as far from the previous few Bonds, with their plots to destroy the world, not to mention the gadgets and babes galore, as you can get. Just to drive the point home, Bond’s nifty Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me is blown to pieces within the first twenty minutes, and our man must resort to a beat-up Citroën to escape the bad guys. In some ways, the film conjures up an earlier age: Bond flinging his hat onto the office rack, or visiting the gravesite of his late wife. In others, it’s very much of the moment — take Bill Conti’s funky, cowbell-inflected score, or Sheena Easton’s synthy title theme, for instance. Overall, though, the film wants to bring the grit back to Bond. No more raised eyebrows in the face of danger — Roger Moore bleeds this time around, when he’s not falling from precipitous heights, getting checked by hockey players (hey, this is Bond, you can’t expect everything to be realistic), or getting battered by beach buggies.
From that description, you might expect (and hope) that For Your Eyes Only is a tense, jangly thriller that recaptures Bond’s glory days while serving as an effective riposte to the excesses of Moonraker — and you’d be half-right. The film is worthwhile for the action sequences alone, which Glen choreographs with verve; very few directors in the series are as crisp and witty with movement as he is. The highlight of the movie is a ski chase that manages to outdo Majesty’s in sheer chutzpah, as Bond escapes his pursuers by slaloming down a bobsled run (tragically, one of the bobsled stuntmen died during the filming of the sequence, the only time a member of the crew has died on a Bond film). 007’s final assault on the villain’s mountain fortress works up a good head of Hitchcockian steam as his life hangs by the weight of three pitons, and perhaps most memorably, Roger Moore gets to be authentically nasty for once when he kicks a baddie’s car off the cliff with the baddie inside — it’s a scene that he was reluctant to film given his established image (he seems to forget he did something similar in The Spy Who Loved Me), but it’s a nice reminder that our hero is a cold-blooded assassin.
What about the rest of the movie, though? Therein lies the rub. For Your Eyes Only wants to return to character and story-driven territory, but neither the story or characters stand up to much scrutiny. The ATAC plot sits uneasily between the two competing Fleming storylines — considering that the main objective is to retrieve a device that could determine the safety of the world, Bond goes for an awfully long time without even attempting to salvage it. Topol is a jovial presence as pistachio-popping ally Columbo, but Julian Glover makes for a singularly bland villain, and as we well know, without a memorable bad guy, a Bond film loses much of its juice. Plus, how can you take a bad guy seriously when his mistress turns out to be Bibi (Lynn Holly-Johnson), a gratingly obnoxious ice skating phenom who tries to hop into bed with 007 at every opportunity? “You put your clothes on, and I’ll buy you an ice cream,” Bond mutters, and for the first time, we realize that Roger Moore is getting a bit old for this. He’s polished as always, and has always been underrated when it comes to Bond’s serious side (i.e., that car off the cliff), but apart from a seduction of Columbo’s gal (Cassandra Harris, who happened to be Pierce Brosnan’s wife in real life), there’s scant opportunities for elegance, wit, or savoir faire in this film. You certainly won’t find that savoir faire with Carole Bouquet’s Melina Havelock, the avenging angel who Bond works alongside. While she’s undeniably stunning, she’s too wrapped up with revenge to generate much heat with our man (revenge in general makes for poor chemistry in a Bond film — for another example, see Olga Kurylenko’s character in Quantum of Solace).
That extra bit of style that sets Bond apart from the rest of the pack is missing in For Your Eyes Only. Outside of the action scenes, Glen is merely functional as a director: his framing and mise en scène are boilerplate. This is Bond in a lower key, with much of the swagger lost in the process. The most salacious image from the movie turns out to be the poster, with that iconic pair of gams leering at Bond (and us). Someone like Peter Hunt might have supplied more zest and glamour, but even Hunt probably wouldn’t have known what to do with the film’s bizarre pre-title sequence, in which Bond’s helicopter is hijacked by none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld (because of legal battles we never get the character’s name, but the Persian cat is unmistakable). Although we’re treated to some nifty stuntwork as Bond clings to the outside of the chopper, it’s followed up by what might be the battiest line in a Bond film: at 007’s mercy, Blofeld pleads, “We can do a deal! I can make you a delicatessen of stainless steel!” (Apparently the line was inspired by Albert Broccoli — who knows what he was smoking that week.) And thus exits Blofeld as Bond drops him down a smokestack — uh, did we say that this film was meant to be a return to serious Bond adventure? Then there’s the finale, in which Bond beds down with Melina for no apparent reason apart from the fact that one expects such a thing at the end of a Bond film. Before the shagging commences, though, he must fool Margaret Thatcher into talking to a parrot. For Your Eyes Only might act like the excesses of Moore’s previous Bonds are beneath it, but it can be just as silly as the best (or worst) of them. The rest of the time, the movie is a mid-price model on the 007 production line: it’s competently constructed, it gets to where it wants to go, and yet you can’t help wishing that the ride would have a bit more panache.
