Octopussy (1983, Dir. John Glen):
As soon as he had walked through into the living-room and seen the tall man in the dark-blue tropical suit standing at the picture window looking out to sea, Major Smythe had somehow sensed bad news. Then, when the man had turned slowly to look at him with watchful, serious blue-gray eyes, he had known that this was officialdom, and when his cheery smile was not returned, inimical officaldom. A chill had run down Major Smythe’s spine. ‘They’ had somehow found out.
‘Well, well. I’m Smythe. I gather you’re from Government House. How’s Sir Kenneth?’
There was somehow no question of shaking hands. The man said, ‘I haven’t met him, I only arrived a couple of days ago. I’ve been out round the island most of the time. My name’s Bond, James Bond. I’m from the Ministry of Defence.’
— Ian Fleming, “Octopussy”
By its nature, the James Bond film series tends to be a tight (if not completely closed) ecosystem: the tone and the quality vary wildly from one film to the next, but they all tend to fall within a certain range. Even when the franchise flirts with outright ludicrousness, its time-honored conventions are there to prevent it from dipping into utter chaos.
And then you have Octopussy, which is as close as Bond gets to anarchy. There’s the outrageous title, for starters. In Ian Fleming’s decidedly un-smutty morality tale “Octopussy,” it refers to a man’s aquatic pet, and the harbinger of his doom. In the movie it refers to a glamorous international jewel smuggler (Maud Adams) who heads her own traveling circus and makes her home in Udaipur, India for no discernible reason. People also tend to remember that this is the movie in which Roger Moore gets made up as a clown (cue punch line to innumerable jokes about Moore’s version of Bond).
Of course there’s more to it than that, much more: when he’s not flying a one-man jet through the ten-foot gap between hangar doors, Bond is ordering tigers to sit, swinging from vines with a Tarzan yell, riding inside a hollow crocodile, fending off assassins with yo-yo saws, bustling in a tuk-tuk alongside tennis star Vijay Armitraj (who naturally fights off the bad guys with a racquet), and dressing up as a gorilla and a clown. Most amazingly, with time of the essence and the safety of the Western world at stake, he’s forced to wait outside a public phone booth while a grumpy middle-aged woman inside makes her call. The previous Bond film For Your Eyes Only made gestures towards a more sober, understated Bond; Octopussy eradicates those notions completely.
That this particular brand of merry mayhem came about is a small miracle when you factor in the very serious agitations going on behind the scenes. While Moore was content to ride off into the sunset after For Your Eyes Only, an old nemesis was stirring the pot: Kevin McClory, the co-producer of Thunderball and the rights holder to Ian Fleming’s book (and by extension, the criminal organization SPECTRE). After two decades of legal tug-of-wars, McClory was finally ready to produce his own Bond film, Never Say Never Again, and he scored a coup by casting Sean Connery as the lead. At this point, Albert Broccoli and United Artists were conducting their own auditions for a new 007, and for inexplicable reasons had fixated on Yank James Brolin (yes, Mr. Barbara Streisand) as the leading candidate. But with Connery and McClory shaping up as box office competition, an offer was made to Moore that he couldn’t refuse, and yet another disaster in Bond cinematic history was averted.
With Moore back on board, extravagance was back in fashion: if Octopussy couldn’t beat Never Say Never Again on the basis of its star, it would do so with the weight of sheer flamboyance. Two forces would shape the film: one was the addition of George MacDonald Fraser as screenwriter. Best known for his Flashman books, Fraser specialized in rowdy, politically incorrect adventures, and that cheekiness comes out to play in Octopussy. Can you really have a Bond movie in which 007 is served stuffed sheep’s head, tells a snake to “hiss off,” and rides to the rescue at the climax in a hot air balloon decorated with the Union Jack while acrobatic women in bikinis fight the bad guys? Yep, yep and yep.
The other major influence was Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which was a successful throwback: it had updated the cliffhangers and perils from old adventure serials, while preserving their depiction of bug-eyed, comical or murderous natives in distant lands. Thus emboldened, the filmmakers place Octopussy in an India where the sun of the British Empire never set, where every street corner has a snake charmer, a fire juggler or a sword swallower. As for the peril and cliffhangers, why not borrow from vintage films? A manhunt through the jungle is The Most Dangerous Game played mostly for laughs, and a lengthy sequence with Bond fighting his way onto and off a train recalls Buster Keaton’s antics in The General.
As everything above suggests, Octopussy has a serious case of whiplash. More than perhaps any other Bond film, its tone veers wildly. You have the threat of a nuclear bomb being detonated by a rogue Soviet general (Steven Berkoff, channeling George C. Scott from Dr. Strangelove) juxtaposed with, well, Roger Moore dressed up as a clown. One moment Bond is having a silky, tense face-off with primary villain Kamal Khan (Louis Jordan, riding close to parody with his fussy diction) over a gaming table, and the next he’s ogling a woman’s breasts with a watch camera. While the movie might be a trainwreck for the Bond purist, its scattershot attempts to find something to please everyone give it more oomph than For Your Eyes Only. It helps that John Glen directs the action scenes briskly, and with even greater wit than he evinced in the previous film. Take a throwaway gag in which Bond slides down a banister, machine-gunning scoundrels left and right — looming at the end of the banister is a bulbous decoration that is a clear and present danger to his private parts. Alarmed, Bond trains his weapon on the offending object and blasts it away just in time, sliding off the banister and taking out another miscreant before he lands. You don’t find that kind of droll humor amidst expertly timed action in Bond films these days, and even when the jokes fall flat, Glen’s pacing ushers us along so we don’t linger on the bum notes.
Moore does what he does best: Every so often he cocks his eyebrow at a mildly interested woman, or exchanges polished banter over a banquet table. Like a fine-tuned engine, he’s as reliable as always, and lest we forget, he proves once again that he has the chops to be a serious Bond in his confrontation with Berkoff, or in his last desperate dash to disarm the bomb. Still, he’s an aging cog in the machine at this point, and it’s debatable whether he or his stunt doubles receive more screen time. By tying their fortunes to ever-more outlandish plots and feats of derring-do, the Bond filmmakers had perfected the equivalent of cinematic fast food: it might hit the spot, but it’s mostly forgotten afterwards. There’s a place for a confection like Octopussy, even for a gourmand like Bond, and the film accomplishes what it sets out to do: in the 1983 battle of the Bonds, Moore’s entry beat Connery’s in the box office by a substantial margin. Still, a bittersweet mood hangs over the movie. Bond might settle down with Octopussy for yet another reassuring clinch at the end, but just as the colonial India that the movie presents has long since faded away, one gets the feeling that this era of the Bond empire is approaching its twilight, and that change will be unavoidable.
