Following the success of The Spy Who Loved Me which was one of the best Bond movies of all time (and brought in the best box office revenue since Goldfinger & Thunderball in the Sean Connery era) on a budget equal to 14 million dollars, which up until that point was the highest budget a Bond movie had received by far (in real terms) and was second in budget behind You Only Live Twice after accounting for inflation – the budget was over doubled for Moonraker in both real terms and after accounting for inflation. But Moonraker’s takings at the box office remained about equal to The Spy Who Loved Me, so budgets were reigned back in after Moonraker didn’t do as well as expected for the money spent – the same budget (after accounting for inflation) was not spent again until the Pierce Brosnan era nearly two decades later, and the box office takings of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker were not surpassed until the soppy Daniel Craig era whose movies I personally find quite unwatchable.
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Both movies – The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979) – were directed by Lewis Gilbert, but Moonraker lacks a woman with as much star power as Barbara Bach from The Spy Who Loved Me, and lacks an evil mastermind as convincing as Curd Jürgens. Still, at least we get the return of Roger Moore as James Bond (who performs excellently as usual) and his most legendary adversary, Jaws (another epic performance by Richard Kiel in the second of his only two ever outings as the most iconic Bond adversary of all time).
The main antagonist on the brains side, is Hugo Drax, played a bit demurely by Michael Lonsdale.
The lead females in Moonraker are played by American actress Lois Chiles (as Dr Holly Goodhead – on loan to Hugo Drax from NASA) and French actress Corinne Cléry (Corinne Dufour – personal pilot to Hugo Drax – she gets killed around half an hour in). They both deliver basic but adequate performances – both far less stunning or sophisticated than Barbara Bach from The Spy Who Loved Me, but that’s to be expected – they’re just about as tidy as an average Bond girl.
Blanche Ravalec plays the most fun female in Moonraker, called Dolly – a nerdy pigtail-wearing young woman who falls in love with Jaws and the feeling is reciprocated!
The most attractive woman in this movie is probably Emily Bolton who plays Manuela – James’s contact in Rio. She doesn’t appear until about an hour into the movie, and doesn’t get much screen time but she certainly brightens up the movie for a while.
The river boat chase after half an hour into this movie, is obviously inspired by the great boat chase in Live And Let Die, although this one is a bit cheap & nasty in comparison, but at least it’s original and not too close an imitation. And there is another boat chase in the second hour of this movie where James is given a much cooler boat. Then in turn, this movie’s boat races probably inspired Pierce Brosnan’s river boat race scene in The World Is Not Enough (1999).
When the boat becomes amphibious and drives around town about 40 minutes into this movie, that’s obviously inspired by the scene where the Lotus drives out of the sea in The Spy Who Loved Me. The reactions are a bit more developed this time round, but that’s not entirely a good thing – it’s all a bit cheesy, as if trying to be a comedy but not quite getting there, and the amphibious boat itself is a bit of a cheap looking stunt – something much improved in the second hour, and in The World Is Not Enough. Having said that, there is a nice bit of unspoken humour occasionally in this movie.
The fencing with the kendo swordsman in this movie probably inspired the swordfighting with Madonna in Die Another Day too.
It’s not till half an hour before the end when we finally see why the movie is called Moonraker – we finally see the hidden space city as James & Holly secretly board one of Drax’s shuttles.
I rate Moonraker an OK movie, like most Bond movies up until this one.
The Spy Who Loved marks Roger Moore‘s third outing as James Bond, and he does a splendid job as always.
The movie kicks off with a submarine hijack scene, followed by a quick introduction to the lead female in this movie: Russian agent, Major Anya Amasova (aka Agent Triple X), played very well by the beautiful Barbara Bach (born Barbara Goldbach), who went on to marry Beatles drummer Ringo Starr (real name Sir Richard Starkey) in 1981. I reckon Barbara has to be up there with the most attractive Bond girls of all time, considering how we’re so commonly fobbed off with a barely better than average looking woman in that role – I guess these women usually get their jobs based on how cooperative they are in giving favours to the decision makers (like the winners of most beauty pageants), but in this case Barbara was cast for the role just 4 days before filming began – she initially expected to take on a minor role but was given the lead female position at the last minute – whoever made that call did a great job, providing it wasn’t in exchange for uncomfortable favours of course. Barbara once auditioned for a lead role in the 70s TV series Charlie’s Angels, but wasn’t picked because she was deemed too sophisticated – I guess most Bond girls look less than what they should do for much the same reason – they’ve been mostly trying to push unsophisticated bimbos as goals.
From 5 minutes in, till 10 minutes in, we’re treated to a nice ski chase down a mountainside as Bond makes it exit from a chalet in Austria when he’s called to head back to England urgently. It seems like an epic scene until you realise how little of that skiing work was actually done by Roger Moore. Any time we see his face, he’s barely moving and the background is clearly overlayed using ancient video editing tricks. A stunt team of skiing experts clearly did all the work here, which is fair enough considering the risk and Roger’s probable lack of skiing expertise – it’s just work noting to observe the contrast with guys like Jackie Chan who is known for doing nearly all of his own stunts himself and that makes his work much more convincing.
The main baddies in this movie include Karl Stromberg, played by Curd Jürgens (full name Curd Gustav Andreas Gottlieb Franz Jürgens) who has vibes of Evelyn de Rothschild; and the legendary Richard Kiel playing Jaws – the very tall man with metal teeth (he seems to be wearing a glorified gumshield, but it’s quite convincing for the less observant). Jürgens makes his intro as Stromberg roughly 15 minutes into the movie, by sitting in his luxury underwater lair and putting a suspected traitor to death by feeding her to his sharks – something he must enjoy because he projects it onto a large TV – quite fitting behaviour for a Rothschild lookalike I’d say. Kiel also makes his debut intro as Jaws within the first 20 minutes, as he’s instructed by Stromberg to recover some microfilm containing a stolen copy of a submarine tracking system – he’s also told to kill anyone who comes into contact with it. Jaws gets properly down to action for the first time about half an hour in. He likes to kill people by biting their necks with his metal teeth, a bit like a vampire. This Jaws character was probably inspired by Tee Hee from Live And Let Die, who had a metal pincer for a hand instead of metal teeth, and also surprised Bond in his train cabin just like Jaws does in this movie. Both get their scary metal weapons exploited before being sent tumbling out the window.
At an hour into the movie, we’re treated to a nice Bond car in the form of a modified Lotus Esprit S1 which even goes under water, making for one of the most memorable scenes in the whole James Bond movie series.
The prisoner escape half an hour before the end, with the help of the rail system, was probably inspired by similar things in You Only Live Twice, from 10 years earlier, starring Sean Connery – but of course this time it’s taken to a whole new level since there’s so many prisoners, so there’s no need for floods of ninjas from the outside as in You Only Live Twice, but the effect is similar. The similarities continue, from nuclear threats, to describing the operations room as impregnable in both movies after Bond’s team captures the rest of the baddies’ building. These similarities may have something to do with the fact that both movies were directed by Lewis Gilbert – he only ever directed three Bond movies and these were his first two – the third was Moonraker which came directly after The Spy Who Loved Me and also featured Jaws.
Rating & reasoning
Overall, I rate The Spy Who Loved Me as an Upper-OK movie, alongside the best Bond movies so far like Goldfinger and Live And Let Die. Not because I prefer Moore over Connery, and not because this movie is extremely well polished or has any single great feature about it, but because of its accumulation of strengths – it has double star power with the help of a great lead female in Barbara Bach (one of the best Bond girls of all time) who is interestingly a top Russian agent temporarily cooperating with Bond – it has a couple of very convincing baddies, satisfying both brains and brawn, including possibly the best Bond baddie of all time in Jaws – it has some great submarine hijacking and re-taking scenes, a great underwater-swimming Bond car (possibly the best Bond car of all time), trips to snowy mountains as well as sandy deserts – it’s got a lot going for it compared to some of the weaker Bond movies. The movie doesn’t dwindle off at the end either – it stays strong even for people to who’ve seen it many times before to stay entertained till the very end (so long as you’ve not seen it too recently of course). The theme tune isn’t bad either. It doesn’t have the awesome comedy of Sheriff JW Pepper from Roger Moore’s first two outings as James Bond, but one movie can’t have everything, and on the overall balance of things I think it’s still the joint best Bond movie up until this point, well deserving of an Upper-OK rating by today’s action hero movie standards according to my taste.
Fun fact 1
I suspect the scene 40 minutes in, where James & Anya confront Jaws (filmed at Karnak Temple and Medinet Habu – both in Luxor, Egypt) was probably inspired by Bruce Lee’s coliseum scene that ended The Way Of The Dragon (1972) just 5 years prior to The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).
The Way Of The Dragon was the last of Bruce’s films that he lived to see the premiere of. He also completed Enter The Dragon but it wasn’t released until shortly after his death – who knows if he even approved of the final edit – and he was working on Game Of Death but that movie never got anywhere near completion in his lifetime – the movie eventually released by that name was mainly made by a Bruce Lee impersonator, obviously to a much cheaper standard. Indeed, Bruce didn’t even have full control over Enter The Dragon – the story was written by someone else and funded by Warner Bros – nor did he have full control over his Hong Kong made movies prior to The Way Of The Dragon, due to the status of his contract with Golden Harvest (Raymond Chow) at the time. So, The Way Of The Dragon stands alone as pretty much the only movie Bruce completely crafted and approved with his own hands according to his own best wishes from start to finish.
The Way Of The Dragon contains a great example of the latest version of Bruce’s kung fu, which he called Jeet Kune Do (JKD). Especially in the coliseum scene at the end, where he fights Chuck Norris. He actually tried to cast karate champ Joe Lewis for that role (not to be confused with Joe Louis the boxer), but Lewis was busy with other things at the time, so Bruce reluctantly settled for karate champ Chuck Norris instead (who Bruce thought had much slower hands so wasn’t ideal, but sufficed). The casting in that movie may or may not have also been affected by a private ‘friendly’ fight Bruce had with Joe Lewis: according to witnesses, they allegedly had a dispute over some technique, so they locked themselves in a room and fought it out. Lewis came out first, face all messed up and covered in blood. Bruce came out next, fists covered in blood. Rumour says they never spoke again after that incident. Rumour also says Lewis was a little too friendly with Bruce’s wife – I don’t know how much of that is true, but this rumour is often cited as an excuse for Bruce being so close to certain Hong Kong actresses while being married to Linda Lee.
Fun fact 2
Off screen, Roger and Anya both agreed that Ian Fleming’s character James Bond were a “chauvinist pig”. Roger said, around the time of his debut as Bond in 1973: “Bond, like myself, is a male chauvinist pig. All my life I’ve been trying to get women out of brassieres and pants.” Then Anya expressed a similar sentiment to the papers 10 years later – she said Bond is “a chauvinist pig who uses girls to shield him against bullets.”