Guide to James Bond

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Again The Spy Who Loved Me abandons all any semblance of to the book. There is no Vivienne Michael, no motel, no gangsters and its goes nowhere near New England.

The film begins at sea. Two nuclear submarines – one British, one Soviet – disappear. M calls for Bond. He is making love to a woman in the Austrian Aalps. He dons he ski gear. As he leaves the cabin, he is pursued by men who try to kill him. He kills one of them, then skis over the edge of a cliff – only to fall to safety thanks to a Union Jack parachute.

Soviet spymaster General Gogol calls agent Triple X, Major Anya Amasova, to investigate the missing submarine. He also informs her that her lover has been killed in Austria in an operation involving British intelligence.

The two scientists who have developed a sophisticated device that can track submarines underwater report to Karl Stromberg, a wealthy shipping magnate. He w ho is having dinner with an attractive young woman in onboard his underwater headquarters, Atlantis, whichthat can rise above the waves when required. He congratulates the two men on their achievement, but tells them that someone has been trying to sell their secrets. They eye each other another suspiciously. Stromberg then asks the young woman to leave. She gets in the elevator and. Stromberg presses a button. The floor retracts. She falls into a pool with a shark in it and is torn to pieces while the three men watch on a video screen. The two scientists then leave on a helicopter, which Stromberg blows up.

Bond heads for Egypt where an old contact says that he must find a man called Fekkesh in Cairo. When Bond visits Fekkesh’s house, an attempt is made on his life. Fortunately he is being kissed by a woman and turns so that she shields him,, getting the bullet in herthe back. He chases the assassin to the roof, where the killer tells him that he can find Fekkesh at the Ppyramids before Bond pushes him off the roof.

At the son et lumière at the Ppyramids, Amasova is sitting with Fekkesh. Seeing Jaws – Stromberg’s steel-toothed assassin – Fekkesh tries to escape, is cornered and killed. Bond pulls a gun on Jaws, but he escapes. FromOn a diary in Fekkesh’s pocket, Bond finds he has an appointment with Max Kalba at the Mujaba Club. Amasova arrives and Bond sees off her two henchmen.

At the Mujaba Club, Bond bumps into Amasova, who knows everything about him. He excuses himself and locates Kalba, the owner of the club. Bond enquires about the tracking device. Amasova arrives at the table to make a rival bid for the details of the device Kalba has on microfilm. Kalba is called away to the phone, where he is killed by Jaws. Bond pursues Jaws and gets into the back of the van he is driving, only to be joined by Amasova.

Jaws drives out to a ruined temple in the desert. There is a confrontation and. Amasova takes the microfilm; however,, but Bond has the keys to the van and takes it the microfilm from her while Jaws trashes the van. They escape only to break down in the desert. Eventually, they get a dhow to take them back to Cairo. On the way, Bond checks the microfilm. But Amasova drugs him and takes it back.

In a secret office in another archaeological site, Bond finds Moneypenny, M, General Gogol and Amasova. Britain and the Soviet Union have combined forces to find out what has happened to their submarines. A clue on the microfilm identifies Stromberg’s marine laboratory near Sardinia. Bond and Amasova take the train there. In a scene reminiscent of From Russia With Love and Live and Let Die, Jaws appears. Bond breaks a table lamp, applies the exposed live cable to Jaws's teeth, then pushes him through the window. Bond is then forced to sleep with Amasova.

On Sardinia, Q delivers a new car. With Bond posing as a marine biologist, he and Amasova are taken out to Atlantis by Stromberg’s assistant Naomi. After a short and amicable interview, Bond and Amasova are returned to land. But Jaws has identified them and is ordered to kill them. There is a car chase, where the pursuers are seen off by Q’s special defences. Eventually they are pursued by a helicopter flown by Naomi. Bond drives off the end of a pier and the car turns into a mini-submarine. A rocket fired from the roof destroys the helicopter. Bond then sails out to examine Atlantis. They are attacked by frogmen, but again the car’s defences prove robust.

Back at the hotel, Amasova notes that Bond’s new cigarette lighter comes from Austria. Bond admits killing her lover and she vows to kill Bond once the mission is over.

Bond and Amasova are then winched down from helicopter to a US submarine. They go to examine Stromberg’s new supertanker Liparus, which opens its bow doors and swallows up the submarine. Inside, it joins the other two missing subs. The crew are incarcerated while Bond and Amasova are taken to see Stromberg. He explains that he is going to used the nuclear submarines to destroy New York and Moscow, prompting a nuclear war that will destroy life on land while he begins a new civilization under the sea.

Crewed by Stromberg’s men, the British and Soviet submarines set off on their mission, while Stromberg takes Amasova and returns to Atlantis. Bond fights off his guards and frees the captured crews of the submarines. They take over the Liparus, but cannot break into control room. Bond achieves this by dismantling a nuclear warhead and using its explosive detonator to blast a hole in the control room’s armour-plated wall. He Bond then helps reprogramme the target co-ordinates of the nuclear missiles so that the submarines destroy each other. The survivors then escape on the American submarine.

The captain then receives orders to destroy Atlantis. Bond persuades him to delay as Amasova is still on board. He sets off on a jet ski supplied by Q. Stromberg tries to feed Bond to the sharks by retracting the floor of the lift. He then kills Stromberg. Searching for Amasova, Bond bumps into Jaws and defeats him using a magnetic hoist that attaches to his teeth. Bond Then Bond dumps [?]him in the pool with the shark, whichwho proves no match for this Jaws.

Bond then finds Amasova and frees her. But the deadline has already passed and the US submarine starts firing torpedoes. As Atlantis sinks, Bond and Amasova escape in a high-tech life-raft. Bond is just opening the champagne thoughtfully supplied by Stromberg when Amasova grabs his gun: t. The mission is now over and she is going to kill him. But she relents and the two are making love when the life-raft his hauled aboard a British ship where M et al are waiting. Meanwhile Jaws swims away.

Moonraker (1979)

The film of Moonraker retains Hugo Drax as the villain, but there is no cheating at bridge at Blades Club and no private ICBM base in Kent. However, Jaws makes a welcome return, though the character appears nowhere in Fleming’s books.

The pre-title sequence begins with a “Moonraker” space shuttle on loan to the UK being hijacked. Meanwhile, Bond is returning to England on a private jet when he is attacked by the air hostess and pilot; the pilot, who jumps out of the plane with a parachute. Bond is then thrown out without one, afterwards without one by Jaws. A skydiving Bond catches up with the pilot and robs him of his parachute. But Jaws catches him up. Bond breaks free by pulling his rip cord. Jaws'’s rip cord fails, but his fall is broken by a circus tent.

When Bond reports to M, he is told that the wreckage of the 747 transporting the Moonraker has been found, but there is no sign of the Moonraker itself. Q gives him a new wristwatch that fires darts – armour piercing or tipped with cyanide. The Moonraker is made by the Drax Corporation and Bond flies to its his headquarters in California to investigate. He is taken to meet Dr Holly Goodhead, who gives him a tour of the facilities. This includes a ride on the Gg-force training centrifuge. Drax’s oriental manservant Chang tampers with the control panel so that the machine rotates at near-fatal speeds. Bond saves himself by shooting through the mechanism with Q’s wristwatch.

With the help of Drax’s obliging helicopter pilot, Corinne Dufour, Bond breaks into Drax’s safe where he finds plans for containers made by a specialist glass- blower in Venice. The next day, Bond goes to bid farewell to Drax, who is shooting game. Drax hands Bond a shotgun. Birds fly over. Bond misses; instead he hits a sniper who has been aiming at him from a tree. After Bond has left, Corinne turns up. Drax fires her. She is chased through the wood by Drax’s two Dobermanns, presumably to her death.

At the glass works in Venice, Bond spots Holly Goodhead. When she refuses a date, he heads off in a gondola. A knife-throwing assassin appears from a coffin in on a floating funeral cortège cortege and kills Bond’s gondolier. Bond hurls a knife back, killing the thrower. HeBond then flicks a switch that turns the gondola into a motor boat. After a chase around the canals of Venice, Bond escapes across St Mark’s Square when his motor-powered gondola makes a further transformation into a hovercraft.

That night, Bond returns to the glassworks and discovers a secret lab where vials of a clear liquid are being packed into the containers designed by Drax. Bond steals a vial. He deliberately leaves another where it will beis knocked over by two men working in lab. As the contents escape, the lab is instantly sealed and the two men die in agony. Bond then has a fight with Chang, who is in kendo gear, destroying the glass works’ museum. Chang is then thrown to his death through the glass front of a clock into the square below. Bond then visits Holly Goodhead, who turns out to be with the CIA, and makes love to her. She disappears in the morning, leaving Bond with a CIA-issue poison-tipped pen.

When Bond, M and the British Minster of Defence return to the lab wearing gas masks, they find it has been transformed into a beautiful baroque room where Drax is waiting to greet them. Despite the embarrassment, Bond still has the vial, which proves there was a laboratory there.

Bond arrives in Rio de Janeiro where he searches a warehouse owned by Drax. His pretty assistant Manuela is grabbed by Jaws, who has now been hired by Drax, but she is saved when carnival revellers drag him off. Next day, on an observation platform overlooking an airfield where planes belonging to Drax’s airfreight company are taking off, Bond bumps into Holly Goodhead again.

On the cable car back down to the city, they are attacked by Jaws, eventually escaping by looping a chain over the cable and sliding down. Jaws comes after them in the cable car and crashes through the winch-house. He is extricated by a short blonde woman with glasses, called Dolly. They fall instantly in love. Meanwhile Bond and Goodhead are picked up by paramedics. Bond manages to break free and after a tussle falls out of the ambulance, but Goodhead is unable to escape.

Bond meets up with M in a monastery seconded by the Secret Service outside Rio. Q has discovered that the vial contains a deadly nerve gas that only affects humans, not animals or plants. It occurs naturally in a rare orchid found deep in the Brazilian jungle. Bond heads upriver in search of it in a motorboat modified by Q. He is pursued by Jaws and his henchmen. As they head for a waterfall, Bond escapes on a hang-glider. When he crash- lands, he sees a beautiful woman and follows her into a temple that is full of other beautiful women. Suddenly he is tipped into a pool where he is attacked by a large python. , which Hhe kills it with Goodhead’s poison-tipped pen.

Jaws grabs him and takes him to Drax, who is in control of the launch of a number of Moonrakers. He explains he had to steal the Moonraker that was on loan to the UK becauseas something had gone wrong with one of his. Bond and Goodhead are locked in the bay under the shuttle engines where they will be incinerated, but they escape through a ventilation shaft using another of Q’s wristwatch gadgets. They knock out the pilot and copilot co-polite of a Moonraker crew and take their place. During their flight, they take a look at their cargo, which consists ofare a number of good-looking young couples.

Docking at a space station that is cloaked by an anti-radar shield, Bond and Goodhead discover that Drax intends to use the nerve gas to kill the world's population of the earth and repopulate itwith world with the offspring of the perfect couples the Moonrakers have brought with them. To foil the plot, Bond and Goodhead turn off the radar jammer, so the space station can be seen from Earth. The Americans launch a space shuttle with troops on board. A space-walking fight breaks out. Drax orders Jaws to throw Bond and Goodhead into the airlock where they will be ejected out into space. But Bond remarks that Drax only intends to let perfect specimens survive. This plainly does not applyied to Jaws and his lady- love. He turns on Drax.

As the American troops board the space station, Drax flees. Bond pursues, wounds him with Q’s dart-tfiring wristwatch and pushes him out into space. The space station is now disintegrating and the US troops return to the shuttle. Bond and Goodhead are trapped, but make for Drax’s Moonraker. Jaws pours two glasses of champagne for himself and Dolly and he says, : “Well, here’s to us” – his only words in the Bond series.

Bond and Goodhead cannot un-dock so theyand called for help from Jaws, who remains in the space station with his lady- love. They then plummet earthwards. News comes later that they haved survived.

Drax has already released three containers of nerve gas. Bond and Goodhead go after them, shooting them down one by one. Now that they haveHaving saved the world, the camera on board the Moonraker is patched though to the White House and Buckingham Palace, revealing Bond and Goodhead making love in weightless conditions.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

While the movie For Your Eyes Only losses most of the plot of the short story, it does borrow include elements and borrows part of the storyline of the short story “Risico” which is also in the For Your Eyes Only collection.

The pre-title sequence begins with Bond visiting his wife’s grave. A helicopter has come to take him back to the office. In fact, it has been sent by Blofeld, who we have not seen since the end of Diamonds Are Forever. Blofeld has a remote control system that electrocutes the pilot. He then uses his remote control panel to send the helicopter spinning madly around the sky. However, Bond manages to climb out of the rear of the helicopter, throw the pilot’s body out and take his seat. But as he struggles to he still cannot take controlol. Meanwhile, Blofeld flies the helicopter into a disused factory. At the last moment, Bond manages to pull the wires out of the control unit on board, then flies the helicopter out of the factory. Blofeld has been sitting in a high-tech wheelchair on top of a roof watching the action. Bond picks Blofeld’s wheelchair up onon the ski of the helicopter and deposits him down a chimney.

The story begins on board a fishing vessel named the St Georges out of Valletta. In fact, it is a high-tech British spy ship. It hits a mine and sinks before the crew can destroy the top secret ATAC (Automatic Targeting and Attack Communicator) equipment on board. The boat has sunk in shallow water off the Albanian coast. Soviet spymaster General Gogol believes a contact in Greece can recover it for them.

The action switches to a seaplane delivering a young lady who is visiting her parents on board their yacht. Her father is seen with a parrot whicht who repeats whatever has been said. Once the daughter has been dropped off, the seaplane returns and strafes the yacht, killing her parents. These are the Havelocks, though their daughter is named Melina, not Judy.

Bond is told that Havelock senior had been sent to recover the ATAC. Now it is Bond’s job. His first lead is Cuban hit man, Hector Gonzales, who killed the Havelocks. He lives near Madrid. Bond parks his car outside Gonzales’s Spanish villa, where. aA pool party is under way., Bond sees a man give Gonzales a suitcase full of money. Bond is then captured. As he is being led away, Gonzales is hit by a bolt from a crossbow. Bond escapes, only to be saved by the archer, who turns out to be Melina Havelock.

Bond’s Lotus Espirit blows up when one of Gonzales’s henchmen tries to break into itin. Instead, they take Melina’s Citroën 2CV on a furious car chase. Nevertheless, they get away. Using Q’s latest “identigraph” machine, they discover that the man who delivered the money to Gonzales was Belgian assassin Emile Leopold Locque, who is thought to be in Cortina d’Ampezzo in northern Italy.

In Cortina, Bond’s contact Ferrara introduces him to a Greek named Aris Kristatos, who says that Locque is working for a drug smuggler named Milos Colombo, known in the Greek underworld as the Dove. The two had worked together in the Resistance during World War II. Kristatos has a young protégé named Bibi who is training to be a future ice-dance champion. Bond agrees to escort her to the biathlon.

Shopping in Cortina, Bond spots Melina. He fends off an attack on her by two black-clad men on motorcycles, then persuades her to return to her father’s yacht and wait for him there. At the biathlon – after Bond fends off her advances – Bibi points out her friend Eric Kriegler, who is a competitor in the event. After Bond has left Bibi, Kriegler tries to kill him. He is chased by two men on motorcycles and his shot at by Locque. After he has escaped, Bond meets Bibi in the skating rink, where she tells him that Kriegler is an East German defector. She leaves and he has to fend off three assailants in ice-hockey outfits. Back in the car, he finds Ferrara dead. There is a white dove pin in his hand.

Bond then goes to Greece to check out Colombo. At dinner at a casino, Kristatos points out Colombo, who is with a contessa named Lisle von Schlaf. Bond spends the night with her. In the morning, they are walking on the beach when they are attacked by Locque and an accomplice in dune buggies. Locque runs down and kills Lisle von Schlaf. Bond is captured. But the frogmen emerging from the sea kill Locque’s accomplice. Locque makes off and the frogmen take Bond. They wear the white dove emblem on their wet suits.

Incarcerated ion a yacht, Bond meets Colombo, who tries to convince him that it is Kristatos whothat is the drug smuggler thatwho works for the Soviets. To prove what he is saying, Colombo takes Bond to Kristatos’s warehouse in Albania. During a raid, they discover a huge store of raw opium, plus deep-sea diving suits and floating mines like the one that sank the St Georges. Locque blows up the warehouse and tries to escape. But Bond shots him through the windscreen of his car and rolls him off a cliff.

Using her father’s two-man submarine, Melina and Bond recover the ATAC, only to be attacked underwater by Kristatos’s men. Kristatos is waiting for them when the two-man sub is winched back on board the yacht. He takes the ATAC and tries to dispose of Bond and Melina by dragging them behind his yacht over a reef, as in the book of Live and Let Die. But thanks to Bond’s ingenuity, they escape, convincing Kristatos that they have been eaten by sharks.

Back on the Havelocks’ yacht, they hear the parrot repeat “ATAC to St. Cyril’s”. This turns out to be a mountain-top monastery where Colombo and Kristatos hid from the Nazis during the war. Bond climbs the sheer cliff to operated the winch that allows the others up. Bond recovers the ATAC machine. As heBond tries to prevent Melina from arevenging herself on Kristatos, he pulls a hidden weapon and Colombo kills him.

Gogol has arrived by helicopter. At gunpoint, he orders Bond to hand over the ATAC. Instead he hurls it over the cliff and it smashes on the ground below.

“That’s détente, comrade,” says Bond. “You don’t have it; I don’t have it.”

Gogol laughs and leaves.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is patched though to the Havelocks’ yacht to congratulate Bond. While he and Melina go skinny- dipping, Mrs Thatcher is left speaking to the parrot.
Octopussy (1983)

The main plot of Octopussy borrows nothing from the short story. However, a version of Fleming’s tale is used as an ingenious backstory. The pre-title sequence begins in an unnamed Latin American country. Bond disguises himself as an army officer in order to place a bomb in a secret installation on an airbase. However, he is quickly captured by the officer he is impersonating. Bond’s female assistant then distracts the guards, allowing him to escape on board a mini -jet plane. Pursued by a SAM, Bond flies though the hangar containing the secret installation, blowing it up, while Bond escapes safely. He then runs out of fuel, lands, retracts the plane’s wings and drives into an ordinary petrol station.

The main story begins in East Germany, where a clown is being pursued by knife-throwing twins. With a knife in his back, the clown survives long enough to reach the British Embassy, where he crashesd dead through the French windows clutching a Fabergé egg. The egg is, in fact, a fake and the dead clown was 009. However, the real egg is up for auction in London, possibly as a method of funding Soviet subversion in the West. According to the catalogue, it is “The Property of a Lady” – a Fleming short story which this part of the plot draws inspiration from.

At the auction Bond bids up the price, while substituting the fake egg for the real one. But exiled Afghan prince Kamal Khan is desperate to get his hands on the egg, paying twice what it is worth. Bond follows him to Delhi. At the casino attached to his hotel, Bond notes that Khan is winning money ata backgammon by using loaded dice. He joins the game, using the egg as collateral and beats Khan at his own game. Bond is then pursued through the streets of Delhi bybut Khan’s henchman, the sinister Gobinda. Evading him, Bond ends up in Q’s laboratory where Q demonstrates a bugging device he has put in the egg which can be tracked by Bond’s Seiko digital watch – the Rolex having fallen by the wayside.

Bond is seduced by the beautiful Magda, who has a tattoo of a blue-ringed octopus on her back. She steals the egg. Gobinda knocks out Bond and takes him to Khan’s palace. But Bond escapes from his room using a pen filled with acid, whichthat Q had provided, on the bars on the windows. He overhears Khan talking to dissident Soviet General Orlov. They agree to meet in Karl-Marx-Stadt in East Germany and Orlov orders Khan to kill Bond.

Bond manages to escape from the palace, disguised as a corpse in a shroud. He is then pursued though the jungle in a big game hunt. He escapes. The tattoo on Magda’s back leads him to investigate Octopussy’s island, which is inhabited only by beautiful women. Bond infiltrates the island under a fake crocodile.

When he meets Octopussy, she asks whether he remembers Major Dexter Smythe. Bond says yes. After a brilliant military career Smythe had been seconded into the Secret Service. His mission was to recover Chinese gold seized in North Korea. Both he and his native guide disappeared and t. The gold was never found. Twenty years later Bond was sent after him. The guide’s body turned up with a bullet in itshis skull. It came from Smythe’s service revolver. Bond traced Smythe to Sri Lanka, confronted him with the facts and gave him twenty-four hours to clear up affairs before taking him back to London. Instead hHe committed suicide rather than face the disgrace of a court martial. Smythe, it turns out, was Octopussy’s father. But rather than seeking revenge, she thanks Bond for giving her father an honourable alternative. During hisin time in hiding, Smythe had become an expert on octopuses, which is why he gave his daughter the nickname Octopussy.

Bond stays the night and learns that Octopussy owns a circus which is to perform at Karl-Marx-Stadt. However, Khan has sent assassins after him. During their attack, Bond disappears. Octopussy thinks he has been eaten by a crocodile. In fact, he has escaped again under the fake one.