With the infamous court case surrounding the rights to its story finally settled, and with Goldfinger having smashed box office records around the world, the path was clear for the fourth Bond film in the series. With Terence Young returning to direct and a (for the time) eye-watering budget, Greg D. Smith wonders – could the series continue its high performances to date?

 

Goldfinger had a budget of $3million, the equivalent of the combined budgets of the previous two movies together. Thunderball had a budget of $9million. By today’s standards, where blockbusters routinely have $100million+ budgets, it might not sound like much, but by the standards of the time, and coming just one year after Goldfinger, it’s really quite staggering.

And a lot of that money can be seen on the screen. Indeed, Terence Young’s comment that the film couldn’t have been done justice if it had been the first movie as originally planned, on the same budget as Dr. No, would seem to be absolutely accurate. The amount of money that’s been thrown at this one compared to the previous entries is obvious, both in terms of the visuals and the ambition.

Beginning with the now standard unconnected pre-title scene, the very fact that James Bond has a jetpack (in 1965, let’s not forget) is evidence enough of that ambition. Sure, the visual FX don’t really hold up to modern standard – the green screen work is extremely obvious – but to be fair, for the time it’s a decently enough put together sequence, following on from a very well-choregraphed and brutal fight scene between Bond and SPECTRE Number Six Jacques Bouvar, crowned with a brief appearance of some of the beloved DB5’s gadgets before the credits roll and Tom Jones’ unmistakable voice belts out the theme song. As openings go, it’s the best so far in the series by quite some way, and sets the stage nicely for what comes next.

It’s certainly an elaborate plot – the theft of nuclear missiles by way of creating a double of the pilot of the plane that they’re on, the way in which the plane is landed and sunk in the sea and the recovery of the warheads are all big, imaginative and stylishly shot plot points. There’s also a feeling of the whole thing being ‘bigger’ somehow than in previous outings. Not just because of the threat of nuclear war, but literally in the fabric of the movie itself, from that pre-credits sequence in France through the impressive briefing rom wherein all the 00 agents are assembled (and indeed this is the first cinematic sighting of Bond’s fellow operatives) to the climactic battle between hordes of bad guys and a swarm of US military frogmen. The sense of scale is undeniable and impressive, and it’s created both by that large budget and the ambitions it seems to have encouraged.

All that said, it isn’t without its issues, and foremost among them – no surprise by now – is the treatment of some (though not all) of the female cast. A staff member at the health spa in which Bond is convalescing after a hard mission becomes yet another conquest after Bond first makes a very clumsy (and rebuffed) pass at her and then essentially blackmails her into bed after he’s almost killed on a traction machine. Domino – the main love interest of the movie who is attached to antagonist Largo and also happens to be the sister of the real pilot of the nuclear bomber who is murdered and replaced – is a fairly passive actor for the most part, although she does get a brief bit of autonomy granted her in the third act and even gets to be the one who kills off Largo. Paula Kaplan, a CIA agent working with Felix Leiter, is essentially there to be captured and then kills herself before she can be tortured into revealing any information.

But then there’s Fiona Volpe. An agent of SPECTRE, Volpe is essentially an assassin, deployed to deal with certain irritants. It is she who kills Domino’s brother, and who also murders Count Lippe when her fellow SPECTRE operative almost jeopardising their schemes. She also ends up going after Bond, and it’s at this point that things take a turn for the unexpected. To this point, the films have told us that every woman who falls into bed with Bond falls for his charms – even those nominally set against him. Think for example of Pussy Galore, the confident partner in Auric Goldfinger’s schemes who is seduced by Bond and ends up sabotaging her former boss for her troubles. Not so Volpe, whose eyes remain firmly on her prize. Her excoriating speech to Bond about this very subject – how shocked he is that after sleeping with him she doesn’t end up falling under his spell, feels almost as much a critique of the movies and their attitude to women to this point as it does a firm rebuke to Bond’s own ego. And what’s more, it’s clear from the look on Bond’s face that, despite his protestations to the contrary, it’s a barb that really lands. Bond is genuinely stung by the notion that his skills in the bedroom haven’t bowled Volpe over, and it’s perhaps that more than anything which drives him to literally use her as a human shield to defend himself from a henchman’s bullet – a rather unfair end to what is a very interesting villain. Also another scene copied by the Austin Powers movies years later.

Continuing that Austin Powers theme is the lead villain Largo’s obsession with sharks (though these ones don’t have laser beams on their heads). In fairness, whereas it does feel weird that he keeps a swimming pol full of the creatures, and he does feed one disappointing henchman to them and tries to set them on our hero, the use of the sharks is fairly restrained compared to some later entries (and indeed to other spoofs and tropes associated with the genre). Rather than have Bond punch a shark to death or wrestle it into submission, he basically just hides from them, keeping calm and still and allowing them to pass. It’s admirably restrained stuff, considering the film it’s in.

As to Largo himself, he very much follows the template established by the previous movie, being a villain who engages in a game of cat and mouse with our hero as each pretends not to recognise the other on their first encounter. However, unlike Goldfinger, Largo is a lot cannier, content to order Bond’s murder as soon as it becomes convenient and not as hamstring by the women with which he surrounds himself. Largo is ruthless, efficient and very much hands-on – he participates in the original recovery of the warheads from the plane, killing the pilot in a fairly typical SPECTRE move, and he’s also right there in the retrieval of them from their hiding place.

In a slight callback to Dr. No, Bond’s final thwarting of the schemes of the villain involves him dressing up in a suit (this time a wetsuit rather than a hazmat one) and blending in among henchmen who – we must assume – never look too closely at their comrades. However, unlike Dr. No, the denouement isn’t a straightforward, blink and you miss it affair. There’s the massive underwater battle between all those frogmen, then the chase to Largo’s yacht, the preposterous (but again ambitious and well shot) sequence with Bond clinging to a hydrofoil moving at full speed and then the final confrontation in which Bond is about to die when Domino shoots Largo dead and saves him.

Even the final ‘rescue’ is not as straightforward as others. There’s a full on sequence involving a Fulton system recovery to a US military plane – the sort of thing that genre viewers might also recall appears in The Dark Knight’s thrilling Hong Kong sequence. This is a movie which, at every turn, takes what has gone before and turns it up to eleven.

And most importantly, unlike its predecessors, it actually holds up a little better to the modern eye. It’s still got those lingering issues with female characters, sure, and the visual FX work can at times look painfully dated (ambition aside, the pre-credits jetpack looks daft when we are zoomed in on Connery against back projection but is nothing as compared to the work indicating the Disco Volante’s front half is travelling at around about 600 mph). But there are other scenes, the underwater sequences in particular, which wouldn’t look too out of place in any modern day action blockbuster. The comparison to a Nolan film isn’t all that far-fetched when one considers that most of the FX work was practical in nature, thanks to the limitations of the technology at the time, and it is perhaps this which helps with so much of the film’s feeling of verisimilitude.

Ultimately then, it’s another mixed bag. Like Goldfinger it ditches the pretensions to ‘real’ or ‘gritty’ aspects of spy work in favour of elaborate and cinematic escapades, but with the massively increased budget and the imagination shown by its writer and director, it transcends from poorly aged film with a few classic/memorable scenes into something else entirely – a genuinely good movie which is almost as watchable today as it was when it released fifty-five years ago.