Thunderball

The Mission
James Bond (Sean Connery) is getting some much needed rest at a health spa when he stumbles across a SPECTRE plot involving a dead NATO pilot. MI6 soon discover that SPECTRE have stolen two nuclear bombs. The evil organisation is holding the North Atlantic to ransom for 100 million pounds, and Bond promptly requests to be despatched to the Bahamas to follow up a lead. Once there he begins to investigate the activities of Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), a wealthy black marketeer who is in fact designated as Number 2 in the SPECTRE organisation and may know the whereabouts of the bombs.

Jimmy Bond Yo!
More than settled into the role, Connery is all jokes and double-entendres galore throughout the duration of Thunderball. He cheekily stops to eat a grape whilst snooping about at one point, and arrives late at a very important emergency conference when all the 00 agents are assembled together - which suggests he's very much the 'maverick' of the group. We're finally given a bit more insight into why he's apparently able to bed so many women - he reveals a rather dainty-looking minke glove that he uses to massage his lady-conquests, and even blackmails a health spa nurse into sex after a near-death experience (!) He foregoes his usual evening-wear whilst in the Bahamas, preferring to get about in a range of very short shorts and a snazzy red pantsless wetsuit. Connery's hairpiece also looks a little bit more noticeable than usual in this film, perhaps due to the extensive underwater sequences.

Villainy
Emilio Largo is a dapper, cold-humoured sporting count in an eyepatch, and very much an Italian stereotype. He's also the loyal Number 2 to SPECTRE's Number 1, Blofield, and has a resort-like bachelor pad in the Bahamas, complete with a pool full of rare man-eating sharks. Despite his trimmings, Largo comes across as a fairly boring stock-standard villain - he looks a lot more interesting than he really is.

Largo's main henchman is Vargas (Philip Locke), an intriguingly nondescript cronie with a talent for killing. In the tradition of Oddjob from Goldfinger, he doesn't really get any dialogue and just gets to stand around whilst looking a bit menacing.

Blofield makes a small appearance near the film's beginning, outlaying SPECTRE's plan to hold the world to ransom with stolen A-bombs. This time he deliberately hides his face from the rest of SPECTRE behind a frosted glass screen (as opposed to his last appearance in From Russia With Love, where he simply appeared with his back to the audience).

Buddies and Babes
Bond's CIA man Felix Leiter shows up in the Bahamas to represent the Americans and is played once again by a different actor (Rik Van Nutter). This time he's a lot more like a stereotypically British view of an American - all exclamations and dressed in a baseball cap and rather loud hawaiian shirt. Put alongside Bond, he offers a classless American contrast with Bond's British dignity and flair for style. Pinder (Earl Cameron) is Bond and Leiter's contact for the Bahamas, he's a fairly bland character who doesn't really do much other than stand around being black so we're reminded that they're in the Caribbean.

M (Bernard Lee) reacts to Bond with his usual weariness but also has the utmost faith in 007 even when it looks like he's failed in his mission - suggesting that he tolerates Bond's rogue-like tendencies because of his positive track record.

Bond deals with a whole gaggle of women throughout Thunderball, starting with Pat Fearing (Molly Peters) - an orderly at the health spa who features throughout the film's first forty minutes or so. After Bond travels to the Bahamas he is assisted by Paula Caplan (played by model Martine Beswick), a local MI6 contact who meets her maker after being kidnapped by Largo.

The two main Bond babes for this film though are Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) and Domino (Claudine Auger, who was Miss France in 1958). Fiona is a SPECTRE agent who attempts to seduce Bond and makes direct fun of the growing cliche where Bond converts exotic foreign enemies to his cause after sleeping with them. Domino is Largo's naive mistress, and is the main love interest for Bond for the bulk of the film. I have to admit that I got a little confused throughout the second half of Thunderball as I thought the actresses who played Domino and Fiona looked too similar, and at one point I was convinced they were even the same character!

Locations
The first forty minutes or so of Thunderball take place in England whilst the rest of the film is set in the Bahamas. Unlike the Jamaican setting of Dr. No, the location work here is a lot more extensive and picturesque - no doubt reflecting the much larger budget of Thunderball. There are also a lot of underwater sequences that showcase tropical coral reefs, but more on that later.

Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
Bond employs the use of a rather ridiculous rocketpack quite early on in the film, using it to escape some angry SPECTRE agents after killing one of their men. He also has a bulletproof shield on the back of his car, which also comes equipped with the ability to spray high-pressure water streams.

Q (Desmond Llewelyn) turns up in the field to give Bond a handy geiger counter, an underwater camera, a mini-flare gun, a mini-oxygen tank and a special pill that emits a homing signal when swallowed. Bond also has a tape recorder hidden inside a book that he leaves in his hotel room to record any chatty intruders. As expected, he gets to use each and every one of these gadgets.

Licence to Kill
Bond kills more enemies than ever before, starting with a high-ranking SPECTRE agent incongruously dressed as a woman.

Once in the Bahamas he really lets loose with his licence to kill - shooting one of Largo's men and stabbing another whilst sneaking into the mastervillain's island mansion at night. He later cuts the oxygen tube on a scuba man (something he does about five more times during the film's climactic underwater battle).

Most spectacularly, he kills Vargas with a speargun whilst lounging around on the beach, and uses Fiona as a human shield whilst dancing with her (causing her to get shot by one of her own stooges). During the big underwater fight at the film's end he fires a mini-torpedo into someone from his special backpack, stabs two other guys and kills yet another with a speargun.

Shag-Rate
Positively high! As mentioned earlier, he 'convinces' Pat to sleep with him whilst on leave at the health spa. He later shags incorruptable SPECTRE agent Fiona Volpe, amusingly claiming afterwards that it gave him no enjoyment. It's also strongly implied that Bond and Domino shag underwater in the reef whilst in scuba diving gear.

Quotes
BOND (referring to himself): Is there ever a man more misunderstood?

PAT FEARING: Haven't you had enough exercise for one evening?
BOND: It's funny you should say that...

BOND: Try some clam chowder.
DOMINO: You've been reading the wrong books.
BOND: How so?
DOMINO: About clam chowder being an aphrodisiac.
BOND: It just so happens that I like clam chowder.

DOMINO: What sharp little eyes you've got.
BOND (quietly): Just wait till you get to my teeth.

BOND: Moneypenny, next time I see you I'll put you across my knee.

BOND (after shagging Fiona): What I did this evening was for Queen and Country. You don't think it gave me any pleasure, do you?

BOND (after killing Vargas with the speargun): I think he got the point.

How Does It Rate?
Following on from Goldfinger, Thunderball further exploits the 1960s fear of atomic warfare as a means to highlight SPECTRE's villainy. The Bond creative team are clearly working their way towards a direct battle between 007 and the SPECTRE organisation - we first learnt about them in passing at the end of Dr. No, then we met them (Number 3 in particular) in the flesh during From Russia With Love. Now in Thunderball we meet the next highest member, Number 2 - Emilio Largo. Unfortunately this exploration of SPECTRE is just a little too slow and any momentum the filmmakers may be hoping to build up just doesn't really happen - perhaps due to the absence of any new information or developments.

Thunderball is a lot more sexually suggestive and sillier than the previous Bond films - starting off with Bond duking it out with a high-ranking SPECTRE agent in drag before wobbling off into the air with the help of a jetpac. We then follow his slightly-rude misadventures in a health resort where he bumbles across a dastardly SPECTRE plot to nuke the world. It probably also doesn't help that SPECTRE don't really make much sense as far as terrorist organisations go - for a criminal venture motivated by financial reasons they seem to have an unusually fanatical leaning towards fascism. The number-based heirarchy and the fervant loyalty of Numbers 2 and 3 (not to mention Blofield's dictator-like fashion stylings) seems to suggest an adherence to some kind of political doctrine - though what that might be is anyone's guess.

The other major failing of Thunderball is it's big selling gimmick of underwater sequences. I can't speak for anyone who first saw the film back in the 1960s, but I found these bits dreadfully boring. The problem with realistic underwater sequences is that everything slows down in water... it's hardly ideal for an action film, is it? This film would've been a lot more entertaining if they'd kept these scenes down to a minimum (or at least made them a bit more dramatic - the director seems to think that the underwater stuff is so exciting that it doesn't even need incidental music. He's wrong). If they'd shaved off about half an hour or so from the overall screentime (the England-set part of the film could've been drastically shortened) then it would've been a lot snappier and a far better movie.

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DIRECTOR: Terrance Young
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins, based on an alternate script by Jack Whittingham that formed the basis for a book by Ian Fleming.
KEY ACTORS: Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Luciana Paluzzi, Rik Van Nutter, Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewelyn, Guy Dolan, Molly Peters, Martin Beswick.

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Thunderball by Ian Fleming, the ninth James Bond novel and one that was actually based on a script written by someone else.
- The legal issues arising from the conception of the Thunderball storyline led to it being remade as an 'unofficial' James Bond film in the early 1980s, renamed Never Say Never Again and starring an older Sean Connery as 007.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Best Visual Effects.
BAFTAs - nominated Best Art Direction.