Octopussy

(Here be spoilers if you are yet to see the James Bond movies...)

The Mission
The theft and smuggling of priceless Faberge eggs leads James Bond into an ongoing investigation that involved the death of agent 009. He follows one such egg to a dodgy prince named Kamel Khan (Louis Jordan), who has connections to a mysterious crime kingpin (queenpin?) named Octopussy (Maud Adams). Behind this, 007 soon uncovers a devastating plot masterminded by a rogue Soviet general who plans to open Europe up to Russian conquest.

Jimmy Bond Yo!
If there's one thing I love about Roger Moore's 007 it's how much he seems to really be enjoying it. Moore's Bond isn't a dark character by any means, and there's a part of me that really admires an actor who can play such an uncomplicated role with enthusiasm and sophistication. That's Moore through-and-through. His Bond is always a risktaker, he bids recklessly high on a Faberge Egg just to see how high his target will go, and he doesn't bat an eyelid when he gets stabbed in the chest by a bizarre Indian instrument (it turns out it hit his wallet, hence the lack of blood).

Amusingly, Bond uses a high tech camera to zoom in on a woman's cleavage (much to Q's annoyance), and is visible disgusted by the prospect of eating a stuffed sheep's head. He doesn't get a lot of character moments in this film due to the high amount of secondary characters, but the end sequence where he has to operate entirely on his own and is racing against time to defuse a nuclear bomb is fantastic stuff - we rarely get to see him in a situation where he's truly desperate. He even has to hitchike at one point, and also steals a civillian's car. He dons Russian peasant garb to disguise himself, has his first train top fight (and it's about time), and breaks his leg at the film's end (his first break of the series?)

Villainy
Okay... let's try and get our heads around this. The main villain of the piece is General Orlov (Steven Berkoff), a warmongering Soviet commander who is feeds a Faberge egg to a smuggling ring in exchange for their co-operation in planting an atomic bomb at the centre of a German circus. He's your typically fascistic fanatic, not quite up to the grand eugenics of Hugo Drax (Moonraker) or Karl Stromberg (The Spy Who Loved Me), but still quite cavalier in his attitude towards human life. He's representative of all the West's worst fears about the Soviet military.

The other main villain is Prince Kamal Khan, a dapper exile from Afghanistan who lives the high life in India through the buying and selling of high art and other expensive artefacts (such as Faberge eggs). A far more traditional Bond villain than Orlov, he's duplicitous, cheats at high-stakes backgammon, doesn't have any qualms about helping level a sizeable portion of Germany with a nuclear bomb, and is also quite happy to betray his colleagues. Most of the time he's flanked by a towering Sikh henchman named Gobinda (Kabir Bedi), who wields a scimitar and has connections to a Thuggee-like cult of Indian assassins. These assassins are deployed at one point to get rid of Bond, and featured among them are a chuckling one-eyed man and a dude with an awesome bandsaw-like device attached to his hand that can be flicked out like a grappling hook. Khan has also two extra henchmen in Europe, the knife-throwing Russian circus twins Mischka and Grischka (David and Anthony Meyer).

Buddies and Babes
I guess the main 'Bond girl' for this film is the lady of the title, Octopussy. She doesn't really show up in the film until about halfway through, and is presented as a possible villain at first (it's initially suggested that Khan is in thrall to her). She lives on an island in a lake in Udaipur, India, and has cultivated an air of mystery around herself. Her opulent hideout is decorated with octopus motifs and she keeps a deadly blue-ringed octopus in a tank. She also commands an army of beautiful female devotees who wear ludicrous bright red lycra suits with an 'O' imprinted on them (making them look a bit like comic book characters). 007 was responsible for the demise of her father but she doesn't seek revenge as Bond gave her father the option of 'settling his affairs' before being arrested. Her empire is fuelled by a jewellery smuggling ring that operates between India and Europe. She's unaware of Orlov and Khan's plans to detonate a nuclear bomb in East Germany.

The other main girl featured is Magda (Kristina Wayborn), a henchwoman of Octopussy's who steals the Faberge egg off Bond. She's fairly forgettable. As always, Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) also puts in an appearance, but this time she is accompanied by a sexy young assistant named Penelope Smallbone (Michaela Clavell), an obvious concessi0n on the part of the filmmakers to the fact that Moneypenny is starting to get on a bit.

M (Robert Brown) returns after an absence in the last film (due to the death of actor Bernard Lee). He's played by a different actor and is a bit more subdued but it's clearly meant to be the exact same character in the same way that Bond is the same character, as opposed to a new man assigned to the 'M' designation. Q (Desmond Llewelyn) shows up as well, and actually gets to help 007 in the field rather extensively for the first time, helping to pilot a hot air balloon for Bond's raid on Khan's palace. Bond is also helped in India by an Indian MI6 contact named Vijay (played by Indian tennis player Vijay Amritraj).


Locations
The opening sequence takes place in an un-named Latin American country but it's pretty clear (by the uniforms of the soldiers and the lay of the land) that it's meant to be Cuba. It probably isn't named as such due the still very real tensions between America and Cuba at the time of filming, but the location fits with Octopussy's cold war themes. We also get some scenes (though not featuring Bond) set within the Soviet Union, featuring a rather impressive concrete military bunker set.

The two major locations for this film are East Berlin and India, tenously linked by the film's smuggling-ring plot. India is brought to life rather vividly with scenes of the Taj Mahal and features elements such as cricket, snake charmers, backgammon, beds of nails, thronging streets, elephants and dodgy thuggee-like assassins. The East Berlin parts of the film are a bit more lacklustre, the circus and train sequences might as well take place in any country east of Germany (no doubt due to the fact that these parts of the film were actually shot in England!)

Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
Our man James Bond comes adequately prepared for this mission - making use of a foldaway jet, a homing device/bug that he hides inside the Faberge egg, and a special pen with an earpiece that allows him to listen in on said bug. He also sneaks onto Octopussy's island by hiding himself inside a submarine-like artificial crocodile.

Ever the master of disguise, Bond starts out the adventure by disguising himself as an officer in the Cuban army (complete with moustache). He later also disguises himself as a clown in order to get into the German circus whilst being pursued by the authorities. He calls upon his wits at various points to outsmart his opponents - pulling the parachute cords on two soldiers who attack him in the back of an open-topped truck (sending them up into the air) and buying himself some space in the Indian streets by throwing money onto the road to cause a commotion.

Licence to Kill
Bond's first kill of the film comes a while into it when he throws a man onto a bed of nails in an Indian marketplace. He also slams a thug into Octopussy's octopus tank where the deadly octopus within latches onto his face and kills him. He feeds another man to a crocodile in a lake, knocks one of the Russian twins dead by bringing a massive cannon down on his head, and throws a knife into the other as revenge for the death of 009. In the raid on Khan's palace at the end he machine-guns at least five men and later knocks Gobinda off the wing of Khan's plane whilst in flight.

Shag-Rate
Magda 'seduces' Bond in his hotel room in order to get to the Faberge egg but is unaware that Bond actually wants her to take it. Bond later beds Octopussy on her octopus-shaped bed, and gets busy with her again on her barge at the film's end.

Quotes
MONEYPENNY (as Bond offers a rose to Penelope Smallbone): Take it dear, it's all you'll ever get from him.

JAMES BOND: Vijay, we have company.
VIJAY: No problem. This is a company car.

JAMES BOND: The jewellery sir, I think is - if you'll forgive the analogy - only the tip of the tentacle.

GENERAL GOGOL: World socialism will be achieved peacefully.

JAMES BOND: Suppose, for argument's sake, I don't feel like talking?
KAMEL KHAN: Oh, you will.

Q (whilst Octopussy's girls kiss and hug him): What are you doing? Cut it out, we have no time for that. Later, perhaps.

Q: 007 on an island populated exclusively by women? We won't see him 'til dawn!

How Does It Rate?
I don't know where to start with Octopussy, on the one hand it has all this great stuff set in India, which is a welcome change of scenery from the usual Caribbean and European locations, but it's also very all over the place in terms of pacing and plot. Director John Glen continues his restructuring of the franchise as something more cold war-orientated, and I can dig that as something that reflects the 80s in a serious way (I mean, it could've been worse - we could've had James Bond fighting South African diplomats to a synth-pop soundtrack whilst teaming up with Eddie Murphy). Octopussy is also to be commended for not portraying the Soviets as uniformly evil... General Gogol is a nice contrast to the villain, General Orlov. The other great aspect of this film is the climactic chase through East Germany; watching James Bond running from the authorities whilst also running against the clock makes for an interesting change of style for Bond - he's usually so cool and collected in the face of danger that it's quite thrilling to see him forced into such a desperate situation for once.

But, like a lot of Roger Moore's James Bond films, the attempts at humour are just downright silly - from a sampled Tarzan-yell as 007 swings from a vine to shots of turning Indian heads watching Bond fight as if it's a tennis match, these 'jokes' are just juvenile and they wreck the serious tone that Glen otherwise seems to be aiming for. Also, I struggle to grasp why the film even needs the character of Octopussy in it... at first she seems like the hidden supervillain of the piece, which makes sense in terms of the evolution of female protagonists over the last few Bond films, but then she turns out to be just another ally/love interest (albeit a more empowered one than usual, considering she has her own cult of worshippers). She's almost superfluous to the plot, and the heirarchy of villains in Octopussy is unneccessarily complicated as it is without chucking in this morally-grey temptress.

I think this movie should've been a lot more like Live and Let Die. Where Live and Let Die riffed on the blaxploitation genre, this film could've been a dark Indian tale of Gunga Din-like proprotions ala Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Instead it's like two completely different films forced into one; an exotic Indian adventure with a mysterious villainess, and a serious cold war thriller involving the circus. They should've dropped the Soviet stuff and stuck it out with just one plot, it would've been much less of a mess.

Visit my James Bond page.

DIRECTOR: John Glen
WRITER/SOURCE: George MacDonald Fraser, Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson. Loosely based on two short stories by Ian Fleming.
KEY ACTORS: Roger Moore, Maud Adams, Louis Jordan, Kabir Bedi, Steven Berkoff, Lois Maxwell, Desmond Llewelyn, David Meyer, Tony Meyer, Kristina Wayborn, Robert Brown, Walter Gotell, Vijay Amritraj, Geoffrey Keen

RELATED TEXTS:
- The two James Bond short stories used as a basis for this film were Octopussy and The Property of a Lady.
- Maud Adams previously appeared in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun, as the girlfriend of Scaramanga.
- As mentioned in my review above, I couldn't help but think of the Indian adventure films Gunga Din and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
- George MacDonald Fraser is best known for writing the colonialist-themed Flashman novels.