Tag Archives: Albert Broccoli

Moonraker [1979)

This was Lewis Gilbert’s best Bond film (which isn’t saying very much).  This film straddles the line between good and bad filmmaking for its entirety.  At the end it’s hard to say just which has edged the other out in predomination.

Something tells me the director in question is less to blame for these debacles than I had previously thought.  It seems that there was an artless voice from above which was exerting pressure upon our metteur en scène.  Was it perhaps Albert Broccoli?

Enough with the finger-pointing.  Let’s talk about why this film is bad (and occasionally good).

The opening sequence is quite masterful.  It is, in fact, to these eyes more impressive than the feted ski jump from The Spy Who Loved Me.  And so, from the start, we are back in the company of dear old Jaws (Richard Kiel).  Any question as to whether he survived the fall from a plane sans parachute is answered quite quickly in the opening credits.  His name is prominent enough (comes quickly after the top-billed stars) that we assume (and correctly) that he did indeed live through the plunge.  It is just this sort of clumsy filmmaking which typifies Gilbert’s contributions to the series.  This daft touch even shows up at the end of the opening credits when the last chord of the song carries over like a maudlin, syrupy blanket into the shot of Q milling about in M’s office.  It is like we are watching Days of Our Lives.  One can hardly take such careless filmmaking seriously.

At least Holly Goodhead continues a string of success regarding the names of Bond girls.

Perhaps the most telling S.O.S. from Lewis Gilbert is the obvious homage to Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu.  As Drax and his hunting party are taking leisure in sportsmanship, his assistants are swatting at the tree trunks with sticks or canes to scare the birds into the air.  Only the finest of minds would work this deft reference into such an otherwise brutish series.

The bit atop Sugarloaf Mountain is generally delightful.  Perhaps Wes Anderson had this in mind when he plotted the funicular rendezvous in The Grand Budapest Hotel.  Jaws meeting the buxom, bespectacled Dolly is just impossibly cute (with the strains of Tchaikovsky in the background).  In a final bit of touching panache, Jaws switches allegiances to help out Bond and Goodhead.  It is actually a masterful stroke in a series rife with pithy henchmen.  We even get to hear Kiel’s voice for once (after he pops a champagne cork by prying it off with his metal teeth).

The film really gets bad when it tries to not only relive the glory of Thunderball, but also tries to transpose that elusive magic into the milieu of Star Wars.  To say that the outer-space laser battle has not aged well would be a fairly grand understatement.  Of particular offence are the sound effects which make Oskar Sala’s noises from The Birds sound like Mozart by comparison.  The lasers sound so cheap and doinky that the entire mise-en-scène falls apart.

Gilbert didn’t really have a very persuasive Bond girl to work with either.  Lois Chiles has about as much personality as a wet rag.  Likewise, we are subject to “villain fail” once again.  Michael Lonsdale is merely a sweaty schlub who happens to have the same tailor as Chairman Mao.  Toshiro Suga is comedically unmenacing.  Corinne Cléry would have made a much better Bond girl.  At least her demise at the hand (paw?) of dogs was unique to the series thus far.

Truth be told:  Blanche Ravalec is the most attractive girl in this movie (with honorable mention to the redhead and the short-haired blonde in Drax’s “ark”).

But saving the most important for last, let us try and deconstruct after Derrida.  The positively worst, most abrupt cut in the entire series happens when Bond is ejected from the back of an ambulance onto a road in Rio.  With absolutely no segue, we next see him on a horse in full vaquero costume.  It is at this point that the movie becomes so absurdly bad and ineptly surreal.  In truth, the whole film hinges on this one amateurish cut.  And it is from analyzing outwards (concentrically) that I assume Lewis Gilbert was subject to a maltreatment akin to that suffered by Orson Welles post-Kane.  No director deserves to be so abused.

 

-PD

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Goldfinger [1964)

Honor Blackman really did know judo.  I am speaking, of course, about Pussy Galore.  No, not the band Jon Spencer fronted prior to the Blues Explosion, but rather the original article.  Blackman plays Pussy (“Poosy,” as Connery says it) and gets to show off the martial arts skills she indeed has in real life.

Art imitated life as well in the directorial realm.  Guy Hamilton took the helm when disputes arose between previous Bond director Terence Young and Eon Productions.  Hamilton had known Ian Fleming and also, like Fleming, done intelligence work for the Royal Navy in WWII.

Ken Adam returned to set design after working for Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove.

Just as odd as Oddjob (the Korean with the throwable hat of death) is the fact that Goldfinger was the seventh Bond novel Fleming wrote.  As I mentioned in my article on Casino Royale (the first Bond novel), there was a bit of trouble concerning rights to these books.  Eon Productions would go on to dominate the screen versions of Bond, but Casino Royale was made as a spy spoof by Colombia Pictures in 1967 (not unlike Modesty Blaise of 1966).  Indeed, it was a court case which convinced Eon Productions to hold off on Thunderball and go ahead with Goldfinger.

Credit for the ingenious “irradiation of the gold” should be given not to Fleming, but to Richard Maibaum.  Fleming had not quite thought through the impossibility of emptying Fort Knox of its gold deposits (unless the thieves had a couple weeks time to haul it off:  not exactly conducive to a “getaway”).

Hollywood magic provided for Sean Connery to be filming Marnie with Alfred Hitchcock while a small crew actually showed up for the location shoot in Miami.  Ian Fleming himself visited the set at Pinewood Studios in the U.K., but died before the film was released.  Notably, there was actual filming done in the Fort Knox area because of a connection between producer Albert Broccoli (a real name, to be sure) and Lt. Col. Charles Russhon, but they were never (reportedly) allowed in the depository.  Ken Adam was tasked with imagining what the inside might look like.  The result of his imaginings was built at Pinewood.

The very latest Aston Martin (1964) was chosen to be Bond’s super-spy car (complete with smokescreen, oil slick, machine gun and other such technology).  The make was chosen at the behest of Ken Adam (who considered it England’s most “sophisticated” brand).  Bond would return with the same model in Thunderball (though he drives his first-issued DB5 into a brick wall).

The laser in Goldfinger morphed from a circular saw in Fleming’s book to the edge of science fiction (industrial lasers not existing in 1959 when Fleming wrote the book, nor in 1964 when the film was made).

To emphasize the human version of gold, the creators of the film took a page out of Hitchcock’s “icy blonde” book and liberally cast blondes for nearly all the female characters.

It is interesting to note that the Goldfinger soundtrack topped the Billboard 200 chart (thanks to Shirley Bassey’s brassy rendition of the title song).

One particularly novel product tie-in which emanated from Goldfinger was Bond “dress shoes.”

But lets get back to people, shall we?  It is people who make products.  The title designer Robert Brownjohn not only referenced Moholy-Nagy, but he was the New Bauhaus founder’s protégé.  Today we know it as the Institute of Design in Chicago.  Brownjohn died in 1970, but not before designing the cover to The Rolling Stones’ album Let It Bleed.

Guy Hamilton directed three more Bond films after Goldfinger, but not until after a long hiatus which stretched to 1971.  He is a French director and, perhaps to the astonishment of those who also don’t realize Godard is still alive, is 91 years old.

Of the producers, Harry Saltzman was born in Quebec and died in Paris.  The aforementioned Albert “Cubby” Broccoli was born in Queens, NY and died in Beverly Hills.

Writers Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn have both passed away.

Ian Fleming we have already noted as concerns mortality.

Sir Sean Connery is alive and well being born, like Godard, in 1930.

Gert Fröbe (Goldfinger himself), funny enough, appeared in the movie version of another novel written by Ian Fleming:  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

And Pussy Galore?  Dear, sweet Pussy Galore?  She lives on as Honor Blackman (even though she was the oldest actress to play a Bond girl).  She declined a CBE in 2002.  She is a signed supporter to replace Britain’s monarchy with a republic.  Indeed, what was it that inspired Pussy to call Washington, D.C.?  Motherly instinct?

 

-PD

 

 

 

 

 

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