Tag Archives: John Glen

Licence to Kill [1989)

It may sound like heresy to say it, but this is the third great James Bond movie up to this point in the series.  Furthermore, it is particularly rich that it came out during the presidency of George H.W. Bush.  The pleasant surprise is that Carey Lowell takes the cake as hottest Bond girl through the first 16 films.  These are controversial claims and allusions.  Buckle up.

1974.  The first great Bond film.  There is no denying the palpable rush of Dr. No–no topping the exotic sensuality of From Russia with Love.  It has less to do with Connery, perhaps the best Bond, than it does with cinema.  The first great James Bond film came under the watchful eye of auteur Guy Hamilton.  He lives.  The Man with the Golden Gun.  Yes, it was a Roger Moore film.  So sue me.

1985.  The second great James Bond film.  Travesty of travesties!  He’s going to name two from the 80s.  Yes, that’s right.  A View to a Kill.  John Glen made an auteurist bid with this flick.  Again with the Roger Moore.  John Glen lives.

1989.  The third perfect Bond film.  John Glen achieves immortality.  Hyperbole.  Hyperbole.  This is to take nothing away from our cherished Guy Hamilton.  He too made more that just Golden Gun.

But let us stretch out a bit…  What makes these three films so strong?  Answer:  the villains.  Christopher Lee.  Christopher Walken.  And Christopher…er, Robert Davi.

George H.W. Bush.  There was a book from 1992 called The Mafia, CIA and George Bush written by Pete Brewton.  That’s back when there was only one George Bush known on the world stage.  Middle initials were unnecessary.  I haven’t read the book in question, but it bears mentioning that I remembered the pithy title mistakenly…as The CIA, Drugs, and George Bush.  There’s more than an Oxford comma’s difference between the two…obviously.

1998 brought the world a book called Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb.  I have not read this book either.

So what, you may be asking, is my fucking point?

Let me note a few poignant books I have read.  9/11 Synthetic Terror:  Made in USA by Webster Griffin Tarpley.  Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert.  The Big Wedding by Sander Hicks.  9/11 The Big Lie (L’Effroyable imposture) by Thierry Meyssan.  Pentagate also by Meyssan.  The Shadow Government:  9/11 and State Terror by Len Bracken.  The Arch Conspirator also by Bracken.  Body of Secrets by James Bamford.  America’s “War on Terrorism” by Michel Chossudovsky.  The 9/11 Commission Report:  Omissions and Distortions by David Ray Griffin.  The Bilderberg Group by Daniel Estulin.  Inside Job:  Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies by Jim Marrs.  The Terror Conspiracy also by Marrs.

If you’re still reading you are likely laughing or transfixed.  And again I can sense the question:  what is the fucking point?

Well, dear reader, it is that I can wholeheartedly agree with Mark Gorton’s reservations regarding George H.W. Bush.  I used to think Dick Cheney was the scariest guy in the world (thanks Mike Ruppert).  Donald Rumsfeld always seemed in the running.  But after reading Gorton’s fastidious research, I concur that the prize should probably go to Poppy Bush.

At wikispooks.com, one can find the following articles by Gorton:

Fifty Years of the Deep State

The Coup of ’63, Part I

and

The Political Dominance of the Cabal

Gorton is not your average conspiracy theorist.  His degrees are from Yale, Stanford, and Harvard (respectively).  His business successes include founding LimeWire and the Tower Research Capital hedge fund.

And that brings us to sex.

Carey Lowell.  With her androgynous hairstyle, she still (because of?) manages to be the hottest Bond girl through the first 16 films.  Sure, Timothy Dalton is great, but Carey Lowell is fan-fucking-tastic.  The message of the establishment is that if you don’t play by the rules, you don’t get the sex cookie.  Carey Lowell is not an establishment actress in this movie.  Her character is the anti-Bond girl in some respects.  For this series, anyway, that’s as good as it gets.  Until Anamaria Marinca is cast alongside (or as) 007, the bar is memorably set by Lowell.  Perhaps as I critically watch the more recent films I will find other Bond girls who truly stand out in a believable way, but Lowell takes the cake through the first 16 films.

Lowell lived in Houston for awhile.  Back to Bush.  Right down the road is the scariest man in the world?  Dear readers…the Internet remains free for only so long.  Soon we may have to get all Bradbury and become book people.  If Carey ever gets tired of Richard Gere, maybe she’ll meet us in the forest.  I’ll be Histoire(s) du cinema.  The book.

-PD

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A View to a Kill [1985)

The opening disclaimer is odd.  Zorin…  One wonders whether the apologetics were in deference to Valerian Zorin.  In the West, the Soviet diplomat/statesman was best known for a stand-off with Adlai Stevenson at a UN Security Council meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Surely the legal clarification wasn’t at the behest of a high Soviet official?  The question is important because it colors my reading of this film.  Something unique was afoot for this production.  At what point in the life of this film was the disclaimer created?  Valerian Zorin died the year after this film was released.

Is it significant that an MI6 agent dies in the carwash at a BP gas station?  Is it significant that a Chevron sign comes tumbling down to destruction in the San Francisco car chase?

One thing is certain:  the fact that villain Max Zorin is interested in horse breeding and horse racing is no accident.  Dr. Carl Mortner (played by Willoughby Gray) is a former Nazi scientist whom the Soviets picked up (à la Operation Paperclip).  His steroid experiments on pregnant women in concentration camps spawned our highly-intelligent, psychopathic antagonist in question.  One could draw many parallels…

But we must also remember that this is a movie.  In my estimation, it is the best Bond film up till this point with the possible exception of The Man with the Golden Gun.  What makes this film so special is indeed exactly what I have been skirting around:  its villain (Christopher Walken).

Yes, the theme by Duran Duran is great.  Yes, Grace Jones is fantastic.  But it is Walken who really provides the drama.  That the greatest of all Bond villains would have a particularly nasty scheme up his sleeve is only natural.  Eliminate the competition.  It is simple.  Cold, calculating, mechanical…and creative in its destruction.

Fiona Fullerton really filled out since her role as the title character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972).  She would have made an excellent Bond girl, but the honor goes to perhaps an even more worthy candidate:  Tanya Roberts.  The blue-eyed Roberts and the blue-eyed Roger Moore are almost like the thoroughbreds which play a minor role in this film.  Credit both actors with remaining human while still being among the beautiful people.  Both do an excellent job of giving depth to their characters.  This would, sadly, be the last Roger Moore production in the Eon series of Bond movies (barring a late comeback).

It may or may not be significant that Roberts’ character has the last name Sutton.  Considering the geopolitical intrigue at stake, one might consider the reference as to Anthony Sutton.  Dr. Sutton was a historian, economist, and writer on politics who researched and published on such fascinating topics as the Skull & Bones fraternity of Yale University, The Trilateral Commission, and the U.S. Federal Reserve System.  Of particular note are Sutton’s books on the relation of Wall Street to both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis.

Shedule, not skedjule.  With a simple pronunciation nuance, Walken exits the mine after killing his own workers with an Uzi (while laughing).  Surely such demented individuals don’t reach such important positions of power, do they?

Walken even laughs at his own death.  By attacking Moore with an axe, we are brought back to the archetypal depiction of insanity which Jack Nicholson so hideously characterized in Kubrick’s The Shining.

I won’t forgive myself without mentioning the significant contribution over the years of Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny (this being her last film in the role).  And as a reward for having read this far, the secret to the disclaimer is Zoran Corporation (which strangely, strangely actually did specialize in making microchips…and! was located in Silicon Valley).  As a side-note, the aforementioned company derived its name from the Hebrew word for silicon (being strongly connected to the government of Israel, though incorporated in Delaware).

And I didn’t even get to snowboarding…or the game for Commodore 64 🙂

-PD

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Octopussy [1983)

This was another childhood favorite of mine.  The intriguing geopolitical aspects were beyond me till now.  In the midst of the Soviet-Afghan War, the Bond franchise saw fit to introduce an Afghan villain.  What is more, the plot revolves around a rogue Soviet general (think Dr. Strangelove and Gen. Ripper) set on a sort of sneak attack against NATO.  The stratagem in question here is a rather more slippery bit of stealth.

Director John Glen does another admirable job and turns in a thoroughly entertaining episode for the series.  The disarming of the nuclear warhead is genuinely enthralling, but perhaps the best part of the movie is after that:  when Octopussy’s amazons besiege the villain’s hideout.

There’s a generous helping of humor and generally ridiculous set pieces in this installment.  Maud Adams makes a return to the series as the title character (having previously appeared in the excellent 1974 Eon production The Man with the Golden Gun).  The film, however, gets a bit clunky when her family history is introduced.  She pours a martini a little too fast and (voilà!) the plot becomes inexplicably convoluted at 100 miles per hour.

There is the nice reference to (one would assume) Strangers on a Train when Vijay is swatting thugs with a tennis racket.  It is cheeky, but the Bond series by this point had started to develop its own film language.  Other films simply could not get away with the hubris involved in such repeated suspension of disbelief.

Roger Moore in a gorilla suit is utterly absurd, but the whole thing works (to me) because he checks his watch while eavesdropping on a time-sensitive conversation.  On the other hand, the sequence in the jungle overdubbed with a Tarzan yell has the effect of the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope film Road to Bali.  The only problem is that Road to Bali sustained the anarchic irreverence throughout.  Bond’s life being in danger all of a sudden seems to be a laughing matter.  Somehow, John Glen gets away with it.  I don’t know if deft is the right word, but in the context of the increasingly farfetched series it works…more or less.

There are a couple of ribald excerpts which bear mentioning.  One is a cheeky cut immediately after the word asp to a lady’s rear end.  The other is far more strange.  As Q is briefing Bond (as usual) there is a strange stand off with a very distant, timid feminism.  Moore focuses a camera on a lady’s breasts (herself also an employee of MI6) and does the mondo zoom in/zoom out to generally entertaining effect.  The strangeness lays in the lady’s reaction.  She is like one of the Vietnamese in the famous picture of Jane Fonda which Godard spun out into an entire film (Letter to Jane).  The lady connected to the breasts is obviously displeased by what today would be accurately termed sexual harassment.  The fumbling mise-en-scène allows her to linger in plain sight for a long while as the joke is played out in aftermath.  I find this to be a potentially greater crack in “the fourth wall” than Vijay’s snake-charmer rendition of the 007 theme.

-PD

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For Your Eyes Only [1981)

This is where it gets good again.  After the misery of Moonraker, leave it to a guy named John Glen to rescue the series from ineptitude.  Like a master astronaut compared to Lewis Gilbert, Glen’s directorial debut in the series was auspicious enough to grant him the chair for four more films.

The MacGuffin (the ATAC machine…a missile command system) bears a striking resemblance to a Boss DR-880 drum machine.  When I was a boy this was a film I saw numerous times on TV.  It may, in fact, be the first Bond film I ever saw.

Credit the props department or perhaps wardrobe for the iconic octagonal glasses of the transient villain Locque.  While not as obviously creepy as Blofeld (seen in the intro where he meets his demise at the bottom of a smokestack), Locque’s silent presence is a unifying element for a series which had recently lacked imagination.  His nickname “The Dove” is said to be, “a sick joke.”  In short, he is a complex if not central character.

For once in the series, Bond turns down the affections of a beautiful young woman (ostensibly because she is too young).  Bibi Dahl also perhaps makes it too easy for our Don Juan superspy.

The underwater recovery of the ATAC is the closest thing to a true hint of return to the glory of Thunderball the series had captured in a long time.  It is a genuinely engaging scene and makes us realize just how far astray the franchise had gone.  Even the escape from the keelhauling is convincing and ingenious.  Glen distinguishes himself as a careful director in the Hitchcock tradition (attention to detail)…a far cry from his predecessor Gilbert.

The climb up the cliff face to St. Cyril’s monastery is riveting.  I remember this scene palpably from my youth.  The stress on the climbing tools…the rope…the hooks and hammers.  Bond’s recovery (with aid from his copious shoestrings) is really a nifty trick.

Carole Bouquet is mysteriously beautiful (and deadly with a crossbow) as Melina Havelock.  She is such a step up from previous Bond girl Lois Chiles.  Chaim Topol (credited as merely Topol) is really a great, great supporting actor in this film.  I mistook him for Alfonso Arau from Romancing the Stone (another great 80s film).

Michael Gothard was very well-cast as Locque.  Walter Gotell is brilliant as always as General Gogol.  We see a bit more of him in this film as the Reagan era of the Cold War was beginning its deep freeze.

The final touch of having Bond wired through to Prime Minister Thatcher is hilarious.  Janet Brown does an impeccable impersonation.  Bernard Lee (M) had passed on before he could film his scenes and this seems like a good time to honor the memory of a fine actor.  Thank you Mr. Lee.

Further recommended viewing is That Obscure Object of Desire (directed by Luis Buñuel)…that is, if you can’t get enough Carole Bouquet.

That Bond goes from driving a Lotus to a Citroën 2CV is emblematic of a film which hits all the right buttons both high and low.  Fans of The Pink Panther (1963) might recognize the location shoot of Cortina D’Ampezzo.  The greatest cheese factor comes at the outset with the song by Sheena Easton.  It really does get better from there.  Happy viewing!

 

-PD

 

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