So far, six Bond actors have appeared as secret agent 007. The three most popular, Connery, Moore, Craig, each took three films before they were anchored in their roles. And every time there was a company car premiere. Sean Connery drove the silver Aston Martin in “Goldfinger” in 1964. Roger Moore received the Lotus Esprit in white in 1977. And Daniel Craig returned to the Aston Martin as a retro model for “Skyfall” in 2012. Sports cars are pop. And “Goldfinger,” “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Skyfall” were the zeitgeisty Bond films of their era.
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However, the omens for “The Spy Who Loved Me” were bad. With the previous film “The Man with the Golden Gun” from 1974, the producers around Cubby Broccoli flopped. Possibly because the duel situation, the personal conflict between Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) and 007 (Moore) couldn’t support an entire film. The world wasn’t really in jeopardy. A break of three years followed. The longest in the Bond universe to date.
“The Spy Who Loved Me” then went back to the full Cold War program. Nuclear submarines, fronts between two military alliances and a Russian spy.
Action, equipment, atmosphere: Bond in the style of the late seventies
Roger Moore, who was already an incredible 50 years old when the film was released, became a comic character among the Bonds thanks to the “spy”. But the eternal question “Connery or Moore?” was created right here. Because this film trumped all the others in the Agents series at the box office. Box office grossed $46 million. Ninth place among the most successful films in 1977. Now the actor, who was considered Bond before the interim Bond George Lazenby (1969, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”), was taken seriously as a long-term prospect.
Roger had exactly the kind of positive humor that seemed like cynicism to Sean. Which of course struck the viewer as a refusal to work. After 1964’s “Goldfinger,” Connery was tired of martinis and gadgets. Moore’s Bond further cultivated the one-liners. He seemed more agile. And he threw real classics after his murdered killers. Whoever ends up in the shark tank: “He just dropped in for a quick bite”. Whose tie he lets go of and who therefore falls off the roof of the house: “What a helpful chap!”
007 shows emotion
Rather in passing, Roger Moore also formulated a self-description in “Spy” that the agent has never given before, not even Connery. He talks about an insecurity. Russian Anya asks 007 if he could be behind her husband’s murder. Bond’s answer: “When someone’s behind you on skis at 40 miles per hour trying to put a bullet in your back, you don’t always have time to remember a face.” Bond sighs. “In our business, Anya, people get killed. We both know that. So did he. It was either him or me. The answer to the question is yes. I did kill him.” 007 may doubt the legitimacy of his means. But he is also afraid for his survival.
When Anya asks him about his wife, who was killed by Blofeld’s henchmen (“On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”), Bond replies defensively: “Ok, you’ve made your point!” He admits that he is sensitive about some things. The film title alone promised a romance like no Bond before or since – there was no brutality in it like in “Fireball” or irony like in “From With Love”. It was a late 70s Bacardi feel.
Still, The Spy Who Loved Me isn’t an outstanding film, but nowhere in the entire series is there a masterpiece hidden. The direction by Lewis Gilbert, back behind the camera for 007 for the first time since You Only Live Twice, is reliably choppy. The story about two missing nuclear submarines is half-baked and loses focus in favor of spectacular locations such as Egypt or the underwater fortress.
The Bogner cocked
The Bond works are loved because they are cool, look good, feature imaginative weapons and great scores. This FX event was up to date. Only with “Star Wars” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” would effects films of similar quality come to the cinema in the same year as “Spy”. It is significant that after “The Spy Who Loved Me” the originally planned “On a Deadly Mission” was postponed to 1981 – with “Moonraker” a quasi-“Star Wars” was hastily inserted in 1979 in order to benefit from the space hype.
“The Spy Who Loved Me” simply set one stimulus point after another. The inevitable Willy Bogner (“In Deadly Mission”, “Fire and Ice”), who later rose to screen fame, shot the introductory action sequence this time, i.e. the classic Bond epilogue, which is supposed to get the audience up to speed right from the start of the film. Bond chases away from his pursuers on skis, down a cliff, but then he flies away – and the parachute is decorated with a huge Union Jack. The British, it was reported from the film premiere, cheered like there was no tomorrow. Even Prince Charles is said to have stood up from his cinema seat.
The set design was no less exquisite. Once again Ken Adam was responsible for retro-futurism. Atlantis, the base of villain Stromberg (Curd Jürgens), looked like something you would either want to stick light bulbs into and then hang from the ceiling, or like a bar seating area where you could entertain subjects. Adam was a master of his craft, as was already demonstrated by the volcano station from “You Only Live Twice” and the “War Room” from Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”.
To date, unfortunately, the suspicion has not been confirmed that Kubrick did more during filming than give lighting tips for the huge hangar that was built in the Pinewood studios for the submarines. It would have been too nice if the director had shot scenes for James Bond himself.
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The somewhat unimaginative score was not written by regular composer John Barry, who only wanted to work in his adopted American homeland in the mid-seventies and was not available, but by Marvin Hamlisch. The New Yorker’s commitment was considered a coup. Just two years earlier, he won three Oscars at the Academy Awards (two for “The Way We Were,” one for “The Clue”). However, Hamlisch obviously couldn’t do much with Bond. “Ride To Atlantis” was like amusement park music, “Bond 77” was a half-hearted, zeitgeisty disco number.
After all, he composed the stunning title song “Nobody Does It Better” for Carly Simon, which Radiohead singer Thom Yorke rightly describes as one of the “most beautiful love songs of all time” (and which Cameron Diaz couldn’t sing in the hotel bar during “Lost In Translation”). It still seemed strange that Hamlisch (for both the score and the title track) received the first ever soundtrack nominations for a Bond film.
It was John Barry who shaped Hollywood spy music like no other, and his tiptoe sounds can still be found in thrillers today. Bond debutant George Martin also built on this with “Live and Let Die” in 1973. It is quite possible that the Oscar jury in 1977 was still very impressed by the awards they had given to their compatriot Hamlisch and therefore immediately courted him again.
Jürgens vs. Fröbe
Roger Moore was firmly in the saddle after The Spy Who Loved Me, but there were also two supporting actors who would make the tenth Bond film almost as popular. With Curd Jürgens as Karl Stromberg, the producers are relying on a German enemy for the secret agent for the second time after Gert Fröbe. Until the 1990s, Germans mockingly groaned because their actors were always “subscribed to bad guys” overseas. Secretly they were happy about the recognition in international productions, in 1964 with “Goldfinger” as well as in 1977 with “Spy”.
In Hollywood, the Bavarian Jürgens has been used as “the German” in war films since the 1960s (“The Longest Day”). But as a megalomaniacal Stromberg, the then 62-year-old seemed strangely apathetic. It’s telling that his industrialist dies sitting down – he had a more Colonel Kurtz-like presence. Gert Fröbe knew how to use the body volume a little better, the scariness and sudden speed made Goldfinger a more unpleasant opponent.
The man remained on the ground at that time
1977 was the year when Star Wars reigned, but the second highest-grossing film of all time was Jaws. That’s perhaps why the producers included one or two sharks in the “spy”, into whose tank Stromberg drops his victims. And then of course there was THE “Jaws”, which became the “Beißer” in German – 2.17 meters tall, embodied by Richard Kiel.
The “biter” continued the popular line of “second-tier villains” who, equipped with physical peculiarities, such as Oddjob or Tee Hee Johnson, make it difficult for James Bond in a duel. The biter had teeth made of steel, even a shark has no chance against him. Did the filmmakers have any idea how popular Richard Kiel’s character would become? As one of the first 007 antagonists, he was spared in the end.
In “Moonraker,” Bond and Beißer would have further duels two years later. In this space opera, the giant even falls in love with a delicate young woman in the midst of all sorts of laser duels.
007, in turn, would experience the most impossible things on the screen from then on, would be a character Larger than life. That’s why you should enjoy “The Spy Who Loved Me” all the more. The man remained on the ground at that time. Well, sometimes he hovered slightly above it.
