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Thunderball: Classic Bond! Hot babes and a shirtless Connery.
Starring Sean Connery, Claudine Auger
Directed by Terence Young
= 5 stars
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Sean Connery (James Bond)
Claudine Auger (Domino Derval)
Luciana Paluzzi (Fiona Volpe)
I think I’ve just seen one of the best, if not the best, Bond film. Suddenly I “get” what Bond is about, and why so much time has been spent (and so many movies made) trying to replicate the suspenseful, exciting experience of Thunderball.
First off, there’s a suave and bold theme song sung by the incomparable Tom Jones. Second, we have a truly suave and bold Sean Connery as James Bond, looking like Marlon Brando mashed with George Clooney. Next, some creepy villains, one with an eye patch (Emile Largo, Blofeld’s Number 2) and others looking like beatniks seen through the filter of a Dick Tracy comic strip. Lastly, Thunderball has some excruciatingly hot women, most notably Claudine Auger as Domino.
The cocktail is shaken (not stirred) and poured over the island setting of the Bahamas, a perfect environment for swimsuits, sharks, underwater harpoon battles, and a shirtless Sean Connery, and you’ve got a deadly sex-appeal sheen that gives the whole violent proceedings a vibrant class.
The plot is, once again, nearly besides the point (I think you get the point), centering around a British airplane called the Vulcan, stolen by SPECTRE and armed with nuclear weapons. Blofeld shows up briefly near the film’s start, his face hidden - all we see is his cat-fondling and sadistic cruelty towards his subservient, numbered stooges.
Bond is sent to investigate. This takes him to the ocean setting to visit Largo (Adolfo Celi), who has several misanthropic henchmen and the female assassin Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi). Bond is attracted to the pretty sister of a dead pilot, now Largo’s mistress, the ravishing Domino (Claudine Auger). After Bond locates the airplane, hidden underwater, a huge undersea battle takes place, with operatives in wet suits, ships shooting at each other, and some cool explosions.
Thunderball, directed expertly by Terence Young, at times recalls a Hitchcock film. In one scene, Bond rides in a car at the hands of a speeding Fiona, reminding me of the drunk driving scene from Notorious. Also fascinating is a pool scene where Bond talks to Largo. The camera pans slightly to the left, revealing Domino putting on her makeup in the background. She realizes Bond is distracted by her (as we are, by the camera move), and she gets up to leave.
Also interesting to me is the story of the theme song, Thunderball, by Tom Jones. Originally, the song Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was supposed to be the theme (hence the appearance of a Kiss Kiss night club in the film). However, just weeks before the film’s premiere, it was suddenly important that the main song have the title of the film as its name. Therefore, Thunderball was hastily written and recorded with Tom Jones as the singer.
IMDB: Thunderball
Categories: 5 Star Movies, General, James Bond, Movies :: Tags: ::
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This was the biggest Bond box-office hit of the 1960s and along with its predecessor “Goldfinger” largely fuelled the popular culture ‘spy boom’ which captured the imagination and wallets of millions over 1964-67. Odd, considering the movie’s actual quality. Agreed, it has an undeniably classic theme song (though is “..strikes like Thunderball..” supposed to be a new mild oath?), but otherwise, I’m afraid that we’ve seen two different movies. If “Thunderball” resembles a Hitchcock movie, it’s “Rope”. After watching thirteen of them, this is the first Bond movie to invite fast-forwarding. After the cautious camp of “Goldfinger”, “Thunderball” was perhaps the first instance of a ‘back to basics’ approach. Well, one can go to the Bahamas, but this is a long way from “Dr No”’s Caribbean. Ye Gods, there’s a lot of underwater stuff towards the end. On the face of it, a nice idea; good visuals to be had (ask Jacques Cousteau). Big problem was, everything moves so slowly underwater anyway that even Peter Hunt’s whiplash editing can’t save such footage from becoming cinematic tedium. The pacing was frustratingly uneven. On land, the story started well but ran out of puff long about a quarter of the way through, had a cup of tea and a lie down while everyone was busy underwater, and never quite got up to speed again. There were some quite shoddy plot developments (just how preternaturally fit does one have to be in order to benefit from the highest setting on that wildly thrashing ‘traction table’ at the sanitarium?), and a lack of continuity (Bond’s long time CIA friend Felix Leiter was played by a soap opera-level nobody, and plotwise may as well have been a stranger). The villains were lightweight (oboy. Brief, obscured Blofeld, a foreign guy with an eyepatch and some other geeky guy. Wow), the direction was downright dull and though the girls were indeed very nice looking, none had a personality to speak of. To top it all off, Connery walked through it. True, his presence was fading in “Goldfinger”, but here James Bond is reduced further down scriptwise into a mere plot-cipher (admittedly equipped with some of the best one-liners so far), and it was difficult to feel anything for the character. Maybe Connery felt the same way. To succeed on their own terms, the Bond movies must hold to (or else play against) an established set of internal criteria, but at some point Bond also has to be about good cinema. Granted, Bond is all ‘about’ pretty girls, guns, gadgets, villains, danger, urgency, sinister hidden networks, and violent solutions to explosive situations, but plot still is important, character development even more so. In the more intriguing franchise entries, Bond’s is a dark world (though not without its lighter, more pleasurable moments), and one in which he could lose heavily (see “OHMSS”, “For Your Eyes Only”, “Licence To Kill”, “Casino Royale (2006)” etc). “Thunderball” was a long, long, languid dip in the briny and not a keeper.
[...] The Turkish bath scene could be a parody of the Bond movie Thunderball. [...]