Blogging the Blog 12: Most Interest & Mostly Americans

I was looking around the various functions that this Blogger site provides for us bloggers and came across a tab I had not used before: Stats.  I took a look at it and it revealed interesting data about you, yes, the people who read my blog.  It was a little depressing but the information is not going to get me to change what I post here.  However, it is interesting to look at what I have found out.The first thing I looked at was where the 99,000+ hits on my blog had come from.  Over a third were from the USA and 16,000 were from the UK.  I guess that I should not be surprised that half of those visiting the site were from English-speaking countries and these two in particular given that I write a lot about the UK and often feature US movies.  The third highest source was Germany with 6,000 visitors followed reasonably closely behind by Canada and France, almost equal with each other; Australia in sixth place has provided 3,000 visitors, the Netherlands next with 2,000; Italy and interestingly, the Philippines both with 700+ and finally Sweden with just over 500.  I guess this spread may come from the topics I have covered.


The tools with which people reach my blog are varied though 84% have come from a machine using Windows and only 10% from a Macintosh.  Of new devices just over 900 used an iPhone, 713 used an iPad (one of those might have been myself), 223 an iPod and interestingly, 65 used a Playstation 3.  The search engine people who did not come direct used is unsurprising, with 45% coming through Internet Explorer (recently it was reported the average IQ of users of this search tool was only 80; I assume because it includes numerous school children); 29% used Firefox, 13% used Chrome, 9% used Safari (the default search tool on the iPad) and only 2% used Opera and <1% Iceweasel, the search tools that are supposed to be the ones favoured by the most intellectual web searchers.

The main ways in which people have reached my blog through other links is in terms of the maps of imaginary places, especially Narnia, because my inclusion of six maps of that world is referenced on Wikipedia in the footnotes. Other imaginary maps are also high in those pages on my blog which are visited with large continents and then tube maps in second and third place of this sub-set.  Getting featured on the 'Today in Alternate History' website has channelled more traffic to me and interestingly so has mlwodementia.blogspot, one which I was not familiar with but is proving to be the third highest channel through which direct traffic as opposed to searchers, is coming.  It turned out to be a blog which has been running since 2007 with over 50 postings per year and is focused on making and playing with fantasy lead figures.

When I turn to the topics of interest, however, I begin to be rather disheartened.  My most popular topic has been discussing James Bond villains, my first posting on this in April 2009 has attracted over 3,600 visits, the second posting over 11,000 and the third over 16,000.  This pattern in itself is shaped by the search terms that have brought people to my blog, the term 'Sophie Marceau' is by far and away the most popular term followed by 'Le Chiffre' though only warranting a tenth of the interest that Sophie has done.  He is followed by 'Robert Davi' and 'Toby Stevens' interesting pair of actors who have been Bond villains and the fifth most popular term is 'Tamriel'.  Interesting my two postings on steampunk pirates have received 7,500 hits for the first one and 8,500 hits for the second, partly through people looking for 'steampunk pirates' specifically as a search term and partly people coming across it looking for images of Japanese flags.   In terms of the counter-factual postings the top one with over 1,100 visits is 'What if the Bolshevik Revolution Failed?' followed far behind by 'What if Hitler Had Been Assassinated?' and 'What if Lenin Had Lived 10 Years Longer?'.  I would have expected more coming to the Second World War and other better known 'what ifs?' but I guess there are a lot of sites covering those that draw them off before they reach me as a result.  Whilst I know that some people have read my political postings and my fiction they must be so few in number so as not to turn up in the statistical returns.

I suppose we have perceptions of how people view our blog.  It seems apparent that mine mainly attracts Americans looking for pictures of Sophie Marceau, perhaps reading about James Bond villains and on occasion looking for maps of Narnia or something on steampunk pirates.  I guess I am filling a role that might not be filled by others, though I find it weird that people cannot source the hundreds of images of actors who have appeared in the James Bond movies from other places, there are hundreds of websites with this stuff on.  As I said when I launched this blog, it was primarily for my own peace of mind and I would always rather be right than read.  As time has passed I guess I did hope that people would at least read my views, but I need to be clear than unless I am commenting on James Bond or steampunk pirates then they are not, well, even then they are probably only here for the pictures rather than the text.  It is also frustrating that the bulk of visitors come to look at pages from 2008 and 2009.  I could easily have packed up after having posting something like 300 pages.  I guess this information is useful for people looking to attract visitors to their blog.  'The Guardian' has been running a column about how to create and 'monetise' your blog.  Clearly a good starting place is to whack on images of popular actresses and maps of fantasy places.

Perspective on James Bond Movie Villains: Part 3 - Freelancers of the Dalton and Brosnan Years

Of course, if I had written this before seeing 'Quantum of Solace' (2008) I might have put Mr. White into this category, but now I know that he is not freelance, but working for SPECTRE's 21st century equivalent, Quantum. I have already put in Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre, which is really the only freelancer Craig's Bond has met in Part 2, in order to compare him to the Welles version, so I will have to wait until the third Craig Bond movie (assuming there is one, look what happened to Dalton after a second dour Bond movie in a row) to add more.

For now, though, I have more than enough decent villains from the Dalton and Brosnan years (1987-2002) to keep me occupied. After years of speculation, going back to 1969, Timothy Dalton (born 1944), finally got to play James Bond but only for two movies, 1987-9. They were unpopular with the mainstream audience but kept the franchise alive and showed that it could be properly grounded after the excesses of the later Moore years.  It is simply a shame Dalton was not selected six years earlier, though ironically that may have meant no Bond movies today.

Major Brad Whitaker played by Joe Don Baker

Major Brad Whitaker

In 'The Living Daylights' (1987) we do not know a great deal about the arms dealer Brad Whitaker, except that he is a novelty for a Bond movie as he is an American and not a recently naturalised one at that. As with Charles Gray who played baddie Blofeld and good guy Henderson in different Bond movies, the actor who played Whitaker, Joe Don Baker (born 1936), gets to switch sides.  He went on to play Bond's CIA contact, Jack Wade, in 'GoldenEye' (1995).  Sometimes you do wonder if there is such a shortage of actors that so many have to keep turning up in the franchise in different roles. We know Whitaker's motive is disappointment in his military career and he seeks consolation in making a private army. Like Katanga/Mr. Big he wants to flood the USA with opiates, but he uses Soviet money funnelled to him by his ally General Koskov to fund this. He also has SPECTRE-like plans to provoke conflicts between East and West and sell the two sides high-tech conventional arms.

Whitaker also wants the British to assassinate General Leonid Pushkin played by Briton, John Rhys-Davies (born 1944) (he has played everything from the dwarf Gimli in the 'The Lord of the Rings' triology of movies (2001-3) to Italian Leonardo Da Vinci in 'Star Trek: Voyager' (1997) to an Egyptian, Sallah, in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981) and 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' (1989)) by suggesting, with the aid of Koskov, that the KGB has revived the SMERSH programme.  The evidence for this is the attempt at eliminating three British agents at the start of the movie on Gibraltar; 004 is killed. For a Bond villain, Whitaker is uniquely brash and self-confident, sneering rather than patronising. Like many Bond villains, however, it is clear that he is affected by disappointment in his past though that does not seem to have left him brooding like Dr. No or Blofeld. The closest to Whitaker previously has been Zorin and yet Whitaker is free of that psychopath element. He simply wants to be rich and thumb his nose at people who have looked down upon him. Baker's best villain role had come a couple of years earlier in the television series 'Edge of Darkness' (1985) in which he played arrogant Darius Jedburgh who seems to encapsulate all that was bad about Reaganite America.

General Georgi Koskov played by Jeroen Krabbé

General Georgi Koskov

Koskov played by Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbé (born 1944) is sometimes treated as a henchman of Whitaker's, but I think that is inaccurate. It is Koskov who provides the funds for Whitaker's drug purchases; sources the opium in Afghanistan and makes the re-appearance of SMERSH appear effective. Bond helps him defect and Koskov fakes his own recapture by the KGB in order to go freelance and work with Whitaker. Perhaps Koskov is not seen as a genuine villain as Bond does not kill him, he is simply returned for trial in the USSR. Like Whitaker, Koskov is a different kind of villain to the ones we have come to know.  He is jocular, playing almost naive when defecting with Bond. He does not really seem that sinister. His main nasty aspect is to portray his girlfriend, Czech cellist Kara Milovy, as a KGB assassin so that she will be killed by Bond. Her incompetence at this is what rouses Bond's suspicion that MI6 is being duped by Koskov.

There are some similarities to 'Octopussy' in that MI6 works with calm-headed elements in the KGB to bring another renegade Soviet general back into line. Renegade Soviet generals were a common theme of TV thrillers of the time. The alliance between a Soviet official and a US businessman was also a feature of the very successful novel 'Gorky Park' (1981; movie 1983) and in terms of criminal gangs, and with more humour, in 'Red Heat' (1988). 'The Living Daylights' was released two years into Mikhail Gorbachev's time at the head of the USSR and when Ronald Reagan only had one year left as US President. The Cold War seemed to be coming to a clear end and the threat of nuclear war, apparent at the time of 'Octopussy' six years earlier, had gone. In this less certain context there was room for a more old-fashioned kind of spy movie. Yet, 'The Living Daylights' is really the next step in the sequence begun by 'For Your Eyes Only' which eventually brings us to 'Casino Royale'.

Despite these changes 'The Living Daylights' does reflect lingering elements of the Second Cold War which was coming to an end. In particular, there is the jaunt to Afghanistan where Bond ironically finds an ally in another Afghan prince and Etonian, Kamran Shah (played by Briton Art Malik) who fights with the Mujahadeen against Soviet forces. Of course the Mujahadeen were the people who put the Taliban into power in 1996 until they were removed by the US invasion of 2001.  In the movie they are shown as ambivalent allies of the Snow Leopard bandits who are involved in drug smuggling for Koskov.

Neither Whitaker or Koskov are terribly frightening, but perhaps in the low-key Bond movie that would be excessive and their manners actually lift the tone. Even with a more brooding style, there is irritation for viewers with the key ring that responds to a whistle to trigger an explosion or tear gas.  However, the car is probably the best since 'Goldfinger'. Fighting Koskov and Whitaker, Bond seems like the 'policeman' he is sometimes characterised as.

Franz Sanchez played by Robert Davi

Franz Sanchez

In 'Licence to Kill' (1989) Sanchez played by American Robert Davi (born 1951) was simply a Panamanian drugs dealer aiming to expand his market through the use of technology, i.e. smuggling cocaine dissolved in petrol. Again Bond is acting as policeman. Sanchez is like any drug smuggler, shown as being callous and greedy. The feeding of Felix Leiter (now working for the Drugs Enforcement Authority) to sharks on the day of his wedding and Sanchez's killing of his assistant by exploding him in a depressurisation chamber show us how unpleasant he is.  This moves us from the jocular nature of Whitaker and Koskov. Bond gets closer to Sanchez than any of his opponents since Scaramanga and similarly is welcomed into the criminal's home.

In some ways Sanchez reminds us of General Manuel Noriega, dictator of Panama 1984-90. Sanchez has US Stinger missiles of the kind supplied to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan by the US. Sanchez has bought two from the right-wing Contra rebels of Nicaragua who were well supplied by Reagan's USA during the 1980s. Sanchez threatens to use one to bring down a US airliner if the Americans do not stop trying to disrupt his business. Korean airline KAL007 was shot down in September 1983 by Soviet warplanes and Iran Air IR655 airliner had been shot down by US forces in July 1988, so attacks destroying civilian passenger aircraft were a current fear at the time.

We know that Noriega and other right-wing dictators and guerrillas in Central America received backing during the Reagan years because of the US fear of the encroachment of liberal regimes in that region. Noriega was a favourite of the USA until his time was done and he was removed when US forces invaded the country in 1990. Perhaps the similarity between real life politics and events in the movie explain its unpopularity. Maybe it is because people saw no global threat. Sanchez, like Mr. Big, seems only about to step up the drugs trade to the detriment of the USA. Drugs play a part in both Dalton's Bond movies, which reflects the growing focus of the time. Between the end of the Cold War around 1985/7/91 and before the perceived rise of Islamist terrorism in 2001 (though it dated back at least 7 years by then) intelligence agencies, notably the UK's MI5, saw organised crime, especially drugs trafficking as their new focus.

Another aspect, as in the recent 'Quantum of Solace', is that in 'Licence to Kill' Bond is working outside MI6 authority on a mission of personal revenge. The role of Pam Bouvier, an ex-CIA pilot is very much like that of Bolivian secret service agent Camille in 'Quantum of Solace'.  This is part of the legacy of female agents working with Bond certainly from 'The Spy Who Love Me' onwards, if not 'Live and Let Die'. The front used by the drug dealer of Professor Joe Butcher's study centre could have been a nice dig at the televangelists of the time (something else that would have made it unpopular in 1980s USA which was still enamoured by such men).  However, having him played by Las Vegas singer Wayne Newton makes him far too pleasant and missing the necessary focus and sinister nature.  Consequently it makes this an embarrassing element of the movie. The portrayal of a drug lord's base in 'xXx' (2002) or even, for Heaven's sake, 'Bedazzled' (2000) was far more credible.

Sanchez is a threat but we see him as evil more for personal reasons than for the larger scale activities he is carrying out. Perhaps with the news of battles with drug lords in Colombia at the time, this approach seemed nothing special.

Alec Trevelyan played by Sean Bean

Alec Trevelyan/Janus

'GoldenEye' (1995) represented a return for Bond after six years caused by a combination of legal wranglings and the uneasy reception of the two Dalton movies. Though the critics like more serious Bonds, the cinema-ticket buying public, and, increasingly, the DVD-buying public want romps. 'GoldenEye' managed to straddle both camps. It had a current focus, reflecting on the changing face of the USSR as it had become the Russian Federation and other states.  This charted the next stage of a development which had been mapped in Bond movies certainly since 1981 and especially 1987. Interestingly, the motives of Alec Trevelyan played by British actor Sean Bean (born 1959 [sporting an upper class rather than the northern English working class accent he is typically directed to use]) go back to the end of the Second World War as his parents were Lienz Cossacks. Owing to the creation the 1st and Cossack Divisions that fought alongside the Germans, units drawn from this people had been part of the SS from 1944 onwards. These Cossack divisions surrendered in the British zone of Austria in 1945 but were returned to the USSR in line with the agreement between the British and Soviets. Josef Stalin had already been persecuting the Cossacks before the war and naturally killed all of those who had collaborated with the Germans and their families. Cossacks fought on both sides of the Soviet-German front and were always portrayed by their opponents as brutal.

Trevelyan seeks revenge for what he sees as the betrayal of his parents by the British, and, having been a successful Russian gangster for the previous six years, aims to secure hundreds of millions of pounds from British bank accounts by using the GoldenEye satellite to fire an EMP blast on London knocking out its computers. As noted throughout these postings, a lot of Fleming's villains had unresolved issues from the Second World War, notably Hugo Drax. We can also recall that in the movies Max Zorin was bred by the Nazis at the end of the Second World War.  He developed silicon chips immune to EMP just like the French Tiger helicopter that Trevelyan's agents steal.

Xenia Onatopp played by Famke Janssen

Trevelyan is many things, first he is 006, supposedly killed and certainly scarred in a raid on a Soviet chemical weapons factory in 1989.  He is also Janus, head of the Russian mafia body of the same name, chosen presumably because of the looking forward/looking back nature of the Roman mythological Janus and Trevelyan's facial scarring. Like Kamal and Whitaker before him, Trevelyan uses a Russian general with a desire to make money, this time (Colonel in 1989) General Grigorivich Ourumov (played by German actor Gottfried John (born 1942) who looks suitably like a lanky version of Russia's Vladmir Putin, prime minister of Russia 1999-2000; 2008- and president 2000-08) head of the space division of the Russian forces. The fear of Russian generals going their own way is an enduring one, despite Russia's political changes. Ourumov also has the best female assassin since May Day: Xenia Zigavna Onatopp (played by Dutch actress Famke Janssen (born 1964)), a former KGB assassin, though we never learn her rank. Just contrast Famke Janssen's portrayal of Onatopp with her roles in the 'X-Men' trilogy (2000-06) and even as another spy in 'I Spy' (2002) to see her range of acting ability.

Trevelyan, like Grant in 'From Russia With Love', is portrayed as a mirror image of Bond and himself questions Bond's motivations, excuses even, for behaving how he does, especially when it causes so many deaths to innocent people. The battle with Trevelyan is unsurprisingly very physical, like that with Grant and to some extent, Katanga/Big's bodyguard Tee Hee. We are not really given a satisfactory explanation of why Bond's behaviour is any more excusable than Trevelyan's, but I suppose that the bulk of movie goers have no doubts.  Yet, it is interesting to see the issue raised. Trevelyan is an excellent villain. Like Goldfinger and Zorin he combines a large scale plot with personal gain.  Like Blofeld, and to some extent Stromberg and Drax, he seeks revenge too and he has the strength, unlike so many Bond villains, to actually fight fist-to-fist with Bond. It is no wonder that 'GoldenEye' made such an impact and remains a credible movie even 14 years on. This longevity is helped to some extent by the fact that after six years of abrupt change 1985-91, Russia has remained pretty much the same since.

Eliot Carver played by Jonathan Pryce

Elliot Carver

The problem with Elliot Carver is that he is acted by Jonathan Pryce (born 1947) who is terribly over-rated. He was alright in 'Brazil' (1985) and even in the two 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movies he appeared in, in 2003 and 2006, but no better than alright. He is hopeless as a villain. He is bad in 'Tomorrow Never Dies' (1997) though far worse in 'Ronin' (1998) playing Irish terrorist Seamus O'Rourke (Sean Bean also appears in that movie as a man pretending to be formerly in the SAS). 'Ronin' is a good thriller and has one of the best car chases seen in movies; with Pryce's role taken by another actor it could have played a larger part in redefining thrillers at the end of the 1990s. In both of these movies Pryce's poor portrayals really bring down the movie and counterbalance excellent acting from his co-stars. The trouble with Pryce is that he seems so devoid of passion, not in a cold clinical way, but it is almost as if he is rather embarrassed to be there and/or weary of the role he is playing. As a villain, his Carver is reminiscent of Savalas's Blofeld, equally lacking in life or conviction. The best bit about Pryce's performance is Carver's death.

Pryce was terribly miscast in this role and it is a shame. Teri Hatcher (born 1964) as his wife and Bond's former girlfriend does not do much better. However, they are over-shadowed by Dr. Kaufman played by Italian Vincent Schiavelli (born 1948) whose appearance on screen is fortunately brief. His portrayal of a supposed expert torturer is painfully embarrassing.  It is so much trying to be a comic turn that you are utterly lost and are begging Bond to kill him. Why he could not have played it more seriously, I do not know. He has appeared in many comedy things, hundreds of TV series, but also more serious stuff too, like 'The X Files' and 'Amadeus' (1984). If that is his real voice then he should have been dubbed as have many other actors in Bond movies been. Myself, I would have recast his role, along with those of Pryce and Hatcher.

Carver is portrayed as a media villain suited to the 21st century. He has white-grey hair but no disability or peculiarity or beard, but yes, he wears an almost Nehru-collared jacket to his launch party. His newspaper 'Tomorrow' harks back to Eddie Shah and his 'Today' newspaper which led the way in the smashing of trade unions in the UK newspaper industry in 1982. The kind of ruthless behaviour Shah used is clearly seen in Carver.

Carver also has elements of Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates as we hear references to deliberately putting bugs into software in order to make customers come back for patches (have you ever tried using Vista? my employers will not go near it with a bargepole) and, of course, to multi-media tycoon Rupert Murdoch (born 1931) who has sought control of different media in Australia, the UK and USA and was very involved in keeping the Thatcherite regime in power 1979-97, especially at the 1992 election. Tony Blair personally went to gain Murdoch's support before winning the 1997 election and that kow-towing probably bought him some millions of votes.

As commentators pointed out at the time of the release of 'Tomorrow Never Dies', Murdoch had already won the kind of media rights in China that Carver is seeking in the movie, to some extent aided by his third wife, from 1999, Wendy Deng. In addition, the announcement of Carver's death echoes that of another newspaper mogul, Captain Robert Maxwell, MC (born Ján Ludvík Hoch; lived 1923-91), who could have been a model for many of Fleming's villains.  There were rumours he had been a Mossad agent. Surrounded with debts and questions over his misuse of the Mirror Group newspapers pension fund, he committed suicide by swimming away from his luxury yacht, off the Canary Islands.

Carver's plot is to provoke a war between Britain and China by misleading a British naval vessel into Chinese territorial waters (a challenging thing to define anyway given how many islands China claims) by altering the global satellite positioning signals coming into the British ship. To some degree this warns us against over-dependence on technological solutions. A similar way of causing disaster is used in 'Die Hard 2' (1990) in which the level that an aircraft perceives the ground as being due to beacons, is intentionally altered, causing it to crash. Carver is happy to kill a ship's crew (he uses a stealth ship [like a stealth aeroplane, but a ship] and an undersea drilling device to achieve this). He also has his wife murdered (why are these women always left draped on beds?) when she betrays him to Bond. He is sneering, but despite these activities, due to Pryce's inabilities, there is no real credibility in his manner. Carver might have been appropriate for current affairs, but needed a more effective actor to play him, instead we are left with someone as lacking in impact as Savalas and Gray.

Colonel Wai Lin played by Michelle Yeoh

 

The only other thing to mention in a movie which is good despite having such a weak villain, is that as with the Soviets in 'The Spy Who Loved Me', in 'Tomorrow Never Dies' we have a Chinese secret agent, Colonel Wai Lin (very well played by Michelle Yeoh [born 1962 in Malaysia]) who is actually more competent than Bond, especially in the early investigation parts of the movie. Yeoh has had a successful martial arts movie career behind her and often played police or military characters such as Inspector Ng in 'Huang Jia Shi Jie' [I am using Mandarin titles as despite being Hong Kong movies I do not have the Cantonese titles; 'In the Line of Duty'] (1985), Inspector Jessica Yang, a Director of Interpol (though she turns out to be a Colonel in the Communist Chinese police, presumably the Ministry of Public Security, most likely the People's Armed Police, formed in 1983) in 'Jing Cha Gu Shi III: Chao Ji Jing Cha' ['Police Story 3'] and is best known in the West for 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' (2003) and 'Memoirs of a Geisha' (2005). Interestingly the Guoanbu (contraction of Guojia Anquan Bu, the Chinese Ministry of State Security) is shown as having bases in Vietnam, a country with which China has had fraught relations not least since China's defeat there in 1979.

The actress and the character, certainly have the abilities to be more than credible assistance to Bond, excelling Major Amasova, though still not being able to avoid being seduced by Bond. With him having saved her life, I suppose she felt obliged to show her gratitude. This is Bond's first close encounter with an Oriental woman since 'You Only Live Twice', thirty years earlier.

Elektra King played by Sophie Marceau

Elektra King

Elektra King, so far, is the only female head villain Bond has encountered and director Michael Apted says she is the main villain.  Some commentators view her as an assistant of anarchist Viktor 'Renard' Zokas, but they clearly have not been watching 'The World is Not Enough' (1999) closely enough. King (played by French actress Sophie Marceau, born 1966) is half-Azeri whose family fled Azerbaijan when it was absorbed into the USSR in 1920. Her mother married Sir Robert King and, because, accordingly to Azeri custom, with her maternal grandfather having no male heirs, King inherits Elektra's family's rights. With the independence of Azerbaijan from the USSR in 1991 the region has been opened up to economic development and King's company is exploiting oil there. Elektra was kidnapped by terrorist Viktor Zokas known as 'Renard' (also a fictional name for a fox in medieval Franco-German stories). Head of MI6, M adhered to the British governmental policy of not dealing with terrorists, something which angered Elektra and she seeks to kills both her father (which she succeeds in doing) and M.

Elektra has subverted Zokas who demanded a ransom that Elektra could use. She mutilated her ear (so, given the fact she does not wear Nehru collared jackets, this shows us she is a Bond villain as it gives her a physical peculiarity) for him to send to demand the ransom. Elektra has Zokas steal a nuclear device and uses part of it to damage her own company's pipeline so that she appears under threat and can fool Bond and M into travelling to western Asia to protect her. She plans to have Zokas use the rest to blow up a Russian submarine in the Bosporus (part of the straits between the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea) through which all the other new supplies of oil coming from the Caspian Sea region, bar her own (as her pipeline comes on the southern side of Turkey) will be transported, so giving her a monopoly for her pipeline.

Of course, if anyone had read their classical mythology they would know that Electra, daughter of King Agamemnon was terribly scheming. The Electra complex would suggest that she had an unhealthy sexual attraction for her father. Perhaps she did and that is why she loathes him so strongly when he refused to pay the ransom for her. Elektra plays the victim very effectively, though is incredibly manipulative getting MI6, Zokas and the crew of a Russian nuclear submarine, among others, to work for her. She can wield a gun efficiently and enjoys using a torture device on Bond. Her plot would kill millions of people in Turkey and Greece and contaminate the region for centuries. Elektra's manipulation of Zokas reminded me of Dr. Esther Martin's (played by Harriet Walter (born 1950)) manipulation of a prisoner to make him think she was the embodiment of a demon queen to get him to carry out murders in 'The Day of the Devil' episode of 'Inspector Morse' shown in January 1993.

Elektra does have another trait and that is a patriotism for the Azeris and she enjoys the acclaim when she has the pipeline diverted around an ancient Azeri church. This is a blunder as 96% of the Azeri population is Muslim. The suggestion must be that these people are in fact Armenians (Armenia neighbours Azerbaijan and there is an Armenian enclave, Nagorno-Karabakh, within Azerbaijan), but, for some reason, they are not portrayed that way, presumably because Turkey has bad relations with Armenia going back to the Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915. Azerbaijan is antagonistic because of the enclave.  Alternatively, Elektra may be half-Georgian. Georgians are Christian, but if they started referring to Georgians and Georgia in a movie shown in the USA, it would have caused immense confusion for the American audience because of their own state of Georgia. The British audience might think it was about the Georgian period of their history (1714-1830/7).

Viktor 'Renard' Zokas played by Robert Carlyle

Zokas is a dying man. He was trained (like Scaramanga) as a KGB assassin but was let go for being mentally unstable. He was shot in the head by 009 which did not kill him but the bullet has removed all feelings from the man.  This means he has increasing endurance and no ability to feel pain, but has a limited life expectancy as the bullet moves through his skull. He is killed trying to explode the reactor in a Soviet nuclear submarine in the Bosporus. Elektra seduced Zokas when he had kidnapped her and held her on Cyprus.

We know little about Zokas's past. Zokas is a Lithuanian surname. This fits, given that Lithuania was part of the USSR 1940-90 so he could have been recruited direct into the KGB. We can guess Zokas is the same age as the Scottish actor, Robert Carlyle (born 1961) who played him, so aged 38 in 1999, and, having grown up in the Soviet system, has seen it dissolve in the previous eight years. His nihilist, anarchist attitude is very much like the Anarchy 99 Russian criminal group in 'xXx' (2002), who seek to eliminate the world population through a binary chemical weapon from a mini-submarine, rather like a combination of Stromberg's and Drax's plot. Seeing little point in life of the early 2000s they seek to take the rest of the world with them. Of course, this is the populist view of 'anarchist' and it is more accurate to portray Zokas and Anarchy 99 as nihilists.

Zokas is reminiscent more of a protagonist in 'The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale' (1907) by Polish-born Joseph Conrad (born Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski in what is now the Ukraine; lived 1857-1924) which features a Adolf Veloc a nihilist agent in Edwardian London. Given we know Zokas has been in the eastern Mediterranean (Cyprus and Syria) this suggests it was where he was assigned. Renard means 'counsel hard' or 'to be made hard by the gods' which would seem a suitable interpretation for the injured Zokas in this movie. That spelling of the name is of Germanic origin (the French name is 'Reynard'; Germans settled in Lithuania in the middle ages), though interestingly a few Renard families lived in northern Scotland in the 19th century.

King and Zokas are two excellent villains that weave a complex double-plot for this movie. Both are portrayed by very strong actors. The story has reach, but is believable: not about the end of the world, but a serious enough threat to need Bond on the case. It is current given the persistent upheaval in the Cis-Caucasus, Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus regions since 1986, notably in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Abkhazia, North and South Ossetia and Chechnya.

Colonel Tan-Sun Moon played by Will Yun Lee

Gustav Graves played by Toby Stevens

 

Colonel Tan-Sun Moon/Gustav Graves

When 'Tomorrow Never Dies' (2002) was released there did not seem to be a great number of dangerous countries left in the world. Eschewing the easy option of Islamist terrorists which were being portrayed in other thrillers, the writer went for North Korea, which remains a true Communist state (unlike capitalist China ruled by the CCP) and, with its developments in nuclear weapons, seems a genuine threat to the world. I am waiting for a movie featuring the regime of Burma/Myanamar which had the suitably Bondesque name of SLORC from 1988-97, but of course it is not a nuclear power.

Featuring the North Korean officer, Colonel Tan-Sun Moon (played by American Will Yun Lee, born 1971) allows nods in many directions: back to the Cold War as he is seeking to reverse the outcome of the Korean War 1950-3 and reunite the two parts, plus to the business-orientated villains we have seen in the Bond movies since 1981 and especially since 1985. Even while in the North Korean Army, Moon is behaving corruptly, dealing in conflict diamonds, i.e. ones being sold from regions in conflict, notably in central Africa, which, in an attempt to reduce chances of such fighting should not be traded officially, but are smuggled. His behaviour shames his father, General Sun.

Sun disappears after a battle with Bond and, 14 months later, in which time Bond has been being tortured by North Korean forces, (as seen graphically across the credit sequence), Colonel Moon has undergone plastic surgery and reinvented himself as Gustav Graves (played by Briton Toby Stephens, born 1969) a billionaire who is being knighted. Graves has built his wealth using conflict diamonds and, like Blofeld in 'Diamonds Are Forever', constructs a satellite which can focus intense light on to the Earth. Though we know such a device using diamonds would not work, this kind of satellite has received increased credibility since 1971, as there were plans announced by Russia in the 1990s to use a huge reflector to bring greater sunlight to Siberia, though naturally there were concerns about the environmental impact. Graves aims simply to use it to explode the land mines which separate South Korea from North Korea to permit an invasion by North Korean forces to win the war. In this way, like Elektra King, patriotism remains a strong motive for Sun/Graves. Given that defending one's country has often been a motive for Bond's action it is naturally interesting when he comes up against patriots of other countries whose interests conflict with those of the UK.

Zao played Rick Yune

In both incarnations Sun/Graves is handsome and it is up to his assistant, Zao, who is exchanged for Bond's release, to carry the physical peculiarities that mark out a Bond villain. First he has diamonds embedded in his face from the explosion that Bond triggers at the start of the movie. Second, his features are altered at the plastic surgery clinic (which uses gene therapy and some form of benign brainwashing that leaves the patient unable to sleep) in Cuba, as a precursor to transforming him into a German businessman. Zao is provided with a car by Graves which is even better equipped than anything Bond can take into the field (though Bond's can turn invisible, but let us sweep that embarrassing aspect aside). Neither Graves or Zao inflict the usual killing of an innocent or a naif that one expects in a Bond movie, but I assume it was thought we had seen enough cruelty in the credit sequence. Both seek to fight Bond. Graves is almost an archetype of the gallant villain especially in the fight scene at Verity's (played by Madonna as a lesbian) fencing club.

Zao played by Rick Yune showing effects of explosion and preparation for plastic surgery

The other interesting thing is the range of strong women characters. Aside from Verity we have Giacinta 'Jinx' Johnson, played by Halle Berry (born 1966), an NSA (makes a change from the CIA) agent who assists Bond in Cuba, Iceland and aboard Graves's aircraft and is a strong fighter who kills Miranda Frost with a dagger. Johnson is in the style of quite a long list of female US agents who are tough and assist Bond. Frost, played by Rosamund Pike (born 1979), is an MI6 agent working undercover as Graves's publicist. She comes across as an uber-public school girl, in fact very much like many leading women in the British civil service. She is in fact a double agent and her loyalties lie with Graves who she has known since being on the fencing team with Sun in the USA as a student. M's mistaken impression of Frost is the second example of her making a dangerous blunder.  Previously we have seen her bending over backwards to help Elektra King when she wanted revenge on M; was the killer of Sir Robert King, M's friend, and behind the nuclear explosion plot seen in 'The World is Not Enough'. This suggests M is not a good judge of character. Thinking of that, her bodyguard, Mitchell, also turns out to be a traitor in 'Quantum of Solace'.
 

Miranda Frost played by Rosamund Pike

Frost seems to sum up the self-focused, arrogant, terse, devious, greedy, treacherous, at times aggressive, women you find in the UK public school system producing (in the UK public schools are elite fee-paying schools), much to the detriment of UK society. (I know: I have worked with women like Frost; one called Tiffany, who represented all of those traits painfully remains in my mind). I can see why she was a popular character in the UK and I understand why so many teenage public school girls see her as a heroine rather than a villain, because her traits are those their schools are fostering. Though no fan of the US intelligence services, I am glad that Jinx rids the world of yet another of these despicable women.

As the last Brosnan-Bond villain, Sun/Graves is pretty good. He is acted in a sneering yet charismatic way and his motives seem credible and genuine. For Europeans and Americans his focus on the Korean peninsula seems very parochial, yet, that reinforces our belief in him as a villain. He does not show his cruelty either, which perhaps is a mistake. His business focus that means he is willing to go outside the rules, is something we are familiar with coming from business people for many decades, but especially in the 2000s.

Post-Brosnan Villains

I have spoken a little about these already and I think the extent and nature of Quantum has yet to be revealed. As has been a recent trend in Bond movies, we have a mix of business-based plots with a desire to control much of the world as possible. Sensibly, not too much has been revealed too quickly. Keeping things secretive is always the best as with the early portrayal of SPECTRE. The Craig-Bond movies, eschewing any silliness, have a very adult feel about them akin to that of the Bourne movies and I hope that that nature does not slide.

Having reflected on all these Bond villains, I started dreaming about them, and awaking the other morning came up with my own James Bond plot, which I share here for what it is worth. I envisaged a plot to drain China's huge savings reserves, currently US$4.8 trillion (£3.3 trillion; €3.6 trillion) (compared to only US$215 billion held in India) which is sufficient to buy every bank in the USA outright.

In the story, Quantum's agent, Madame Brune (or 'Marron' or even 'Châtain'; 'Noire' would be too obvious, anyway, played by Grace Jones perhaps as May Day survived the blast, perhaps scarred to show she is a villain) is operating from a palace outside Samarkand in Uzbekistan, has subverted leading financial officials in China to funnel millions of dollars into Quantum accounts with the objective of buying a new lease for Hong Kong to control this very prosperous part of China as the British once did. However, when one official (played by Chow Yun Fat) begins siphoning off funds himself, Brune employs freelance assassin Francesca Scaramanga (born in 1973 to Francisco Scaramanga and a Khmer or a Filippino woman) to kill him (the golden gun was never seen to be retrieved from Scaramanga's base. Perhaps Nick Nack has come out of prison in UK or Thailand and allowed Francesca access to her father's legacy). He tries to flee to the West via Hong Kong (where MI6 retains a base), attracting the attention of MI6 which assigns Bond to find out what is happening.

Whilst doing this, however, alerted by Dame Dr. Melina Havelock, European Maritime Commissioner (aged 52 now), suspicious about certain petrol shipments into China, Bond stumbles across a plot by a high-ranking PLA (Chinese Army) official (played by Jet Li). Li's character is actually a double-agent long working for the Taiwanese Political Warfare General Bureau but has gone off the rails. He borrowed from Fat's character to fund his plan. Working with Karl Sanchez (brother of late Franz Sanchez) and his nephew (born to Franz's lover Lupe Lamora after Franz's death), he intends to flood China with cocaine using the solution in petroleum method neglected since the late 1980s. This way he hopes to weaken China and allow a reconquest by Nationalist GMD forces who have held Taiwan since losing the Chinese Civil War in 1950.

Bond works with Brigadier Wai Lin (promoted after 'Tomorrow Never Dies') to prevent the smuggling through Shanghai. Given the US long-term involvement in Taiwan, a US agent (Jinx?) may be involved too, or, more interestingly, a Russian spy, say Captain Anna Dmitriova of the FSB. Dmitry is the Russian equivalent of 'James'. The Amasova in Major Anya Amasova was her middle name, her patrynimic (i.e. formed from adding '-ova' to her father's first name); we never find out her surname. Anna would be the daughter born to Major Anna Amasova in 1980 after her encounter with Bond. Of course, with Daniel Craig only being born in 1968, it cannot be his Bond's child so we presume Anna will have been the child of another British agent named James.

Of course, the reappearance of descendants of previous villains will mess with the chronology, but Judi Dench as M has overseen two Bonds just as Bernard Lee's oversaw three without any narrative upset. The plot is both current yet refers back to the Bond legacy and allows the reappearance of some of my favourite villains or their children.

Perspective on James Bond Movie Villains: Part 2 - Freelancers of the Connery and Moore Years

This is a continuation of looking at villains from the James Bond movies, influenced by reflection on the one in the most recent Bond movie, 'A Quantum of Solace' (2008). In this part, I will look at villains who worked freelance rather than for SPECTRE, SMERSH or Quantum. Given how many there are to get through, in this part I will look at the ones in movies starring Sean Connery and Roger Moore, so covering 1962-85; George Lazenby's Bond only fought SPECTRE.

Auric Goldfinger played by Gert Fröbe disguised as a US Army officer despite carrying a gold-plated revolver

Auric Goldfinger
As I noted in Part 1, the author of the first James Bond novels, Ian Fleming, was not averse to using the names of real people for his villains. This is noticeable with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of the criminal organisation, SPECTRE. Fleming simply added 'Stavro' to the name Ernst Blofeld, a relative of Tom Blofeld, a member of Fleming's club. For Auric Goldfinger the protagonist in 'Goldfinger' (1964), played by German actor Gert Fröbe (1913-88), the name was clearly influenced by Ernő Goldfinger (1902-87), the Hungarian-born architect. Fleming talked with a cousin of Goldfinger's wife, Ursula, whilst playing golf (in the movie Bond and Goldfinger first meet on the golf course; Goldfinger is shown cheating at both golf and cards).

The real Goldfinger, a man renowned for disliking jokes, was tempted to sue Fleming when the novel came out in 1959.  As a counter-attack Fleming threatened to rename the character 'Goldprick' (with 'prick' in Britain being a perjorative term of the penis, perhaps influencing the movie 'Austin Powers in Goldmember' (2002) with 'member' being a similar perjorative term for the same piece of anatomy). The first name, Auric, was clearly influenced by the Latin word for gold, 'aurum', from which the chemical symbol for the element, Au, comes.

Goldfinger certainly fits the 'bad uncle' category of Bond villains and, at times, the rotund jolly German appears too amenable. The actor later played bumbling German characters, Colonel Manfred von Holstein in 'Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines' (1965) and Baron Bomburst in 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' (1968), the novel of which had also been written by Ian Fleming. Goldfinger's plot fits in with a period when control over the movement of capital was much more restrictive than these days.  British people going on holiday were only able to carry £25 in foreign currency (though, in 1964, £25 would have been three weeks' wages for a technical worker), so as not to upset the balance of payments. Also the value of gold was different in different countries. Thus, Goldfinger begins the movie simply smuggling gold in the chassises of cars. However, making use of mafia connections in the USA he moves to a larger scheme to irradiate the US gold stockpile at Fort Knox using an atomic device in order to raise the value of his own gold holdings. This type of plot was revived for the John McClane movie 'Die Hard With A Vengeance' (1995).

Goldfinger seems to be working in concert with the Communist Chinese (who tested their first atomic bomb in 1964) who want to bring economic chaos to the West, though clearly Goldfinger will also gain a lot from the situation. British actor Burt Kwouk (born 1930) who would later appear as a SPECTRE member in 'You Only Live Twice' (and plays a Chinese general in 'Casino Royale' (1967)) is seen in this movie as Goldfinger's Chinese contact, Mr. Ling. In 'Goldfinger' the villain is derived from: lingering concerns over the Germans with the added issues of the time about currency manipulation felt to be carried out by Swiss bankers; combined with the perceived threat from Red China which crops up in many of the Bond movies. These days with China having such huge foreign reserves itself you could have an interesting twist on 'Goldfinger' for the late 2000s.

Despite his avuncular manner, or perhaps because of it, we are shown Goldfinger's callous side. Notable is the painting gold of Jill Masterson to leave an iconic image, after she has screwed up Goldfinger's cheating at cards on Bond's initiative. Bond always involves women in his plans to get close to the villains and it usually ends with them dying in a remarkable way that is seen as a warning. There is a sense that in the world of villains we are all at risk of being caught up in the crossfire. Occasionally the less sophisticated agents of the villain also die, one remembers in 'Dr. No' when Professor Dent, on the orders of No, fires into what he believes is the body of Bond. Casually, Bond who is actually hidden behind the door, steps forward and says 'That's a Smith and Wesson and you've had your six' and shoots the man dead. Similarly in the same movie, he uses Miss Taro as a shield when being shot at. The implication is that, in such battles, both the good and the bad manipulate people and dispose of them to win the greater victory. In more recent movies questions around this abuse of human life are raised more explicitly than in the Bond movies of the 1960s and 1970s.

Others are killed by Goldfinger: the mafia bosses are gassed at Goldfinger's stud farm and another is crushed in his car at a scrap yard. The scene that makes Goldfinger memorable, even forty-five years later, is with Bond tied to a sheet of metal about to be cut in half by a powerful laser. "You expect me to talk?" Bond asks. "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die." Goldfinger chuckles, making it all that more chilling because we are aware of Bond's vulnerability. As the directors of the later Moore-as-Bond movies forgot, making both Bond and his opponents human allows the audience to engage with the characters far more effectively than with pantomime goodies and baddies.

Other interesting aspects of Goldfinger include his obsession with the material of gold. It is interesting that, despite his seeming joviality and ability to attract women like Jill Masterson and Pussy Galore to work for him, he actually is emotionally detached. His manservant Oddjob is a Korean mute and Pussy Galore, it is suggested, is a lesbian. It is as if they are not only Goldfinger's workers, but almost his wards. Like all villains and spy bosses (notably M and Felix Leiter) in the Bond movies, Goldfinger has to be on the scene of his exploits, even equipping himself with the disguise of a US Army officer, though the gold-plated revolver might give the game away.

Goldfinger is an engaging villain as there is more to him than Dr. No and we can see what motivates him. In some ways for Goldfinger it is the pull of gold and a desire to thumb his nose at the authorities, whereas with Dr. No it is about a personal rejection of his background and what that has meant for him. Blofeld and No almost seem to be aesthetes in a kind of hermit like existence in their bases.  In contrast Goldfinger lives the good life: we see him relaxing in Miami, playing golf, at his stud farm and so on.

Le Chiffre
Le Chiffre is an interloper in this category as he does not appear in a Connery or a Moore Bond movie. However, he is first seen in 'Casino Royale' (1967), a Bond spoof, which does fit, however with the mid-1960s Bond peak.  Le Chiffre (i.e. The Cipher) has appeared in the two movie versions of 'Casino Royale' to varying effects. In the novel, he is a displaced person found at Dachau at the end of the Second World War. He is portrayed as having Jewish and Polish or German ancestry, though he speaks French with an Occitan (southern French) accent. He becomes a banker for the Soviet organisation, SMERSH, through a front trade union. In all the versions Le Chiffre is trying to recover his employers' money he has invested but lost; in the novel he has put money into brothels.

In the 1967 movie, Le Chiffre has lost SMERSH's money through gambling at baccarat and, failing to retrieve the funds through blackmail, returns to the gaming table to try to win it back.  However, he comes up against the British card expert Evelyn Tremble (in those days Evelyn was a man's rather than a woman's name) backed by Sir James Bond. In the 2006 movie, Le Chiffre is more freelance, investing money from a Ugandan rebel leader, Otanno, in an insider trade deal that Bond foils.  This means Le Chiffre loses Otanno's money and is compelled to try to win it back, something Bond and Felix Leiter work to prevent.

Le Chiffre played by Orson Welles

I am going to say very little about 'Casino Royale' (1967) because it is a very poorly made comedy movie spoofing aspects of James Bond novels and movies. The main villain is Dr. Noah, the alter-ego of retired Sir James Bond's son, Jimmy Bond, played by comic actor/director Woody Allen. However, among the star-filled cast is Orson Welles (1915-85) as Le Chiffre. Welles had an up and down career but acted in some stunning roles, notably Harry Lime in 'The Third Man' (1950) and Captain Hank Quinlan in 'A Touch of Evil' (1958); I do not rate 'Citizen Kane' (1941) highly but many people do. In this version of 'Casino Royale' he is being very much a representation of himself, but in that, he probably does the best acting in the whole movie and is very credible as the sophisticated card player who has to be beaten.

The 'Casino Royale' story reflects incidents in Ian Fleming's own life as a secret agent in which he tried (unsuccessfully) to bankrupt a rival at the gaming tables. Welles's Le Chiffre is one of only four bearded villains in the Bond movies (Julian Glover's Aristotle Kristatos, Max von Sydow's Blofeld and Michael Lonsdale's Sir Hugo Drax being the others). Despite the comic elements of Welles's role such as performing tricks to try to distract Tremble, he is the best element of the movie and it is a shame that Welles was not used in such a role in one of the mainstream Bond movies.

Le Chiffre played by Mads Mikkelsen

In the 2006 movie Le Chiffre is played by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen (born 1965) as a much colder character of the Dr. No style. It is suggested that he is an Albanian and is in the mould of East European chess masters (imagine a physically stronger Kronsteen). In terms of coldness, such as his lack of concern when his girlfriend is threatened with being maimed, is a remarked upon trait. For the bulk of the movie, of course, he is focused on survival. Having lost the rebel general's money in the foiled insider trading he knows he has to win the money back playing at his best; then by poisoning and finally torturing Bond to try to get the access code to the money Bond has won.

Some elements have had to be altered to reflect the fact that this is the 2000s and not the late 1950s. Thus, Casino Royale is now in Montenegro rather than France, and it is an East African general rather than Soviet intelligence that whose money Le Chiffre loses. The torture weapon is a knotted rope rather than a carpet beater (I do not know where you would find one of those these days) but the bulk of the story is very close to that of the novel. Le Chiffre is shot by his main employers, who we learn, in the sequel, 'Quantum of Solace' are Quantum, rather than SMERSH, but the plot is basically the same which is possibly why the movie is highly rated.

I suppose I could have put Le Chiffre in with those who work for SPECTRE/Quantum, but when we see him he is very much working for himself, in fact, counter to the interests of his employers. Le Chiffre has the disability, i.e. that he weeps blood (haemolacria), that is the easy signal that he is a villain, but he appears human and as a desperate man trying to remain calm when he knows he is onto his last chance. Le Chiffre is interesting, as aside from insider trading, he has no grand plot, rather he is an important cog in the plots of others, but one with his own sense of pride and his personal interests. This makes him more engaging that a cackling mad man in his huge base.

Dr. Kananga and Mr. Big both played by Yaphet Kotto

Dr.Kananga/Mr. Big
The first thing about this villain is that he presents two faces: first the dictator of small Caribbean island, San Monique, and, then, a leading drugs dealer in New York, Mr. Big. It is interesting that in the movie, it is as Dr. Kananga that he wears a plastic covering that alters his facial features (slightly) to make him appear as Big.  Removing it is a bit like Clark Kent taking off his glasses to be Superman. Kananga/Big was played by Yaphet Kotto, a Jewish black man from New York whose father had been Crown Prince of the Cameroons. The kind of international background that Kotto has in reality was typical of the villains in the Bond stories. The name Kananga came from Ross Kananga, the man in Jamaica who owned the crocodile farm featured in the movie. However, there may have been some intention to obliquely reference Dr. Kenneth Kaunda who was dictator of Zambia in 1964-91; the Katanga region is in Uganda.

Many of the aspects from the novel 'Live and Let Die' (1954) turn up in other Bond movies rather than the 1973 movies of the same name.  Examples are Leiter losing an arm and a leg when dropped into a shark tank: this is used in 'Licence to Kill' (1989) and Bond and a woman being dragged by an aircraft over coral is used in 'For Your Eyes Only' (1985). In the novel Mr. Big works for SMERSH and is smuggling gold. Of course, with the currency exchange rules being altered, this was less of an issue by 1973 so the plot in the movie is to flood the USA with cheap heroin shipped in from San Monique to drive other dealers out of business and then to take a monopoly of the trade. This references US fears of drug cultivation in the Caribbean (taken to an extreme in 'Bad Boys II' (2003) in which Cuba is portrayed as a vast drugs cultivation centre).

There is another contemporary movie reference in that, for some of the movie, Bond eschews his Walther PPK pistol in favour of a magnum revolver.  The very successful 'Dirty Harry' movie starring Clint Eastwood had come out in 1971 and was followed in 1973 by 'Magnum Force'.  In both of these, Eastwood's character wields and regularly references his magnum revolver.  Perhaps to show that Bond is equally as tough he ends up with one in this movie.

'Live and Let Die' (1973) seemed an ideal Bond story to make at the time, given the 'blaxploitation' movies of the early 1970s.  These featured black heroes/heroines (or anti-heroes) for the first time in US movies.  However, the themes were often around the crime and inner city life occasionally with references to Africa and the Caribbean. In this, 'Live and Let Die' is almost an archetypal blaxploitation movie with locations in the Caribbean, the Harlem district of New York and New Orleans. It references jazz and voodoo culture too, using both in intimidating ways. Kananga/Big is calm but Baron Samedi, the voodoo leader offers the cackling and, in contrast to Kananga and his assistants, ends the movie surviving Bond's intervention. In contrast to many blaxploitation movies, the interaction between the black and the white (Bond, Felix Leiter and fortune teller Solitaire) protagonists, actually offers a different dimension. In one scene Leiter jokes about Bond's 'disguise' of being a white man in Harlem.  This is interesting, as, in general, Bond is portrayed as being at home in any context, yet, in this movie he comes into ones in which he is a clear outsider.

In some ways the movie as with all Bond movies touches on the tensions felt at the time. In this case the anxiety among white Americans in the face of rising black consciousness which was becoming an element of international popular culture especially through movies.  The movie, however, uses stereotypical black roles associated with drugs and crime.  At the end of the day Kananga/Mr. Big is an ambitious drugs baron, little different to Franz Sanchez in 'Licence to Kill'. Of course, his approach would still have killed off more Americans even than the drugs trade of the 1970s was already doing.

In the novel Mr. Big becomes involved in the gold smuggling as a way to overcome the lethargy that he suffers from being sated in his life. In the movie, there is a kind of clinical weariness with things that also comes through. Kananga/Big is callous and uses torture and voodoo to keep San Monique's people in check.  He kills people he feels have betrayed him, such as Bond's first black sexual conquest, Rosie Carver.  Bond discards her in a very harsh way and she is killed by robot guns hidden in scarecrows around Kananga's poppy fields. The moment when Bond shuns her, thinking she has betrayed the CIA, is probably the harshest we see Moore acting as Bond. Ironically Kananga/Big, even when he knows Solitaire has betrayed him and lost her virginity (necessary to retain her psychic powers), is almost sad for what has happened rather than malicious. That vulnerability, again, is important in making the villain seem to have some humanity and thus engages us further.

Kananga/Big is difficult to categorise as a villain, he is not over-the-top and neither is he avuncular and yet he shows more emotion than the 'cold fish' villains. He was reviewed as a poor opponent for Bond, but I feel he has credibility. He remains the only villain that Bond has faced in movies whose ethnicity was not at least half-Caucasian.

Francisco Scaramanga played by Christopher Lee

Francisco Scaramanga
Scaramanga is named either after one of Fleming's rivals at school, George Ambrose Scaramanga, or perhaps Pandia Peter Scaramanga whom Fleming met while writing 'The Man with the Golden Gun' (published 1965). In the novel Scaramanga is a Cuban agent working with a strange consortium of the Soviet KGB and American gangsters. He is also seeking to destabilise the sugar industry of the Caribbean to increase the value of the Cuban crop. Scaramanga uses a gold-plated revolver (like the one Auric Goldfinger uses in his movie) and a gold plated derringer single shot pistol firing a poisoned bullet. In the novel the revolver is .45 (11.4 mm) calibre, firing silver cored, gold coated rounds. In the movie Scaramanga uses a 4.2 mm (.17) calibre single shot gold pistol firing a dum-dum bullet of 23 carat gold and nickel. The gun can be disassembled into a cigarette case, a pen, a lighter and a cuff link. The prop of the gun, reckoned to be worth £80,000, was stolen in October 2008.

In the movie of 'The Man with the Golden Gun' (1974), Scaramanga, superbly played by Christopher Lee (1922-2015; his mother was an Italian contessa and his step-father was an uncle of Ian Fleming), is half-Cuban, half-Catalan, but like the novel version, learnt his shooting skills being brought up in a circus.  In the novel, Scaramanga worked for gangsters bizarrely called 'The Spangled Mob' who feature in the novels of 'Diamonds Are Forever' and 'Goldfinger'. In the movie he has worked for the KGB until leaving in the 1950s to become freelance. Scaramanga charges $1 million per hit, which, in 1974, was worth equivalent to between $4-6 million today.  He has become a successful freelance assassin allowing him to acquire a private island in the South China Sea (though the real location is off Thailand) with its own solar power plant, and a car that is able to adapt into an aeroplane.

Scaramanga works for anyone who pays and, in the movie, has killed 002 Bill Fairbanks, and, later, Dan Gibson a British scientist who has developed the solex agitator.  This is the device that Scaramanga's latest employer, seemingly a Thai crimelord called Hai Fat, wants, but Scaramanga takes for himself. At the time of the movie, the world had suffered the 'oil shock' a rapid increase in oil prices by Arab producing nations to protest at Western support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. This ended cheap oil which had fuelled the post-1948 boom across much of the world and led to instability in terms of balance of payments. In addition, there were growing fears that oil would soon run out in the face of spiralling demand, so efforts were made to find alternative sources of power.

The British, in particular, led the way in exploiting wave and wind power though all of these developments were allowed to go to waste by the late 1970s when more North Sea oil and gas became available and the world adapted to more expensive oil. Of course, given the location of Scaramanga's base, solar power was an ideal form of energy supply for him and the solex agitator would improve the equipment he already had, some suggest, in order to create a solar-powered laser cannon (something like what Goldfinger used to access Fort Knox?). A similar solar device is the focus of the thriller 'Caravan to Vaccarès' (novel by Alastair Maclean, 1969; movie 1974 which featured Michael Lonsdale, more on him later).

Scaramanga is the most suave Bond villain. We know he is a villain because of his peculiarity (rather than disability) of a third nipple (which I was told recently affects 1 in 20 of the population meaning there are over 200 million people with it across the world). He is never uncertain about what he does and is proud of his skills. He is even more of a recluse than many of the other villains, having only Nick Nack his man servant, Kra a combined technician/security man and Andrea Anders, his lover.  He kills Andrea when it is revealed she has sought Bond's assistance to escape from Scaramanga, partly because he only makes love to her before a kill. In the novel, Scaramanga is supposedly a latent homosexual, but in the movie he appears to be rather a ladies man. However, there are hints that he finds relationships difficult and he killed the man who hurt his only childhood friend, an elephant at the circus.

Scaramanga does not appear to be a great threat to the world, but he is to Bond who it appears he has been charged with murdering, though we are uncertain by whom. He has also killed Gibson, removing the world of a man who could have assisted a great deal with the fuel crisis. In stealing the solex agitator for himself, Scaramanga has betrayed an employer which presumably would have reduced his chances of future employment and he probably would have had to auction the device to the highest bidder, perhaps allowing him to retire.  This movie's story is as much about a duel between Bond and a worthy adversary, one who is certainly as deadly as Bond and equally as sophisticated. In fact, there were criticisms that Moore toned down his suaveness for this movie, though I think the harder edge was visible in 'Live and Let Die' too. Two very sophisticated men might have seemed a little too much.  A duel between Connery's Bond and Lee's Scaramanga would have been different, perhaps something like the Rob Roy - Archibald Cunningham duel near the end of 'Rob Roy' (1995).
 
Personally I am always irritated by the flippant humour of the Moore movies and loathe the presence of the hick sheriff, J.W. Pepper (played by Clifton James, born 1921) who it is contrived to appear both in his home state of Louisiana in 'Live and Let Die' and then totally unnecessarily on holiday in Thailand in 'The Man with the Golden Gun'. He was a popular character and I imagine that I am simply out of step with the tastes of the average movie goer of the early 1970s. 

Scaramanga is a little like Le Chiffre, a tool of bigger criminals who is trying to secure his freedom. He is, until the last, more successful than Le Chiffre and it is on his terms that he has a duel with Bond, who, it is clear, he had long envisaged as his main rival in the world, hence there being a replica of him in Scaramanga's 'fun house' training area. To some degree, picked up more in 'GoldenEye' (1995), there is the sense of the villain being a reflection of Bond himself, another hired killer.  In 'The Man with the Golden Gun' we see this duality explored to the greatest extent and certainly for the first time since the brief Grant-shadowing-Bond scene on/beside the train carriage in 'From Russia With Love'.  Scaramanga has been voted the best Bond villain though the opposite view has been held by others.

Karl Stromberg played by Curt Jurgens

Karl Stromberg
Though not working for SPECTRE, like Ernst Stavro Blofeld and later Sir Hugo Drax, Stromberg (played by Curt Jurgens (1915-1982)) can see benefit in destroying the world and, in his case, allowing a new civilization to develop beneath the sea. Stromberg has a webbed hand (the peculiarity to signal that he is a villain) which makes him feel an affinity with the sea. In 'The Spy Who Loved Me' (1977) we see a revival of the plan from 'You Only Live Twice' of ten years earlier with Stromberg using a huge oil tanker to capture Soviet, American and British submarines equipped with nuclear missiles. The way the submarines are paralysed and absorbed into the tanker is very similar to the spacecraft which takes the rockets in 'You Only Live Twice'.

Stromberg plans to go further than SPECTRE's project and, rather than simply precipitating a war (being in 1977 detente between the USA and USSR, though having faded, had not gone entirely; the tensions were certainly less than they were to be two years later when the USSR went into Afghanistan and the so-called Second Cold War started), he plans to launch nuclear missiles on New York and Moscow. Bond gets on to Stromberg because he is trying to purchase a submarine tracking device which has come on the market and which would aid his capture of the submarines.

Fleming was disappointed with the novel 'The Spy That Loved Me' which is written from the perspective of a woman and in which Bond does not feature a great deal. Fleming specified that the story could not be used in a movie, only the title. Only two aspects of the novel survive in the movies, again with an element appearing in a movie of a different title. In this case, Bond having his assassin shoot pillows thinking they are Bond's body in bed, is seen in 'Dr. No'. The only aspect from the book brought to this movie was the steel-toothed assassin. In the novel he was Sol Horrowitz, a gangster and in this movie and 'Moonraker' (1979) he is the supposedly mute, Jaws, played by Richard Kiel (born 1939, 2.18m tall). The movie 'Jaws', about a killer shark, had been released in 1975 and was incredibly successful, so the name had easy comprehension for the audience.  In the movie novelisation SMERSH, headed by Colonel-General Nikitin, who featured in the novel 'From Russia with Love' (1957), appears though it does not do so in the movie. Bond is also shown in this book as being tortured with electric shocks to his genitals, naturally something which is not in the screen version.

Major Anya Amasova (Agent Triple X) is shown in the novel of the movie as working for the Otdyel IV section of SMERSH whereas in the movie itself she is simply a member of the KGB, an organisation well known by audiences by that time. Bond kills her lover, Sergei Bersov, though neither know this until Major Amasova and Bond are compelled to work together to prevent Stromberg's plot. By the time they find out, Amasova, has fallen for Bond and will not carry out her intended revenge.

In the movie Major Amasova is directed to work with the British by her commander, head of the KGB, General Anatol Gogol who appears in the following Bond movies too: 'Moonraker', 'For Your Eyes Only', 'Octopussy', 'A View To A Kill' and 'The Living Daylights' by which time (1987) he has moved to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, presumably to reflect the changing political climate in the USSR of the time. Gogol was played by Walter Gotell (1924-97) a German born actor who had also appeared as SPECTRE trainer Morzeny in 'From Russia With Love'.

The Soviet-UK collaboration was interesting especially at the time as was having a woman who was clearly Bond's equal and had a reason to hate him after he has killed her lover in the opening scenes of the movie. Her hostility evaporates rather too easily and Bond seduces her, but I suppose we could not expect anything different in a mainstream movie. The next agent in movie history to be assigned the Triple X designation is CIA agent Xander Cage in 'xXx' (2002).

'The Spy Who Loved Me' was acclaimed at the time and I liked it in my youth, but its appeal has palled with time. In some ways, even though we had been building up to it in the preceding movies, this is the first one in which the gadgets become stars in their own right, notably the Lotus car that can turn into a submarine. There is some gravity: we have the usual killing of an assistant to prove the villain's callous nature when the floor of the lift aboard Stromberg's aquatic base drops his assistant into a tank of sharks and watches them eat her through the glass of a large aquarium. He is the third villain, after Emilio Largo and Kananga/Mr. Big, and, later, Franz Sanchez to use sharks to kill people; Blofeld used piranhas and Kananga/Mr. Big also makes use of crocodiles. Stromberg also has a harpoon gun concealed beneath his meeting room table, the barrel of which Bond fires down to shoot Stromberg in the stomach and kill him.

Stromberg is very much in the Dr. No category in terms of coldness, though his plans are of the scale of Blofeld's. Stromberg is too distant really for us to engage with him. In the novel of the movie, you get a better sense of him. He almost seems like a cross between someone from the Green movement who wants us to return to a simpler life and one of these American post-apocalyptic fantasists that feels men would be real men once we have had the nuclear holocaust. In both these trends he was ahead of fashion as these aspects came more to the fore in popular politics in the 1980s.

Hugo Drax played by Michael Lonsdale

Hugo Drax
Despite the poor quality of 'Moonraker' (1979) it was the most successful Bond movie financially until 'GoldenEye' (1995). The budget, double that of 'The Spy Who Loved Me' was used in very silly ways: the chase through Venice on a motorised gondola which produces a hovercraft skirt, stands out amongst these elements. Bond killing a large rubber snake with a poison-tipped pen after having been tipped into a pool off a fake rock (having eschewed the suspicious looking metal bridge so often used to drop people among the sharks in Bond movies) is another.

As 'Live and Let Die' reflected the blaxploitation movies and, to a lesser extent, 'The Spy Who Loved Me' was a response to trends following 'Jaws', 'Moonraker' is clearly of the 'Star Wars' (1977) era. The second movie produced in that series, 'The Empire Strikes Back' (1980) was not going to come until the following year, but there were numerous other 'Star Wars' influenced movies around that a Bond movie had to contend with. Unfortunately, as throughout the 1970s, perhaps bar with 'The Man with the Golden Gun', it suggested that the Bond movies were simply following rather than leading.

The effects are good, but perhaps are out of place in a Bond movie and reinforce the trend to the gadgets being the stars.The plans of Hugo Drax are very similar to that of Karl Stromberg. Drax wants to wipe out humanity and build a new civilisation afterwards. Unlike Stromberg. though, he at least seems to have some people ready to repopulate the world afterwards. For Stromberg refuge would be under the sea, for Drax it is in space. The first space shuttle was launched in April 1981 but this movie, as with most Bond movies, shows technology having developed further, so that six space shuttles have already been built.  One shuttle is being loaned to the UK for its use when it is stolen to replace another one Drax had built but has faults, quite incredible given how limited the UK's space programme is even now, let alone in 1979.  In addition the US Marine Corps has a space force equipped with laser guns that can battle threats in space. Of course, you can argue that the Bond world is parallel to ours, as yet, as far as I know, we still do not have a laser as powerful as the one Goldfinger wields as early as 1964. Yet, in such a context, hand-held laser guns would presumably have been possible within 15 years of Goldfinger's development.

Drax's method of killing the world's population is by use of poison from a rare Amazonian Black Orchid (reused as a plant in the British TV series, 'Doctor Who' in 1981) which will be emitted from 50 pods placed around the world each with sufficient poison to kill 100 million people. Now, this sounds more like the type of methodology that villains of the past would have used. Even more stylish he holds the poison in special glass vials developed in Venice (the second of three occasions Bond goes there in the movies, the others being at the end of 'From Russia with Love' and later at the end of 'Casino Royale' (2006)). 'Casino Royale' (2006) comes closest to putting the unique aspects of Venice to best effect.  In 'Moonraker' the setting is quite wasted, though the laboratory (its keypad opening to the tune signalled to aliens in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' (1977)), is in elegant surroundings of a Venetian glass showroom. The parcour chase scene in 'Quantum of Solace' (2008) could have been very intriguing staged in Venice rather than Siena.

'Moonraker' was produced in France and features a French chateau that Drax has had moved to southern California. Having it set in France, say, near the border with West Germany (as the European Space Agency's Mission Control is at Darmstadt and its astronaut training centre at Köln), and having action move to French Guiana rather than Brazil would have fitted, but I imagine that would have put off US audiences.

Drax is the first Bond villain in the mainstream Bond movies to be bearded and, given he has no other disability or physical peculiarity, presumably this is the signal that he is a villain.  He also wears a Nehru-collar jacket for part of the movie, just like No and Blofeld before him. He is played by excellent Anglo-French actor Michael Lonsdale who portrays Drax as urbane with an underlying cruelty. The scene in which Bond and Drax go shooting is reminiscent of the scene between Bond and Goldfinger at the golf course. People comment on how Drax has his assistant killed by dogs as being unnecessarily brutal. However, I think this is no different to Largo or Stromberg or Aristotle Kristatos using sharks. Perhaps the lack of water makes it seem more immediate. In many ways this is a repeat of what Stromberg does.

In the novel Drax is a redhead, a former German nobleman and Nazi soldier, Graf Hugo von der Drache. He fought in the SS Panzer Brigade 150 which employed English-speaking soldiers wearing US uniforms to work behind enemy lines in the Ardennes Offensive of 1944. The unit drove captured US vehicles and others modified to resemble them. Drax ends up as a Werwolf, the alleged post-war Nazi guerillas, and, after an explosion is injured, heavily scarred and is mistaken for a British soldier.  He becomes Sir Hugo Drax a millionaire through his company Drax Metals. He develops rockets for the British but, retaining an undying hatred for the country, aims these (armed with an atomic bomb supplied by the Soviets) at London rather than into the North Sea as intended. The co-ordinates are altered and Drax is killed by his own missile whilst escaping in a submarine. In the movie, we do not know Drax's background, though in the novelisation Bond wonders which side he had fought on in the Second World War. Given the French influence apparent in his house and his assistant Corinne Dufour, perhaps he was supposed to be a Vichyite collaborationist or a member of the French staffed SS unit, the Charlemange Division, or someone from Alsace-Lorraine which was taken from France and formed part of Nazi Germany 1940-5.

Drax seems to be an ideal Bond villain with a complex history, a kind of superficial civilised air with cruelty and disregard beneath it. His plot is one of the grandest as he effectively plans to become master of the world leading a shrunken 'perfect' human population. This emphasis on the purity of the new human race is used by Bond to turn the supposedly mute giant Jaws and his deaf girlfriend, Dolly, against Drax. It is also very much like the Nazis' emphasis on racial purity which led them to kill around 70,000 disabled people in their T4 scheme even before the Second World War in Europe had been started.

Aristotle Kristatos played by Julian Glover

Aristotle Kristatos
We know that, aside from Jamaica, Ian Fleming had an interest in Greece. However, until 'For Your Eyes Only' (1981) it does not feature in the movies. In terms of novels, only 'Colonel Sun', a post-Fleming Bond novel, written by Kingsley Amis in 1968, published four years after Fleming's death, features the country.  It sees Bond rescuing M from a Greek island where he has fallen into the clutches of expert Chinese torturer Colonel Sun (perhaps some influence for the North Korean torturers for 'Die Another Day' (2002)). 'For Your Eyes Only' is geographically quite restricted to Greece and northern Italy, but this is no bad thing and is certainly a refreshing change after the excesses of 'Moonraker'.

Roger Moore almost decided to not appear in the movie and it is a shame that he did not step down and allowed some better, more serious actor to come instead. Michael Billington (1941-2005) would have been the most credible option, he regularly screen tested for Bond in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lewis Collins (born 1946; holds a pilot's licence and a black belt in ju-jitsu) is rather now too associated with his role in 'The Professionals' (1977-83) but could have been a credible dour Bond in the Brosnan style.  At 1.79m he has physical presence, though smaller than Moore.  Heights have been Connery - 1.90m, Lazenby - 1.87m, Moore - 1.87m, Dalton - 1.82m, Brosnan - 1.85m, Craig the shortest at 1.77m plus an upper class British accent. Ian Ogilvy (born 1943) was also considered but would have been a disaster as he was nothing better than a watered-down version of Roger Moore. He appeared in the appalling 1970s revival of Moore's series 'The Saint'.

With a better Bond this movie could have been an excellent addition to the series. The interaction between Moore, 54 in 1981 and the female leads especially Bibi Dahl (played by Lynn-Holly Johnson, 23 in 1981) and to a lesser extent Melina Havelock (24 at the time though she looks quite a bit older than Johnson) is often highly embarrassing due to the age differences.  Fortunately the script has Bond turning down Dahl's attempted seduction.

One thing that people tend to forget is how much the world had changed from the time 'Moonraker' had been released in 1979 and when 'For Your Eyes Only' came out in 1981. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the start of a war that would last until 1989. The USA, under bullish Republican President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 and president from January 1981, backed the Afghan guerillas fighting the Soviets and the Afghan government. Reagan believed that in the case of a nuclear war, worthy Christians would be somehow lifted into the skies by God and be lowered back down to Earth once the war was over in order to bring about the second Eden. With politicians openly talking in a way that seemed to come right out of Stromberg's and Drax's plans, it was a challenge for movie makers to trump that. In addition, with the advent of the Second Cold War 1979-85, nuclear war did seem, once again, to be possible to an extent not felt since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961. In such a context, movies featuring that threat might have been seen in bad taste. This, combined with criticisms of 'Moonraker', led to a return to a smaller scale focus.

One thing that is interesting about 'For Your Eyes Only' is the lack of certainty about the key players. Greek smuggler Aristotle Kristatos (played well by British actor Julian Glover who, in the past, had been considered for the role of Bond himself) is initially portrayed to Bond as an ally who will help him retrieve the ATAC tracking device from a British spyship which has been sunk in the Mediterranean. It is only later that Bond finds out that Kristatos, whilst freelance, is actually employed by the Soviets.  Conversely, his enemy, another Greek smuggler, Milos Columbo (played by Chaim Topol), is actually the man Bond needs to work with (in another example of Ian Fleming using real-life people's names for his characters, he is named after Gioacchino Colombo, the Ferrari designer). In addition, Melina Havelock, the daughter of Sir Timothy Havelock, the British secret agent in the region killed at the start of the movie, is not content to fit in with Bond's plans and simply wants to kill Kristatos in revenge for his murder of her father. After Kristatos's death, Bond is able to seduce her.

If Bond had only watched Bond movies he could have told Kristatos was the villain much sooner. He has no disability, though he is bearded, but so is Columbo. However, he employs Jacoba Brink (a name a little like Irma Bunt from 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' who she resembles and Helga Brandt from 'You Only Live Twice') to train his skating protegee Dahl and a cold East German skiier (who resembles both Hans of 'You Only Live Twice' and later Mr. Stamper of 'Tomorrow Never Dies' (1997)). Columbo, who has previously worked with Kristatos, going back to the Second World War, also wants revenge on him. There is an unstated implication that they may have fought on different sides in the Greek Civil War between Communists and Royalists 1944-8 which followed, especially as Kristatos is in league with the Soviets and Columbo is sympathetic to the British.

With Columbo's help, Bond finds evidence that Kristatos has mines like the one used to sink the British spyship and also that he is a drug smuggler. The movie revolves around a 'MacGuffin', the ATAC device which Bond retrieves from the sunken British ship and then is taken from him by Kristatos who wants to sell it to the Soviets for pure financial gain. There is no battle in a huge base, rather a mountain top monastery, St. Cyril's. The motivations of all involved are pretty much personal. Bond does not have the full picture from the start and ironically destroys the ATAC machine to stop the General Gogol taking it from him.

Kristatos is suave, seen as a man of interests, especially in winter sports. In no way does he seem maniacal and is not seeking the demise of humankind. He has his personal rivalries and is willing to kill rivals and people who get in his way, notably Havelock and Bond. Kristatos is a believable villain and, whilst not threatening armageddon, is a worthy adversary for Bond.

General Orlov played by Steven Berkoff

General Orlov
In 'Octopussy' (1983) Soviet General Orlov is played by actor/director Steven Berkoff (born 1937) who is adept at portraying driven men, just the right side of maniacal (I think particularly of Sagan in 'Outland' (1981) which starred Sean Connery; Victor Maitland in 'Beverly Hills Cop 2' (1984); The Fanatic in Absolute Beginners (1986); Berkoff had also been in an episode of ' The Professionals' in 1983 which co-starred Lewis Collins) and he portrayed Hitler in 'War and Remembrance' (1988-9). Orlov's plan is to smuggle a nuclear device into an American military base in West Germany and trigger it in the belief that the West German public will demand the removal of nuclear weapons from their soil allowing an easier Soviet invasion of western Europe.

Of course, 1983 was at the beginning of the end of the Second Cold War, but the threat of nuclear war was still a very real one. Mikhail Gorbachev had yet to come to power and Reagan was still in office in the USA backing anti-left wing guerillas in Central America. In western Europe, in the face of the heightened tension between the USSR and USA, the campaign for unilateral disarmament was becoming strong.  In the 1983 election, the British Labour Party had that as one of its policies. Of course, right-wingers argued rather than making western Europe safer, it would provoke a Soviet invasion. An invasion was believed to be the goal of the USSR by millions of people, as indicated by the popularity of books like 'The Third World War' (1982) by Sir John Hackett.  Thus, this movie about such a plot played to such beliefs. In fact, in the movie, Orlov is reined in by General Gogol and other calmer heads in the Soviet hierarchy.

Berkoff portrays Orlov as a driven Soviet leader wanting glory. However, ironically, he is also an entrepreneur using forged Faberge eggs to fund his development of an atomic device. His desire for a strong USSR is not out of step with those who tried to derail Boris Yeltsin's reforms through a coup in Russia in 1991. Orlov has no base and he is a member of the Soviet armed forces but his plan is a dangerous one for Europe. I believe, though, he under-estimated how wedded western governments were to retaining nuclear weapons even when accidents occurred with them. His plot is similar to that seen in 'The Fourth Protocol' (1987 based on the 1984 novel by Frederick Forsyth) which stars Pierce Brosnan as a Soviet agent smuggling a nuclear bomb into Britain.

Kamal Khan played by Louis Jourdan

Kamal Khan
Kamal Khan, an exiled Afghan prince, was played by French actor Louis Jourdan (born 1919) and was the first Bond villain to receive equal billing with another. Khan is an Indian jewel thief that Orlov uses to recover a Faberge egg snatched by the murdered 009, whose name we never learn. Orlov's plan will also make use of Khan's contact in India, Octopussy a British-born female jewel smuggler.  Her circus that travels around Europe, and is used as a cover for the smuggling, will be employed to transport the nuclear device into the US military base. Octopussy, though being robust in defending her business, has no desire to provoke war. She feels an affinity for Bond because he allowed her father to commit suicide rather face the humiliation of a court martial.

Khan (who wears a Nehru-collar jacket) is also a suave character and his manner contrasts with that of Orlov. Both the actors seem well cast for the roles. Orlov, planning nuclear war, does not have to really prove he is ruthless but Khan achieves it by a 'tiger' hunt of Bond which is a gripping element of the movie. The involvement of Khan provides some exoticism to the movie which otherwise was focused on rather dull parts of West and East Germany. The division between the two continents jars with some reviewers, but it is a little more rational than the globe trotting of the 1970s Bond movies.

There is some ambivalence as seen around the characters of 'For Your Eyes Only' especially concerning Octopussy herself. She is a smuggler, but as with Columbo, Bond has to work with her to avert a much larger hazard. Like Melinda Havelock, she probably gives into Bond's wiles too easily, given that she is head of such a large operation and has her own palace. Her relationship with Kamal is uncertain too. One feels that, played by Jourdan, Khan would have more chance of seducing Octopussy than Bond would have done.  This is probably why we have to have her gratitude towards Bond and this also references the short story from which the movie takes its title.

The most irritating elements of 'Octopussy' include Moore's age, as by now he was 56 compared to Maud Adams (born 1945) as Octopussy, aged 38 at the time of movie. She is supposed to be experienced so it was right not to have an actress in her early 20s, but again, 14 years difference makes the love interest uncomfortable for the audience. In this movie, Moore looks really weary when battling with the knife-throwing twin assassins, Grischka and Mischka, especially if you set it beside Moore blasting away with the large revolver in 'Live and Let Die'. It seems a lot more than 10 years between the two movies if you compare how Moore appears in each.

The other thing is the use of Indian tennis player, Vijay Amritraj, as Bond's Indian contact.  He is given terrible lines related to his real-life profession. I do not know why they felt they had to include him. Fine, give him a part, but do not undermine the fantasy of the story by having behave as if he is not that character. You might as well have had General Orlov reference theatre direction all of the time. I know some of this stuff was crowd pleasing, but there are better ways of leavening the mood when you are trying to give a sense of threat.

Max Zorin
The last Roger Moore Bond movie was 'A View To A Kill' (1985) and suffered from budget cuts and sloppy direction. Even Moore admits he was 'four hundred years too old' for the part. The movie cost US$30 million to make compared to US$35 million for 'Octopussy', US$28 million for 'For Your Eyes Only' and US$34 million for 'Moonraker' which had been made six years before. This is a shame because there are some wonderful characters in this movie. The key villain is Max Zorin played by Christopher Walken (born 1943). Walken, like Berkoff, has honed his skills in playing sinister men and, despite being weighted down by a poorly made movie, does not disappoint in this case.

David Bowie, who has been appearing in full movies since 1969 and had been quite acclaimed for 'Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence' (1983) and 'The Hunger' (1983) had that alien appearance (put to greatest effect in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' (1976)) which seemed to suit the portrayal of Zorin who was the result of Nazi genetic experiments. Bowie turned the part down feeling, probably correctly, that he would spend all his time watching stunt men acting as him. Another pop singer, Sting, who had appeared in 'Quadrophenia' (1979), on television in 'Brimstone and Treacle' (1982) and most relevant for the Zorin role, as the manic, cruel, very fit, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in 'Dune' (1984), was also offered the role. Either would have been good as Zorin, but either would have been wasted in this poor vehicle.

There are two plots in the movie, both of which revolve around silicon chips. Given that the Sinclair ZX81 the first (immensely successful) UK home computer had been launched four years earlier, followed by the ZX Spectrum in 1982, which sold 2 million units, computing was suddenly thrust into the public consciousness. Before then, computers had been seen as huge things that only companies (or villains bent on world domination), had.  Now they were in millions of homes and, by the mid-1980s, schools as well. So, we all knew what a silicon chip was and how vital it was for developments of the era. Ironically, the movie's lawyers did not check carefully enough and there was already a Zoran company that made silicon chips and they had to put a disclaimer on the movie. I suppose, though, despite causing them difficulties, this was in line with Ian Fleming's own controversial use of real people's names.

Anyway, 'A View to a Kill' sees a threat to a resource in high demand, like the one against gold in 'Goldfinger'; food supply in 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service'; to some extent solar power in 'The Man with the Golden Gun' and, most recently, control of utilities in 'Quantum of Solace'.  So, it provides a relevant issue that audiences can connect with.

The movie opens with Bond recovering a computer chip, from the corpse of 003, which Soviet forces are also after, that can withstand the EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) of a nuclear explosion. The chip is an exact replica of one made by Zorin Industries. Bond escapes all too comically in a submarine disguised as an ice floe. The theme of silicon chips continues with Zorin using implanted one to release chemicals into horses' bloodstreams at critical moments in races allowing them to win but meaning the doping is untraceable by conventional means. Like Goldfinger, Zorin likes to cheat on quite a low level as well as planning greater schemes.

The main plot by Zorin is to destroy California's Silicon Valley which, at the time, was at the heart of the global development in micro chip technology. He aims to do this by detonating explosives beneath lakes along the San Andreas and the Hayward faults leading to a double earthquake, devastating the area. You can compare this with Lex Luthor's plot in 'Superman' (1978) in which he aims to use nuclear missiles to shatter the San Andreas Fault and send the cities of the Californian coastline into the sea.

Max Zorin played by Christopher Walken

Zorin is portrayed as a psychopath, born at the end of the Second World War as a result of Nazi genetic experiments using steroids to create geniuses. Zorin was born in Dresden but moved to France where he became a successful businessman. Overlaps with Hugo Drax's life stem from the fact that the short story 'A View To A Kill' was originally seen as providing the background for Drax's life. Of course, like many of the characters in Bond's novels, their lives have been shaped by the Second World War and by the Cold War that followed. Zorin is accompanied by one of the surviving scientists, Dr. Carl Mortner (played by Briton Willoughby Gray (1916-93)), who changed his name from Dr. Hans Glaub. In the German release of the movie, Mortner is said to be a Polish Communist rather than a German. Like many Nazi scientists, he was taken up by one of the sides in the Cold War, in this case working for the USSR, where, we are led to assume he raised Zorin and both men escaped or were sent to the West in the 1960s.

We know Zorin has worked for the KGB but is now breaking free of that connection (a little like Rosa Klebb in 'From Russia with Love') and setting up on his own. General Gogol comes to try and rein Zorin back in, which suggests the break has only been comparatively recent and maybe a result of the precursors of the looser perestroika policy with the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the USSR at the time.

Physically Walken is ideal for the role having the necessary Teutonic appearance combined with a brash American style that makes him appear a credible businessman of the computer revolution of the 1980s. He seems to have no peculiar physical traits, not even a beard, that signal he is a villain, all of what makes him a villain is psychological and effectively concealed inside.

As with Drax's use of the doberman pinschers to kill his assistant, people baulk at Zorin gunning down the mining staff that have been used to dig the locations into which his bombs are going to be placed. It seems acceptable for a villain to feed their assistants to sharks or electrocute them, but a more visceral attack is seen as somehow not suitable for a Bond movie. However, in an age when we see casual bloody violence nightly on television, if you want a villain who appears evil then he must show that to the audience. Feeding someone to something for the umpteenth time would not have worked. Zorin is supposed to be the product of the Nazi and Soviet Communist regimes and both gunned down people in pits, it fits with the character. Without this, we see Zorin's agents killing people, but not Zorin himself and the hazard of urbane villians is that they do not appear to be villains. Lacking the clear villainy then undermines Bond's carte blanche moral authority to use any means necessary to get to them and kill them. Of course, the earthquake would kill hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people, but that is removed from us, we need to see more immediate evil to perceive Zorin as a man who must be defeated.

May Day played by Grace Jones wielding a Walther PPK pistol

Zorin is a credible villain, planning something ingenious to make him very wealthy and, like Scaramanga, to entirely break free of KGB control. In many ways Zorin is also like Elliot Carver shown in 'Tomorrow Never Dies' (1997).

The other character who must be mentioned is May Day, wonderfully played by singer and model Grace Jones (born 1948), herself an iconic figure of 1980s culture; she is 1.79m tall, only about 4cm shorter than Walken. Jones was only the second black female protagonist in the Bond movies after the short-lived Rosie Carver in 'Live and Let Die'. She is Zorin's lover and his key enforcer, killing Bond's contacts in France Achille Aubergine (Aubergine?! I suppose this came about as that vegetable is called 'egg plant' in the USA), Sir Godfrey Tibbett (played by Patrick MacNee) and CIA agent Chuck Lee (played by British actor David Yip).

May Day is shown as incredibly strong, through the abuse of steroids, presumably supplied by the expert in them, Dr. Mortner. She escapes from the Eiffel Tower by parachuting off it, the kind of stunt usually reserved for Bond. In love making with Zorin and Bond it is clear she is in the driving seat coming on top, a decade ahead of Xena Onatopp. Her sense of betrayal by Zorin when she sees that he has allowed her aides, Jenny Flex and Pan Ho, to drown, means that she turns to working for Bond and foils the bulk of Zorin's plan, sacrificing herself in the process. Of course, she was probably foolish to expect love from a psychopath, but as she rides Zorin's bomb, her fury at him seems mixed with a genuine sense of lost love, which indicates her acting skills that she can produce emotion in such a mess of a movie. As with Jaws, May Day was a tough villain that audiences loved, but for that reason, she had to be seen by mainstream audiences as at least coming over to the side of good.

Of course, it would have been great for her to escape, like Irma Bunt. Imagine the camera pulling back from a slender black hand on a white cat (or probably more suitably a panther or snow leopard) to reveal Grace Jones as the chief villain. Jones is renowned for doing her own thing, especially on chat shows and may have been a challenge to work with, but I think she is a real highlight of the Bond villains and I hope the movie makers come up with someone equivalent in the future, though no-one could really replace Grace. This movie could have worked if Billington or Collins had already replaced Moore, if it had a better budget; better direction and editing; had not had a silly chase on a fire engine through San Francisco and a silly female scientist, geologist Stacey Sutton (played by Tanya Roberts) who puts this kind of role in Bond movies to shame. She should have looked at Dr. Holly Goodhead in 'Moonraker' or even KGB agent Pola Ivanova (played by Fiona Fullerton) in 'A View To A Kill' itself. As it is, Max Zorin and May Day are two excellent Bond villains, wasted.