THUNDERBALL
1965
Directed by Terence Young
Written by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ian Fleming, Richard Maibaum, and John Hopkins
Thunderball was Eon Productions' fourth James Bond film, and it was supposed to be the first, which seems bizarre when Thunderball was Ian Fleming's ninth James Bond novel; but that assumes it was ever "Ian Fleming's" Thunderball, and that's a proposition that his own lawyer felt insufficiently confident of that he advised Fleming not to even bother attempting to fight the legal battle that arguably killed him, given it coincided with the inauguration of the chain of heart attacks that claimed Fleming's life in 1964. The opening quarter of the novel, incidentally, involves James Bond being unwillingly sent on medical leave at a quasi-satirical health center to cleanse him of his complex of personal vices, such as smoking 60 cigarettes a day, a virtually all-meat diet, and a worrisome alcoholism, all of which turns out to have been Fleming listing the things that his own stay at a spa had failed to get him to quit.
Now, I've previously mentioned Fleming had always been eager to get Bond on screen, and given that he even had friends in the industry, it's a wonder that it took a decade for it to happen. Thunderball was a huge part of the reason why, because Thunderball wasn't intended to be a novel at all, but a film treatment that became a series of spec Bond scripts written in a collaboration with Fleming and one Kevin McClory, who eventually brought Jack Whittingham in, too. The shortest version of this infamous tale is that Fleming threw McClory over the instant another screenplay of his suffered a box office setback, and that would've just been business, except that Fleming, by his own admission, was getting tired of coming up with Bond adventures, so he took the most recent screenplay draft, called Longitude 78 West, renamed it the more awesome Thunderball, and rewrote it in 1961 as his follow-up to the short story collection For Your Eyes Only, with neither credit nor remuneration accruing to either of Fleming's co-authors. Then he sent them advance copies. To the apparent surprise of a writer whose reputation lies partly in his worldliness, they sued his ass.
I'm being mean to Fleming, but it's not like lot of Thunderball wasn't his, and it seems that it was Fleming who came up with one of the big things, the bold new concept to replace the usual commies with a global conspiracy unfettered by any actual ideology, which Fleming dubbed SPECTRE (and I continue to wish the acronym didn't stand for anything either); hence how SPECTRE had managed to appear in previous Bond films despite the Thunderball litigation. McClory's very first treatment, anyway, was about hijacking a plane full of celebrities—a good premise for an Airport—but McClory came up with, and therefore supplied Fleming with, the other big thing here: that most archetypal of Bond plots, regarding stolen nukes, ultimatums to the world's governments, and the possibility of thermonuclear terrorism hanging over our hero as he occasionally demonstrates a sense of urgency about it. I've previously stated that there are only two truly great Bond premises, those of the film versions of Goldfinger and The Spy Who Loved Me (and Fleming didn't come up with those either), but Thunderball's gets tremendously close. I suppose the missing ingredient is that the nukes here are just nukes—and, spoiler, neither one even goes off—as opposed to being a means to a more flavorful end, like Goldfinger's petty crusade to ruin everyone else's gold, or Stromberg's yen to live in an ocean undisturbed by mankind. But hell, it's pretty great, what SPECTRE's up to in Thunderball. Put simply, it's classic (it's been the plot of many films since, perhaps most memorably John Woo's Broken Arrow). I cannot be positively certain—even Fleming's earlier novel Goldfinger has a small nuke illicitly supplied to its villain (where it's not even used as a nuke, but as demolition equipment, because Fleming's Goldfinger is kind of dumb)—but the concept of nuclear theft and subsequent extortion was, so far as I can tell, invented right here, though the idea must've been in the air, because Fleming writes that the day every spy had always feared had, at last, arrived.
The upshot is that while Fleming could publish "his" novel (with an appropriate acknowledgment), McClory got the Thunderball film rights forevermore, and that leads us down a road we need not travel yet (I'd only never say he never exercised those rights); for now, it means that Eon's Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman pretended to be "executive" producers for this one, extending the sole producer credit to McClory, whom I'd assume got quite rich off his innovation. As for Fleming's novel, I can see why Eon might have wanted to adapt it first—of the four I've read so far, it's probably the best—and while they put veteran Bond adapter Richard Maibaum on it (he shares credit with John Hopkins), fresh off of his triumph of adapting Goldfinger, director Guy Hamilton didn't return from that film, so Dr. No and From Russia With Love's Terence Young came back, and whichever factor is responsible, it's the Russia With Love pattern: surrendering the novel's clearest strengths, and getting by on the distinct strengths developed by Eon's craftsmen instead. But Eon had gotten scientific about it by now, so while it's a rather "more spectacle, less character" approach, by this fourth James Bond superhit, they could afford some real spectacle. (I find it mathematically amusing that Thunderball, costing $9 million, was the second Bond film in a row where its budget was higher than all the previous Bond films combined.)
The structural blueprint established by Goldfinger is presently confirmed, and given its final touch: at last, in Maurice Binder's "gun barrel" prelude, it's actually Sean Connery; though if you want to be annoyed with Eon Productions, this appears to have been the case mainly because they switched to Panavision for this one, so if they hadn't, they still wouldn't have redone the fucking thing. If we want to get off-puttingly detailed, Thunderball marks the first time (I think only) it's in color, and the first time the barrel irises into the prologue footage; and now, we jump right into that opening sequence, finding Bond in attendance at a funeral for a fellow "JB," evidently for the two seconds' suspense we glean from that monogrammed coffin—it's a certain Jacques Bouvar (Bob Simmons, no less! so the JB is actually an in-joke)—and Bond would be glad to have seen the last of this villain, but Bond's ridiculous sexism puts him on the scent of Bouvar's "widow" (why, she opened her own car door, which we'll agree is extremely revealing). Thus are we treated to the sight of our hero punching a widow directly in her veiled face, before we're remotely aware that it's a man, baby, which I very much doubt we would've guessed in any circumstance, considering up till now Bouvar's been played by Rose Alba.
But as editor Peter Hunt says, cinema is illusion, so thhpt: this opening is terrific, from the absurdist shock of Bond punching a grieving woman to the actual fight that erupts, which demonstrates how good stunt coordinator Simmons and everybody else had gotten by now, with fight choreography and editing so crisp you could begin mistaking it for a movie from as late as the 00s, the only real tell being Hunt's very-60s penchant for frame-cutting (i.e., sped-up motion) that's going to be a huge part of the combat in this film but is gingerly applied here, mostly just to effect some of the choreographic ideas; I have nothing to back this up, but Simmons's work on Thunderball seems in conversation with the iconic fight in the Bond movie he didn't stunt-coordinate, Russia With Love, with this sequence serving as the opposite of the tight space of both that film's train fight and Goldfinger's opening sequence, with this "widow's" enormous mansion serving as their arena but still utilizing all that space and the props it contains—just some great "tip over the heavy object onto your opponent" choreography here, though the sped-up chair Bond slides across half the freaking room to trip Bouvar is my favorite beat—ending with Bond's remarkably cold-blooded execution of his target. Then Bond escapes via a jetpack that I guess he set up on the roof ahead of time, which is superlative "Bond fantasy" albeit let down slightly by Bond landing in the mansion's Goddamn driveway where he gets immediately shot at.
But that's immaterial enough that we barely bother with Bouvar's goons, and dissolve straight into the credits sequence, forcefully representing Binder's return, now armed with the series-defining concept Robert Brownjohn came up with for him: silhouetted women, presumptively nude, though it's hard to tell with this one. The concept incorporates the marine setting we'll be getting; the women are swimming, and the overriding color is blue, though Binder starts switching that up very quickly with a lot of shifting solid colors. Technically, the main thing wrong with it is that the translucency betrays the composite dissolves; meanwhile, artistically, I think it's pretty, but it doesn't deal with many ideas beyond possibly-naked women swimming through color, the only real convolution being the occasional speargun-equipped male assassin, entailing a metaphor about masculine pursuit and feminine retreat with a cheekily unsubtle speargun gag, and that's about it. On the plus side, it's backed by Tom Jones's "Thunderball," which I recalled outright loving, but I misremembered it as being a touch faster, whereas it's actually sort of oddly pensive. (Yet this doesn't presage anything: ironically, the parts of Thunderball I remembered being slow are not.) It remains a solid song, with Jones achieving some superhuman feats with the word "thunderball" (it's an alternative term for "mushroom cloud"), and being pensive keeps it in the same register as John Barry's score, which might exceed Goldfinger's—and hence it might be my single favorite score in this series, tasked with heavier lifts during the biggest action sequence, and developing "underwater"-style suspense cues that are outright beautiful in the way they patiently work on your nerves, and not just in the actual underwater scenes, but in a "Bond inspects his hotel room, that's always a way to get the runtime up" scene that works because of the way Barry is almost-literally dripping the notes into the sequence. (It's also good because Ken Adam production designed this hotel room, though it's perhaps a bummer that my favorite Adam set in Thunderball is, in fact, this modernist split-level hotel room.*) Anyway, "Thunderball's" lyrics are downright confusing—Don Black appears to have no good Goddamn idea whether his lyrics are supposed to be describing this film's villain, like "Goldfinger," or Bond himself—but Jones is an angel lecturing on philosophy compared to what was supposed to be Thunderball's theme song, Dionne Warwick's "Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which is redolent of James Bond parody, and doesn't even bottom out with its title.**
So, the plot: SPECTRE has determined to steal a pair of nuclear weapons, and by way of a surgically-crafted double for Derval (Paul Stassino), a French pilot seconded to the RAF, they bring the plane down in the ocean surrounding the Bahamian Archipelago. SPECTRE's cycloptic No. 2, Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi, dubbed by Robert Rietty), is on hand to personally oversee the recovery of the nuclear devices as well as to murder Derval's troublesome doppelganger. He even camouflages the plane at the bottom of the Atlantic, just in case, because Blofeld (who's introduced in the novel, but isn't really in the movie) has thought of almost literally everything, and the only things he didn't think of were things only a writer like Fleming could think of, in that they're astoundingly hackish and neither Maibaum nor Hopkins have bothered fixing those problems, regardless of their eminent fixability. You see, Bond has already made "Derval's" (and the real Derval's corpse's) acquaintance, having quite coincidentally been at the same spa where his handler (Guy Doleman) was staying, leading inexorably to a low-stakes game of each man trying to surreptitiously assassinate the other with spa equipment. (This also involves superfluous Bond conquest Patricia Fearing, her name being disagreeably appropriate; the goal is a Pussy Galorish dominance-submission interlude, and reads as even rapier. I don't really approve of either scene—besides the obvious objections, the Bondian fantasy is effortless sexual access, right? maybe Bond is kink, but for that reason oughtn't invoke kink, except perhaps in being sexually menaced by a villain—but it's doubly stupid to do it with a non-character like Patricia, and it's done no favors by Molly Peters's performance or that of her dubber Barbara Jefford, neither of whom appear to have been told she was supposed to be playfully resistant until half of their scenes were already shot.) Well, Bond is shocked when his would-be murderer gets blown up on the drive home, and the murderer's murderer, SPECTRE executioner Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi), will probably kick herself later that she didn't dispense with Bond then and there.
This barely manages to send Bond to Nassau once SPECTRE's countdown to armageddon kicks in; his weak lead is Derval's sister, Dominique "Domino" Derval (Claudine Auger), who, quite miraculously, turns out to be Largo's mistress. (Novel or film, you might spend the entire time waiting for the other shoe to drop. Don't: this too is complete coincidence, and it's aggravating how much it didn't need to be.) So: Bond makes time with Domino, and also makes contact with his intelligence community allies, including ol' Felix Leiter (Rik Van Nutter, our third Leiter, and the first to make an impression; there's a chumminess to Van Nutter, and a manneristic resemblance to Gary Busey that creates the constant sensation, in this ocean-set film, that he's seconds away from exhorting Bond to finally seal the deal with this Ex-Presidents case). Bond investigates Largo and, perhaps because this apparent vacationer murdered his sidekick (Martine Beswick) and tried to feed him to his sharks, he solves the mystery. Soon, Domino will be imperiled, and a great big underwater battle will be waged to prevent Largo from sailing his yacht, the excellently-named Disco Volante, right up to Miami and setting off a nuke.
I kid Thunderball, but it's good stuff: it's frequently exciting and, despite/because of its rather generous 130 minute runtime, has that uniquely "Bondian" pace—that whole "occasionally demonstrates a sense of urgency" thing—and has nearly no bad scenes, and several great ones. It's actually better than the book at "action thrills," and unlike with Dr. No (which cost 1/9th as much), there's not much imagery in the book that even gets left on the table here (hell, maybe Bond doesn't fight a barracuda in the open ocean, but he is sealed into a swimming pool full of sharks, which frankly made me shudder more). I would rather express disappointment that Domino doesn't live up to her rather extraordinary book precursor, whom Fleming gave a humanizing monologue that occasions the most genuinely literary gesture I've so far seen from the author (a beautifully unstressed and not-unironic parallelism between Cmdr. Bond and Domino's cherished memories of adolescent daydreams about her "HERO," the nautically-themed mascot for her favorite cigarettes); still, it's time I came to terms with the ways that book-Bond has actual romances with idealized adventure characters, and movie-Bond mainly just has sex with bodacious babes and the movies are rarely-to-never going to close out in ways that make my heart swell like at least the novels Dr. No and Thunderball do (I should be happy the intimation of their underwater tryst is at least romantically shot), so the jerk thing to say would be that movie-Domino's primary point of recommendation is that Auger is simply so surface-of-the-sun hot. That'd be unfair, because Domino's climax is retained: the movie ends with her saving Bond (and, considering the Bond films' sexism, this retention is almost shocking), and righteously killing Largo. But leaving aside whether the novel's underwater visualization of this is cooler (it is, but the movie needs to be above water for its climax, so it's a push), it's irritating that the one "plot hole" the script bothers filling is how Domino escaped her imprisonment (entirely through some guilty SPECTRE scientist's help), something I can't imagine anyone caring about, and which undermines her implacability. Not that Auger is implacable; she's not terrible, but she's playing Domino somewhat featurelessly, not even hitting "sneering badass courtesan" baseline, which was only one of the dimensions Fleming gave her.
The film profits more from the sinister feminine: Volpe, invented for the movie, is pretty awesome (it's unproveable without access to a SPECTRE org chart, but you could make the case she's the highest-ranking villain on the ground). Paluzzi has some fun subtly mocking the "Bond, James Bond" trademark while they're having mutually-duplicitous sex, then openly decrying Bond's whole persona (and this early in the franchise, too) when she's about to murder him; and her conclusion, a taut chase through a Nassuvian Junkaroo festival that ends with Bond using her to stop her colleague's bullet in the middle of a crowded dance floor, demonstrates Hunt's increasing mastery of thriller montage, so quickly cut it becomes more like a violent fugue, until suddenly relaxing in death. The scene further demonstrates the Bond screenwriters' increasing mastery of idiotic quips—"Do you mind if my friend sits this one out? She's just dead." I am, nonetheless, of two minds about Connery's "ain't I a card?" shrug that might as well have been directly at the camera: it is funnier, but by the same token, less cool. Connery, overall, is gliding breezily through these proceedings with the occasional display of determined nastiness, much as he had under Young in Russia With Love, and while Thunderball is more obviously asking for this low-affect performance, either way, Connery's still less interesting than in Goldfinger, where he threaded moral horror into his characterization and was arrayed against two world-class, mutually-reinforcing villain performances. And so, for our acknowledged big bad, I do like Largo's piratical eyepatch; but he's not even that good in the book, and what color he possessed didn't translate. The screenplay's bolted-on compensation, the sharks, doesn't even manage to be particularly diligent about Largo's new fascination with sea life. But maybe it's the Disco Volante: it takes until the very end till it resembles the futuristic superboat Fleming described; then again, that this is a surprise, and Largo's huge-but-bland yacht becomes a tricked-out hydrofoil after shedding its decoy aft section, might be even better.
What's always good is the action-thrills, and Thunderball, Young's last Bond, sees the director incorporating the lessons he'd learned for himself, in addition to Goldfinger's, so that he oversaw one hell of a good action film. Of course, between Hunt, Simmons, and this film's true X-factor creator, the percentage of the film that Young authored personally is such that one could idly question if he actually "made" Thunderball. But I'm less concerned with Bond auteurism than with results (though it was dreadfully negligent of me not to mention last time that Hunt, in addition to editing, had graduated to second unit director already, back on Goldfinger); and, anyhow, we do have that special x-factor to consider, celebrated underwater filmmaker Ricou Browning, here given all the resources in the world and coming back with the most ambitious and complex sequence of his entire career, which doubles-down on Goldfinger's "Bond brings down an army***" concept and then chucks it straight into the ocean.
I comprehend the problems people have with this, and I suppose some authority even stands with them: if Young or Hunt had had his way, Browning's sequence would be a lot shorter—in a shocking lapse of Hunt's instincts, his rough cut of the battle was no longer than four minutes—but in one of those cases of executive meddling being good, Broccoli and Saltzman took Browning's side, and Hunt dutifully took Browning's probably-several-hours' worth of footage and turned it into the twelve minute epic that flattened audiences in 1965, the best of its special breed, which is definitely true if I mean "Bond's army storms the base setpieces" and is likely still true if I meant "all underwater action setpieces ever attempted." Underwater action is—as is well-known—very likely to be stultifying, thanks to the prevailing challenges of filming underwater, choreographing stuntpeople underwater, or, generally, just moving in any kind of rapid and deliberate manner while underwater. (Jesus, look no further than fellow 1965 film War-Gods of the Deep, where its underwater chase is not merely stultifying but nauseating.) Even the most wonderfully exciting storyboards might not stand up to getting soaked, and certainly, to no small degree, Hunt (with much assistance from Barry) is responsible for this being as coherent as it is (Hunt also throws some frame-cutting in there from time to time to ramp things up, and of course he and the sound team had to build the soundscape from complete scratch). But Thunderball somehow makes its deadly aquaballet work, as a collection of awesome individual strings of images embodying awesome individual ideas about underwater infantry combat, enough of them that I'm confident the sequence's body count is higher than the number of stuntmen who actually participated, yet there are some doozies of single shots thronged with orange- or black-clad scuba dudes that are amazing at showing the sweep of the conflict, without ever surrendering a grand sense of scale (for it is, in truth, just a medium-sized gang fight), plus some intelligent inserts of Connery that keep things attached to our hero. (Though I love that the preceding underwater sequence depends on how anonymized his gear makes him; he just slots right in with the SPECTRE goons as if he belongs, and it's surprisingly credible.) There's a cornucopia of swell tech involved (whole speargun arrays), and, naturally, some terrific grace notes (my favorite is the postscript to a grenade Bond's lobbed into the shipwreck he's lured his enemies into, whereupon a lonely flipper floats out of the hole); there's likewise a cunning incorporation of sea life into a battle that's likely to become a scavengers' bonanza.**** But the main thing is the half-speed desperation of this struggle against a backdrop of Technicolor blue—the blood blooms and frame-perfect editing implying a dozen impaled men make it startlingly gory, to boot—and it's all like a quasi-nightmare that you can't wake up from, but you don't even want to. It represents one of the Bond series' most appealing aspects, its sheer eagerness to show off action concepts that you've never seen before, and may not even exist: for instance, "underwater infantry combat."
And then—and this is mainly Hunt—Largo absconds on his superboat and Thunderball switches gears in a way that will intoxicate you, as the Disco Volante roars away with its remaining nuke and the frame-cutting gets absolutely wild, almost constant. This is the other fight that feels like it's conversing with Russia With Love's train brawl: Bond punching Largo on a bridge certainly no bigger than that train cabin, frequently interspersed with punching dudes who keep appearing on the bridge to kill Bond (or, in one guy's hilarious case, deliver Largo's intended "victory" champagne), and this all happens at double-speed—the Disco Volante exteriors, and the rear-projected footage of deadly shoals as the yacht careens madly across the sea, might be presented at triple-speed—right up until Bond faces doom and Domino gets her moment to shine. Bond movies will, in the future, have their problems with wrapping shit up, but not Thunderball: it's paced such that it comes off damn near avant-garde in its manipulation of speed and time. Even the little epilogue with a skyhook is good, quick fun. Now, I don't know how Bond and Domino were supposed to have fully satisfied the formula and fucked while being hung from that fifty-foot cable extended from a B-17; but I'm sure 007 managed somehow.
Score: 7/10
*A swanky Bahamian mansion with shark tanks is nice, and the contrast between SPECTRE's cold, bureaucratic, metal-themed conference room and MI6's venerable-looking "cathedral of spies" conference room is very good; but it's kind of just not Adam's movie this time.
**It begins, "he's tall and he's dark/and like the shark/he looks for trouble/that's why the zero's double," but then I put hot needles in my ears, so I don't know what comes next.
***Or, in this, probably the newly-established Navy SEALs.
****Not that I approve of spearing that shark, or how they more-accidentally asphyxiated several sharks in Largo's tank.
"(I'd only never say he never exercised those rights)"
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