Octopussy
Octopussy | |
---|---|
Directed by | John Glen |
Screenplay by | |
Based on | James Bond by Ian Fleming |
Produced by | Albert R. Broccoli |
Starring | |
Cinematography | MGM/UA Entertainment Co. (U.S.) (International)United International Pictures |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 131 minutes |
Countries | United Kingdom[1] United States[2] |
Language | English |
Budget | $27.5 million |
Box office | $187.5 million |
Octopussy is a 1983
The film's title is taken from a short story in Ian Fleming's 1966 short story collection Octopussy and The Living Daylights, although the film's plot is mostly original. It does, however, contain a scene adapted from the Fleming short story "The Property of a Lady" (included in 1967 and later editions of Octopussy and The Living Daylights). The events of the short story "Octopussy" form part of the title character's background and are recounted by her in the film.
In Octopussy, Bond is assigned the task of following a megalomaniacal Soviet general (Steven Berkoff) who is stealing jewellery and art objects from the Kremlin art repository. This leads Bond to a wealthy exiled Afghan prince, Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan), and his associate, Octopussy (Maud Adams), and the discovery of a plot to force disarmament in Western Europe with the use of a nuclear weapon.
Octopussy was produced by Albert R. Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson; it was released four months before the non-Eon Bond film Never Say Never Again. The film earned $187.5 million against its $27.5 million budget and received mixed reviews. Praise was directed towards the action sequences and locations, with the plot and humour being targeted for criticism; Maud Adams's portrayal of the title character also drew polarised responses.
Plot
After an encounter with knife-throwing twin assassins Mischka and Grishka in East Berlin, mortally wounded British agent 009, dressed as a circus clown and carrying a counterfeit Fabergé egg, stumbles into the British ambassador's residence and dies. MI6 immediately suspects Soviet involvement and, after the genuine Fabergé egg is to be auctioned in London, sends James Bond to identify the seller.
At the auction, Bond swaps the fake egg for the real one and subsequently engages in a bidding war with an exiled Afghan prince named Kamal Khan, forcing Khan to pay £500,000 for the counterfeit. Bond follows Khan to his palace in India. Bond defeats Khan in a game of backgammon using Khan's loaded dice. Then Bond and his MI6 contact, Vijay, escape Khan's bodyguard Gobinda in a taxi chase through a marketplace. Later, Khan's associate Magda seduces Bond. Bond allows Magda to steal the real Fabergé egg, which is fitted with Q's listening and tracking device. Gobinda knocks Bond unconscious and takes him to Khan's palace. After Bond escapes, he listens in on the bug and discovers that Khan works with Orlov, a corrupt Soviet general seeking to defy his superiors and expand Soviet domination to Western Europe. Orlov has been supplying Khan with priceless Soviet treasures stolen from the Kremlin, replacing them with counterfeits while Khan has been smuggling the genuine objects into the West via Octopussy's circus troupe.
Bond infiltrates a floating palace in Udaipur and meets its owner, Octopussy, a wealthy businesswoman, smuggler and Khan's associate. She also leads the Octopus cult, of which Magda is a member. Octopussy has a personal connection with Bond: her father is the late Major Dexter-Smythe, whom Bond arrested for treason. Octopussy thanks Bond for allowing the Major to commit suicide rather than face trial, and invites Bond to be her guest. Khan's assassins break into the palace to kill Bond, but Bond and Octopussy thwart them. Bond learns from Q that the assassins have killed Vijay.
Orlov is planning to meet Khan at
Bond takes Orlov's car, drives it along the railway tracks and boards the moving circus train. Orlov gives chase, but is killed by border guards after he tries to rush a checkpoint. Bond kills Mischka and Grischka to avenge the murder of 009, and after falling from the train, hitch-hikes a lift from a passing motorist to reach the airbase, eventually stealing a car from a nearby town to complete his journey. Bond penetrates the base and disguises himself as a clown to evade the West German police. He convinces Octopussy that Khan has betrayed her, and realizing that she has been tricked, she assists Bond in deactivating the warhead.
Some time later, with the plan foiled, Khan has returned to his palace and prepares to flee. Bond and Octopussy also return separately to India. Bond arrives at Khan's palace just as Octopussy and her troops launch an assault on the grounds.
Octopussy attempts to kill Khan, but is captured by Gobinda. While Octopussy's team, led by Magda, overpower Khan's guards, Khan and Gobinda abandon the palace, taking Octopussy as a hostage. As they attempt to escape in their airplane, Bond clings to the fuselage and disables an engine and the elevator panel. Struggling with Bond, Gobinda falls to his death from the plane's roof, and Bond and Octopussy jump off the plane onto a nearby cliff only seconds before the plane crashes into a mountain, killing Khan instantly. While the Minister of Defence and Gogol discuss the return of the stolen jewels to the Kremlin, Bond recuperates with Octopussy aboard her private galley in India.
Cast
- MI6agent 007.
- Maud Adams as Octopussy, a jewel smuggler and wealthy businesswoman. Adams previously played a different character in The Man With the Golden Gun.
- Louis Jourdan as Kamal Khan, an exiled Afghan prince.
- Kristina Wayborn as Magda, trusted subordinate and henchwoman to Octopussy and Khan.
- Kabir Bedi as Gobinda, Khan's powerful bodyguard.
- Steven Berkoff as General Orlov, a renegade Soviet general who works with Khan to bomb a US airbase, and destabilise NATO.
- Vijay Amritraj as Vijay, Bond's MI6 ally in India. This was Armitaj's acting debut after gaining prominence as a tennis player.
- David Meyer and Anthony Meyer as Mischka and Grischka (credited as Twin One and Twin Two): Orlov's knife-throwing henchmen who are performers in Octopussy's circus.
- Douglas Wilmer as Jim Fanning, antiquities expert who accompanies Bond at the Fabergé auction.
- Robert Brown as M, head of the British Secret Service and Bond's superior.
- General Anatoly Gogol, director of the KGB.
- Desmond Llewelyn as Q, MI6's gadget designer. Llewelyn was disappointed that he was unable to travel to India since his scenes were filmed at Pinewood Studios.[3]
- Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny, M's secretary.
- Frederick Gray(credited as Minister of Defence).
- Albert Moses as Sadruddin, head of MI6 station in India, assigned to assist Bond.
- Bruce Boa as U.S. Air Force General Peterson, the American base commander in West Germany.
- Michaela Clavell as Penelope Smallbone, Moneypenny's assistant.
- Paul Hardwick as the Soviet Chairman who presides over meeting between Orlov and Gogol. Hardwick was cast due to his resemblance to Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, but Brezhnev died during production in November 1982, making his presence an anachronism.[4] This was Hardwick's final film role, who himself died in October 1983, four months after the film's release.
Other actors in smaller roles include Andy Bradford as MI6 agent 009, Dermot Crowley as Lieutenant Kamp, Orlov's nuclear weapons expert; Peter Porteous as Lenkin, the Kremlin art expert; Eva Rueber-Staier as Rublevitch, Gogol's secretary; Jeremy Bulloch as Smithers, Q's assistant; Richard LeParmentier as General Peterson's aide; and Gabor Vernon as Borchoi. Ingrid Pitt has an uncredited voice cameo as Octopussy's galley mistress.
Production
Writing
Despite financial problems at
Fraser was hired to work on an early draft of the script and he proposed that the story be set in India, as the series had not yet visited said country.[8] The first draft was delivered shortly after the release of For Your Eyes Only,[7] whose writers Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum went on to rework the script. They discarded his idea for the opening sequence, featuring a motorbike chase set at the Isle of Man TT, but still retained moments that producer Albert R. Broccoli had first criticized, where Bond dressed as a gorilla and later, a clown.[8] The film was rewritten to focus on jewellery smuggling after a scandal in the Soviet Union involving General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev's son-in-law in which the Moscow State Circus was being used to smuggle jewellery.[5]
Casting
Following For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore had expressed a desire to retire from the role of James Bond. His original contract had been for three films (Live and Let Die in 1973, The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974 and The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977) which was fulfilled. Moore's following two films (Moonraker in 1979 and For Your Eyes Only in 1981) were negotiated on a film-by-film basis. Given his reluctance to return for Octopussy, the producers engaged in a semi-public quest for the next Bond, with Timothy Dalton and Lewis Collins[5] being suggested as a replacement and screen tests carried out with Michael Billington, Oliver Tobias, and American actor James Brolin.[6] However, when rival Bond production Never Say Never Again was announced, the producers persuaded Moore to continue in the role as it was thought the established actor would fare better against former Bond Sean Connery.[9] It has been reported that Brolin had actually been hired and was on the point of moving to London to begin work on Octopussy, while Broccoli refused to dispute Tobias's public statements that he was about to be cast as Bond.[10][6]
Octopussy is also the first film to feature Robert Brown as M, following the death of Bernard Lee in 1981. Brown was recommended by Moore, who had known him since both worked in the series Ivanhoe.[14] Brown had previously played Admiral Hargreaves in The Spy Who Loved Me, six years earlier.[15]
The first actor to be cast in the film was
Filming
The filming of Octopussy began in
The pre-title sequence has a scene where Bond flies a nimble
Much later in the film, Bond steals Orlov's
Stunt coordinator Martin Grace suffered an injury while shooting the scene where Bond climbs down the train to catch Octopussy's attention.[23] During the second day of filming, Grace – who was Roger Moore's stunt double for the scene – carried on doing the scene longer than he should have, due to a miscommunication with the second unit director, and the train entered a section of the track which the team had not properly surveyed. Shortly afterwards, a concrete pole fractured Grace's left leg. The cyclist seen passing in the middle of a sword fight during the baby taxi chase sequence was in fact a bystander who passed through the shot, oblivious to the filming; his intrusion was captured by two cameras and left in the final film.[9] Cameraman Alan Hume's last scene was that of Octopussy's followers rowing. That day, little time was left and it was decided to film the sunset at the eleventh hour.[24]
The
In a bit of diegesis that "breaks the fourth wall", Vijay signals his affiliation to MI6 by playing the "James Bond Theme" on a recorder while Bond is disembarking from a boat in the harbour near the City Palace.[25] Like his fictional counterpart, the real Vijay had a distinct fear of snakes and found it difficult to hold the basket during filming.[9]
Music
After being absent in For Your Eyes Only due to tax problems, John Barry returned to do his ninth Bond score.[26] Barry made frequent references to the "James Bond Theme" to reinforce Octopussy as the official Bond film, given that the motif could not be featured in Never Say Never Again, and opted to include only subtle references to the music of India, avoiding instruments such as the sitar for feeling that authentic music "didn't work dramatically". He also wrote opening theme "All Time High" with lyricist Tim Rice. "All Time High", sung by Rita Coolidge, is one of seven musical themes in the James Bond series whose song titles do not refer to the film's title. "All Time High" spent four weeks at number one on the United States' Adult Contemporary singles chart and reached number 36 on the Billboard Hot 100.[25]
The soundtrack album was released in 1985 by A&M Records; the compact disc version of this release was recalled due to a colour printing error which omitted the credits from the album cover, making it a rare collector's item. In 1997, the soundtrack was re-issued by Rykodisc, with the original soundtrack music and some film dialogue, on an Enhanced CD version. The 2003 release, by EMI, restored the original soundtrack music without dialogue.[27]
Release and reception
Octopussy was the first Bond film released by
Contemporary reviews
Gary Arnold of
Variety felt the film's strong points were "the spectacular aerial stuntwork marking both the pre-credits teaser and extremely dangerous-looking climax. The rest of the action scenes are well-executed but suffer from a sense of deja vu, as in a speeding train that recalls Sean Connery's derring-do in The Great Train Robbery".[39] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times felt the film proved "to be business as usual, no better or worse than most of its predecessors. After all this time, it's amazing that the same old formula still plays: the gadgetry, gorgeous girls, travelogue locales and the shameless double-entendres—in this instance, octo-entendres."[40] Richard Corliss of Time magazine negatively reviewed Moore's performance, writing he has "degenerated [Bond] into a male model, and something of a genial anachronism."[41] Derek Malcolm of The Guardian wrote the film "doesn't treat itself seriously for a moment ...Bond has now become almost totally absurdist, a parody of a parody. The film effectively disarms criticism, except that one might wish for the public to flock to something other than the technically ambitious."[42]
Retrospective reviews
On
James Berardinelli said that the movie was long and confusing, and strongly criticised Steven Berkoff's performance, describing it as "offensively bad" and the worst performance of any Bond villain.[45] A particular point of contention are comedic scenes where Bond is dressed in a clown costume, a gorilla outfit and doing a Tarzan yell during a jungle chase.[46] As a result, it frequently ranks low in rankings of James Bond films, such as the ones by Entertainment Weekly,[47] MSN,[48] and IGN.[49] C. J. Henderson reviewed Octopussy in The Space Gamer magazine, writing "there isn't a moment in the movie when we worry for the slightest instant that anything could happen to suave ol' James. Predictably, it doesn't. To kill Bond would be to lose the most bankable genre character ever brought to the movies."[50]
By contrast, the elegance of the film locations in India, and the stunts on the aircraft and train were appreciated.
Character reviews
In 2006,
Television
Octopussy premiered in North America on The ABC Sunday Night Movie on February 2, 1986. It placed third in its time period with a Nielsen Media Research household rating of 17.4, a 29% audience share, and approximately 25 million viewers. The movie started 18 minutes late due to an overrun earlier in the day of Wide World of Sports,[59] which may have negatively impacted its performance slightly (a key action sequence near the end of the film[60] did not air until after 11:30pm in the Eastern Time Zone).
See also
- James Bond in film
- Outline of James Bond
- Whitewashing in film
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