Done!

We did it!

I really wanted to get through the Bond films before October and we totally did it. Now it's time to be like Bond and Melina, quiet down, and have a little rest.

At least until tomorrow when we start the Countdown to Halloween. After all, that's why we had to be done by October in the first place.

For Your Eyes Only (1981) | Music

During the production of For Your Eyes Only, John Barry was still in tax exile from the UK. He'd been able to work on Moonraker, because it was made in Paris, but FYEO returned the production team to Britain, meaning that Barry was back out. To replace him, he recommended Bill Conti, the man behind the amazing Rocky theme, so that's who Broccoli and Wilson hired.

For the title song, Conti teamed up with lyricist Mick Leeson. I can't find much about Leeson's career before this, but he'd go on to work with Sheena Easton quite a bit after. He and Conti worked on a couple of variations on the song with input from Maurice Binder who always liked to have the title said early in the song so he could put it on screen at the same time. There was also a version that Blondie submitted, and it sounds like they were considered, but only if they played the Conti/Leeson song. They passed and ended up releasing their own song on their next album, The Hunter.



At United Artists' suggestion, Sheena Easton was hired to sing "For Your Eyes Only." She'd just had a big hit with "Morning Train" and she totally fit the easy-listening, soft-rock vibe that the Bond films were in love with at the time. The song isn't horrible, but it's too sentimental and earnest. I don't like it. I'm not a huge fan of the Blondie song either, but it's at least got blood pumping through it.

To go with the song, Binder basically made a music video. For Your Eyes Only predates the debut of MTV by about a month, but music videos were already becoming a big deal thanks to USA Network's Video Concert Hall. The FYEO credits are mostly interested in Sheena Easton's face as she sings the song with generic silhouettes running around doing the same stuff they always do in Bond credits. There's also a water theme to the imagery, teasing at and leading into the opening scene of the movie where the spy boat with the ATAC is sunk by a mine. It's mostly weaksauce.

Conti doesn't use the Bond Theme as much as I'd like, but he uses it more than Barry does. A lot of the action in FYEO is set to this weird, disco-y music that sounds like its from a '70s or '80s TV cop show. During the cold open, when Bond's hanging from the helicopter, Conti mixes that music with the Bond Theme, but it's not satisfying. There's also a short, wa-wa guitar version of the Bond Theme after Lisl's death when Bond is captured. That seems like a weird spot to put it since Bond isn't doing anything cool right then, but it works as an "oh crap, they don't know who they're messing with, they're going to get it" moment. Even though don't get what's coming to them right then, it makes it very clear that they're going to later.

The best uses of the Bond Theme though are during the mini-sub trip and when Bond finally gets up to the monastery after killing the last guard. The mini-sub is as close to a gadgety vehicle as we get in FYEO and the monastery scene is when Bond is finally going to make the bad guys pay. Great moments.

Top Ten Theme Songs

1. The Spy Who Loved Me ("Nobody Does It Better")
2. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
3. Diamonds Are Forever
4. You Only Live Twice
5. From Russia With Love (John Barry instrumental version)
6. Live and Let Die
7. Dr No
8. Thunderball
9. Goldfinger
10. From Russia With Love (Matt Monro vocal version)

Top Ten Title Sequences

1. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
2. Dr No
3. Thunderball
4. Goldfinger
5. From Russia with Love
6. The Spy Who Loved Me
7. Diamonds Are Forever
8. Live and Let Die
9. Moonraker
10. The Man with the Golden Gun

For Your Eyes Only (1981) | Villains

The biggest flaw of For Your Eyes Only is that it has a dull villain. Kristatos is smart - I like how he uses Columbo to throw Bond off the scent, and how he tricks Melina into coming to the Alps so that he can bump her and Bond off at the same time - but he's just not that interesting or cool. Julian Glover (General Veers from Empire Strikes Back, and of course Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) plays him as coldly arrogant, so it's difficult to connect with him. His interest in sponsoring Bibi's Olympic career could have been humanizing, but even that turns cynical and sour by the end. And for no good reason.

And really... Kristatos isn't the film's actual villain anyway. He's just a very powerful henchman.



Emile Locque has a great look for a cold-blooded assassin. He doesn't have anything to prove; he's just frightening as hell.

I also love how he sub-contracts the Havelock's deaths to Gonzales, presumably to protect Kristatos' involvement. And then how he stays detached when the crap hits the fan at Gonzales' estate.



Erich Kriegler looks like your typical big, blonde, thuggish henchman in the tradition of Grant and Hans. He's got a lot more backstory than Hans though. He's introduced as an Olympian friend of Bibi, but we quickly learn that she doesn't really know him and that he's standoffish in general. Then we find out that he's actually an assassin and we assume he's working for Columbo and then Kristatos, but nope! He's a KGB agent working for Gogol. Which leads us to...



This is an interesting role for Gogol. He's been in two movies before this and both times he was a friendly ally, united with Britain to bring down an independent threat. This time, he's the Big Bad. He makes some noises early on about not taking a direct role in the search for the MacGuffin, saying that he'll simply buy it if it becomes available. But then he immediately puts out the order to contact Russia's "friend in Greece," who turns out to be Kristatos. So he is responsible for everything that happens in the movie. He hires Kristatos, who has the Havelocks killed and starts looking for the ATAC. Gogol even sends a KGB assassin to assist Kristatos in all the murder. Sounds like a pretty direct role to me.

Not that I'm complaining. The script and especially Walter Gotell do a great job of making him the villain without compromising the goodwill he's built up in Spy and Moonraker. He runs the KGB. Of course he's going to end up on the opposite side from Bond occasionally. If anything, FYEO helps his character out by showing that he's not a big marshmallow. But his history with and fondness for Bond come through even here and I love his reaction to the final détente scenario. Easy come; easy go.

He also doesn't ever screw up. He almost gets exactly what he wants. Except for a ridiculous coincidence where someone said the wrong thing in front of a parrot, he and Kristatos would have won.

Top Ten Villains

1. Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger)
2. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (From Russia With Love and Thunderball)
3. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
4. Francisco Scaramanga (The Man with the Golden Gun)
5. Dr. Kananga (Live and Let Die)
6. Doctor No (Dr. No)
7. General Gogol (For Your Eyes Only)
8. Karl Stromberg (The Spy Who Loved Me)
9. Emilio Largo (Thunderball)
10. Hugo Drax (Moonraker)

Top Ten Henchmen

1. Baron Samedi (Live and Let Die)
2. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
3. Grant (From Russia with Love)
4. Nick Nack (The Man with the Golden Gun)
5. Naomi (The Spy Who Loved Me)
6. Oddjob (Goldfinger)
7. Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me)
8. Irma Bunt (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
9. Miss Taro (Dr. No)
10. Tee Hee (Live and Let Die)

For Your Eyes Only (1981) | Women

I started talking about Melina Havelock some yesterday, because I love her and I love how real her relationship with Bond feels.

Carole Bouquet can't do big emotions very well, which is a problem when the moment calls for her to be seething with rage, but she's great at the little stuff. I love the fun she's having during the car chase. I love her conflicting emotions about whether to let Bond help her or just do things on her own. That's a complicated decision and I can see her struggling with it the entire movie. She also does "sad" extremely well.

She never turns stupid and she's a vital part of the film right up until the end. She storms the monastery right alongside the men and is crucial in taking it. My one regret is that we don't get to see whether or not she would have killed Kristatos. The movie does a lot of work to get her to that point and then chickens out at the last minute. That's too bad.

I usually try not to talk much about the attractiveness of the women in the series, because I don't want this to be about that, but I'm making an exception for Bouquet. She's so beautiful, I can't even stand it. I'm not going to pretend that's not a huge part of why I love her and this movie, but it makes me so happy that the rest of the film is also awesome.





Okay. Moving on...



Bibi Dahl isn't really a Bond Girl. Not if you only count women whom Bond actually makes out with. But she so very much wants to be and it's great to see Bond show some restraint for once in his horndog life. His relationship with her is perfectly summed up in the line, "You get your clothes on and I'll buy you an ice cream cone."

Here's the hilarious thing though. Actress Lynn-Holly Johnson is only one year younger than Carole Bouquet.



I've always had a problem with Lisl von Schlaf, but I've warmed to her the last couple of times I've seen FYEO. Mostly, I think my problem is that by this point in the movie I'm fully invested in Bond and Melina as a couple. This whole interaction feels like it belongs in another movie.

But there's a really lovely part when she lets her accent slip. Moore is so wonderfully real and casual with her when he asks if it's from Manchester; then she drops her guard and admits that she's from Liverpool. It's just this sweet, human moment between two people who are supposed to be playing each other, but find a genuine connection in the process. Bravo, For Your Eyes Only.

My Favorite Bond Women

1. Tracy Bond (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
2. Melina Havelock (For Your Eyes Only)
3. Paula Caplan (Thunderball)
4. Tatiana Romanova (From Russia With Love)
5. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
6. Domino Derval (Thunderball)
7. Holly Goodhead (Moonraker)
8. Mary Goodnight (The Man with the Golden Gun)
9. Andrea Anders (The Man with the Golden Gun)
10. Honey Rider (Dr. No)

For Your Eyes Only (1981) | Bond

Actors and Allies



I've read that Roger Moore didn't enjoy making this movie and I believe it. It's not the kind of Bond flick he's known for and I expect that he liked making those kind better. But he's great in it. It works really well that he's getting a little older, even though Carole Bouquet (Melina) is 30 years younger than he is. He's still super active (that ski chase is amazing!), a handsome man, and I buy that she's temporarily attracted him as an anchor point in the chaos her life has become. Especially as a surrogate father figure after the death of her dad.

Bond isn't just a potential lover to her, he's a mentor. In fact, he's that first, offering her counsel on the price of revenge; something he knows a lot about. And I absolutely love that at the very end, he's going to let her make the decision about whether or not to murder Kristatos. It's taken out of both of their hands by circumstance, but it's important to me that Bond isn't the one to step in and deny her what she's spent the whole movie looking for. He obviously cares a great deal about her; enough to let her make her own choices.

More than just about any other Bond movie, his romantic relationship with Melina builds naturally (The Living Daylights and Casino Royale are other exceptions). There's even a really lovely montage of Bond's tagging along as Melina shops the Grecian markets for supplies for her crew. It's not a love to last the ages or anything, but it's believable and I appreciate the work that went into them as a couple.

I also like the way Bond's age factors into his reactions to Bibi. And he's back to flirting with Moneypenny, but it's mellowed out a lot. There's no danger in it, which is kind of sad, but it also makes sense that at some point these two would move past the flirting and just be friends. However, there's also something sad in the way Moneypenny starts putting on makeup when she notices that it's time for Bond's appointment. I can willfully re-interpret that as something else, but it's clearly supposed to be her holding a torch for Bond. Really, their whole scene together has an air of melancholy about it that I don't care for.

Moving on to Bond's other allies, this is the first movie in the series without Bernard Lee. He died of cancer, sadly, before they got around to shooting his scenes, but the script was already written and filming had already begun on other parts of the film. To work around his absence, they rewrote the story to explain that M is "on leave" and that Bill Tanner, M's Chief of Staff, is filling in. In the novels, Tanner is Bond's best friend in the Service and there's some of that camaraderie here, too. Tanner is more relaxed than M ever was and when he tells Bond to "try not to muck it up again," he's probably teasing, although it's a little hard to read that line.

The reason Tanner might be serious is because the Minister of Defense is also involved. The only "again" Tanner can be referring to is Melina's killing the Cuban assassin before Bond could question him, but that seems unfair to put on Bond. Except that the Minister already doesn't care for Bond thanks to the all times that Bond's embarrassed him one way or another. In FYEO, the Minister seems to know that Bond's a good agent, but he's still chilly towards him. And that's probably not going to change after the situation between Margaret Thatcher and the parrot.

Q's got a new assistant named Smithers who shows up again in Octopussy. There's not much to him here other than Bond knows his name and - more importantly - he's played by Jeremy "Boba Fett" Bulloch.

In the field, Bond's first ally is a fellow spy named Luigi Ferrara. He's competent, but mostly inconsequential and only there for exposition and to provide some pathos when he's killed. I like him though. He's a nerdy little guy and physically, he kind of reminds me of Roman Polanski.

Bond's biggest ally turns out to be Columbo, aka The Dove. Like in "Risico," we start off thinking he's the bad guy, but he turns into one of Bond's most memorable friends. He's one of those Fleming characters like Kerim Bey or Marc-Ange Draco who are not only Bond's pals, but sort of mentor/father figures to him. What's interesting in FYEO though is that the actor who plays Columbo (Topol from Fiddler on the Roof) is eight years younger than Roger Moore. He's letting his gray hair show though, so the age difference seems less and he and Bond treat each other as peers. It's a cool relationship and another reason I like older Moore in this movie. He's playing his age and it's great.

Another cool thing about Colombo is his obsession with pistachios. He uses them once as sort of an impromptu warning system, but they aren't in the movie as a plot device. They're just a character quirk and it's stuff like that that makes me love FYEO so much.

One last sort-of ally is Bibi's trainer, Brink. She's just a background character for most of the film, but when things get tough at the end, she turns out to be loyal and great. I like her a lot.

Best Quip



"That'll come in handy," regarding Smithers' fake-cast weapon.

Worst Quip



"He had no head for heights," after Locque goes over a cliff.

Gadgets



True to it's scaled-back tone, FYEO doesn't do much with gadgets. In fact, it comments on this by having Bond's white, "burglar protected" Lotus blow up right before a chase, forcing Bond and Melina to escape in a tiny and cute, but unglamorous Citroën 2CV. Q's able to repair and repaint it, but Bond never uses any of its gadgets. The only field gadget he ever uses in the movie is a pager watch with a two-way radio transmitter.

The biggest gadget of the film is the Indentigraph (inspired by the slightly lower-tech Identicast system in the novel Goldfinger) that Bond and Q use to identify Locque. I like how Bond walks into the Identigraph room with Q and immediately grabs a tape reel to load up. He's clearly used the system numerous times.

Top Ten Gadgets

1. Lotus Esprit (The Spy Who Loved Me)
2. Aston Martin DB V (Goldfinger and Thunderball)
3. Jet pack (Thunderball)
4. Glastron CV23HT (Moonraker)
5. Little Nellie (You Only Live Twice)
6. Rocket cigarettes (You Only Live Twice)
7. Ski pole rocket (The Spy Who Loved Me)
8. Magnetic buzzsaw watch (Live and Let Die)
9. Attaché case (From Russia with Love)
10. Propeller SCUBA tank with built-in spearguns (Thunderball)

Bond's Best Outfit



I really like Bond's mountain climbing outfit from the end of the movie, too, but he's too dapper in this blue, double-breasted number with brass buttons. Reminds me of his Naval uniform.

Bond's Worst Outfit



Sunny yellow short-sleeves with high-waisted pants. Hi, Dad! (That's a joke. My dad never wore anything that dorky.)

For Your Eyes Only (1981) | Story

Plot Summary

A MacGuffin goes missing and Bond has to locate it before a) the Soviets do, and b) a beautiful avenger kills everyone who knows where it is.

Influences

Moonraker was a huge financial success, but producers Cubby Broccoli and his stepson Michael G Wilson realized that there was no way to go bigger. Instead, they intentionally went smaller; back to basics. They didn't invite back Christopher Wood - the man behind the over-the-top scripts for The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker - but brought back original Bond screenwriter Richard Maibaum. He and Wilson worked on the story together, merging two of Fleming's short stories, "For Your Eyes Only" and "Risico."

There's no super villain in For Your Eyes Only with a mad scheme to extort money from world powers or destroy the planet. It's a simple Cold War spy tale and it is fantastic. I enjoy some of the craziness of the Moore era, but that's not the Bond I'm most interested in seeing. Give me classic, close-to-literary Bond any day.

For Your Eyes Only uses several elements right out of the short stories, like Melina and Bond's meeting as they both infiltrate a remote estate to assassinate the man who killed Melina's parents. The opening scene from "Risico" is also played out very faithfully, including Kristatos' mistaking Bond for a narcotics agent and Colombo's staging a fight with Lisl. Later, when Bond tries to get information from Lisl, he even pretends to be a writer like he does in Fleming.

My favorite Fleming homage though is pulled from the novel Live and Let Die when Bond and Melina (Solitaire in the book) are dragged behind the villain's boat as shark bait. That's a great, memorable Fleming scene and it was a shame it didn't get used in that movie.

There are some weird coincidences attached to that scene though. Like how the sharks don't really go for Bond and Melina, even though Bond is leaking blood badly. They sure do like that non-wounded guard the second he goes overboard though. And is it a thing to leave your SCUBA tank at the bottom of the sea in case you need it later to get away from bad guys? I don't know anything about SCUBA. Maybe that's common practice.

And speaking of coincidences, how nice is it that the parrot just happened to pick up and mimic the very information that Bond needed to continue his investigation?

Those are small complaints though in my favorite Roger Moore movie. Director John Glen, freshly promoted from editor on the series, does a great job building suspense and keeping things logical. I love the way he does the sequence towards the end where Bond's hanging on a cliff face as a bad guy pounds out the pitons keeping Bond there. Each time a piton is removed, Glen shows the strain on the others. It makes me nervous every single time. And the underwater attacks by the JIM diving suit and mini-sub are legitimately scary thanks to weird camera angles and POV shots.

How Is the Book Different?

The movie is shockingly faithful to the short stories it's based on. I'm amazed at how seamlessly the script puts them together. "Risico" is the main plot with "For Your Eyes Only" mostly just adding complications to it. The big differences are 1) the addition of the ATAC MacGuffin and 2) Bond's relationship with Melina.

Melina is named Judy in the short story and she's horrible. She starts off all cool and tough, but falls apart at the end, not able to handle the reality of revenge because, you know, girls and feelings. Melina is amazing and badass to the very end. There's a question about whether or not revenge is what she needs, but I don't read that as a gender thing. It's more like a civilian thing: the same advice that Batman gives Robin in Batman Forever.

Moment That's Most Like Fleming



Fleming's Bond isn't quite as brutal as I remember him. He's actually squeamish about killing in cold blood. But he's still a much harsher character than the wise-cracking movie Bond and that's especially true compared to Roger Moore's campy version.

Except for this movie where Moore kicks Locque's car off a cliff out of revenge. That moment is right up there with Connery's "You've had your six" and it's my favorite thing Moore's Bond ever did.

Moment That's Least Like Fleming



The one goofy thing in For Your Eyes Only is that hockey fight. I like the fight itself, but it's stupid that someone's keeping score every time Bond knocks a goon into the goal. Very small potatoes compared to Pigeon Double-Take though.

Cold Open



The cold open sequence sets up the whole retro feel that FYEO is going for. It starts with Bond at Tracy's grave (which nicely has her death as the same year that OHMSS came out) and then has him picked up by a Universal Export helicopter. Unfortunately, the pilot is actually working for a wheelchair-bound Blofeld.

Because Kevin McClory owned the rights to Blofeld and SPECTRE, neither is mentioned by name, but it's clearly Bond's arch-enemy complete with bald head and white cat. Incidentally, Blofeld's body is played by John Hollis; better known as Lobot from The Empire Strikes Back. His voice is Robert Rietty, who also dubbed Emilio Largo in Thunderball.

The FYEO teaser has a stunt, but it's way toned down from the parachute sequences of Spy and Moonraker. Bond has to climb out of the back of a helicopter and work his way to the front while in flight, so it's still pretty exciting, but the most memorable parts of the sequence are the references to Bond's past.

Top 10 Cold Opens

1. The Spy Who Loved Me
2. Moonraker
3. Thunderball
4. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
5. Goldfinger
6. The Man with the Golden Gun
7. For Your Eyes Only
8. From Russia With Love
9. Diamonds Are Forever
10. You Only Live Twice

Movie Series Continuity



For Your Eyes Only may have a deliberately retro feel, but it doesn't go after nostalgia as desperately as On Her Majesty's Secret Service did. At least, not after the opening credits. One major callback to early days though is that Bond's hat rack trick is back. I'd forgotten how much I missed it. Another is a scene where Roger Moore plays baccarat, which makes me realize that we didn't get a lot of card playing from Moore.

Most of the continuity though is with the other Moore films. The Minister of Defense has returned to represent the Establishment that Bond's working for and Gogol is also back. His first scene is even in the same office where he briefed Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me.

A less welcome bit is when the Cuban assassin identifies Bond as a Double-O agent simply by looking at his gun. And even worse than that is Q's yet again going into the field, but not even to deliver equipment. He simply shows up undercover as a priest to receive some intelligence from Bond. That's way outside of his job description.

But most of the gags are understated compared to the last couple of movies. The Italian wine guy from Spy and Moonraker makes his final appearance on a patio during the big ski chase, but there's no looking at his bottle this time. It's just a cameo for sharp-eyed viewers. The silliest bit is when Margaret Thatcher tries to talk with Bond at the end, but actual thought went into that joke and it makes me laugh every time.

Even Know-It-All Bond is toned down. He shows a solid knowledge of wine and expresses his preference during dinner with Kristatos, but he doesn't pull out any weird, arcane knowledge the entire movie.

Octopussy and The Living Daylights | "The Living Daylights"

"The Living Daylights" was first published in 1962 as part of a color supplement for The Sunday Times. The Times was a rival to the Daily Express, which had been serializing and adapting Bond stories for about six years by that point, so the Express was naturally upset. In fact, "The Living Daylights" created a big rift between Fleming and the Express to the point that the Bond strip was abruptly ended part way through the adaptation of Thunderball. More about that on Thursday, though. "The Living Daylights" was also published in the United States a few months later in Argosy magazine.

I have a lot of praise to gush on the movie The Living Daylights, which I'll do at the proper time, but one of the things I love about it as that it adapts its short story pretty faithfully, but with a twist that propels the rest of the movie. In the short story, Bond is called to Berlin to assassinate the person who has in turn been assigned to assassinate someone escaping to the West. In the short story, the escapee is a returning double agent instead of a defector, but Bond is still supervised by a tiresome liaison and still changes his shot when he discovers that his target is a woman. And not just any woman, but a cellist he's been watching and fantasizing about as she's come and go from a nearby building over a few days.

One of my favorite lines in the movie version is when Bond lashes back at his annoying supervisor by exclaiming that the worst that can happen is that M will fire Bond, but that Bond would "thank him for it." I've always associated that with Bond's attitude at the end of Casino Royale, but re-reading "The Living Daylights" reminds me that it's yet another element right out of the short story. Bond is uncharacteristically sulky in this story and grumbles a couple of times about not minding if he gets kicked out of the Double-O section.

The best explanation that I have for that is that Bond is changing as a person. He's become less and less selfish since Dr No and has apparently become a happier person for it. Certainly his sense of humor has improved in Goldfinger and Thunderball. There's even a bit in "The Living Daylights" where he acknowledges to someone that the Bentley is a "selfish car." That kind of awareness is remarkable and important. It shows that while Bond still loves his car, he's also a little embarrassed about what it says about his past self. He sees that past selfishness and is able to comment on it, which I don't think he would've been able to do in the early books.

As Bond continues to change, it makes sense that he's becoming less patient with the uglier aspects of his job. His current mission is outright, cold-blooded assassination. He's never been super fond of that (as we saw in From Russia with Love), but it seems to be really getting at him now. The only time he's seemed okay with it was in "For Your Eyes Only," but that was more about his compassion for M than about willingly taking another person's life. My theory about Bond's attitude in "The Living Daylights" is that the assignment has got him especially down and is creating a bad attitude about his job and life in general. If it pops up again over the next few assignments, I'll adjust that theory, but it works for now.

One last thing that bothers me (not about Fleming's writing, but about Bond's mindset) is that Domino doesn't come up at all. From a storytelling perspective, I don't actually expect her to, but from a fannish, continuity-exploring perspective, I wish that there was more fallout from that relationship than just Bond's fantasizing about a pretty cellist. I fantasized myself about Bond and Domino's forming a mature relationship, so it hurts a little that she's just disappeared over the last couple of stories. There may be good, extratextual reasons for that (McClory?), but again, I'm just talking about continuity. Something apparently happened between Bond and Domino to sour things and I want some closure. I don't expect Fleming's next full novel, The Spy Who Loved Me to explain it, but I wish it would. And if not, I'm perfectly willing to come up with something on my own.

[Argosy cover found at Galactic Central]

"For Your Eyes Only": The Comic Strip

Like the other short story adaptations, the "For Your Eyes Only" strip leaves very little out. But what it does trim down actually improves the story.

When I wrote about Fleming's version, I pointed out that Bond seems a little nervous about pronouncing a death sentence on someone. That's usually M's job, but M is too close to the case, so Bond helpfully and compassionately takes that responsibility from his boss. That's very explicit in the short story, but in the comic strip, the conversation is abridged so that Bond isn't quite so on the hook. He endorses the mission, but he's not forced to make the call about whether the mission will even exist.



That takes out my favorite moment in Fleming's version, but it also allows a different reading of the entire story; a reading that fixes my least favorite part of Fleming's version. Since this is just another mission for Bond (albeit one with a personal angle for M), it offers some insight on Bond's attitude about assassination assignments. We'll talk more about this when we get to Fleming's "The Living Daylights," a story all about Bond's attitude towards assassination, but there are several moments in the "For Your Eyes Only" strip that reveal Bond's distaste for these kinds of jobs.



In Fleming's version of "For Your Eyes Only," Bond keeps telling Judy Havelock that assassination is "man's work" and it kills me that she accepts that by the end. But I let my distaste for Fleming's gender politics take over my reading and the comic strip version allows a different take. Bond expresses himself in a sexist way, but what lies beneath that is that he's protecting Judy from an action that he himself finds repellant. It's his job to sometimes assassinate people in cold blood, but he's growing less and less tolerant of that part of his duties. Again, we'll see this very clearly in "The Living Daylights."

So when Judy breaks down at the end of "For Your Eyes Only," she's not admitting that Bond was right about her being fragile because she's a woman. She's simply admitting that he was right about how horrible murder is. I'm curious to reread the end of Fleming's version and see if that reading makes sense there, but I suspect that it does. I'm betting that it's just buried more deeply, so I'm grateful to the strip for uncovering it.

"From a View to a Kill": The Comic Strip

"From a View to a Kill" is another example of Fleming's short stories being well-suited for adaptation as comic strips. Henry Gammidge and John McLusky leave nothing out except for some of Bond's interior monologues. Because of that, Bond's introduction to Mary Ann Russell isn't nearly as sexy in the strip as Fleming writes it, but otherwise it's a fine adaptation of a rather mediocre story.

In fact, the way McLusky draws Bond's camouflage mask like the Unknown Soldier and his depiction of the entrance to the bad guys' lair are actually improvements on what I imagined while reading Fleming's version.

Thunderball by Ian Fleming

The creation of Thunderball is notoriously complicated. If most of For Your Eyes Only was the result of Fleming’s trying to bring Bond back to television, Thunderball was the result of his trying to get a film made. In late 1958, he teamed up with a few people including Irish writer/director Kevin McClory, hoping to create a Bond movie. Fleming and McClory weren’t the only people involved, but they were the two who ended up in court, so I’ll focus on them. Not that I’m going to spend much time on that drama, but it’s important to see how the book developed.

According to Wikipedia, Fleming’s confidence in the potential movie fluctuated throughout its development, in part because one of McClory’s other movies bombed at the box office around that same time. So Fleming was more involved at some times and less at others, but between him and the other writers, close to a dozen different treatments, outlines, and scripts were created with lots of different titles. It’s impossible to verify who created what exactly, especially when it comes to the story’s most famous contributions to Bond lore: Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE. Though the courts gave those elements to McClory for years, there’s a strong case to be made for Fleming’s contributing to them, especially since Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia with Love clearly show that he had a fondness for the word “spectre.”

Regardless of who contributed how much and which parts, Fleming was certainly on ethically shaky ground when he turned the collaboration into a novel with just his name on it. Once McClory got wind of that, he petitioned the courts to stop publication. That was denied, but the courts left the door open for McClory to pursue later action, starting a long, bitter feud between him and Fleming (as well as future caretakers of Bond’s adventures).

For Your Eyes Only | "For Your Eyes Only"

The final story (chronologically) in For Your Eyes Only is the one that gives the collection its name. It's also the only one that made its debut in the collected volume, not having been published anywhere else previously.

Fans of the film For Your Eyes Only will recognize the story of a young woman who goes looking for revenge against the man who killed her parents. In the film it's Malina Havelock with her crossbow, but in Fleming's story she's Judy Havelock and prefers a traditional bow.

Bond is involved because M was a close friend of the Havelocks and even served as best man at their wedding. There are shades of Moonraker here as M uncomfortably navigates the ethical dilemma of using a government agent in what could be construed as a personal vendetta, especially since the Havelock mission involves outright assassination instead of just beating a cheater at cards. There's a wonderful scene though where M is absolutely stuck and puts Bond in the unfair predicament of making the decision. Bond gallantly suggests that assassination is the logical, impersonal response to a foreign agent who murders British citizens on British soil. Easily the best relationship in the entire Bond series is the one between Bond and his boss. It's very much a relationship between father and son, though with plenty of Stiff Upper Lip to keep it from getting sappy.

In the course of their conversation, the topic of Bond's toughness comes up. Bond truly does have to sacrifice something when he volunteers to kill the Havelocks' murderer. He's not used to those kinds of decisions and he stammers quite a bit as he tries to support M in such unfamiliar territory. Bond says that he's able to withstand all kinds of hardship "if I have to and I think it's right, sir." He realizes that's a weak answer and continues, even more lamely, "I mean ... if the cause is - er - sort of just, sir." In the end, I got the feeling that Bond volunteers not because he's 100% convinced it's the right thing to do, but because he's 100% convinced that that's what M wants. It's a beautiful act of selflessness, though one I could easily see the Bond of Live and Let Die doing as easily as the post-Dr No Bond.

Sadly, Bond's relationship with Judy isn't as great. That's an understatement; Judy is a tragedy of a character along the lines of Pussy Galore. She spends most of the story as an amazingly strong and independent woman, but completely melts by the end. With Pussy, it was Bond's manliness that changed her, but with Judy it's just the natural, womanly reaction (according to Fleming) to having killed someone. Bond keeps telling her throughout the story that murder is "man's work" and the end of the story reinforces that notion as she sobs in his arms and lets him make a woman out of her. Gag.

For Your Eyes Only | "From a View to a Kill"

"From a View to a Kill" was first printed in the Daily Express a few months after Goldfinger came out, making it the earliest of the For Your Eyes Only stories to be published. It starts well with the dramatic murder of a NATO motorcycle courier and Bond's being called in to help investigate.

Bond's involvement is purely political. NATO command already isn't happy with the security risk of Britain's having it's own offices outside of the main headquarters, so M sends them 007 as a way of showing that Britain is involved and taking the matter seriously. Bond was nearby anyway, relaxing in Paris after a failed mission to help a defector come over from Hungary.

I had a hard time connecting to the investigation itself. Bond's a capable detective, but in the end he solves the thing with intuition and being the only person to suspect a previously unnoticed lead, which is a tactic that M specifically instructed Bond to take. I'm not saying that Bond merely stumbles across the right clues, just that his investigative techniques aren't especially compelling. And I'm not sure how I feel about the rather outlandish revelation of who's behind the murder. On the one hand, it's more fantastical than its lead-up prepared me for. On the other hand, it's kind of cool and a taste of things to come in the Bond series.

The meaning of the title isn't explicit in the story, but one theory is that it's a hunting reference. "D'ye Ken John Peel?" was a popular song in the nineteenth century about a fox hunter and one version includes the line, "From a find to a check, from a check to a view, from a view to a kill in the morning." In other words, first you see the prey, then you kill it. It's not one of Fleming's stronger titles, but at least it makes me hear Duran Duran in my head when I read it.

There's one bit of character development for Bond in the story, though it's from a small throwaway line about Bond's drinking preferences. Fleming writes that Bond dislikes Pernod "because its liquorice taste reminded him of his childhood." He gives no more detail than that, but it's the first hint that Bond's childhood wasn't completely happy and full of golf and fancy tea parties. A curious piece of the puzzle as we try to reconstruct Bond's early life as Fleming imagined it.

For Your Eyes Only | "The Hildebrand Rarity"

"The Hildebrand Rarity" was published in Playboy just a month before For Your Eyes Only came out. In it, Bond is in the Seychelles Islands (northeast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean), having just finished a security check for the British Navy. Most of the stories in For Your Eyes Only occur while Bond's hanging out after some routine mission ("Risico" and "For Your Eyes Only" being the exceptions) and this time Bond has a few days to kill before a ship arrives to take him home.

We already know from Live and Let Die that Bond's an accomplished diver, and that's how he's spending his time on his break. When a buddy of his on the islands gets an opportunity to help an American philanthropist track down a rare fish - the Hildebrand Rarity - for the Smithsonian, the buddy recommends that Bond come along too. (Side note for Creature from the Black Lagoon fans: the plan is to use Rotenone to catch the fish.) Unfortunately, the wealthy Milton Krest is a first class jerk who insults his guests and uses his charitable foundation to write off pleasure expenses. Most heinous though, he has a habit of beating his wife Elizabeth with a stingray tail when she displeases him.

Bond connects with Elizabeth, partly because she's British, but mostly because she seriously needs a friend. This is what I love most about "The Hildebrand Rarity" and one of the reasons it's my favorite in the collection. Elizabeth is beautiful, but there's not the usual sexual tension between her and Bond. I mean there is tension there, but it comes from knowing how Bond usually interacts with beautiful women and from knowing that Milton Krest is a dangerous man to offend. If Bond acts as he usually does, life on Krest's yacht is probably going to become deadly.

But that's not what happens and Bond simply befriends the woman. Her nervousness and unsuccessfully concealed desperation touch Bond and turn him into a listening ear for her. He becomes an oasis of comfort and normality in the life of fear that she's leading, which is a really odd role for him to take. But he wears it well and it's another great example of the post-Dr No Bond at work.

For Your Eyes Only | "Quantum of Solace"

Originally published in Cosmopolitan a couple of months after Goldfinger, "Quantum of Solace" is the one short story in For Your Eyes Only not based on a plot outline for CBS's scrapped Bond series. Instead, Fleming wrote it as an homage to W Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage, Ashenden: The British Agent, The Razor's Edge), one of Fleming's favorite authors. According to the British Empire website, Maugham enjoyed writing about "the remote locations of the quietly magnificent yet decaying British Empire" and the people who worked and lived there. He was a master at juxtaposing "realistic depictions of the boredom and drudgery" of plantation life or civil service with "the desire and trappings of what [British citizens who lived in those places] would regard as civilisation."

Fleming evokes all of that in "Quantum of Solace". It's an odd Bond story in that Bond is only there to serve as an audience as the British Governor of the Bahamas relates the story of Philip and Rhoda Masters, a tragic couple who lived on the island earlier. "Quantum of Solace" opens after a dull dinner party where Bond and the Governor are the last remaining attendees. The two men have nothing in common with each other and each is completely uncomfortable. Bond is in the area after blowing up a boat full of contraband weapons. He's bored by the Governor, a lifelong civil servant who values quiet and routine. Desperate to get the conversation going somewhere interesting, Bond makes an intentionally offensive comment about wanting to marry an airline hostess if anyone at all. The Governor refuses the bait, but is reminded about the Masterses because Rhoda was an airline hostess when Philip met her.

The bulk of "Quantum of Solace" is the Masterses' story, a tragedy of betrayal brought on by the boredom and drudgery that Rhoda feels towards life in the Bahamas. She wants the trappings of a proper British life, but can't get them out in the colonies, so she acts out, hurting her husband enormously. The story's title refers to a theory of the Governor's: that bad marriages can endure if each member can offer the tiniest amount of comfort to the other. Rhoda was unable to do that and in the end it damaged her as much as Philip.

It's a powerful story of heartbreak, not a rousing Bond adventure, but that's the point it's trying to make. I have to spoil it to talk about it adequately, but Bond ultimately learns that Rhoda was in fact a very dull woman he'd sat next to during dinner. He realizes that he misjudged her and that what he's always thought of as an adventuresome life has been empty of the emotion and meaning - however tragic - that filled hers. For that reason, it's an important story in Bond's character development, second so far only to Dr No. Bond continues to be confronted by his own self-absorption and to grow from those experiences.

For Your Eyes Only | "Risico"

As we move into some of Fleming's short stories about James Bond, I need to talk a bit about chronology. There are three ways I could integrate the short stories with Bond's longer adventures: I could write about them in the order in which they were originally published by magazines and newspapers, I could write about them in the order in which they were collected in book form, or I could write about them as they happened within the chronology of Bond's career.

So far, I've been tackling this project in publication order and there's been no conflict because Fleming wrote and published the novels in the same order that they occur in Bond's life. With the short stories though it gets more complicated, especially when we get into the stories collected in Octopussy and The Living Daylights, which were published after Fleming's death and clearly take place earlier in Bond's career rather than after the dramatic events that closed Fleming's series.

Because I'm interested in Bond as a fictional character and how Fleming developed him, I'm going to write about the short stories as they happened to Bond. But that's going to be an anomaly in this project. After Fleming's death, a consistent chronology of Bond's life becomes impossible. So while I'll include the non-Fleming books in the project, I'm not going to pretend that they're about the same character. That'll free me to just take them in publishing order and transition to thinking about James Bond as a phenomenon instead of a character.

There are a couple of major chronologies that put Fleming's stories in order of when they took place in Bond's life. The one I like best is John Griswold's from Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming's James Bond Stories. Griswold uses the publication order of the novels and then fits the short stories into that. It's nice and simple as opposed to the other major chronology which rearranges some of the novels.

Both chronologies agree though that "Risico," the fourth out of the five stories collected in For Your Eyes Only, takes place earliest; soon after Goldfinger. That's because M mentions the Mexican assignment that Bond was musing about at the beginning of Goldfinger as happening "earlier this year."

It comes up again in "Risico" (named after the way a character mispronounces the word "risk") because the short story has Bond on another drug case. This time he's tasked with shutting down the flow of heroin into England from Italy. I don't want to say too much about the plot, because it's a twist-ending kind of short story, but if you've seen the movie For Your Eyes Only, you're familiar with the characters of Kristatos, Colombo, and Lisl Baum (renamed Lisl von Schlaf in the film) and their relationships with Bond and each other.

Fleming developed the story for a Bond TV show that never made it to the air. CBS had been happy with the results of the "Casino Royale" episode of Climax! and wanted more, so Fleming wrote some plot outlines. After CBS dropped the idea, he worked the outlines into four of the short stories collected in For Your Eyes Only. The fifth is the one we'll talk about tomorrow, but "Risico" was the last of them published, debuting in the Daily Express newspaper simultaneously with the publication of the whole For Your Eyes Only collection.