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.

"Risico": The Comic Strip

Starting with the "From Russia with Love" strip, there's an upturn in the quality of the Bond comics and the series excels even more at adapting Fleming's short stories. The length of the "Risico" strip isn't much shorter proportionally than those adapting full length novels, so Henry Gammidge is able to take his time and build scenes instead of rushing through them. Reading the comic strip "Risico" is a lot like reading the prose "Risico," only with pictures.

And the pictures are pretty great. John McLusky has really found his stride and the art looks totally relaxed and confident. His Kristatos has a laid back, slimy quality that makes me smile and Bond looks a lot tougher and more serious than the smirking character in some of the earlier adaptations. Lisl Baum feels like a real person as opposed to some of the pinups McLusky was using for previous women.

"Risico" is so good that it represents a strip I'd look forward to reading even if it wasn't about one of my favorite literary characters. It's not only an excellent adaptation; it has enough great qualities to stand as its own thing. It has a mature feel to it, like it's not dumbing down the story, and that even extends to some of the language. Gammidge lets Bond say "hell" quite a bit, which isn't indicative of quality, but does seem like he and/or his editors are willing for this not to be seen as a kids strip.

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.