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The series resets by erasing the emotional punch of On Her Majesty's Secret Service and bringing back an older, mellower Sean Connery, the Swinging Sixties are dutifully dragged into the Gaudy Seventies. A tranquil Japanese composition is torn apart to announce the agent's wrathful path, cf. Fuller's House of Bamboo, the case is "a relatively simple smuggling matter" that balloons into the mandatory doomsday scenario. South African diamonds in an Amsterdam chandelier for a gag reused by Hitchcock's Family Plot, the contact (Jill St. John) is a blonde when first spotted by Bond, then brunette and redhead in the next few minutes. "Quite a nice little nothing you're almost wearing." No better place to wait for the apocalypse than Las Vegas, the circus jumbo playing the slot machines might be one of Ralph Steadman's illustrations for Hunter S. Thompson. From cremation urn to Persian kitty's collar, the glittering MacGuffin achieves its final form as part of a satellite packing a mighty laser beam. "An international auction, with nuclear supremacy going to the highest bidder," Blofeld sees it differently, "total disarmament and peace for the world." (Charles Gray's plummy playing of the villain imagines Noël Coward saying yes to Dr. No.) The Howard Hughes enigma and the moon landing hoax are indicated, women's lib is a couple of Amazons given a bath by the unflappable hero. Infernal flames at Slumber, Inc., cars on their tiptoes for a chase across Glitter Gulch, above all Bruce Glover and Putter Smith as uncloseted versions of the henchmen from Lewis' The Big Combo. "Thank you very much. I was just out walking my rat and I seem to have lost my way." The transition to flashy Roger Moore camp is a seamless one. With Lana Wood, Jimmy Dean, Bruce Cabot, Norman Burton, Leonard Barr, Joseph Furst, Laurence Naismith, Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewelyn, and Lois Maxwell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |