|
The lights come up on a nasty nocturnal exercise and the credits are projected onto undulating flesh—the shift from Dr. No's Caribbean design is a marked one, the Byzantine network fits the metallic Cold War ménage to a fare-thee-well. A Soviet decoding machine is the MacGuffin, SPECTRE's scheme is to seize it and sell it back via pawns on both sides of the Iron Curtain, a natural grid for the Czech chessmaster (Vladek Sheybal). One half of the plan is James Bond (Sean Connery) and the other is a Russian consulate clerk in Istanbul (Daniela Bianchi), a gauzy guise (sightseeing newlyweds) over a splintering East-West. "I think we're talking at cross-purposes again." Gypsy catfights for tourists and stampeding rats in the catacombs, the land of sultans in the age of spies, the intelligence chief (Pedro Armendáriz) inspects it through a periscope. The blithe Eros of cavorting agents is contrasted with the steely Thanatos of the flaxen assassin (Robert Shaw), "a homicidal paranoid, superb material." (The Paolozzi image of a dead enemy dangling from the lips of an Anita Ekberg billboard segues into a ripe view of Bianchi's mouth, isolated in close-up like a pink Lichtenstein.) Out of plush elements Terence Young weaves the series' tightest expression of brutes playacting as gentlemen, a British calm met with sundry jolts. Lotte Lenya's presence enhances the Germanic flavor (Lang figures in the exploding suitcase plus a scuffle adduced from Cloak and Dagger), though Hitchcock is the clear tributary in the bizarrerie of the drugged heroine waking up on a truck of flowers just in time for a helicopter blitzkrieg. "Yes, I think I got that without the subtitles." The gondola ride ends with the unspooling of a tell-tale reel of film, just the romantic declaration for cutthroats "working on the company's time." With Bernard Lee, Eunice Gayson, Walter Gotell, Francis De Wolff, and Lois Maxwell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |