Bovie Movie

For Your Eyes Only eschews the gimmickry and campiness of earlier James Bond films, concentrating instead on telling the story and maintaining suspense. Roger Moore is back as Secret Agent 007, this time on the trail of Soviet spies while he romances the beautiful Melina, played by Carole Bouquet. Richard Maibaum’s screenplay has very little to do with the collection of short stories that made up Ian Fleming’s For Your Eyes Only, save for the plotline involving Melina’s seeking vengeance for the death of her father. The direction is by John Glen, who’d previously done second unit work on other Bond films.

The Living Daylights represents the first appearance by Timothy Dalton as “Bond…James Bond.” Based very, very loosely on an obscure Ian Fleming short story, the film finds Bond assigned to aid in the defection of KGB agent Jeroen Krabbe. 007 must prevent an unknown sniper from killing Krabbe before he can reach the West. The mysterious assailant turns out to be the luscious Maryam d’Abo, who like practically everyone in the film except Bond is Not All That She Seems. The plot wends its way through a scheme to trade several million dollars’ worth of diamonds for weapons, which will be shipped off to mercenaries worldwide. The climax takes place high above the clouds in a cargo plane loaded with opium. Dalton would play Bond one more time in License to Kill (1989) before handing the franchise over to Pierce Brosnan.

In this adaptation of Ian Fleming’s 1955 novel, James Bond (Roger Moore) must thwart Sir Hugo Drax (Michel Lonsdale), who plans to wipe out all of humankind and replace it with a super race that he has cultivated in a massive space station. The girl in the case is American secret agent Holly Goodhead, intelligently played by Lois Chiles. “Jaws,” the steel-mouthed henchman played by Richard Kiel in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), makes a return appearance in Moonraker, turning good guy (complete with a girlfriend of his own) in the process. Bernard Lee makes his last appearance as “M” in this most costly of James Bond’s 1970s escapades.

Though not Ian Fleming’s most famous James Bond novel, 1962’s The Spy Who Loved Me was distinguished by the unique device of telling the story from the heroine’s point of view; in fact, Bond doesn’t make an appearance until the book is two-thirds over. This would hardly work in the film world’s Bond franchise, so the original austere plotline of the novel was eschewed altogether in favor of a labyrinthine story involving outer-space extortion. The leading lady, a “hard-luck kid” in the original, is now sexy Russian secret agent Barbara Bach, who joins forces with Bond (Roger Moore, making his third appearance as 007) to foil yet another megalomaniac villain (Curt Jurgens), who plans to threaten New York City with nuclear weaponry. Beyond the eye-popping opening ski-jump sequence, the film’s best scenes involve seven-foot-two Richard Kiel as steel-toothed henchman Jaws. Fifteen scriptwriters worked on The Spy Who Loved Me; only two were credited, including Bond-film veteran Richard Maibaum.