4. Octopussy: Bond Goes To Market
Octopussy, the thirteenth Bond film, has a strangely old fashioned sensibility. The cars and gadgetry we expect are all there, but they're set against opulent Raj-era palaces, safaris and the hunt for a Fabergé egg. This is the India of 1933, not 1983, and it's mostly populated by broad ethnic stereotypes. Awkward? Undeniably, but I'll give it this- when the Bond series does ethnic stereotyping, it does it thoroughly. When Bond arrives in India, his helicopter passes the Taj Mahal. You can tell a movie isn't going to be a masterpiece of nuance when it uses an internationally recognised landmark in its first establishing shot. Touching down, the Bond meets a snake-charmer (helpfully tootling away at the Bond theme) and then a taxi driver. These two people are his MI6 contacts. They take Bond to his hotel, he wins a lot of money at the casino, and as he hands them their share of the winnings, he intones the immortal line "That should keep you in curry". If you thought the movie was going to peak at that magnificent example of casual racism, then you're adorably innocent. The creative team have plenty more clichés where that came from. Happily for impatient viewers, they dump most of them in the ensuing chase scene. On leaving the casino, Bond is attacked by a massive Indian fella wielding an elephant gun (tick). He drives off in a little Tuk Tuk taxi (tick) into a crowded marketplace (tick) populated by a camel (tick), a sword swallower (tick) and a swami on a bed of nails (tick tick tick). It's just as well they were all out and about that day, otherwise Bond would have had to tell more curry jokes to boost the screenplay's stereotype quota. The moment is awkward in two ways- firstly, for the sheer cheap laziness of the observations, and secondly, for the useless efforts to integrate them into the narrative. The chase scene has zero tension because every few seconds the camera will home in on another of these visual platitudes and wring every drop of enfeebled humour from it. Imagine one of the writers went to a stand-up club and opened their set with 'Hey, what's the deal with those funky little taxis they have in India? Huh? Y'know those taxis they have?' and nobody in the audience laughed because no insight or meaning had gone into the words. That's exactly what this moment in Octopussy is like. And it's bloody awkward.