7. Moonraker: Corinne Goes To The Dogs
In the whole film of Moonraker there are about fifteen embarrassing tonal shifts. You get the sense (and it's almost laudable) that the film-makers wanted to cram everything into this movie. So there's the usual spying shenanigans, alongside a post-Star Wars laser show and a masterfully ill-judged romantic sub-plot for that loveable metal-faced giant, Jaws. And then there's this scene, which would be beautiful if it weren't so tonally out of place. Bond has just been enjoying some pigeon shooting with the esteemed Hugo Drax (really a massive bastard trying to exterminate the entire population of Earth). Having accidentally on purpose killed one of Drax's boys (who may or may not have had a sniper rifle trained on Bond's comb over), 007 makes a quippy exit and sets the stage for the unfortunate Corinne duFour, Drax's not-entirely-confidential secretary. A French woman in a Bond film has about as much chance of going un-seduced as a woman in a Bond film, and this dalliance ended, as they often do, with duFour revealing Drax's hidden safe to 007. "I'm terminating your employment. You will leave immediately" Drax mutters, in full view of a homicidal Chinese man holding two baying Rottweilers on a leash. A typical Bond movie death involves being dropped into a pond teeming with piranhas, or inflated to the size of a hot air balloon. Corinne's death is different. Director Lewis Gilbert puts his 'light and shade' hat on and executes a sequence of grisly beauty, in which Corinne is relentlessly- and in the end, fatally- chased through a Californian forest by the ravenous dogs. Backed by John Barry's insistent score, it's more befitting of a highbrow horror film, or even a particularly gruesome period drama, than the naked George Lucas rip-off that constitutes the rest of Moonraker. I'm left wondering why so much craft and creativity was expended on a moment like this, which has no major significance on the rest of the narrative, when the rest of the film is utterly bereft of it. As an example of tonal shift, it embarrasses everything around it.