6. For Your Eyes Only: Bond Meets An Old Friend Over A Chimney Stack
An interesting, and generally un-remarked, aspect of the Bond saga is the character's doomed marriage. Even though On Her Majesty's Secret Service was, for the longest time, the red-headed stepchild of the canon, the writers sprinkled references to the late Mrs Bond in subsequent movies. The most overt call-back comes at the start of For Your Eyes Only, opening with Bond laying flowers at his wife's grave. It's a touching moment, not least because Roger Moore's increasingly aged features lend it the appropriate note of mortality. And the reason for this bittersweet prologue? Why, to completely undercut it with the return of a character who may or may not be but definitely is Blofeld, of course. Pairing Tracy Bond and Blofeld in the pre-title sequence does make some sense- they're integral parts of the very limited backstory Bond has acquired- and the idea of 007 finally, irrevocably getting revenge on the man who killed his wife could have been excellent.* It's not that, and it's not that in the worst possible way. Instead of portraying Blofeld as the cunning, resilient foil of the Donald Pleasence/Telly Savalas incarnations, the film-makers get the guy that played Lobot in The Empire Strikes Back to sit in a remote controlled wheelchair, while another guy who dubbed all the foreign actors in the early Bond films spouts mental dialogue like "I trust you had a pleasant... FRIGHT?!?" and "I'll buy you a delicatessen in stainless steel!" I mean, I assume they're jokes, but they don't sound very funny when you say them out loud. Or write them down, for that matter. The meat of the scene- Bond is trapped on a helicopter being operated from afar by Big Ernst- is decent enough, but the exquisite set-up lead me to expect something more poignant than the now standard 'Bond nearly falls to his death' opener. By the end, when Bond pats Blofeld on the head and says "keep your hair on", before launching him down a giant chimney stack, at least you're in no doubt that you're watching a Roger Moore James Bond film from 1981. I did slightly yearn for the movie promised in the first two minutes, though. *Before anyone says anything, I know Blofeld didn't fire the shot that killed her. I was being succinct. Deal with it.