20 Things You Didn’t Know About Octopussy (1983)

15. “Spend The Money Quickly, Mr Bond!”

octopussy movie
MGM/UA

Octopussy has a largely original plot, but was still inspired by Ian Fleming’s works.

Notably, Octopussy’s father, Major Dexter Smythe killed a North Korean guide to steal Chinese gold. In Fleming’s 1966 short story, Octopussy, Smythe murdered Hannes Oberhauser in Austria for a cache of Nazi gold. Oberhauser was a father figure to James Bond, who gave Smythe the "honourable alternative" of committing suicide rather than facing a court martial after Oberhauser’s body resurfaced years later. The Oberhauser-related aspects of this plot later surfaced in SPECTRE (2015).

The Sotheby's auction came from the 1966 short story, The Property of a Lady in which known double agent, Maria Freudenstein auctioned jewellery crafted by Peter Carl Fabergé for her KGB masters. When Double-0 Seven interfered, London's resident KGB director was expelled from Britain whilst Freudenstein faced likely assassination by the KGB.

Lastly, the backgammon game was inspired partly by the golf match in Goldfinger (1964) and Fleming’s 1959 novel of the same name, and by Sir Hugo Drax’s cheating at bridge in the 1955 novel, Moonraker. Kamal Khan’s threat “Spend the money quickly, Mr Bond” was also drawn from that novel.

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