‘IT’S THE BIGGEST, IT’S THE BEST, IT’S BOND…AND BEYOND!!!’ proclaimed the posters when Roger Moore’s third and arguably his best outing arrived in cinemas during the Summer of 1977.
Although STAR WARS was already the big one in the US, in the UK nobody did it better than SPY, which coined it in on all levels and became the summer movie entertainment.
Although this is an Ian Fleming Bond title, the film is anything but and in fact, Fleming didn’t want any film-makers to base a script on this. The original novel sees Bond as a supporting character who emerges to protect a woman from some gangsters on the Canadian border. MOONRAKER, which followed this, actually did the same as a different story to the original novel, which involved a rocket targeted by Hugo Drax at London.
In THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, scripted by Christopher Wood and directed by Lewis Gilbert, who directed YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, Bond is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a UK nuclear submarine and a Soviet one is being investigated by their top agent, Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach).
The pair meet in Cairo, where the prize is a microfilm containing details of a new submarine tracking system, but a henchman called Jaws (Richard Kiel) with steel teeth and acting like his best Dracula to eliminate all who come into contact with it is in the way. It transpires that an industrialist called Carl Stromberg (Curt Jurgens) has designs on changing the world by creating one under the sea….
From the now-legendary pre-credits sequence shot in Baffin Island on top of a huge clifftop (with daring skier Rick Sylvester doubling for Moore), with the amazing Lotus Esprit car that travels like a submarine through the water and a spectacular climax within a tanker which was shot on the very first 007 Stage at Pinewood (the stage burned down in 1985 during the making of Ridley Scott’s LEGEND), THE SPY WHO LOVED ME ranks as one of the very best of the Bond franchise – and justified its’ tagline as mentioned at the start.