Octopussy - 1983

It starts with Bond turning his common country clothes inside out and becoming a Spanish Colonel with fake moustaches. When he’s caught by the real colonel and taken away, the girl working with him distracts the soldiers with her legs so Bond can free himself and jump on her car. It wasn’t really pulling a horse carriage, inside there’s a small plane - under a horse camouflage - so he can fly away. I guess the mission is accomplished when the place blows up. Bond has to stop at a gas station when he runs out of fuel…

The title song is “all time high”, of course it’s not the film title, what good song could…

Opening titles: Roget Moore as Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 in Octopussy. Lyrics by Tim Rice.

We see a 00 agent who is as good as 007 but not as lucky because when they throw a knife at him, they get him good. They always miss Bond.

This is East Berlin and he still manages to enter the “Residence of the British Ambassador” to die there but only after delivering an object; the jeweled Fabergé eggs were made “as an Easter gift for the Russian Royal family”, all very rare and priceless, and “this one contains a model of the Imperial State Coach” and it’s really beautiful, but a fake nonetheless. Their art expert shows them that the real one is at Sotheby’s, and the 4th “to turn up at auction this year” from an anonymous seller. Now this “near perfect forgery” will unravel a huge threat to the world: a Russian general fimly opposes Nato proposals of “mutual disarmament”, he calls these ideas “timid, outdated and unrealistic policies”, he thinks they’re so superior that with all their divisions they could easily win evey battle.

He believes “the West is decadent and divided” which is not untrue but he’s still mad.

He rejects Gogol’s words that the US would reply with nuclear weapons and that’s the talk of a fool. Good Gogol thinks they should not risk war but devote their energy to their own “pressing domestic problems”.

Since the Committee wants peace they listen to Gogol, but general Orlov doesn’t give up.

Orlov’s face at the Committee… he was really disagreeable but his pouting face was comical :-p

Bond and the art expert Fanning go to the auction to “try and spot the seller”. M worries the Russians might want “to raise currencyy for covert operations abroad or for payoffs” and he’s right, only it’s just one Russian.

At the “Kremlin Art Repository” expert Lenkin is worried: there will be “an unscheduled inventory in two days” and they’ve lost the fake egg - 009 got it - so Orlov orders to get “the genuine egg back”.

Bond joins the auction for the egg - gold, saspphires and diamonds - raising the price to “half a million pounds”, bought by Kamal Kha. Fanning knows his as a seller, “marginal quality from dubious sources”. Bond was sure he had to buy it no matter the cost. Of course Bond also switched the eggs so he wouldn’t have paid if he’d got it.

Now the egg is “government property”.

Bond goes to India and meets his contact when the man starts playing the James Bond theme music :lol: Vijay introduces him to Sadruddin, “head of Section”. Vijay likes tennis and knows Kamal as an “exiled Afghan Prince” which explains why his guards obey him so much, I guess. Kamal lives “up on the hill” at the “Monsoon Palace”. Kamal keeps winning at backgammon because he cheats, so Bond uses his dices and beats him. He had already let Kamal’s lady friend Magda know he was the man at the auction, and as if that wasn’t enough he shows him the egg now. Kamal is not amused: “spend the money quickly, Mr Bond” :lol: and neither is his guard Gobinda who turns the dices to ash in his fit :-p

Vijay’s taxi is one of those things that look like an ape piaggio but without doors or container. They’re attacked but Bond fights using the things around him, like hot coals, a bed of nails and even a sword he takes from a man’s throat… and for once that a knife hits him, it actually hits a stack of money in his jacket… then Bond throws the money to the people so they gather and slow the bad guys enough to hide. They meet Q who is “most unhappy”, “sent out here at a moment’s notice, no proper facilities”… 

Bond: “someone seems to have stuck a knife in my wallet”. Q: “they missed yoou, what a pity” :lol:

And I like that there’s both men and women working in the Q department, but of course if there’s sewing to do they call the girl to do it. At least Q calls him out on his “adolescent antics” when Bond points a camera on a girl’s breasts.

Magda shows up to sleep with Bond in order to steal his Fabergé egg. Bond lets her becausehe and Q put a chip inside it so when Bond is at Kamal’s palace he can listen in on his conversation with Orlov. But now there’s the scene I don’t understand: Orlov compliments Kamal on the quality of his fakes because it’s Kamal who provides the duplicates made “according to Lenkin’s specifications”… 

Their deal is that Orlov gets the money and Kamal keeps the genuine jewellery… and then Orlov says “this fake has caused enough trouble” and breaks it, revealing the chip inside…

So, Kamal gave them the auction-egg to give to Lenkin before the inventory, believing it the real one, and nobody noticed that it was a fake,, not even Lenkin. Bond left the real one to his government and got a new perfect replica from Q who can do anything, and Orlov smashes it thinking it’s the one 009 got. 

It was a bit hard to believe that nobody noticed they had bought a fake egg, but after all people are superficial, that was supposed to be the real egg so to them it was real and didn’t even look at it… 

Seeing the chip starts a search for Bond who hides in a bag as one of the corpses ready to be taken out… yeah… someone sure gets a fright when the ‘corpse’ gets … then they hunt him, on the back of elephants as the English liked it, poor animals; Bond escapes the men and also the snakes and the tiger by swinging on the jungle vines like Tarzan until he reaches a tourist boat.

Sadruddin and Vijay tell him of the “blue ringed Octopus” that Bond saw on a boat and tattooed on Magda’s back. Her “little octopussy” and that’s also the name that Saruddin gives him because no one knows her real name, the woman leader of “ an old secret order of female bandits and smugglers”. Bond goes disguised as a crocodile but is soon found. Octopussy tells him of Major Dexter Smythe, Bond was “sent out to arrest him” because he never came back from a secret service mission and the gold was never found, and when Bond found him, they talked and Bond gave him a day to put his things in order before arresting him. She says “he committed suicide rather than face the disgrace of a court martial”, and also that he was her father and she thanks him “for giving him an honorable alternativc”…

Kamal had also gone to her with the egg taken from Bond, thinking they got the stolen fake back…(didn’t Orlov break it???), I don’t know why since he plans to take it back with him. Now Kamal is not happy to find him having a drink with Miss Smythe, “you have a nasty habit of surviving”. 

I’ll call her Smythe because the other name is awful, it sounds ridiculous. These Bond people were really obsessed with the word pussy, they take every chance they get to use it.

 She likes it because her father used it for her pet name, but she was a kid. 

She tells Bond that “smuggling is no concern of the secret service” and “I’ve violated no British law” then sendshim to sleep. Alone.

There’s only women on her little island; there are many women “looking for a guru, spiritual discipline, who knows what?” And she says “I train them, give them a purpose, a sisterhood and a way of life” and also that she has “diversified into shipping, hotels, carnivals and circuses”.

Kamal hires men to deal with Bond without harming ‘the woman’, and they attack at night. They kindly give Bond and Smythe enough time, because of course they sleep together, they “are two of a kind”, and the they kill Vijay who was watching the island and then they try to kill Bond. She takes a gun against the men but she probably believes Bond dead when he ends up in the water and does not come up. He’s actually fleeing under his crocodile disguise. Q tells him about Vijay’s last words, that Kamal’s men killed him, because Gobinda was with them.

Some people in Octopussy Circus are working for Kamal. The knives-throwing brothers killed 009. Now Bond goes to Berlin, the circus is there. Smythe thinks they’re just smuggling jewels and they’ll sell them in Zurich, but Orlov takes them away and puts a bomb in the circus train car instead. It’ll look like an American bomb exploded ‘accidentally’, so all Countries will insist on disarmament. General Gogol is investigating, he found out about the fake jewels and is now here to retrieve the real jewelry from Orlov’s car and try to stop him. They have to shoot him. 

I have no idea why Orlov tried to get on the train.

So, the train takes the bomb to the circus. They were in West, now they’re in East Germany, I think, and it is near a US base? Or at the base, maybe.

Bond disguises himself as a clown - with all the make up and stuff, done so quick - to geet in because the guards don’t listen to him and want to stop him. Bond tells a general about a bomb and tries to convince Smythe that she’s been double-crossed by showing her a jewel. Everyone is on him, he can’t get to the bomb, until she shoots at a lock revealing to everyone the bomb. Only a few seconds time, but Bond stop it. 

Back to India, all the women do a great job of attacking Kamal’s place while Q and Bond arrive on a hot air balloon. Smythe is Kamal’s hostage, they take her along on their plane and Bond takes a hold of it and is on the plane. Gobinda is not happy to be ordered to go outside while they’re flying to kill Bond, and of course he’s the one who will fall. The plane got damaged during the fight, I think, so it goes down and crashes, boom. 

Bond and Smythe jump out of course.

Mission accomplished, so Bond of course stays  behind with the girl as usual instead of reporting to his superiors.

James Bond is Roger Moore

Octopussy is Maud Adams

Kamal is Louis Jourdan

Magda is Kristina Wayborn

Gobinda is Kabir Bedi

Orlov is Steven Berkoff

Q is Desmond Llewelyn

M is Robert Brown

Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell

Gogol is Walter Gotell

Vijay is Vijay Amritra

P.s.

The scene when Vijay used his tennis racket while driving his taxi to fend off the attackers was funny;

The credits end with “James Bond will  return in From a view to a kill”

I agree with Bond that the “stuffed sheep’s head” did not look inviting at all, as it wasn’t watching Kamal take out one eye and eat it…

Moneypenny had a new assistant, Penelope Smallbone, and Bond gives to her the flowers he brought and one to Moneypenny. Penelope knows him because Moneypenny described him “in nauseating detail”.

ITA Octopussy operazione piovra