Thunderball is dated-but-good. It’s 1965 technology… which is amazing when you think that high-tech at the time was a small AM transistor radio that took a 9v battery.
In the 90s, I was lucky enough to visit the Bahamas (near Atlantis) where much of it was shot. The casino was a fine French restaurant. There really were cement steps (that the divers walked out of the water up) in a canal behind it. Also, there was the long road where Connery was ‘taken for a ride’ in a white mustang.
The trees on both sides of the road interlocked into an almost solid canopy… and at night, when the wind blew, the wooden limbs would creak and groan eerily (think of it as a rather convenient opportunity to hold your date a little closer on a moonlight stroll).
Sadly, Atlantis was a ‘success’… and developers bought up all the surrounding land. They bulldozed flat all the trees and all the natural curves of rock and land. Before the Developer-Locusts moved on, they dug out holes, poured concrete, and built loads of shitty ‘family friendly’ hotels.
The steps the divers walked out of the water on might still be there, across from the entrance to Atlantis, but I honestly don’t ever want to go back to see the “progress”.
Its depressing enough to see what developer scumbags do to ruin my country daily without spending money to see how they’ve ruined others…
Bond didn’t have any problems slapping Tatiana Romanova around in From Russia with Love, or doing martial arts with Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (as noted above, the “model” for this one, and which Guy Hamilton also directed). Or hurting Teresa Vincenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Certainly in later Bond films (Goldeneye) he could get a bit tougher with would-be female assassins.
For me, it isn’t the datedness that hurts Thunderball, it’s just that the SCUBA scenes send the movie to an painfully slow crawl. It is impossible to figure out who’s on what side. I’m sure it was exciting to see on a big screen in 1965, but nowadays it’s a slog.
Bond knows three ways to kill with a single punch. But he only kills professionals and only bad guys. He could have killed Bambi and Thumper quite easily. But they are just bodyguards protecting their boss. Killing them would be against his principles. The problem was to overpower them without injuring them.
I don’t think this is a terrible movie. A few plot holes that don’t make sense if you stop and think about it, but so do most Bond movies. Really a pretty entertaining ride.
Impossible to figure out who’s on which side? After they go to all the trouble of establishing that the Good Guys are wearing the red suits and Largo’s Bad Guys are all in black? Were you paying attention? It seems really obvious.
In the novel, by the way, they were conscious of the problem of avoiding friendly fire, so the US Navy SCUBA divers paint numbers on their suits so they know who’s who.
Weird trivia detail – the guy who lives down the street from me claims that he was one of the parachuting divers who jumped in the scene from the film.
I’ll watch the movie again. I just remember being confused during the SCUBA scenes as to who the good guys were and who the villains were, but I’m overdue for a rewatching of the Bond movies.
Nitpick: The good guys were actually wearing Day-Glo Orange. It photographed red because they were underwater, and the yellowish wavelengths of light were filtered out.
The big battles at the climax of each movie became standard after Goldfinger, whether they made a lot of sense or not. I mean, yeah, Fort Knox is surrounded by US troops; they would logically be available to act as an assault force. But frogmen parachuting in out of the blue? A private army of Samurai? Airmobile Mafiosi? The list goes on and on.
In high school German class one day, we were talking about professions. I said I wanted to be a spy like James Bond, and mentioned Pussy Galore and Plenty O’Toole.
My teacher, Fräulein I _ _ _ _, who was young but fairly uptight about such things, turned on me and said “What?!?” :dubious:
After I explained they were two of Ian Fleming’s characters, she saw the humor in the situation and started smiling. Up to then, I thought she was going to kick me out for being a smartass!
I was recently reminded of ffolkes, a 1980 movie starring Roger Moore as an anti-terrorism expert who has to make a sneak attack on an oil platform. He’s given a red wet suit and says “a wet suit in vermilion. Just what one needs at night.” He also hates women. It’s kind of an anti-Bond film.
In fact, I’d argue that in those shots, the suits look red, not orange.
“Day Glo” is a trademark for colors created and marketed by the Day Glo company, founded by the Switzer brothers. You can’t mistake Day Glo for a non-fluorescent color. (I’ve been researching Day Glo and other fluorescent paints.)
Respectfully disagree. I think they were the shade of high-visibility orange the US military uses, like on this C-130, f’rinstance. It may look red to some, but to me it’s definitely orange.
My apologies to the Switzer Bros. if I infringed on their trademark.
I haven’t seen DAF in awhile, but when I last did, I was underwhelmed. Not a good movie, and not a good Bond movie. Putting Bond in a pipe segment and then leaving him there alone out in the desert is about as sloppy as an assassin can get. The campy gay assassins are embarrassingly homophobic today. I agree they shouldn’t have used Charles Grey as Blofeld.
Didn’t know that the busty brunette in the casino (IMHO 'way hotter than JSJ) was Natalie Wood’s sister. Thanks! Ignorance fought.
That fight in the elevator wasnt just phoning it in imo. No matter how professional, there was going to be a real punch thrown there. It hurts to watch that scene and also goes to show why most of the actors who played Bond could have never been Bond.
Yes, it’s “red”. It’s to the orange side of red, as opposed to the purple side, but it’s closer to red than it is to true orange. At least as I see it.
