Ten Statements About....THUNDERBALL (1965)

"Yes, yes, I am boring...but given all the movies,
sometimes you get a baddie like me!"

“My dear girl, don't flatter yourself. What I did this evening was for Queen and country. You don't think it gave me any pleasure, do you?"
“But of course, I forgot your ego, Mr. Bond. James Bond, the one where he has to make love to a woman, and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing. She repents, and turns to the side of right and virtue...but not this one!"

1) The reason this is my least favorite of the Connery Bonds is that even though it is more coherent than the two that follow it, it is aggressively dull.  This film drags, it has very few engaging moments, and is a chore to watch.

It’s also the only Bond film in the official canon produced by perpetually water-logged thorn in the Broccoli family’s side, Kevin McClory.  Make of it what you will.

2) And the dullness begins with the extended sequence at the health club.  The thing that makes this rather lengthy and boring stretch of film unendurable is how inconsequential and coincidental it all is.  Even though Connery does stumble across the imposter that is part of Largo’s plot to blackmail the world, his discovery is not integral to his cracking the case at all.  In all it’s just twenty hours of him running around in shorts and stuff.

3) The weirdest thing about the overall plot is how frontloaded the intrigue is; so much of the first forty five minutes is spent with Fiona and her plastic surgery’d pawn getting everything set up so the bombs will end up off the coast of Nassau....followed quickly by an hour and twenty-some minutes of Bond wandering around looking for trouble.  It’s hard not for the second and third acts to not be a let down after all the running around of the first act.

4) Of course, this leads us into one of the other major problems with this film--namely, Emilio Largo is a terribly dull villain.  Now I know Adolpho Celi is an amazing character actor; he’s been a highlight of many policia films, as well as Danger: Daibolik.  But here he comes off as a pumped up gangland accountant, even with all his accouterments.  Some of this may be because Celi was dubbed, but there’s something inherently flawed with the performance and the character that makes his a non-starter.

SCUBA!!!!!!!

5) And while we’re on the subject of non-starters...I will admit that Claudine Auger is drop-dead gorgeous...but there’s a difference between being gorgeous and being sexy, and Auger’s Domino is cold and stiff, making her one of the least interesting Bond Girls to date...no matter how hot the scene involving the poison spine is.

6) But luckily, Auger is the only dull Bond girl in this film.  Martine Bestwick’s Paula and--especially--Luciano Paluzzi’s Fiona Volpe are wonderful additions to the Bond mythos...to the point where I wished that Fiona was the main villain Bond came up against, and not Largo.  Fiona is so fun, reveling in her nastiness while being flirty with Bond, that her every scene is a delight.

7) Fiona plays a part in what has to be the highlight of the film--namely, the cat-and-mouse chase between her, Largo’s henchmen and Bond through Junkcano, referred to as ‘the Nassau Mardi Gras.’  Apparently director Terence Young shot this sequence using handheld cameras, and it manages to increase the paranoia and suspense of the chase without losing any coherence.  Granted, the whole sequence ends kinda dopily, but other than that...choice!

Yep, evil...but I'd do her...

8) If you don’t like scuba diving, this film is going to be truly painful for you.  There are massive stretches of ‘suspenseful’ scuba fight scenes and similar action, and they’re dreadful boring.  No amount of orchestration will be able to convince you otherwise.

9) But you know, I would put up with all this underwater noodling and the dull villain and main Bond girl if Bond actually acted like an actual spy, and not like some schmoe who’s stumbling around in the dark guessing at clues.  Hell, Bond deduces the bombs have to be in Nassau because...well, he sees a photo of Domino in a bikini and naturally assumes that’s where it is.  The way the script makes it sound, it’s more like Bond decides the weapons are there because he wants to see Domino in a bikini in the flesh.

10) The thing I find so amusing about Rik Van Nutter’s version of Felix Leiter is how it seems that McClory found an actor who looked as much like Jack Lord as possible, dressed him up like Jack Lord...but made the actor behave like a goof.  Leiter in this film is here mainly to drive Bond around and, in a key scene, get punched in the gut by him.

Overall...dull, uninteresting and full of filler, this is the first real big let down of the Bond series (although it’s gold compared to what comes down the pike during the later part of the Moore era).

Ten Statements About....LA MALA ORDINA (a.ka. THE ITALIAN CONNECTION and MANHUNT) (1971)

He's oily, she's got the weirdest fashion sense..it's a match made
in Italain Stereotype Heaven!

"These men are worthless. You've worked them over. Luca Canale has worked them over, and when their bruises heal, so will their fear, and that's exactly what must not happen! You've got to make sure the fear stays in them like an open wound."

1) Boy, there's nothing quite so engaging as Henry Silva and Woody Strode sitting together trying to out-stoneface each other. It's like watching the heads on Mount Rushmore trying to act all gangsta...

2) ...until you realize once Silva's Dave Catania hits Milan that he's more interested in chasing tail and throwing money around and he's....seriously goofy. I'm so used to Silva being the quiet, brooding guy of so many other films that seeing him lounging in yellow bathrobes, making it rain for a bunch of prostitutes and trying to bang hippy chicks is a bit of a culture shock. And the weird thing is that the interplay between Silva and Strode's Frank Webster is the most compelling thing about the film. There's this sense that Frank is there just as much to keep an eye on Dave as he is to kill a small-time pimp, and it's a fun and compelling little partnership.

3) But here's a big problem with the film. We spend almost the entire first act--roughly twenty minutes of the film's ninety minute running time--with Dave and Frank, following them around as they punch hookers, kick bikers in the nuts, insult mafia soldiers and otherwise raise hell in their search for Mario Adorf's Luca Canali. But after that they disappear for long stretches of time as we discover that it's Luca that's the real hero of the film and not these two. And because Luca comes off as a goof for all of the first act and a portion of the second, it takes a while for the film to regain that first twenty minutes' momentum.

Believe it or not...someone just told Woody Strode and Henry
Silva a funny joke.  This is them laughing.

4) As someone who called Adolfo Celli's Largo one of the most boring Bond villains of all time, I was really surprised at how cool his Don Vito comes off here. He goes through the entire film with this dark malicious light in his eyes, as if he's looking for the next person to slaughter. And the scene where Vito outdoes Dave in disciplining one of his soldiers by shooting them both dead is a highlight of the film.

5) Why is Luciana Paluzzi even in this film? She's established in the very first scene of the film as Dave and Frank's handler...and then all she does, it seems, is take the two of them to this same goofy nightclub so they can sit in a booth and ogle the naked women dancing on tabletops. Everything else Dave and Frank do, they do for themselves. Yeah, she's hot--the hottest of all the women on view here, although Francesca Romana Coluzzi comes close when she's not wearing that ridiculous blue wig--but narratively she contributes nothing.

6) Getting back to Luca, you know what else bugs me about him? He's established as a low-level pimp, and not a very good one. Nothing in the first thirty-some-odd minutes do we get any indication that he's nothing but a muttonchopped, oily 'tard. And then when everything starts going down we see him outwitting, outfighting and otherwise acting like Big King Ass Kicker Guy. There's a severe disconnect between the Canali of the first act and the Canali of the rest of the film. And speaking of which....

7) That chase scene that seems to be the central sequence of the film...Ye Gods, does it go on. It exceeds its Chase Tolerance Point by a mile, and having the chased being a thug driving a milk cart (!) gives it a rather silly cast. It could easily have lost a few minutes, especially from the back end.

Mario Adorf's attempt to recreate the scene where Tom Cruise
shows off in The Color of Money goes horribly, horribly wrong.

8) I find the slapping that goes on in this movie infinitely fascinating. It seems like the biggest insult of all--Hell, the scene where Luca's girl is being brutalized as punishment for not telling Vito where he is comes down to two men pinching her breast, jerking her around by the arm and taking turns slapping her. Given in an earlier scene the woman tells Luca they promised to cut off her arm, the whole slap fest seems a lil' anticlimactic.

9) Boy, nightclubs are really peculiar in policia films. Seemingly random people--including a few guys in glasses and business suits amongst the young hipsters--bouncing up and down without rhythm while some bizarre pop song plays....wow. Just...wow.

10) There's a weird mix of fairly normal acting performances mixed with some really theatrical ones that seem to come straight out of the silent era. The aforementioned girlfriend/hooker of Luca in particular is so broad as to yank the viewer out of the film whole.

Overall...a strange mix of elements, some of which (especially Silva and Strode acting like bad asses) are admittedly fun...but the way the film seems in love with its pimp lead, turning him into a total asskicker after promising us ninety minutes of Dave and Frank, makes it a slightly unsatisfying experience.