An appreciation by Mike
Vincitore.
James Bond travels to Nassau to thwart SPECTRE' s nuclear blackmail plot. This was intended to be the first film in the series, but legal battles with Kevin McClory, with whom Fleming co-wrote an early script, delayed its making. McClory, an up-and-coming director who had done second unit work on Around The World In Eighty Days and had just completed the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful The Boy And The Bridge, was an admirer of the Bond novels and wanted to bring 007 to the screen-a goal Fleming, of course, shared.
During 1959 Fleming and McClory, together with author Jack Whittingham and Fleming s longtime friends Ernest Cuneo and Ivar Bryce, developed several screenplays, variously entitled James Bond Of The Secret Service, SPECTRE, Longitude 78 West (which I must admit is a good-sounding title), and ultimately Thunderball, the codename for the joint British/American operation to find the hijacked nuclear weapons.
| Note: for an excellent in-depth article by Goldeneye Magazine editor John Cork on the development of the scripts that ultimately metamorphosed into the Thunderball screenplay and novel, the reader is recommended to the Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang site (but please-go there later! ) |
The team had trouble enlisting the necessary financing, especially since no major company would invest in the big-budget film with McClory as director or producer despite his qualifications. Since The Boy And The Bridge fell on its face commercially, Fleming and, especially, Bryce, had begun to cool on the project. McClory met with Fleming at Goldeneye and was told that he had three options-back out as director and producer, convince whatever backer they found to hire him as director or producer, or go to court. It was a disheartened McClory who left Jamaica after an hour and a half at Goldeneye. Ernest Cuneo sold his rights to Fleming for one dollar, and the project died .
Ian Fleming was accustomed by this time in his writing career to using discarded scripts as the basis for his novels. He had partially developed a James Bond-style adventure series for NBC which they did not use, called Commander Jamaica. The unused pilot script from this series had become the novel Doctor No. Shortly afterward, CBS had commissioned a series of half-hour episodes for a potential James Bond television series. The series never got off the ground, but several of the episode scripts were ultimately turned into the short story anthology For Your Eyes Only. Therefore it was no big deal in Fleming s eyes when he went to Goldeneye in the spring of 1960 and went to work on this script. He fleshed out the characters, added a wealth of interesting technical detail and inserted an interesting introductory subplot where Bond is sent to a health clinic after an unsatisfactory medical and has a chance encounter with a SPECTRE agent.
The result was the novel Thunderball, a book that despite its by-committee origin is very much a Fleming work, and which I personally consider one of his very best. But this time Fleming had had collaborators on the script. Although Fleming was safe from his friends Cuneo and Bryce, McClory hauled Fleming and Bryce into court immediately after seeing an advance copy of the novel. The resulting landmark trial was settled out of court at Bryce s instigation, as he could not bear watching the stress destroy his friend s health (Fleming had his first heart attack within a month after the suit was filed). Fleming kept the rights to the book, but all subsequent editions are required to state: this story is based on a screen treatment by K. McClory, J. Whittingham and the author. McClory also was granted substantial monetary damages and all film rights to the scripts on which Thunderball was based.
While EON Films, led by Broccoli and Saltzman, were churning out the first three Bond films, McClory tried to put Thunderball together on his own, at one point supposedly approaching Richard Burton for the lead. He was hampered, however, by several factors, not least of which was the fact that audiences already were conditioned to accept Sean Connery as James Bond. McClory himself knew, deep down, I really wanted Sean in the role. Ultimately, he made a deal with EON that gave him producer credit. (McClory s deal with Broccoli & Saltzman, supposedly struck during a meeting at Shannon Airport in Ireland, stipulated that McClory could make films based on the script material the committee had developed in 1959. However, McClory would be required to wait ten years from the date of Thunderball s release before doing so.)
Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins re-tooled the script that had been written in 1961, based on the Fleming/McClory/Whittingham material. EON postponed preproduction of On Her Majesty s Secret Service and went to work on Thunderball. Encouraged by the phenomenal success of Goldfinger, UA coughed up a large budget, and EON made good use of it.
Designer Ken Adam and special effects wizard John Stears are at the top of their game (Thunderball won an Academy Award for Special Visual Effects). The hydrofoil yacht described by Fleming is brought to life. Adam found a boat exactly like the one described in the book and spent a small fortune reconditioning it and adding a breakaway cocoon used to great effect in the film s finale; he was also able to find a firm in Miami able to exactly realize the fantastic designs he had drawn for the SPECTRE underwater sleds. A full-scale model of a Vulcan bomber was constructed and lowered into forty feet of water off Nassau (its skeleton remains there today and is a popular site for scuba-diving vacationers).
Underwater film techniques were redefined with this film, and if you like watersports, it s a joy to watch. McClory was an expert diver and had scouted many locations for the film; indeed, one clinching piece of evidence in his court case was photography of McClory himself taken in the cave where Largo hides the bombs. Lamar Boren, Ricou Browning (who, believe it or not, had once portrayed the Creature From The Black Lagoon-but I digress), and Jordan Klein, using newly-designed underwater motion-picture technology, did an incredible job of working with director Terence Young on choreographing and filming the extensive underwater sequences. Young felt that the underwater scenes slowed the film unnecessarily. Personally, I disagree. They are necessary to advance the plot, and are one of the most atmospheric aspects of the film, especially the ones shot around the sunken bomber.
Peter Hunt does his usual first-class editing job, and it is a discerning watcher indeed who is able to pick out the continuity slips in the film, although aficionados are well versed in them by now. In one scene during the helicopter search for the Vulcan, the film negative gets reversed, showing Bond with his watch on the right wrist and hair parted on the right. In another, Felix Leiter apparently changes wardrobe at least twice. During the underwater battle, Bond is stripped of his blue mask by Largo. He dons a black one removed from a dead SPECTRE diver and in the next shot, it s blue again. Hunt has commented, it s better to have the pace of the film than to worry about continuity , and he is right. The scenes still work. John Barry s score is outstanding, and he does an especially good job with the underwater scenes, creating an eerie, otherworldly effect.
Sean Connery does his usual confident, credible job as Bond in this film. He is not as dominant a personality as in the previous three, but a lesser performer would have been totally swallowed up by the sheer spectacle of the film. As an actor, he remains at the top of his form, and delivers his lines with his customary savoir-faire. Claudine Auger is indisputably one of the most beautiful actresses ever to grace the screen in a Bond film, and carries off her incarnation of Domino fairly well, although she is not as polished an actress as readers of the book would hope.
Adolfo Celi is a magnificent if slightly underwritten Emilio Largo, and every bit a worthy adversary for our hero. However, if any performer in Thunderball can be said to steal the show, it is Luciana Paluzzi as the lustful SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe. She is every bit the black widow type and totally credible in the part. Rik van Nutter, although seemingly perfectly cast in the role of Felix Leiter (he is the only cinematic Leiter to date who exactly tallies with Fleming s physical description, save for the artificial limbs), suffers from a woefully underwritten part-he becomes more a sidekick and less an active participant in the operation. Blofeld appears yet again, portrayed once more by the hands of Anthony Dawson, but unless my ears deceive me, the voice (electronically distorted this time) belongs to Joseph Wiseman, who portrayed Dr. No.
Highlights of Thunderball, for this writer at least, include:
Thunderball was hugely successful. To date, it has sold nearly 75 million tickets worldwide since its December 1965 release, making it indisputably the most successful film in the series by the adjusted for inflation yardstick, with an adjusted gross of approximately $702 million!
Unfortunately, the one regrettable aspect of Thunderball is that the character of James Bond plays second fiddle to the gadgetry. Terence Young left the series after directing this one, griping that the producers no longer needed a director but an MIT professor to handle the gadgets. Indeed, at one point Bond himself sourly looks at his array of diving gear and weaponry and quips, and the kitchen sink! , a line supposedly inserted by Young that reflects his sentiment towards the emphasis on hardware.
The gadget-laden formula works to perfection in Thunderball -as it did in Goldfinger-but it put the series on a treadmill of audience expectation that has been tough to live up to since (Lord knows they ve tried, though). Young said later in an interview that he would only direct another Bond if he were given a free hand, and if it absolutely for certain would be the last of the series (Young, of course, died in September 1994).
Works consulted in the preparation of this article:
