ROBERT COTTON Max Von Sydow has always struck me as the perfect Blofeld from the book YOLT. In NSNA he's given the task of sitting in a chair stroking his cat. The character is right. He's the head of the world's greatest criminal organization and he's checking up on progress. As far as that goes, he fits exactly with the faceless Blofelds of the early Eon films. This film's Maximilian Largo character is the immediate predecessor of Max Zorin in AVTAK. Klaus Maria Brandauer plays Largo with a boyish glee, which separates him from the other villains, but he doesn't give off the right air of accomplishment. He doesn't feel like he could do the things the script has him pulling off. He reminds one of a game show host turned evil, which is of course, a redundancy. Fatima Blush is a rewrite of Fiona Volpe. Not bad, but her villainy comes from madness, the same as her immediate superior Largo. While madness can be a motivation, it can also be an excuse. Sadly, Ms. Blush's final curtain falls on a wide-eyed out of focus over the top moment that would make Joan Crawford wince. BILL KOENIG Max Von Sydow is the best film Blofeld but, unfortunately, gets little screen time. Klaus Maris Brandauer is a better Emilo (or Maximilian, in this case,) Largo compared to Adolfo Celi, but he runs hot and cold. JAMES McMAHON Maximilian Largo - Superb actor Klaus Maria Brandauer shows what an actor can do with not much of a script.  He shows Largo as a man with charm that can't quite mask his dementia.  A fact Bond sees and plays upon by romancing Domino when he knows Largo is watching.  This Largo is so much more interesting than the one in Thunderball.  Brandauer is a fabulous actor in such diverse films as Mephisto, and Out of Africa. Fatima Blush - Barbara Carrera pulls out all the stops playing Fatima, in what I would normally condemn as a cartoonish performance, but here, I just can't, because she's just too damned much fun.  She's having so much fun taking he role over-the-top, that we just go along with her for the ride.  In the mold of Thunderball's Fiona Volpe, and a predecessor of GoldenEye's Xania Onatopp, Fatima has the most fun of all the cinematic femmes with a joie de'morte. DEBORAH LIPP The best thing about NSNA is the casting. I think Brandauer is nothing short of brilliant as Maximillian Largo, and I believe that Max von Sydow could have been the greatest Blofeld of all, had he been given any appreciable screen time. The scheme is a weak remake of Thunderball. One would think improvements would be possible, but every change here is for the worse.

ED WERNER Now in this film, Largo is certifiable. Granted, it's not part of the official series, but EON could have used a villain of this caliber in more than a few of theirs! The controlled violence that runs just below the surface of Largo's character is incredible. There is an electricity that is palpable between Bond and the villain this time around, something that is missing from many of the other films. Unfortunately, this movie does not have the polish of what you have come to expect from the official canon and the character (hell, all the characters) suffer from it. Too bad, because Klaus Maria Brandauer certainly puts in an admiral performance considering what he is given to work with. TOM ZIELINSKI Ernst Stavro Blofeld - Sean Connery and Kevin McClory's renegade production has a sublime cast, including the great actor Max Von Sydow as Blofeld.  A real coup, that.  Unfortunately, Von Sydow is given nothing to do in this remake of Thunderball, the biggest crime in the entire film. Maximillian Largo - Klaus Maria Brandauer is brilliant as a truly psychotic Largo.  His performance is terrific and he deserves more respect, as does the film overall.  When a smiling Brandauer tells Domino that he would slit her throat if she betrayed him, I believed him. Fatima Blush - Roughly equivalent to Thunderball's Fiona Volpe, Barbara Carrera is great as the psychotic Blush.  Beautiful and deadly, she is particularly offended when Bond mentions her obvious hatred for men.  A scene where she demands Bond to write an endorsement of her as a lover is weird stuff, but very much in keeping with the character.  Carrera (who won a Golden Globe nomination for her performance) deserves more respect within Bond fan-dom, as does the film overall. PAUL BAACK For me, the standout moment for Klaus Maria Brandauer's Maximilian Largo is the violently icky, spitty kiss he lays on Domino. It's a nice moment of craziness in an otherwise rather bland James Bond movie; this version of Largo might be a pleasant-looking yuppie, but there is something... wrong with him in the head. When he grins boyishly after threatening to cut Domino's throat, we come to understand that he views everything within his grasp as a toy to be played with, and then discarded once he's done with it. One of the great out-and-out dangerously crazy Bond villains. Barbara Carrera has so much fun playing Fatima Blush that her good time is communicated to the audience. She overacts and overdresses outrageously, becoming more of a cartoon villain than a truly Bondian femme fatale, but that's okay with me -- this isn't a canonical Bond film anyway. She's a real blast, and that's literally so at the end of her part of the story. Carrera scores big points here for bringing the hotness and the fun. Max von Sydow always seems to have a faint cast of aesthetic saintliness about him; he certainly never was my idea of Blofeld (although he was a great Ming the Merciless). Nevertheless, he brings the required gravitas to the part, and is in too much of a distraction in the "Hey-that's-Bergman-actor-Max-von-Sydow-playing-Blofeld!" kind of way. I could've done without the bow tie, though. m

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