Was Octopussy more than a junk Bond?
IT HAD EVERYTHING A GREAT 007 MOVIE NEEDED AND MORE
Roger Moore couldn’t believe that James Bond had to wear a gorilla costume — one of several unlikely disguises in Octopussy.
“These actors never read the bloody script until the night before,” laughs Octopussy director John Glen. “Roger came in and said, ‘You can’t be serious about me dressing up in that costume, can you?’ Roger was looking at me like I was completely mad. But he went along with it.”
Octopussy, which hit cinemas in June 1983, put Bond on the trail of a Fabergé egg, a radical Russian general, and Octopussy herself — smuggler, cult leader and all-around temptress (played by returning Bond girl Maud Adams). All of which leads Bond onto a circus train, where he hides from a pair of knife-throwing twins by slipping into the nearest fancy dress. “He’s in this carriage and there are all these costumes hanging up,” says Glen. “Suddenly: where did Roger go? Then we cut to this gorilla costume and you see Roger’s eyes behind the mask ...”
In Octopussy, Moore would not only don a gorilla suit, but would also disarm a nuclear warhead while dressed as a clown — giant shoes and all — and swing through the jungle to the sound of a Tarzan cry.
“There were critics at the time who said maybe I went too far,” says Glen. “Maybe I did. There’s an awful lot of slapstick, when you think about it.”
Indeed, on the grand spectrum of all things Bond, Octopussy swings toward the ridiculous end — by way of some clanging cultural stereotypes and cleavage-ogling cheekiness.
But the image of Moore in his clown costume, sometimes cited as Bond’s most foolish moment of all, belies what Octopussy is beneath the makeup: a thumping action film that goes stuntfor-stunt with the more grizzled likes of 2006 Bond film Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig.
Combining the action with Moore’s particulars (cue eyebrow raise), Octopussy is a Roger Moore Bond film of the purest kind.
Octopussy also pitted Bond against a tough opponent: his old self, as Sean Connery returned to play 007 in the rival, rogue Bond film, Never Say Never Again, also released in 1983 — “the Battle of the Bonds”.
“Octopussy is often overlooked in favour of Roger’s other entries, such as Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me,” says Matthew Field, co-author of the comprehensive Bond history Some Kind of Hero.
“However, Moore’s sixth movie has remained one of my favourites. Bond movies must be entertaining and Octopussy delivers on every level.”
Octopussy was made amid some behind-the-scenes turbulence. United Artists, Bond’s longtime distributor, took a major hit after Michael Cimino’s 1980 Western megaflop, Heaven’s Gate, and was sold to MGM. Glen remembers “terrific pressure” from MGM to economize Octopussy.
Glen was promoted to director on the previous film, 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, after working as editor and second unit director on numerous Bonds before that (he would direct a record five Bonds altogether).
“We made films around the $30 million mark, which wasn’t huge for this type of movie,” says Glen, now 90. “We thought we were good value but the hatchet men came, trying to get us to cut the scenes that make Bond what it is. We fought and fought and there was some sort of compromise.”
Never Say Never Again was partly filmed at Elstree Studios, just more than 32 kilometres from Octopussy’s production base at Pinewood. The tabloids revelled in Connery vs. Moore.
The Connery-starring film had plum source material, too — it was a remake of the hugely successful Thunderball — whereas the official Bond team were now scraping the barrel of Ian Fleming tales.
British writer George Macdonald Fraser, author of the Flashman stories, came on-board to write an original Bond adventure (though some scenes were inspired by remaining Fleming tidbits — the short stories Octopussy and The Property of a Lady). When Fraser was introduced to Moore as the writer, the latter quipped “Commiserations.”
Glen recalls that on Fraser’s first day, they sat and discussed ideas while waiting for Albert R. Broccoli to join them. Broccoli, known as Cubby, eventually arrived with a lawyer in tow, said a quick hello, went into his office, closed the door, and stayed in meetings about Never Say Never Again legal issues all day.
“George looked baffled,” says Glen. “I told him, ‘You’ll get used to it.’”
Indeed, the appropriation of Bond weighed heavily on producer Broccoli. “There had been various court cases and lawsuits going on in the background,” says Glen. “Cubby never bothered me too much with it.” The Fleming estate, reportedly financed by Broccoli’s company, sought an injunction against the distribution of the rival film.
With the script seemingly safe in Fraser’s hands, Glen returned to Pinewood to begin work on the action sequences.
“The next evening the phone rang,” says Glen. “It was Cubby. He said, ‘Get your arse back here. We’ve thrown that script out — we’re writing another script.’ How are we going to make this film? We were shooting in six weeks time. We prepared the film in record time.”
Fraser’s script was revised by veteran Bond writer Richard Maibaum, along with Cubby’s stepson and current Bond producer Michael G. Wilson.
Octopussy begins with an oddly underrated sequence. Bond, disguised with a fake moustache as Colonel Toro (“Sounds like a load of bull”), infiltrates the base of a South American regime and makes his escape in a BD-5J Acrostar jet. The flying was performed by stunt pilot JW (Corkey) Fornof, who offered to perform the stunt’s dangerous money shot: flying the jet right through a plane hangar — in one end and out the other.
Instead, the shot was completed by using miniatures and mounting the jet (with Moore sitting in the cockpit) on a Jaguar car, which drove through the hangar.
“I always prayed that everyone else knew what they were doing, and they weren’t like me,” said Moore in a making-of documentary. “I had no idea what I was doing. I was just sitting there.”
A murder leads Bond to India, where he uncovers a smuggling ring led by the mysterious Octopussy and an exiled Afghan prince, Kamal Khan (the always debonair Louis Jourdan), who — with the assistance of the barmy Russian general, Orlov (Steven Berkoff ) — smuggle treasures pilfered from the Kremlin via Octopussy’s travelling circus. But Orlov has bigger ideas: to set off a nuclear bomb and force Western disarmament.
Before setting off to film in the Indian city of Udaipur, Glen’s car — which was parked in the EON garage — was broken into. He wondered if the other secret agent, that rogue 007, had infiltrated their operation.
The crew members found themselves under very real surveillance at Checkpoint Charlie, the notorious crossing point on the Berlin Wall. Principal photography began there for a scene in which Bond crosses into East Germany.
Filming outside the wall without permission from East German authorities, they erected a circus tent and camera crane, which was raised above the wall and peered at the fortifications and no man’s land beyond. Suddenly, strobe lights began flashing back at them from the East German watchtowers.
“They were filming us filming them,” says Glen. “They had no idea what we were doing. I could imagine all this stuff going back to the KGB in Moscow, and them scratching their heads and wondering what the hell was going on.”
The film’s primary location was Udaipur, chosen partly because Bond hadn’t yet travelled to India on screen, and partly to take advantage of frozen rupees. It is a stunning setting, particularly the Lake Palace Hotel on Lake Pichola, the home of Octopussy’s all-female cult.
Octopussy has the most sustained action of perhaps any Bond film: from the whiplash-inducing Acrostar jet sequence and high-speed tuk-tuk chase, to Bond running across a moving train and fighting atop a plane thousands of feet in the air.
By the time of Octopussy, Moore was in his mid-50s — getting on in Bond years — and it’s faintly daft to imagine Moore doing the action.
The Battle of the Bonds, meanwhile, was little more than tabloidese. Far from battling each other, Moore and Connery socialized during the production of their respective films.
Octopussy, which premièred on June 6, 1983, took in $182 million worldwide. Never Say Never Again didn’t open until October in the U.S. and December in the U.K. It took $159 million — a respectable number, though it was outclassed by the official Bond.
There were critics at the time who said maybe I went too far. Maybe I did. There’s an awful lot of slapstick, when you think about it.
— DIRECTOR JOHN GLEN