The Cast
Roger Moore (James Bond) Barbara Bach (Anya Amasova) Richard Kiel (Jaws) Caroline Munro (Naomi) Curt Jurgens (Karl Stomberg) Bernard Lee ('M') Desmond Llewelyn ('Q') Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny) Walter Gotell (General Gogal) Geoffrey Keen (Minister Of Defense) Robert Brown (Admiral Hurgreaves) Vernon Dobtcheff (Max Kalba)
Review
The Spy Who Loved Me was a renaissance, of sorts, for the Bond series, which had been suffering from a lack of confidence after the tepid release of "The Man With The Golden Gun". Harry Saltzman had sold his share of the Bond rights, and Albert Broccoli bought them from him for full control of the Bond empire. Meanwhile, Kevin McClory was beginning to make noise with his attempts to get his rights to remake Thunderball off the ground. Between 1974 and 1977, Bond was facing his toughest opponent: internal problems. Everyone involved with bringing The Spy Who Loved Me to the screen knew the stakes. Another misstep could be the end of the series. Fortunately for Bond fans around the world, The Spy Who Loved Me was a winner, and insured that the series would continue. It features one of Roger Moore's two finest performances as 007. It teams him up with an equally capable female Russian opposite, a megalomaniacal villian, and henchmen that range from the beautiful to the ugly. The storyline hop, skips, and jumps from Austria, to Eygpt and on to Sardinia. Ian Fleming never cared much for his own novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, and stipulated that that book could only be used in title only. In order to get back to the grandiose, larger than life type of film like You Only Live Twice, the producers literally went back to You Only Live Twice and took it's plot and even brought back it's director, Lewis Gilbert, after a 10 year abscence. Basically, bad guy Karl Stromberg wants to destroy Moscow and New York. With both of those superpowers down for the count, he figures he can create a new world order fashioned on his lavish lifestyle aboard his aquatic Disneyworld he dubbed Atlantis. I guess. The writers don't exactly give you all the details about how Stromberg plans to rule the world with just a supertanker and a dream. That's a Bond film for you though. You've got to suspend some of your disbelief or you'll never make it through the first 10 minutes. Most everything is top notch in the film. Great song, soundtrack, locations, pretitle sequence, and titles. Moore is better than in The Man With The Golden Gun because he's able to successfully blend humor with a harder edge, as opposed to coming off as just a brute in 'Gun'. Bach, on the other hand, isn't quite up to the task of convincingly playing a Russian agent. Her accent is terrible, but most of her lines are so good that it hardly matters. The direction is adequate, but the film lacks inspired action sequences on the whole. Overall, the film rates a B+.
