For their podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin have been watching the James Bond movies in order and discussing them on the show. Now that Netflix has added the bulk of the series to its instant watch library, I thought I’d play along. Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

Boy, it’s a lot easier (and more fun) to write about a movie that’s bad, like our last installment in my Bond series, than one that’s good. That’s why it’s so hard for me to write about For Your Eyes Only. I’ve maintained for a while now that FYEO is the best Roger Moore James Bond movie, though I was momentarily distracted by the awesomeness that is The Spy Who Loved Me into thinking that it might actually be the better film. No way. Having watched it again I can attest that without question, For Your Eyes Only is not only the best Roger Moore James Bond film, it is one of the all time best Bond films period. I also really like the Sheena Easton theme song.

It starts out well with a nice tip-of-the-cap to the Bond films that came before it by having Blofeld attack Bond while he’s visiting the gravesite of his dead wife, and gives Bond the chance to dispatch Blofeld once and for all (though we’ve certainly thought that before). The only goofy part is when Blofeld is begging for his life and offers to buy Bond a delicatessen. Huh? What’s that about?

The rest of the movie is a good old fashioned spy caper about the fate of a piece of British military technology capable of, if in the wrong hands, ordering British submarines to fire missiles on London. At the beginning of the movie it’s being housed in a British spy ship disguised as a fishing vessel. The boat is sunk by a mine. The Russians want it, but they can’t launch an official recovery operation. The British can’t either, I guess because they’d have to admit it was aboard a spy ship, so they get one of their agents to look for it instead. The British agent and his wife are assassinated, and his daughter Melina, our main Bond girl, is off to get revenge. Bond is sent to find out who hired the hit man who is killed by Melina by a cross bow. Awesome.

Honestly the movie’s plot is so involved that I could write paragraphs more describing it, but that’s not to say it’s too complex, just that it has a lot of details. As The Dude might say, “a lotta ins, a lotta outs.” You really just need to go and watch this one.

I love the car chase with the little Citroen or whatever it is. As cool as the whole Lotus car chase was in The Spy Who Loved Me, I love Bond driving this ridiculous little car and still taking out the bad guys. Love when it overturns and Bond and Melina have to get the village people to help him push it over and give him a push start. 

As an aside, I love Roger Moore’s style. There’s a scene during that chase when one of the bad guys pulls up next to him while he’s driving. He does like a startled double take and then just flashes a trademark Moore grin: classy, but amusing. Love it!

I love the scene where Bond kicks the henchman’s car off of the cliff. Very dark, but then he reminds you that you’re watching a Bond movie by remarking, “He never had a head for heights.” I remember when I watched this scene a few years ago that line totally ruined the scene for me, but this time around I liked it. I don’t want Bond to be too dark, and the humorous line nicely takes the edge off of the situation.

I dig the skiing scenes, and the tense moments at the end with the cliff-hanging stuff. And you gotta dig Julian Glover as the villain. At first he appears to be an ally of Bond before later being revealed to be the bad guy. Sort of a template perhaps for Glover’s character in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a few years later? It’s also nice that he’s not a larger-than-life unrealistic villain as Bond movies usually get, but just a criminal middle man. Sounds anticlimactic, but it’s rather refreshing after the absurdity that was Moonraker’s plot.

About the only thing I really didn’t like in the movie was Bibi, the figure skater. Was she in the movie just to make Roger Moore seem old?

Interesting fact: Cassandra Harris, minor Bond girl in this one, was the wife of future Bond Pierce Brosnan.

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