THUNDERBALL (1965)

Let's talk about THUNDERBALL (1965), the James Bond film released during the height of the 1960's super-spy boom, and the 007 movie released the year I was born.

Thanks to the unexpected runaway success of the third Bond outing, GOLDFINGER (1964), the next Bond film was afforded a then-massive budget of $9,000,000 and was shot in widescreen, with much of the action taking place in picturesque Jamaican locations. If the public wanted more 007, then that's what the studio would give them, so THUNDERBALL featured more violence, more sexy women, more outrageous gadgets, more quipping, more you name it, all crammed into two hours plus. Too bad they paid little or no attention to providing a decent script, fine-tuned editing, and a pace faster than that achieved on a belly full of Lorazepam.

With all of that said, let's go through the movie with my observations, culminating in a final verdict.

 

• THUNDERBALL sports my favorite Bond theme song. My go-to for karaoke, I nail the rest of the song surprisingly beautifully, but nailing that final note and sustaining it? Yeah, I am NOT Tom Jones. (Alas.)

• Next to MOONRAKER's skydiving sequence, THUNDERBALL features the best  of the series'  pre-credits mini-adventures. Bond killing the in-drag and allegedly dead Colonel Bouvard is a realistic and savage fight that ends in what can only be called cold-blooded murder. It's the Bond of the novels. 
• The direction by Terence Young is pedestrian at best. (No, I will NOT go into the whole story about Kevin McClory's involvement with this film and the legal battles connected to it. There's actually an entire book on the whole convoluted mess.) 
• The SPECTRE briefing after the opening looks fantastic, and set the standard for all such scenes in cinema going forward. The Ken Adam set design is a big reason for this. 
• Our villain, Emilio Largo, explains part of SPECTRE's plot to steal two nuclear warheads, and the details are filled in as we see the operation, which is tediously depicted with setup involving SPECTRE agents engaging in shenanigans with 007, who's conveniently at a health spa located next to a military base, and the first of many, MANY slow-moving underwater sequences. 
• Bond's relentless sexual harassment of spa physiotherapist Molly Peters is annoyingly, obnoxiously laddish and absolutely unacceptable in the year 2020, but the fact that he blackmails her into having sex with him places Bond firmly in the category of sexual predator. (Do NOT get me started on the barn scene in GOLDFINGER. I'll just leave it at "That was rape.") 
• The pacing of the entire film is turgid. 
• John Barry's score is one of the film's few saving graces. Very moody and evocative. 
• With the exception of a few scenes, this is where Connery's Bond is at his blandest. Surpassed in this respect only by his performance in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, where it's obvious he'd rather be anywhere else. 
• I had not seen this film in its entirety in a while, so for decades Emilio Largo held the title as my favorite Bond villain, simply because he's just so suave, cool, and old school Italian. Looking at him today, he doesn't really do much and is rather a personality-void bore. His sense of menace is nowhere near what I remembered it being. 
• Bond arriving late to the massive 00 briefing on Operation: Thunderball at MI-6 headquarters and M's reaction is classic. 
• Among the other agents at the briefing, a female can clearly be seen. Fuck this boring slog, what's her story? What would the adventures of a female 00 agent in the 1960's be like? I WANT THAT MOVIE. 
• The MI-6 briefing on Operation Thunderball is boring and, worse, it's totally redundant, as we, the audience, witnessed Largo's crew pull off the nuclear heist. WE know all of the details before the good guys do, so it's now the good guys catching up with us. 
• The mission itself must be accomplished within four days, and does not actually begin until well over a half-hour into the film. The setup to get to it is all just boring and could have been told in five minutes so we can get to the point. I get that they wanted to take advantage of the new widescreen format and colossal budget, but give us a meaty story to fill up the time instead of a load of bullshit. 
• Once the story's action shifts to Jamaica, the film has the look and feel of a bland travelogue or someone's vintage home movies of their summer vacation. 
• Domino, while a feast for the eyes, has zero personality. 
• How the hell do you fuck underwater in a coral reef with full scuba gear on? Seriously, exactly HOW THE HELL DOES THAT WORK? 
• There's a hell of a lot of nothing going on once we get to Jamaica. 
• Luciana Paluzzi as SPECTRE femme fatale Fiona Volpe is arguably the best and liveliest character in the entire film. Too bad she was stuck in this specific entry. 
• I liked Rik Van Nutter as Felix Leiter, but he has little to do here, and the character was recast for his next appearance anyway. 
• Martine Beswick as Paula, Bond's assistant in Jamaica, is wasted, as her character quite literally has no reason to be in the story other than to look stunning. (Beswick was last seen as one of the two battling gypsy chicks in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, the second and best James Bond film ever made.) 
• THUNDERBALL really only gets by because it stars Sean Connery as Bond. If any of the other Bond actors had swapped places with him in this film, it would universally rank toward the bottom of the roster. 
• Gratuitous items: the beloved Aston-Martin DB-5 (seen at the beginning), a ridiculously-placed rocket pack (how did it get there with no one noting Bond hauling it up to that exact, necessary location?), Largo's pet sharks, loads of boring flying around in helicopters, Bond's pointless super-scuba tank. 
• Clocking in at two hours and ten minutes, THUNDERBALL was the first of the lavish, bloated Bonds, and could easily have been trimmed by 45 minutes without losing anything of narrative value. 
• The sequence at the junkanoo is chaotic and feels like it was edited with a weed whacker. Too much going on and no real cinematic management of the parade's chaos. Consequently, though Bond is clearly in danger, there is zero suspense. 
• How Bond disposes of Fiona's corpse is a classic gag. Bond's dispatching of Vargas and the subsequent one-liner. (chef's kiss) 
• The famous underwater melee between MI-6 (in orange scuba gear) and Largo's forces (in black) is a boring mess and visual nightmare, as dozens of agents kill each other beneath the waves. Due to how we land creatures move when hampered by being submerged, everything is sloooooow. The presence of a random shark or lobster does nothing to liven the proceedings. 
• ANIMAL CRUELTY ALERT: During the underwater fight, there's a moment where a shark enters the fray and a SPECTRE frogman wrestles a speargun away from an MI-6 agent to shoot the deep-sea predator. We see — for real — the speargun discharge and send a spear through the shark's head and out the other side. It's an odd angle but there it is. We see other sharks get speared but this was a through-the-head shot. This was the 1960's, when this kind of thing could be included in a movie without a second thought. Poor wee sharks... 
• The climax takes forever and, no matter how hard it tried, it just wasn't thrilling. Maybe in 1965, but definitely not now. 
• Dud sequence or not, the Disco Volante is a cool yacht. 
• Largo's right hand man's heel turn comes from out of nowhere, and he was such a minor character that the viewer could be forgiven for having no idea who the hell he is when he releases a tied-up Domino.

FINAL VERDICT: After careful consideration, and even taking into account that it was for some reason a favorite during my youth, I have to rank THUNDERBALL somewhere among the weakest efforts in the series. It has too much going for it to consider it a total loss, but this is the exact moment when the Bond films became lavish, bloated, overlong, and, in many cases, tedious. They also became beat-for-beat remakes of GOLDFINGER, with the corporate thinking being "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," which led to Bond movies mostly becoming rote self-parodies with wildly-varying degrees of quality.

If one approached THUNDERBALL without any prior knowledge of James Bond, Sean Connery, or the cultural impact of the franchise and observed it from a purely objective standpoint, it's a middling thriller at best, whose over-length and dreary directing are its undoing. I won't be returning to it again, and my DVD will join the stack of films eventually to be sold off for cash or Japanese import toys at Book-Off in Midtown.