Thunderball (1965)

One of the best of the original Bonds...
Sean Connery's fourth outing as James Bond, 1965's "Thunderball", finds him and the franchise in high gear in a spy extravaganza filmed on location in and around beautiful Nassau, the Bahamas. The underwater film sequences were pioneering at the time and hold up pretty well today.

As the movie opens, Bond is at a health spa in England, recovering from one of his recent adventures. He can't help getting involved in another. The clues he picks up at the spa will lead him to a SPECTRE plot to steal a British bomber with two nuclear bombs aboard, stash the bomber in the ocean, and sell the devices to the highest bidder. Bond ends up in the Bahamas, where his investigation leads him to SPECTRE agent Largo (played with haughty menace by Adolfo Celi) and his beautiful mistress Domino (Claudine Auger). The movie manages two equally thrilling climaxes. One is the huge underwater fight between British and American frogmen and Largo's SPECTRE henchmen. The second is a struggle between Bond and Largo for control of Largo's escape boat as it careens toward destruction on a reef.

Luciana Paluzzi is an added bonus as a gorgeous but deadly red-headed SPECTRE agent who dogs Bond's footsteps. Their meeting in his bathtub features one of the more priceless tongue-in-cheek Bond dialogues, as she asks for something to wear and he hands her a pair of sandals.

This movie is very highly recommended as one of the best of the original Bond movies, featuring Sean Connery at his wise-cracking best as the prototypical Bond.

THE BOND FEW REMEMBER
Top rate Bond film, completely forgotten by many. As I've mentioned before, Connery is absolutely no match for a 2007 Matt Damon (Jason Bourne), but in 1965 he had no peer. As usual in these films, the plot is both simple and outrageous. An organized international banditry group wants to extort 1 million pounds from NATO countries. They steal a bomber with 2 armed nuclear warheads as ransom. Bond arrives both casually and late at headquarters, having nearly been already killed and having had his mandatory sexual encounters with two gorgeous underground types.(If you ever see Shirley Booth or Rose Marie in one of these films, they've accidentally wandered onto the wrong set). With time running out, again and again the enemy has a chance to put Mr. Bond away for good, but fails to do so, thus lengthening the film, but also enabling a wild, realistic finale,accompanied by beautiful photography and a stirring musical score. Do not let alleged inferior Bond films fool you; this production can stand tall against the best of the others.

Bigger budget does not always make a better movie
After the success of "Goldfinger", the Bond producers secured the film rights to "Thunderball" and tripled the budget. The basic plot is simple but good: Largo, working for Spectre, steals atomic missiles and demands a ransom. Unfortunately, "Thunderball" is considerably longer than the previous movies, but there's less plot. The script is dull and the direction lifeless. Most of the budget seems to have been spent on the underwater sequences. But they're not well made, only chaotic and go on for way too long. They become the anticlimax of a movie that had already lost my interest. "Thunderball" is one of the few Bond movies that manages to bore me. Not recommended.