The Spy who, Love Me

The Spy who Love me cost $14 million to make in 1977 and amassed $185.4 to get the commercial aspects of the series back on track. The film was acclaimed as the best Roger Moore Bond and nominated for three Academy awards but without success.

A British and a Russian nuclear submarine disappears and we the audience learn that they are drawn into a massive super tanker floating dock where the crew are taken prisoner. Bond is having some R and R in an Skiing Cabin in Austria when he is summoned and where he is pursued by a small army of Russian agents who he evades by ski jumping off a mountainside opening a union jack parachute. He kills one of the agents.

He earns that someone has acquired a super submarine tracking system and he and the Russians go in pursuit in Egypt with a ‘Son et Lumiere’ production among the pyramids the setting for a mini adventure involving his Russian counterpart Anya Amasova, They are told to join forces by Walter Gotell as head of the KGB and Bernard Lee as M. Geoffrey Keen debuts as the Minister of defence in a role he continues for five films with Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny and Desmond Llewelyn as Q and his technical tricks. The couple have their first encounter with Richard Kiel as Jaws one of the great Bond characters.

The couple work out that the man behind the submarine thefts is Curt Jurgens as Karl Stromberg who plans to trigger World war III by using the submarines to fire missiles at Russia and West and create a new underworld water civilization and which enables the latest Q car to be used as sports car which also becomes an under water craft. The pair become a couple after Bond saves her from the character Jaws but later she promises to kill him when their mission is over discovering that the agent Bond killed in the Austrian Alps was her boyfriend. The couple visit Stromberg at what appears to be his under water home but later they find that he has an extraordinary underwater Atlantis type of community which can rise above the sea bed to above the water level

The couple board a third nuclear submarine which is captured and in turn they are captured and separated. Bond manages to first rescue the crews of captured Russian, USA and British submarines and then cleverly reprogrammes the two missiles so instead of heading for Moscow and New York they destroy each other’s other submarines. Why the villains only launched one rocket from each submarine remains a fortunate puzzle.

Bond rescues the Russian girl, and Kills Stromberg in the process and they also appear to kill Jaws. The couple escape as the Atlantis is destroyed, The couple are seen having an intimate relationship by their superiors while Jaws escapes from the shark tank. I regarded this fil as OK than good and certainly did not merit Academy recognition depspite its popularity at the box office.