6 / 10
Official trailer
A Clown in the Woods
The main story opens with a man in a clown costume running through a forest in East Germany, chased by knife-throwing twins. He’s 009, a British agent, and he stumbles into the British ambassador’s residence in Berlin and dies, clutching a fake Fabergé egg. It’s a strange, arresting start, and it’s the most serious thing in the entire film.
The egg leads Bond to an auction in London, where a smooth Afghan prince, Kamal Khan, pays a fortune for the real one. Bond follows him to India, and the trail leads to a jewel-smuggling operation, a mysterious woman called Octopussy, a traveling circus and a mad Soviet general’s plan to start a nuclear war.
John Glen directed, his second Bond after For Your Eyes Only, and he’d direct the next three as well. Where that film stripped the series back to basics, Octopussy piles everything back on.
I have a soft spot for Octopussy and very little respect for it. It’s gorgeous, it’s got a mad Soviet general I could watch all day, and it keeps stopping so Roger Moore can do pantomime. Every time I start taking the bomb plot seriously, the film hands Bond a vine to swing on.
For Writers
Octopussy opens with a dying agent in a clown costume clutching a fake egg. The image is so strange that the audience needs to know what it means.
A strange, puzzling opening image is among the best hooks a story can have. It raises a question the reader wants answered, and it promises that the story will be worth following.
The best opening images also plant something the story will pay off. The clown and the egg both return, and the circus at the climax makes sense of the clown suit the audience saw in the first scene. That’s a satisfying click, and it’s the film’s best piece of structure.
The Pre-Title Jet
The pre-title sequence is terrific. Bond, disguised as a Latin American colonel, is caught trying to sabotage a military base, escapes in a tiny folding jet hidden in a horse trailer and flies it through an open hangar while a missile chases him. The mini-jet, the Acrostar, was real, and the sequence has a fun, gadgety energy.
It’s the kind of opening the Moore films did best: silly, exciting and completely confident, and I think the folding jet is the most purely fun thing in the film. Then the Rita Coolidge theme, All Time High, arrives, and I’ve forgotten it before it’s over. It’s a lush, sleepy ballad and one of the weaker Bond songs.
Octopussy
Maud Adams plays Octopussy, a wealthy, mysterious smuggler who lives on a floating palace in Udaipur, surrounded by an army of women trained in combat. She’s involved with Khan’s jewel smuggling, and she has a personal connection to Bond: her father was a disgraced agent whom Bond once allowed to settle his own fate.
Adams, who’d played a different character in an earlier Bond film, is elegant and commanding, and Octopussy is a stronger, more independent figure than most Bond women of the era. The film doesn’t give her enough to do, though. She disappears for long stretches, and the title character ends up oddly marginal to her own film.
Kamal and Orlov
Louis Jourdan plays Kamal Khan, a suave, sophisticated villain who plays backgammon with loaded dice and has a giant henchman, Gobinda, played by Kabir Bedi, who crushes dice in his fist. Jourdan is charming and silky, with a lovely line in contemptuous asides, but he never seems very threatening. You never believe this man could beat Bond, and a Bond villain needs that belief.
Steven Berkoff plays General Orlov, a wild-eyed Soviet hardliner who wants to explode a nuclear bomb on an American air base in West Germany, so that Europe will demand nuclear disarmament and leave the continent open to a Soviet invasion. Berkoff chews every piece of scenery in the Kremlin, shouting and ranting with enormous gusto. He’s ridiculous, and he’s easily the most fun thing in the film.
Berkoff is my favorite thing in the film. He plays a man plotting nuclear war as if he’s auditioning for a Soviet opera, and I wouldn’t ask him to lose a single decibel.
For Writers
Orlov’s plan to start a nuclear war through a staged accident gives the film a real Cold War edge, even amid all the clowning and silliness around it.
A villain’s scheme is more frightening when it’s rooted in real-world fears the reader already carries around. Orlov’s plan plays on anxieties about nuclear accidents and the fragility of the balance of power, and it provides the film’s only moments of real tension.
Even in a light story, a plausible threat can anchor everything else. Give your villain a plan that connects to something the reader already fears. Orlov’s scheme works because the audience of 1983 lived with that fear every day. Character Traits of Villains is worth a look on this.
India
The Indian scenes, shot in and around Udaipur, are gorgeous to look at: lake palaces, crowded markets and royal courts. They’re also full of silly jokes and tourist clichés, including snake charmers, fire-eaters and a sword-swallower in a market chase, and a tuk-tuk chase through the streets, with Bond throwing handfuls of rupees to the cheering crowds as he goes.
The Indian tennis star Vijay Amritraj appears as Bond’s local contact, Vijay, and he gets to swat away attackers with a tennis racket. It’s funny, and it’s exactly the kind of gag that made the Moore films feel like light comedies.
Tarzan and the Tiger
The film’s most notorious moments are its gags.
Bond, escaping Khan’s men through the jungle, swings through the trees on a vine while the soundtrack plays a Tarzan yell. He tells a tiger to sit, and it does. He hides in a gorilla suit. It’s pure pantomime, and it drags the film’s tension down every time.
These moments embarrass a lot of Bond fans, and they embarrass me too. The Tarzan yell is where the film loses me completely, because once Bond is swinging on a vine to a cartoon sound effect, I stop believing anything can hurt him. The gags turn Bond into a clown long before the film puts him in a literal clown suit.
For Writers
Bond swings through the trees to a Tarzan yell and tells a tiger to sit. The gags undercut every moment of danger.
Humour in a thriller has to be handled carefully. A quip can relieve tension, but a gag that mocks the danger itself destroys it. Once the reader stops believing the hero is at risk, the suspense is gone.
If you use comedy in a tense story, let it come from character. Breaking the story’s own reality is a different thing. A wry remark under pressure works. A pantomime moment that tells the reader nothing is real does not, and one of those can undo a whole chapter of suspense. My piece on humor in writing digs into this.
The Circus
The climax takes place at Octopussy’s traveling circus, performing at an American air base in West Germany, where Orlov and Khan have hidden a nuclear bomb in a cannon. Bond, racing against time, has to reach the base, get into the circus and defuse the bomb.
To do it, he dresses up as a clown, sneaking through the base in full make-up and a red nose while the countdown ticks. The mix of real suspense and slapstick is strange. The race across Germany, including a sequence on top of a moving train, is exciting. The sight of Moore in clown make-up, trying to convince American soldiers there’s a bomb, is absurd.
Moore at Fifty-Five
Roger Moore was fifty-five when he made Octopussy, and you can tell. He’s still charming, and he handles the comedy with his usual ease, but the action scenes rely heavily on stunt doubles, and the romance with Octopussy feels a little awkward.
Moore had considered leaving the role, and the producers had tested other actors, but he returned partly because Never Say Never Again, the rival Bond film starring Sean Connery, was coming out the same year. The so-called battle of the Bonds was a big story in 1983, and Octopussy won it at the box office.
The Auction
The Fabergé egg auction at Sotheby’s in London is a high point. Bond, having swapped the real egg for the fake one, sits in the room and drives up the price, bidding against Kamal Khan until the Afghan prince pays a fortune. Then Bond walks off with the real egg in his pocket.
The sequence is clever and witty, with no gunfire and no gadgets, just Bond outplaying a villain at his own game in a room full of millionaires. The scene shows what the Moore films could do when they trusted character and wit over slapstick.
I’d trade every gag in the film for another ten minutes in that auction room. Moore’s quiet smugness as the price climbs is the best acting he does in the picture.
Magda and the Twins
Kristina Wayborn plays Magda, Khan’s glamorous accomplice, who seduces Bond to steal the egg back and makes a spectacular exit from his hotel balcony by unfurling her sari and gliding down to the street. It’s absurd and oddly elegant, and Wayborn plays it with a knowing smile. The knife-throwing twins, Mischka and Grischka, circus performers who work for Orlov, are the film’s best henchmen. They’re silent, sinister and deadly, and their pursuit of 009 in the opening and their clashes with Bond around the circus train give the film its sharpest action.
What Works
For all its silliness, Octopussy has plenty to enjoy. The pre-title jet, the Fabergé egg auction, the fight on top of the train, Berkoff’s mad general and the tension of the bomb countdown are all good fun. The Indian locations are beautiful, and the plot, though convoluted, has a Cold War edge.
It’s also got a sense of adventure, a big, colorful, globe-trotting energy that’s hard to dislike entirely. The finale on the outside of Khan’s plane, with Bond clinging to the fuselage and fighting Gobinda high above the Indian countryside, is a proper old-fashioned stunt sequence, and it’s thrilling in a way the clown scenes never are.
What Doesn’t
The gags are too much, the story is too convoluted and Octopussy herself is underused. Louis Jourdan never feels dangerous, and the film is too long. The mix of real nuclear stakes and pantomime silliness never quite settles into a coherent tone.
It’s a middling Moore film: fun in places, embarrassing in others and a long way from the lean seriousness of For Your Eyes Only, made just two years earlier by the same director.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Octopussy mixes serious nuclear suspense with broad comedy, and the two never quite fit. The film is fun in its best moments and undermined by its own jokes in its worst.
Tone is a promise. Once a story establishes how seriously to take its danger, breaking that promise with slapstick costs the reader’s trust.
Decide how real the danger in your story is, and make every scene, including the funny ones, respect that decision.
Bond in Clown Make-Up
Octopussy is a 6, and I think it’s a fair one. I like the pre-title jet, Berkoff’s mad general, the auction and the tense bomb countdown, and I like them enough to forgive a lot. What I can’t forgive is the Tarzan yell, the tiger told to sit and a hero in clown make-up, because those gags wreck the only real tension the film has. It’s fun in places and ridiculous in more, and the ridiculous parts cost it the points.
