8 / 10
Moore’s Best
The Spy Who Loved Me is Roger Moore’s best Bond film, and the one where his version of the character finally came together. His first two films, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, had been uneven, and the second had disappointed at the box office. The series needed a hit, and this film delivered one: big, lavish, funny, exciting and completely confident.
Lewis Gilbert directed it, returning to the series ten years after You Only Live Twice, and it came out in the summer of 1977. It was the first Bond film produced by Albert R. Broccoli alone, after his long partnership with Harry Saltzman had ended, and he put everything into it. I give it an 8. It’s not the most serious Bond, and it’s not trying to be. It’s the most purely fun.
The title is the only thing it takes from Ian Fleming. His novel of the same name is an unusual, small-scale story told by a young woman in a motel, and Fleming, unhappy with it, allowed the producers to use only the title. The screenplay is entirely original, and it’s built for spectacle from the first frame to the last.
The Ski Jump
The pre-title sequence ends with the greatest stunt in the series. Bond, chased by Soviet agents on skis down a mountain in Austria, skis straight off the edge of a cliff and falls, and falls, and then a parachute opens, printed with the Union Jack, as the music swells.
The stunt was real. It was performed by the skier Rick Sylvester, who jumped from Asgard Peak on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, and the whole sequence was captured in a single take because there was no chance to do it twice. It cost a fortune to arrange, and audiences reportedly cheered in cinemas. It’s still one of the most famous shots in any action film.
It also tells you everything about the film to come. It’s spectacular, patriotic, a little absurd and done for real, and it announces that Moore’s Bond is going to be bigger and bolder than ever. After the disappointment of The Man with the Golden Gun, it was exactly the statement the series needed to make.
For Writers
The ski jump happens before the titles and has nothing to do with the plot. It exists to tell the audience what kind of film this will be, and it does.
When you write an opening, a self-contained scene of spectacle or surprise can set the tone for everything that follows, even if it’s not part of the main story.
Open with one scene that captures the feeling of your whole story in a single dramatic moment. Make it complete in itself, so it works even before the reader knows the plot.
Two Missing Submarines
A British nuclear submarine and a Soviet one both vanish, and both governments suspect the other. Bond is sent to investigate, and so is a Soviet agent, Major Anya Amasova, code-named Triple X. The trail leads both of them to Egypt, where a microfilm of a submarine tracking system is being sold, and they end up forced to work together on the orders of their superiors.
The villain is Karl Stromberg, a reclusive shipping magnate who lives in a vast, spider-like underwater base called Atlantis. He has stolen both submarines using a gigantic supertanker, the Liparus, whose bow opens to swallow them whole. His plan is to fire their nuclear missiles at New York and Moscow, provoking a world war that will destroy civilisation, so that he can build a new one under the sea.
It’s among the grandest plans in the series, and the film treats it with complete seriousness. It is exactly right. The scale is enormous, and the stakes are the end of the world. Curd Jürgens plays Stromberg with cold, aloof calm, and his underwater palace is a standout villain lair.
Anya Amasova
Barbara Bach plays Anya, and she’s one of the series’ most important Bond women: a Soviet agent who is Bond’s equal, a rival as much as a partner, and who matches him in skill and intelligence for much of the film. She outwits him several times, and the early scenes of the two agents trying to steal the microfilm from each other are playful and fun.
There’s a darker thread, too. Bond killed Anya’s lover, a Soviet agent, in the ski chase at the start of the film, and when she finds out, she promises to kill Bond once the mission is over. It gives their relationship an unusual edge and gives her a motive of her own. Bach isn’t the strongest actress the series has had, but the character was a real step forward, and the chemistry between her and Moore is easy and warm.
The film also plays with the Cold War in an unusually warm way. British and Soviet agents working together against a common enemy, with their bosses, M and General Gogol, cooperating grudgingly, reflected the détente of the late seventies. It gave the series a new kind of story to tell, and Gogol became a recurring character.
For Writers
Anya has a reason to kill Bond, because he killed her lover. It turns a flirtation between rival agents into a relationship with real stakes.
When you write a romance between adversaries, a personal grievance between them gives their scenes an edge that simple rivalry can’t.
Give your two lovers a real, specific wrong between them from before the story starts. Let it surface at the worst moment, and make them decide what matters more.
Jaws
Stromberg’s henchman is Jaws, a giant assassin with steel teeth who bites through anything, including chains, cables and people. Richard Kiel, more than seven feet tall, plays him, and he became a fan favourite across the whole series. He’s nearly indestructible, surviving a collapsing building, a car crash and a fight with a shark, and he never says a word.
He’s frightening at first and increasingly funny as the film goes on, and he’s the reason the fights have so much energy. His battle with Bond on a train, a brutal, lengthy fight in a sleeping compartment, is one of the best fights of the Moore era. Audiences loved him so much that he returned in Moonraker, where he was turned into a comic figure and eventually a good guy.
Kiel was a gentle, thoughtful man off screen, and he reportedly found the metal teeth so uncomfortable that he could wear them for only short periods. He remains one of the few Bond henchmen whom audiences loved, and his face is as much a part of the Moore era as Moore’s own.
For Writers
Jaws never speaks, and he’s the most memorable character in the film. His teeth, his size and his indestructibility tell the audience everything.
When you write a secondary character, one striking physical detail can make them unforgettable more effectively than pages of dialogue or backstory.
Give one supporting character a single distinctive trait the reader can picture, and let it define every scene they’re in. Keep them mostly silent.
The Lotus
Q provides Bond with a white Lotus Esprit, and it’s the most famous car of the Moore era. After a chase along the mountain roads of Sardinia, pursued by a car, a motorbike with a missile sidecar and a helicopter, Bond drives the Lotus off a pier into the sea, and it turns into a submarine: the wheels retract, fins slide out and it cruises underwater, firing torpedoes and missiles.
It’s a wonderful gadget sequence, completely ridiculous and completely delightful, and it ends with Bond driving the car back up onto a crowded beach and dropping a fish out of the window to the astonished tourists. The car became a huge success as a toy, and one of the actual submarine props was later bought at auction by Elon Musk.
The sequence was shot partly with a full-size car, partly with specially built submarine models and partly with a real submersible shell piloted underwater by a diver. The combination of practical tricks makes it more convincing than it has any right to be, and it’s the gadget scene most people remember from Moore’s whole era.
Ken Adam’s Tanker
The film’s greatest achievement is its design. Ken Adam, the series’ legendary production designer, built the interior of the Liparus supertanker, with three captured submarines inside it and a vast dock, on a new soundstage at Pinewood Studios. It was the largest soundstage in the world at the time, and it was named the 007 Stage.
The final battle, with British, American and Soviet submariners fighting Stromberg’s men inside the tanker, takes place on this enormous set, and few finales in the series are as spectacular. Stanley Kubrick reportedly advised on how to light the huge space. Atlantis, Stromberg’s underwater base, rising from the sea on its legs, is another of Adam’s great designs.
Adam was nominated for the Academy Award for his work on the film, and it’s easy to see why. The tanker, Atlantis and Stromberg’s elegant, cold interiors give the film a scale and style that few action films of any era have matched, and they helped make it a high point of the series visually.
Nobody Does It Better
Carly Simon sings the theme, Nobody Does It Better, written by Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager, and it ranks with the best and most successful Bond songs. It’s romantic, warm and a little knowing, and it was nominated for the Academy Award. It became a major hit and is still instantly recognisable.
Hamlisch also wrote the score. It mixes the Bond theme with a disco-influenced sound that dates the film to the late seventies. It’s a smooth, stylish score, and it suits the film’s lighter, more romantic tone.
Egypt and Sardinia
The film travels to the pyramids and temples of Egypt, where Bond and Anya chase and fight each other and Jaws through the ruins at night, including during a sound-and-light show at the pyramids, and to a lavish hotel in Sardinia. The locations are beautiful, and Gilbert films them with a travel-brochure glamour that became central to the series’ appeal.
The Egyptian scenes also include one of the film’s best moments of comedy, when Bond and Anya stumble through the desert after their van breaks down, arguing, and then share a sleeping compartment on a train. The film balances action, romance, comedy and scenery with real skill.
Where The Spy Who Loved Me Falls Short
It’s a very long film, and the pace sags in the middle. Stromberg is a rather dull villain next to the henchman who works for him, and his plan, for all its scale, is a repeat of You Only Live Twice, also directed by Gilbert, with submarines instead of spacecraft. Some of the jokes are silly, and Moore’s Bond, charming as he is, rarely feels in real danger.
None of that matters much. The ski jump, Jaws, the Lotus, Anya, the train fight, the tanker and the song are all classics. It’s an 8, and it’s the Moore film I’d show to anyone who wants to see why audiences loved him.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The Spy Who Loved Me pairs Bond with a rival who is his equal and has a personal reason to kill him. The tension between cooperation and revenge gives the whole film its shape.
When you write two characters forced to work together, the partnership becomes much more interesting if one of them has a secret reason to betray the other.
Give one member of your forced partnership a hidden grievance against the other, reveal it halfway through, and make the final act depend on whether they act on it.
The Verdict on The Spy Who Loved Me
Yes. It’s an 8 and Roger Moore’s best Bond, big, glamorous, funny and exciting. Watch it for the ski jump, Jaws, the Lotus and Ken Adam’s tanker, and for the moment Moore made the role completely his own.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on one of my film lists