7 / 10
Official trailer
Bigger and Wetter
By 1965, Bond was the biggest thing in cinema, and Thunderball was built to prove it.
The budget went up, the locations went tropical and the plot got nuclear: two stolen atomic bombs and a ransom demand aimed at two whole countries. Audiences lined up around the block. For years it was the most successful Bond film ever made, and adjusted for inflation, it’s still near the top.
Terence Young, who’d directed Dr. No and From Russia with Love, came back for his last Bond, and he shot much of it in the Bahamas. The film looks gorgeous: turquoise water, white sand, sunlit yachts and villas full of rich crooks in linen. It’s pure sixties glamour, the kind of holiday brochure every audience member wished they were living in.
I like Thunderball a lot, and it tests my patience more than any other Connery Bond.
On dry land, with Connery grinning his way through a health spa and Fiona Volpe tearing around on that motorbike, I’m having a great time. Then everybody puts on a mask and my attention starts drifting. It’s a 7 because the good stuff is that good, and it stops at 7 because there’s so much water.
The trouble is the water. Huge chunks of the film happen under it, and underwater, everything slows down. Every time Thunderball dives, it loses its breath.
The Jetpack
The pre-title sequence starts at a funeral in France, where Bond suspects the grieving widow is the dead man in disguise. He’s right. After a vicious fight, Bond straps on a jetpack, flies over the château wall and lands beside his Aston Martin. That blasts the pursuing henchmen with water cannons.
The jetpack was real, a Bell Rocket Belt flown by a stunt pilot, and it’s wonderfully daft sixties futurism. It looks faintly silly now. And it announces exactly what kind of film you’re in for: gadgets, stunts, spectacle and Connery looking completely unbothered by any of it.
I get a kick out of that jetpack. It’s absurd, it looks like a science fair project, and Connery lands it like a man stepping off a bus. That opening tells me the film knows exactly how silly it is and doesn’t care, and I’ll take that attitude over a Bond that thinks it’s too good for gadgets.
A Health Farm
The film’s best stretch is its funniest. Bond is recuperating at Shrublands, a health clinic in England, where he spots a man with a strange tattoo. A SPECTRE agent tries to kill him by cranking up a traction machine while he’s strapped to it, and Bond gets even by cooking the man in a steam cabinet.
It’s silly and sly, and it’s how the film delivers its plot: a disguised pilot, a mysterious death and a stolen NATO bomber, all uncovered by a spy who’s supposed to be taking the waters. Connery, on his fourth outing, is completely at home. He moves through the film like a man on a paid holiday, and you enjoy the trip with him.
The Shrublands stretch is my favorite part of the film. The traction machine gag is nasty and funny at once, and the steam cabinet payback is exactly the kind of petty revenge I want from sixties Bond. If the whole film moved like this, I’d rate it two points higher.
For Writers
The Shrublands clinic sequence delivers a nuclear plot through traction machines, steam cabinets and a disguised pilot. Humour carries the exposition.
Setting up a complicated plot doesn’t have to be dry. A light, character-driven scene can deliver essential information while keeping the reader entertained, and readers absorb facts far more easily when they’re laughing. The trick is to let the information emerge from what the characters are doing. Bond gets stretched on a rack and pulls a prank, and the plot comes out of the mischief. By the time the scene ends, the audience knows everything it needs to, and it never felt like a lecture.
Two Stolen Bombs
SPECTRE hijacks a NATO bomber carrying two atomic bombs, using an agent surgically altered to look like one of the crew, and sinks the plane in the shallow waters off the Bahamas. Then it demands a hundred million pounds in diamonds, or it’ll destroy a major city in Britain or the United States.
Every double-0 agent goes hunting, and Bond picks the Bahamas on a hunch. There, he meets SPECTRE’s man on the spot, Emilio Largo, who lives in a luxurious villa in Nassau with a pool full of sharks and a yacht that turns into a hydrofoil.
The story has a tangled legal history. Fleming developed it with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham as a screenplay before turning it into a novel, and the dispute over the rights gave McClory a producer credit here and let him remake the story years later as Never Say Never Again. That’s why the same story exists twice.
Largo
Adolfo Celi plays Largo, SPECTRE’s number two, an eye-patched, piratical Italian with a taste for cruelty. Another actor dubbed his voice, a common practice in the early films, and his menace is mostly physical: a smile, a squint and a habit of feeding people who fail him to his sharks.
He’s fine, and he’s also a bit dull next to the best Bond villains. His plan relies on everybody else, his confrontations with Bond are mostly gambling and small talk and he never feels like a real match. His yacht, the Disco Volante, is more memorable than he is. In the finale, it splits in two, the back half left behind as the front becomes a speeding hydrofoil.
Fiona Volpe
Thunderball’s greatest asset is Fiona Volpe, SPECTRE’s assassin, played by Luciana Paluzzi with wicked delight. She’s gorgeous, ruthless and completely unimpressed by Bond. She rides a motorbike that fires rockets, seduces him as a matter of business and laughs at him when he assumes sleeping with him will turn her to the side of the angels.
Her hunt for a wounded Bond through the Junkanoo carnival in Nassau, all drums, costumes and dancing crowds, is the film’s liveliest sequence. Her end, on a dance floor, is sudden and darkly funny, capped by one of Connery’s most famous quips.
She’s the first great Bond femme fatale, and she set the standard for everybody who followed, from Xenia Onatopp to the killers of the Craig era. She’s far more alive than the film’s heroine. Paluzzi walks off with the whole movie, as far as I’m concerned. She laughs at Bond, and I laugh with her, because he has it coming. Every scene she’s in has a pulse, and every time the film cuts back to Largo and his small talk, I miss her.
For Writers
Fiona Volpe laughs at Bond for thinking she’ll switch sides after sleeping with him. She refuses the role the formula expects her to play.
A secondary character who knowingly defies the conventions of your genre can become the most memorable person in the story. Readers love it when a character surprises them by seeing the cliché coming and stepping around it.
The refusal works because it’s part of who Fiona is: proud, professional and amused by men who underestimate her. A character who breaks a convention needs a reason in her own nature, or the moment feels like the writer showing off. Fiona’s pride is the reason, and it makes her unforgettable.
Domino
Claudine Auger plays Domino, Largo’s mistress and the sister of the pilot SPECTRE murdered. Bond meets her while snorkelling, charms her, tells her about her brother and turns her against Largo. Her voice was dubbed too, by the same voice artist who dubbed several early Bond women.
Domino gets a satisfying bit of revenge in the finale, and she’s sympathetic enough. She’s also passive for most of the film, a beautiful woman who waits, worries and gets rescued. Next to Fiona, she barely registers. Early Bond often gave its best material to the villains, and the women were no exception.
Underwater
Thunderball is famous for its underwater photography, and it was groundbreaking. Ricou Browning, who’d played the Creature from the Black Lagoon, directed much of it, and the shots of divers, sharks and a sunken bomber in clear Caribbean water are beautiful. The film won the Oscar for special visual effects.
The climax is a huge underwater battle between SPECTRE’s frogmen and American aquanauts, with spear guns, knives and underwater sleds. For 1965, the achievement is extraordinary. Then it turns into a slog. Everybody looks alike in masks and wetsuits, there’s no dialogue, nothing moves quickly and after a few minutes you stop caring who’s stabbing whom.
That’s the film’s central problem. So much of it happens underwater that the pace keeps dropping, and patience runs thin long before the last spear is fired. The underwater finale loses me. I admire the photography, and for a few minutes the frogman battle is something to see. After that I can’t tell anybody apart, nobody says a word, and I’m watching bubbles. I’d have cut that battle in half and not missed a thing.
For Writers
The underwater battle is a technical triumph, and it drags because everybody looks alike in masks and nobody can be heard. Spectacle without clarity loses the audience, no matter how much it cost to shoot.
Big action sequences need clear stakes and recognizable characters, however expensive they are. If the reader can’t tell who’s who, even the most impressive scene becomes tiring, and they start skimming. In any large-scale action, keep your viewpoint on one or two identifiable characters, and make sure the reader always knows what they’re trying to do and what happens if they fail. A duel between two people the reader knows beats a battle between two hundred strangers every time.
Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
The theme song has its own story. The producers originally commissioned a song called Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, recorded first by Shirley Bassey and then by Dionne Warwick. Late in production, they decided the theme had to include the film’s title, and John Barry and Don Black wrote Thunderball in a hurry.
Tom Jones sang it, and he reportedly fainted holding the final note. The song is big, brassy and swaggering, and it suits the film’s excess perfectly. The discarded song survives in Barry’s score. Listen for it.
The Skyhook Exit
The film ends with Bond and Domino adrift in a life raft, rescued by a plane that snags them with a Skyhook line and yanks them into the sky. The Skyhook was a real rescue system, used by the American military, and it makes a wonderfully odd final image: Bond, triumphant and dripping, hauled off into the clouds. It’s the kind of ending only this period of Bond would try, and it sums up the film: glamorous, ingenious and a little ridiculous.
Connery at His Peak
This is Connery at the height of his Bond. He’s relaxed, amused, physically confident and completely in command, whether he’s fighting in a château, flirting at a card table or swimming away from sharks. He’d grow visibly bored with the role in his next film. Here, he’s still enjoying himself, and you can see it in every scene.
His Bond is also at his most ruthless. He uses Domino, dispatches henchmen with a shrug and treats most women as a pleasant distraction. He’s a very sixties hero, and some of it plays badly now. The charm is undeniable anyway, and it gets the film through its slowest stretches.
A Seven for the Holiday
Visually, Thunderball is gorgeous, full of great moments and built around Connery at the peak of his confidence, with Paluzzi’s Fiona stealing every scene she’s in. Then again, it’s long, slow in the water and saddled with a so-so villain and a passive heroine.
It’s the moment the series got bigger, and not every bit of bigger was better.
Craft Note
Craft Note
At heart, Thunderball is a film about scale: a bigger budget, a bigger threat and a bigger battle. The spectacle impresses, and the story sags under its weight whenever it loses sight of the people.
Spectacle serves a story only when the reader can follow it and cares about the people inside it.
When you write your biggest scene, keep it anchored to one character’s goal and one clear danger, however much is happening around them.
Beautiful, and Slow in the Water
I rate Thunderball a 7, and I’m happy to give it that.
I get a jetpack, a shark pool, a big brassy theme song, Connery enjoying the part before the boredom set in, and Fiona Volpe stealing every scene she’s in. What I don’t get is a villain worth fearing, a heroine who does much before the finale, or an underwater climax that holds my attention. It’s gorgeous and it drags, and the dragging is what keeps it out of my top tier of Bond.
