Thunderball (1965)

Bigger, Wetter, Slower

By 1965, Bond was a worldwide craze, and Thunderball was built to be bigger than anything that came before: bigger budget, bigger locations, bigger set pieces and a plot about stolen nuclear weapons that threatened two cities at once. For a while it was the most successful Bond film ever made, and adjusted for inflation it still sits near the top of the series’ box office. Audiences queued around the block, and the film delivered exactly the glamour they came for.

Terence Young, who had directed Dr. No and From Russia with Love, returned for his third and final Bond. He shot much of the film in the Bahamas, and the result is gorgeous: turquoise water, white beaches, luxury villas and sunlit yachts. The trouble is pace. Long stretches of the film take place underwater, where everything moves slowly, and the story loses momentum each time it dives. My rating is a 7, for a film that looks magnificent and runs out of breath.

Two Stolen Bombs

The plot is simple and grand. SPECTRE hijacks a NATO bomber carrying two atomic bombs, using an agent surgically altered to impersonate one of its crew, and sinks the plane in the shallow waters of the Bahamas. It then demands a ransom of one hundred million pounds in diamonds, threatening to destroy a major city in Britain or the United States if the money isn’t paid.

Every double-0 agent is sent out to search, and Bond chooses the Bahamas on a hunch, following a clue from a health clinic in England where he stumbled onto the plot while recovering from an injury. The search turns into a duel with SPECTRE’s man on the spot, the wealthy, eye-patched Emilio Largo, who lives in a luxurious villa in Nassau with a pool full of sharks.

The story came from a screenplay Ian Fleming developed with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham before he turned it into a novel, and the dispute over its rights meant McClory became a producer of this film and later remade it as Never Say Never Again. That legal history hangs over Thunderball, and it explains why the same story exists twice.

The Jetpack and the Clinic

The pre-title sequence has Bond escaping a French château by strapping on a rocket-powered jetpack and flying over the wall to his waiting Aston Martin. The car then fires water cannons at the pursuing henchmen. The jetpack was real, a Bell Rocket Belt flown by a stunt pilot, and it’s a wonderful piece of sixties futurism, even if it looks faintly absurd today.

The early scenes at Shrublands, a health clinic where Bond is recovering, are the film’s lightest and funniest. Bond is strapped into a traction machine by a SPECTRE agent who turns up the power in an attempt to kill him, and he gets his revenge by locking the man in a steam cabinet. The clinic sequence introduces the plot, a disguised pilot and a mysterious death, with a sly comic touch.

These scenes show Connery at his most relaxed and confident. By his fourth film he owned the role completely, and his easy charm carries the slower sections of the story. He moves through the film like a man on a paid holiday, and the audience enjoys the trip with him.

Emilio Largo

Adolfo Celi plays Largo, SPECTRE’s second in command, a wealthy, piratical Italian with an eye patch, a yacht and a taste for cruelty. Celi’s voice was dubbed by another actor, and his performance is mostly physical, a smiling, menacing presence who treats murder as a leisure activity. He feeds a failed henchman to his sharks, and he enjoys it.

Largo is a solid villain, and he’s also a little dull next to the most vivid Bond villains. His plan relies on others to execute, his confrontations with Bond are mostly gambling and small talk, and he never quite becomes the formidable opponent the film needs. His yacht, the Disco Volante, is more memorable than he is: in the finale it splits in two, the rear section left behind as the front half becomes a speeding hydrofoil.

The casino scene in which Bond and Largo play baccarat is a nice echo of Dr. No and a reminder that the series was already building its own traditions. Bond at the card table, trading barbs with a villain over a large pile of chips, would become one of the franchise’s signature scenes.

Fiona Volpe

The film’s most exciting character is Fiona Volpe, SPECTRE’s assassin, played by Luciana Paluzzi. She’s glamorous, ruthless and completely unafraid of Bond, and she’s the first great femme fatale of the series. She rides a motorbike that fires rockets, seduces Bond as a matter of business and mocks him when he assumes she’ll switch sides after sleeping with him.

Her scenes are the film’s liveliest. Paluzzi plays Fiona with wicked amusement, and the sequence at the Junkanoo carnival in Nassau, where she hunts a wounded Bond through dancing crowds, is one of the film’s highlights. Her end, on a dance floor, is sudden and darkly funny, delivered with one of Connery’s most famous quips.

She set the template for a long line of dangerous Bond women, from Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye to the assassins of the Craig era, and she still sets the standard. Her confidence and humour make her far more alive than the heroine she shares the film with.

Domino

Claudine Auger plays Domino, Largo’s mistress and the sister of the pilot SPECTRE murdered to steal the bombs. Bond meets her while snorkelling, charms her, reveals her brother’s fate and persuades her to help him against Largo. Auger’s voice, like Celi’s, was dubbed by another actor, a common practice in the early films.

Domino is sympathetic, and her revenge on Largo in the finale is a satisfying payoff. The character is also passive for much of the film, a beautiful woman who waits, suffers and is rescued, and she has far less personality than Fiona. The contrast between the two women shows how much more interesting the villains of early Bond could be than the heroines.

Underwater

Thunderball is famous for its underwater sequences, pioneering at the time and still impressive technically. Ricou Browning, who had played the Creature from the Black Lagoon, directed much of the underwater photography, and the scenes of divers, sharks, submerged aircraft and hidden bombs are beautifully shot in clear Caribbean water.

The climax is a massive underwater battle between SPECTRE’s frogmen and American aquanauts, with spear guns, knives and underwater sleds. It’s an extraordinary achievement for 1965, and it’s also the film’s biggest problem. Underwater, everything moves slowly, the combatants all look alike in their masks and wetsuits, and there’s no sound except the music. After several minutes, the battle becomes hard to follow and harder to care about.

The film’s underwater effects earned it the Academy Award for best visual effects, and the sequences are worth seeing for their ambition. They also explain why many viewers find Thunderball slow: a large portion of its running time is spent watching swimmers, and patience wears thin by the final battle.

The Title Song

The theme song was the subject of a last-minute change. The producers originally commissioned a song called Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, recorded by Shirley Bassey and then Dionne Warwick, but United Artists wanted a song with the film’s title in it. John Barry and Don Black wrote Thunderball in a hurry, and Tom Jones recorded it, famously holding the final note so long that he reportedly fainted in the recording booth.

The song is big, brassy and dramatic, a perfect fit for Jones’s voice and the film’s scale. Barry’s score is one of his most lush, with the Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang melody woven through it as a romantic theme, and it gives the underwater scenes a grandeur they sometimes lack on their own.

Sharks in the Pool

Largo’s pool full of sharks is the image most viewers remember from the film, and it produced some of its most dangerous filming. Connery reportedly came close to real harm during the sequence in which Bond is trapped in the pool, with only a plexiglass barrier separating him from live sharks, and a gap in the barrier nearly let one through.

The shark scenes are tense and effective, and they show the series’ growing appetite for real danger on set. That commitment to practical stunts, animals and locations would become a defining feature of Bond, and Thunderball pushed it further than any earlier film. The danger was real, and you can see it on screen.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Thunderball is a film of wonderful parts that don’t quite add up. The pre-title sequence, the Shrublands clinic, Fiona Volpe, the carnival chase and the final hydrofoil race are all excellent. Between them, the pace slackens, the underwater sequences drag, and the plot, for all its nuclear stakes, never generates the tension of From Russia with Love or the fun of Goldfinger.

It’s also the moment the series began to grow heavier. The success of Goldfinger led the producers to believe bigger was always better, and Thunderball’s length, scale and spectacle point toward the excesses of You Only Live Twice. It’s the first Bond film that feels more impressive than exciting.

The Verdict in Numbers

Seven out of ten reflects a film that looks spectacular, stars Connery at his most assured and gives the series one of its greatest villainesses, but loses its grip whenever it goes below the surface. Viewers who love lush sixties glamour and underwater photography will enjoy it more than those who want a tight thriller.

For newcomers, it’s best watched after Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, as the fourth chapter of the Connery story. Seen in that order, it plays as the grand, sun-soaked peak of Bondmania, just before the series began to wobble. Its flaws belong to a franchise at the height of its confidence.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Thunderball

Thunderball earns its 7 with Connery, Fiona Volpe, the Bahamas and some of the most ambitious underwater filming of its time, and it loses points for a slow, murky finale. Take it as a gorgeous period piece, and keep the remote handy for the long swims.

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