Action Archive

Bond hunts for two stolen nuclear warheads and comes face to face with SPECTRE’s Agent 2, Emilio Largo . By this point in the Bond series the freshness had started to dissipate but there is still much to enjoy here.

As was becoming the norm with the series, the ability to deliver your lines was a secondary requirement to appearance when casting villains and Bond girls. Both Claudine Auger as the beautiful Domino and Adolfo Celi as Emilio Largo were dubbed but Auger does what the producers wanted, namely show of her figure in a series of skimpy swimsuits, and Celi’s Largo would provide the basis for Robert Wagner’s Number 2 in the Austin Powers films.

By comparison with previous films in the series, Thunderball is a little light on action, but John Barry’s excellent score keeps the suspense mounting as it blends itself into almost every scene. And once the action does kick off we are treated to a superb undersea free-for-all, with the goodies and baddies conveniently wearing colour coded wetsuits to allow us to keep track (villains, sticking with tradition, in black and the good guys wearing orange but with white oxygen tanks). In fact it’s the undersea photography that’s the most striking part of Thunderball, giving the film more of an exotic feel than even Ms Auger could provide.

Stan Boyle, a friend of Lon McQ’s, is found badly wounded and the veteran cop is convinced local villain Manny Santiago is behind it, so he goes looking for a little payback. When he’s chastised by his superior, Ed Kosterman (Eddie Albert), for assaulting Santiago, McQ quits the force and searches for evidence that will prove Santiago was behind the murder (Boyle dies in hospital), but he discovers far more than he bargained for.

A John Wayne film directed by John Sturges is an exciting prospect but sadly the finished article failed to live up to its potential. Had they made a western together instead of a modern-day thriller things might have been different but Wayne is too old, too fat, and too out of his element in McQ for it to really work. Wayne’s westerns of the ‘70s had him, for the most part at least, aging gracefully, with his roles in Big Jake, The Cowboys, and The Shootist fitting the actor perfectly. Yet both the contemporary films he made that decade, this and Brannigan, have him playing a cop, when a man his age would have been pensioned off. Brannigan is the more fun of the two, it at least knows it’s silly and plays on that, but McQ plays it straight and is much the worse for it.