The remarkable story of 1983’s Battle of the Bonds | Little White Lies

The remark­able sto­ry of 1983’s Bat­tle of the Bonds

26 Apr 2023

Words by Mark Allison

Two men wearing black suits and bow ties, appearing in a comic book style image.
Two men wearing black suits and bow ties, appearing in a comic book style image.
Forty years ago, Roger Moore and Sean Con­nery duked it out at the box office as Octo­pussy and Nev­er Say Nev­er Again faced off on the big screen.

James Bond has fought mega­lo­ma­ni­acs across the world, but rarely has he bat­tled his most dan­ger­ous ene­my – him­self. Forty years ago, the thir­teenth Bond adven­ture (and sixth star­ring Roger Moore), Octo­pussy, faced com­pe­ti­tion from a rival 007 pic­ture: the unof­fi­cial” Nev­er Say Nev­er Again. A remake of 1965’s Thun­der­ball, this pre­tender to the Bond throne had an ace up its sleeve – a sur­prise come­back from Sean Con­nery, in his first appear­ance as Bond since quit­ting the series in 1971. But how could this happen?

The brain­child of exec­u­tive pro­duc­er Kevin McClo­ry, Nev­er Say Nev­er Again had its ori­gins in the ear­ly 1960s – before pro­duc­ers Albert R Broc­coli and Har­ry Saltz­man formed Eon Pro­duc­tions and kick­start­ed the Bond movie fran­chise as we know it today. The com­plex and lengthy legal entan­gle­ment which sur­round­ed McClory’s rival project is explored in Robert Sell­ers’ excel­lent book, The Bat­tle for Bond. As the author sum­maris­es, it was 40 years of law­suits, court cas­es, injunc­tions, betray­als, deaths and bro­ken lives.”

McClo­ry had the legal right to make an unof­fi­cial’ Bond film because pri­or to the Broccoli/​Saltzman series, the Irish film­mak­er worked with Ian Flem­ing on a pro­posed Bond pic­ture, to be called Thun­der­ball,” Sell­ers tells LWLies. When that project failed, Flem­ing used the dis­card­ed screen­play as the basis of his next Bond nov­el, but with­out the per­mis­sion of McClo­ry, who had worked on the sto­ry and con­tributed sub­stan­tial plot ideas. The Irish­man sued and won a pla­gia­rism case against the author that result­ed in a suit­case full of mon­ey and the film rights to Thun­der­ball. This is the rea­son why 1965’s Thun­der­ball is co-pro­duced by McClo­ry, and why he was able to remake the Thun­der­ball story.”

McClo­ry hand­ed the reins of his nascent Bond pic­ture to pro­duc­er Jack Schwartz­man and direc­tor Irvin Ker­sh­n­er, but the film’s unof­fi­cial” sta­tus left them in legal lim­bo. We had a great deal of prob­lems get­ting a script,” reflect­ed Ker­sh­n­er, as report­ed in Sell­ers’ book. To make a film we would have to take free­doms, and every time we tried to take free­doms Eon and Unit­ed Artists would some­how get wind of it and start to sue us that we weren’t using the book. We were kind of trapped in the mid­dle, and there was no easy way out.”

Nev­er Say Nev­er Again had access to many of the key ingre­di­ents to the Bond for­mu­la – his allies M, Q, Mon­eypen­ny, and Felix Leit­er are all present, as is the req­ui­site glo­be­trot­ting, vio­lence and sex – but Ker­sh­n­er was denied some of the most iden­ti­fi­able tropes. The open­ing gun­bar­rel sequence and Mon­ty Norman’s theme music, for exam­ple, are prop­er­ty of Eon. But the prob­lems with Nev­er Say Nev­er Again go well beyond a few miss­ing motifs; it’s a taste­less and aching­ly dull film which lacks the pol­ish or spec­ta­cle expect­ed of the Bond brand.

These fail­ings are thrown into sharp relief when com­pared with the offi­cial” Octo­pussy, pos­si­bly one of Roger Moore’s less cel­e­brat­ed Bond efforts, but nev­er­the­less a fine entry in the series. Filmed in strik­ing loca­tions from Udaipur, India, to Check­point Char­lie in West Berlin, it’s a fun Cold War thriller with a sur­pris­ing­ly down-to-earth plot, deal­ing in top­i­cal­ly Thatcherite con­cerns of Euro­pean secu­ri­ty and nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment. Moore, now a decade into his tenure as Bond, is com­plete­ly at ease in his famil­iar din­ner jack­et, while French actor Louis Jour­dan plays the vil­lain Kamal Khan with sin­is­ter sophistication.

John Glen’s unshowy direc­tion con­tin­ues the larg­er-than-life spir­it of Moore’s Bond while avoid­ing a descent into self-par­o­dy. A stand­out sequence fea­tures 007, dis­guised as a cir­cus clown, defus­ing a nuclear bomb on an Amer­i­can air force base – it sounds laugh­able, but the sin­cer­i­ty of Moore’s per­for­mance sells the moment. Mean­while, the stunt work is uni­form­ly stu­pe­fy­ing – a cli­mac­tic bout of air­borne fisticuffs atop a twin-engine plane is as impres­sive as any­thing Tom Cruise could con­jure. The sense of grandeur is bol­stered by John Barry’s stir­ring score and Peter Lamont’s opu­lent pro­duc­tion design, to which the non­de­script loca­tions of Nev­er Say Nev­er Again have no response.

Octo­pussy show­cas­es orig­i­nal, ground-break­ing action in air and on land, with stunt­men stand­ing in for the 55-year-old Roger Moore, while dou­bling down on Eon tropes, par­tic­u­lar­ly Mon­ty Norman’s James Bond theme,” Ajay Chowd­hury, co-author of Some Kind of Hero: The Remark­able Sto­ry of the James Bond Films, tells LWLies. Nev­er Say Nev­er Again show­cas­es its most expen­sive spe­cial effect; the return­ing Sean Con­nery, who is kept front and centre.”

Two people, a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a black dress, standing together in a room.

Oth­er than Connery’s typ­i­cal­ly elec­tric screen pres­ence, how­ev­er, Nev­er Say Nev­er Again is a curi­ous­ly anaemic film. Kershner’s direc­tion is lan­guid, while the script is mud­dled and betrays a poor under­stand­ing of Bond and his appeal. Connery’s age­ing 007 is less of a prob­lem­at­ic wom­an­is­er and more of an out­ward­ly creep­ing letch, at one point dis­guis­ing him­self as a masseuse in order to grope Kim Basinger.

Efforts to cap­ture the eight­ies zeit­geist also do the film no favours, from the war­bling synths of Lani Hall’s title song to a frankly baf­fling scene in which the vil­lain, Max­i­m­il­ian Largo, chal­lenges Bond to a duel over an arcade game. Com­pare this tedious con­fronta­tion with the cor­re­spond­ing episode in Octo­pussy, in which Bond out­wits Kamal Khan in a game of backgam­mon – it’s drenched in the heady blend of ele­gance and dan­ger for which the Bond films are celebrated.

Nev­er Say Nev­er Again proved it was nev­er Con­nery or any lead actor as Bond who cre­at­ed that movie mag­ic,” Mark O’Connell, author of Catch­ing Bul­lets: Mem­oirs of a Bond Fan, tells LWLies. Octo­pussy has a sense of orig­i­nal craft, fan­ta­sy, style, scope, pre­sen­ta­tion and swag­ger about it. Nev­er Say Nev­er Again always feels like a curi­ous TV movie – re-dress­ing exist­ing loca­tions rather than build­ing its own, swap­ping Europe’s finest movie tai­lor­ing for Bond in a pair of ill-fit­ting dun­ga­rees and com­mis­sion­ing a score that sounds like a jazzer­cise ses­sion rather than the lush strings and brass of John Bar­ry. It does, how­ev­er, have its plus points – Bar­bara Carrera’s deli­cious vix­en Fati­ma Blush, Klaus Maria Brandauer’s bril­liant­ly bland vil­lain Largo and, yes, the return of Connery.

Yet, Nev­er Say Nev­er Again rarely feels the sum of its parts. Shot by the cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er of Raiders of the Lost Ark, cos­tumed by the man who dressed Blade Run­ner and direct­ed by the guy that helmed The Empire Strikes Back, it lacks the col­lec­tive sheen of those tal­ents.” In the end, the bet­ter film won, with Octo­pussy tak­ing $182 mil­lion at the glob­al box office against Nev­er Say Nev­er Again’s (still impres­sive) $159 million.

It would take more than a fresh­ly bewigged Con­nery to over­come the well-honed pro­fes­sion­al­ism which has always raised Eon’s Bond series above its com­peti­tors and imi­ta­tors. But the real win­ner of the con­fronta­tion was the show­biz press, who rev­elled in this bat­tle of the Bonds. Con­nery and Moore were good friends. The 1983 rival­ry’ was noth­ing more than a great, obvi­ous piece of PR – with Nev­er Say Nev­er Again arguably rid­ing the coat­tails of Moore’s momen­tum as Bond,” says O’Connell.

Beyond its qual­i­ties as a film, there’s a cyn­i­cism to Nev­er Say Nev­er Again which leaves a bit­ter taste. It stands on the shoul­ders of a giant, rely­ing on brand recog­ni­tion in order to prof­it from an icon which oth­ers had spent decades build­ing. It pre­dicts the recent trend for reboots, sequels and cin­e­mat­ic uni­vers­es”. Look­ing at the lat­est cycle of live action” Dis­ney remakes, for exam­ple, from Ken­neth Branagh’s Cin­derel­la to Rob Marshall’s upcom­ing Lit­tle Mer­maid, it’s dif­fi­cult to see much cre­ative impe­tus beyond the desire to make a quick buck from exist­ing intel­lec­tu­al property.

When Kevin McClo­ry died in 2006, his Bond rights were swift­ly secured by Eon, bring­ing the messy saga to a con­clu­sion. But 40 years on from the bat­tle of the Bonds, com­pet­ing fran­chise films may yet become a famil­iar sight in Hol­ly­wood, as more lit­er­ary char­ac­ters go into the pub­lic domain. The recent Win­nie the Pooh: Blood and Hon­ey is a vivid demon­stra­tion of what’s pos­si­ble when clas­sic movie stu­dio prop­er­ties fall out of copy­right, with Bond him­self cur­rent­ly sched­uled to go pub­lic in 2035. It seems there are plen­ty of law­suits, betray­als and bro­ken lives still to come.

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