For Your Eyes Only (1981)

Director: John Glen 

Cast: Roger Moore, Carole Bouquet, Topol, Julian Glover

Have I Seen it Before: Yes... There’s a stretch of time in the mid 1990s where I would watch and record any Bond film that appeared on TNT. Without those marathons, I might never have viewed some of the middle-era Roger Moore films.

Did I Like It: Now comes the part in my review of a Roger Moore Bond film where I talk about how I don’t care for him as Bond. He’s too funny, and in that preening sort of way where he thinks he’s pretty funny, too. Sort of like Dane Cook with a vodka martini and a slightly less misogynistic misanthropy. I loathe Moonraker (1979) for feeling the need to chase the Star Wars (1977) and I think his best entry is the one everyone seems to shrug at, his final entry, A View to a Kill (1985), mainly because Moore plays against type. As such, For Your Eyes Only was never in my pantheon of go-to entries to re-watch.

As I continue to read through Nobody Does It Better: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized History of James Bond I was surprised to hear everyone talk about this entry as if it was a return to the form of more Fleming-esque source material, like From Russia With Love (1963) or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969).

Then I re-ran my DVD, and I’ll be damned. This is the one where the pre-credits sequence has Bond getting his long overdue revenge on a maniacal villain complete with pet cat. We all know the fiend is Blofeld, but because the morass that became the rights to Thunderball and the larger SMERSH/SPECTRE lore, he goes unnamed. It’s a pretty good beginning to the movie, especially when its as close to coming up against Blofeld as Moore ever got.

The rest of the film is a smaller story (far smaller than the ridiculous previous entry, Moonraker) and that’s a welcome change for Moore. I do get the same sense of ennui that I feel during the last half of nearly every Moore entry (and for that matter, Brosnan as well), but even Moore’s penchant for humor worked better than it does at other times. I’ll be damned if that last moment with Margaret Thatcher talking to a parrot didn’t having me laughing, and that typing the phrase “Margaret Thatcher talking to a parrot” didn’t have me laughing all over again. So, good job, Roger Moore-era Bond. You got me.

Am I starting to like Roger Moore’s entries? Is that what happens when people get older? Will I start thinking Moonraker is actually worth my time? Surely not.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Alison Doody, Julian Glover

Have I Seen it Before: I’m reasonably sure that I did not see it in the theater when it was released. I have a weird encyclopedic memory of movies I saw from 1989-1990. I would imagine most movie buffs have such a memory of the movies they saw when they were about that age.

But I surely ran a VHS copy of this movie down to the nub in the years since. I even skipped a lecture of Chemistry 1 to go grab the trilogy (and back then, it was a trilogy) when it was first released on DVD.

Did I Like It: Back in those days, I think I might have been convinced that it was the greatest of all the Indiana Jones films. 

I don’t think that any more. I certainly don’t think it is the worst of the series, but we’ll get to that later. After both the creators and the public decided (and I believe wrongly) that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) was a failed experiment, Lucas, Spielberg and company opted for what I’m sure was a course correction to make the third film in the series more like the original Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

And the film so desperately wants to be Raiders. The story is once again about Indiana (Ford) reconciling with someone from his past by making them his partner. In Raiders, he reconnects with old lover Karen Allen, here he makes amends with his father in the form of Sean Connery. The Nazis are back in full force, which is a sentence I write with unfortunate frequency in this last half of the first decade of the 21st century. Even the font chosen for the opening titles is directed to the sole goal of making the audience feel like this is going to be like the Indy adventure that they liked at first blush.

Now, it helps that what the film lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in charm. It’s likely the missing ingredient in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). That film wants to be Raiders, too, but it doesn’t have Sean Connery giving one of the most blissfully nerdy performances of any movie star. For a screen presence that was so thoroughly contingent on machismo, making Indy’s father an aloof bookworm who fells Nazis with an umbrella, some seagulls and some well-remembered Charlemagne. It also helps that this was in the time pre-Air Force One (1997) when Ford spent a number of years sleeping through every film in which he starred. He eventually corrected this notion by the time Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and maybe we’ll get one more charming outing with Henry Jones Jr. in our future.