Moonraker (1979) is the
eleventh spy film in the James Bond series, and the fourth to star
Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. The third and
final film in the series to be directed by Lewis Gilbert, it co-stars
Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Corinne Cléry, and Richard
Kiel. Bond investigates the theft of a space shuttle, leading him to
Hugo Drax, the owner of the shuttle's manufacturing firm. Along with
space scientist Dr. Holly Goodhead, Bond follows the trail from
California to Venice, Rio de Janeiro, and the Amazon rainforest, and
finally into outer space to prevent a plot to wipe out the world
population and to re-create humanity with a master race. The end
credits for the previous Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, said,
"James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only"; however,
the producers chose the novel Moonraker as the basis for the next
film, following the box office success of the 1977 space-themed film
Star Wars. For Your Eyes Only was subsequently delayed and ended up
following Moonraker in 1981.
Moonraker
was intended by its creator Ian Fleming to become a film even before
he completed the novel in 1954, since he based it on a screenplay
manuscript he had written even earlier. The film's producers had
originally intended to film For Your Eyes Only, but instead chose
this title due to the rise of the science fiction genre in the wake
of the Star Wars phenomenon. Budgetary issues caused the film to be
primarily shot in France, with locations also in Italy, Brazil,
Guatemala and the United States. The soundstages of Pinewood Studios
in England, traditionally used for the series, were only used by the
special effects team.
Moonraker was noted for its
high production cost of $34 million, spending almost twice as much
money as predecessor The Spy Who Loved Me, and it received very mixed
reviews. However, the film's visuals were praised, with Derek
Meddings being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual
Effects, and the film eventually became the highest grossing film of
the series to date with $210,300,000 worldwide, a record that stood
until 1995's GoldenEye.
Moonraker was the third
novel by Ian Fleming and was first published by Jonathan Cape on
April 5th 1955, bearing a cover based on Fleming's own concept. Set
completely in England, the story has two halves: the first concerns a
battle over a game of bridge in London's clubland between Bond and
industrialist Sir Hugo Drax, while the second follows Bond's mission
to stop Drax from destroying London with a nuclear weapon. The book
played on a number of fears of the 1950s, including the V-2 rocket,
the re-emergence of Nazism, the menace of Soviet communism and the
'threat from within'. There have been a number of adaptations of
Moonraker, including a broadcast on South African radio in 1956
starring Bob Holness and a comic strip that appeared in the Daily
Express in 1958. Though the novel's name was used in the film, the
story was significantly changed from the book so as to include
excursions into space.
The story from Fleming's
novel is almost entirely dispensed with, and little more than the
name of Hugo Drax (above) was used, in favour of a film more in
keeping with the era of science fiction. The 2002 Bond film Die
Another Day makes further use of some ideas and character names from
the novel. Tom Mankiewicz wrote a short outline for Moonraker that
was mostly discarded. According to Mankiewicz, footage shot at Drax's
lairs was considerably more detailed than the edited result in the
final version. The crew had shot a scene with Drax meeting his
co-financiers in his jungle lair and they used the same chamber room
below the space shuttle launch pad that Bond and Goodhead eventually
escape from. This scene
was shot but later cut out. Another scene involving Bond and
Goodhead in a meditation room aboard Drax's space station, was shot
but never used in the final film. However, press stills were released
of the scene which featured on Topps trading cards in 1979 as was a
cinema trailer which featured a close-up of Jaws reaction after Bond
punches him in the face aboard the space station, neither of which
featured in the complete film. Some scenes from Mankiewicz's script
were later used in subsequent films, including the Acrostar Jet
sequence used in the pre-credit sequence for Octopussy, and the
Eiffel Tower scene in A View to a Kill.
In March 2004 an Internet
hoax stated rumours about a lost 1956 version of Moonraker by Orson
Welles, and a James Bond web site repeated it on April Fool's Day in
2004 as a hoax. Supposedly, this recently discovered lost film was 40
minutes of raw footage with Dirk Bogarde as Bond, Welles as Drax, and
Peter Lorre as Drax's henchman. A film poster was created displaying
the actors and the title of the film. The screenplay of Moonraker
differed so much from Ian Fleming's novel that Eon Productions
authorised the film's screenwriter, Christopher Wood to write a
novelization; this would be his second Bond novelization. It was
named James Bond and Moonraker to avoid confusion with Fleming's
original novel Moonraker. It was published in 1979, with the film's release.
Untitled
French
actor Michael Lonsdale was cast as Hugo Drax and Corinne Cléry
for the part of Corinne Dufour, given that the film was produced in
France. American actress Lois Chiles (above with Roger Moore) had
originally been offered the role of Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved
Me (1977), but had turned down the part when she decided to take
temporary retirement. Chiles was cast as Holly Goodhead by chance,
when she was given the seat next to Lewis Gilbert on a flight and he
believed she would be ideal for the role as the CIA scientist. Drax's
henchman Chang, played by Japanese aikido instructor Toshiro Suga,
was recommended for the role by executive producer Michael G. Wilson,
who was one of his pupils. In Moonraker, Wilson also continued a
tradition in the Bond films he started in the film Goldfinger where
he has a small cameo role. He appears twice in the film, first as a
tourist outside the Venini Glass shop and museum in Venice, then at
the end of the film as a technician in Drax's control room.
The
Jaws character, played by Richard Kiel (pictured at right with his
petit co-star) makes a return, although in Moonraker the role is
played more for comedic effect than in The Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws was
intended to be a villain against Bond to the bitter end, but director
Lewis Gilbert stated on the DVD documentary that he received so much
fan mail from small children saying "Why can't Jaws be a goodie
not a baddie", that as a result he was persuaded to make Jaws
gradually become Bond's ally at the end of the film.
Diminutive French actress
Blanche Ravalec (right), who had recently begun her career with minor
roles in French films such as Michel Lang's Holiday Hotel (1978) and
Claude Sautet's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film nominee,
A Simple Story (1978), was cast as the bespectacled Dolly, the
girlfriend of Jaws. Originally, the producers were dubious about
whether the audience would accept the height difference between them,
and only made their decision once they were informed by Richard Kiel
that his real-life wife was of the same height. Lois Maxwell's
22-year old daughter, Melinda Maxwell, was also cast as one of the
"perfect" human specimens from Drax's master race.
Production began on August
14th 1978. The main shooting was switched from the usual 007 Stage at
the Pinewood Studios to France, due to high taxation in England at
the time. Only the cable car interiors and space battle exteriors
were filmed at Pinewood. The massive sets designed by Ken Adam were
the largest ever constructed in France and required more than 222,000
man-hours to construct (roughly 1000 hours by each of the crew on
average). They were shot at three of France's largest film studios in
Épinay and Boulogne-Billancourt. 220 technicians used 100
tonnes of metal, two tonnes of nails and 10,000 feet of wood to build
the three-story space station set at Eponay Studios. The elaborate
space set for Moonraker holds the world record for having the largest
number of zero gravity wires in one scene. The Venetian glass museum
and fight between Bond and Chang was shot at Boulogne Studios in a
building which had once been a World War II Luftwaffe aircraft
factory during Germany's occupation of France. The scene in the
Venice glass museum and warehouse holds the record for the largest
amount of break-away sugar glass used in a single scene.
Drax's mansion, set in
California, was actually filmed at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte,
about 55 kilometres (34 mi) southeast of Paris, for the exteriors
and Grand Salon. The remaining interiors, including some of the
scenes with Corinne Defour and the drawing room, were filmed at the
Château de Guermantes.
AV
CLUB FEATURETTE DEPARTMENT
Untitled
In this, the 11th outing of
agent 007, Moore is on the trail of a wealthy industrialist who plans
to poison the human race from the safety of his own private space
station. Add
Moonraker to your DVD collection.
Much of the film was shot
in the cities of London, Paris, Venice, Palmdale, California, Port
St. Lucie, Florida, and Rio de Janeiro. The production team had
considered India and Nepal as a location in the film but on arriving
at those places to investigate, they found that it was inconceivable
to write them into the script, particularly with time restrictions to
do so. They decided on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, relatively early on, a
city that Cubby Broccoli had visited on vacation, and a team was sent
to that city in early 1978 to capture initial footage from the
Carnaval festival, which featured in the film.
At the Rio de Janeiro
location, many months later, Roger Moore arrived several days later
than scheduled for shooting due to recurrent health problems and an
attack of kidney stones that he had suffered while in France. After
arriving in Rio de Janeiro, Moore was immediately whisked off the
plane and went straight to hair and make-up work, before re-boarding
the plane, to film the sequence with him arriving as James Bond in
the film. Sugarloaf Mountain was a prominent location in the film,
and during filming of the cable car sequence in which Bond and
Goodhead are attacked by Jaws during mid-air transportation high
above Rio de Janeiro, the stuntman Richard Graydon slipped and
narrowly avoided falling to his death. For the scene in which Jaws
bites into the steel tramway cable with his teeth, the cable was
actually made of liquorice, although Richard Kiel was still required
to use his steel dentures.
Iguazu Falls was a natural
location depicted in the film, although as stated by "Q" in
the film, the falls were intended to be located somewhere in the
upper basin of the Amazon River rather than where the falls are
actually located in the south of Brazil. The second unit had
originally planned on sending an actual boat over the falls. However
on attempting to release it, the boat became firmly embedded on rocks
near the edge. Despite a dangerous attempt by helicopter and rope
ladder to retrieve it, the plan had to be abandoned, forcing the
second unit to use a miniature at Pinewood instead. The exterior of
Drax's pyramid headquarters in the Amazon rain forest near the falls
was actually filmed at the Tikal Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The
interior of the pyramid, however, was designed by Ken Adam at a
French studio, in which he purposefully used a shiny coating to make
the walls look plastic and false. All of the space centre scenes were
shot at the Vehicle Assembly Building of the Kennedy Space Center,
Florida, although some of the earlier scenes of the Moonraker
assembly plant had been filmed on location at the Rockwell
International manufacturing plant in Palmdale, California.
The early scene involving
Bond and Jaws in which Bond is pushed out of the aircraft without a
parachute took weeks of planning and preparation. The skydiving
sequence was coordinated by Don Calvedt under the supervision of
second unit director John Glen. As Calvedt and skydiving champion
B.J. Worth developed the equipment for the scene, which included a
1-inch-thick (25 mm) parachute pack that could be concealed beneath
the suit to give the impression of the missing parachute, and an
equipment to prevent the freefalling cameraman from suffering
whiplash while opening his parachute, they brought in stuntman Jake
Lombard to test it all. Lombard eventually played Bond in the scene,
with Worth as the pilot from which Bond takes a parachute, and Ron
Luginbill as Jaws. Both Lombard and Worth would become regular member
of the stunt team for aerial sequences in later Bond films. When the
stunt men opened their parachutes at the end of every shoot,
custom-sewn velcro costume seams would separate to allow the hidden
parachutes to open. The skydiver cinematographer used a lightweight
Panavision camera, bought from an old pawn shop in Paris, which he
had adapted, and attached to his helmet to shoot the entire sequence.
The scene took a total of 88 skydives by the stuntmen to be
completed. The only scenes shot in studio were close-ups of Roger
Moore and Richard Kiel.
Since
NASA's Space Shuttle program had not been launched, Derek Meddings
and his miniatures team had to create the rocket launch footage
without any reference. Shuttle models attached to bottle rockets and
signal flares were used for takeoff, and the smoke trail was created
with salt that fell from the models. The space scenes were done by
rewinding the camera after an element was shot, enabling other
elements to be superimposed in the film stock, with the space battle
needing up to forty rewinds to incorporate everything.
For the scene involving the
opening of the musical electronic laboratory door lock in Venice,
producer Albert R. Broccoli requested special permission from
director Steven Spielberg to use the five-note melody from his film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). In 1985, Broccoli would
return the favour by fulfilling Spielberg's request to use the James
Bond theme music for a scene in his film, The Goonies (1985).
Moonraker was the third of
the three Bond films for which the theme song was performed by
Shirley Bassey (following Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever). Kate
Bush and Frank Sinatra were both considered for the vocals, before
Johnny Mathis was approached and offered the opportunity. However
Mathis, despite having started recording with Barry, was unable to
complete the project, leaving producers to offer the song to Ms.
Bassey just weeks before the premiere date in England. Bassey made
the recordings with very short notice and as a result, she never
regarded the song 'as her own' as she had never had the chance to
perform it in full or promote it first. The film uses two versions of
the title theme song, a ballad version heard over the main titles,
and a disco version over the closing titles. Confusingly, the United
Artists single release labelled the tracks on the 7" single as
"Moonraker (Main Title)" for the version used to close the
film and "Moonraker (End Title)" for the track that opened
the film. The song made little impact on the charts.
The
soundtrack of Moonraker was composed by John Barry and recorded in
Paris, again, as with production, marking a turning point away from
the English location at CTS Studios in London. The score also marked
a turning point in John Barry's output, abandoning the Kentonesque
brass of his earlier Bond scores and instead scoring the film with
slow, rich string passages – a trend which Barry would continue
in the 1980s with scores such as Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time.
For Moonraker, Barry uses for the first time since Diamonds Are
Forever (1971) a piece of music called 007, the secondary Bond theme
composed by Barry which was introduced in From Russia with Love
during Bond's escape with the Lektor. Barry also made use of
classical music passages in the film. For the scene where Bond visits
Drax in his chateau, Drax plays Frédéric Chopin's
Prelude no. 15 in D-flat major (op. 28), "Raindrop" on his
grand piano (although he plays in the key of D major).
Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka by Johann Strauss II was featured during the
hovercraft scene on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and Tchaikovsky's
"Romeo and Juliet Overture" was used for the scenes in
Brazil in which Jaws meets Dolly following his accident. Other
passages pay homage to earlier films including Richard Strauss's Also
Sprach Zarathustra (op. 30), associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey)
with the hunting horn playing its distinctive first three notes,
Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven when Bond appears
on horseback in gaucho clothing at MI6 headquarters in Brazil, and
the alien-contacting theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as
the key-code for a security door as mentioned previously.
The
Italian aria "Vesti la giubba" from the Ruggero
Leoncavallo's opera "I Pagliacci", was sung in Venice,
before one of the henchmen falls to his death from a building,
landing and ruining a piano, resulting in Bond to quip the often mis-quoted
line from the film "Casablanca", "Play it Again,
Sam". Finally in 2005, Bassey sang the song for the first time
outside James Bond on stage as part of a medley of her three Bond
title songs. An instrumental strings version of the title theme was
used in 2007 tourism commercials for the Dominican Republic.
Moonraker premiered on June
26th 1979, in the United Kingdom, grossing $70,308,099 in the UK.
Three days after the UK release, it went on general release in the
US, opening in 788 cinemas. On the mainland of Europe, the most
common month of release was in August 1979, opening in the
Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden
between the 13th and 18th August. Given that the film was produced
largely in France, and it involved some notable French actors, the
French premiere for the film was relatively late, released in that
country on October 10th 1979. Moonraker grossed a worldwide total of $210,300,000.
Moonraker had a mixed
reception by critics. The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby
called Moonraker "one of the most buoyant Bond films of all.
Almost everyone connected with the movie is in top form, even Mr.
Moore. Here he's as ageless, resourceful, and graceful as the
character he inhabits." Canby subsequently said the film was,
alongside Goldfinger, the best of the series. Whilst The Globe and
Mail critic Jay Scott said Moonraker was second only to Goldfinger.
"In the first few minutes – before the credits – it
offers more thrills than most escapist movies provide in two
hours." During the title sequence, "the excitement has gone
all the way up to giddy and never comes down." Scott admired the
film's theme song and cited with approval the film's location work.
He also singled out Ken Adam's sets, dubbing them "high-tech
Piranesi." Frank Rich of Time felt "The result is a film
that is irresistibly entertaining as only truly mindless spectacle
can be. Those who have held out on Bond movies over 17 years may not
be convinced by Moonraker, but everyone else will be."
However,
some critics consider Moonraker one of the lesser films in the
series, largely due to the extent of the plot which takes James Bond
into space, some of ploys used in the film for comedic effect, and
its extended dialogue. Entertainment Weekly describing it as "by
far the campiest of all 007 movies" with "one of the worst
theme songs"; while IGN called it outlandish and said that
despite the actors "trying what they can to ground the film in
reality, the laser gun/space station finale pretty much undercuts
their efforts"; and Norman Wilner of MSN said the film just
"just flat-out sucks".
In his review of Moonraker
in 1979, the Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, while clearly
expressing his approval of the advanced special effects and Ken
Adam's extravagant production sets, criticised the pace in which the
locations of the film evolved, remarking that, "it's so jammed
with faraway places and science fiction special effects that Bond has
to move at a trot just to make it into all the scenes".
Christopher Null of Filmcritic.com said of the film: "Most
rational observers agree that Moonraker is without a doubt the most
absurd James Bond movie, definitely of the Roger Moore era and
possibly of all time". However, while he criticised the
extravagance of the plot and action sequences, he believed that this
added to the enjoyment of the film, and particularly approved of the
remark "I think he's attempting re-entry!" by "Q"
during Bond and Goodhead's orbiting of the Earth which he described
as "featuring what might be the best double entendre ever".
The
exaggerated nature of the plot and space station sequence has seen
the film parodied on numerous occasions. Of note is the Austin Powers
spoof film The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) which whilst a parody of
other James Bond films, pays reference to Moonraker by Dr. Evil's
lair in space. The scene in which Drax is shot by the cyanide dart
and ousted into space is parodied by Powers's ejection of Dr. Evil's
clone Mini-Me into outer space in the same way (left).
AV
CLUB SLIDESHOW DEPARTMENT
My Neat Stuff Slideshow - Jssor Slider, Slideshow with Javascript Source Code
scene
was shot but later cut out. Another scene involving Bond and
Goodhead in a meditation room aboard Drax's space station, was shot
but never used in the final film. However, press stills were released
of the scene which featured on Topps trading cards in 1979 as was a
cinema trailer which featured a close-up of Jaws reaction after Bond
punches him in the face aboard the space station, neither of which
featured in the complete film. Some scenes from Mankiewicz's script
were later used in subsequent films, including the Acrostar Jet
sequence used in the pre-credit sequence for Octopussy, and the
Eiffel Tower scene in A View to a Kill.
French
actor Michael Lonsdale was cast as Hugo Drax and Corinne Cléry
for the part of Corinne Dufour, given that the film was produced in
France. American actress Lois Chiles (above with Roger Moore) had
originally been offered the role of Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved
Me (1977), but had turned down the part when she decided to take
temporary retirement. Chiles was cast as Holly Goodhead by chance,
when she was given the seat next to Lewis Gilbert on a flight and he
believed she would be ideal for the role as the CIA scientist. Drax's
henchman Chang, played by Japanese aikido instructor Toshiro Suga,
was recommended for the role by executive producer Michael G. Wilson,
who was one of his pupils. In Moonraker, Wilson also continued a
tradition in the Bond films he started in the film Goldfinger where
he has a small cameo role. He appears twice in the film, first as a
tourist outside the Venini Glass shop and museum in Venice, then at
the end of the film as a technician in Drax's control room.
The
Jaws character, played by Richard Kiel (pictured at right with his
petit co-star) makes a return, although in Moonraker the role is
played more for comedic effect than in The Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws was
intended to be a villain against Bond to the bitter end, but director
Lewis Gilbert stated on the DVD documentary that he received so much
fan mail from small children saying "Why can't Jaws be a goodie
not a baddie", that as a result he was persuaded to make Jaws
gradually become Bond's ally at the end of the film.
Since
NASA's Space Shuttle program had not been launched, Derek Meddings
and his miniatures team had to create the rocket launch footage
without any reference. Shuttle models attached to bottle rockets and
signal flares were used for takeoff, and the smoke trail was created
with salt that fell from the models. The space scenes were done by
rewinding the camera after an element was shot, enabling other
elements to be superimposed in the film stock, with the space battle
needing up to forty rewinds to incorporate everything.
The
soundtrack of Moonraker was composed by John Barry and recorded in
Paris, again, as with production, marking a turning point away from
the English location at CTS Studios in London. The score also marked
a turning point in John Barry's output, abandoning the Kentonesque
brass of his earlier Bond scores and instead scoring the film with
slow, rich string passages – a trend which Barry would continue
in the 1980s with scores such as Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time.
For Moonraker, Barry uses for the first time since Diamonds Are
Forever (1971) a piece of music called 007, the secondary Bond theme
composed by Barry which was introduced in From Russia with Love
during Bond's escape with the Lektor. Barry also made use of
classical music passages in the film. For the scene where Bond visits
Drax in his chateau, Drax plays Frédéric Chopin's
Prelude no. 15 in D-flat major (op. 28), "Raindrop" on his
grand piano (although he plays in the key of D major).
Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka by Johann Strauss II was featured during the
hovercraft scene on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and Tchaikovsky's
"Romeo and Juliet Overture" was used for the scenes in
Brazil in which Jaws meets Dolly following his accident. Other
passages pay homage to earlier films including Richard Strauss's Also
Sprach Zarathustra (op. 30), associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey)
with the hunting horn playing its distinctive first three notes,
Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven when Bond appears
on horseback in gaucho clothing at MI6 headquarters in Brazil, and
the alien-contacting theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as
the key-code for a security door as mentioned previously.
The
Italian aria "Vesti la giubba" from the Ruggero
Leoncavallo's opera "I Pagliacci", was sung in Venice,
before one of the henchmen falls to his death from a building,
landing and ruining a piano, resulting in Bond to quip the often mis-quoted
line from the film "Casablanca", "Play it Again,
Sam". Finally in 2005, Bassey sang the song for the first time
outside James Bond on stage as part of a medley of her three Bond
title songs. An instrumental strings version of the title theme was
used in 2007 tourism commercials for the Dominican Republic.
However,
some critics consider Moonraker one of the lesser films in the
series, largely due to the extent of the plot which takes James Bond
into space, some of ploys used in the film for comedic effect, and
its extended dialogue. Entertainment Weekly describing it as "by
far the campiest of all 007 movies" with "one of the worst
theme songs"; while IGN called it outlandish and said that
despite the actors "trying what they can to ground the film in
reality, the laser gun/space station finale pretty much undercuts
their efforts"; and Norman Wilner of MSN said the film just
"just flat-out sucks".
The
exaggerated nature of the plot and space station sequence has seen
the film parodied on numerous occasions. Of note is the Austin Powers
spoof film The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) which whilst a parody of
other James Bond films, pays reference to Moonraker by Dr. Evil's
lair in space. The scene in which Drax is shot by the cyanide dart
and ousted into space is parodied by Powers's ejection of Dr. Evil's
clone Mini-Me into outer space in the same way (left).
