Movies: Bondomania

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York World's Fair—but there is also Pussy Galore, to say nothing of Tilly Masterson and her gilded sister Jill, Tatiana Romanova, and Honeychile Rider.

Bubbles by the Reef. Currently completing the next Bond film, Thunderball, in Nassau and London, Co-Producer Kevin McClory predicts: "In this film, James Bond will be a bigger superman than he has ever been before, bigger than he ought to be." To make sure the film tops fantasy, $1,500,000 is being sunk into underwater effects alone, including a drowned Vulcan bomber, a two-man sub with mock-up atom bombs (stenciled "Handle like eggs") tucked under its manta-ray wings, eight SPECTRE henchmen skimming through the water on jet-powered underwater scooters. There will even be underwater sex, although all the cameras will show is bubbles merging by a reef.

Such goings on have had Nassau in an uproar for weeks. The company staged an out-of-season Junkanoo carnival parade for background shots that laid up half the island with hangovers, invited over the whole jet set from Palm Beach for other background shots, and built the "Kiss Kiss Club" on Huntington Hartford's Paradise Island with such style that one old Nassauvian remarked, "Best damned nightclub on the island. They should have left it there." But it all left Connery himself on the blah side. "There's an awful lot of this stuff," he groused. "Next they'll be making Son of . . . It's got so one needs the constitution of a rugby player."

Clobbered Widow. Nor is Connery backward about claiming that he has helped the James Bond image along no end. "You must realize," he says, "that Ian Fleming's books began coming out after the war and rationing and all that, and they had all this selectivity of detail of eating and drinking. It was marvelous journalism. But Ian told me it was nothing but padding. You know, vodka must be shaken and not stirred, that kind of razzmatazz. But he did write with a bit of size." The only thing the Fleming books lacked, in Connery's view, was a sense of humor. "I discussed it with Ian, and he thought there was humor in them. But Terence Young and I did not. So we injected some."

Director Terence Young agrees, "In a Bond film you aren't involved in cinema verite or avantgarde. One is involved in colossal fun." Just what turn the fun can take is indicated by Thunderball's top-secret opening sequence. There, in rapid order, Bond clobbers a widow ("she" turns out to be a man), strangles him (her) with a fireplace poker, then escapes from the balcony with the aid of a jet-powered backpack, and finally drives off in his Aston-Martin with a blonde.

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