For Fresh Eyes Only: For Your Eyes Only (1981)

Finally, I have a film for me. All these other James Bond movies were made for the general populous, but this one? This one is For My Eyes Only. I’m a little surprised, and frankly very flattered, that they filmed an entire entry in the James Bond canon just for me. And they did it 14 years before I was even born, no less! They even named the damn thing after my own column here (referencing Harrison's column, no less), that’s how I knew for sure that it was for me. Although, I greatly appreciate this gesture, it does put me in a bit of a pickle. Surely there are millions of Bond fans the world over who would give anything to see this, a missing bit of their favorite super spy’s history. Do I upload this film to the internet for all to see and set up a GoFundMe for donations to my legal fund to fight off the Broccoli family? Do I sell the film off to the highest bidder and buy a yacht and sail away somewhere the Broccolis could never catch me? No, no. I’ll just write all about it instead and hope that that doesn’t upset them too much. 

As usual, these plots are not important at all and you could not pay me to pay attention to them, so don’t ask me, the only person who could possibly know the answer, what this was about. Something about underwater bombs or something. They went to Switzerland, I think. Or Russia. It was definitely snowy and there was a lot of skiing and skating. All I know is that it looked pretty and the location scouts deserved a raise. The entire film’s finale takes place on the top of a precarious mountain so beautiful that I rewound the movie just to look at it some more. I’ve been saying it the entire time I’ve done this column, this series’ best feature might be it’s globetrotting. Unlike the performances and action, it’s the one thing that is consistently interesting and always fun to see.  

For Your Eyes Only does happen to have some great action and performances in it, though. This is the most brutal Bond I’ve seen up to this point. There’s a car chase that ends with Bond personally kicking a car down a cliff side with a man still inside, his limp body falling out the driver’s side window and flopping on the ground, only for it to be crushed by the still falling car. The opening scene sees the return of the one big bad that this series has, Blofield (How is he back? It’s not important.) only for him and his wheelchair to be nonchalantly picked up by Bond’s helicopter legs and be plopped into a mile-high smokestack where he surely fell to his death. Bond even straight -up explodes a dude inside of a Big Daddy suit while they’re underwater searching for mines. And then at the end of the movie he has the gall to moralize to his companion Melina (Carole Bouquet) when she attempts to definitively put down the film’s villain. He’s a weird guy.

I loved the characters in this one; Melina is easily one of the most multidimensional Bond Girls in the series thus far. The main villain, Aristotle (Julian Glover), was a surprisingly more subdued Bond villain and it’s very successful. Lynn-Holly Johnson’s Bibi Dahl, a spoiled Olympic hopeful being sponsored by Aristotle, had a number of funny scenes. But without a doubt the standout is Chaim Topol as Columbo. He’s funny, charming, and he steals every scene he’s in; I only wish that he could have been in more of the movie. What a performer, and by god what a god damn mustache.

I would be amiss to not mention Sheena Easton’s wonderful theme song. The effect given when she’s singing over the film’s opening credits (another great Bond credits sequence, by the way) is nothing short of entrancing. It’s a dream.

All in all, For Your Eyes Only is a real highlight in the Bond franchise. A killer theme, fun performances, beautiful locales, gnarly action, good goofs. It really has it all, and I’m genuinely sad that I’m the only person who will ever see it. But that is the cross that I bear as the world’s number one James Bond superfan, and I can only hope that I did a good job in describing it to the rest of you. If the Broccoli’s are reading this, please don't hurt me. 

Marcus Irving will return in For Fresh Eyes Only: Never Say Never Again.