It’s night again in Nassau, and Bond is ready for some
spying. Suited up in SCUBA gear, he swims up to Largo’s yacht.
He swims under the boat. His Geiger watch indicates that the
bombs are not onboard. Suddenly, a bad guy attacks with a harpoon gun! Bond
manages to fight him off, but in the process, alerts Largo and his men. Bond
quickly snaps a few photos of the underside of the yacht and swims away.
Largo isn’t going to just let him go, though. He has his
chief henchman, Vargas, arm himself with hand grenades and attempt to kill
Bond. Because sound is amplified underwater, every detonation practically
destroys Bond’s eardrums.
He manages to give Vargas the slip by shedding his SCUBA
tank and letting Vargas’ boat collide with it. They conclude that they hit Bond
and killed him, in spite of the complete absence of Bond’s body. Typical
henchmen.
Bond eventually swims to shore in the middle of nowhere.
Fortunately, just at that moment, a car comes past on a nearby road. Bond flags
it down and asks for a lift.
The driver is a strangely-familiar redhead. You know the
drill by now, Bond has just met an attractive woman, so he begins flirting
immediately. He introduces himself, and we finally learn the redhead’s name:
Fiona Volpe. Bond spots a ring on Fiona’s finger.
That’s SPECTRE’s logo. Bond recognises it, but doesn’t let
on. As he tries to make small talk, he cannot help but notice that the speed of
the car is steadily increasing. Fiona, it seems, likes to drive dangerously.
Bond watches with growing anxiety as the speedometer rises higher and higher.
Fiona looks devilishly pleased that she’s scaring the shit out of Bond.
Just before the car can go any faster, it screeches to a
halt. Fiona announces that they have arrived at her hotel. Bond, surprised,
tells her that it’s his hotel as well. “What a coincidence,” Fiona
replies with a smirk.
Back at the safehouse, Bond develops the photos he took.
They show that there is a secret underwater hatch on the underside of Largo’s
yacht. Bond realises that this means the whole operation took place underwater –
meaning that’s where the Vulcan is likely to be.
So Bond and Felix head off in a helicopter. They know that,
on the night the Vulcan crashed, Largo’s yacht was out for six hours.
Estimating the maximum speed of the yacht gives them a rough idea of how far
out it could have travelled, and so they search within that radius. However,
they find no sign of the sunken plane, and head back inland.
On the way, they pass Palmyra, getting a nice overhead view
of Largo’s pad.
Down below in said villa, Fiona is visiting. She’s
practicing her aim with clay pigeons, while telling Largo off for trying to
kill Bond the previous night. Bond’s death would have confirmed that the nukes
were in Nassau, bringing MI6 and the CIA down on them. She tells him to be
patient: when the time is right, she will personally kill Bond.
Later on at Palmyra, Bond turns up for his lunch date. As
he’s being shown in, he finds Domino in her swimsuit, taking a dip in a
non-shark infested pool. Of course he does.
Largo greets Bond amiably. He introduces him to Vargas, who
had attempted to kill Bond the previous night. Bond doesn’t seem perturbed by
this fact, apparently believing one should always be polite to people actively
trying to murder you. Largo says that Vargas “does not drink, does not smoke,
does not make love… what do you do, Vargas?” to which the killer looks
away, embarrassed.
Largo gives Bond a tour of the villa. They go to the clay
pigeon range, where Bond shows off his marksmanship and upstages Largo,
thoroughly irritating the villain. They visit the shark pool. Largo claims the
sharks are for marine biological purposes, while casually telling Bond that
they are Golden Grotto sharks, renowned for being vicious.
Bond is not intimidated. He spies Largo’s yacht, and asks
about it instead. Largo tells him she’s called the Disco Volante
(Italian for “flying saucer”). Bond gets him to boast about how fast she can
go, without realising why Bond is asking: the Disco Volante has a higher
top speed than Bond estimated, meaning the Vulcan could be further out than
they thought.
As they prepare to sit down for lunch, Largo makes a request
of Bond: to accompany Domino to Junkanoo, a street parade that night.
Bond accepts.
Back at Bond’s flat, Paula is chilling on the sofa, when the
door opens and Fiona Volpe walks in. Paula is suspicious, and she has right to
be. Vargas and his cohort Janni burst in and, using chloroform, capture her. Oh
dear. Well, never mind, it’s party time!
The Junkanoo is in full swing, with Bond and Domino all
dressed up and watching from a balcony. Felix arrives, however, and tells Bond
that Paula is missing. Bond figures that Largo has taken her, so he leaves
Domino with Felix while he rushes to the rescue.
Bond being Bond, his rescue plan is not exactly subtle. He
arranges for the entire island to have a power cut (as in, the whole of
Nassau, the capital city of the Bahamas) just so he can sneak in. Never mind about, say, the hospitals, or the
police, or, y’know, the enormous fucking parade that’s taking place right
now. I’m sure they can all do without electricity for a bit so Bond can
rescue the pretty girl.
So Bond sneaks into
the villa. He knocks out a guard and the power cut happens as planned. However,
Largo instructs his henchmen to switch to an emergency generator, and power is
restored to the villa about a minute later. So, congratulations Bond, you cut
the electricity to an entire city and achieved absolutely nothing by
doing so. Excellent secret agent work, there.
Anyways, Bond makes
his way into the basement of Palmyra, only to find he’s too late.
Paula, like all
agents, was provided with a cyanide pill. Rather than be forced to reveal what
she knows, she decided to sacrifice herself. So, finally, a female agent who
knows her stuff and is a decent character, rather than being something for Bond
to romance and forget about. It’s too bad she didn’t get more screen time, but
the film needed a sacrificial lamb, and she’s it.
Bond needs to get out of the villa ASAP. However, the guard
he knocked out earlier has been found, alerting Largo to his presence and
putting the guards on full alert. Bond tries to trick the guards into shooting
blindly at each other, but Largo’s too smart for that. To make matters worse,
Bond loses his gun. He gets into a struggle with a guard beside the swimming
pool (not the shark one, the normal one) and they fall into the water.
Largo sees this, and sees an opportunity. He activates a
switch, which closes the pool cover.
Bond and the thug are now trapped. Largo could leave
it at that, and have Bond drown, but he’s got something even better up his
sleeve. He throws a second switch.
Bond manages to kill the guard with a knife. He pulls out
the rebreather and fits it into his mouth, giving him (literally) breathing
space. Looking around the pool, he sees a small hatch. He swims over to it and
pulls it open.
Shit! This pool, it seems, is connected by a small tunnel to
the shark pool, and Largo has just opened said tunnel. Fortunately, the
bleeding body of the mook attracts the sharks, and Bond is able to slip past.
He climbs out of the shark pool while Largo and his men are watching the other
one. When they see no movement under the cover, they assume Bond is dead.
Because, of course, it would be far too much effort to flick that switch again
and open the pool cover to check. Nope, like the Bond villains they are, they
wander off, satisfied that the hero has been dealt with.
Before returning to Felix and Domino, Bond stops off at his
hotel room to freshen up. Three guesses as to what he finds there.
Naked lady in bath! At this point, I think Bond is surprised
anytime he goes to his room and there isn’t a sexy naked woman waiting.
This time, it’s Fiona Volpe. She’s a bit more aggressive than Bond’s usual
women, and very quickly gets Bond into bed.
After the romancing, they get dressed, Bond intending to
head back to the Junkanoo. He believes he has the upper hand, but Fiona quickly
proves otherwise:
She pulls a gun on him, and Vargas and Janni enter and
relieve him of his weapon. Bond tells Fiona he was on to her, since she’s
wearing a SPECTRE ring. He does have a point. If you’re a member of a criminal
organisation, do you really want to advertise that fact everywhere you go?
Fiona gloats that she’s successfully outsmarted Bond, but
Bond quickly counters that he only went to bed with her for the mission, and it
meant nothing to him. Fiona, likewise, hits him right where it hurts: in his
ego.
FIONA: “But of
course, I forgot your ego, Mr Bond. James Bond, who only has to make love to a
woman, and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing. She repents and
immediately returns to the side of right and virtue. But not this one. What a
blow it must have been, you having a failure.”
Bond looks dejected, but shrugs with a “can’t win ‘em all”
attitude. Fiona and her cohorts take Bond into a car, intending to bring him to
Largo.
They are held up, however, by the Junkanoo. A drunk guy
approaches the car. Bond sees an opportunity. He combines the fact that the
drunk guy is wielding a bottle of alcohol with Fiona lighting a cigarette,
causing a small fire and allowing him to escape in the confusion. He runs off
into the parade, but one of Fiona’s thugs manages to shoot him in the leg. He
limps away, trailing blood.
Fiona and the gang run through the parade, searching for
him. Bond, meanwhile, has found a cunning hiding place:
Fiona follows the blood to the float. Bond takes this as his
cue to flee, and runs down an alley. He finds an open-air club and stops in.
It goes without saying that a nearly naked lady is dancing
onstage. Bond pops into the bathroom to attend to his leg. He cleans off the
blood and ties a handkerchief around the wound. What, that’s it? I’m sure a
bullet in the leg would require medical attention, but Bond seems fine with
just a hanky. Of course, he did recently have the power cut off, so the
hospitals are probably in disarray anyway. Lack of foresight there, Bond.
Bond wanders back into the club, only to see that Largo’s
goons are standing at all the exits. How will Bond escape? Answer: he won’t,
he’ll grab a random woman and begin dancing with her. She goes along with it,
but they are immediately interrupted.
“May I cut in?” Bond has little choice, so he begins dancing
with Fiona. Bond makes light of the situation, while checking all the exits.
Meanwhile, the drumbeat in the club is building. And behind the drummers,
something moves behind a curtain.
Bond notices that Fiona and all the thugs are watching
expectantly. Something is about to happen. As the drums speed up, he looks over
and sees the gun pointed at him. In a flash, he realises what is going to
happen: just as the drumbeat hits its peak, they’ll shoot him. He pauses for a
second, and then:
At the last second, he whips Fiona round, and she takes the
bullet instead. Fortunately, the bullet both A) does not pass through her and
into Bond, and B) hits her right between Bond’s fingers, narrowly missing them.
Lucky, eh?
This moment also caused some controversy, as it is the first
time Bond has killed (either directly or indirectly) a woman. It won’t be the
last time, and future occasions will be less ambiguous, but this is
nevertheless the first time we’ve had an undisputed “bad girl” who remains a
villain throughout and is killed by Bond.
Largo’s men, seeing that the plan has failed and knowing he
won’t be pleased that Fiona has been killed, leave. Bond casually deposits
Fiona’s body at a random table, saying to the people, “Do you mind if my friend
sits this one out? She’s just dead.”
Yeah, that’s great Bond, very witty, but do you mind
forgetting the cavalier attitude for a bit and concentrating on the mission?
After all, there are less than fifteen hours to go until the
deadline.
Screencaps courtesy of
Screenmusings.org
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