Thunderball

Thunderball (1965, directed by Terence Young) was the fourth James Bond movie, and the fourth outing with Sean Connery as 007. Building on the gadgets and over-the-top plotting of Goldfinger, this movie took the action into a whole new league.

Here are a few cool bits about the film:

007 is investigating the disappearance of nuclear weapons from a NATO plane, a plot by SPECTRE to detonate them. There's much intrigue and action, with lots of stunts, fights and chases.

In the pre-credit sequence, Bond uses a jet pack, and his Aston Martin DB5 is equipped with water cannons.

Italian actor Adolfo Celi does a great job as the villian, Emilio Largo, who's the number 2 man at SPECTRE. (All we see of Blofeld is his lap, as he strokes his cat.)

Largo's yacht, the Disco Volante, has two sections - a passenger section in the stern, and a hydrofoil that detaches from the rest of the ship. It also has underwater hatches so that Largo's henchmen can come and go to carry out his dastardly plot.

The underwater fight at the climax of the film is a great underwater action sequence. It's really the template for such large-scale battles in future Bond films.

The film was helmed by Terence Young, who had directed Dr. No and From Russia With Love.

Thunderball won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. (The FX unit was headed up by John Stears.)

It was adapted from the ninth novel in Ian Fleming's series; the novel itself though, unlike the others, was based on an original screen treatment that Fleming developed with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham.

Legal wrangling around the film rights to Thunderball eventually led, of course, to the making of Never Say Never Again in the 1980s by McClory, with Sean Connery returning to the role of Bond after a dozen years. (That was the only good thing NSNA had going for it. OK, Barbara Carrera was great too as the fanatical Fatima Blush.)

I saw Thunderball on July 2, 1978, on TV. In those days before video rentals, I had to see them on TV. (And I had been a little too young to see it 65 when it ran cinematically.)