The quintessential Bond movie of the Roger Moore era is without a doubt The Spy Who Loved Me. It is certainly the best one he made with a capable Bond Girl by his side and a couple memorable villains. It also had some fantastic stunts and action sequences with a fantastically daft story to match. In a nutshell, it's just plain fun.
James Bond (played by Roger Moore) is tasked with looking into the disappearance of two missing nuclear submarines, one British and one Russian. Bond learns there are plans for a highly advanced submarine tracking system up for sale in Egypt. So, off to Cairo he goes and in the process of his investigation crosses paths with Russian KGB Agent Major Anya Amasova (played by Barbara Bach) who is investigating the same missing subs for the Russian government. Unknown to either of them at the time, Bond is actually responsible for the death of Anya's boyfriend when he ambushed Bond at the beginning of the film in Austria. The two team up to track down the microfilm and wind up encounter a nasty customer known as Jaws (played by Richard Kiel), an intimidatingly tall assassin with steel teeth. Narrowly escaping him with the microfilm retrieved, the two are officially partnered by their respective superiors who have agreed to a truce. The investigation leads the two agents to Karl Stromberg (played by Curt Jurgens), who intends to trigger World War III and then rebuild a new civilization under the sea.
This entry in the Bond series is one of my favorites. It's perfectly paced with an exciting and intriguing story. Moore has settled in and really found the groove for his rendition of Bond and Barbara Bach is the perfect pairing for him as Anya. She's a perfectly capable agent on her own, although maybe not quite as good as Bond. The film also has a couple iconic villains with Jaws dominating the film and becoming so popular he would turn up again in the next film, Moonraker. In the long line of Bond villains, I'm not sure anyone is quite as far off the reservation as Karl Stromberg. The idea of destroying civilization and then creating his own under the sea is so completely nuts, it makes some of the others seem almost reasonable in comparison. Although he somehow figured out how to have an open and apparently wood burning fireplace on his submersible sea base named Atlantis, so clearly the man is brilliant in addition to being completely insane.
The film has a number of fantastic action sequences as well with the best and most memorable one coming right at the beginning. In a sequence originally suggested by George Lazenby for On Her Majesty's Secret Service but was unable to be used then due to not having the right equipment to shoot it, Bond skis down a mountain in Austria while trying to escape an ambush of enemy agents, including Anya's boyfriend, and ski's off a cliff. Soon, a parachute opens (designed to look like the Union Jack no less) and Bond drifts off to safety as the title sequence and Carly Simon's iconic title song, "Nobody Does it Better" begins. Of course, it's also worth mentioning Bond's new car, a Lotus Esprit, he obtains from Q (played by Desmond Llewelyn), which has among it usual refinements submersible capabilities.
The film's story and plot work well, despite certain elements being recycled from a previous Bond film, You Only Live Twice, with the methods Stromberg uses to hijack the two submarines being remarkably similar to how SPECTRE hijacked the to space shuttles in that film, as well as plotting to incite war between the Western Allies and Russia. But the underlying plot point between James and Anya and the fact that Bond killed her boyfriend is a nice touch. We as the audience know this from the beginning and are just waiting for these two to figure it out. When she does, she promises Bond she will kill him when the mission was over. To say she gets over this grudge quickly is really saying something and maybe the one inconsistency in her character. She is in so much grief that she swears vengeance but then when she gets her chance, she forgives and goes to bed with her boyfriend's killer instead. To say the least, she gets over it in record time.
Despite this, The Spy Who Loved Me remains Roger Moore's best Bond movie. It has the right balance of action, drama and light moments, including maybe my favorite double entendre in the series. It really is a blast from beginning to end.
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