Despite the silliness and overt innuendo of its name, Octopussy revitalizes a franchise that got stuck in the mire of Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only. Roger Moore’s age doesn’t do an about face and revert to the Manhattan-street car chases of Live and Let Die, but there is a noir style here not felt since the Connery days of From Russia with Love. The mood throughout is dark and the theme more adroitly political.
Whereas Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only relied much more on perpetual action sequences, Octopussy creates layers of subversion, beginning with counterfeit Farberge eggs and ending with a potential nuclear attack on NATO forces.
Certainly, the third act ending up in a circus tent could be a deterrent to some viewers, but there’s a cleverness here, one that revolves around value. Circus performers and their nomadic essence, are castoffs, their identities embroiled in the characters they portray. Replete with makeup and costumes, the performers are agents of entertainment and perpetuators of fantasy.
And the similarities drawn between the clowns, their ilk, and the British secret agents of 00 are fascinating. Before Bond dons a clown costume, his colleague, 009, disguises himself as a clown before he is taken down by a knife-hurling twin in East Berlin.
But they themselves are already in disguise, their identities occluded by the numbers that designate them. Bond is moreover a clown than his fallen comrade, whose only existence we know because of his death. The life of Bond initially appears one of action and conquest, but in a film like Octopussy, he is exposed as a shill, in this case a rube for Octopussy, whose enchanting he can’t escape, but whose presence he can’t keep as she easily slips out of his grasp – and his bed.
True to form, Bond beds the mysterious Ocotopussy by the end of the film, this too ties him closer to the life of a clown. After his conquest, over which Octopussy finds as much joy in non-commitment, he will move on to another adventure, engage with stock villains, and meet new people, all of whom he should never encounter again. If he does, then he hasn’t done his job.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into Octopussy. Perhaps the previous two films made me thirst for something deeper than a script written by sifting through a paper shredder.
Or perhaps the near-end of Roger Moore’s run as James Bond truly shows the essence of Bond: a loner, a man whose nomadic ways so obscures his identity that he merely is going through the motions. And perhaps this, in two films, is why The Living Daylights changes course.
