For Your Eyes Only

British secret agent James Bond is dispatched across Greece and the Italian Alps to locate a sunken naval encryption transmitter before Soviet agents can intercept the device, aligning with a vengeful crossbow-wielding daughter.

In 1981’s FOR YOUR EYES ONLY we learn that even James Bond, superspy and playboy par excellence, has his limits when it comes to romantic liaisons. A sexually attractive, young skater and would-be Olympian named Bibi, played with provocative pseudo-innocence by Lynn-Holly Johnson, puts her moves on James by jumping naked into his bed. He curtly refuses her with, “Put your clothes back on, and I’ll buy you an ice-cream.” She seems a bit too young, and, besides, her uncle asked him to keep an eye on her.

On the other hand, Bond is perfectly willing to take other risks. When invited in by a lovely woman in what seems certain to be a trap, he’s happy to play the odds in return for a potential night of pleasure. Roger Moore, back for his fifth time as Bond, dresses more casually in this outing. Wearing a black turtleneck and coat, Moore has a body that makes every wardrobe fit him like a glove.

As the show opens, a control boat with a key device that gives directions and firing orders to British subs is sunk. Someone needs to find where it went down and retrieve the secret controls. But where exactly did it sink, and which group is responsible?

As Melina, the daughter of parents murdered earlier, Carole Bouquet plays Bond’s aid and one of his many romantic companions. Bibi’s “uncle” Kristatos, underplayed by Julian Glover, turns out to be this episode’s bad guy. Without a credible villain or a suitably sinister plot, the show drifts more than it excites.

In the de rigueur chase sequence, the movie asks the question: Are two fast motorbikes with on-board machine guns more than a match for Bond as he escapes with just a pair of skis? If you don’t know the answer, this has to be your first Bond movie.

In one of the hokier gadgets Q (Desmond Llewelyn) ever came up with, Bond and Q employ an Identigram, which allows one to describe a person in English. After a vague description about facial features, the exact image of the person in question begins to emerge in its monitor from a sketch so crude that it looks like kindergarten art.

Continuing in its tradition of good visuals, this time our Bond travelogue takes us to the sun-drenched Greek islands with its bikini-clad women and twisting narrow streets. And after that we’re off to the ski slopes of the majestic Italian Alps, all filmed beautifully by Alan Hume.

With Kristatos’s men in hot pursuit, Bond and Melina eventually retrieve the sunken control panel. One of my favorite illogical aspects of this Bond movie, and every one of them has plenty, is that with two flashlights 600 feet underwater Bond and Melina brightly illuminate everything in front and back of them. And sure to generate a few chuckles, the attacker’s diving suit is an enormous white one that looks like the robot in the old television series, “Lost in Space.”

So what does the device that cost so many lives look like? A simple keyboard console that presumably contains some secret chips. How one misses GOLDFINGER and the early Bond films in which the gadgets had more style and imagination.

In his first theatrical film Charles Dance from MICHAEL COLLINS appears briefly to say one inconsequential line before he disappears. Despite its uneven pacing and modest gadgetry, this more restrained adventure remains an engaging chapter for 007 fans seeking a classic espionage movie to watch.

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When the British spy vessel St Georges hits a rogue naval mine and sinks in the Ionian Sea, it takes down the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator (ATAC)—an ultra-classified transmitter used by the Ministry of Defence to order Polaris submarine ballistic missile strikes. MI6 hires marine archaeologist Sir Timothy Havelock to secretly locate the shipwreck, but Havelock and his wife are assassinated by a Cuban hitman named Hector Gonzales, witnessed by their vengeful daughter Melina (Carole Bouquet).

James Bond (Roger Moore) is assigned to retrieve the ATAC before the Soviets can purchase it on the black market. While tracking Gonzales to a villa in Spain, Bond witnesses Melina assassinate the hitman with a crossbow. Escaping together, Bond follows intelligence leads to Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Alps. There, British intelligence contact Aris Kristatos (Julian Glover) frames his former wartime smuggler rival, Milos Columbo (Chaim Topol), as the mastermind behind the operation, while Bond fends off pursuit from motorbikes, ski assassins, and ice bobsled tracks.

Columbo ambushes Bond and reveals the truth: Kristatos is a double agent working directly for the Soviet KGB to secure the ATAC. Joining forces with Columbo’s smuggler crew, Bond and Melina dive deep into the wreckage of the St Georges to recover the ATAC console, surviving an assault by an armored diver and Kristatos’s surface gunboats before preparing for an assault on Kristatos’s mountaintop redoubt.