Moonraker

Plot

A Drax Industries Moonraker Space Shuttle orbiter on loan to the United Kingdom is hijacked in midair while on a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. The carrier is destroyed but no wreckage of the shuttle is found. M, head of MI6, assigns James Bond, Agent 007, to investigate. En route to England, Bond is attacked and thrown out of a plane by assassin Jaws. He survives by stealing a parachute from the pilot, while Jaws lands on a trapeze net within a circus tent. At the Drax Industries spaceplane-manufacturing complex in California, Bond meets the owner of the company, Hugo Drax, and his henchman Chang. Bond also meets Dr. Holly Goodhead, an astronaut, and survives an assassination attempt while inside a centrifuge chamber. Drax's personal pilot, Corinne Dufour, helps Bond find blueprints for a glass vial made in Venice. Drax discovers her betrayal and has her chased down and killed by his Beauceron hounds.

In Venice, Bond encounters Goodhead and observes her sneaking around a door near the glass factory and is then chased through the canals by Drax's henchmen. He returns to the factory at night to investigate and discovers a secret biological laboratory and learns that the glass vials are to hold a nerve gas deadly to humans, but harmless to plants and animals. Chang attacks Bond, but Bond throws him through the stained glass clockface of the Saint Mark's clocktower, killing him; during the fight, Bond finds evidence that Drax is moving his operation to Rio de Janeiro. Rejoining Goodhead he sleeps with her having revealed that he has deduced that she is a CIA agent spying on Drax. Bond has saved one of the vials he found earlier, as the only evidence of the now missing laboratory; he gives it to M for analysis, who permits him to go to Rio de Janeiro under the pretense of being on leave.

Bond survives attacks by Jaws (Chang's replacement) during Rio Carnival and on the Sugarloaf Cable Car at Sugarloaf Mountain. After Jaws' cable car crashes, he is rescued from the rubble by Dolly, a young woman, and the two fall in love. Drax's forces capture Goodhead, but Bond escapes; he learns that the toxin comes from a rare orchid indigenous to the Amazon jungle. Bond travels the Amazon River and comes under attack from Drax's forces, before eventually locating his base. Captured by Jaws, Bond is taken to Drax and witnesses four Moonraker shuttles lifting off. Drax explains that he stole back the loaned Shuttle because another in his fleet had developed a fault during assembly. Bond and Goodhead are locked in a room under the launch platform, and narrowly escape being incinerated by the exhausts of Moonraker 5, which is carrying Drax, and then pose as pilots on Moonraker 6. The shuttles dock with Drax's space station, hidden from radar by a cloaking device.

Cast

Roger Moore as Commander James Bond "007", an MI6 agent assigned to look into the theft of a shuttle from the "Moonraker" space programme.

Lois Chiles as Holly Goodhead, an astronaut scientist on loan from NASA working at Drax Industries. She is later revealed to be a CIA agent.

Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax, an industrialist who plans to poison all humans on Earth, then repopulate the planet from his space station.

Richard Kiel as Jaws, Drax's new henchman who replaces Chang at Drax Industries. He is known for his giant stature and possessing a set of strong steel teeth.

Corinne Cléry as Corinne Dufour, Drax's personal pilot.

Emily Bolton as Manuela, 007's contact in Rio.

Toshiro Suga as Chang, Drax's first henchman.

Irka Bochenko as Blonde Beauty, Drax's lead henchwoman.

Geoffrey Keen as Frederick Gray

Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny, M's secretary.

Bernard Lee as "M", the head of MI6. This was Lee's final appearance as M.

Desmond Llewelyn as "Q", MI6's quartermaster who supplies Bond with multipurpose vehicles and gadgets useful for the latter's mission.

Anne Lonnberg as a museum guide, and Drax's henchwoman.

Jean-Pierre Castaldi as the pilot of the private jet from the opening sequence.

Production

The end credits for the previous Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, said, "James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only". However, following an increase in the popularity of science fiction such as 1977 space opera film Star Wars, the producers chose the novel Moonraker as the basis for the next film. For Your Eyes Only was postponed and ended up following Moonraker in 1981. It was intended to be released alongside the test launches of the Space Shuttle.

Script

Ian Fleming had originally intended the novel, published in 1955, to be made into a film even before he began writing it. A part of the novel was thus based on an original idea for a screenplay which had been on his mind for years. Fleming first pitched the novel to Hungarian-British film producer Alexander Korda, who had expressed interest in purchasing the rights to Live and Let Die. In 1954, Stanley Meyer attempted to purchase an option for both Live and Let Die and Moonraker, but withdrew his offer after Fleming asked for too much money. In 1955, American actor John Payne offered $1,000 for a nine-month option to Moonraker, plus $10,000 if production eventually took off. The negotiations broke up the following year because of disagreements regarding Payne's ownership of the other Bond novels caused when Fleming tried to manipulate Payne and the Rank Organisation into getting in a bidding war with each other. Fleming eventually settled with Rank Organisation, a British company who owned Pinewood Studios. Rank wound up not developing the film, even after Fleming contributed his own script trying to push production forward, and Fleming purchased the rights back in 1959.

However, as with several previous Bond films, the story from Fleming's novel is almost entirely dispensed with, and little more than the idea of Hugo Drax as an industrialist who makes rockets was used. Drax has a plan for a master race in the film, but in the novel actually had been a Nazi (unbeknownst to the British). The dramatic scene of Bond and his female companion being trapped in an exhaust duct under a rocket where they are nearly burned to death also appears. Otherwise the film is more in keeping with contemporary trends in science fiction. The 2002 Bond film Die Another Day makes further use of some ideas and character names from the novel. Tom Mankiewicz wrote a short outline for Moonraker that was mostly discarded. According to Mankiewicz, footage shot at Drax's lairs was considerably more detailed than the edited result in the final version. Some scenes from Mankiewicz's script were used in subsequent films, including the Acrostar Jet sequence, used in the pre-credit sequence for Octopussy, and the Eiffel Tower scene in A View to a Kill.

In 1978 Steven Spielberg offered to direct after the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but Albert R. Broccoli turned him down. In March 2004 rumours surfaced about a lost 1956 version of Moonraker by Orson Welles, and a James Bond web site repeated it on April Fool's Day in 2004 as a hoax. Supposedly, this recently discovered lost film consisted of 40 minutes of raw footage with Dirk Bogarde as Bond, Welles as Drax, and Peter Lorre as Drax's henchman.

Casting

Roger Moore had originally signed a three-film contract with Eon Productions, which covered his first three appearances: Live and Let Die in 1973, The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974 and The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977. From Moonraker onwards, Moore was contracted on a film-by-film basis.

Initially, the chief villain, Hugo Drax, was to be played by British actor James Mason, but once the decision was made that the film would be an Anglo-French co-production under the 1965–1979 film treaty, French actor Michael Lonsdale was cast as Drax and Corinne Cléry was chosen for the part of Corinne Dufour, to comply with qualifying criteria of the agreement. Stewart Granger and Louis Jourdan were considered also for the role of Drax. Jourdan later portrayed prince Kamal Khan, chief villain of Octopussy.

American actress Lois Chiles had originally been offered the role of Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), but had turned down the part when she decided to take temporary retirement. Chiles was cast as Holly Goodhead by chance, when she was given the seat next to Lewis Gilbert on a flight and he believed she would be ideal for the role as the CIA scientist. Jaclyn Smith was originally offered the role of Holly Goodhead but had to turn it down owing to scheduling conflicts with Charlie's Angels.

Drax's henchman Chang was played by Japanese aikido instructor Toshiro Suga; he was recommended for the role by executive producer Michael G. Wilson, who was one of his pupils. Wilson, continuing a tradition he started in the film Goldfinger, has a small cameo role in Moonraker: he appears twice, first as a tourist outside the Venini Glass shop and museum in Venice, then at the end of the film as a technician in the US Navy control room.

The Jaws character, played by Richard Kiel, makes a return, although in Moonraker the role is played more for comedic effect than in The Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws was intended to be a villain against Bond, but director Lewis Gilbert stated on the DVD documentary that he received so much fan mail from small children saying, "Why can't Jaws be a goodie not a baddie", that as a result he was persuaded to gradually transform Jaws into Bond's ally by the end of the film.

Originally Jaws's girlfriend was going to be portrayed as even taller than him, but Kiel insisted on a rewrite. Diminutive French actress Blanche Ravalec, who had recently begun her career with minor roles in French films such as Michel Lang's Holiday Hotel (1978) and Claude Sautet's A Simple Story (1978), was cast as the bespectacled Dolly, the girlfriend of Jaws. Originally, the producers were dubious about whether the audience would accept the height difference between them, and only made their decision once they were informed by Richard Kiel that his own wife was of the same height. Lois Maxwell's 22-year-old daughter, Melinda Maxwell, was also cast as one of the "perfect" human specimens from Drax's master race.

Filming

Production began on 14 August 1978. The main shooting was switched from the usual 007 Stage at the Pinewood Studios to Epinay and Billancourt Studios in France, because of the high taxation in Britain at the time. Only the cable car interiors and space battle exteriors were filmed at Pinewood. The massive sets designed by Ken Adam were the largest ever constructed in France and required more than 222,000 man-hours to construct (roughly 1,000 hours by each of the crew, on average).

Drax's mansion, set in California, was actually filmed at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, about 55 kilometres (34 mi) southeast of Paris, for the exteriors and Grand Salon. The remaining interiors, including some of the scenes with Corinne Defour and the drawing room, were filmed at the Château de Guermantes.

Much of the film was shot in the cities of London, Paris, Venice, Palmdale, California, Port St. Lucie, Florida, and Rio de Janeiro. The production team had considered India and Nepal as locations, but after scouting trips these were rejected as impractical to work into the script, particularly considering the time constraints. They decided on Rio de Janeiro relatively early on, a city that producer Albert R. Broccoli had visited on holiday, and a team was sent there in early 1978 to capture initial footage from the Carnival, which featured in the film.

At the Rio de Janeiro location, many months later, Roger Moore arrived several days later than scheduled for shooting, owing to recurrent health problems and an attack of kidney stones that he had suffered while in France, Moore previously suffered this while filming Live and Let Die in 1973. Upon arrival, Moore was immediately taken from the plane for hair and make-up work before reboarding to film the sequence with him arriving as James Bond. Sugarloaf Mountain was a prominent location, and during filming of the midair cable car sequence in which Bond and Goodhead are attacked by Jaws, stuntman Richard Graydon slipped and narrowly avoided falling to his death. For the scene in which Jaws bites into the steel cable-car cable with his teeth, the cable was actually made of liquorice, although Kiel was still required to use his steel dentures.

The Iguaçu Falls, in the south of Brazil, was used in the film, although as Q notes, the falls were supposedly somewhere in the upper basin of the River Amazon. The second unit had originally planned on sending an actual boat over the falls. However, on attempting to release it, the boat became firmly embedded on rocks near the edge. Despite a dangerous attempt by helicopter and rope ladder to retrieve it, the plan had to be abandoned, forcing the second unit to use a miniature at Pinewood instead. The exterior of Drax's pyramid headquarters in the Amazon rain forest near the falls was actually filmed at the Tikal Mayan ruins in Guatemala. The interior of the pyramid, however, was designed by Ken Adam at a French studio, in which he deliberately used a shiny coating to make the walls look plastic and false. All of the space centre scenes were shot at the Vehicle Assembly Building of the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, although some of the earlier scenes of the Moonraker assembly plant had been filmed on location at the Rockwell International manufacturing plant in Palmdale, California.

Music

The soundtrack of Moonraker was composed by John Barry and recorded in Paris, again, as with production, marking a turning point away from the prior studio, CTS Studios in London. The score also marked a turning point in John Barry's output, abandoning the Kentonesque brass of his earlier Bond scores in favor of slow, rich string passages—a trend which Barry would continue in the 1980s with scores such as Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time. For Moonraker, for the first time since Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Barry used a piece of music called "007" (on track 7), the secondary Bond theme composed by Barry and introduced in From Russia with Love during Bond's escape with the Lektor; some classical music pieces were also included.

Moonraker was the third of three Bond films for which the theme song was performed by Shirley Bassey (following Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever). Frank Sinatra was originally considered for the vocals, and Kate Bush was asked, but she declined. Johnny Mathis was approached and offered the opportunity. However, Mathis—despite having started recording with Barry—was unable to complete the project, leaving producers to offer the song to Bassey just weeks before the premiere date in England. Bassey made the recordings with very short notice and as a result, she never regarded the song 'as her own' as she had never had the chance to perform it in full or promote it first. The film uses two versions of the title theme song, a ballad version heard over the main titles, and a disco version over the closing titles. The song made little impact on the charts, reaching #159, partly attributed to Bassey's failure to promote the single, given the last-minute decision to quickly record it to meet the schedule and confusion regarding the two versions of the track, when the United Artists single release labelled the tracks on the 7" single as "Moonraker (Main Title)" for the version used to close the film and "Moonraker (End Title)" for the track that opened the film.

In 2005, Bassey sang the song for the first time outside James Bond on stage as part of a medley of her three Bond title songs. An instrumental strings version of the title theme was used in 2007 tourism commercials for the Dominican Republic.

Release and reception

Moonraker premiered on 26 June 1979 at the Odeon Leicester Square in London. It grossed an opening record for the cinema of £67,139 in its first week and was the number one film in London and went on to gross £10.7 million in the UK. Three days after the London opening, it went on general release in the US, opening in 788 theatres with 900 prints struck; it was United Artists' widest opening at the time. It grossed $14,744,718 in its first week from 900 bookings. On the mainland of Europe, the most common month of release was in August 1979, opening in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland and Sweden between 13 and 18 August. Given that the film was produced largely in France, and it involved some notable French actors, the French premiere for the film was relatively late, released in that country on 10 October 1979. It saw a record attendance of 413,314 in its first week in France. Moonraker grossed a worldwide total of $210.3 million, making it United Artists' highest-grossing film at the time, surpassing The Spy Who Loved Me.

Moonraker received a mixed reception by critics. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 59% approval rating based on 57 reviews, with an average rating of 5.50/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Featuring one of the series' more ludicrous plots but outfitted with primo gadgets and spectacular sets, Moonraker is both silly and entertaining." On Metacritic the film has a score of 66% based on reviews from 13 critics.

The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called Moonraker "one of the most buoyant Bond films of all. Almost everyone connected with the movie is in top form, even Mr. Moore. Here he's as ageless, resourceful, and graceful as the character he inhabits." Canby subsequently said the film was, alongside Goldfinger, the best of the series.

The Globe and Mail critic Jay Scott said Moonraker was second only to Goldfinger. "In the first few minutes—before the credits—it offers more thrills than most escapist movies provide in two hours." During the title sequence, "the excitement has gone all the way up to giddy and never comes down." Scott admired the film's theme song and cited with approval the film's location work. He also singled out Ken Adam's sets, dubbing them "high-tech Piranesi".

Frank Rich of Time felt "The result is a film that is irresistibly entertaining as only truly mindless spectacle can be. Those who have held out on Bond movies over 17 years may not be convinced by Moonraker, but everyone else will be."

Television

Moonraker had its US television premiere on the ABC Sunday Night Movie on 22 November 1981, during the same month ABC also featured the Sunday night television premieres of Grease and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Moonraker finished first in its 9–11 p.m. Sunday nighttime period—and fifth overall for the full week—with a Nielsen Media Research household rating of 24.2, a 39% share of audience, and nearly 40 million people watching. It was the Bond franchise's highest rating since 1978 on ABC, and would be the highest rating for a James Bond movie on ABC for the entire length of the 1980s.

Accolades

Derek Meddings, Paul Wilson and John Evans were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and the film was nominated for three Saturn Awards, Best Science Fiction Film, Best Special Effects, and Best Supporting Actor (Richard Kiel).

Mandela effect debate

Significant debate and discussion surrounds a scene in Moonraker, with some claiming it to potentially have been changed, subject to a supposed phenomenon called the Mandela effect. In one comedic scene of the film, the villain Jaws encounters a short blonde geeky woman, Dolly, who becomes his girlfriend. Jaws and Dolly are opposites, with her standing just five feet tall, while Jaws is over seven feet in height. In the scene, Jaws smiles at Dolly with his metal teeth, while she smiles back at him.

Many fans of the film claim that they recall Dolly having metal braces during her smile, in what would have been a joke about both individuals possessing metal teeth. However, in the VHS, DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film, Dolly clearly does not possess braces. Some fans believe that Dolly possessed braces in the theatrical run of the film, which have been removed since, while opponents of the theory claimed that she never possessed braces, with the notion that she did being the result of the Mandela effect. Online articles have generally agreed that braces did not exist and are the result of a Mandela effect.

Contemporary evidence (1979)

Two named contemporary critics writing shortly after the film's theatrical release directly contradict each other on the question. Film critic Charles Champlin, Arts Editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote: "Kiel...even acquires a love interest, a small, voluptuous blonde named Blanche Ravalec. It would be a relationship made in heaven if only she wore braces", implying Dolly did not have them. However, Emery Lichtenwalter of the Journal Gazette and Times-Courier wrote within weeks of this: "And call her braces galore! She has about as much hardware in her mouth as [Jaws] does", explicitly describing braces.

Pre-Mandela Effect online discussion (2000)

A May 2000 discussion on the Usenet group alt.fan.james-bond, nine years before the term "Mandela Effect" was coined, treated Dolly's braces as an established fact, with multiple users debating their narrative purpose rather than their existence.

Later sources

The braces have been reported as fact by several later sources. A 2006 Finnish television advertisement for Sampo Mini Visa Card, featuring Richard Kiel reprising his role as Jaws, was built entirely around the premise of a cashier revealing braces to Kiel, suggesting the braces were widely understood as the natural completion of the joke. A 2014 BBC News article on the death of Richard Kiel referred to Dolly as "a small, pig-tailed blonde with braces". However, Ravalec, who played Dolly, wrote in 2016 that she never wore braces during film production.