James Bond Declassified: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

Roger Moore gets it right for the last time

File #12: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

This series will trace the cinema history of James Bond, while also examining Ian Fleming's original novels as source material and examining how faithful (or not) the films have been to his work.

Directed by John Glen
Screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson

CHARACTERS / CAST

James Bond / Roger Moore
Melina Havelock / Carole Bouquet
Milos Columbo / Topol
Aristotle Kristatos / Julian Glover
Bibi Dahl / Lynn-Holly Johnson
Countess Lisl von Schlaf / Cassandra Harris
Emilie Locque / Michael Gothard
Bill Tanner, MI6 Chief of Staff / James Villiers
Q / Desmond Llewelyn
Miss Moneypenny / Lois Maxwell

I went back and forth and back and forth about this.

Roger Moore kind of kicked my ass. He always does. Pierce Brosnan, too. As much as I love James Bond, when I’m doing a marathon of the whole series, there are definitely two eras where it starts to become a real problem for me. The mere thought of the last few films in the Roger Moore run of James Bond films was enough to create a feeling of near-total paralysis on my part, and this series took a hit because of it.

I considered consolidating everything else that Moore made into one column. I even wrote a version of it. But that feels like a betrayal of the original idea of this column, so I’m going to back up and do this the right way. You guys waited long enough, patiently enough, and I owe you the whole series. From now on, you can expect to see these on the 7th of each month until we get the entire thing done. That means you’ve got another year of Bond here on the site, and by that time, I suspect Eon will have made some announcements about where the series is going.