A series by Patrick Brennan
After the small scale of For Your Eyes Only (FYEO), Octopussy is a return to the mid-level scale that suits Roger Moore’s Bond best. Moore’s sixth film is directed by John Glen and stars Maud Adams as the title character, Louis Jordan and Stephen Berkoff as the villains Kamal Khan and General Orlov, Kristina Wayborn as the delectable Magda, and tennis player Vijay Amritraj as ally Vijay.
Ian Fleming’s original story of the same title becomes the backstory of the Octopussy character, and the rest of the plot is wholly original and involves a jewellery smuggling scheme by the villain Kamal Khan, using Octopussy’s gang, to finance a scheme by a rogue Soviet General named Orlov.
The pre-title sequence sees Bond captured as he tries to plant a bomb at an enemy military base, later escaping using his ‘Acrostar’ mini-jet, in reality a Bede BD-5J, the world’s lightest single-engine jet.
After the title sequence with its unmemorable song ‘All Time High’, we get a strange sequence where a clown, later revealed to be 009, runs away from two knife-throwing twins named Mischka and Grischka. The twins kill 009 but not before he reaches the British embassy holding a Fabergé egg.
Fabergé eggs are incredibly ornate jewelled eggs created by Carl Fabergé for the Romanovs, the last tsars of Russia, between 1885 and their deposing by the Bolsheviks in 1917. But the one 009 was carrying is found to be a fake and Bond is tasked with recovering the real one which is up for auction at Sotheby’s.
007 engages in a bidding war for the real egg with an exiled Afghan prince named Kamal Khan, swapping the real egg for the fake one during the auction. Khan buys the fake egg and Bond, knowing Khan will still be after the real egg, follows him to India.
There he meets his contact Vijay and beats Khan in a game of backgammon, using Khan’s loaded dice against him. Later Bond and Vijay are attacked by Khan’s henchman Gobinda and his men but escape on board a Q-branch equipped tuk-tuk.
