- Song/Theme: All Time High
- Created by: John Barry and Tim Rice
- Performers: Rita Coolidge
- Who is it about?: Bond
- What's it about?: Doing so much more than falling in love
When I planned this sequence of posts I considered swapping the order of last week's post so that we'd finish with a strong song. I stuck with the original order so that we zig-zagged through time to 1983.
The film is not good. Positive aspects include Maud Adams as far more interesting Bond girl than usual and a way less creepy age gap for Moore than For Your Eyes Only. Louis Jourdan out suaves Roger Moore. Steven Berkoff intimidates the scenery into chewing itself and Berkoff is usually worth watching.
The plot makes zero sense, despite the central conceit (a Soviet-official smuggling jewellery via a circus) being an actual real scandal from the previous year.
"Much about the case, and about the reported dismissal of General Zotov, has been impossible to verify. But one Russian who claimed to have knowledge of the diamond scandal reported that Miss Brezhnev had been questioned by the police after she was implicated in the affair by Boris the Gypsy, whose real name was not known. Miss Brezhnev was said to have denied the allegation and there was no indication that she was still under investigation."
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/27/world/2-scandals-have-all-moscow-abuzz.html [apologies for the term now more widely recognized as a slur]
The circus theme means Bond has to dress as a clown. There is less plot reason as to why Bond also has to dress as a gorilla and no reason at all why Bond has to do a full-on Tarzan impression. I also can't help wondering if the circus theme was an obscure dig at John Le Carre's very un-Bond-like spy stories. The BBC TV adaptation of Smiley's People was a big hit the year before, with Alec Guinness reprising his role as George Smiley working for "the Circus" aka MI6.
The song is a schmaltzy love song with lots of eighties musical touches. Forget the lyrics and you can easily imagine this is the title song to an early 80's US sit-com/soap set in a nameless neighbourhood. Maybe the dad is an ex-spy who dresses as a clown and the mom used to run an octopus cult in India but now they've settled down and are raising 5 precocious adopted kids and annoying their neighbours General Orlov and Louis Jourdan. I'm thinking of a cross between Wandavision and Bojack Horseman's TV show. The running joke in the show is why Louis Jourdan claims to be an Afghan prince when he is clearly French and called Louis*.
Tim Rice's lyrics verge on making the song's PoV character sound self-deluded about where this relationship is going:
"I don't want to waste a waking moment
I don't want to sleep
I'm in so strong and so deep, and so are you
In my time
I've said these words before
But now I realise
My heart was telling me lies
For you they're true"
https://genius.com/Rita-coolidge-all-time-high-lyrics
As we are on our final film [not our final post] it is worth touching on the role of the iconic James Bond theme in the film. With Octopussy competing with the non-Eon produced Bond film Never Say Never Again with Sean Connery returning as Bond, the classic theme was a key piece of intellectual property the "official" Bond film could use to hammer home its authenticity.
This leads to one of the film's many weird moments. When Bond arrives by boat to visit Louis Jourdan's palace, his India-based MI6 contact is undercover as a (sigh) snake charmer. To let Bond know who he is, the agent plays the Bond theme on his musical instrument.
The Bond films have been running musical jokes referencing other movies (Lawrence of Arabia, Close Encounters and others) but here the films reference themselves and in-universe the Bond theme is something Bond himself knows and recognises as being about him.
And this completes the set of songs. However, I've a couple more posts planned to conclude the series.
Bond Songs Will Return...
*[yes, I know he is not called Louis in the film but you can't help marvel at the extent to which Bond films main faithfulness to the spirit of Ian Fleming is the quintessential English xenophobia that makes "foreign" so fungible that an actor renowned for being OTT French is cast as an Afghan prince. France, Afghanistan - they're both on the wrong side of the Channel, right?]
If you enjoyed the foregoing posts and didn't know that Bill Fairclough and John Barry both went to St Peter's School in York England (founded in 627 AD!) you are going to love this non-promotional anecdote about real spies and authors from the espionage genre whether you’re a le Carré connoisseur, a Deighton disciple, a Fleming fanatic, a Herron hireling or a Macintyre marauder and If you don't love all such things you might learn something so read on!
ReplyDeleteThere is one category of secret agent that is often overlooked … namely those who don’t know they have been recruited. For more on that topic we suggest you read Beyond Enkription (explained below) and this very current article on that topic by the ex-spook Bill Fairclough. The article can be found at TheBurlingtonFiles.org website in the News Section. The article (dated July 21, 2021) is about “Russian Interference”; it’s been read over 20,000 times. Anyway, since you seem to be interested in all things espionage we guess you’re interested in Oleg Gordievsky, so this anecdote should make for compulsory reading.
John le Carré described Ben Macintyre’s fact based novel, The Spy and The Traitor, as “the best true spy story I have ever read”. It was about Kim Philby’s Russian counterpart, a KGB Colonel named Oleg Gordievsky, codename Sunbeam. In 1974 Gordievsky became a double agent working for MI6 in Copenhagen which was when Bill Fairclough aka Edward Burlington unwittingly launched his career as a secret agent for MI6. Fairclough and le Carré knew of each other: le Carré had even rejected Fairclough’s suggestion in 2014 that they collaborate on a book. As le Carré said at the time, “Why should I? I’ve got by so far without collaboration so why bother now?” A realistic response from a famous expert in fiction in his eighties!
Gordievsky never met Fairclough, but he did know Fairclough’s handler, Colonel Alan McKenzie aka Colonel Alan Pemberton. It is little wonder therefore that in Beyond Enkription, the first fact based novel in The Burlington Files espionage series, genuine double agents, disinformation and deception weave wondrously within the relentless twists and turns of evolving events. Beyond Enkription is set in 1974 in London, Nassau and Port au Prince. Edward Burlington, a far from boring accountant, unwittingly started working for Alan McKenzie in MI6 and later worked eyes wide open for the CIA.
What happens is so exhilarating and bone chilling it makes one wonder why bother reading espionage fiction when facts are so much more breathtaking. The fact based novel begs the question, were his covert activities in Haiti a prelude to the abortion of a CIA sponsored Haitian equivalent to the Cuban Bay of Pigs? Why was his father Dr Richard Fairclough, ex MI1, involved? Richard was of course a confidant of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who became chief adviser to JFK during the Cuban missile crisis.
Len Deighton and Mick Herron could be forgiven for thinking they co-wrote the raw noir anti-Bond narrative, Beyond Enkription. Atmospherically it’s reminiscent of Ted Lewis’ Get Carter of Michael Caine fame. If anyone ever makes a film based on Beyond Enkription they’ll only have themselves to blame if it doesn’t go down in history as a classic espionage thriller.
By the way, the maverick Bill Fairclough had quite a lot in common with Greville Wynne (famous for his part in helping to reveal Russian missile deployment in Cuba in 1962) and has also even been called “a posh Harry Palmer”. As already noted, Bill Fairclough and John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) knew of each other but only long after Cornwell’s MI6 career ended thanks to Kim Philby. Coincidentally, the novelist Graham Greene used to work in MI6 reporting to Philby and Bill Fairclough actually stayed in Hôtel Oloffson during a covert op in Haiti (explained in Beyond Enkription) which was at the heart of Graham Greene’s spy novel The Comedians. Funny it’s such a small world!