Word: largo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Largo. Occasionally Horowitz finds himself seized with a sickening stage fright. He asks the manager of one concert hall to tell the audience that Mr. Horowitz cannot appear. Tell them yourself, says the miffed manager. Horowitz tries: he goes to center stage, looks out over the blob of faces, opens his mouth-and then dashes for the safe harbor of his grand piano...
Well, nobody goes to these things looking for slices of life. Still Thunderball is unusually ridiculous, even for its genre. One might have suspended disbelief, perhaps, if its characters seemed to feel as well as act. But the sinister mastermind Largo (Adolfo Celi), his lovely but treacherous "niece" (Claudine Auger), and the slowwited CIA man Leiter (a very inadequate Rick Van Nutter) are never developed beyond the comic-book level, and Bond himself (Sean Connery again) is slick and lifeless, as always...
Thunderball spreads a treasury of wish-fulfilling fantasy over a nickel's worth of plot. The fantasy is the familiar amalgam of wholesale sex, comic-strip heroism, bogus glamour and James Bond (Sean Connery). The plot concerns Bond's new nemesis, Largo. As No. 2 man of Spectre, Largo masterminds a daring bombnap. He hijacks a Vulcan bomber aloft on a NATO training flight, sinks its atomic payload in the Atlantic near Nassau. Then, for an asking price of ?100 million, he promises not to obliterate Miami or a city of equal size...
...fisheye view from below, filtered through a victim's blood. In one donnybrook following a funeral, Bond slugs it out with the widow-actually a male adversary-and lifts himself up, up and away by backpack jet. Still more dazzling is a climactic, blue-green underwater battle between Largo's men, wearing black rubber wet suits, and the brave lads from Our Side, parachuting to the fray in flag...
Bond's dry-land conquests were somewhat zingier type in Goldfinger, but in Thunderball he manages a change of pace by joining Largo's seaworthy French playmate (Claudine Auger) for an amorous exploit down among the corals. "I hope we didn't frighten the fish," he quips afterward, wading ashore. Alas, even subaqueous sex cannot keep the formula entirely fresh. Yet, if Thunderball's gimmickry seems to overreach at times, Actor Connery gains assurance from film to film, by now delivers all his soppiest Jimcracks martini-dry. He is hilariously astringent when he drops a limp...