Never Say Never Again


Never Say Never Again is a 1983 spy film directed by Irvin Kershner. The film is based on the 1961 James Bond novel Thunderball by Ian Fleming, which in turn was based on an original story by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, and Fleming. The novel had been previously adapted as the 1965 film Thunderball. Never Say Never Again is the second and most recent James Bond film not to be produced by Eon Productions but instead by Jack Schwartzman's Taliafilm, and was distributed by Warner Bros. The film was executive produced by Kevin McClory, one of the original writers of the Thunderball storyline. McClory had retained the filming rights of the novel following a long legal battle dating from the 1960s.
Sean Connery played the role of Bond for the seventh and final time, marking his return to the character twelve years after Diamonds Are Forever. The film's title is a reference to Connery's reported declaration in 1971 that he would "never again" play that role. As Connery was 52 at the time of filming, the script makes frequent reference to Bond as aging and past his prime – although Connery was three years younger than his Eon Productions replacement, Roger Moore. The storyline features Bond being reluctantly brought back into action to investigate the theft of two nuclear weapons by SPECTRE. Filming locations included France, Spain, the Bahamas, and Elstree Studios in the United Kingdom.
Never Say Never Again was released by Warner Bros. on 7 October 1983, and opened to positive reviews, with critics praising the cast's performances and Connery's return to the role. The film grossed $160 million at the box office, making it a commercial success, although it earned less overall than the Eon-produced Octopussy, released earlier the same year. Retrospective reception to Never Say Never Again has been mixed, and it is considered by several critics to be one of the weaker Bond films.

Plot

After the MI6 agent James Bond fails a routine training exercise, his superior M sends him to a health clinic outside London to get back into shape. While there, Bond witnesses a nurse beating a male patient with a bandaged face. While the patient's eye is being scanned with a machine, she spots Bond. The nurse sends an assassin after Bond, but Bond kills the male assassin in a lengthy fight. An angry M is forced to pay for the damage the fight causes to the clinic, and he consequently suspends Bond from active duty.
The nurse is Fatima Blush, an agent of the criminal organisation SPECTRE, which is run by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The man she was beating is Jack Petachi, a United States Air Force pilot who has undergone an operation on his eye to make it match the retinal pattern of the US President. He uses his altered retina to authorize the replacement of dummy warheads with live nuclear warheads in two cruise missiles. SPECTRE then steals the warheads, intending to extort billions of dollars from NATO. Blush covers up the crime by murdering Petachi.
M is ordered to reactivate the double-0 section, and Bond is tasked with tracking down the missing weapons. He follows a lead to the Bahamas and finds Domino Petachi, Jack's sister, and her wealthy lover Maximillian Largo, who is SPECTRE's top agent. Bond has sex with Blush aboard her boat, after which she tries to kill him. He then follows Largo's yacht to France, where he joins forces with his CIA ally Felix Leiter and his French contact Nicole. Posing as a masseur, Bond gives a massage to Domino, who reveals that Largo is hosting a charity event that evening. At the event, Bond beats Largo at a video game and wins money from him, but says he will accept a dance with Domino instead of a check. While dancing, Bond informs Domino that her brother was killed on Largo's orders.
Returning to his villa, Bond finds Nicole killed by Blush. He pursues her, but she captures him. She then demands that he declare in writing that she was his best sexual partner. Bond pulls out a pen to write, then shoots Blush with an explosive dart from the pen.
Bond boards Largo's yacht in search of the missing warheads. He finds Domino, and attempts to make Largo jealous by kissing her. Enraged, Largo traps Bond and takes him and Domino to Palmyra, his base of operations in North Africa. Largo punishes Domino for her betrayal by offering her to a group of men, but Bond escapes from captivity and rescues her.
Bond and Domino reunite with Leiter on a US Navy submarine. After the first warhead is found and defused in Washington, D.C., they track Largo to the Tears of Allah, a location on the Ethiopian coast. Bond and Leiter infiltrate the underground facility and a gun battle ensues between Leiter's team and Largo's men. Amidst the chaos, Largo flees with the second warhead. Bond catches and fights him underwater. As Largo is about to shoot Bond with a spear gun, Domino arrives and kills him. Bond defuses the warhead, then returns to the Bahamas with Domino. He vows he will never return to MI6, but she is skeptical.

Cast

Never Say Never Again had its origins in the early 1960s, following the controversy over the 1961 Thunderball novel. Fleming had worked with independent producer Kevin McClory and scriptwriter Jack Whittingham on a script for a potential Bond film, to be called Longitude 78 West, which was subsequently abandoned because of the costs involved. Fleming, "always reluctant to let a good idea lie idle", turned this into the novel Thunderball, for which he did not credit either McClory or Whittingham; McClory then took Fleming to the High Court in London for breach of copyright, and the matter was settled in 1963. After Eon Productions started producing the Bond films, it subsequently made a deal with McClory, who would produce Thunderball, and then not make any further version of the novel for a period of ten years, following the release of the Eon-produced version in 1965.
In the mid-1970s, McClory again started working on a second adaptation of Thunderball and, with the working title Warhead, he brought writer Len Deighton together with Sean Connery to work on a script. A lawsuit with Eon Productions ended in a ruling that McClory owned the sole rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld, forcing Eon to remove them from The Spy Who Loved Me. The script initially focused on SPECTRE shooting down aircraft over the Bermuda Triangle, before taking over Liberty Island and Ellis Island as staging areas for an invasion of New York City through the sewers under Wall Street. The script was purchased by Paramount Pictures in 1978. The script ran into difficulties, after accusations from Danjaq and United Artists that the project had gone beyond copyright restrictions, which confined McClory to a film based only on the novel Thunderball; once again, the project was delayed.
Towards the end of the 1970s, developments were reported on the project under the name James Bond of the Secret Service, but when producer Jack Schwartzman became involved in 1980, and cleared a number of the legal issues that still surrounded the project, he decided against using Deighton's script. The project returned to the original nuclear terrorism plot of the original Thunderball, in order to avoid another lawsuit from Danjaq, and after McClory saw Jimmy Carter mention the issue in a 1980 presidential debate with Ronald Reagan. Schwartzman brought on board scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr. to work on the screenplay. Schwartzman wanted him to make the screenplay "somewhere in the middle" between his campier projects such as Batman, and his more serious projects such as Three Days of the Condor. Connery was unhappy with some aspects of the script, and asked Tom Mankiewicz, who had rewritten Diamonds Are Forever, to work on it; however, Mankiewicz declined, as he felt he was under a moral obligation to Albert R. Broccoli. Semple Jr. ultimately left the project, after Irvin Kershner was hired as director, and Schwartzman began cutting out the "big numbers" from his script to save on the budget. Connery then hired British television writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to undertake re-writes, although they went uncredited for their efforts, despite much of the final shooting script being theirs. This was because of a restriction by the Writers Guild of America. Clement and La Frenais continued rewriting during the production, often altering it from day to day.
The film underwent one final change in title: after Connery had finished filming Diamonds Are Forever, he had pledged that he would "never again" play Bond. Connery's wife, Micheline, suggested the title Never Say Never Again, referring to her husband's vow, and the producers acknowledged her contribution by listing on the end credits "Title Never Say Never Again by Micheline Connery". A final attempt by Fleming's trustees to block the film was made in the High Court in London in the spring of 1983, but this was thrown out by the court and Never Say Never Again was permitted to proceed.