The Spy who Loved

No doubt aware that such overtly fetishizing attitudes toward women could alienate a portion of the public. Binder relied heavily on ambiguous choreography for the titles of two key 1970s Bond films, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). These sequences deviate from Thunderball s pattern of veiled adversarial relationships between Bond and his female companions, opting instead for a playful allegiance between Bond and the ubiquitous female silhouettes. This shift in choreographic form allows for a more liberated view of the women represented in the titles, but retains the sexually provocative quality of the earlier sequences. 

Then, Carly Simon scored big with Nobody Does It Better for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), with music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by his wife, Carole Bayer Sager. (Hamlisch was hired as John Barry was unavailable to work in the UK because of tax reasons.) Sager was the one... 

The arrangement of the song seemed to be an attenqjt to meld the big band style of the first films with the rock n roll themes ftom the previous Live and Let Die. It didn t help that TMwtGG was considered one of the weaker entries in the Bond series. When the next Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me, appeared three years later, it would be helped along by a more 1970 s style romantic tune. 

Sheena Easton, whose performance in the movie s main title sequence helped launch the song to number eight in the UK and fourth place in the US. Both of these songs had a strong musical presence in the scores themselves as Hamlisch and Conti decided to use them as the primary love themes. While the themes stand strong as evergreens, the action music in both pictures is heavily influenced by disco beats which date both The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only. 

In determining if a female agent is truly the equal of Bond, one might simply see if there is ever a female agent who isn t placed in the damsel-in-(hstress role, requiring the salvation of the man. If so, then perhaps that woman is truly an equal. The three previous examples— finm The Spy Who Loved Me, Tomorrow Never Dies, and Die Another Day obviously fail that test. So let s examine the other three. 

Earnest, David C. and James N. Rosenau, The Spy Who Loved Globalization. Foreign Policy, no. 120 (Sept.-Oct. 2000) 88-90. Accessed 1/17/2010 via JSTOR. http //www.jstor.org/stable/1149720. 

For exairple, it was originally plarmed that the next film to be produced after The Spy Who Loved Me would be For Your Eyes Only. This was changed to Moonraker for two main reasons. First, as a direct result of Star Wars phenomenal success, science-fiction became the latest popular film genre. The producers wished to capitalise upon this popularity. The... 

Harry Saltzman, co-producer of nine Bond films, had expressed great concern regarding the heavy technological turn the films had taken, particularly in the 1970s (McCarthy, 1987 80). After Saltzman and fellow co-producer Albert Broccoli parted company in 1975, the technological emphasis in the series increased with the production of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. As Saltzman later lamented in 1987 ... 

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