Spy Who Loved Me, The (1977)

Two nuclear submarines – one British and one Russian – have been stolen. A mysterious person offers the submarine detection device for sale to the highest bidder.

James Bond (Roger Moore) is sent to Egypt to negotiate with businessman Max Kalba, who is known to be representing the seller, but has to go through a middleman, Fekkesh, first.

Two things become very clear very quickly – first, the Russians are also bidding, in the shape of Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach), and secondly, someone wants to frustrate the sale and does so by killing both Kalba and Fekkesh.

Bond and Anya chase the assassin – a giant of a man with metal teeth – but he escapes.

During a conference between M, General Gogol, Bond and Major Amasova, Bond realises that the small piece of the plans for the submarine detection device that they obtained from Max Kalba before he was killed contain a clue pointing to the millionaire shipping magnate Carl Stromberg (Curt Jurgens).

Bond and Anya travel undercover to Stromberg’s oceanic home in Sardinia to investigate, but he sees through their disguise and tries to have them killed.

Investigating more openly in an American nuclear submarine, Bond and Anya are stunned when the submarine is incapacitated and swallowed up by one of Stromberg’s oil tankers – actually a seagoing submarine stealer.

Both the British and the Russian submarines are already inside her capacious body.

Stromberg explains that, tired of the corruption of civilisation, he intends using the nuclear missiles taken from the submarines to provoke a Third World War between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, devastating the land so that mankind will have to live beneath the sea.

Without Stromberg’s knowledge, one of his employees had tried to sell plans of his submarine tracking equipment, and he had sent Jaws (Richard Kiel) to recover the plans and eliminate anyone involved in the foolish scheme.

Stromberg fires the missiles, but Bond has re-targeted them so that they destroy the submarines that fired them rather than their original targets of New York and Moscow.

Bond follows Stromberg back to his Sardinian undersea base, where he has taken Major Amasova, and shoots him. Bond and Anya escape in a life capsule.

Richard Kiel makes his debut as Bond’s new nemesis, Jaws, providing a memorable (and recurring) Bond villain and a significant amount of comic relief.

The Spy Who Loved Me (the 10th in the series) is regarded by most Bond fans to be the best of the Roger Moore Bond films.

The film cost £6,300,000 and took 18 weeks to shoot, in glamorous locations including the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the fabled temples of the ancient city of Thebes, the Aga Khan’s Costa Smeralda pleasure resort in Sardinia, the peaks of Pangnirtung ten miles north of the Arctic Circle at Baffin Island, the Bahamas at Nassau, the supersecret British Navy Polaris Clyde submarine base at Faslane in a Scottish Loch and on the ski slopes of Switzerland’s St Moritz.

Other exteriors of a 600,000-ton supertanker were shot at sea off the Bay of Biscay near the coast of France, Spain and Portugal.

It’s certainly worlds apart from Live And Let Die (1973), AND it features a cool Lotus Esprit, the fab theme song Nobody Does It Better, and a clever nod to Lawrence Of Arabia (1962).

James Bond
Roger Moore
Major Anya Amasova
Barbara Bach
Carl Stromberg
Curt Jurgens
Jaws
Richard Kiel
Naomi
Caroline Munro 
General Gogol
Walter Gotell
Minister of Defence
Geoffrey Keen
M
Bernard Lee
Captain Benson
George Baker
Q
Desmond Llewelyn
Miss Moneypenny
Lois Maxwell

Director
Lewis Gilbert

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