A look at the `wild card` of the Bond film legacy: `Never Say Never Again`

Fervent fans of James Bond - especially the Sean Connery brand of 007 - will definitely want the new "Collectors Edition'' of Never Say Never Again. But they should be warned that this 1983 film - just out on both DVD and Blu- ray - is a decided oddity.

Canada.com explains that in the first place, it came out 12 years after the release of Diamonds Are Forever and Connery's vow that he would never play Bond again.

Secondly, it was made outside the umbrella of the Broccoli family's EON Productions, then and now the zealous custodians of the 007 franchise.

Thirdly, the plot seemed like a rerun of Thunderball, the 1965 Bond thriller - also starring Connery - which was one of the official entries in the canon.

Never Say Never Again still reminds you of Thunderball when you view it now - albeit with a Connery who, at 53, is visibly older. The new version seemed unnecessary in 1983 - except perhaps to Connery who was paid a bundle for putting his hairpiece back on to play creator Ian Fleming's intrepid spy once more.

It still seems unnecessary. Yet it remains a fascinating wild card in the 007 cinematic saga.

The reason it happened dates back to 1960 when Fleming and producer Kevin McClory collaborated on a screenplay for a thriller called Latitude 78 West, which never went anywhere. Later, Thunderball appeared in bookstores and to McClory, it seemed a direct ripoff of his plot about a sinister international syndicate which steals two cruise missiles and holds the world to ransom.

McClory sued Fleming and ended up retaining the rights to a storyline which he subsequently licensed to producer Albert Broccoli and his partner, Harry Saltzman, who promptly turned it into the 1965 Thunderball movie. But a legal loophole also gave McClory the right to film his own version - and this he did in 1983, much to the consternation of the original producers.

If Never Say Never Again lacks the ``feel'' of a traditional Connery 007 film, it's understandable. This new DVD release comes with fascinating special features - a commentary by director Irvin Kershner and Bond historian Steven Jay Rubin, and a featurette on the challenges of making a 007 film in a situation where the original producers would pounce if there was any perceived infringement of their rights.

Kershner - the director responsible for The Empire Strikes Back, the best of the Star Wars films - is now in his eighties but he has vivid memories of the legal restrictions which prevented him from copying anything in the original Thunderball film and tried to confine him to the content of the book. Kershner was determined to be more creative than that, but the challenge was ongoing.

He replaced the original American screenwriter with two seasoned English writers in an effort to give the project a more recognizable Bond flavour.

Meanwhile Connery was protesting that this was not the movie he had agreed to do. At one point Kershner had four separate screenplays but still had to improvise scenes as he shot them. ``This was Bond in some places and not Bond in others,'' the director remembers. ``I don't fault the actors - I fault what we had to work with.''

Kershner didn't have access to screenwriters like Richard Maibaum who had set the tone of the early Connery films. He himself lacked the sensibility of Terence Young and Guy Hamilton, the two British directors who so memorably defined Connery's Bond persona back in the 1960s. He was barred from using signature moments - the traditional opening in which we see 007 through the muzzle of a gun, composer Monty Norman's memorable James Bond theme. Indeed, Never Say Never Again contains one of the worst scores of any Bond film - despite the fact that it was entrusted to Michel Legrand.

Yet, if you accept it in its own curious context, much of the movie remains excellent fun as it builds on its premise of an older Bond pulled back into service to save the world. The 53-year-old Connery seems battle-weary but this is part of the appeal - particularly in the fabulous scene where he's almost dismembered by a seemingly invincible strongman and ends up fleeing for his life. There are also good set piece scenes, including a motorcycle chase and a massage room encounter. And the closing underwater sequence proves less boring than the one in Thunderball.

There are also some terrifically skewed characterizations - Edward Fox's splenetic M, Alec McCowen's chirpy Q, Barbara Carrera's sexually charged turn as a terrorist named Fatima Blush, Rowan Atkinson's comic cameo as a twitchy British diplomat and Max von Sydow and Klaus Maria Brandauer as the suave lead villains.

As for the film's peculiar title - Connery's wife suggested it as a jokey commentary on her husband's 1983 pledge never to play 007 again.

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