The Furniture: The Spy Who Loved My Supertanker

1977 is our "Year of the Month" for July. So we'll be celebrating its films randomly throughout the month. Here's Daniel Walber...

Looking back at the films of '77, the clear production design stand-out is Star Wars. It won the Oscar and changed the world, though not necessarily in that order. Science fiction was crossing over, pushed even further by fellow nominee Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But why talk about harder sci-fi when you could focus on the futuristic gadgetry and technological excess of the James Bond franchise?

The Spy Who Loved Me is a remarkable showcase for legendary production designer Ken Adam, who passed away earlier this year. He built models of the Pyramids, a cavernous office for the head of the KGB and a decadent underwater lair for nefarious shipping magnate Karl Stromberg (Curt Jurgens). But the real showstopper is the interior of the Liparus supertanker, the site of the film’s climax. Or, rather, the liveliest of its many climaxes. This is a Bond film, after all.

This was Adam's sixth contribution to the franchise, and he made a point of outdoing his prior work. The set for the Liparus was to be an entirely new sound stage, among the largest ever constructed. 

The final product was gigantic, 334ft by 136ft. Cinematographer Claude Renoir couldn’t actually see from one end to the other. Adam had to call in Stanley Kubrick, with whom he had worked on Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon, just to figure out the lighting...

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Ingrid Bergman at "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness"

Tim continues our Ingrid Bergman centenary retrospective which concludes Saturday...

The two films Ingrid Bergman headlined in 1958 offer a splendid study in contrasts. Both are obvious attempts at image control as she re-entered the American film industry following the scandal of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy by Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and they approach that mission as differently as they could. Indiscreet, which Anne Marie just looked at, is a head-on confrontation with the scandal, humorously defusing it with satiric candor. The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, on the other hand, is a forthright piece of special pleading that we should ignore all of that unpleasantness by squashing Bergman into the role of the saintliest damn woman who could be scrounged up.

The living saint in question was Gladys Aylward, a London housemaid who became gripped by the idea that she should give up everything to move to China in her 30s to be an informal missionary and later became a national hero for her charitable work with orphans. Bergman was such a poor fit for the tiny Cockney brunette that Aylward herself openly complained about the casting, as well as just about every plot detail in a screenplay by Isobel Lennart that fairly should be counted more as a fantasia on the themes of Aylward's life than a legitimate biography. [More...]

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