Never show a horse falling into the water again...

 

Working my way through all the old films on the shelf I have today been reappraising “Never Say Never Again”.  For those of you who don’t know the plot Ian Fleming wrote a film treatment for Thunderball with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham before the “official” Bond franchise got going but published a novel based on this anyway sparking a copyright dispute and this led to McClory retaining the rights to Thunderball so he could remake it which he did.  Although the plot is …well, almost identical because well, it is … one could say that about most of the early Bond movies anyway.  The point of Bond films is seldom the plot anyway but... bits of it stand up quite well. 

The best thing about it, of course, is Sean Connery who despite knocking on a bit by this time still has his impressive bodybuilder stature and swagger.  You really feel that if Connery hit you it would hurt …and reading his Wikipedia page it’s interesting to discover that some real life villains who messed with Sean Connery did indeed get more than they bargained for from the ex-also-ran-for-Mr-Universe.  Apparently someone tried to sign Connery as a professional footballer once but he gave it a miss and turned to acting because he reckoned a career that’s often over by your 30s isn’t a great idea in your mid-twenties. 

The other outstanding thing about the film is Barbara Carrera’s turn as the misandrist Spectre agent as Fatima Blush which almost won her a 1984 Golden Globe nomination for "Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture".  It’s a two dimensional character but it seems ahead of its time.  I quite enjoyed Klaus Maria Brandauer’s extremely laid back performance as Maximillian Largo too.  It’s interesting how someone can be so threatening but at the same time never openly show anger until …

Anyway, I was filling my head with this mindless sexist escapism and wondering how well it would hold up today and I thought probably the most offensive scene would be the scene where James Bond in his attempts to escape the bad guys on horseback with Domino makes his horse jump off the battlements of a castle into the sea …

This stuck in my head watching it again because something didn’t make sense.  We see Bond and Domino jump off the battlements on the horse and then there’s a process shot of the horse falling through the air.  And then we see Bond and Domino underwater and then we see them surface but … where’s the horse?  Did it drown?

I was perplexed by this so I googled it to see if anyone complained about it.  Well, they did.  Actually in the original cinema release – see below…

… we do in fact see the actors or their stunt doubles and the stunt horse hit the water and later we see the horse swimming away to the shore.  However, at the time there were no “no animals were hurt in the making of this film” disclaimers so the film was retroactively edited for the European market after criticism from the RSPCA.  The problem is that as well as removing the film of the horse hitting the water they’ve also removed the footage of the horse swimming away giving the impression the horse is dead … which is even worse.  The stunt was actually performed by veteran stuntman Vic Armstrong and I managed to find an old photo online of how it was shot...

Of course being dropped into the water from a height of a high diving board probably wasn’t nice for the horse but they can swim so was it actual cruelty?  Bit of a grey area.   Being old enough to remember when the local swimming baths used to allow one to jump from the high diving board I can confirm that if you jump from that height while it's not fatal it can hurt quite a bit if you do a belly flop... oh well...

After the gun went off the cat refused to ever go near a camera again

Hopefully the horse wasn’t as traumatised as Donald Pleasance’s cat in “You Only Live Twice” which on hearing the loud bang from Donald’s gun was scared to death, bolted and hid its self so well in the recesses of the Volcano set that it took the producers three days to find it.  When the wrangler did finally recover the cat it steadfastly refused to go near a camera ever again which was a bit of a problem as it was booked to do a series of cat food commercials…

And people wonder why cats won’t do any work…

....in the real world the R rate is now 1.7.  The government are testing more people than ever before it seems but ...if it doesn't result in the lowering of the R rate what's the point of that then?  One could examine important issues such as this that but I'd rather...