Say It Again (Extended Mix)
Sean Connery played the role of Bond for the seventh and final time, marking his return to the character 12 years after Diamonds Are Forever. The film's title is a reference to Connery's reported declaration in 1971 that he would "never" play that role again. As Connery was 52 at the time of filming, the script makes frequent reference to Bond as aging and past his prime; though ironically Connery was three years younger than incumbent Bond Roger Moore. The storyline features Bond being brought back into action to investigate the theft of two nuclear weapons by SPECTRE. Filming locations included France, Spain, the Bahamas and Elstree Studios in the United Kingdom.
Say It Again (Extended Mix)
Domino and Bond reunite with Leiter on a U.S. Navy submarine. After the first warhead is found and defused in Washington, D.C., they track Largo to a location known as the Tears of Allah, below a desert oasis on the Ethiopian coast. Bond and Leiter infiltrate the underground facility and a gun battle erupts between Leiter's team and Largo's men in the temple. In the confusion, Largo makes a getaway with the second warhead. Bond catches and fights Largo underwater. Just as Largo tries to use a spear gun to shoot Bond, he is shot with a spear gun by Domino, taking revenge for her brother's death. Bond then defuses the nuclear bomb underwater, saving the world. Bond retires from duty and returns to the Bahamas with Domino, vowing never again to be a secret agent.
In the mid-1970s McClory again started working on a project to bring a Thunderball adaptation to production and, with the working title Warhead, he brought writer Len Deighton together with Sean Connery to work on a script.[9] A lawsuit with Eon Productions ended in a ruling that McClory owned the sole rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld, forcing Eon to remove them from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).[10] The script initially focused on SPECTRE shooting down aircraft over the Bermuda Triangle before taking over Liberty Island and Ellis Island as staging areas for an invasion of New York City through the sewers under Wall Street. The script was purchased by Paramount Pictures in 1978.[10] The script ran into difficulties after accusations from Danjaq and United Artists that the project had gone beyond copyright restrictions, which confined McClory to a film based only on the novel Thunderball, and once again the project was deferred.[8]
Towards the end of the 1970s developments were reported on the project under the name James Bond of the Secret Service,[8] but when producer Jack Schwartzman became involved in 1980 and cleared a number of the legal issues that still surrounded the project[10][3] he decided against using Deighton's script. The project returned to the original nuclear terrorism plot of the original Thunderball in order to avoid another lawsuit from Danjaq and after McClory saw Jimmy Carter mention the issue in a 1980 presidential debate with Ronald Reagan.[11] Schwartzman brought on board scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr.[12] to work on the screenplay, who Schwartzman wanted to make the screenplay "somewhere in the middle" between his campier projects such as Batman and his more serious projects such as Three Days of the Condor.[10] Connery was unhappy with some aspects of the work and asked Tom Mankiewicz, who had rewritten Diamonds Are Forever, to work on the script; however, Mankiewicz declined as he felt he was under a moral obligation to Eon's Albert R. Broccoli.[13] Semple Jr. ultimately left the project after Irvin Kershner was hired as director and Schwartzman began cutting out the "big numbers" from his script to save on the budget.[10] Connery then hired British television writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais[11] to undertake re-writes, although they went uncredited for their efforts despite much of the final shooting script being theirs. This was because of a restriction by the Writers Guild of America.[14] Clement and La Frenais continued rewriting during the production, often altering it from day to day.[10]
The film underwent one final change in title: after Connery had finished filming Diamonds Are Forever he had pledged that he would "never" play Bond again.[9] Connery's wife, Micheline, suggested the title Never Say Never Again, referring to her husband's vow[15] and the producers acknowledged her contribution by listing on the end credits "Title Never Say Never Again by Micheline Connery". A final attempt by Fleming's trustees to block the film was made in the High Court in London in the spring of 1983, but this was thrown out by the court and Never Say Never Again was permitted to proceed.[16]
Writing for Newsweek, critic Jack Kroll thought the early part of the film was handled "with wit and style",[58] although he went on to say that the director was "hamstrung by Lorenzo Semple's script".[58] Richard Schickel, writing in Time magazine praised the film and its cast. He wrote that Klaus Maria Brandauer's character was "played with silky, neurotic charm",[59] while Barbara Carrera, playing Fatima Blush, "deftly parodies all the fatal femmes who have slithered through Bond's career".[59] Schickel's highest praise was saved for the return of Connery, observing "it is good to see Connery's grave stylishness in this role again. It makes Bond's cynicism and opportunism seem the product of genuine worldliness (and world weariness) as opposed to Roger Moore's mere twirpishness."[59]
In the 1990s, McClory announced plans to make another adaptation of the Thunderball story starring Timothy Dalton entitled Warhead 2000 AD, but the film was eventually scrapped.[77] In 1997 Sony Pictures acquired McClory's rights for an undisclosed amount,[4] and subsequently announced that it intended to make a series of Bond films, as the company also held the rights to Casino Royale.[78] This move prompted a round of litigation from MGM, which was settled out-of-court, forcing Sony to give up all claims on Bond; McClory still claimed he would proceed with another Bond film,[79] and continued his case against MGM and Danjaq;[80] On 27 August 2001 the court rejected McClory's suit.[81] McClory died in 2006;[77] MGM's acquisition of the rights to Casino Royale finally allowed Eon Productions to make a serious, non-satirical film adaptation of that novel the same year with Daniel Craig as James Bond. Ultimately, in 2013, McClory's heirs sold the Thunderball rights to Eon, allowing the company to reintroduce Blofeld to the Eon series in the film Spectre.
Through a web of scaffolding, you can read a passage from the Book of Psalms on the main entrance: "Open for me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them to praise the Lord." Reading those soaring words from the street, they feel bittersweet and poignant. Could this haven for worshippers and hub of musical innovation ever throw open its gates again?
At the same time, I have been arguing for some years that ubiquitous sensing can improve our verification capabilities. The ideas are controversial, but some of them are already in play, again, in the environmental arena. For years, the notion of engaging citizen volunteers has been widely used in environmental monitoring. I think a good example here is the way Japanese citizen volunteers improve the radiation detection in range of the Fukushima power plant, by using apps on their mobile phones, apps designed to detect radiation. If we are all worried about strengthening the ban on chemical weapons use, the ban that is inherent in the Chemical Weapons Convention, should we not be empowering those who are living with the threat of chlorine attacks to be able to report rapidly and accurately when such attacks occur? This might be done through disperse sensing mechanisms. 041b061a72