The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 335

4 0 A 1 it Steel- toothed Richard Kiel as Jaws is a menace in "The Spy Who Loved Me xSpy Who Loved Me': Outbonding James Bond while Roger Moore as 007 and Barbara Bach are attractive undercover agents. CD vl has become (severing all links with whatever reality survived in the Sean Connery characterization of Bond), Moore in his elegant command of the highly -unlikely is himself a form of perfection. The double-en-tendres are wide enough to take in the school lavatory, but Moore delivers them with an urbanity that suggests Noel Coward was holding the cue cards. Producer Albert (Cubby) Broccoli has, like Fleming, understood that more, please, is the only twist sure to keep the series working. He has given production designer Ken Adam and the special effects folks a lavish if not quite blank check to touch the Gee Whiz in us all.

James tootles off to the villain's sea lair aboard a water-going motorcycle, a sort of aquatic scooter that really works. He and XXX flee the bad persons in a Continued from First Page the sensibilities of a later day. The first Bond novels were reflections of the Cold War. Russia, and SMERSH, were the enemies, even if there were other villains trying to play both sides against a self-interested middle. This time Her Majesty's Government and the U.S.S.R.

are on the same side, proving that secret agents make attractive bedfellows. Somewhere, far off, you hear Vesper and Irma Bunt and all the others who gave their alls for SMERSH, saying, "Detente, take it with you." What Fleming himself would think of and his Russian counterpart plotting together against an enemy bigger than both of them is not certain, but it seems a reasonable guess he might be amused. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME' A United Artists release. Producer Albert R. Broccoli.

Director Lewis Gilbert. Script Christopher Wood, Richard Maibaum. Production design Ken Adam. Photography Claude Renoir. Editor John Glen.

Music Marvin Hamlisch. Art direction Peter Lamont. Special effects Derek Meddings. Titles Maurice Binder. Underwater photography Lamar Boren.

Featuring Roger Moore Barbara Bach, Curt Jurgens, Richard Kiel, Caroline Munro, Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell, Walter Gotell, Shane Rimmer, Sydney Tafler, George Baker, Bryan Marshall, Geoffrey Keen, Robert Brown, Milton Reid, Edward De Souza, Vernon Dobtcheff. Running time: 2 hr. 5 min. MPAA-rated: PG (some parental guidance suggested). sleek Lotus Elite which turns submarine and has a pushbutton for every emergency you never thought of.

It used to be that a secret agent could get by with a trick lighter and a postgraduate attache case, but those hardly get you out the front door anymore. It is all a joke, of course, but by now it is a cleverly polished joke. There are three specific jokes even before the main title including the Russian agent's music box, which plays Lara's theme from "Dr. Zhivago." Bond makes an early escape by doing an amazing ski jump which becomes a sky dive. The movie is You Asked for It with dialogue.

Roger Moore is Bond for the third time. And for the free-floating exercise in merriment which the series In its physical demands, "The Spy Who Loved Me" looks very rough indeed the kind of leapings, fallings, grapplings and shovings that can't really be faked. Moore does his chores but he comes through with his sense of the larkiness of it all intact. The insouciance is vital, because if the wholesale carnage of the climactic battle is taken at all seriously, the excitements turn painful. (There is more than enough din, as it is, but I reckon if you are going to spend that much on a set, you are entitled to the joys of demolishing it.

The sets and effects are not, as they have occasionally been in the Bond series, a substitute for other inventions. In particular, Maibaum and Wood have come up with a refreshing secondary villain in 7 foot 2 Richard Kiel, who is called Jaws in respect for his stainless steel teeth which could put the bite on a shark. Bond and Jaws keep surviving each other's worst efforts, a running fight and a running gag which builds to its own surprise. Kiel is that unexpected item, a sympathetic bad guy, and after years of being a size, the American actor has a chance to be an acting personality and he uses it well. Lewis Gilbert, who did "You Only Live Twice" earlier in the series, also directed "Alfie." He has a feeling for tone and a sense of humor, and if "Spy" is the most extravagant of the Bonds in its locations and sets, it is also probably the surest in its mixing of talk and action, violence and romance.

Jurgens as written is not one of the great Bond adversaries, for example, so we spend relatively little time with him. "Spy" runs just over two hours; Gilbert and editor John Glen move it along constantly. Claude Renoir, grandson of the painter and nephew of the director, was the cinematographer and the movie is among other things a handsome tour of a variety of locations from Egypt to Baffin Island. Marvin Hamlisch did the vivid music. It is a movie dominated by Moore, the fetching Ms.

Bach, Kiel and Jurgens. The appearances by Bernard Lee as and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny are by now ritualistic. Walter Gotell is M's Russian counterpart. Milton Reid is a subsidiary heavy and Vernon Dobtcheff is a man of brief mystery. "The Spy Who Loved Me" is an extravagant silliness, a high-cost undertaking in let's pretend which delivers a tested formula.

It may not be everyone's tonic, but it is what it says it is, rousingly. The new movie (like the previous Bond movies) extends the direction Fleming's novels were taking. Looked at again, that first Bond novel, "Casino Royale," is as far from the extravagances of "The Spy Who Loved Me" as "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" was. That first appearance of 007 had the make-believe elements that were crucial to the success of the series the secret service hocus-pocus, the license to kill, the compliant ladies and the sadistic villains, and not least the encyclopedic familiarity with the best of everything from small arms to large martinis. But success had to feed upon ever larger dosages of make-believe: grosser villains with vaster dreams of conquest and pillage, and cleverer weaponries for 007 to shoot them down with.

In a sense, Fleming and Bond had to go to the movies because only the screen could deliver the broadening fantasies and the broader jokes. This 10th time out, the Bond movie as a genre within a genre achieves a kind of perfection of the preposter-rous. It is everything the movies did with James Bond (not invariably the things Fleming did with Bond) here brought to a spectacular fulfillment. What the movie intends to do cannot be done much better. Not one but two nuclear submarines (one British, one Russian) have disappeared without trace from the depths of the sea.

Bond is roused from an Alpine slumber to give chase. So is Russia's agent XXX (Barbara Bach). The trail leads past the pyramids to the subsca palace of the newest supervillain, Kurt Jurgens, who dreams madly of a new deep-dip civilization at the bottom of the sea. And where are the missing subs? In the belly of a giant tanker aimed to hold the whole dry world for ransom. The tanker is also the largest film stage ever built, some $3 million worth reportedly, and indubitably Curt Jurgens appears as the newest supervillain in "The Spy Who Loved Me," the 10th James Bond epic..