Towards a Definition of Pop Culture

...probably no more people incur damnation through James Bond than work out their salvation through Louisa May Alcott...

...The result is fatal to both the parody and the thing parodied-the one becomes ridiculous, the other ceases to be funny...

...The performers are only around long enough to be judged by their looks, and I can report that the women are opulent, the villains ghastly, and Sean Connery capable of sustaining the same expression indefinitely, even underwater, where the face is that of a double...

...There is one thing, though, that all these films have in common, no matter on what level of pseudoseriousness and proto-funniness they operate...

...makes out, explicitly or implicitly, with five beauties, usually in aqueous settings-the beach, a shower-room, an underwater coral reef...

...As Richard Maibaum, the chief scenarist, proudly proclaimed, Bond is the universal wish fulfillment, which is yet again as far beyond mere old-fashioned escapism as escape is beyond reality...

...His previous Christmas specials have been LorenMastroianni vehicles...

...Sex, murder, and sadistic humor triangulate the surface of the Bond world, and surface is all it has...

...A further trouble with this kind of exaggeration is that while it stimulates parodies, it also, in order to keep surpassing itself, ends up being indistinguishable from those parodies...

...However, even wish fulfillment, which is a kind of dream, must submit to the laws governing dreams...

...When a member of The Great Hunt has bagged ten scalps, he can retire to a life of honor and riches...

...the set designer, Piero Poletti, is Antonioni's man...

...Sometimes, though, a film does not seem to know itself whether it wants to be wish fulfillment, parody, persiflage, satire, or what...

...Terence Young's direction is quicker than the eye and, therefore, beyond criticism...

...Among the gadgets, the most engaging is a kind of computer turned pet, a mechanical animal that can be programmed to infinite fidelity as well as to carrying concealed guns, and that looks like a cross between a dog and a bug...

...Anything that depends merely on exaggeration must, if it is to continue beyond one shot, pull off ever bigger exaggerations, and the Bond films are now exaggerating themselves into a corner...

...Too bad, for here was a chance at another Dr...

...And that is, regrettably, their scornful dismissal of love...

...the rest of the time, again helped by a variety of props, he is torpedoing around underwater, a veritable Superfish, perfectly in keeping with the superficiality of it all...

...This is the case with The Tenth Victim, Joe Levine's current attempt to trim our Christmas tree with an Italian sparkler...

...this time, Sophia Loren is replaced by Ursula Andress (the name has always seemed a spoonerism to me), and oh, the difference to us...

...This is not meant, however, to designate Thunderball a dangerous influence...

...And from the reaction of the majority of the preview audience, I am inclined to think that the question is not can 100 million ticket-holders be wrong, but can 100 million insensibilities be right...

...There has been a slew of Bond take-offs lately, the most recent being Our Man Flint, which contains two or three scenes that have almost identical counterparts in Thunderbolt, though the parodists could not possibly have seen that newest Bond caper...

...the cinematographer, Gianni di Venanzo, has worked for both Fellini and Antonioni...

...dispatches more villains than I could count on fingers and toes...

...In their pitiful way, these films did at least make a plea for quality over quantity in man-woman relationships...

...The editor, Ruggiero Mastroianni, is especially associated with Fellini and Monicelli...

...When the dream becomes too much for him, the dreamer awakes...

...Pavlov's famous school for dogs, has barely the time to produce a response...

...Now the locus of The Tenth Victim is somewhere between Brave New World and Alphaville, between 1984 and Thunderball, and, to make matters shakier, it won't stand still, but shuttles back and forth among all four...

...Among its four scenarists are Ennio Flaiano, the "intellectual" half of Fellini's principal scriptwriting duo (Tullio Pinelli being the "earthy" half), and Tonino Guerra, who is Antonioni's main scenarist...

...I repeat, I do not think that film trash can seriously affect our lives, but it may be that even the most unreal films reflect a nascent historic reality...

...Once that standard is unconditionally reversed, not only love becomes meaningless, but even sexuality escalates itself out of being a refined pleasure into becoming a production-line opiate...

...It is hard to say which is more ruthless in Thunderball, the mayhem or the sex...

...Gadgets, women, and quaintly-arrived-at corpses succeed one another at such vertiginous speed and in such dumbfounding quantity that the viewer, unless he happens to be a graduate of Dr...

...She's just dead...

...Characteristic of the prevailing confusion is the use of pop art throughout: in the décor, the clothes, the music even...

...has one of his lovelies, as it were, shot out from under him...

...One would be tempted to call it a "dug" or a "bog" if, in the vicinity of Miss Andress' bust and the script's longueurs, this might not give rise to misunderstandings...

...Of course, we learn that the three previous Bond films have sold more than 100 million tickets, and 100 million ticket-holders, presumably, can't be wrong...

...Altogether, The Tenth Victim features a curious line-up...

...In the older escapist fare, love was the sunset-colored panacea, the supreme reward of the hero, the last stop on the road to romance...

...The Tenth Victim takes place in the future, when war has been superseded by something called The Great Hunt, an organization in which warlike individuals from all over the world alternate as hunters and victims-either of whom can legally kill the other-to the vicarious satisfaction of the rest of humanity...

...Strangelove...

...But when one thinks of the number of gifted men who have labored to produce this wobbly jape, one is struck by the fact that, of all the arts, film can be the greatest waster of talents...

...A typical amatory exchange runs, Girl: "What sharp little eyes you've got...

...indeed, at a few, a very few, points some valid and funny satire on our own age is achieved-yet how much more of it there could have been under the immunity granted by couching the action in the next century...

...Probably the most celebrated of these demises will be that of an Oriental killer who pursues his appointed victim, Ursula Andress, into the Masoch Club (!), where she performs a mildly sadistic dance number almost naked, and thus ostensibly harmless, only to shoot her enraptured hunter with her metal brassiere, which is really a doublebarreled, or double-breasted, gun, dispensing mammary justice...

...and makes use of an array of prodigious weapons and devices, some already invented, and others that science has been waiting for the Bond scriptwriters to supply...

...Needless to say, owing to the cleverness of the membersand to titillate the moviegoer-the mode of these slayings has to be refined to a point of sinister subtlety that would have left the Borgias at the starting post...

...amusing as this sometimes is, it is never clear whether we are supposed to laugh at it or with it...

...But the archetypal situation occurs on the dance floor of a night club, when Bond uses the beautiful villamess he has just had sex with as a shield against her accomplices' bullets, then seats her body at some unsuspecting revelers' table and remarks, "D'you mind if my friend sits this one out...

...In that case, sauve qui peut...

...Bond: "Wait till you get to my teeth...

...The screenplay stands on tiptoe at the outermost edge of the suggestive and gazes yearningly down into the obscene...

...Instead, most of the picture reduces itself to Godardian chases and gun duels that are supposed to be endearingly inept, or to slightly travestied Bondian gadgetry...

...Thunderball begins and ends with Bond zooming through the air by means of two entirely different gadgets, the true heir of Superman...

...But the fact is that the Bond series, dubious as it was from the outset, is getting progressively worse...

...When the wish fulfillment is put on too thick, the wisher, likewise, wakens-unless his sensibilities are so dulled that they require continual bombardment...

...And, sure enough, the film is a mixed bag...

...the only thing that prevents it from leaping is the still, small voice of conscience whispering, "Mightn't we lose money...

...Some of the technical aspects of the film, no less than its technological ones, show considerable expertise, and there is particular hope for the director, Elio Petri...