MI6 looks back at forty years ago to Thunderball's premieres around the world, and what the critics had to say...

Thunderball - The Premiere & Press
24th December 2005

World Premieres
Unlike the previous three Bond films, Thunderball did not have its premiere in London. The film was first greeted by a hysterical audience in Japan, where Bond fever was reaching epidemic proportions. On December 9th 1965, the film opened in Tokyo at the Hibiya Cinema.

The reaction from the Japanese public was so positive that some commentators claim that it tipped the decision to make You Only Live Twice the fifth Bond film and to shoot it mainly in Japan (instead of filming On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as had been originally planned). In the meantime, the Paramount Theater in New York had been planning for OO7's arrival a couple of weeks in advance by installing a specially built viewing booth outside the theatre that continuously ran a teaser trailer for the film. On December 21st 1965, James Bond arrived in Manhattan in style as a Bond double descended from the theatre marquee with a Bell Textron rocket belt. Unfortunately, New York City police arrested the pilot and several United Artists publicity people, as they had not secured the necessary permit! Along with many other theatres, the Paramount remained open for 24 hours a day to satisfy public demand, often with customers queuing round the block for tickets.

In England, Thunderball had two opening galas to deal with the demand for tickets. On December 29th 1965, premieres were held at the Pavilion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus and at the Rialto Theatre just 100 yards away in Coventry Street.

Following the dual screening, a special supper party was served for the assembled guests at the Royal Garden Hotel. Members of the cast present included Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi, Martine Beswicke and former Bond girls, Honor Blackman and Tania Mallet. Ironically, some of the key people involved with the film had to miss the festivities. Sean Connery and Harry Saltzman were among those who could not attend the event. Cubby Broccoli was still grieving from the recent loss of his mother, and was too upset to attend the screening or the supper.The evening was, nevertheless, a huge success and raised £60,000 for the Newspaper Press Fund. Other charity premieres were held around the world after the New Year. On February 10th 1966, Ireland enjoyed its premiere at the Savoy theatre in Dublin, with Luciana Paluzzi, Mollie Peters and Cubby Broccoli in attendance. The success of Goldfinger on both sides of the Atlantic meant that pundits were predicting record-breaking takings at the box office again, but nobody was prepared for the level of success achieved by Thunderball.

The film's grosses rivalled those of the newly released The Sound of Music and dwarfed those of the epic Battle of the Bulge. Even a re-issued Goldfinger had to stand in the shadows, with Thunderball taking four times more at the box-office in its first week than all the other films combined.

A record 58.1 million admissions were recorded in the USA (totaling $63.6 million). At the same time, Paris and Rome also reporting record takings, scooping $95,000 and $79,000 respectively in the first three days. The film eventually made $141.2 million globally, which, in 2002,was calculated to be equivalent of roughly $950 million, taking inflation into account.

What The Critics Said... "The cinema was a duller place before Bond." - Dilys Powell. The Sunday Times "The explanation of SPECTRE's ransom plan takes a little time, but once the plot is clear it gallops from one lethal situation to another, dallying amusingly between them in the company of [with Bond] a succession of lovely girls, some good, some bad. The whole improbable concoction is put over with shattering speed and an irresistible sense of humour; you can't help laughing while you enjoy the dangers and admire dazzling use of Caribbean colour on the very large screen." - Kinematograph Weekly, 20 December 1965 "In the raw, racy action of the tale, Connery is better that ever - a maturer, more self-assured hero who wears the role like a glove. A mink one." - Donald Zec, The Daily Mirror

"There's visible evidence that the reported $5,500,000 budget was no mere publicity figure; it's posh all the way, crammed with pop value, as company moves from France and England to the Bahamas... One of highlight sequence is the underwater battle between US Aquatroops, whom Bond calls upon after he locates the hidden bombs, and the heavies, both using spear guns for spectacular effect..." - Whit, Variety

“The Bond gadgets and girls, fantastic plots and imagery are back, but it's all a little less well done. It wouldn't be so bad except that the climactic finale, a prolonged underwater battle which was supposed to be the film's highlight, is painfully slow and borders on dull...and the sped-up film of the final struggle with the villain is laughable.” – Rinkworks, At a glance Film Review "It's not just that Sean Connery looks a lot more haggard and less heroic than he did two or three years ago [success can age a man so]; but there is much less effort to establish him as connoisseur playboy. Apart from the off-handed order for Beluga, there is little of that comic display of bon viveur-manship that was one of the charms of Connery's almost-a-gentleman 007." - David Robinson, The Financial Times "Unless things pick up somewhat it will take more than a one-man jet equipment to extract Bond with equal popular success from his next assignment." - The Times

"Of course one would rather have Dr. Mabuse. Of course Thunderball is a blatant parody of the genre, all gargantuan sets, paintbox blood, sexless blondes and gadgetry. There is absolutely nothing memorable about it. It is simply there for the moment, to be superficially enjoyed if one likes that kind of thing, and if one can condone the vast cost of such a toyshop trifle. What does it offer? More polish than usual, for one thing. Terence Young's direction is nothing if not taut, whisking the narrative along with the speed and precision of a jet plane, defying one to express boredom. To achieve this, he has wisely thrown away most of Bond's character detail, the drinks-and-cars expertise, and stripped Bond down to a kinky-looking Superman in red rubber, an outline Sean Connery fills for once admirably and with ease. The gadgets are splendid - hydrofoil, radio-active pill, underwater jet-harness, a health-clinic rack which threatens to rattle Bond's bones to pulp, a black-leather motor-cyclist whose machine fires rockets and who turns out under her crash-helmet to be the delectably treacherous Luciana Paluzzi. John Hopkins has been brought in on the screenplay to provide some insolent, amatory wit; the post-Strangelove sets are by Ken Adam; Ivan Tors has provided some eerily effective underwater sequences, including a long climactic battle which looks like Agincourt fought with submarines instead of horses. In other words the film is all of a piece, cunning, heartless, extravagant, shamelessly mid-Sixties. Agreed that Adolfo Celi's villain, though perfectly adequate, is no Dr. Mabuse. But then a film like this would be enough to shock the good Doctor back to sanity." - Monthly Film Bulletin

"THE popular image of James Bond as the man who has everything, already magnificently developed in three progressively more compelling films, is now being cheerfully expanded beyond any possible chance of doubt in this latest and most handsome screen rendering of an Ian Fleming novel, "Thunderball."

Now Mr. Fleming's superhero, still performed by Sean Connery and guided through this adventure by the director of his first two, Terence Young, has not only power over women, miraculous physical reserves, skill in perilous maneuvers and knowledge of all things great and small, but he also has a much better sense of humor than he has shown in his previous films. And this is the secret ingredient that makes "Thunderball" the best of the lot.

This time old Double-Oh Seven, which is Mr. Bond's code number in the British intelligence service he so faithfully and tirelessly adorns, is tossing quips faster and better then he did even in "From Russia With Love," and he is viewing his current adventure with more gaiety and aplomb. I think you will, too. In this creation of superman travesty, which arrived yesterday at the reopened Paramount, the Sutton, Cinema II and twoscore or more other theaters in the metropolitan area. Bond is engaged in discovering who hijacked two nuclear bombs in a NATO aircraft over Europe and is secretly holding them for a ransom of £100 million. That in itself is fairly funny — fanciful and absurd in the same way as are all the problems that require the attention of Bond. But what Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins as the script writers have done is sprinkle their gaudy fabrication with the very best sight and verbal gags. "Let my friend sit this one out." Bond asks politely of two disinterested young men as he places his dancing partner in a chair beside them at a table in a nightclub in Nassau. The gentlemen nod permission. "She's just dead," he explains.

Or when Bond leaps from a hovering helicopter wearing a skindiver's suit of extraordinary mechanical complexity to engage in an underwater war between SPECTRE and C.I.A. frogmen in the climactic scene of the film, he flips the conclusive comment: "Here comes the kitchen sink!"

In addition to being funny, "Thunderball" is pretty, too, and it is filled with such underwater action as would delight Capt. Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The gimmick is that the airplane carrying the hijacked bombs has been ditched, sunk and covered with camouflaging on a coral reef off Nassau. And to get this information and then find and explore the sunken plane. Bond has to do a lot of skindiving, with companions and alone.

The amount of underwater equipment the scriptwriters and Mr. Young have provided their athletic actors, including an assortment of beautiful girls in the barest of bare bikinis, is a measure of the splendor of the film. Diving saucers, aqualungs, frogman outfits and a fantastic hydrofoil yacht that belongs to the head man of SPECTRE are devices of daring and fun.

So it is in this liveliest extension of the cultural scope of the comic strip. Machinery of the most way-out nature become the instruments and the master, too, of man. "I must be six inches taller," Bond wryly quips at one point after he has been almost shaken to pieces on an electric vibrating machine. The comment is not without significance. This is what machines do to men in these extravagant and tongue-in-cheek Bond pictures. They make distortions of them.

Mr. Connery is at his peak of coolness and nonchalance with the girls. Adolfo Celi is piratical as the villain with a black patch over his eye. Claudine Auger, a French beauty winner, is a tasty skindiving dish and Luciana Paluzzi is streamlined as the inevitable and almost insuperable villainous girl.

The color is handsome. The scenery in the Bahamas is an irresistible lure. Even the violence is funny. That's the best I can say for a Bond film." - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times