In 1983, there were warring Bond flicks in the theatre, Sean Connery's one-time 80's return to Bond, "Never Say Never Again" and the official OO7 entry, OCTOPUSSY.
It's by far the superior film of the two, won the box office battle and was probably Roger's last great time in the role before his tired final "View" on the role.
Roger Moore is comfortable and having fun as Bond. The terrific pre-credits sequence puts Bond in a mini airplane with missiles tracking him and the stunt and explosives team doing heroic work.
Bond is tracking fake Fabergie eggs (strange plot hook) that lead him into worldwide adventures around a jewel smuggling ring.
In retrospect, the film is a bit of a ying and yang between great Bond moments and all the elements that made 007 films fade in importance in the late 80's and early 90's.
The title sequence is composed of repetitive, tired Maurice Binder designs but is accompanied by a pretty decent Bond song, "All Time High" by Rita Coolidge.
The villain of the piece Kamal Khan, played by Louis Jourdan is pretty lame and non-threatening, but his female sidekick Magda is played with style by the gorgeous Kristina Wayborn.
Maud Adams is beautiful and very good as Octopussy, but the circus setting feels like a limp rip-off of Pussy Galore's Flying Circus.
The Russian power play subplot adds some nice tension, but it's led by a seriously over-acting Steven Berkoff as General Orlov.
The entire final act aboard the train, with Bond battling bad guys over/under and across a long circus train is very good, but then the film stumbles by staging a tense scene around disarming a nuclear bomb by having Bond in complete clown make-up.
Can you imagine Sean Connery in clown makeup? Nope. I can't either.
The stunt teams are amazing and the final aerial fistfight on top of Kamal's plane is fantastic.
John Barry's music is superb throughout.
This is a classic compared to the mess of "A View To A Kill' that would follow it, but when you have Roger Moore sneaking across a river in a robot alligator, you start to sense that the writers are getting desperate.
With a license to have fun and still provide some thrills, Octopussy ranks somewhere in the middle of the Bond library and gets a B-.
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