Picture: Getty Images – Credit: Getty Images Hovercraft assembly lines at the British Hovercraft Corporation’s Cowes, Isle of Wight plant. They were more about irritated dads and bored kids in Allegros and Cortinas than they were about secret agents in sports cars. That’s how the hovercraft sat in the imagination in the late 1960s and early 1970s – they were considered thrilling enough to sit between sex and murder.Īlas, reality almost always gets in the way of imagination. Just before this scene, Bond had been flirting with Moneypenny: just afterwards, we see the body of a murdered woman being dragged from a canal in Amsterdam. We then see the Princess Margaret – one of the huge SR.N4 hovercraft which plied the cross-Channel route for more than 30 years – its four Rolls Royce Proteus engines roaring as it accelerates down the slipway into Dover harbour, at the start of its half-hour dash across to the Continent. As he does so, the music punches into the peak of its brass section crescendo – ‘BA-DA, BA-DA, BA DAH DAH!’Īt that very moment, the camera zooms in on the lane signage, which reads ‘HOVERCRAFT’. Like the alpha-male he is, he effortlessly speeds into the correct lane on the approach to the docks. We see him at Dover port behind the wheel of a Triumph Stag and the Bond theme strikes up as 007 accelerates his way below the White Cliffs. Near the beginning of the 1971 film Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond is heading to Europe on the trail of a sinister smuggling ring.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |