The Spy Who Loved Me/Trivia


 * Actor Allusion: Curd Jürgens, who plays Stromberg, starred as the U-Boot captain in The Enemy Below, one of the most famous movies involving submarine warfare.
 * Exiled From Continuity: SPECTRE couldn't be used because of legal difficulties.
 * Fake Russian: Russian secret agent Anya is played by Barbara Bach, an American actress.
 * Incidentally, this movie almost single-handedly changed Americans' views of Russian women. Before it came out, all Russian women were assumed by Americans to be outright Gonks, to the point that American comedians (and especially the hugely influential Johnny Carson) could count on getting cheap and easy laughs by poking fun at the purported hideousness of Russian women. Carson admitted during a visit by Roger Moore that the movie had ruined "half his jokes".
 * Fan Nickname: Bond's Lotus Espirit is sometimes called "Wet Nellie", in honor of "Little Nellie" from You Only Live Twice.
 * Hey, It's That Guy!:
 * Anya's lover at the beginning is Paul Foster from UFO.
 * Naomi is Margiana from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.
 * Captain Hopper came home from Telos, and the only job he could find was on Stromberg's ship.
 * Sir Hillary Bray joined the Royal Navy and is friends with M.
 * Wait, there's two Ms in this movie! One (Bernard Lee) was also Connery's boss; the other one (Robert Brown; he's an admiral here) went on to take Dalton's Licence to Kill.
 * Meaningful Release Date: The film came out on 7/7/77.
 * Old Shame: Ian Fleming hated the book, which was basically the memoir of a young Canadian woman who gets an abortion in Switzerland then works at a hotel where a mob scheme is about to take place, and Bond just so happens to be spending the night. He doesn't even enter the picture until 2/3 of the way through.
 * It makes even less sense than the above. First she goes to boarding school, then she fumbles with some guy in the cinema, then she meets the German jerk who leads to the abortion, then she's riding around America on a scooter (no, seriously), stops at a motel, where she runs into the gangsters, and James Bond just HAPPENS to get a flat tire nearby in time to save her. Did we mention this is told in the first person by said girl, and the narration includes the immortal line "All women love semi-rape"? Fleming rightly realized this literary experiment was a case of Epic Fail.
 * The Red Stapler: After this movie, demand for white Lotus Espirits grew so much that new customers were put on a three-year waiting list.
 * What Could Have Been:
 * Stromberg was originally going to be Blofeld before the legal rights squashed that idea.
 * Reportedly, one script draft featured the arrival of a "new" SPECTRE, comprised of former members of various real life terrorist groups. The film would've opened with the new group raiding SPECTRE HQ and killing off the organization's old guard before taking over.
 * Steven Spielberg was considered to direct, but was rejected because he was thought to be inexperienced.
 * James Mason was considered to star as Stromberg.
 * Albert R. Broccoli wanted Lois Chiles to star as Anya, but she was taking a break from acting at the time. She would star as Holly Goodhead in the next movie Moonraker.
 * The producers thought of bringing Anya Amasova back in A View to a Kill. After Barbara Bach declined, the part was rewritten into another female KGB agent, Pols Ivanova.