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.
 * 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
 * In Name Only: Enforced. Fleming realized the book was just wrong, so he sold the rights on the condition that any feature film using the title film would NOT be an adaptation. He probably would have been better off just quietly dropping the novel in a shredder, as this film set a precedent for In Name Only adaptations of the Bond novels.
 * 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.
 * Shout-Out: The music that plays while Bond and Anya are wandering through the desert after the van breaks down sounds very familiar...
 * 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.