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From his headquarters aboard the submarine "Atlantis", off Sardinia, Stromberg, a shipping magnate who dreams of destroying the world and creating a new civilisation beneath the sea, has hired scientists, whom he later murders, to design a device to track nuclear submarines. Stromberg uses a giant tanker, the "Liparus", to 'kidnap' a British and a Soviet submarine. When he discovers that a female assistant has passed microfilm of the tracking device to an Egyptian middle-man, Fekkesh, for sale to the highest bidder, he has her killed, then sends strongarm men to recover the film. The British agent James Bond and the Russian Anya Amasova are detailed by their governments to obtain the film: the pair meet in Egypt, where Stromberg's henchman. Jaws, murders Fekkesh and another contact, Kalba, and then attempts to kill Bond and Anya; his ploy backfires, however, and they get the film. Instructed by their superiors to co-operate, the two agents trail Stromberg to Sardinia where they evade his elaborate attempts to kill them. The agents reconnoitre the "Liparus" in an American submarine which is, however, captured by Stromberg. Bond subsequently overpowers his guards, releases the submarine's crew and takes control of the hangar housing the "Liparus" and Stromberg's equipment. At the last minute, Bond foils Stromberg's scheme to blow up Moscow and New York; he relays false information to the two submarines which instead blow up each other. Bond penetrates "Atlantis", kills Stromberg and frees Anya, moments before the U.S. Navy blows up the hideout.

"Tell Bond to pull out", says "M"; cut to 007 in coitus with (anonymous) damsel in mountain chalet. Responding to the call of duty, Bond polishes off sundry (anonymous) attackers before soaring off a cliff on skis, a Union Jack parachute blossoming over his head. In the ensuing two hours, seaside-postcard smut and comic-strip feats of derring-do continue unabated, suggesting that the makers are being driven to desperate extremes to keep the formula going (having roped in the author of the Confessions series for the purpose). Sometimes, however, it is difficult to be certain how deliberate the absurdities are, particularly with a lacklustre, clock-work villain like Stromberg, incarnated by all-purpose international guest star Curt Jurgens. The strip-cartoon aspect of the film extends beyond such running gags as the presence of a superhuman, steel-toothed heavy called "Jaws", who emerges unscathed from one lethal hardship after another and drops huge boulders on his toes in careless moments, and permeates the structure itself. Narrative coherence has been disregarded (the take-over of Stromberg's HQ, for instance, looks too easy by half) in favour of a succession of self-contained set-pieces. This might not matter if these were more precisely organised or less derivative of earlier movies in the series - a train sequence out of From Russia with Love, for instance, and a death-dealing car straight out of Goldfinger. Indeed, where lan Fleming's novel offered an attempt to ring some changes in terms of scale and viewpoint, the film - bearing no relation to its nominal source - seems to do nothing more than anthologise its forerunners, and comes out looking, for all the expensive hardware and location shooting, like a Saturday serial risen grandiloquently above its station. Still, Claude Renoir's visuals are often easy on the eye, even if Marvin Hamlisch's insistent score is never quite so kind to the ear.

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