INTERMISSION
A WRITER TAKES PAUSE TO CONSIDER…
How the James Bond films inspired a passion for set-jetting.
NEIL SMITH
It was May Day wot done it. Had Grace Jones’ sultry assassin (or rather stuntman B.J. Worth) not parachuted from the Eiffel Tower in A View To A Kill, this Bond-loving film fan would not have cultivated a passion for going to the sites of 007’s exploits he has spent the last three decades indulging.
Sure, I’d been to Paris before. On returning there in 1986, though, I was a young man on a mission: to follow in the footsteps of Roger Moore and see as much of the tower as he had done in John Glen’s 1985 film. In this I was somewhat thwarted, much of it having been shot on stairwells out of bounds to members of the public. Youthful Neil was also disappointed to find out the Jules Verne restaurant on the second floor of the tower was not the one seen in the film, production designer Peter Lamont having built his own version for the scene in which May Day dispatches Achille Aubergine with a poisoned butterfly.