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Thunderball (film)

Thunderball
Thunderball - UK cinema poster.jpg
British cinema poster for Thunderball, designed and illustrated by Robert McGinnis and Frank McCarthy
Directed by Terence Young
Produced by Kevin McClory
Screenplay by Richard Maibaum
John Hopkins
Story by Kevin McClory
Jack Whittingham
Ian Fleming
(Original Screenplay)
Based on Thunderball by
Ian Fleming
Starring Sean Connery
Claudine Auger
Adolfo Celi
Luciana Paluzzi
Rik Van Nutter
Music by John Barry
Cinematography Ted Moore
Edited by Peter R. Hunt (supr ed)
Ernest Hosler
Production
company
Distributed by United Artists
Release date
  • 9 December 1965 (1965-12-09) (Tokyo, premiere)
  • 21 December 1965 (1965-12-21) (United States)
  • 29 December 1965 (1965-12-29) (United Kingdom)
Running time
130 minutes
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Budget $9 million
Box office $141.2 million

Thunderball (1965) is the fourth spy film in the James Bond series starring Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ian Fleming, which in turn was based on an original screenplay by Jack Whittingham. It was directed by Terence Young with its screenplay by Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins.

The film follows Bond's mission to find two NATO atomic bombs stolen by SPECTRE, which holds the world to ransom for £100 million in diamonds, in exchange for not destroying an unspecified major city in either England or the United States (later revealed to be Miami). The search leads Bond to the Bahamas, where he encounters Emilio Largo, the card-playing, eye patch-wearing SPECTRE Number Two. Backed by CIA agent Felix Leiter and Largo's mistress, Domino Derval, Bond's search culminates in an underwater battle with Largo's henchmen. The film had a complex production, with four different units and about a quarter of the film consisting of underwater scenes.Thunderball was the first Bond film shot in widescreen Panavision and the first to have running time of over two hours.

Thunderball was associated with a legal dispute in 1961 when former Ian Fleming collaborators Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham sued him shortly after the 1961 publication of the novel, claiming he based it upon the screenplay the trio had earlier written in a failed cinematic translation of James Bond. The lawsuit was settled out of court and Bond film series producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, fearing a rival McClory film, allowed him to retain certain screen rights to the novel's story, plot, and characters, and for McClory to receive sole producer credit on this film; Broccoli and Salzman were instead credited as Executive Producers.


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