For Your Eyes Only 1981: Cast, Plot and Ending Explained

For Your Eyes Only follows Bond as he races the Soviet KGB to recover the ATAC, a system used to coordinate Royal Navy Polaris submarines, after the British intelligence ship carrying it hits an old mine and sinks in the Ionian Sea. The British quietly hire marine archaeologist Sir Timothy Havelock to find the wreck, but a Cuban hitman kills him and his wife on their yacht.

Their daughter Melina sees it happen and vows revenge. Bond is sent to recover the ATAC before the Soviets get it. His search leads him to Spain, where Melina Havelock is pursuing the same killers.

In For Your Eyes Only, James Bond tracks the hitman Hector Gonzales from Spain to Cortina, Corfu and Albania, kills Emile Leopold Locque, and ends up throwing the stolen ATAC off a cliff so neither Britain nor the Soviets keep it.

In Spain, Bond is captured while watching the villa of Gonzales, but Melina kills Gonzales with a crossbow and the two escape together. Back in London, Bond and Q use a face matching device to identify the man who paid Gonzales as Locque. The trail then moves to Cortina, Italy, where the Greek businessman Aristotle Kristatos tells Bond that Locque works for his former wartime partner Milos Columbo. Bond survives attacks by skiers and by men in hockey gear, and his contact Ferrara is found killed in Bond's car.

In Corfu, Bond meets Columbo's circle and spends the night with Columbo's mistress, Countess Lisl, who is killed the next morning by Locque. Columbo's men capture Bond and reveal that Kristatos is the one working for the KGB. Bond joins Columbo's raid on Kristatos's warehouse in Albania, where he sees mines like the one that sank the ship, and he kills Locque by forcing his car off a cliff.

Bond and Melina dive to the wreck and recover the ATAC, but Kristatos takes it from them when they surface. They survive another attempt on their lives and learn where Kristatos will meet his buyer when Melina's parrot repeats the meeting phrase. With Columbo and his men they storm a mountaintop monastery, and Bond climbs the cliff to get in. Bond kills Kristatos's henchmen and gets the ATAC back, and he stops Melina from killing the surrendered Kristatos. Kristatos pulls a hidden knife and Columbo kills him with a thrown knife.

General Anatol Gogol arrives by helicopter to collect the device, and Bond throws it off the cliff so neither side has it. The film closes with Bond and Melina on her father's yacht while the parrot answers a call from MI6 and the Prime Minister.

For Your Eyes Only had its UK premiere, reported as June 24, 1981, at the Odeon Leicester Square in London, and its US release followed on June 26, 1981. The Australian release is reported as July 1, 1981.

The film is rated PG in both the US and the UK and M in Australia, and its runtime is 128 minutes. At the box office it took $54.8 million in the US and Canada and $140.5 million internationally, for $195.3 million worldwide against the $28 million budget. For the series as a whole, the James Bond box office page puts that figure alongside every other film.

In release order the film sits between Moonraker and Octopussy, and you can see the full sequence in the James Bond movies in order guide. If you want to watch it now, where to watch James Bond lists the current services.

Milos Columbo kills Aristotle Kristatos, James Bond throws the ATAC off a cliff in front of General Anatol Gogol, and the film closes on the yacht with a parrot taking calls from MI6 and the Prime Minister. It sets up no direct sequel.

Why does Bond throw the ATAC off the cliff? Because the device is useless to Britain if the Soviets can also claim it, and Bond refuses to hand it over. In my opinion, it is the most practical choice in the film, since the whole plot has been a tug of war over one object and the only way to end the tug of war is to remove the rope.

The moment before it matters as much. Bond stops Melina from killing the surrendered Kristatos, which respects her need for revenge but denies it a cold blooded execution. Kristatos then pulls a hidden knife, and Columbo's thrown knife kills him, so the villain dies with a weapon in his hand and nobody has to carry the moral cost. I think that is a tidy piece of plotting, and a neat contrast with the earlier scene where Melina kills Gonzales with a crossbow.

The final yacht scene is a light button on a film that spends most of its runtime on cliffs, wrecks and snow. Melina's parrot, which earlier gave away the meeting phrase that led them to the monastery, now fields the calls from MI6 and the Prime Minister, so the one animal that cracked the case also gets the last laugh.

Seen against the rest of the series, the ending stands on its own. For Your Eyes Only is the 12th official film, arriving after Moonraker and before Octopussy, and because it sets up no direct sequel, nothing in the yacht scene points toward Octopussy. In my opinion that makes it a closed story: the ATAC is destroyed, Kristatos is dead, and neither Moonraker before it nor Octopussy after it is left a loose object to pick up. It also sits eleven films after Dr. No, the first entry, in a run of 25 official EON films, and its answer to the question of who keeps the dangerous device is to let nobody keep it.

Corfu is the Greek island where For Your Eyes Only was mainly filmed, and principal photography began there on September 15, 1980. The island supplied the casino, Kalami Bay and Kanoni Island scenes and the car chases.

The climax moved to the Greek mainland, at Meteora and Kalambaka, where the mountaintop monastery sits. The ski, biathlon and bobsled sequences were shot in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, and because Cortina had no snow during filming, the production brought it in by truck. Studio interiors and sets were built at Pinewood Studios in England, and the underwater sequences were shot in the Bahamas.

By the ASC's account, the shooting schedule ran about 20 weeks: six on Corfu, two at Meteora, three in Cortina and nine at Pinewood. That split explains the look of the film, with sun and stone in the Greek scenes and cold white slopes in the Italian ones.

John Glen made his feature directing debut on For Your Eyes Only after working as a second unit director on earlier Bond films.

• Roger Moore was reported to be out as Bond after Broccoli screen tested other actors, but trade papers confirmed in July 1980 that he would return.
• Bernard Lee died in January 1981 during production, so M was written out and Bill Tanner briefed Bond instead.
• Stuntman Paolo Rigon was killed in a bobsled accident during filming in February 1981.
• The title song was written by Bill Conti and Michael Leeson, performed on screen by Sheena Easton, and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
• Production used six separate units, including an underwater unit in the Bahamas.