Egyptian capital featured in Diamonds Are Forever and The Spy Who Loved Me. In Diamonds, the city is the second stop for James Bond (Sean Connery) on his ruthless search for Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Charles Gray), the man behind the murder of Bond’s wife in the previous film. Tipped off in Tokyo, Bond goes to a Cairo casino and meets a fez-wearing blackjack player whose card request, “Hit me,” is happily obliged—literally—by Bond. To avoid a further beating, he in turn directs Bond to Marie (Denise Perrier), a bikini-clad jet-setter who tells Bond everything when he rips her top off and nearly strangles her with it. The information eventually leads him to the jungles of South America and to Blofeld’s cloning experiments.

In The Spy Who Loved Me, Cairo becomes the scene of a number of strange encounters between Bond (Roger Moore) and KGB major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach), who are competing for a nuclear submarine tracking system that is being offered on the open market by anonymous sources. Bond also receives an equipment briefing from Q (Desmond Llewelyn) inside an Egyptian tomb turned headquarters of the British Secret Service in Cairo. All exterior sequences were shot on location in the Egyptian capital, including a visit to a spectacular nightly light show conducted on the Giza Plateau with the pyramids in the background.