KALBA, MAX

Contributed by: The James Bond Movie Encyclopedia by Steven Jay Rubin

Egyptian black-market trader and the owner of Cairo’s Mojaba nightclub in The Spy Who Loved Me, portrayed by veteran character actor Vernon Dobtcheff. Following a clue he finds on the dead body of Aziz Fekkesh (Nadim Sawalha), Bond (Roger Moore) goes to the Mojaba Club to find Kalba and bid on a microfilm copy of a missing nuclear-submarine tracking system that he possesses.

Competing for the microfilm with KGB major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach), Bond is prepared to offer a higher bid when Kalba is called to the phone. Instead of receiving a call, Kalba finds Jaws (Richard Kiel) waiting for him in the booth. He’s “cut off,” Jaws steals the film, Bond finds the body, Anya joins him, and both stow away in Jaws’s phone utility truck as he drives off into the desert.

In an early treatment for The Spy Who Loved Me, the meeting with Kalba at the swank nightclub featured a tense, high-stakes game of backgammon in which Bond comes from behind to win 50,000 pounds from Kalba, who dies before he can pay up. Bond and Anya still go after Jaws, but this time they follow him in a sports car. The desert sequence was much more elaborate, with Bond and Amasova fighting off marauding bands of Tuareg bandits, with Anya’s pearl necklace providing them with mini hand grenades. The unused backgammon sequence was later resurrected in Octopussy, when Bond battles the evil Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan).

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