Thunderball

Thunderball was the first James Bond 007 film I ever saw.

I was 13 years old, a high school freshman anxious to make new friends in a new school. Three new friends invited me to go with them to see Thunderball at the State Theater on a fall Saturday afternoon.

Never having seen a Bond film before, I did not know what to expect and I certainly did not expect the film to open with a full-fledged femulation!

I will never forget it. The film opens with Bond (Sean Connery) observing a funeral in a church. Bond and the camera concentrate on the widow, a leggy blonde appropriately dressed in black from veiled head to high heeled toe. The widow exits the church and a limo whisks her home, where she finds Bond.

Bond greets her, "Madame, I've come to offer my sincere condolences." And then he slugs her in the jaw.

Bond adds, "My dear Colonel Bouvar, I don't think you should have opened that car door by yourself." (After exiting the church, the widow opened the door to the limo herself.)

Turns out that the blonde widow was actually Colonel Bouvar, one of Bond's enemies, faking his own death femulating as his own widow. (I did not see that coming!)

After viewing the film for the first time, I was convinced that the widow was a femulation throughout the opening of the film. But after revisiting the film, I wasn't fooled again.

In the first scene, the bad guy en femme was actually played by a woman (Rose Alba). You can catch a glimpse of an attractive blonde under the thin veil covering her face, but in the second scene, the veil has suddenly became thicker and you cannot see the features of the grieving "widow" as she fights Bond and is revealed as a male (stuntman Bob Simmons).

Despite the obvious, I prefer my initial interpretation, that is, the leggy blonde was a male all along.

Wearing Dress Barn (Source: Dress Barn)

Actor and professional femulator, Frederick Kovert (or Fred Ko Vert)