Clubs in film: 'The Spy Who Loved Me' (1977)

Aug 28, 2025

Clubland became an increasingly important component of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels; and this was reflected in the first Bond feature film, Dr. No (1962). But the film series acquired its own more outlandish style, and by the mid-1970s it had been over a decade since we had seen a private members’ club in an official ‘Eon’ Bond film, in Goldfinger (1964).

This changed with The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Roger Moore’s third outing as the spy. Here, the screentime for the club is barely five minutes - but we see a surprising amount of the interior and exterior during that screentime.

The Mojaba Club

We are shown the Mojaba Club in Cairo. Some film guides suggest this is simply supposed to portray a nightclub, but there are several architectural clues that this is a private members’ club - most notably the high walls around the expansive premises, for keeping people out. This is a traditional, colonial-style gymkhana club, in the model of Cairo’s real-life colonial clubs, like its United Service Club, and the Turf Club.

And as with many of these colonial-era clubs, it has a complex of large outhouses dotted around the main building, which are briefly seen when Bond pursues Jaws.

Internally, the set revolves around a central atrium with strong Islamic architectural influences, through which all the other rooms are reached. The interior (clearly shot on a studio set at Pinewood) is very different to the barely-glimpsed British imperial-style exterior.

To one side of the atrium is the main bar, in a very contemporary 1970s style, but again, with the more traditional Islamic touches of the courtyard evident - a somewhat incongruous architectural flourish, given the obvious serving of alcohol. (But these contrasts do exist: I once telephoned a very discreet traditional British club in an Islamic country, which is informally known to locals as the one place where alcohol can easily be obtained, even though serving it is technically illegal. The first question on the other end of the line was an incredulous-sounding, “How did you find us?”)

To another side of the courtyard are the phone booths lined up in cubicles - it is in one of these that ‘Jaws’ later silently murders Max Kalba, with Bond finding the body.

The busiest section of the Mojaba Club has a stage with entertainments. It is this part of the studio set which leads to the widespread belief that it must just be a nightclub. But the ambience and architecture of the Club suggests otherwise, and it is not unusual for colonial-era clubs to have stages like this.

It is at a balcony area to the side of this stage that Bond and Major Anya Amasova meet Max Kalba, described as “the owner of the Club” - so it is established as a proprietary club, not a member-owned one. But it is not unusual for clubs set up as member-owned clubs in a then-British colony, to have survived post-independence as proprietary clubs, with the previous European membership having largely left with colonial independence. It is a conversation cut short by Kalba's phone call, resulting in his murder.

The Mojaba Club is little-remembered in Bond canon, being mainly a bridging link from the film’s previous setpiece fight to its next. Even Marvin Hamlisch, the film’s composer, did not seem overly familiar with it - his score had a track for the scene called “Mojave Club”, with the same spelling as Mojave in California. Presumably he was not given a script, and went by his hearing of the dialogue onscreen.

Whither Clubland?

The Mojaba Club also serves as something of a swan song to Clubland in the films. While clubs were a staple of the literary Bond’s world, we do not see another club onscreen for the remaining nine Bond films of the twentieth century. Only in the twenty-first century did clubs make a comeback with the screen Bond.

The closest the series gets to depicting any more clubs before then was in the Timothy Dalton era, when the idea of a club was treated as a term of abuse: James Bond announces his resignation from the secret service in Licence to Kill (1989), and a clearly unimpressed and irritable ‘M’ (Robert Brown) exclaims, “We’re not a country club, 007!”

MI6: Not a country club, according to ‘M’', in Licence to Kill (1989).

There is also mention of a club in the unofficial, non-‘Eon’ Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983), though this is scarcely any more complimentary. This film has possibly the most open hostility of any between Bond and ‘M’ (here played by Edward Fox). At the end of the film, the mission completed, a now-impressed ‘M’ offers Bond over the radio, “I’d like to offer you lunch at my club.” The reference is clearly intended to show how Bond and ‘M’ live in very different worlds, and Sean Connery’s Bond is far too distracted by having Kim Basinger in his arms to pay ‘M’s offer any notice. For Sean Connery’s last big screen outing as Bond, the Club is something to be shunned - quite a departure from his suave onscreen introduction in the louche splendour of Les Ambassadeurs in Dr. No (1962).