Thunderball (1965) is the fourth spy film of the British James Bond series, and the fourth to star Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent Commander James Bond. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ian Fleming, which in turn was based on an original screenplay by Jack Whittingham. It was directed by Terence Young with screenplay by Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins. The film follows Bond's mission to find two NATO nuclear bombs stolen by SPECTRE, who holds the world to ransom for £100 million in gold, in exchange for not destroying an unspecified major city in either England or the United States (later revealed to be Miami). The search leads Bond to the Bahamas, where he encounters Emilio Largo, the card-playing, eye-patch wearing SPECTRE Number Two. Backed by the CIA and Largo's mistress, Bond's search culminates into an underwater battle with Largo's henchmen. Thunderball was associated with a legal dispute in 1961 when former Ian Fleming collaborators Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham sued him shortly after the 1961 publication of the Thunderball novel, claiming he based it upon the screenplay the trio had earlier written in a failed cinematic translation of James Bond. The lawsuit was settled out of court and Broccoli and Saltzman fearing a rival McClory film allowed him to retain certain screen rights to the novel's story, plot, and characters. The film had a complex production, with four different units and about a fourth of the film consisting of underwater scenes. (via Wikipedia)