Nothing else in our popular culture has endured with such elan as Agent 007, whether played by Sean Connery, by George Lazenby (briefly, in ''On Her Majesty's Secret Service'') or by the incumbent, Roger Moore. Not the least of the feats of the Bond films is their having outlived all the imitations, particularly the Matt Helm and Flint pictures.

''For Your Eyes Only'' is not the best of the series by a long shot - that would be a choice between ''Goldfinger'' and ''Moonraker'' - but it's far from the worst. It has a structural problem in that it opens with a precredit helicopter chase - in, over, around and through London - which is so lunatic and inventive that the rest of the movie is hard-put to achieve such a fever-pitch again.

Though Mr. Moore shows no sign of tiring - his Bond retains an ageless cool that remains outside of time - the screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Michael Wilson is occasionally lazy, allowing us fleeting moments of introspection when logic raises its boring head. One of the secrets of the best of the Bonds is the manner in which we, in the audience, are made willing accomplices to illogic.

Most of the time, though, ''For Your Eyes Only'' is a slick entertainment in which Bond's mission is to locate a sunken British spy ship, one that contains some potentially lethal equipment sought by the Russians and that went down perilously close to the coast of Albania. The film, which was shot on location in Greece, Corfu and the Italian Alps, contains a great deal of natural scenery in which Bond swims, dives, skis, drives, falls and flies, and from which he emerges never scratched so badly that he can't carry on.

''For Your Eyes Only'' is not the spaced-out fun that ''Moonraker'' was, but its tone is consistently comic even when the material is not. It has no villains to match Goldfinger or Jaws, but it has one of the most appealing leading ladies of any Bond picture. She is Carole Bouquet, the tall, dark-haired beauty who played one-half of the title role in Luis Bunuel's ''That Obscure Object of Desire.''

The supporting cast includes Topol, who still can't resist playing cute when straight would be better; Lynn-Holly Johnson as a champion ice skater, which she is; Julian Glover as the principal bad guy, and Michael Gotherd, who gives a new, evil connotation to the wearing of octagonal-shaped glasses.

The film is probably the best-directed on all levels since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as John Glen, moving into the director's chair after long service as second unit director and editor, displays a fine eye.

Story also benefits from presence of a truly sympathetic heroine, fetchingly portrayed by Carole Bouquet, who exhibits a humanity and emotionalism not frequently found in this sort of pop adventure and who takes a long time (the entire picture, in fact) to jump into the sack with him.

M is gone, due to Bernard Lee's death; Bond doesn't make his first feminine conquest until halfway through the picture; there's no technology introduced by Q which saves the hero in the end; no looming supervillain dominates the drama; Bond bon mots are surprisingly sparse, and the fate of the whole world isn't even hanging in the balance at the climax.

Once again Bond matches wits with nasty men and lips with shady ladies. Once again his work takes him to a bunch of tony vacation spots (the Dolomites, Corfu, Spain, Albania, Moscow in winter). Once again the fate of the world is threatened by—what is it this time?—a nuclear-sub tracking system that has fallen into enemy hands, and can be saved by one lone agent working for an empire over which the sun set long ago.

This is all standard equipment, but the technicians responsible for the Bond films' felicities—car chases, aerobatics, all the sophisticated paraphernalia of Saturday-matinee thrills—have devised some splendid optional features for For Your Eyes Only. There is a funny-brutal pentathlon of alpine sports: cross-country skiing with hired assassins; a two-man ski jump with the competitors gouging each other in midair; downhill racing at gunpoint; a bobsled run on skis; ice hockey using players as pucks. Director Glen has kept the plot moving briskly, and, in several action sequences, clipped a frame or two from within a shot to increase the impact.