Shaken, Not Stirred takes a (brief) look at the James Bond canon from Eon Productions. Twice a month, Chris and Jon share their impressions of each film, both on its own terms and in terms of the cultural landscape as well as the genre it helped to create, not to mention its intersection in the Cinema Dual hosts’ lives.
FROM THE (LETTER)BOX(D): FAR UP! FAR OUT! FAR MORE! JAMES BOND 007 IS BACK! With the help of Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Unione Corse crime syndicate, and Draco’s troubled daughter Tracy, James Bond tracks his archnemesis, Ernst Stravro Blofeld, to a mountaintop retreat in the Swiss Alps, where he is training an army of beautiful, lethal women.
WHAT CHRIS THOUGHT: With an imposing build and a coy poshness that meets Roger Moore more than halfway while retaining some of the brute (with way more polish) force of Connery, George Lazenby makes his one and only appearance as Bond. And if I’m being honest, I kinda love it, even if I can clearly see Lazenby isn’t the greatest thespian; just watch Diana Rigg run circles around him in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a film that, going by what’s been released is my second favorite Bond film, just behind From Russia With Love.
That’s right, I kind of adore this movie. Having been involved as the editor for all the previous films, Peter Hunt takes the director’s chair and brings us for the first time a Bond who really feels like a reflection of the groovin’ times while retaining and building on the mythology and template the franchise would use for the next few decades. The colors are just HUGE in this film, and Hunt’s use of locations really brings an epic scope and feel to the film in a way a lot of the obvious sets from previous films lacked. There’s a simple sequence shot of Bond running into a parade, and the fact that Hunt and cinematographer Michael Reed simply shoot him on location makes the sequence infinitely more compelling.
Are there issues? Sure, and I’m more than happy to get to them in the next section. But let’s talk about the good stuff, like how incredible Diana Rigg is in this. Or how Lazenby is unafraid to show a side of Bond that fans should really take a second look at, since it pretty much prefigures what happens in Casino Royale. And with his imposing physique, I came away from this viewing thinking if there was truly a parallel to be drawn, it’s with Craig’s Bond rather than Connery’s.
WHAT JON THOUGHT: On a surface level, George Lazenby’s one movie run as Bond tends to be treated as a forgettable franchise footnote. The fact that Connery will almost immediately (if briefly) return further builds a sense of dread going into this assignment. Chris even had to tell me to approach On Her Majesty’s Secret Service with an open mind. I’m glad he did because on a closer investigation, it was Lazenby himself who declined to come back for a second movie, apparently finding the concept of secret agents to be somewhat archaic. Given where we are in this project, history may not ultimately vindicate Lazenby’s thinking — but I can’t help admiring the decision. More importantly though, if Lazenby wasn’t exactly a memorable Bond, you can at least make the claim that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a pretty good Bond movie, because it is.
First and foremost, this movie works because of Diana Rigg. Not since Daniela Bianchi in From Russia With Love have we had a love interest so integral to the story that the movie actually suffers with her absence in the middle section. More Bond girls should be regularly putting Bond in his place. On her own Rigg’s character is great, but she also brings out Lazenby’s best qualities as an actor. For whatever flaws you might attribute to him, he works as an actor here when he is in relationship mode. The tragedy of the film’s ending is genuinely compelling, and in addition to subverting the typical “have sex on a raft adrift in the sea” ending, it spotlights some rarely seen vulnerability to our protagonist.
Secondly, while I can’t pretend to be enthralled by the specifics of Blofeld’s plot, or of how he survived the last film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service does have my favorite depiction of the recurring Bond villain. While I appreciate Donald Pleasance’s iconic, near alien portrayal of Blofeld, I felt like he didn’t get that much to do. Telly Savalas, however, charms his way all through this movie. Should he have been personally leading the incredibly memorable ski attack instead of masterminding it from his lair? Probably not, but his hands on approach is how you get the film’s memorable ending, so I can live with it.
ANYTHING ELSE, CHRIS? Man I love the plot of this film, and I love how much Telly Savalas hams it up as Blofeld, coming off more creepy than the weirdo Donald Pleasance portrayed him as. And the plan of brainwashing beautiful women as sleeper agents is incredible, and leads to one of the best sequences of the film, as Bond once again proves his true worth to MI6 by sleeping with multiple women in the name of getting close to Blofeld. I love the colors and the way hypnosis is used, and the finale with the massive attack on the mountain fortress is fantastic.
What doesn’t work? I wish the two halves of the movie felt a little more connected; we get this great setup with Bond and Tracy, and then they literally drop him off on the corner for the next half of the movie to take place without her. And, much as I love the ending (goddamn the look Bond and Moneypenny give each other is great) the actual final shot is so sudden and abrupt I have no idea how they thought people would react. It’s the biggest thing to have ever happened in a Bond film, and drives his personality in much the same way Casino Royale uses it decades later, but even there we get the final tag with Bond suited up carrying an assault rifle. Here, we get a grieving widow with nothing to lead us to a sense of closure or retribution.
But if I have a real problem with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, it’s that for all the great action and locations used, I have no idea why Hunt keeps putting in glaring rear-screen projection shots. Is it to simply get more “face time” for the actors? It’s so distracting, and I think if you took 90% of them out and just let the action happen it would be vastly superior. I’ll take another three films with Lazenby if we could guarantee that.
ANYTHING ELSE, JON? With a new actor playing James Bond for the first time ever, it may be an understandable impulse to avoid the plot point in the book where Bond gets plastic surgery so he is unrecognizable to Blofeld. If you entertain conspiracy theories that “James Bond” is a title rather than a person to explain away the actor replacements, this becomes even more fun, especially when Blofeld also keeps getting recast. But the unfortunate and mundane truth is that Blofeld should recognize Bond immediately, and does not. It may be a small nit to pick, but you already have to squint real hard to find any continuity in the series to date and this just makes it worse.
I mentioned it above, but Telly Savalas is keeping the menace in this movie through sheer force of personality, because the plot itself kind of doesn’t matter. I guess he’s scheming to claim some kind of noble title, which is related to an allergy research institute he’s running as a front — that institute, in turn, serving as cover for hypnotizing a bevy of Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus knockoffs into spreading biological warfare. When can Diana Rigg come back into the movie and do a kick ass chase sequence already?
THE FINAL WORD(S): For Jon, he can’t be all that mad that Lazenby didn’t stick around for more, even if the movie is far better than its reputation suggests. For Chris it’s a hidden gem, unfairly maligned and filled with enough charm to keep him coming back over bigger, more popular entries.
NEXT TIME: THE MAN WHO MADE 007 A HOUSEHOLD NUMBER IS BACK…IN DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER!
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