Review/Essay
:
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
The prevailing opinion seems to be "Bad Bond, good Bond film" but I think it's perhaps the opposite.
George Lazenby is spot on as Bond, he's got the physicality and the attitude. Where as the film is structurally flawed, sometimes tonally misjudged, cheesy, dated and sloppily edited. The two major plot threads are Bond finally falling in love for real with the suicidal Countess Tracy (
Diana Rigg) and the infiltration of Blofeld's Swiss mountain-top lair. The main problem is the decision to not integrate Tracy into the Blofeld half of the plot, which means she doesn't feature in a single shot for 65-minutes in the middle. Since Blofeld's plan involves hypnotizing a series of important women to be sleeper agents (on a pretext of curing their mental problems) it should have been obvious that Tracy's own depression was the perfect excuse to have her be one of the girls. Then Bond could have gone there to rescue her at the same time as facing his nemesis. This causes a secondary problem because Bond sleeps with several of the girls at Blofeld's clinic, which is showing the audience that Tracy has not won Bond's heart like we are supposed to believe. Plus during that hour the script requires Lazenby to pretend not be Bond (including comedy dubbed voice) for 30-minutes, not the way you should introduce a new actor in an already iconic role.
Stylistically OHMSS sits uncomfortably in that period between the timeless razor-sharp suits of the mid 60s and the safely bland clothes of the early 70s, in that full-on camp late-60s post-Sgt. Pepper style that even
The Beatles dropped almost as soon as they made it famous. The decor of the sets is gaudy and kitsch, the clothes make
Austin Powers look barely a parody and even
John Barry's admittedly terrific score is dated by the use of then fashionable Harpsichord. The promotional poster uses the phrase
"Far out", which should tell you everything you need to know. There are countless occasions when I'm sure an extra comedy line has been dubbed in when Lazonby's face is away from the camera to try and jazz the movie up in post production. I personally don't like
Telly Savalas as Blofeld, he isn't sinister enough and he's no
Donald Pleasence. The idea that Bond and Blofeld do not recognise each other simply because they are different actors makes no sense. Blofeld's clinic has cured women of their aversions/allergies to certain foods, so we are shown shots of them eating plates of just potatoes, just chicken etc. Then we are shown a Chinese girl who can now eat rice, an Indian girl eating Naan bread and a black girl tucking into a plate of bananas! Oh my gods!
With those problems dealt with, I have to say OHMSS has many fine points to enjoy. Lazonby and Rigg work beautifully together, in the scenes they do get to share. The alpine photography is insanely beautiful. The skiing action scenes are amazing and genuinely dangerous looking.
Gabriele Ferzetti is wonderful as Tracy's father and Bond's new compadre, Draco. The finale where he joins Bond for a helicopter assault on Blofeld's stronghold is epic action. Of course there is that heartbreaking ending too. Despite all these highlights, OHMSS remains frustratingly flawed for me.
Happily, LastSurvivor's excellent fanedit fixes most of my problems with it:
https://ifdb.fanedit.org/on-her-majesty-s-secret-service-the-ls-cut/
Becoming Bond (2017)
As I was re-watching OHMSS, this odd
George Lazenby biopic/documentary hybrid was a welcome find on Amazon Prime. Lazenby faces the camera and tells us his life story (up to the point he quit Bond), which is intercut with comedic re-enactments of what he is describing. So much runtime and effort is put into these scenes that it's almost like they shot a whole narrative movie, decided it didn't work and then got Lazenby in to talk all over it. I applaud the filmmakers for trying something radically different in the tired Bio-Doc and Bio-Drama Genres but I don't think it works. Lazenby mostly comes across exactly as you'd expect from a man who infamously chucked away super-stardom and fortune because he thought he knew better. Some of the details of what he claims has the whiff of BS but I did feel sympathy for the guy, plucked from near obscurity and dropped into the biggest franchise on the planet.
By the way, notice at 01.01 where they've censored a shot in the trailer by digitally painting out a woman's breasts, so Lazonby appears to be making love to a breast-less mutant
.