Which one is this? The George Lazenby one.
Who’s who in this one? Lazenby (Bond); Lee (M); Llewelyn (Q); Maxwell (Moneypenny).
Where did you first encounter this one? When the series was released on DVD in the early 2000s.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? It’s Blofeld again, but this time – holy smokes! – he’s played by Telly Savalas. He wants to use chemical weapons to hold the world to ransom.
Who are the Bond girls? Diana Rigg as Tracy, the most significant Bond girl in the series, in that Bond a) falls in love with her, b) marries her, and c) becomes a widower when she is killed.
Opening number? A harrowing instrumental piece from John Barry, set against an equally harrowing title sequence: what appears at first to be a martini becomes a portentous hourglass theme, through which scenes from the previous five films slowly drain as we tick inevitably towards OHMSS’s legendary finale.
What’s memorable about this one? See above re: Tracy. Also, the skiing, the mountain fortress, and Bond’s rather naughty kilt, and the eternal question of whether or not George Lazenby was a franchise highlight or hindrance.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 10. Going into writing this series, my general estimation was that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the actual best in the line.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? I will keep it at 10 while admitting some sluggishness in the second act. It’s not the best in the line, butOHMSS is a heady brew and a Bond masterpiece.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the furthest outlier of the Bond series – or perhaps more accurately, the unseen dwarf star around which the rest of the system secretly orbits. It is the most the most intellectually and emotionally complete of the Bond pictures (more so by far than Casino Royale), which makes it nearly not a Bond picture at all; in spite of its extraordinary downhill chase in the second act and a few brief set pieces elsewhere, OHMSS is barely an action picture, and barely a thriller either. Its precise genre is hard to gauge; the second act is bound up in the usual Bondian intrigue, but the first and third acts – jagged, unsettling, and glibly “not nice” – are ultimately a trenchant and highly compelling love story. Without ever leaning on the sort of verbal psychoanalysis that Vesper levels upon Bond in Royale, we learn a great deal about secret agent 007 in his every interaction with Contessa Teresa Di Vicenzo – “Tracy” – right up to and including the moment in a snowed-in farmhouse in the Swiss Alps where Bond chooses, extraordinarily, to forego his dangerous life for a marriage to Tracy and the hope of fathering six kids – three boys, three girls.
Peter Hunt, who edited the five previous Bond pictures and directs here for the first and only time in the series, creates rich, distinct compositions and blocking. This is an editor’s picture in every frame. (John Glen, who would go on to direct five Bond pictures himself, is Hunt’s picture editor here, and second-unit director.) Released in 1969, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is heavily influenced by the Bond- and Avengers-driven visual style of The Prisoner, whileAvengers mainstay Diana Rigg plays Tracy. As the ‘60s draw to a close, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service might well be the definitive take on that decade’s obsession with secret agents, jet-set foreign locales, and the leisure of playboys. Hunt brings us into the film by way of a thrilling opening set piece where Bond rescues Tracy from a seeming suicide attempt, only to face two of her father’s goons on the beach. The secret agent’s face is held in silhouette for as long as possible to tease the arrival of the series’ very first New Bond on the scene. When he finally emerges from darkness with a schoolboy grin and one of the franchise’s only purposeful in-diegesis acknowledgements of the fourth wall – “This never happened to the other fella!” – we are off and away into a franchise rarity: the Bond movie as character study, with the possible adjustment here being that the character in question may not even be Bond. It may, in fact, be George Lazenby.
Lazenby – an Australian model who looks far more comfortable with dinner jacket off, beating the hell out of someone in the surf than he does with dinner jacket on, making nice in civilized company – is equal parts perfect asshole and perfect Bond. He crystallizes the essential element of the secret agent’s onscreen makeup: the thin veneer of civility that shellacs an otherwise marginally unlikeable man. Lazenby plays Bond as angry, disaffected, callous, sexual, enviable, and dangerous in equal measure, sinking deeply into the role by appearing at first to not have sunk into it at all. Lazenby’s Bond is a man living nearly sociopathically on the surface of his own personality, but only, as we later come to understand, to keep all the other things safely inside. He achieves the indicative Bond beats with casual grace: observe the high cheek with which, having laid out an encroaching thug, Lazenby pauses on his way out the door to brutally slather an indignant quantity of beluga caviar on a cracker from a nearby service cart, and stuff it into his mouth. Like all the great Bonds, he knows how to order breakfast (here: “Café complet for two with fresh orange juice”); is an irreverent dick when he wants to be (lazily enjoying aPlayboy centerfold while wandering out of a Swiss bank, surrounded by old ladies); and like Connery before him and Moore after, is not above slapping a woman. We are disgusted by him and fascinated in equal measure, but Lazenby’s Bond is one of the precious few who will, ultimately, let us far enough inside to glimpse the boy beneath the brute. We will even learn the truth of the Bond/Moneypenny relationship through him – not in the early scene where they dance back and forth on the sexual liaison that will never happen, but at Bond’s wedding, where they tenderly, nonverbally, acknowledge the connection that was driving the dance for all those years.
When On Her Majesty’s Secret Service reveals that its spy plot will be driven by, of all things, genealogy, you’re either on board with the film or you’re not. “I’ve been reading up on the technical side of heraldry,” Bond tells M during a rare visit to the Admiral’s home (where M contents himself pinning butterflies to cards). Bond is preparing to impersonate Sir Hilary Bray, a richly conceived character in an area of expertise completely alien to what we nominally consider “Bondish”: a genealogical expert from the London College of Arms, who has been summoned to Switzerland to verify Blofeld’s vainglorious claim that he is the heir to a Count’s title. Bond’s subsequent impersonation of Hilary at Piz Gloria in the Swiss Alps – as a hysterical fussbudget homosexual in a cape, pipe and hat! – turns into a series of naughty sexual gags as Bond, the proverbial rooster in the henhouse, works his way from bedroom to bedroom in the mountaintop complex, bedding the harem of women who are staying at the compound for purported allergy cures – and who are, in fact, “the Angels of Death,” tentpoles in Blofeld’s master plan to disburse biological weapons around the globe. Ordering malt whiskey and branchwater and declaiming biliously about the history of heraldry over dinner, boring, gay “Sir Hilary” turns lothario overnight, prowling the sleeping quarters, romancing the ladies, and telling each of them, in turn, to “Call me Hilly.” One imagines Bond nearly screaming with laughter at the end of each duplicitous sexual conquest.
The massive, chilling downhill tumble on ski, foot and wheels when Bond escapes Piz Gloria – from the height of the Alps to the base of the mountain – seems to last an hour, yet passes in such a visceral rush that you can nearly feel your ears pop. It foregrounds Savalas’ weirdly energetic Blofeld – no spider here, but rather a spry sportsman willing to don a ski-suit to pursue Bond down the slopes personally – along with the extraordinary skiing of Willy Bogner, who doubled the performers, and filmed chase sequences while skiing backwards downhill with a handheld camera. When Bond is run aground at the edge of a precipice, the musical score drops off in favour of source music from the chalet town far below, a terrifying whisper of carnival sounds heard on the wind as Bond sends thug after thug spiraling to their doom off the Alpine cliff. As the chase continues into Bern, we arrive at the film’s ecstatic moment – as Bond, helpless and alone, is suddenly found by Tracy, who saves him. Fireworks go off, and the sky goes mad, and the lovers make their getaway by car before finally ending up snowbound and sequestered, where Bond realizes that he’s been choosing the wrong track all along.
Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World,” woven throughout the film with terrifying precision as both a song and as the key melody for the romantic underscore, becomes a warning almost from the outset. The movie is telling us that we don’t have the time we think we do, with every frame; even as Blofeld – the specter of death – chases Bond and Tracy down the last of the mountainside, indomitable. The grand finale as Bond and Draco invade Piz Gloria and “defeat” the bad guy may play as eye candy, but there is a dreadful, propulsive inevitability to the wedding and celebration that follow, even as Bond parks his “Just Married!”-festooned car by the side of a seaside road, with the wide world before him. The murder that follows is swift and brutal. “She’s having a rest,” Bond assures the police officer who shortly arrives, as his dead wife lays in his lap, the film holding its breath. “We have all the time in the world.”
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is playing on November 13. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.