When we last left James Bond, he’d met (and defeated) his
great nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Like any good sequel, On Her
Majesty’s Secret Service gives us the rematch we wanted, though the faces
are a little different – and not entirely, I might add, for the better.George Lazenby takes the reins as superspy 007 opposite Telly Savalas’s Blofeld, whose dastardly plan aims to poison global food stores. As if that weren’t trouble enough, Bond is in-and-out of employment at MI6 while wooing the feisty Tracy di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), the only woman ever to win movie-Bond’s hand in marriage. It sounds like it has the potential for horribly maudlin montages (to be fair, we do get one, set to Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World”), but director Peter R. Hunt wisely amps up the action for the whole 2:20 runtime, never letting you feel the 140 minutes.
If I haven’t said it already, the best Bond films are ones where James Bond and the audience are piecing together clues; Goldfinger and Skyfall did this quite well, but Thunderball tipped its hand too soon. Here, we’re right with Bond in following the central mystery; we know, of course, that Blofeld is up to no good, but we don’t quite know how his “allergy clinic” and harem of female patients fit together. Smartly, then, the film doubles the suspense; will Bond solve the case, and will he be discovered while doing so?
On top of it all, OHMSS includes several rousing chase scenes, most set near Blofeld’s ski lodge hideout. One such scene runs for a very long time, going from the slopes to a carnival, but it’s to Hunt’s credit that it never feels bloated. I suspect, though, that the captivating nature of these scenes has a great deal to do with John Barry’s score, which is among the best in the series so far (see also Goldfinger and Skyfall, which had exemplary scores by Barry and Thomas Newman, respectively). Barry crafts a new theme tune for the film while deploying the Bond notes we’ve come to expect; lead actor aside, the soundtrack can for my money make or break a Bond film, and in this regard OHMSS thrives. (Sidebar: The Propellerheads have recorded a brilliant version of the title track, which is well worth the listen.)
Now to the elephant in the room: the recastings. The unequivocally good news is that Telly Savalas is a fine Blofeld, adding a layer of physical menace to the squirrelly version Donald Pleasance animated in You Only Live Twice. Gone are the facial scar and the cat (earlobes, too); instead, we get a burly heavy whose thuggish nature is concealed beneath a thin masquerade as a prospective count. In fact, so good is his Blofeld that the 1990s Lex Luthor cartoon was modeled after him.
Your mileage may vary, though, when it comes to George Lazenby as James Bond. Now, arguably the bulk of this review should be dedicated to a dissection of his one-and-only performance as 007, but honestly the film does so much else right that Lazenby would need to do a rubbish job for it to impact the success of the film. Truth be told, Lazenby isn’t a remarkable Bond – he’s no Sean Connery, to be sure – but his work is, in a word, serviceable. He never steps too far out of character, and his polish and charm make plausible his scenes with Diana Rigg (about whom I haven’t said enough, though she’s credible enough as a potential wife for Bond).
It’s been said that OHMSS would be the perfect Bond film had Sean Connery starred in it. I don’t know about all that – Goldfinger is still a perfect movie, let alone a James Bond one – but OHMSS is successful enough at accomplishing a lot of things I thought impossible in a Bond film. A different actor leads the womanizing James Bond to the altar in a 140-minute flick: theoretically, that shouldn’t work, but the filmmakers have done a whiz-bang job. I’m a bit saddened that Lazenby never got a second shot as Bond, but I can’t wait for Connery to return.
And speaking of returns, James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Diamonds Are Forever (1971) on July 7, 2013!
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