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.
On Her Majesty’s
Secret Service is rated PG. Bond hops
into bed with two separate partially-clothed women, while Tracy wears a few
revealing outfits. The violence is quite
tame, with much bloodless gunfire and a few fistfights, though the final scene
is a bit bloody.
And speaking of returns, James Bond and The Cinema King will
return in a review of
Diamonds Are
Forever (1971) on July 7, 2013!
