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Yep.If Hunt could get a decent acting performance out of a non actor like Lazenby in that scene, he certainly could have gotten an experienced vet like Sean to to do even better.
I see this posted a lot, but it’s also a fact that Connery felt he wasn’t getting what he was earned and that the material he was working with wasn’t, in his opinion, on par with the earlier films.
If EON had decided to pay him $1m and give him a character rich film like OHMSS, I think we would have gotten a much more energized. performance.
I honestly don’t get how you interpret his performance in that as “phoned in”. It’s pretty evident throughout the film that he’s engaged throughout the film and Tom Mankiewicz, who’s always been very candid, has spoken about how game and collaborative Connery was.
As for being overweight, it can’t be helped since he was brought in at the last minute before shooting. He probably would have been in better shape if he had more prep time. Either way, he at least looked like he was having far more fun in DAF than he was in YOLT.
For me it's still Roger for the win in this one. He could have handled everything better except for the fight scenes.
I don't know if Laz maintained the same line consistently, or even if it is true - but in the late '70s he was publicly complaining that Hunt had barely spoken to him on set and that Hunt had done little to nothing in shaping his performance in OHMSS.
From an interview with Hunt:
Q: Lazenby, I felt, turned out to be quite good as Bond.
A: Oh yes, he was very good. And I had a big job directing him, even though he seems to think he wasn't directed, and it was quite a job to make him Bond. But he took it and did it, and that's the important thing. I'm not questioning how difficult it was, because that's part of the director's job. You don't just stand up there and say, "Cut, action," and that sort of thing. You've got a lot more on your plate than that. It was a difficult job, but the answer for me was that it worked, and it worked for the producers as well.
Q: In Bondage, the magazine of the James Bond 007 Fan Club, Lazenby was quoted as saying that he wasn't directed in the film, and that you weren't even talking to him.
A: I don't know why he should say that, because it's quite untrue. You can't possibly have a new, young, guy who has never been an actor and not talk to him. You simply can't do it. I had to tell him where to go and what to do. The whole thing with him is that he changes his mind all the time. But he had to do what I wanted him to do. Indeed, we had long conversations during and before we even started shooting. I wouldn't have gone with him if Diana Rigg hadn't assured me that she liked him enormously at that time before we started shooting, and that she would do everything to help and work with him.
Q: He also noted how he and Rigg did not talk to each other.
A: I think it's a measure of the man's personality. He changed about all over the place, when it all went to his head. You must remember that he was an ordinary little guy from the backwoods of Australia and he was suddenly thrust into a very sophisticated area of filmmaking, and it was very difficult for him. I had to do certain things that directors have to do. For instance, one of the best things he ever did was when she's shot. We got up there at eight in the morning, I insisted he was on set, I sat him in the car and made him rehearse and rehearse all day long, and I broke him down until he was absolutely exhausted, and by the time we shot it at five o'clock, he was exhausted, and that's how I got the performance. He thought that was me being unpleasant to him, but I couldn't say, "Now, listen George, I'm going to do this because it's the best way to get you to react." Maybe I did things like that all the way through, because I knew how to get emotions out of him, but he didn't seem to think that that was fair.
Good point mate, I hadn't thought about that. Sir Roger played those subtle quiet moments beautifully, that would have suited OHMSS
Yeah, despite his reputation as the most button-pushing Bond he was also much more human than Connery ever was and showed more moments of affection and warmth, I think he’d have been very good in this. It’s hard to imagine Connery’s Bond just doing something like walking hand in hand with Lisl on the beach in FYEO, for example.
There’s even a lengthy sequence in Vendetta For The Saint, released in 1969, where he has to escape a villain’s mountaintop lair and is hunted by goons all the way down in the surrounding countryside, and he plays it really rather tense.
And if his mate and repeated co-star Pat Macnee could strike up a great partnership with Rigg onscreen then I’m sure Roger could have.
This is a great read, thanks for posting.
Quite frustrating that he says he thought Goldfinger was made poorly but doesn’t quite explain what he means by that.
And he really wants to get onto the subject of OHMSS! :D
And while he does demonstrates a strong command over progressing the story in OHMSS, and was, I think, largely responsible for insisting on the relatively serious tone of the film, he also had a very good team behind him, especially the DP, Michael Reed, to help achieve the accomplished look of the film.
But had Hunt any experience at all in handling actors prior to OHMSS? I don't think so - and, except for Rigg (who may have directed herself, in effect), the variable quality of all of the performances in OHMSS, most especially Lazenby's, betrays that lack of experience.
Lazenby is quite good in certain scenes and the ending is one of them. He really is quite affecting there and plays it perfectly, whatever might be Hunt's contribution to it. There's a certain vulnerability and even tenderness, at times, especially at the ice rink just prior to his rescue by Tracy and in the barn scene to follow. Possibly Lazenby's very callowness as an actor might even have contributed to the effectiveness of such scenes, just as it takes a certain amount of vulnerability for his Bond to believably fall in love ...
For me, just about the only like-minded sense of vulnerability in Connery’s Bond comes in the train compartment scene just prior to the fight with Grant. And yet, even there, his very countenance is one of an overly confident class superiority.
Just compare, for example, in 1964, his performance for Hitchcock in Marnie with that of his acting in Goldfinger. It's almost the same performance, the same immaculately-dressed, socially-superior alpha male to the nth degree. It would take him years to evolve comfortably into very different but equally memorable roles.
Perhaps he could have done it in '69 had he been interested, but my guess is that he would have required a director stronger & more experienced than Hunt, or one who was at least more amenable to working with actors, a Sidney Lumet, for example, for whom Connery had great trust & respect.
Very good point. I don't doubt that Connery could have done it because he was a terrific actor, but whether it would have conflicted with the kind of muscle memory he'd built up of playing Bond as the slightly distant coolest guy in the world, I don't know. And yeah, a better director than Hunt may have been required.
His other films that I've seen have been rather boring, I've found.
When viewed in french, Laz has one voice from beginning to end, + the experience of the dubber to bring forward the emotions, in ways you can't hear in the original language because he has that stupid Mickey Mouse impersonator voice.
Also it's the same dubbing artist that after this, will dub Sean Connery in most his films.
So basically, we french have the closest Sean Connery performance we could have in OHMSS, because even though the physique is not Sean, the voice is!
That is too harsh. Hunt may not have become an A-list director, but he directed two big-budget, well-received adventure films with Roger Moore (Gold and Shout at the Devil), and Death Hunt with Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin. He directed regularly until 1987, even if the projects weren't prestige ones.
Even good actors need direction, otherwise they're liable to lapse into mannerism or over-act. As for Lazenby, I don't find his acting in OHMSS much worse than Moore or Brosnan at their worst. As a first-timer he did pretty well and Hunt deserves credit for that.
Why not compare his contemporaneous performances in The Hill or A Fine Madness? Or his prior ones as Hotspur and Macbeth? In Marnie he's limited by the role, as in Woman of Straw.
I don't agree. Hunt was amenable enough to actors to get a good performance out of a complete amateur and work very well with a consumate professional. And he also coaxed two excellent performances out of Roger Moore in the 70s. Connery had already shown his chops, and if he was truly interested he would have risen to the challenge, especially if his grudges with the producers had been satisfied. He knew that Hunt had played a vital role in the series with his editing and he had already directed second-unit scenes with Connery in YOLT. There's ultimately nothing to indicate they wouldn't have gotten along.
I do find those films pretty boring though.
That's not really what directors do: they interpret a script and decide how to bring it to life; they also give the actors context and a lot else. They're not just there to constrain the actors.
And I don't.
Yes, all of that is part of what directors do. The actors have to fit into the director's overal interpretation of the film.
And all that follows is just my amalgamation of opinions, impressions and (maybe, occasionally faulty) memory.
And forgive me for anything obvious here but I assume others are reading this as well!
But, hey, you left out his Count Vronsky ... haha.
So, yes, Connery did, of course, always have an admirable ambition to stretch himself as an actor, even before Bond. But, not having had a great deal of training beyond elocution & rudimentary acting lessons that might have prepared him for roles beyond those of the mostly 'beefcake' variety, that was always going to be difficult.
Probably it was his own star power that propelled him into a few serious or more challenging roles beyond Bond in the sixties, uncomfortably so to my eye - which is what I mean above in suggesting that he had not yet "comfortably" evolved into such parts. Not that he didn't try - but I find his performance in A Fine Madness almost unwatchable, where the charisma & violence [and little of the charm] of his Connery-Bond persona is still very much on show and co-existing badly with the greater, if comedic realism of the working class poet he is meant to be. He's just not in the right register throughout, and is constantly overplaying scenes as if in an effort to be seen as a legitimate actor. But maybe that's on Irvin Kershner.
The Hill, of course, is the exception. And why? In large part down to working with Sidney Lumet, I would think, a director who, even by the mid-'60s, had had great success in eliciting a large number of wonderful performances from actors in very serious dramatic works long before working with Connery. Lumet was, and would very much remain throughout his career, an actor's director. And it's no surprise that Connery would go on to work with him four more times.
One of those films is The Offence, where Connery would most successfully channel all of the 'coiled violence,' which is an ever-present in both his Bond and non-Bond work from the sixties, to great dramatic and ultimately tragic effect for the character that he plays in this movie. The viewer may even sense that Connery's performance in The Offence is that of a tortured reckoning with the violence within not just his on-screen persona but, possibly, the very man himself. It remains an unnerving movie to watch. And it may well have had a purgative effect that helped allow him to become more at ease as an actor in future dramatic and even non-dramatic parts. But that's just speculation.
It's not so much that Connery is straight-jacketed by the role in Marnie, not at all, he's utterly compelling--but I do think Hitchcock is using his Bond persona against him here, perhaps as a way of exploring its dark side, the superior arrogance, for example, but especially in that his character in Marnie is not above raping on their wedding night the wife he had blackmailed into marrying him.
As I recall, Connery was no stranger to violence in his early life in Edinburgh. And when he became Bond no one doubted that here was a man who could handle himself in a fight. And that's one of the anxieties that I think all future Bond actors have had to face, at least to some extent. Do they measure up in their own eyes to Connery's machismo? No doubt Lazenby felt he did - and I think the producers probably saw something of that same 'coiled violence' within Lazenby that they had seen in Connery.
But what was different for Lazenby is that Connery had the experience of someone like Terence Young to help shape his performance as Bond. I don't think it can be said that Lazenby benefitted from the same comparative experience - and that may show in his highly-variable performance throughout OHMSS. Not that we can blame Hunt for that because, of course, Lazenby was himself, essentially, a non-actor when he came to Bond. So as a non-actor, for the most part, there would clearly have been little for Hunt to work with.
So I have no wish to denigrate Peter Hunt. Not least because OHMSS remains my favourite Bond film. But it does have several faults - yet, what movie doesn't?
Hunt may have done what he could, but neither did he have the experience to transform, not merely shape, Lazenby's inadequacies as an actor. And how could he? Hunt could only work with what he had, as he had himself not been a director of any kind except on second unit. So, in a way, Hunt must have been learning on the job just as much as Lazenby.
As for the latter movies directed by Hunt, whether or not we each think them a success, I would think that he benefitted in having well-known, very experienced lead actors mostly playing to type, as I recall.
I would think Connery would've gotten along quite well with Hunt. It's been said Connery liked to associate with members of the crew on his films and I'd be surprised if he wasn't aware of Hunt's contribution to the way the films were presented and he worked closely with Young in establishing that style.
My big reservation with Connery in OHMSS was the extremely long production schedule, which was even longer than the others up to that time. One of Connery's biggest complaints was the length of the shoots which prevented him from taking other roles. I can't see him being patient waiting for the weather in Switzerland and the delays on that and so on.
I don’t think he had any regrets not doing it. He was open to actually do the film, but the producers opted to look for someone else rather than pay him a million pounds. So he looked elsewhere for work and didn’t give much thought until UA came begging him back.
When OHMSS occured, Jean-Claude Michel took over to dub Lazenby. That choice was interesting, because Jean-Claude Michel had already been kinda Sean official french voice for his films outside Bond like Marnie, The Hill, Shalako. So they did give Laz Connery voice!
What happened after is Jean-Claude Michel became de facto Connery voice because no more EON films were made with Sean after 1971 and Jean-Claude Michel dubbed him in all the other films. Highlander, Indiana Jones, The Rock etc. Jean-Claude Michel dubbed him in NSNA too.
So, this makes the french dub of OHMSS very "Connery like" for french viewers. Also, Jean-Claude Michel experience as a well established actor, offer voices nuances and emotions lacking in the original film due to Laz being a bit green (and a bit dubbed in the middle section).
If you have both NSNA and OHMSS on DVD or Blu, try the french dub, you'll see how they both sounds for reason like the same man.