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You might not have noticed it, but your brain did.-Harry Plinkett, RedLetterMedia
https://vanyaland.com/2019/07/22/once-upon-a-1969-on-her-majestys-secret-service-is-bond-at-his-best/
https://www.firstshowing.net/2019/watch-awesome-piz-gloria-tribute-video-in-honor-of-bonds-ohmss/
I suspect that they’ll be quite a few of these in the months to come.
Brilliant!
On the flip side, these moments give the film a feeling of continuity, something that's lacking in so many other Bond films.
Also, the irony of Bond pretending to be a gay genealogist and then going on to seduce three of the women in Piz Gloria is pretty funny...
Where does it say he is gay ?
The guys over at “the00files” also did a 3 ½ hour podcast on OHMSS recently that was quite good. And, of course, the latest copy of MI6 is on order!
It's in the text:
"But I think you do not like girls, Hilly."
Gets better everytime I see it. George is wonderful in it.
NTTD won't even come close.
Agreed. My annual watch looks like it will definitely be Christmas Day. It's like I'm looking forward to a premiere. Can't wait. A Christmas highlight every year!
Damn straight mate! I had a free afternoon and I've been itching to watch it. From Bond's escape from Piz Gloria the film doesn't put a foot wrong. Wonderful film!
Hell, I may even watch it again before the big day! 😁
IMO, OHMSS is the very definition of “Classic” Bond.
Does anyone have access to this (full) article? Would like to read it:-)
Yes, here is the entire article in full below, but without photos @JWPepper...
Why On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the greatest Bond film of all
“I fervently trust this will be the last of the James Bond films.” So thundered one broadsheet critic on the release of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 50 years ago this week. It was one of the more damning reviews of the sixth official James Bond film, but by no means the only one, with critics taking issue in particular with the man who had taken over from Sean Connery as Bond, George Lazenby (more on whom later).
As for the film’s commercial impact, although it made $65 million worldwide, confirming it as one of the biggest films of 1969, this figure was half of You Only Live Twice’s total earnings two years earlier (and that had made less than 1965’s Thunderball). In other words, something seemed to have gone rather wrong, and for many years the film overall was considered something of a blip, a strange anomaly sandwiched uncomfortably between the tail end of Connery’s pantherine hunter-killer reign and the entertaining levity of Roger Moore’s.
What a difference 50 years make. Watch it now, and you may find yourself wondering if On Her Majesty’s Secret Service isn’t in fact the best – and most influential – Bond film of the lot.
It was directed by the series’ long-serving editor Peter Hunt, who wanted to take it back to basics after the extravagant You Only Live Twice, which bore little or no relation to Ian Fleming’s original novel. This would be a Bond film that followed the source material pretty much to the letter, and one that almost entirely ditched the gadgets that had already become one of the franchise’s hallmarks.
Then, there was the crucial matter of who would play Bond. With Connery insisting that he had hung up his Walther PPK for good, the producers chose a 28-year-old Australian model called George Lazenby whose previous claim to fame – as far as British audiences were concerned – was a series of adverts for Fry’s chocolate. “He’s my best-looking boy yet,” insisted Harry Saltzman, who, like his co-producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, was particularly impressed when Lazenby accidentally broke the nose of the formidable wrestler who was hired for the would-be Bond’s screen test.
That said, in a move that now feels bracingly old-fashioned at best, the producers still sent an attractive woman to Lazenby’s flat to check (for the sake of image control) that he was straight – he didn’t disappoint them.
Lazenby’s Bond gets off to a flamboyantly virile start in the film itself, rescuing Diana Rigg’s suicidal countess Tracy di Vicenzo from the waves and dispatching three thugs. But it’s right after that excellent “teaser” that the hairs really start to prickle.
Regular designer Maurice Binder excels himself in these opening credits, with snippets from the previous four films slipping through an hourglass as Bond, against a backdrop of silhouetted Britannia figures, turns back the hands of a giant clock. Meanwhile, the great John Barry acknowledged that his music here had to be so good that people wouldn’t think to miss Connery, and the result is an exhilarating, Moog-propelled title track that stomps effortlessly between distant minor keys and is also the first wordless Bond title track since From Russia with Love.
Besides setting the scene for a rollicking action film, the son et lumière here makes Hunt’s own mission abundantly clear. This is a Bond film determined to cut back to the hard-edged nucleus of Bond in a way that no Bond film would attempt until 2006’s Casino Royale. And nor, in fact, do the parallels with Daniel Craig’s (to date) four Bond ventures end there.
The film’s great trick – and the reason that Inception and Dunkirk director Christopher Nolan is said to rank it as his favourite in the series – is the cleverness with which it balances romance and thrills. Like Craig’s Bond in both Casino Royale and Spectre, this is a Bond who, for all his toughness, breaks the ultimate 007 taboo and falls in love, and – aided 35 minutes in by Barry’s sublime, specially-written song for Louis Armstrong, We Have All the Time in the World – the film allows him and Rigg’s Tracy (ultimately, one of Bond’s most stylish and resourceful women, and the only heroine to actually marry him) plenty of time to do so.
But it never forgets it’s a Bond film. Blofeld (an authoritative Telly Savalas) has this time brainwashed 12 “angels of death” (including a then unknown Joanna Lumley) and given them the means to sterilise the entire world’s crops, with a view to holding the entire planet to ransom. And along with this perfectly outlandish master plan comes an identically outlandish lair.
The producers learnt of a restaurant that was being built on the peak of the Schilthorn, in the Swiss Alps, almost 10,000ft up, and realised that “Piz Gloria” (identically named in the film) would be the perfect setting for Blofeld’s “clinic”. It is here that Bond encounters the “angels”, one of whom, played by Angela Scoular, surreptitiously writes her room number on 007’s thigh.
As Lazenby recently told The Daily Telegraph, when he and Scoular came to rehearse the notorious kilt scene, the crew strapped an 18in German sausage to his leg without Scoular’s knowledge. “She put her hand on my leg and said, ‘You’ve got no pants on!’ I thought, ‘I hope she doesn’t think that’s me…!’ ”
Naturally, this alpine setting also gave Bond the perfect excuse to hit the slopes for the very first time. Shot with cameras both hand-held and suspended from helicopters, the resulting ski chases still generate a giddy adrenalin-rush, and remain the most beautifully shot sequences in any Bond film. There's also some spectacular stunt-work here: ever tried descending a yard-wide, tree-lined, off-piste slope at 30mph, on just one ski?
Off-screen, there were tensions. Although the rumours of Rigg deliberately eating garlic before love scenes were in fact untrue (she accidentally did it once, cheerfully announcing, “Hey George – I’m eating garlic for lunch, I hope you are, too!” and the press pounced on it), Lazenby did later admit that, “I acted stupidly. It went to my head, everything that was happening to me”, and the result was reports of cocky on-set behaviour with far more experienced actors, and an even more cocky refusal to sign up for any more Bond films.
Meanwhile, his performance is not, in the main, one that even the late Roger Moore is likely to have lost much sleep over. And Lazenby apparently had such trouble mastering the cut-glass English tones of Sir Hilary Bray – the College of Arms representative that Bond impersonates to get invited to the social-climbing Blofeld’s hideout – that those sections ended up being dubbed by George Baker, the actor playing the “real” Sir Hilary.
But Lazenby looks the part, carries himself like a fellow who can handle a fight and knows it, and puts Colin Firth’s much later Mr Darcy to shame with his wet-dinner-shirt look in that opening tussle on the beach.
Then, of course, there’s the climax, which remains the most stirring scene the series has so far yielded. Hunt deliberately rehearsed Lazenby mercilessly for an entire day, later explaining, “I broke him down until he was absolutely exhausted… that’s how I got the performance.” And, with Bond’s broken little monologue to a concerned policeman as he cradles the dead Tracy in his arms, Lazenby nails it.
“It’s all right,” he insists. “It’s quite all right, really, she’s having a rest…” The shock of it lies not only in the sudden death-by-machine-gun of Bond’s bride of barely an hour, but of the realisation that there was perhaps a real character, and a real actor, beneath the gloss all along.
By Mark Monahan (20 December 2019) for The Telegraph.
I'd hoped to do an OHMSS anniversary piece for the newspaper I write for, but never got the chance this year.
Lazenby is GREAT.
Diana is PERFECT.
John Barry's music, unparallel.
Thank you Peter Hunt.
Thank you so much!!
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/movies/on-her-majestys-secret-service-james-bond-lazenby.html
BTW: I find it funny that Laz always says he hasn’t watched the movie in over 50 years given the number of screenings that he attends. 😊
My Bond rankings tend to skew somewhat, when I do rewatches. The top 3, however always stay the same. And OHMSS is in there with a bullet.
Perhaps this should be in the "I've never noticed that before" thread but...as groundbreaking as OHMSS is, it also adheres to formula too. For example, Bond sleeps with the main love interest early (unusual) but the first woman he sleeps with dies (usual).
Something I've never understood in the film is how Bond messes up the ancestral home of the Bleuchamps--didn't he get that information from the real Sir Hillary Bray?
Truer words have never been spoken.
Growing up I had never watched On Her Majesty's Secret Service as I had always heard it was terrible.
Well, OHMSS became my favourite Bond film immediately after initial viewing. The argument that this film would've been superior with Connery is complete nonsense. Connery's Bond lacked the vulnerability required for OHMSS. There's no denying Connery along with Terence Young created the definitive cinematic Bond, but Peter Hunt with Lazenby created Fleming's Bond on the silver screen. I feel that Connery by this stage had become a superman who was almost untouchable and while I appreciate his performances, I don't feel that the characterisation he had established would've worked within the narrative of OHMSS. I can never imagine Connery's Bond falling in love and getting married.
Lazenby was the first new Bond in the franchise and to add to it he had to portray Bond in the most emotionally driven Bond film in the franchise. I've always said that you aspire to be Connery but believe you could be Lazenby. George's portrayal of Bond is straight from the pages of Fleming, IMO. I find him extremely relatable and often find myself smiling at his performance as I empathise with his character. The way he double takes when Tracey hands him her room keys. The look on his face when he finds Tracy in St. Moritz while being chased by Blofeld's men. Lazenby may have not been an actor, but in a way I think it's for this reason that his Bond stands above the rest. He tapped into his emotions and they came out naturally, rather then trying to act them out on screen. He is reacting to the events of the film as he would in real life. He didn't know any better. It's this quality of his performance which makes him relatable as a human and therefore extremely Fleming, IMO.
The reasons I love On Her Majesty's Secret Service are endless, but I think when it comes down to it, it's because of Lazenby's performance. George was the most Bond like character in real life, IMO. He served in the Australian Special Forces and was an unarmed Military Combat Instructor as well as a self-admitting serial womanizer. He didn't need to be an actor, he had all the makings of James Bond already.
I still feel to this day that the fact we didn't get a reprisal of George in the role for Diamonds Are Forever under the direction of Hunt is the biggest missed opportunity in the franchise.
I think if he were alive OHMSS would've been his favourite film and he would've endorsed Lazenby.