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Comments
Hear hear for Donald Pleasance, people hate him here unfortunately.
I don't think anyone hates him, but I think most feel his legacy is the visual, rather than the performance. Next to the Dawson/Pohlmann version he's significantly diminished as a threat from my pov. He's like a sniping little weirdo, rather than a force of nature. I actually don't think anyone has absolutely nailed it, but I genuinely think Waltz brought something of Fleming with him. More than Pleasance, that's for sure.
Donald Pleasance is probably the best remembered, vocally and visually not bad but I think he was to slight a figure of real menace. Blofeld yet to be done justice on the screen.
His approach reminds me of Max in Mission Impossible, with Vanessa Redgrave also playing a terrorist quite in a "loveable" way.
I agree with everything in your post, especially the bolded part. His first two appearances in the film series were great, when he was hidden from view and was just a voice and a pair of hands. For my money, the only truly successful appearance that he's actually made in front of the camera was in OHMSS, where Savalas was solid in the role and, along with Dianna Rigg, helped to carry that film in the absence of a quality performance from the film's lead. But, there's been no truly great rendition of the character put up on the screen, aside from the hidden-from-view Blofeld of FRWL and TB.
Savalas was definitely the most credible threat and yes the unseen version was much more menacing. I think Waltz was almost a victim of the over confidence that surrounds Spectre, it's like they just signed him up and he read the lines, there's no angle to the performance just bad guy by numbers.
Well, his performance definitely made an impression on you then ;))
I'm not sure if that's fair given it was mostly John Logan's script.
Completely agreed. The rewritten torture scene, which many of us recognize from Colonel Sun, was well done. The meteorite reveal of him as he steps out of the shadows, though a little over-the-top, feels inspired by Dr. No (and a lot of that block of the film clearly was). And his intro in the SPECTRE meeting - holy s**t - is one of the great highlights of Craig’s tenure.
But then off-screen, he went by FedEx Kinko’s and printed off a bunch of poorly Photoshopped promo portraits of the dead characters from previous films. 😳
The failure is just as much the writing, especially at the end, as it is the acting. He may have been directed by Mendes to play it more subdued or under-the-radar, but on premiere night I kind of wanted him to be truly terrifying and bats***t crazy. I don’t feel like that was how Blofeld came out in the final product. It wasn’t just Christoph. I don’t think that will probably improve in NTTD much either - we will just be used to it.
He’s one of the best parts of the Craig era for me, and a huge reason I love Spectre so much, pitfalls be damned. The ‘banter with Bond in the basement of the blown up building’ I also love, and even “Goodbye, James Bond” is delightfully campy.
Since we're talking about Von Sydow, he's one of the greatest actors of all time and would have been a great Blofeld in another film, like YOLT or OHMSS. But there's just not much for him to do in NSNA.
Agreed. Mendes probably thought an understated Blofeld would be more menacing and disturbing. Waltz had already pulled that off in Inglourious Basterds, but it fell flat in SP. Maybe Waltz lost interest when he found out he'd been lumbered with 'Brofeld'...I know I almost did.
He wanted him to be nondescript, inoffensive looking, like most Billionaires from the silicon valley are, ie wearing no socks, etc. They said no to him, but all the "no" in the Bond series are recycled ideas that comes up later in other films.
I think he works much better in NTTD.
Silva > Le Chiffre > Safin & Greene >>>>>>> Oberhauser
YOLT and OHMSS offer the best Blofelds in my opinion. And those were rooted in the '60s fantasy world of Bond. It was relatively easy to construct such charmingly evil world dominators back then. And both actors played the role with indisputable charisma.
The Craigs existed in a different world, a world that tried to be more naturalistic and more real. They tasked themselves with finding a Blofeld that could convincingly exist in such a world, yet still be larger than life and exotic enough to appeal to us. Where do you start? With an evil Elon Musk? We certainly weren't expecting Bond's long lost foster brother we didn't know existed. And did he really have to be the man behind not just LeChiffre and Greene, but behind Silva as well? But those are really my only two gripes with this Blofeld. I like his SP introduction scene (minus the cuckoo) because it is dark and feels menacing. I like the fact that he wants to work with information and desinformartion (21st century) rather than with hijacked nukes. Waltz himself is pretty good when you try to look past bald heads. He's probably too much Landa and Schultz, but Waltz is still good. Was he the best choice for the role? Maybe not. But he doesn't not make sense either.
Obviously a big problem is what we didn't get:
Well now we have the stage clear for a new incarnation. Which I find both exciting and worrying. The most difficult aspect of Blofeld is his casting, IMO. Waltz may not have been the best choice, but which actor is at this point? I always imagined Ciaran Hinds, but he's getting old now. Gary Lewis perhaps. But then he's getting old too. And both of them are British. I'd rather have an Eastern European actor with about the same age as the Blofeld of the books, with an appearance similar to one of the source material's incarnations. Waltz would not have been my first choice, but I understand why they went for him and we could have had far worse.