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Nice. Agree with a lot of what he says as well. Laz was under appreciated. He was actually great casting.
he actually comes over as a really big Bond fan with his Laz autograph and fair commentary and could even be someone online here...
I love this movie but agree with the above. It's not perfect. At the beginning of the picture, during the beach sequence you cut back to a wide over the shoulder shot of bond waking the girl after he's already waken her and told her he's Bond.
I'm italian and watch the movie in my language thus Lazenby's acting and George Baker's dubbing are completly inexistent, making the movie perfect.
I already appreciated Soderbergh as a filmmaker and this blog makes me appreciate him even more. ;-)
One of the few supporters of Lazenby amongst the critics was Alexander Walker in the London Evening Standard who said that "The truth is that George Lazenby is almost as good a James Bond as the man referred to in his film as 'the other fellow'. Lazenby's voice is more suave than sexy-sinister and he could pass for the other fellow's twin on the shady side of the casino. Bond is now definitely all set for the Seventies."
Totally agree - OHMSS really feels like a reboot in many respects. Things really seemed set for Laz to plough forward into the 70s. What a movie a Lazenby revenge DAF would have been.
And also this is really interesting, as I always understood Hunt didn't think much of Laz, but it sounds like he did actually put some time in with him, and would have directed him in DAF if Laz had stayed in the part. Not sure this is accurate but it flies in the face of my understanding of what happened.
Lazenby said he experienced difficulties during shooting, not receiving any coaching despite his lack of acting experience, and with director Hunt never addressing him directly, only through his assistant. Lazenby also declared that Hunt also asked the rest of the crew to keep a distance from him, as "Peter thought the more I was alone, the better I would be as James Bond."[21] Allegedly, there also were personality conflicts with Rigg, who was already an established star. However, according to director Hunt, these rumours are untrue and there were no such difficulties—or else they were minor—and may have started with Rigg joking to Lazenby before filming a love scene "Hey George, I'm having garlic for lunch. I hope you are!"[11] Hunt also declared that he usually had long talks with Lazenby before and during shooting. For instance, to shoot Tracy's death scene, Hunt brought Lazenby to the set at 8 o'clock in the morning and made him 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."[36] Hunt said that if Lazenby had remained in the role, he would also have directed the successor film, Diamonds Are Forever and that his original intentions were concluding the film with Bond and Tracy driving off following their wedding, saving Tracy's murder for the pre-credit sequence of Diamonds Are Forever. The idea was discarded after Lazenby quit the role.
Then there was an open letter the two of them wrote to each other, sniping, in one of the tabloids when the film was released.
That said, it's true the garlic incident was a joke, but the press sometimes like to make something of that kind of stuff, to point to a bigger problem.
The big problem in this film is the acting. Quite mediocre IMHO except for Mrs. Rigg. The star of this film is no other than Peter Hunt and his - then - innovative and colorful approach. I think Lazenby was not that bad: if well-guided, he would have made a good Bond on following films, but, alas...
As a sidenote, I would have loved to see the chase involving Lazenby and the SPECTRE operative in the streets of London, ending in the Underground. Well... At least we have a nice reconstruction in YT.
I'm completely buying this, by Tutatis.