This Never Happened to the Other Fella

The Best Bond Film

This Never Happened to the Other Fella: The Best Bond Film

The week my brother and I returned for our last year at primary school, ITV screened On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

For once, I had the smug advantage of having read the book first, and it immediately became my favourite Bond film, tying in first place with The Spy Who Loved Me. It’s still hard to choose between them to this day.

Flaked out on the scatter cushions with our customary choc-ices, a feline purring on each of us (James cradling our new ginger kitten), we watched OHMSS with a kind of tranced astonishment. It was a scintillating trip, as fresh and crisp and unexpected as the Alpine slopes Bond skis down, pursued by Blofeld’s relentless orange-and-black-clad henchmen. Its opening sequence, with Bond tearing down a coastal road in Portugal at sunrise, was uniquely gripping. There was something strange about the light conditions; the sky pearlescent and brooding. Though we had no idea at the time, this weird, lurid lighting was the result of using a ‘day-for-night’ filming technique, by which night scenes are shot in the day, with all the tone and contrast reduced in the edit to make it resemble dusk or dawn. Often hilariously artificial – like back-projection, which was used to for some of the ski chases later in the film – it was curiously apt here. It adds to the sense of menace and strangeness, of time being out of joint. What Bond discovers when he skids to halt in his sleek new Aston Martin is a woman trying to commit suicide in the relentless surf of the Atlantic Ocean. I felt happy to have identified the woman at once as Tracy from the book, but I still didn’t know whether she was going to make it in the film version. She’s dressed in a sparkly, other-worldly 60s evening dress, a sylph committing herself to the waves. Bond being Bond, he rescues her in style, only to be set upon by goons for the most frenetic fight I’d ever seen. Tracy escapes in her open-topped crimson Cougar, only for Bond (played by an actor who resembles Sean Connery, but who we know isn’t) to mutter: ‘This never happened to the other fella…’

It’s a stunning opening, one that ends on a self-referential note which went over our heads. This note is sounded again during the credits, with an hourglass sifting images of Bond’s finest celluloid moments to date. Honeychile Rider rising from the waves. Bond battling Red Grant in the train carriage. Bond on the Bahaman beach in Thunderball. These knowing nods to the past are sustained when Bond hands in his resignation after being taken off Blofeld’s trail by M. Emptying his desk, he takes out Honey’s knife-belt; the watch with its cheese-cutter used to despatch Red Grant; the mini oxygen-tank from Thunderball; each action prompting a musical cue from the appropriate John Barry score. For us, there was something satisfying about this, as by this point we knew where most of these talismanic objects originated (though it was obviously a ploy by the producers to indicate the film would have some continuity with its predecessors, despite the Sean Connery Who Wasn’t Sean Connery). We were beginning to know our Bond, and it felt good.

And perhaps the film drew us in like no other because it’s all about the girl. Bond’s mission is saving the girl, often from herself. As with The Spy Who Loved Me, this is the real plot we follow. Contessa di Teresa Vicenzo (played with labile brilliance by Diana Rigg) is a jaded socialite who hates her controlling father. Her father happens to be Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Unione Corse Crime Syndicate. When Bond falls for Tracy, he discovers Draco has information about the whereabouts of Blofeld, leading him to Switzerland, after a brief visit to the Royal College of Arms. It turns out that Blofeld is holed up in the Swiss Alps attempting to prove he’s a bonafide Count – a descendant of the ludicrously named Count Balthazar de Bleauchamp – while publicly running an allergy clinic. This is a front for a laboratory that’s developing deadly poisons. These will be used to threaten global destruction after Blofeld trains a group of young women – his Angels of Death – to distribute the venom unless his blackmail demands are met. The weaving of the two plots is masterly, and Richard Maibaum’s script reinstates Bond’s customary quips, something missing after Roald Dahl’s amateurish and po-faced screenplay for You Only Live Twice.

Just about every scene of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is memorable and perfectly executed. There’s Bond’s romantic progress through a sun-flooded Portugal, wooing Tracy as Louis Armstrong sings the immortal ‘We Have All the Time in the World’. There’s the tense episode in Gumboldt’s Swiss office where Bond breaks into a safe (using his only gadget in the film). There’s the soaring, Barry-soundtracked helicopter ride to Blofled’s gleaming mountain hideaway, Piz Gloria. Then the first meeting with the Angels of Death, where Bond strides in wearing a kilt to meet the missing contestants from the 1969 Miss World competition. Then the moment one of them lipsticks her room number on his bare thigh. This is followed by Bond’s daring escape in the cable car hut. The night ski chase that ends with an assailant plunging into a gorge thousands of feet below. The stock car race and Bond’s proposal to Tracy in the barn. Their escape in the morning over stretches of dazzling snow, only for Tracy to be lost in an avalanche. And the dawn raid on Piz Gloria, with an armada of helicopters, led by Draco’s troops posing as a ‘humanitarian mission’; the sunrise bleeding beauty over the Alps. And lastly, Bond’s exuberant, slightly hippy wedding, followed with horrible swiftness by Tracy’s cold-blooded murder; Blofeld’s car speeding past while henchwoman Irma Bunt sprays the windshield with machine-gun fire. They had all the time in the world. Until they didn’t.

We finished the film exhilarated, stimulated, more alive. But another emotion was in the mix, too; a first for a Bond film. We were moved. Heartbroken by the way life could provide joy one moment, only to bring tragedy the next. Another reversal, but this time a grown-up one. A lesson. It seemed to reinforce our growing awareness that love was always doomed to go wrong in the end, one way or another.

Along with its late 60s glamour, its nods to the counterculture (the poster promised Far Up! Far Out! Far More!) and a post-war society undergoing rapid change, there’s something regal about OMHSS. Something ineffably noble. Also something pure and super-distilled. It’s hard to quantify – and John Barry’s heraldic, ever-descending fanfare of a theme tune certainly helped – but maybe this cohesive effect is due to the fact that, by the end of the 60s, the Bond team had become a crack fighting unit. After five films, their wealth of expertise had been honed to perfection. There was production designer Syd Cain, who had worked on Dr No and From Russia with Love. Director Peter Hunt, who had edited four out of the five Bonds so far. Stunt coordinator extraordinaire Bob Simmons. Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell and Desmond Llewelyn returning as M, Moneypenny and Q respectively for the sixth time. And John Barry, of course, fresh from winning an Oscar for A Lion in Winter, also back for his sixth James Bond film, producing music of such piercing beauty and grandeur that his soundtrack stands as his highest achievement.

The only missing link in the chain was, of course, Sean Connery. Bored with Bond after You Only Live Twice, Connery had handed in his notice, tasking Broccoli and Saltzman with the impossible job of finding a replacement. After screen-testing over four hundred actors, they chose an Australian male model who had made a suave, suited-and-booted impression in a Fry’s chocolate commercial. It wasn’t that George Lazenby was a poor actor, he wasn’t an actor. We’ll come back to the quality of his performance, and how it affected the film, later.

So the producers were taking risks, as well as using a tried-and-trusted team of seasoned professionals. And maybe this added to the freshness and daring of the film. An actor who’d never acted. And a director (in the shape of Peter Hunt) who’d never directed. To prop up this lack of experience, some very seasoned and excellent actors were hired. For Tracy, it was clear they couldn’t cast a European actress of limited range and then dub her, as they had done with both Daniella Bianchi in From Russia with Love and Claudine Auger in Thunderball. Diana Rigg was a formidable stage actor, and had honed her action chops as Emma Peel in The Avengers. A perfect fit. For Draco, they chose veteran Italian actor Gabrielle Ferzetti, who brought a smooth garrulous charm to the role. And for Blofeld, they eschewed Donald Pleasance’s rather mannered turn in the previous film and cast Telly Savalas, with his New York savvy and subtle force. Another perfect fit. The scene where Tracy and Blofeld exchange lines from Yeats and James Elroy Flecker in the Alpine Room, as a distraction from the imminent onslaught of Draco’s helicopters, is beautifully played by both Rigg and Savalas, and beyond the scope of many of the actors Cubby and his team had hired previously to play the Bond Girl and Bond Villain. Finally, there’s Michael Reed’s pin-sharp cinematography coupled with John Glen’s pacy editing, both of which contributed to making the film so sumptuous and kinetic. Glen, who went on to direct the pre-credit parachute-jump stunt in The Spy Who Loved Me, and further Moore Bonds, was initially presented with a rough assembly of over three hours. That he cut this down to the tight action movie that has since become one of the most beloved Bond films is nothing short of miraculous. There’s something enormously accomplished and confident about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. At its best, it presents a perfect symbiosis of image and music: cinema at its peak.

However, not everyone thought so at the time of the film’s release. While the ensuing years have revealed OHMSS as the pinnacle of the Bond franchise, the first reviews were lousy. In 1970, America’s oldest movie magazine Film in Review pronounced it: ‘Plotless…meaningless… beneath contempt’. Two decades later, in 1992, they revised this opinion, commenting: ‘A perfect movie and the crowning achievement of the series’. Lazenby, in particular, came in for much flak, mainly for not being Sean Connery. This has always puzzled me. When I first watched the film as an open-mouthed ten-year-old, Lazenby was perfectly convincing as James Bond. This is not an opinion that time has revised. He was Bond, through and through, from the moment he appears in his ruffed shirt to the last scene where he cradles the dead Tracy in his arms; a chance to do ‘some proper acting’, as the reviews of the time sneered.

But what is proper acting when it comes to a screen performance? Screen acting is much, much harder than it looks, something I came to realise when, years later, my brother and I both tried our hand at it (in a limited way, and mainly to earn some money in our lean thirties). With screen acting, every micro-expression, every movement has to ring true. Deal in false coin, and the audience won’t buy it for a second. Not only that, you have to do it at seven in the morning surrounded by fifty crew members with arc lights burning into your face. And not just once. You have to do it over and over again, with the same spontaneity. It’s hard, concentrated work, requiring a great deal of skill, subtlety and nuance. Then there’s the problem of the continuity of a performance. Unlike a play, which gives an actor a linear opportunity to build a convincing portrayal of character, a film is shot out of sequence. It always struck me as apt that Connery’s delivery of his immortal lines, ‘My Name is Bond, James Bond,’ as he lights his Moreland cigarette in the casino, was shot three months after filming commenced on Dr No. This is the first time Bond ever has been seen on screen, and Connery knocks it out of the park. If it had been shot on day one of filming, it’s unlikely he would have been able to muster the nonchalance, the suave confidence required. Connery had been playing the role of 007 for months and knew just how much spin to give it. Not only that, but he was an experienced screen actor by this point in his career.

Which makes Lazenby’s first-ever performance on screen all the more remarkable. While he certainly looks the part in a tux or a tight sky-blue ski suit, he also seems to spiritually inhabit the role in a way many of the fine actors who later played Bond (such as Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan) never quite manage. Lazenby is never wooden. Every reaction shot rings true. He’s a natural. Every softening of the eyes, every charming dimpled smile, every hardening of the brow as he gets ready to go into action, is on the money. Plus, as a physical actor, there are few who can surpass him as Bond. With no stage-combat training, Lazenby was throwing real punches. While this must have been hard on his fellow actors, there’s no doubt it added to the vérité. He brings a real sense of danger and athleticism to Bond. Watching the film again only reinforces the skill, subtlety and nuance Lazenby brings to the role. He excels at the emotional stuff, too. From his lovesick-suitor exchanges with Draco (‘You must give me the name of your oculist’), to his wonderfully effortless proposal to Tracy in the hayloft (‘Will you marry me?’), to his heartbroken reaction to seeing his bride of an hour dead (‘It’s okay, she’s only taking a rest. We have all the time in the world…’), Lazenby proves himself a resourceful, talented and watchable screen actor. It’s only a shame he turned down the offer to make further films. If OHMSS makes a real error, it’s in dubbing Lazenby for his scenes where Bond poses as Sir Hilary Bray from the Royal College of Arms. The voiceover provided by George Baker often verges on risible. As Mark O’ Connell comments in his 007 memoir Catching Bullets, the sequence where Bond works his way through the Angels of Death finds Lazenby suddenly ‘speaking like Noel Coward while acting like Sid James’.

O’ Connell also goes on to astutely distinguish between having one’s own personal ‘favourite’ Bond film and identifying the ‘best’ Bond film. After all these years, if put to the test, I would plump for The Spy Who Loved Me as my favourite Bond. But On Her Majesty’s Secret Service will always be the best.