00 Week: We've got all the time in the world to talk about love

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE

1969

Directed by Peter Hunt

Written by Richard Maibaum and Simon Raven (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

I have made a certain distinction between Ian Fleming's James Bond and Eon Productions' rendition of the same, which is of course not the only distinction, but I think it might be the most interesting one: Bond's novels are romances, and Bond's movies, with their other priorities, never are.  Or almost never, because if you fix your sights on adapting On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as Eon did for their sixth Bond movie (and indeed, even earlier, but things had kept getting in the way), and you intend on adapting it with any fidelity—though I'd suggest there could be no adaptation of On Her Majesty's Secret Service without some fidelity, or everyone would think you were a crazy asshole—then you have to make a romance.  This, after all, is the one where Bond—a character who, under Eon, was required to meet a literal sexual partner quota each film—settles down and gets married to the love of his life, the widowed countess Teresa Di Vicenzo, better known as Tracy Bond even if, to spoil things right away, she was Tracy Bond for only a matter of hours.  And, knowing they had to make a romance, Eon did so, even though the Bond combine had limited institutional competence at this and they still had other priorities.

Even so, it's mainly Fleming's fault: Secret Service concerns Bond's most consequential romance*, but doesn't give much compelling inherent reason for that.  It may surprise anybody who's only ever watched the movies, but in the books Bond either explicitly or implicitly contemplates marriage in a lot of them, starting with Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, and frequently it's a complete mystery why he didn't get married, except that a new book demanded a new woman.  (I can't presently speak to The Spy Who Loved Me, the immediately preceding novel, except I'd bet good money that Fleming wished he'd held that title in reserve.)  Yet to actually do it, that's still special; and most of Bond's loves were more appropriate (or symbolically-meaningful) partners, and for that matter more interesting fictional characters (even Vesper, who becomes interesting only with her novel's twist), than Teresa.

I know I'm stepping on toes here, but Tracy Bond doesn't work for me much at all, and the movie version of Tracy Bond works for me mostly to the extent she's played by Diana Rigg, an actual English-speaking actor for a change, and a good actor at that, which is almost as distinguishing, whereas being "Emma Peel on The Avengers" meant they could give Rigg one cool action scene of her own, albeit in a manner that still isn't exactly organic to Tracy's actual character concept.  (Much of the rest of what I approve of in Rigg's Tracy is found in our new Bond, but we'll get there.)  Then we have screenwriter Richard Maibaum (Simon Raven provided some additional dialogue) who is, at every available opportunity, compounding the problem he'd inherited from Fleming, starting with a "solution" to the non-problem of adapting a novel that goes non-linear for a spell at the beginning—and Bond movies couldn't possibly do that, what are they, art films?—which nonetheless offered up as its first scene an irresistible option for checking off the first box of the Bond formula with badass opening action; so Maibaum takes that option and marches through scenes that were in a different chronological order in the book for a reason.  This is on top of the fact that, thanks to the spoof version, there's not a real Casino Royale yet, and if there's a key to Bond's fixation upon poor little rich girl Tracy, it's that he meets her at Royale-les-Eaux, and Fleming placed them there, and mentioned Vesper's grave, also for a reason.

And so Secret Service opens with Bond (???) out cruising the coast, where he's passed by a woman going like a bat out of hell, which entices him but when he chases her to her destination of a lonely stretch of beach, all she takes off are her shoes.  They are very oblique about this, but this woman, Tracy, has come to the sea to die, and Bond saves her, and his reward is his attempted murder by goons, which he wards off by what is, albeit only for about twenty minutes, the most formally-wacky major fistfight so far in the franchise, this jumpy, almost disaggregated impression of strikes and counterstrikes courtesy the series' new editor and second-unit director, John Glen.  I dig it—previous Bond editor and second-unit director, and brand-spanking-new director, Peter Hunt, certainly approved too—with the big exception of the way new Bond photographer Matthew Reed is shooting it, all at dawn and still badly underexposed, mostly, I suspect, to delay answering that triple-question-mark at the top of our cast list after already filming Bond's car scenes in weird, shadowy closeups of a cigarette-smoking man who's definitely not Sean Connery.  I will quote Hunt: "We agreed, after a lot umming and ahhing, that we would not overemphasize the introduction of a new Bond."  Well, our hero wins his battle, but Tracy has used the confusion to flee into the ambiguous darkness, prompting George Lazenby to look directly at the camera and say, with a twinkle in his eyes, "This never happened to the other fella."  I have no Goddamn idea what "overemphasize" means to Hunt, but regardless, this tosses us into Maurice Binder's title sequence, a disagreeably singing-free title sequence, because nobody could figure out how to force the phrase "on her majesty's secret service" into an appropriately lyrical shape.  (Carole Bayer Sager figured out "the spy who loved me.")  Binder has one idea germane to the film we're about to watch—time, specifically not enough of it (the animated clock comes off, though I spent some of it thinking the hourglasses were martinis)—but it's mainly clips of previous Bond films swirling through those hourglasses, carefully curated to not, you know, include Connery.  It's pretty bad, though the nude silhouettes are sufficiently nipply for Hunt's directorial credit, which boasts the most nipples, to have been rudely cut out by at least one country's censors.

But let's stake our position on Lazenby now: I love him in the role.  Now, I do think, had Connery not been so tired of Bond, that it's plausible this works better with him, simply because he was Bond, and we'd be watching a character we already knew try and horribly fail to build a new life for himself.  It's also the case that Lazenby is basically an industrial accident, the result of Roger Moore temporarily begging off for more of The Saint when a version of The Man With the Golden Gun got cancelled because of the Samlaut Uprising, and of Lazenby punching a stuntman so hard during an audition he broke his nose, which impressed Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzmann even though you'd think "unintentionally causing injury" is the exact opposite of ideal for the lead of a stunt-heavy action movie.  Furthermore, he's Australian.

But while appreciation for Lazenby has grown exponentially over the years, alongside appreciation for Secret Service itself, he seemed almost destined to fail (and Secret Service failed as much as a Bond movie could, the lowest-grossing of the franchise in adjusted dollars since Dr. No until 1980).  Maybe Connery himself was barely anybody in 1962, but in 1969, Lazenby was a Fry's chocolate bar pitchman following up a movie star.  On set, Lazenby felt so maltreated and disrespected by a director who, callowly enough himself, didn't want him, that he refused to return, and while Eon weren't unhappy with him, they didn't beg.  Thus Lazenby only got his one chance to shine, when even Timothy Dalton, the other Bond Without An Era, still got two; and as Secret Service does not, in a sense, complete its story, whatever vengeance would be afforded by Diamonds Are Forever shall be undertaken by some other dude.  (And against some other dude, to boot, Blofelds being even more mutable than Bonds.)  Hunt, for his part, never worked on a Bond film again, for reasons that are mysterious to me, considering how vigorously he'd lobbied to direct this one and that Eon, seeing no need to punish him for the Lazenby affair, continued to extend him offers of employment; but it doesn't seem like it could be a pure accident of history that both Lazenby's and Hunt's respective follow-ups to Secret Service—1971's godawful peacenik PTSD montage, Universal Soldier, and 1974's terrific grounded Goldfinger with Moore, Gold—are deliberate rebukes to Bond.

But, anyway, I like Lazenby a lot, including that fourth wall break, which is as risky a gag as any Bond movie's ever pulled, and which I find adorably cheeky.  (Isn't there a fan theory, which obviously could only be held by very casual fans, that the government killer named "Bond" is different fellows?  I might well prefer it if it were so.  I assume we're all aware of how the reshuffled sequence from the books and Blofeld's previous familiarity with Bond in the films means that Blofeld is stymied, Lex Luthor-style, by a disguise consisting of "glasses.")  He's very different from Connery, and even with Moore in the wings, I would declare him the poshest Bond, which I distinguish from the classiest, though social class actually feels like a part of Lazenby's Bond, perhaps because he was such an outsider to its British manifestation: if Connery and Daniel Craig come off like they've donned gentility as a disguise (one of them more successfully), and if Moore, Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan may come off, in their different ways, as bourgeois, Lazenby is the one who feels legitimately aristocratic.  Partly this is just because he's masquerading as an aristocrat for half the film.  Partly it's a result of being such a fashionable Bond (often in the pejorative sense, for the casual wear Marjory Cornelius arrays this Bond in can be quite atrocious, though she also gives former model Lazenby some of the fussiest and fanciest costumes in the series).  Partly it's because he's so laid-back and comfortable amongst wealth when, give or take a Moore, every other Bond radiates a certain resentment over being more cultured than literally everyone he meets yet often being required to perform subservience to them.  Partly it's because he seems cheerfully, humanely oblivious to his own condescending manner, which doesn't even need a scene partner to manifest—there's a fun line to himself about caviar, and later he'll be rude to a St. Bernard about booze.  And he rocks a kilt because he can.

So Secret Service is certainly armed with what it needs, but then we trip right into Maibaum's blenderized version of a story that wasn't great on the page: Bond catches up with Tracy, saving her from a humiliating revelation of poverty at the baccarat table, then, in between more confrontations with goons, fucks her almost as a discharge of her obligation (in a film that has some pretty neat color style, "red" takes on several different tones in regards to Tracy), which all plays somewhat better when Bond rescuing her from suicide comes afterwards.  And in either form, we presently arrive at the heart of the problem: those goons were agents of Marc-Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti, dubbed by David de Keyser), head of the Union Corse, and after impressing the gangster even further by beating up his goons again (now in a completely disaggregated impression of strikes and counterstrikes that, this time, also gets bizarre cosmic sound effects, rendering a hallway dust-up one of the weirdest fights in the series), Draco reveals he's simply Tracy's father.  And there we have Tracy, the ennui-ridden party girl whose daddy attempts to buy her James Bond (the movie even makes him pushier about it), first with money then with information, and while it's not truly so transactional, Bond is delivered to her, though why she loves Bond (despite her patently false resistance and, good actor or not, Rigg's even more patent inability to make herself cry with this material), it's never obvious here.  (I can't say I like the idea of a marriage alliance between MI6 and organized crime, either.)  Finally, in book and movie alike, it's essentially a false first act anyway, only a little (and instrumentally) to do with the actual plot—Tracy doesn't reappear for an hour!—because the actual plot concerns the information that Bond requested, the location of the fiend Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas).  At least in the movie the information Draco provides actually matters (providing Bond a cool spy-heist scene), so there's one little quibble that Maibaum fixed, even if it feels like I'm praising somebody for fixing a crooked painting in a collapsing house.

The actual plot still isn't very good, and somehow Blofeld might be the least well-served figure here.  (Yet, as with Lazenby and Rigg, through no fault of Savalas's.  Happily, my recollection of his performance was partially wrong: he's a menacing Blofeld and a good one for a movie that wants to reposition Donald Pleasence's diminutive schemer as a physical threat when the time comes; still, there is a certain affability that Savalas can't turn off and isn't quite right, and once Blofeld is stuck kidnapping Tracy and asking if she'd rather be his girlfriend, there's not a performance in the universe that could've maintained Blofeld's dignity.)  But, well, here it is: Bond's lead on Blofeld runs through the London College of Arms, for Blofeld's latest preoccupation is establishing himself as the rightful heir to a title of French nobility, and I simply don't know what to do with this character-degrading nonsense, and neither did Fleming besides expounding on snobbery.  (Meanwhile, we only get to hear the name "Sable Basilisk" in the movie once, which in my mind is a clear strike against it.  We do get the Bond family motto, however, even if it's presented much more provisionally in the book: "The world is not enough.")  So the actual-actual plot arrives even later: in addition to his noble pursuit, Blofeld is running a biological warfare lab in an imposing alpine fastness atop Piz Gloria in Switzerland, masquerading as a cure center for allergies where he's gathered, under the Klebbesque figure Irma Bunt (Ilse Steppat), a dozen women whom, actually, he's brainwashing to serve as vectors for infecting the world's farms with virological weapons that will destroy humanity's food supply lest, as usual, his demands are met.  It is unclear why he needs brainwashed double-agents to infiltrate the tight security of rural farms, and it's only clear as a matter of "it's a Bond movie" why they're all girls.  But Bond's own course is clear: take on the identity of the College of Arms' Sir Hilary Bray (George Baker), lineage detective, to infiltrate the villain's eagle's nest and foil his evil scheme.

This goes awry, as it must, but as much as I've just bitched and moaned about Secret Service, the instant we get to Switzerland, the approach switches from "Bond book" to "Bond movie" which, as I've noted before, is as much to say from "romance" to "pornography," and because it is a Bond movie, it's inevitably better at porno.  It's stupid but in mostly good ways now, and honestly quite excellent at providing the pleasures we expect from this series.  I'm half-convinced my favorite stretch in the entire film isn't even action this time, but the extended comic subterfuge that kicks in as soon as Bond unpacks "Sir Hilary's" kilt, which at a minimum contains my favorite beats of Lazenby's performance, my second-favorite performance in the film (Angela Scoular's loopy hot nerd Northerner, Ruby, one of the allergy girls), and by far my favorite quip in this film and potentially the franchise, as Bond has basically had to seduce all the girls at once over their communal dinner in the hopes of generating a source, and bags Ruby first, but he's actually bagged everybody, hence to keep his cover he's obliged to properly service Nancy (Catherina von Schell) when she shows up in his room as soon as he's managed to get back from the first rendezvous, and it's already very funny (even satirical) to watch Lazenby run through the same lousy woo, much less enthusiastically, a second time, though it's really funny when he declares her "an inspiration" and adds, with some exasperation and not as under his breath as Bond thinks, "you'll have to be."  Even that might not be the funniest concept, which is just the slow dissolve that indicates that "Hilly" has spent hours holding forth about genealogy, and while some of them yawn, it's because they've been hanging on James Bond's every word and they're just tuckered out from the long edge.  One also can't complain about the pretty terrific way Ruby communicates vital intelligence via Bond's exposed thigh thanks to his man-skirt.

Sex comedy that's sustained across multiple scenes yet is also across-the-board successful is unique enough in Bond, but it does benefit a great deal from the expected things, even if the expected personnel weren't behind them; Secret Service is an odd and transitional object, especially so in the positions taken here by Hunt and Glen, given that their respective tenures on Bond possibly represent more useful analytical units for thinking about the series than the tenures of Bond actors do.  But also a lot of people just didn't show up for whatever reason: stunt coordinator Bob Simmons and production designer Ken Adam sat this one out**, their functions fulfilled by what we might term, for lack of a better phrase, the B-team, particularly George Leech (stuntman on all sorts of Bond movies, including, funnily enough, Casino Royale) and Syd Cain (art director on several Bonds, and effectively production designer on From Russia With Love), though it's certainly not B-team results.

The latter's effort, anyway, is a huge part of why the "Hilary Bray" segment works so well, with the alpine health center being a real place, a restaurant in fact... that Cain basically built for its owners, thanks to their fortuitous intersection of interests, giving them a weirdly-niche Bond-themed novelty restaurant (though I assume the biggest line item would've been the damn helipad!) in exchange for using a building for a few months.  Everyone always points out that it remains in operation all these years later, whichever year they happen to be writing, so I won't buck tradition: it still is.  It of course lacks the full measure of Adam's grandiosity—being a functional outfit, it'd practically have to!—but after the overwhelming scale of You Only Live Twice this more intimate, even cozy lair is a welcome change of pace, not to say it lacks in either style or spectacle, and in its hidden frozen recesses Hunt and Cain and Reed are taking Bond into a place as much akin to Italian horror (just the most flamboyant sheets of solid color lighting, some of it motivated by the virology lab) and outright psychedelia (in the women's hypno-beds).  Even in its client-facing cover, it's still quite modernist and geometric, and made slightly weird by the story's Yuletide timeframe, while Hunt never allows us to forget we really are filming (the majority of this, anyhow) at the top of a damn mountain.

This also, naturally, serves as the exigence for most of the action here, inagurating one of the grandest of Bond traditions, winter sports, a species of action that the Bond films will never stray from for very long.  (I believe the next three movies in a row after Secret Service lack any skiing sequence, but after that sometimes there wouldn't be one movie in a row that did.)  Fleming's awesome ski escape is split into two different awesome ski escapes here, captured by skiborne cameraguy Willy Bogner, a doubling-of-pleasure that's well-intentioned though it's debatable whether the necessity of differentiating the first one by way of night or "night" helped matters.  (There's some brutal skier-on-skier violence in the nighttime one, nonetheless.)  The daytime one is cool and it's easy to be disappointed because it was supposed to be beyond the impossible, with the production's own private avalanche, but it happened on nature's schedule instead of the Swiss authorities' (Hunt was disappointed because he'd been on them and they kept demurring), and hence they were consigned to cobbling together their own, which means even more of these sequences' big distraction, insert shots of Lazenby, Rigg, and Savalas (in ski gear so they're barely identifiable anyway), where approximately one-third the number would've been too many.  Glen, with Hunt's connivance, is overediting this movie; it sure feels like an editor making his directorial debut, anyway, with editing sometimes used as a very blunt tool, nowhere moreso than a jump cut between two static shots of a clock tower to effect the hands of the clock going from 1:59 P.M. to 2:00 P.M.  But it can be used well: the best action scene is as much a thriller scene, with Bond escaping imprisonment from the alpine tram wheelhouse and dangling—and, as the tram wheels approach his fingers, falling—from the cable.  Piz Gloria demanded a "Bond's army" sequence that's less mindblowing than earlier ones, but secretly one of the most impressively death-defying, more-or-less everything about the heliborne assault being really-real except the bullets and the final explosion.  And somewhere in there is the car chase that ends up on an ice track rally and makes it a demolition derby, directed by Anthony Squire, which is as splendid an example as you'll find of the anarchic "feels good, do it" philosophy that was taking shape for Bondian action cinema, and that would serve Glen in such good stead when he spread his wings.

By this point, Tracy has reentered the story by means Fleming had only slightly camouflaged as anything besides his favorite plot mechanic, coincidence, but now, without requiring Bond to be attracted to broken birds like Tracy, in a way never suggested by the movies and only the books, the romantic approach does work, and while there are conflicting reports about how much Lazenby and Rigg liked one another, their screen chemistry is quite fine, and Hunt has some ideas about Bond's proposal in a snowstorm that would take a lot not to work.

I don't know if I'm being shitty to say that there's not a harder emotional punch than that delivered by Lois Maxwell on behalf of pining Moneypenny, who gets a farewell with Lazenby so beautiful it's taken me two days to even wonder if Connery's presence would have made it even more objectively heartbreaking.  (The movie is rather good to the Universal Exports cast: even Desmond Llewelyn's Q, barely-glimpsed otherwise, gets to open the movie by amusingly yammering about traceable radioactive lint; Bernard Lee may have more opportunity to characterize M than in any other film, determined to conceal his affection for his subordinate.)  Yet I will confess that the ending, so deeply uncharacteristic for Bond (if pretty at-home in a movie right on the cusp of the 1970s), does get me.  Lazenby brings the tragedy home with some fine understatement, and we sit with him and with that stunning, terrible final frame—Tracy, victim of nothing more super-espionage fantastic than a crude drive-by, her onscreen corpse only slightly obscured by the spiderwebbed bullethole in Bond's windshield—for long enough that it becomes truly pitiful, even if it's bullying you a bit.  Then a reorchestration of Monty Norman's Goddamn surf rock blares out over John Barry's plaintive music, and the movie is phony all over again, so it's not that uncharacteristic.

Score: 8/10

*Well, he full-on got Kissy Suzuki pregnant, but I assume he never finds that out.

**If I'd made Blofeld's volcano lair and then somebody tore it down, I'd consider jumping into a real one, so maybe that's what Adam was up to in 1969.  Okay, it was just the musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.  I'm also not 100% sure about Simmons's complete absence.