The Greatest Bond Film Ever Made turned 45 today

I am, of course, talking about On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

I thought I'd return to that post and update it with a few things that I left out the first time, or else touched on but didn't really explain in depth. So:

11) The Concept.

They knew better than to try to cast a Connery clone and carry on as though nothing had changed, but surely a safer course of action than what they did would have been to cast a name actor who'd established himself as "the heir apparent to Sean Connery," write Bond quite a bit like Connery's Bond, and remake/update the early Connery films. It's not surprising that this is exactly what they did in 1973 with Roger Moore, and it shouldn't surprise to learn that they actually did try to get Moore for this one.

What they did instead was acknowledge the change and make The New James Bond totally different than his predecessor, on a level that has never been equaled. (Even Daniel Craig starts out with a handful of Brosnan-isms, although these are presented as signs of Craig!Bond's immaturity and he grows out of them by the end of Quantum of Solace.) Arguably they came up a bit short by casting an actor who couldn't quite pull it off (it's fair to say that there are scenes where you can't tell whether Lazenby's being unconvincing as James Bond or whether Lazenby's being very convincing at making Bond, as one site called it, an "authentic failure of an agent"), and arguably they undermined him considerably by drowning him in his predecessor's trappings. It's not surprising that they never tried such a radical shift again, nor that they deliberately chose to have Roger Moore never drive an Aston Martin nor say "shaken not stirred." But having said that, it's amazing that they were willing to take such a giant leap back then. (The "people who want to stay alive play it safe" line is kind of awkward in hindsight, isn't it?)

What's more, they decided to do this "Different Bond," but keep a lot of the tone of the previous few outings. There's still a sense of zany fun here that the Craig films, in their superseriousness, lack. Blofeld's scheme this time around is to hypnotize bimbos into murdering all the chickens in the world with a super-virus. He's not out to win back some money or steal Bolivia's water or rip off The Dark Knight. Now, some might say that changing Bond but not the tone fatally undermined the film; you can make the same argument for the two Daltons. My counter-argument is that they had to play to their audience's expectations somewhere. The audience wanted Sean Connery and mad villainy. They couldn't have the former, so I applaud the filmmakers in not even trying to give it to them. They could have the latter, though, so the filmmakers wisely gave it to them.

12) The Ice Rink Scene

I talked about it a bit in the other post, but on reflection, it's also one of the best scenes in the film and deserves its own section. Special mention goes to the use of an insipid Christmas song, first to provide a massive dose of soundtrack dissonance to an increasingly hopeless escape attempt (again, just imagine the Connery Bond ever just hunkering down and waiting to be recaptured), and secondly to re-introduce Tracy on the line "...and most of all, they need love."

(I do confess some confusion as to whether this scene is meant to take place on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve. Dialogue in the surrounding scenes implies the former, but I've never heard of fireworks going off at midnight on Christmas Eve. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how long the time-frame of the movie is. How cold does Portugal get in the winter?)

13) Peter R. Hunt

He edited the first five Bond films before getting to direct this one. In the course of those films he changed the way fight scenes are edited, as well as edited both Thunderball and You Only Live Twice down to watchable lengths. Then he got saddled with this one, starring an inexperienced nobody and set up a mountain. In a less-capable man's hands, the end result would have been a disaster. And yet, Hunt took the same lessons he'd learned as an editor and employed them here. The film mostly zips along, disguising its 2:20 running time behind a series of energetic punch-ups, romance, intrigue, nutty villainy, and epic action sequences.

The fights push the Hunt-style rapid-fire editing basically as far as it can go (indeed, we'd never see editing this fast again until Quantum of Solace, which overdid it). Hunt's visual style is also just-noticeably different from that of his predecessors - check out the shot of Blofeld silhouetted by the sun when he's talking to Bond's MI6 shadow. There's enough inspiration in here to suggest that, even though this was the first film he directed, he wasn't just following in his predecessors' footsteps. I've actually covered a good chunk of it before - the love-letters to the various scenes and shots and so on are really love-letters to his style - so there's not much else to say, other than the fact that, according to one source, it was actually Hunt's idea to give James Bond an actual character, rather than a collection of tropes bundled into a suit bundled into a car.

Honestly - and I admit that this is probably more controversial than me saying that OHMSS is the greatest Bond Film ever - Hunt's abrupt departure from the series was a bigger problem than Connery's. Look at how tepid the editing is in the 70s. Look at how uninspired the visuals are in the 80s. 60s Bond manages to stand out - partly because it was carving its own path rather than aping someone else, yes, but also because of people like Hunt who were doing the path-carving.