On Her Majesty's Secret Hermits

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Shouldn't it be 'In Her Majesty's Secret Service'?
DVDs are great, aren't they? It's one of the tragedies of the modern era that there isn't a special time machine that lets us go back in time and see what Diana Rigg must have looked liked without any clothes on, back when she was young.
Dating In Hong Kong On FirstClickFriend.Com Offers Online Dating Services And Online Personals For All Regions In Hong Kong. Dating In Hong Kong Can Be Really Successful Ith FirstClickFriend.Com 1. Diana Rigg is lovely. She's much nicer than Honor Blackman. The fact that George Lazenby - George Lazenby, I add, not Sean Connery - manages to win her heart in less than fortnight makes me insanely jealous of Bond. I wish I could be him. But I cannot. I'm fat and ugly. Diana Rigg would not have noticed me if I had been around in 1969. I would have been one of Blofeld's henchmen, shot down without anybody caring. Sometimes I find it hard to tell the difference between reality and the world of films. This is one of those times. 6. The American man on the audio commentary says 'faahv' instead of 'five'. Apart from that, the commentary is very good - there are lots of people (director Peter Hunt, a cameraman, John Barry, Lois Maxwell, George Baker), and it's edited so that they don't get boring. 1b. The editing is a bit odd. There must have been a fad for extremely quick cutting in the late-60s - The Ipcress File and the action bits in The Prisoner were similarly frantic. It just skates the edge of coherence at times. The fight in the pre-credits sequence, for example, is hard to follow, and has crash zooms, a sure sign of madness. Having said that, any sequence that features Diana Rigg being slapped in the face and threatened with a knife is almost beyond criticism. 3. Supposedly, one of Lazenby's reasons for leaving the Bond franchise was that, by 1969, Bond was becoming an increasingly-outdated symbol of the establishment, one that a younger audience would find hard to cheer. Certainly, the Bond films were going through a long patch of relative unpopularity - Diamonds are Forever was successful enough, but the first two Roger Moore films were disappointing. It wasn't until The Spy Who Loved Me that the series returned to the blockbusting days of Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. On Her Majesty's Secret Service was a hit - it had Diana Rigg in it, for a start - but the lack of Connery, and the general downward trend in Bond grosses meant that people tend to think of it as a flop nowadays. Lazenby had been signed to appear in DaF (instead, Sean Connery returned) and if he hadn't decided to pop off elsewhere, would presumably have stepped aside for Roger Moore in either LaLD or TMwtGG. - Because of the long running time, OHMSS doesn't get shown on television all that often, and general audiences tend to dismiss the film as 'the one with George Lazenby'. Nonetheless, it's a favourite amongst Bond fans, who regard it as the Empire Strikes Back of Bondage. It's much more down-to-earth than the films surrounding it, and there are very few gadgets, but at the same time it's packed with spectacular action sequences and has Diana Rigg in it. In the later films Bond tended to blunder around, getting captured, and escaping with the aid of a hitherto-unsuspected piece of equipment, whilst the few Bond films that deliberately tried for a more realistic atmosphere (For Your Eyes Only, and, particularly, Licence to Kill) were deadly dull. Here, Bond does some proper detective work, and uses his ingenuity and brawn to get out of trouble. And there are lots of spectacular stunts, and some romance for the ladies. Despite going on for two hours it seems to whizz by, and it's still great fun, certainly moreso than Goldfinger, which is iconic but quite dull to watch (boo, hiss). 3b. Lazenby is not bad as Bond, and it's a shame that there isn't more to judge him by. Certainly, he's no worse than Roger Moore, and indeed he's quite similar - the flippant humour is there, as is the chin. Perhaps as insurance against their new signing being a dud, the creators ensure that he always has something to do, and he's more believable in the fight sequences than Moore or Dalton. His version of Bond is more of an action man than either, although he seems to lack the capacity for being a complete bastard that Connery and Moore displayed. Some bad dubbing ruins a couple of his lines, and he seems to be taking the whole thing too lightly, but he's actually quite good, especially considering that OHMSS was his first film. 5. James Bond drives an Aston Martin DBS, sequel to the DB6, which was in turn the follow-up to the DB5 of Goldfinger fame. The DBS features heavily in the first half of the film (and the last five minutes), although it doesn't have any gadgets and doesn't do a great deal. Nowadays, the boxy DBS is the least popular classic Aston Martin, and you can buy one for about £12,000. The baddies drive a black Mercedes saloon. I have no idea what it is - it probably has SEL in the name. Late-60s / early-70s Mercedes saloons had a pair of vertically-stacked twin headlights, and, in black, are intrinsically linked to Cold War films. 9. Bond is a spy, right, but he can't even lose himself in a Swiss village - at night - during a festival of some kind? 6. Conforming to stereotype, Blofeld reveals his plan to James Bond and then, instead of locking him up in a concrete cell, he locks him in a cable car engine room, from whence Bond escapes less than five minutes later.
Joanna Lumley is a mindless plague-carrying harpy. This man has absolutely the worst hairstyle in any Bond film ever. Why didn't I think of having the screenshots vertically-stacked beforehand? It saves all the 'On the left, x, and on the right, y' nonsense. But it takes up more room. There's always something.
7. Donald Pleasance was Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, and Charles Grey would go on to play the same role in Diamonds are Forever (after which, contractual problems would prevent the 'official' Bond films from using the character - Max Von Sydow played him in Never Say Never Again, the unofficial remake of Thunderball, and that was that, apart from an unidentified 'man in a wheelchair who most definitely is not Blofeld, oh no' at the beginning of For Your Eyes Only). Here, Telly Savalas plays a more energetic, more charismatic version of the same character - apparently, the producers wanted a Bond villain who could plausibly engage Bond in fisticuffs, a problem that dogged Roger Moore's James Bond, who seemed to spend a lot of his time shooting old, defenceless men in cold blood. Blofeld is presumably blessed with the same supernatural regenerative force that allows Bond to switch bodies whenever the previous actor's salary becomes unmanageable / the last couple of films didn't do too well at the box office / the producers change their mind. This creates an odd plot hole. At one point, Bond masquerades as genealogist Sir Hillary Bray, and meets Blofeld face-to-face. Despite the fact that Blofeld and Bond had already met during You Only Live Twice (indeed, Blofeld held Bond at gunpoint), Blofeld completely fails to recognise Bond. He could be bluffing, of course, but wouldn't somebody have taken this into consideration? It implies, spookily, that George Lazenby's Bond is not the same Bond as Sean Connery, although it seems more likely that it was just a silly mistake. Originally, the producers wanted to explain the change of actor by making reference to plastic surgery. Thankfully they didn't, otherwise Bond would, by now, be a walking mass of silicone. Telly Savalas makes an odd Bond villain - his plot (to exterminate plant and animal life in exchange for a royal title and an amnesty for past crimes) seems mundane, he doesn't randomly kill any of his henchmen (although he orders some to their deaths), and it's hard to see Telly Savalas as a villain. He's just too nice. And since when did people called 'Ernst Stavro Blofeld' talk like Bugs Bunny? 2. John Barry's score is famous, and justly so - the theme tune is a classic to rival Barry's own 007 (the 'chase scene music' from Thunderball and Moonraker), and most of the incidental music, often based on variations of the All the Time in the World melody, is similarly lush. There's a not entirely successful early use of cheesy synths on some of the score, but that can be forgiven.
At one point Bond reads through a copy of Playboy. If I was really sad - and I am - I'd try to find out the date of the issue of Playboy he is holding, and the name of the centerfold (who is presumably now in her fifties). On the right, a big American car bullies a Mini - boo! Hiss!
11. It's an odd thing, but the music and cable-cars always reminded me of Where Eagles Dare, which came out in the same year. 1969 was a great year if you were into explosions and snow - and let's face it, who isn't? Switzerland is really nice. I wish I lived there. 10. At one point Blofeld takes credit for 'last year's foot and mouth outbreak'. Plus ca change, as they say in France, plus ca meme chose. Which means 'Increase the change, increase the breast-cauliflower'. Lord knows what they're on about, the French. 9. Four blocks of walnut can support an elephant. Similarly, during the first ski-chase, Bond has the power to transform one of his assailants into a dummy before throwing him off a cliff. Incidentally, this is the first Bond film to feature a big ski chase. There were others in The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, The World is Not Enough and a little one at the beginning of A View to a Kill, by which time audiences must have been getting sick of a back-projected Bond luring baddies off the edges of cliffs (something neatly parodied in TWiNE). And the downhill chase with the 2CV from FYEO was sort-of ski-chase-ish. And there was some ice in The Living Daylights. 8. Diana Rigg is very nice. I like her a lot. I'm going to put lots of pictures of her at the end of this article. It will be a little shrine. She's probably very old and unattractive nowadays, which is one more reason why there isn't a God. 11. There's a mercifully-short 'falling in love' montage to the excellent 'All the Time in the World', sung (but not trumpeted) by an ailing Louis Armstrong, also known as 'Satchmo' because his full name from 'Louis Satchmo Armstrong'. No, not really. You know why he was called 'Satchmo' It's one of this little trivia things that gets drilled into people's heads. Armstrong shares one attribute with Liam Gallagher of Oasis - he pronounces 'world' as 'wee-urld'. A lot of the score is based on the song, which was written by John Barry, and it's one of the few Bond songs that works even if you don't know anything about the Bond films (it was re-released in the mid-90s, apropos of nothing). It's almost perfect, marred only by a guitarist who seems to have wandered in from another session to pluck some random notes before being shooed off. 1. Let's get this right - Bond escapes from Piz Gloria (a research institute on the top of a hill), skis downhill, skis downhill some more, and then meets up with Tracy. They both get into a car and drive for ages, presumably downhill, before holing up in a barn. And then, next morning, they escape some more, by skiing down what appear to be enormously-huge hills. Is Switzerland just a big hill? No wonder it's retained its independence for so long. 8. Blofeld's guards appear to be armed with the FN FAL, a common cold war assault rifle also used by the British Army (as the 'SLR'). There are many instances where the guards fire on full-automatic- as the FAL is much too light to dampen the recoil of the 7.62x51mm round, they inevitably miss. Because of this, British Army variants were permanently set to semi-automatic. The classic 1970s Action Man had an SLR.
Despite being empty (the slide is locked back), Bond manages to fire more bullets from his gun. And on the right, the Rebels get ready for the Imperial walker assault.
12. As part of Blofeld's subliminal anti-allergy treatment, he utters the line "Do you remember when you first came here, how you hated chickens... I've taught you to love chickens - to love their flesh, to love their voice" to one of his patients. This same line was sampled by Scottish indie-dance group Finitribe on their 1992 album An Unexpected Groovy Treat, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. 2. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em - if you're scared to fight it out, watch him, and watch out!", goes the trailer. Eh? What? Beat who? Fight it out with whom? Watch out for what? "And if you think your girl's a good looker, take a look at this guy's dolls!", the trailer continues. Trailers aren't like that any more. According to the trailer, Diana Rigg (or "this [Bond girl]") has "class, and style." Which is quite correct. 564. At the end of the pre-credits sequence Bond loses the girl, and looks slightly off-camera and says "This never happened to the other fella". Although it's supposed to be a nod to the audience, it makes me wonder who, in the context of the film, Bond might have been talking about. Another double-oh agent? But he didn't say "any of the other fellas", and there are several double-oh agents. There's a very remote possibility that he's talking about the deceased husband of 'the girl', but it seems unlikely. M? Q? God? The use of the word 'fellas' also betrays Lazenby's Australian origins, although 'betrays' isn't really the right word, given that it's not psychologically unacceptable for Bond to be Australian. Sam Neill (who I think - but don't quote me - is from New Zealand), of Jurassic Park and Dead Calm, was briefly considered as a possible replacement for Roger Moore, and would probably have been very good. 1. This is one of the rare Bond films where Q doesn't give Bond any gadgets. In fact, he only appears in two scenes, and only for a few moments - right at the beginning, and right at the end. M has a slightly larger role, as does Moneypenny. Private Sponge doesn't appear at all, but that's because he was in Dad's Army and not the Bond films. 17. There's some very, very bad dubbing at points. More than once, characters say things without moving their lips, and large portions of George Lazenby's dialogue seem to have been added by the actor later on in the studio. Oddest of all is a long sequence in which Bond impersonates the aforementioned Sir Hillary Bray. To give the impression that Bond is a perfect mimic, the creators had George Baker dub Lazenby's lines. Notwithstanding the fact that there doesn't seem to be much point in this, it just seems odd. 13. Staying with that trailer, they include the 'No, Mr Bond - I expect you to die!' line. They knew a thing or two in the past. 12. Ilse Steppart, who played Irma Bundt, henchwoman of Blofeld and eventual murderer of Bond's wife, Tracy, died shortly after the film was completed. Which is sad. She was 52. 1. The film was directed by Peter Hunt, who edited the previous five James Bond films. After OHMSS he went off to do his own thing in the big wide world of non-Bond films. In an odd twist of fate, the editor was John Glenn, who later went on to direct some of the Bond films (and Iron Eagle III, which presumably comes lower on his CV).