Listen to the companion episode of the Raven Bond podcast here!
Released: December 1969
Producers: Harry Saltzman & Albert R. Broccoli
Director: Peter R. Hunt
Written by: Richard Maibaum
Plot:
On the trail of SPECTRE head Blofeld, James Bond has a series of encounters with a depressed Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, leading her father, crime boss Draco to recruit Bond to romance and marry his daughter. In return, he helps Bond find out where Blofeld is hiding, and the superspy goes undercover as a genealogist to assess Blofeld’s claim to a French title. It turns out Blofeld has been hypnotising hot chicks in an effort to destabilise the world’s food supply. Can Bond stop the plan, and have a happy ending with Tracy?
Famous For:
A brand new Bond
Spectacular Swiss ski slope stunts
James Bond gets married!
THAT ENDING
1969 is one of those red-letter years in history, chock full of landmark cultural moments. The moon landing, Woodstock, Stonewall riots, John & Yoko’s bed-in, the Manson Family murders, Monty Python’s first season, and, of course, Bryan Adams getting his first real six-string.
And tucked in just before the clock ticked over to 1970 was On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a little slice of 60s nostalgia, a self-contained Bond experiment which remains an often overlooked entry in the franchise.
Most of this is due to the casting of Queanbeyan’s own George Lazenby as 007, stepping into a set of polished derbys so big nobody could possibly fill them.
It’s still quite common to dismiss Lazenby as “bad”, even if critical opinion has come around on the film enough to see it consistently rank in Top 10 or even Top 5 favourites lists.
In many ways it was the most “sixties” of all the Bond films - certainly stylistically, its emphasis on choppy editing and realistic interior settings perhaps more suited to French New Wave than English blockbuster.
Its costumes too, are crazy 60s - consider Tracy’s wedding jumpsuit, the epitome of Flower Power:
SHE WEARS THE PANTS, BRO
But more than just the exterior sheen, I would argue OHMSS’s happy -turned-tragic ending draws a line in the sand of a certain type of Bond.
Spoilers: James Bond marries Tracy di Vincenzo, ostensibly giving up the spy life for a fresh start with a woman he genuinely loves and respects. Moments after they leave their wedding reception, Blofeld and Irma Bunt drive past and blast machine gun fire at their car, leaving Tracy dead.
In a famous paean to the counter cultural movement of the 1960s, gonzo legend Hunter S. Thompson immortalised a feeling of potential, lost:
“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... so now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
OHMSS is interesting to study as the potential high water mark for Bond as a human being, susceptible to love and grief, before the 1970s crashed in and shot him full of something akin to that Captain America super serum, making Bond impervious to regular human sensitivities.
A former car salesman and jobbing model at the time, 28-year-old George Lazenby was cast as James Bond after producers saw him in Fry’s Chocolates commercials that cast him in a suave, Bond-ish role… dishing out sweet lovin’ of a different kind.
It still took four months to convince Saltzman and Broccoli to cast him, even though Lazenby had bought an uncollected suit made for Sean Connery from his London tailor, and gone to Connery’s barber to have his hair styled similarly. According to Lazenby, it was when he decked out a Russian ex-wrestler in a fight demonstration that the producers agreed.
Despite his inexperience, I can absolutely understand going with a “nobody” for a new Bond. Lazenby had the look, he was tall and fit, and he was a newcomer. He could be moulded without too much hassle by long time Bond editor and first-time Bond director Peter R Hunt.
Or could he? The rumours quickly began that Lazenby was arrogant during filming, and any number of documentaries and makings-of features have the man himself say he had his moments. Lazenby says media interest and the pressure of the part definitely affected him, and he did seem to show arrogance by turning down future Bond outings because he didn’t think the spy franchise would have a place in the peace-loving, authority-challenging decade that the 1970s promised.
In a sense, he was right, which brings me back to the idea that a certain type of Bond would die along with Tracy di Vicenzo at the end of this film. Director Peter R. Hunt and writer Richard Maibaum wanted to eschew the gadgets and oversized villainous plans and lairs, and stick close to the plot of Fleming’s tenth novel, which he wrote in Jamaica in early 1962 while Dr No was filming nearby.
The pre-credit sequence is a noir-ish thriller, in which Bond runs into the sea to rescue a beautiful woman in a flowing, kimono-sleeved gown, who seems to be walking out with no intention of returning.
The film keeps Bond’s face concealed while he follows Tracy and runs to her aid. You see glimpses of it as he fights off goons (who later turn out to be her bodyguards, employed by her father Draco), but it’s only when he’s reviving Tracy that he introduces himself as “Bond, James Bond” that we see the tanned, cleft-chinned face of the new Bond.
Tracy runs away and Lazenby not so much breaks the fourth wall as stampedes through it like a herd of meth-addled elephants:
The gag was a last minute addition from director Hunt, who urged Lazenby to use a line he’d been regularly tossing around onset whenever something happened to him that he didn’t think Connery would have suffered lightly (again, joke or arrogance? I suspect the former in most cases, but you never know).
So they have this wink at the audience to acknowledge HE’S A DIFFERENT GUY, but then immediately launch into Maurice Binder’s opening titles sequence to show you that HE’S THE SAME GUY.
As an aside - are the girls’ boobs in those opening credits weirdly pointy, or is that just me?
As John Barry’s thrilling instrumental (the first since From Russia With Love and the last so far in the franchise) clips along, significant characters from the previous Connery films are literally pulled into frame during the sequence.
All except for Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld, of course. The filmmakers decided to make a deliberate choice to ignore the fact that Bond met his SPECTRE nemesis in You Only Live Twice, and have them meet from scratch. So there’s no point reminding punters that some fairly crucial things have changed.
It’s also not lost on me that the key image in those credits is the hourglass. Within the film, time’s running out for Blofeld, for Tracy, for Bond’s bachelorhood. Externally, time’s running out for Lazenby, for the decade, and for the image of James Bond as we know it.
It also seems to represent that this movie is almost two halves - one in which James Bond is recruited as a gigalo-cum-psychologist (unfortunate Latin there) by Tracy’s father to “dominate” his daughter and therefore make her happy…
...and the other half in which Bond confronts Blofeld at his Swiss mountain Institute for Allergy Research aka Hypnotic Centre for Hot Chicks Destabilising Food Supplies.
Tracy di Vicenzo crosses into the second half of the movie, so let’s start with her - if for no other reason that she’s the most captivating character in the entire film, and if it weren’t for this movie’s relative obscurity compared to others in the canon she would be remembered more as one of the greatest.
A good place to start is with this fantastic interview from the time, in which Diana Rigg summarises Tracy’s role in the Bond canon more succinctly and in a much posher accent than I could ever muster:
“They’re ciphers, not real people,” Rigg says of women in Bond’s world.
Now, I wouldn’t necessarily agree 100 per cent with that. Sure, many Bond girls are somewhat fantasy women, but there’s often a backstory - like Honey Ryder’s experience of rape or Pussy Galore’s lesbianism, or Domino Derval finding herself a kept woman of man she increasingly despises. And yes, those backstories are often how the women are placed in opposition to men, but the Bechdel test hadn’t been invented yet, I’ve just got to take the moments when I find them.
Also - Tracy is the daughter of a crime boss who received a posh education in Switzerland and married an Italian count during her jetsetting party lifestyle. That’s a fairly unique set of life circumstances and one that perhaps is not quite “real” to many female viewers of the time, or even now.
However, Tracy does bring something new that genuinely feels authentic - a sense of ennui, fatalism and probably a good old case of depression.
Once we hear her father Marc-Ange Draco’s explanation of why she might be running headlong into the ocean, or placing risky bets with no money at casinos, starts to explain perhaps part of her depressed state.
She ran wild with the A-list party types, he claims, and she needs a man to dominate her. That’ll make her feel better. He casually mentions Tracy was sent to boarding school at 12 after her mother died, essentially leaving her without direct parenting during her teen years, as well as the fact her marriage ended when her husband killed himself and one of his mistresses in a car crash, but oh no, she just needs to be given her marching orders and a good dicking.
“Wow, an even shittier Draco, well done.”
I mean, even Bond tells Draco “She needs a psychiatrist”. She may not worry for money, but Tracy’s still been through some shit. Little wonder paying Bond back for saving her honour at the baccarat table (and after he’d beaten up her bodyguard again) had been so matter of fact for her - she’s not attracted to him as much as she is detached from potential consequences.
Draco offers Bond 1 million pounds to romance and marry Tracy, but the reason he agrees is because Draco, the head of the second-biggest European crime group after SPECTRE, can help Bond track down Blofeld.
When Bond suspiciously turns up at a bullfight at the Draco estate in Portugal, Tracy is initially and justifiably pissed at her Dad, and threatens to never see him again, releasing Bond from the deal she knows he’s made.
Who can take this amount of outrageous cravat work seriously?
Despite this, Bond manages to convince her that he actually likes her as a person, drying her tears and launching into a Hallmark-esque couple montage of the pair of them walking through parks, horse-riding, chasing each other on beaches, and foreshadowing-ly looking at rings in a jewellery store.
It is reductive to say that Bond “cures” Tracy of her depression, but I guess for a spy movie they can’t go too deeply into Jungian analysis.
What is true is that Bond finds Tracy fascinating; perhaps this complex inner life of hers is as appealing a mystery as finding Blofeld himself.
By the time the pair get to Bern, we’ve almost forgotten that oh yes, that’s right, this is a spy movie. Bond sneaks into the office of lawyer Gumbold, and has a safecracker/photocopier craned in so he can check out secret files relating to Blofeld. He also takes the opportunity to have a look through a Playboy magazine, which one assumes is signal to the audience that while he may be falling in love with a human female person and what not, it’s not like he’s gone soft or gay or nuffin’. His heterosexuality is still robust and meaty.
He even steals the centrefold for a future shake not stir.
It’s at this point that Tracy and Draco vanish from the film. Bond returns to England and visits M at home to demand being reassigned to Operation Bedlam because he’s found out Blofeld is in the Swiss Alps trying to pass himself off as a French count.
M, whose own smoking jacket and cravat combination is as classy as his butterfly collection is creepy AF, agrees to let Bond hatch a plan to stand in for Coat of Arms expert Sir Hilary Bray and “assess” Blofeld’s claim to be heir to the title of Count Balthazar de Bleuchamp. Bond has a lovely moment with Sir Hilary in London where he is shown a family crest for a possible Bond ancestor, complete with the motto “The World Is Not Enough”, and they discuss the minutiae of how Bond will assume Bray’s identity.
This seems to involve three key personality elements: be boring; be Scottish; and be gay.
It’s a strange story twist that isn’t set up until Joanna Lumley’s allergy patient remarks “We know what he’s allergic too” after Bond/Bray bores them all to death with a lecture about gold balls on coats of arms. Then, as Bond starts seducing the women undergoing treatment at the Piz Gloria facility, they remark how “We didn’t think you liked girls!” and he plays along, saying “Normally I don’t, but you’re very special!”
Given high altitude can do funny things to your sense of judgement, and hey, this was the Swinging Sixties, there’s no judgment from me about a sexual free for all, more that I’m not quite certain if it’s supposed to be taking the mickey out of gay men. Or if it’s like that teen movie trope of a straight guy pretending to be gay to see the girls’ boobies during a sleepover or something.
At least one assumes that whatever their orientation, all Scottish men wear the same thing under their kilt.
It’s during his assignation with this chirpy-but-allergic-to-chickens chicky babe that Bond discovers Blofeld is using hypnotism techniques to program the girls to become sleeper agents, ready to unleash biological weapons on the world’s food supply unless Blofeld gets…money, I guess?… from the United Nations.
I had wondered why there were only about a dozen girls at this medical research centre, and that they were all in the 20s, extremely attractive and came from agriculture-based areas in different home countries. Very specific treatment parameters at old Piz Gloria.
Bond’s seductions are undone when he clambers into one bed one night only to find Irma Bunt herself hidden under the covers. Blofeld then greets Bond with a jaunty “Merry Christmas 007” and the revelation he pinged Bond was not Bray when he got a detail about a Beauchamp family grave incorrect (and not at all from the fact he remembered him from the last time they met).
Telly Savalas is marvellously menacingly mellifluent as Blofeld, a calm, imposing figure more like the faceless SPECTRE boss of Dr No and From Russia With Love than the camp villain of You Only Live Twice (not surprising since director Hunt wanted to return to the straighter style of the earlier films).
He also gives a masterclass in onscreen smoking, holding his cigarette more like the lollipop he would later famously wield as Kojak.
Bond is locked up inside the cable car hoisting system (again, no immediate plans by Blofeld to just shoot him), but escapes by busting out along the cable.
He sneaks back in, grab skis and make his getaway in a blue ski suit that leaves little to the imagination.
The ski stunt sequence here is incredibly well done. Watch a making of special and you’ll see how the producers hired not only professional skiers to be filmed as Blofeld’s goons, but also taught to be camera operators so they could film while skiing backwards. Cameraman John Jordan - who lost a foot while filming the Little Nellie sequence in You Only Live Twice - designed a harness that would hang five metres below a helicopter, allowing him to film 360 degrees while airborne. Many of these techniques were new to action movies - they remain a key reason why OHMSS is so well regarded by modern filmmakers.
Bond manages to get to the village of Lauterbrunnen, grabs a plaid jacket to put on over his recognisable ski suit. The scene is fascinating because of its fast edits; cuts of Bond looking genuinely panicked as goons hunt for him, and Christmas surprises keep popping up around him. At one point, he sits down next to the ice rink, and in a move rare for Bond - and one to get rarer still - he looks downright scared. He’s all alone, he has no easy exit, he’s basically stuffed.
This clip is very short and cuts off too soon, but you get a glimpse of Lazenby’s face, engaged in what is pretty decent acting, as Tracy appears as an ice-skating angel in beige and brown:
Bond has never been so relieved to see anyone in his life. Tracy thankfully has a speedy red car on standby - it turns out she’d been hanging around the village after insisting her father tell her where she might find James. It’s a good question, considering he did just seem to disappear after raiding that Swiss lawyer’s office.
Bond tries calling London to warn MI6 of Blofeld’s plan, but damnit if that Irma Bunt doesn’t show up with a machine gun. Oh, for some sort of communication device that Q did not issue him - too busy working on his radioactive lint.
Tracy turns into Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder when she barges into a stock car race and promptly leads the goons on a bumper car circuit they won’t soon forget. Diana Rigg did much of the stunt driving in this sequence, and it’s a fantastic way to give her agency and power in the story.
After making a getaway, the couple find an empty barn to hide their now-empty car and cuddle up to rest against the cold. It’s here where Bond does something he’s never done before, nor since - he proposes.
Is it the heat of the moment? Is it gratitude that Tracy just saved his sorry ass? Is it the sense of hell, why not do something out of character now when they could both be dead come the morning? Is it genuine love?
The swelling soundtrack and soft lighting certainly suggest so. It’s more An Affair to Remember than A Snare in December.
The film doesn’t get too carried away with soppiness; Bond insists he will not engage in sexy times with Tracy until they’re married (even though they, like, totally did it when they first met) and puts her on a trough filled with hay for a chaste night’s sleep. But he can’t help himself, flipping her out of the makeshift bed and back onto the floor where it’s him for some Christmas Night delight. It’s not so much Away in a Manger as Wahay in Some Danger.
The chase resumes at first light, and through another series of beautifully shot mountain scenes, Bond and Tracy attempt to out-ski Blofeld. Eventually, the crime boss fires off a gun in an avalanche danger zone (the production crew actually set off the colossal avalanche, using a helicopter to drop some sort of explosive on the mountain), and the pair are trapped. Bond manages to escape but Tracy is captured.
Clearly, then, Bond must go after his now fiance. M refuses to mount a rescue mission - back in London he tells Bond that Blofeld’s ransom will be paid and he’ll be allowed to carry on as Count de Bleuchamp. Funnily enough Bond doesn’t mention that he and Tracy got engaged mid-escape attempt; who knows if that might have swayed M.
But Bond has another option - future Daddy-in-law Draco and his own set of goons.
The assault on Piz Gloria is another stonkingly good bit of action - particularly impressive given the stark white snowy setting. It takes some time to get going, because Draco and Bond have to trick the Piz Gloria goons into letting their chopper pass, and also because Blofeld and Tracy need to have an interaction.
This happens in the shape of a “seduction”, in which Blofeld tries to crack onto Tracy despite never having met her before, simply because she was Bond’s gal. I mean, maybe he also knows she’s the daughter of a crime boss, but still. It’s all very sudden.
Tracy’s not having any of it; she recites poetry at him and when he offers to make her his Countess she replies in the most bored tone ever “I’m already a Countess”.
Overhearing radio comms with the approaching helicopter, Tracy realises it’s her Dad coming to get her, and by extension Bond. And boy does Lazenby arrive in the BEST POSSIBLE FORM for a GIF:
King of GIFS.
There’s fights, and explosions and flamethrowers and even an impaling. Tracy herself has a fantastic fight with a goon in the Alpine Room, eventually spiking him on some modern art. She reunites with Draco as he men set their bombs to blow up the whole operation and start to make a move outta there. Except for Bond, who’s gone in search of Blofeld.
Tracy doesn’t want to leave without Of course you never forget that Tracy’s dad has some really questionable parenting practices, but it… well, literally punches you in the face as he makes his escape. It’s at 5.13 in the clip below - please observe Draco just clocking his beloved only daughter in the head:
It’s one of those moments which are totally inappropriate, but I can’t help laughing because it’s just so brazen. “Hey, I’m a father! I’m protecting my kid by knocking her unconscious!” I despite violence against women in real life, but the way this is done is almost slapstick. I’m a bad person, I know.
Meanwhile Blofeld and Bond take their chase to the only place left - the bob sled track. Olympic athletes were brought in to double for the pair; the sequence incorporates some of the accidents and unplanned moves they made during the race. Blofeld is finally caught head on by a tree branch - but nobody went back to check if he was in fact dead.
Case closed, it seems. Bond is next seen pulling up to the same jewellery store featured in the romance montage, and plucking the ring Tracy liked out of the window.
And then, that ending.
Bond and Tracy’s wedding is genuinely sweet - with Bond wiping away her tears just like he did when they first met, only now they’re tears of happiness. There’s genuinely good chemistry between Lazenby and Rigg here; despite sometimes negative reports that came out of the set, they were both certainly professional enough to make their nuptial bliss believable.
The best moment - one which almost makes Draco’s terrible fathering worth it - is when he tells Tracy she must obey her husband in everything, and she says of course, Dad, just like I’ve always obeyed you. It’s a brilliant daughter to father “f***-you” that only Diana Rigg could deliver with such sweet contempt.
M and Q make sweet cameo appearances; even Miss Moneypenny is there, weeping tears for all that might have been with her favourite 00 agent, but ultimately happy for him to find happiness and a new life. There’s a wonderful parting shot in which Bond throws his hat to her like a bride throws a bouquet. It’s the perfect little touch on their relationship, and signals Bond wanting her to find happiness too.
Happy they are too, laughing and making plans for the future, which is what Tracy tells James he gave her - the best wedding present she could ask for.
Given Tracy’s resourcefulness, bravery and supremely accurate bullshit detector, it’s ironic that she would have made a pretty darn good spy herself. As it is, they’re both happy to leave that world - but that world is still coming for them.
Although he remains something of a might-have-been, in a way, I’m glad Lazenby only had this one outing as Bond. It’s a self-contained piece, a transitional moment from one era to another, both in terms of the franchise and the decades.
With Tracy’s death, the soft gap she opened in Bond’s heart closed. And in a more meta-take, the idea of Bond as man who could fall in love in the ways us regular non-superspies do, died too.
Bond will still have affairs, still love women in the abstract, but the films of the 1970s will shoot Bond into another stratosphere of spydom (literally, in Moonraker’s case), in which romantic connection is fun and fleeting, but nothing more. The peace and love of the 1960s will be left behind, and the high-water mark of Bond in love rolls back, leaving true love as just a spectre in the dark.
Thank you for reading this instalment of the James Bond Retrospective! If you enjoyed it, you can sign up to support the series and my other writing/podcasting efforts via my Patreon page. Thanks to all of you who are already members; your support is truly invaluable.
You can listen to the companion Raven Bond You Only Live Twice podcast here:
Stu and I have are also ranking the Bond films as we watch and podcast about them. Here’s how we stand:
See you next week for the brief return of Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever!