{"id":3778,"date":"2024-09-02T21:41:02","date_gmt":"2024-09-02T21:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=3778"},"modified":"2024-10-13T19:11:44","modified_gmt":"2024-10-13T23:11:44","slug":"on-her-majestys-secret-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/09\/02\/on-her-majestys-secret-service\/","title":{"rendered":"On Her Majesty’s Secret Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"On Her Majesty’s Secret Service <\/strong>(1969)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 United Artists\/Action-Adventure\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 142 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (language, violence, sexual situations)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Peter R. Hunt\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Richard Maibaum\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: John Barry\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Michael Reed \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Release date: December 19, 1969 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Gabriele Ferzetti, Ilse Steppat, Angela Scoular, Lois Maxwell, Catherina Von Schell, George Baker, Bernard Lee, Bernard Horsfall, Desmond Llewelyn, Yuri Borienko, Virginia North.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Opening Song: \u201cOn Her Majesty’s Secret Service\u201d (composed by John Barry)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $22.7M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: **<\/p>\n

\u00a0Sean Connery decdied to call it a day after You Only Live Twice. He was tired of playing James Bond and wanted to pursue other roles. That put producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli in a predicament. They needed to find a replacement for the next film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service<\/strong>. Over 400 actors, including Oliver Reed and future Bond Timothy Dalton, were considered before the producers chose George Lazenby, a male model from Australia with no prior acting experience. Boy, did they choose poorly. He might be handsome, but he can\u2019t act worth a damn. He doesn’t bring the same charm, wit and sophistication to the role as his predecessor (and eventual successor).<\/p>\n

\u00a0Lazenby isn\u2019t the only reason On Her Majesty’s Secret Service<\/strong> is one of the weakest entries in the series. The plot is disappointingly slim. There\u2019s not a lot to it. I\u2019ll come back to this momentarily. I’d like to talk about the opening sequence which concludes with the best line in the whole picture. Bond follows a woman (Rigg, The Avengers) to the beach where he stops her from drowning herself in the ocean. He\u2019s then jumped by two thugs who obviously don\u2019t know who they\u2019re messing with. He makes short work of his assailants then watches as the woman drives away without so much as a \u201cthank you\u201d. That\u2019s when Bond breaks the fourth wall and says to the audience “This never happened to the other fellow.\u201d Sadly, the rest of the movie doesn\u2019t live up to its promising start.<\/p>\n

\u00a0For the past two years, since the events of You Only Live Twice, 007 has been on the trail of SPECTRE head Ernst Stavros Blofeld. He is determined to find him and take him down. He meets the suicidal woman again; this time in a casino in Portugal. Her name is Tracy and she\u2019s the daughter of the head of a European crime syndicate, Marc-Ange Draco (Ferzetti, Once Upon a Time in the West). He makes Bond an interesting offer. He will pay him one million pounds if he marries his troubled daughter. Ever the gentleman, 007 turns down the money, but agrees to romance Tracy if Draco helps him find Blofeld.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Back at MI6 HQ, M (Lee) informs Bond he\u2019s being taken off the Blofeld case as it\u2019s become too personal for the agent. Bond immediately tenders his resignation, but quick-thinking Moneypenny (Maxwell) changes it to a request for two weeks vacation. He returns to Portugal to accept Draco’s offer, but Tracy wants no part of it and demands her father tell Bond where he can find his archenemy. This is where the romance begins replete with a montage set to Louis Armstrong\u2019s \u201cWe Have All the Time in the World\u201d. It\u2019s not what you expect to see in a James Bond adventure; it feels rather out of place.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So where in the world is Blofeld? He\u2019s running an allergy research clinic in Switzerland. Bond goes there in the guise of a genealogist looking into Blofeld\u2019s claim that he descends from royalty. His nemesis is up to something and Bond intends to find out what. Hint, it involves world domination, but when doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

\u00a0In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service<\/strong>, the role of Blofeld is played by Telly Savalas who would go on to star in the hit detective show Kojak. He\u2019s not a good Blofeld. He doesn’t project the same level of menace as his predecessor Donald Pleasance (You Only Live Twice) or successor Charles Gray (Diamonds Are Forever). They say an action movie is only as good as its villain. Blofeld is one of the greatest movie villains of all time, but not in Telly\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Up until this point, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service<\/strong> moves at a snail’s pace. Not too much of interest happens, not even when Blofeld reveals his latest scheme to rule the world. It doesn\u2019t really get going until the final 45 minutes starting with Bond\u2019s escape from the mountaintop clinic on skis complete with Blofeld\u2019s goons shooting at him. That\u2019s followed by a car chase that puts Bond and Tracy (who miraculously turns up in the right place at the right time) in the middle of a stock car race. Then there\u2019s the finale where Bond goes against M\u2019s orders and leads an attack on the clinic. The action is very well done. It\u2019s legitimately exciting, but it happens at a point when viewers will likely have stopped caring.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I don’t usually like to spoil the endings of movies, but I will make an exception in this case only because it lays the groundwork for Bond\u2019s future conflicts with Blofeld. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service<\/strong> is the one where James Bond gets married. He is deeply in love with Tracy, one of the more interesting \u201cBond Girls\u201d although it\u2019s not really fair to characterize her as such. She\u2019s more than just some girl he sleeps with. She\u2019s the one. Unfortunately, their happiness is cut when Blofeld and his main henchwoman Irma Bunt (German actress Ilse Steppat in her only English-speaking role) kill Tracy en route to the honeymoon. It\u2019s a sad ending that lends a note of pathos to the series.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I admire that the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli wanted to try something different with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service<\/strong>. They wanted to make a more realistic film that closely followed Ian Flemings\u2019 original novel. It doesn\u2019t really work. Most of the fault lies with Lazenby. He just doesn\u2019t cut it in the lead role. The good news is he only played James Bond once. He was offered the chance to play him in seven films, but his agent convinced him to quit after just one saying that the character would become archaic and outdated by the liberated 70s. Bad news for Lazenby; good news for the rest of us. Even better, Sean Connery returned for the next movie Diamonds Are Forever.<\/p>\n

\u00a0On Her Majesty’s Secret Service<\/strong> is one of the worst of the Bond films. Aside from the good (not great) action sequences, there’s nothing about it that’s particularly memorable. Sure, the spy with the healthy libido gets to sleep with a few of the clinic\u2019s female patients (aka \u201cBlofeld\u2019s Angels of Death\u201d), but that\u2019s nothing new. John Barry\u2019s classic theme isn\u2019t heard until the two-hour mark. Until then, the score is completely forgettable. The editing, particularly in the fight scenes, is bad. To be fair, it was a new guy (John Glen) doing it this time. The usual editor Peter R. Hunt got promoted to director. It\u2019s not the most auspicious of debuts.<\/p>\n

\u00a0In short, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service<\/strong> is weak. I’m not saying that every Bond adventure has to be awesome, but it doesn\u2019t even seem like they\u2019re trying here. The only one putting forth any real effort is Ms. Rigg. The rest of the film is just mediocre. Ordinarily, I might advise you to skip this particular entry but since the final scene is so significant, I’m not inclined to do that. It’s hardly a recommendable movie, but you needn\u2019t go out of your way to see it.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 United Artists\/Action-Adventure\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 142 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (language, violence, sexual situations)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Peter R. Hunt\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Richard Maibaum\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: John Barry\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Michael Reed \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Release date: December 19, 1969 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Gabriele Ferzetti, Ilse Steppat, Angela Scoular, Lois Maxwell, Catherina Von Schell, George […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-james-bond-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/On-Her-Majestys-Secret-Serv.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3778"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5178,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3778\/revisions\/5178"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}