On Her Majesty's Secret Service

The sixth James Bond film arrived in British cinemas on 18 December 1969 with a new man in the suit and a first-time director, and for years it was treated as the odd one out. Sean Connery had gone, and George Lazenby, who had never carried a film, took over. Peter R. Hunt, directing for the first time, went back to Ian Fleming’s novel and kept most of it, including a Bond who falls in love and means it. The result is a Bond film with a lead who cannot act and a last half hour no other entry has come near. We think it is one of the best in the series, and we say that knowing exactly what is wrong with it.

Lazenby first, since he is the problem everyone names. He looks the part, moves well, and fights with real, thumping conviction; the brawl in a hotel bedroom early on, all thrown furniture and cracked plaster, is rougher than anything Connery did. But when he has to speak he goes flat, and Richard Maibaum’s screenplay gives him a great deal to speak. The film knows it. For a long stretch in the middle, Bond is undercover as Sir Hilary Bray, a genealogist, and his voice is dubbed by George Baker, who plays the real Bray. A Bond film that takes its star’s voice away for twenty minutes is telling you how much confidence it had in him.

Diana Rigg is the reason it does not matter as much as it should. Her Tracy is a rich man’s damaged daughter who drives too fast and does not want rescuing, and Rigg plays her with the same dry quickness she brought to The Avengers on television. She is better than Lazenby in every scene they share, and instead of sinking him she carries him. Gabriele Ferzetti, as her father Draco, plays the marriage negotiation as comedy and the worry underneath it as real. The scene between the three of them at Draco’s birthday party, with John Barry’s We Have All the Time in the World coming in underneath, is where we stopped keeping score against Connery and started watching the film.

Hunt was an editor before he was a director, and it shows in the action. He and John Glen cut the ski chases into short, hard pieces, the camera down on the slope with the skiers and the snow flat white behind them, so that the black figures read like ink dropped on paper. Michael Reed shoots the Alps in clear, hard daylight rather than postcard gold. Syd Cain’s Piz Gloria, Blofeld’s clinic on the summit, is a circle of glass and orange upholstery that looks like an airport lounge, and is the better for it. Marjory Cornelius puts Rigg in a fur-trimmed ski suit that is unmistakably hers and keeps everyone else in colours you could spot from the next mountain. A bobsleigh fight made us grip the armrest; it is done with real sleds on a real run and the camera going down with them.

Here are the faults. At 142 minutes the film is long, and the stretch at Piz Gloria, in which Bond pretends to be a heraldry expert and spends his evenings with a dozen young women, is a lot of dinner and not much threat. Telly Savalas plays Ernst Stavro Blofeld as a bruiser with a grievance rather than a mastermind, which we rather like, but the script never explains why a man who met Bond in the previous film does not recognise him now. Ilse Steppat, as Blofeld’s assistant Irma Bunt, is the film’s best villain, a smiling matron with a pistol, and she has too few scenes. Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell do their usual turns as M and Moneypenny, and one small exchange between Moneypenny and Bond over a letter is the warmest either character has been.

Then the last half hour, and we will not describe it. What we can say is that it drops the jokes, that Barry’s score does what the lead cannot, and that the final scene is the reason this film has been reassessed upwards ever since. We had seen it before. It still got us, and we sat through the credits saying nothing.

Nobody has made a Bond film quite like it since, though several have tried. If you can forgive the man in the middle of the frame for being a beginner doing his best, and we found that we could, the rest of the frame is as good as this series gets.