ON HER MAJESTY’S

Well it’s fifty years since everyone’s favourite government assassin first walked that slow walk across the cinema screen, turned and shot at the gun barrel which was pointing at him and now he’s become so ubiquitous that the image of a paid killer in a smart suit is now deemed to be so representative of the very “best” of “British” that he can be used as a central feature in our international image making exercises and can even be allowed to be given the Royal seal of “approval” by appearing in skits with Her Majesty herself.

As a culture, we’ve come a long way in half a century, and sometimes not so very far at all.

I’ve got to admit that, despite their moral ambiguity, their rather unpleasant portrayal of women and “foreign types”, and the general glorification of violence, I’ve always rather enjoyed a James Bond film as, it seems, have rather a lot of people, especially since they became rather a cornerstone of the ITV schedules in October 1975 and for most of the subsequent Bank Holidays, until, it seems now, when the film rights baton has apparently been passed over to Sky and the current showings might very well be the last for terrestrial television for quite some time.

In fact, whilst all of my chums were being allowed to actually go to the cinema and see the unsuitably “adult” content of “Live and Let Die” a couple of years earlier at an age when such things should have been restricted from us, my own first experiences of this film series came from those “first ever” showings on British Television nearly a decade and a half after the first movie was released and, as an impressionable not-quite teenager back then, I was simply “blown away” by all of the excitement.

Strangely enough, however, I think that it might have been the exciting posters reprinted in the “TV Times” and my “Look In” comics which drew me in the most. I might even go as far as to say that my own burgeoning interest in things of a “Graphic Design” nature might have been stimulated by those rather bonkers, over-the-top campaigns that were created in the 1960s but which only reached me some ten years later.

Why is it that I still think that after all these years and it being rarely considered to be the most memorable film in the series that I still think that “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” is a rather great film…? Could it be the age I first saw it at? Was is just that I was at an impressionable age? After all, right from the moment I first saw it – quite possibly in September 1978 when I was fourteen years old – something about the style and the pace of it made it seem to be something rather “special” and “different” from all of the films which had preceded it, and it wasn’t just due to the lack of Sean Connery as the star.

He had, of course, been replaced by the Australian actor/model Mr George Lazenby who, by deciding at the eleventh hour to only ever appear in one James Bond film (something which apparently had ruled out Cary Grant back at the beginning of the series which would have been “interesting...”), instantly became the butt of so many jokes and “Whatever happened to...” articles for the rest of his career, but he gives an honest, more “humble” and rather more “innocent” performance which has been unfairly ridiculed down the years but which actually is not that bad. His biggest “crime” was possibly in simply not being Sean Connery...

Even now, I think that this is the film which I have probably seen the most times of any film in my life , with “From Russia With Love” possibly running it a close second. Oh, I might have watched and rewatched “Alien” a fair few times over the years, but for a long time, “O.H.M.S.S.” was my default position on those long, lonely weekends when I couldn’t really think of anything much else to do.

It’s not a film great of course, but it is still a great film (if that’s not a paradox?) and I do think it edges out most of the others and really ought to be considered to be the very best of the Bond films not least because of its almost spectacular and slightly epic direction from Director Peter Hunt and one of the very best and more subtle scripts written for the series.

The film also starts with possibly the best joke in the series with George Lazenby breaking the “fourth wall” and looking straight down the lens and smirking “This never happened to the other feller” after the girl has left him on the beach holding only his shoes. “The girl” in this instance is, of course, the rather fabulous Diana Rigg, fresh from her rather brilliant turn as Mrs Emma Peel on “The Avengers” (The telly one, not the Marvel Comics one...) who is destined briefly to become the future “Mrs James Bond” during the tragic closing sequences of the film.

Perhaps one of the reasons that this film seems so great is because for once the two main roles are pretty much equal with Diana Rigg as Tracy giving as good as she gets in her various “face-offs” with both the villain and his henchmen, although she still has to - perhaps - get killed for her sheer arrogance in being “equal” in status (in plot terms at least, although her performance is by far the best in the film) to her “leading” man.

There are other Bond films that are far more well regarded amongst the general public and the people who write about such things. “Goldfinger” is often made out to be by far the “best” of the series amongst the critics and in terms of story, perhaps “From Russia With Love”  is the better film. After all,  I’d be the first to admit that “O.H.M.S.S.” has more than its fair share of flaws, not least because despite the fact that there is less overt sexism on display than is usual for films of this type at that time, once the plot takes you into Blofeld’s lair, the “eye candy” aspect of Blofeld’s “Angels of Death” is pretty dated, even if you take into account the presence of both future 1970s icons Jenny Hanley and Joanna Lumley in the mix, and there is some quite bonkers dubbing going on and a large chunk of the plot depends upon Bond not being recognised by Blofeld despite them having been face to face in the previous film, a plot point that only makes sense if you accept that the change of actor means a change of the actual character as well.

The other thing, of course, that puts this move right up there for me is the astonishing soundtrack to the movie which I think is one of John Barry’s masterpieces, only let down by the rather strange Christmas Carol which tends to lock itself inside your brain like a Piranha fish in a villain’s pond deep inside his subterranean lair and refuses to let go, no matter how hard you might try. The instrumental title music is an astonishing piece of work, and remains one of my own all-time favourite pieces of music.

The soundtrack also, of course, contains Louis Armstrong’s last recording, the rather beautiful “We Have All the Time in the World” which has rightly become a bit of a “classic” and it sometimes really surprises people when they discover that such a beautiful “old song” was written for a James Bond film.

I once had a friend who hated Bond films and she would most probably have disliked me even more than she actually did had she known that I enjoyed them so much. Ah well… I haven’t heard from her in years but, unlike friendships it would seem, Bond Films are Forever... Still, I don’t really think that there’s any real harm in liking things that you “shouldn’t” and these films, especially that first half dozen or so, remain one of my own “guilty pleasures” even though it’s now actually quite a few years since I actually sat down and watched one all of the way through.

There is, of course, that final scene which lifts this particular film above all of the others in the series. Someone - it may very well have been Peter Hunt - once said that George Lazenby “couldn’t have created a boiled egg” in that scene, but that seems ridiculously harsh to me and it seems perfectly fine to me, so I really don’t think so. In the end it remains almost the perfect send off for that “incarnation” of the franchise…