9 / 10
Official trailer
The Other Fellow
When Sean Connery walked away from Bond after You Only Live Twice, the producers took a gamble. They cast George Lazenby, an Australian model who’d never acted in a feature film, and built a film around him that was more faithful to Ian Fleming’s novel than any Bond before it.
The pre-title sequence tackles the change head-on. Bond rescues a woman on a beach, she drives off, and he turns to the camera and says that this never happened to the other fellow. It’s a cheeky, knowing wink at the audience, and it announces that this Bond, and this film, will be a little different.
This is the Bond film that moves me most. It’s the one where Bond gets to be a man with something to lose, and it makes me care about him in a way the Connery pictures never tried to. Lazenby wobbles and the middle sags, and I forgive all of it by the time the car pulls over on that road in Portugal.
Peter Hunt, who’d edited the earlier Bonds, directed it in 1969, and he brought a kinetic, fast-cut energy to the action and an unusual seriousness to the story.
Tracy
The film’s heart is Tracy di Vicenzo, played by Diana Rigg. She’s a reckless, unhappy countess, the daughter of a Corsican crime boss, Marc-Ange Draco, and when Bond first meets her, she’s driving into the sea, apparently trying to end her life. He saves her, and she keeps running away from him.
Rigg, fresh from The Avengers on British television, is magnificent: witty, sad, strong and completely Bond’s equal. Tracy doesn’t need rescuing so much as understanding, and patience, and the romance between them grows slowly, through montage, conversation and shared danger, until Bond does something he’s never done before or since. He asks her to marry him.
Rigg is the reason I buy it. She’s funny and sad in the same breath, and she makes Bond look like the one who has to prove he belongs in the room. It’s the most believable love story in the series, and it gives the film an emotional weight no other Bond had attempted.
For Writers
Bond falls in love with Tracy slowly, through conversation, arguments and shared danger. The romance feels real because it takes its time.
Give your romance space: several scenes, small moments, obstacles and misunderstandings. By the time the characters commit to each other, the reader should be rooting for them. Bond’s proposal works because the audience has watched Tracy slowly let him in, scene by scene, and wants her to say yes as much as he does.
A love story that develops gradually is far more believable than one that happens instantly, at first sight. The reader watches the characters come to know each other, and the growing trust makes the relationship feel earned. For more, see my article on pacing.
Blofeld’s Mountain
The spy plot is excellent, too. Bond tracks Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played here by Telly Savalas, to Piz Gloria, a clinic on top of a Swiss mountain, where Blofeld claims to be curing allergies in a group of beautiful young women. In fact, he’s hypnotizing and brainwashing them to spread a biological agent that will devastate agriculture around the world unless his demands are met.
Bond infiltrates the clinic disguised as Sir Hilary Bray, a stuffy genealogist from the College of Arms, and the scenes of him in tweed, kilt and spectacles, surrounded by flirting patients, are very funny. Savalas makes a physical, menacing Blofeld, less a cat-stroking mastermind than a tough, bald brute who can ski, fight and bobsled with the best of them. Ilse Steppat is terrific as his henchwoman, Irma Bunt.
The Ski Chase
The action is some of the best in the series. Bond’s escape from Piz Gloria, skiing down the mountain at night with Blofeld’s men in pursuit, is thrilling, fast and beautifully shot, with stuntmen hurtling down real slopes and flares lighting up the snow. Hunt’s editing, cutting fast between close-ups and wide shots, gives it tremendous speed.
There’s also a wild stock-car race, as Tracy drives Bond through a demolition derby to escape, an avalanche, a bobsled fight between Bond and Blofeld and a helicopter assault on Piz Gloria led by Draco. The final act is relentless and exciting, all done practically, with real stunts on real mountains.
Lazenby
Lazenby is the film’s weak link, but he’s much better than his reputation suggests. He’s physically superb, and he handles the fights and stunts with real conviction. He’s also stiff in the dialogue scenes, and his line readings are sometimes flat, and he never quite has Connery’s easy, dangerous charm.
But he has something Connery rarely showed: vulnerability. In the romantic scenes, and especially in the ending, Lazenby’s Bond is open and wounded in a way that works beautifully for this story. He’s a Bond who could fall in love, and you believe it. Connery’s Bond, for all his brilliance, never seemed to need anybody. Lazenby’s does, and the film is built around that need.
Lazenby famously quit after one film, convinced by his agent that the Bond series was out of date. That decision still drives me a little crazy. With a couple more pictures behind him, I think he’d have grown into the dialogue scenes, and we’d have had a Bond with a heart for years. Film history has few bigger what-ifs.
For Writers
Lazenby’s Bond is openly vulnerable, and Connery’s rarely was. The film uses that openness to make both its romance and its tragedy work.
You can deepen a familiar character by showing a side you haven’t let the audience see before. Vulnerability, in particular, can make a tough hero more human and give the story new emotional stakes.
If you’re writing a character readers think they know well, look for the feeling they’ve never been allowed to show. Revealing it at the right moment can transform the story. A hero who can be hurt is a hero the reader can fear for, and fear makes the stakes real.
We Have All the Time in the World
John Barry’s score is his best for the series, driving, orchestral and full of synthesized menace, and the main theme, an instrumental, is one of the great action themes. The film also has a love song, We Have All the Time in the World, sung by Louis Armstrong in one of his final recordings.
The song plays over the montage of Bond and Tracy falling in love, and it’s gentle, sad and beautiful. Its title becomes the film’s final words, and it gives the ending an almost unbearable, lingering poignancy.
That song wrecks me. Armstrong sounds tired and warm at once, and saving its title for the last line of the film is the cruelest and smartest decision in the whole picture.
A Wedding in Portugal
Bond and Tracy marry in Portugal, in a lovely, sunny, happy scene with M, Q and Moneypenny in attendance, and drive away in Bond’s Aston Martin. They pull over at the side of the road to remove the flowers from the car, and Blofeld and Irma Bunt drive past, firing a machine gun. Tracy is killed instantly, a bullet through the windshield.
Bond cradles her in his arms, and when a policeman arrives, he tells him quietly that it’s all right, she’s having a rest, and they have all the time in the world. Then, finally, he breaks down in tears. It’s the most devastating ending in the series, and Lazenby plays it perfectly.
No other Bond film had dared to end on such a bleak note, and I admire the producers for letting it stand. Plenty of studios would have cut to the happy couple driving off and saved the killing for the next picture. This one lets the wound land, and it haunts the series ever after, from For Your Eyes Only’s opening at her grave to the Craig films’ echoes of loss.
For Writers
Tracy is killed minutes after the wedding. The happiest moment in Bond’s life becomes the most tragic, and the ending haunts the series for decades afterward.
Placing a tragedy immediately after a moment of pure joy makes it far more devastating. The reader has just been given everything the character wanted, and it’s all taken away in an instant. The quiet aftermath matters as much as the shock. Bond’s calm, broken words to the policeman do more than any scream could, because they show a man unable to accept what’s happened. Grief, shown quietly, hits far harder than grief performed at full volume, and it stays with the reader longer.
Fleming’s Favourite
Few films have adapted Fleming as faithfully as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It follows the novel’s plot closely, keeps its romance and its tragic ending and captures the melancholy tone of the later books.
For years, it was dismissed as the one with the other actor. Its reputation has grown enormously since, and many fans and critics now put it at the very top of the series. Christopher Nolan has cited it as one of his favorites, and its influence is visible in Inception’s snow fortress and in the emotional stakes of the Craig era.
Draco
Gabriele Ferzetti plays Marc-Ange Draco, Tracy’s father and the head of a Corsican crime syndicate, and few characters in any Bond film are as likeable. He’s a gangster, but a loving, worried father, and he offers Bond a million pounds to marry his daughter and give her a reason to live.
Bond refuses the money and asks instead for information about Blofeld, and the deal sets the story in motion. Draco becomes an ally, leading the final assault on Piz Gloria, and his warmth, and his obvious love for Tracy, make the ending even harder to bear.
Hunt’s Cutting
Peter Hunt had edited the early Bond films and worked as a second-unit director on them, and his directing style comes straight out of the cutting room. The fights are shot in fast, jagged bursts, with sound effects punching every blow, and the ski chases use rapid cuts and speeding camerawork to create a sense of real velocity.
It was startling in 1969, and it still feels modern. Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh have both praised the film’s style, and you can see its influence on action films decades later. Hunt only directed one Bond, and it may be the best-directed of them all.
Not Perfect
The film runs over two hours, and the middle section at Piz Gloria drags a little. Lazenby’s inexperience shows in several scenes, and George Baker dubs his voice when Bond disguises himself as Sir Hilary. The romance montage is a touch syrupy. Those complaints barely dent it for me. The dubbing hurts more than the slow middle, because hearing another man’s voice come out of Bond pulls me right out of the scene. The film’s heart, its action and its ending make it a high point of the whole series.
Craft Note
Craft Note
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service gives Bond a real love story and then takes it away, turning a spy adventure into a tragedy. The romance makes the action matter, and the ending gives the whole series a wound.
A genre story gains depth when it risks real emotional stakes and lets them cost the hero something permanent. Let your protagonist win something precious, and then consider whether the story would be stronger if they lost it.
All the Time in the World
It’s a 9, and the only things keeping it from a 10 are Lazenby’s stiffness in the talky scenes and that saggy stretch at Piz Gloria. Everything else is the series at its best: Diana Rigg’s Tracy, Alpine action shot for real, John Barry’s finest score and an ending that still makes my chest hurt. Lazenby isn’t Connery. That suits the film, because Connery’s Bond could never have played that last scene.
