Sean Connery’s departure from the role of 007 just after 1967’s You Only Live Twice put the film series into a spiral for a decade, some of which was self-inflicted by Bond producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Sure, Connery had become synonymous with the hero and a superstar in the process. Replacing him satisfactorily was always going to be problematic. Yet the producers didn’t make life easy for themselves with a range of risky and questionable decisions.
First was the decision to cast unknown actor George Lazenby in 1969’s ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. The actor had to be trained in various things like horse riding and the finery that inhabits the character of James Bond; how to walk, talk and carry himself generally. That meant Bond was delayed from reaching cinema screens for the longest time in the franchise so far. The next puzzling choice was to use this particular title in the Ian Fleming books. Admittedly they were already running out of suitable source novels to be adapted to celluloid. You Only Live Twice had been cobbled together using a bit of inspiration from the book along with hiring Roald Dahl to devise a completely different and outlandish plot that would be recycled at least three times more in the series over the decades.
The fact is that ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ the novel is one of Fleming finest works, a thriller that takes both the hero and the audience back to basics with less gadgets, authentic romance and Alpine skirmishes perhaps never bettered since. But there were a few difficulties.
For starters, they not only asked the Australian born lead to adopt a ‘well-to-do’ English accent but then made him assume an alter-ego in the movie so he has to pretend to be a toff for prolonged periods, to the extent his voice was dubbed. Quite a lot to ask for.
Next was the plot. Bond falls in love for the first time on film and ends up getting married before his bride Tracey is brutally gunned down by his enemies. So Lazenby was expected to convey emotions like love and grief in a way his predecessor never had to.
Lastly, (and I am only focusing on the primary issues in the film) Bond has to encounter Ernst Stavro Blofeld. In itself this was okay as Blofeld and his syndicate SPECTRE had been Bond’s adversary in four of the previous five movies. However, since they first encountered one another in You Only Live Twice, both roles had been re-cast with Lazenby obviously replacing Connery and Telly Savalas taking over from Donald Pleasance. Yet, when they are reunited in Blofeld’s alpine retreat with Bond posing as his alter-ego Sir Hilary Bray, we are really meant to overlook the fact they don’t recognise each other?
Strangely On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, for a film striving to break new ground and being very touching and earnest in the process, scores some hideous own goals. Despite this and various other stylistic and plot quibbles, it emerges as one of the greatest films in the series. But all the positives were undermined for the franchise going forward when George Lazenby took the bizarre decision to make no more Bond films before his one and only entry had hit cinemas. The result is a bizarre curio and a very unique almost experimental Bond debut for Lazenby and director Peter Hunt.
Did Messrs Broccoli and Saltzman try and arrest the wobble? Did they fiddlesticks! Instead of trying to cast a reliable and well-known actor in the part, they were forced by the anxious studios to pay the necessary amount to bring back Sean Connery. His career hadn’t quite panned out as he wished so he was apparently willing to take the sizeable pay cheque and come back as a rather bloated and aged version of the hero who had bewitched audiences in the sixties.
Problem being, if you’ve ever seen Diamonds Are Forever, it had more plot holes than any Bond film hitherto and the main star was now obviously jaded.
It appears that the Bond producers were determined to put quantity over quality so just getting another movie off the conveyor belt was their priority. They switched directors again, opting to use Guy Hamilton who had been at the helm of Goldfinger. Indeed, the finished product had a lot in common with the phenomenon from 1964 but this was merely a short-term fix as neither Connery nor the producers intended on making another movie together.
It was here that the producers used a bit of common sense and cast a man long linked with the role in Roger Moore. Once again employing Guy Hamilton as director, they released Live and Let Die in 1973 which got the series back on track although it was now unrecognisable to what it had been in the mid-1960’s.
Suspenseful plots and thrilling action sequences had been replaced by puzzling detours and unsurprising revelations towards the end of the movies. Gimmicky henchmen were out in force as was a brand of comedy that owed more to ‘Carry On’ films than the wry one liners of the series with Connery in the main part. There was also now a worrying trend that the makers were bandwagon jumping, delving into other genres and getting away from the Fleming books. In Live and Let Die, the movie owes a lot to the blaxploitation films of the era. Likewise in 1974’s The Man With the Golden Gun, there’s a preoccupation with martial arts following the global success of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon.
This would of course continue the more the Fleming well ran dry especially with The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. Yet by 1974 the series needed an overhaul, a reboot if you like. It had become too camp, too slapstick and lacked the guile or the tension of the earlier films.
Audiences and the makers seemingly had faith in Roger Moore so the latter didn’t resort to another re-casting as a solution. But a three year break between 1974 and 1977 helped them focus on the product in general. Using a Fleming title ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ which was nowhere near as compelling as other titles like Goldfinger or Thunderball, they hired Christopher Wood to write a new story using the origin book sparingly.
Wood got the memo perfectly and with director Lewis Gilbert on board (Alfie, You Only Live Twice) as director, the film series made an important and bold step forward that would sustain it for several more decades.
Admittedly, the plot is a re-hash of ‘You Only Live Twice’ – master-criminal attempts to bring the world to its knees by stealing the most powerful nation’s hardware with a potential World War Three on the cards. Here the hardware was atomic submarines while it had been space rockets in the aforementioned Connery bonanza and in Moonraker was space shuttles. Bond is involved in a race-against-time plot to identify the culprit and stop them which he does alongside a female agent in the shape of Major Amasova (Barbara Bach) of the KGB. Throw in a seriously dangerous henchman – Jaws, a gadget on steroids – the Lotus Esprit – and an inhuman megalomaniac and you have the blueprint to what would further elevate the series and rescue it from becoming a franchise for kids.
In summary, The Spy Who Loved Me heralded the start of a new era where the makers shrewdly moulded the film’s style, dialogue, pacing and tone around the leading man. Indeed, Roger Moore looks comfortable here and doesn’t try matching up to the efforts of his predecessors. After the hectic vehicle chases in the previous three films where cars and boats would perform relatively forgettable stunts or be in mass pile ups, the action sequences here are as smooth as Moore’s persona and stylish. The Spy Who Loved Me is a globetrotting glory with action scenes brilliantly executed and shot in Austria, Cairo and Sardinia using bare knuckles, skis and the tremendous Lotus Esprit which comes only second to the Aston Martin DB5 in 007’s best cars.
Moore looked and dressed the part of a playboy action man in his first two outings but was never really given the material nor the sequences in which to shine. Here though, the audience is reminded that Bond is Commander Bond of Her Majesty’s Navy as he almost single handedly leads the breakout from Stromberg’s enormous ocean liner and turns the tables on his private army.
Yes, some of the one liners and quips grate and it hasn’t aged well in certain places. The innuendoes are aplenty and some of them gratuitous and tenuous. But the interplay between Bach and Moore is splendid. Kurt Jurgens might not be as good a villain as Hugo Drax in Moonraker but whatever small space the script gives him, he does well with. Richard Kiel as Jaws does threaten to steal the show and is genuinely sinister and scary even after all these years.
As for the closing pay off when the Major and the Commander are discovered in a compromising position by their superiors, well you have to admire the audacity of it.
The Spy Who Loved Me was a big hit in the cinemas and prolonged the shelf life of the super spy showing that it could adapt with the times. The franchise would invariably hit the buffers again many times over the coming decades but retained the knack of refreshing and reinventing itself.
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