I'll also say that I prob wouldn't watch this film again on it's own. I think it works better for me only in Bondathons.
"Hostile takeovers. Shall we?"
New 2020 ranking (for now DAF and FYEO keep their previous placements)
1. TLD 2. TND 3. GF 4. TSWLM 5. TWINE 6. OHMSS 7. LtK 8. TMWTGG 9. L&LD 10. YOLT 11. DAD 12. QoS 13. DN 14. GE 15. SF 16. OP 17. MR 18. AVTAK 19. TB 20. FRWL 21. CR 22. FYEO 23. DAF (SP to be included later)
Bond actors to be re-ranked later
Only 2 complete sets have been for sale (in public) since i started collecting around 1998 or so , this is one of those sets (sorry but im not tech skilled)
I concur, massive laugh from the audience (biggest since “I think he got the point,” and a big buzz from everyone after the movie ended, loads of chat, “he’s really good”, “great action”, “can’t believe she died” etc.
It’s still my favourite and is the Bond that I judge all others against, and are found wanting.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I think there are many Bond girls who are independent, strong-willed, tough and rescues Bond. What makes her special is her strong story and that's she's a complete person. She's also damaged and vulnerable. Only one is comparable, and that's Vesper Lynd.
I'm going to watch OHMSS like I do every year. ☺️⛷️🚡🎄
The biggest con -- and I'm sure many will disagree -- is Hunt's direction. Now, it's clear OHMSS represents a turning point for the films, which move away from the more traditional camera set ups and toward a blend of such and more "New Wave" styles of oblique angles and framing.
In the older Bond films, the direction is very much like that of major filmmakers of the 50s and 60s -- David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, etc. Actors are kept in frame and while the camera moves, it does so with a stable fluidity and only when necessary. The camera acts as an eye, tracking, pushing in, pulling back, and so forth, but with a kind of grace that adds lyricism to the imagery.
The New Wave directors wanted to do away with such staging, which they thought was artificial. So, they relied more on handheld cameras, tight but often off-kilter close ups and medium shots, more artsy angles and play with images, quick editing and sometimes jarring jump cuts, and so forth. Hunt doesn't completely fall into that camp, but something clearly different is how he treats Bond -- and specifically Lazenby -- as less the subject and more the object of his camera.
In all the Connery films, he got the typical attention of the star, which is to say the camera not only loves on him but the direction tries to frame the actor in dominant and complimentary ways. Connery in particular benefitted from this, but that's because part of his strength is to command the scene. Hunt, like the New Wave directors, was less interested in that. He treats Bond less like a subject in many scenes and more like an object among many. Consider how often the camera is distant from Bond, for example, or obscures his face or body.
Sure, there are still close ups and other traditional shots, but it's with less "promotion" of Bond and more "documentation" of what's going on.
The argument could be made that all this was calculated to hide Lazenby's novice acting skills, but, to me, it had the opposite effect. Because we get relatively few moments where Lazenby gets to command the screen, he's sometimes treated more like an afterthought in his own movie. On the other hand, Diana Rigg is often treated the opposite way. She gets much more attention from the camera even though she has less screen time. The same might be said for Telly Savalas as Blofeld.
Hunt was head of the curve. Certainly by the end of the 1970s, his style of directing would be pretty commonplace, to the degree that when John Glen directed For Your Eyes Only in 1981, his styling very much mimics Hunt's. But even as directing was moving away from the older styles, there were still remnants. For instance, Diamonds are Forever returns to the more traditional approach, though Guy Hamilton is trying for a looser but edgier style than he did in Goldfinger, which could be a Hitchcock film in the way it looks and feels. But by Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, even Hamilton is abandoning the stylings he used only 10 years earlier that set much of the pattern and formula of Bond films.
New Wave directors, you say? Might Hunt have therefore got his inspiration for the opening scene from the closing scene of just such a film - The 440 Blows?
Yep, though that still uses horizon lines and more or less places the subject in the center of the image. Consider how Hunt introduces Bond with glimpses of portions of his face and the quick zoom to lighting the cigarette, the more oblique shot of him running followed by the quick reverse zoom, and the various superfast cuts in the fight scenes (long before QoS). It’s all very much the sort of thing working against traditional directing and camerawork. With an established actor like Connery it might have worked better.
I'm sorry if this is not the correct section but, who is the blonde haired chap, I think he's another agent who appears firstly in the village then tries to approach Piz Gloria but is later taken care of by Blofelds men. I have never found out either the actor or the character name?
do you mean Shaun Campbell, as played by Bernard Horsfall?
he's in Fleming's book, he's Number 2 from Station Z in Zürich. This is a rather disturbing part of the book, as Bond has to deny knowledge of him and let him die to preserve his own cover, but still Blofeld now knows Bond is a spy.
At the sound of his name, the man on the ground stirred. He lifted his head and looked wildly round the room. He had been badly battered about the face and head with a pistol or a cosh. His control was shot to pieces. When his eyes lit on the familiar face of Bond, he looked astonished, then, as if a lifebuoy had been thrown to him, he said hoarsely, 'Thank God, James. Tell 'em it's me! Tell 'em I'm from Universal Export. In Zürich. You know! For God's sake, James! Tell 'em I'm O.K.' His head fell forward on the carpet.
The Count's head slowly turned towards Bond. The opaque green eyes caught the pale light from the window and glinted whitely. The tight, face-lifted smile was grotesquely horrible. 'You know this man, Sir Hilary?'
Bond shook his head sorrowfully. He knew he was pronouncing the death sentence on Campbell. 'Never seen him before in my life. Poor chap. He sounds a bit daft to me. Concussed, probably. Why not ship him down to a hospital in the valley? He looks in a pretty bad way.'
'And Universal Export?' The voice was silky. 'I seem to have heard that name before.'
'Well, I haven't,' said Bond indifferently. 'Never heard of it.' He reached in his pocket for his cigarettes, lit one with a dead steady hand.
The Count turned back to the guards. He said softly, 'Zur Befragungszelle.' He nodded his dismissal. The two guards bent down and hauled Campbell up by his armpits. The hanging head raised itself, gave one last terrible look of appeal at Bond. Then the man who was Bond's colleague was hustled out of the room and the door was closed softly behind his dragging feet.
To the interrogation cell! That could mean only one thing, under modern methods, total confession! How long would Campbell hold out for? How many hours had Bond got left?
I think you're correct @Unknown007 While Shaun Campbell is listed in the cast credits, I don't believe his name is ever mentioned in the film. Blofeld never uses it, Bernard Horsfall's character never says it, nor does Bond officially meet him and M never mentions him. This was probably an editing decision. There's either a cut scene or an excised scene from the script where Bond and Campbell meet, possibly before the break in to Gumbold's safe. Years ago I wrote a Fan Fiction adaptation for OHMSS and one of the alterations I made was to include such a bridging scene, as I had noticed the film doesn't properly explain who the blonde haired man is.
His name isn't mentioned at all, and he's only credited as "Campbell". His first name is omitted for, shall we shay, obvioush reashonsh.
Bernard Horsfall turns up in another Peter Hunt film, "Gold", in which he gets into a fight with Roger Moore early on, as well as another Hunt and Moore movie "Shout At The Devil".
As we see in the passage @caractacus potts quotes from 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service', Fleming's Bond is ready to abandon a fellow agent to his fate, when he has to. He's better prepared to do that than, say, Craig's Bond, who, for example, whines to M about her order to leave Ronson, in the PTS of SF. It's partly a generational thing. Fleming's idea of heroism was hardbitten, hewn during his wartime service in Naval Intelligence. Perhaps the Craig Bond of SF is a tad softer than he was in CR06, but if Vesper is right and he's "ex-SAS" he really ought to have been able to show as much metal as Fleming's Bond when it comes to having to abandon Ronson. (Bond's line in the novel, "Why not ship him [Campbell] down to a hospital in the valley?" is as far as he can go in trying to help out Campbell without breaking his own cover - but he, Campbell, Blofeld and the reader all know full well that this is useless.)
The film version of OHMSS spares Bond the dilemma that Fleming's Bond faces in the passage quoted from the novel - which is really no dilemma at all. Lazenby's Bond *isn't* put in a situation of having to ignore Campbell's direct pleas to support his (Campbell's) cover, but that isn't to say that the Campbell-related moments we *do* get in the film aren't highly effective, i.e. Campbell's sun-blinded point-of-view at Blofeld when Blofeld, posing as the Count de Bleuchamp, challenges him for trespassing on private property; or the dramatic moment when the gloating Blofeld points out, to Lazenby, Campbell's strung-up corpse.
The decision to omit from the film the passage quoted from Fleming may have had something to do with the difference in media between novel and film. In a film, we can't 'hear' the private thoughts of Bond. (The critical sentence in the passage is: "He knew [that] he [Bond] was pronouncing the death sentence on Campbell.") Had the makers of OHMSS been able to bag Connery as Bond, they might, on the other hand, have felt incentivised to work around the problem and find a way to adapt that passage: such a scene could have been powerful, as an illustration of Connery-Bond's ruthlessness when up against it, harking back to the spirit of DN/FRWL. (It's easy to visualise Connery performing this, as he 'sentences Campbell to his death': "He reached in his pocket for his cigarettes, lit one with a dead steady hand.") 'If only it had been Connery...' is, of course, quite a familiar conjecture in discussions about OHMSS, so forgive me for indulging it here, too...
Incidentally, I'm a huge fan of Bernard Horsfall, who plays Campbell. He had multiple appearances in 'Doctor Who', two with Patrick Troughton (including as a member of the Time Lord tribunal which sentences the Doctor to a change of appearance and exile to Earth), one with Jon Pertwee and one with Tom Baker, the latter appearance being notorious: Horsfall is seen drowning Baker in a freeze-frame for a cliffhanger in the serial 'The Deadly Assassin', a moment which provoked the ire of TV clean-up campaigner and busybody, Mary Whitehouse. My favourite show featuring Horsfall was, however, Season 1 of the grossly overlooked, brilliant BBC police drama of the early 90s, 'Between The Lines'. Horsfall plays Chief Constable Gordon, "a high-calibre woodentop" embarrassed to be leading an interview under caution with a Chief Superintendent of his acquaintance suspected of corruption. Daniel Craig plays an undercover Special Branch officer in an episode in Season 2.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I think in general the expectations of heroism in film are too simplistic to allow for such a no-win choice. A hollywood good guy can only be seen doing pure noble things. The audience would see Bond as an antihero if they saw him choosing to sacrifice an ally (and yet Fleming himself said Bond was never meant to be a role model).
The more I think of that's one of the more disturbing passages in all of Fleming. The villains do lots of horrible things, but that just proves how villainous they are. And there are scenes like Quarrels death, yet thats literally a battle scene where odds are one of them won't make it. But this page from OHMSS really takes us inside Bonds mind as he has to make a horrible choice for the greater good, and makes me realise I could never do his job.
@Napoleon Plural scanned and posted an interview with Lazenby from an 1983 issue of the US magazine Starlog. Its over here in the Man from UNCLE thread, because it came up in the context of Lazenby's cameo in the Return from Man of UNCLE movie, contemporaneous with the cinematic Battle of the Bonds. I don't want any OHMSS fans to miss it, because it gives a bit of insight as to what was going on his mind when he chose to quit, and some of the behind the scenes from his point of view.
Comments
New 2020 ranking (for now DAF and FYEO keep their previous placements)
1. TLD 2. TND 3. GF 4. TSWLM 5. TWINE 6. OHMSS 7. LtK 8. TMWTGG 9. L&LD 10. YOLT 11. DAD 12. QoS 13. DN 14. GE 15. SF 16. OP 17. MR 18. AVTAK 19. TB 20. FRWL 21. CR 22. FYEO 23. DAF (SP to be included later)
Bond actors to be re-ranked later
Only 2 complete sets have been for sale (in public) since i started collecting around 1998 or so , this is one of those sets (sorry but im not tech skilled)
5 years later eh?
One Big Con - "This Never happened to the other Fella"... Sorry.
It got a huge laugh at the time (yes, I'm old) and arguably helped ingratiate the new Bond with the audience.
I concur, massive laugh from the audience (biggest since “I think he got the point,” and a big buzz from everyone after the movie ended, loads of chat, “he’s really good”, “great action”, “can’t believe she died” etc.
It’s still my favourite and is the Bond that I judge all others against, and are found wanting.
Just watching OHMSS again (because its a Christmas film) and I got to wondering - was there ever a Bond Girl who was in the same league as Tracy?
Independent, strong-willed, intelligent, tough, rescues Bond (properly)
I can't think of one
I think there are many Bond girls who are independent, strong-willed, tough and rescues Bond. What makes her special is her strong story and that's she's a complete person. She's also damaged and vulnerable. Only one is comparable, and that's Vesper Lynd.
I'm going to watch OHMSS like I do every year. ☺️⛷️🚡🎄
The biggest con -- and I'm sure many will disagree -- is Hunt's direction. Now, it's clear OHMSS represents a turning point for the films, which move away from the more traditional camera set ups and toward a blend of such and more "New Wave" styles of oblique angles and framing.
In the older Bond films, the direction is very much like that of major filmmakers of the 50s and 60s -- David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, etc. Actors are kept in frame and while the camera moves, it does so with a stable fluidity and only when necessary. The camera acts as an eye, tracking, pushing in, pulling back, and so forth, but with a kind of grace that adds lyricism to the imagery.
The New Wave directors wanted to do away with such staging, which they thought was artificial. So, they relied more on handheld cameras, tight but often off-kilter close ups and medium shots, more artsy angles and play with images, quick editing and sometimes jarring jump cuts, and so forth. Hunt doesn't completely fall into that camp, but something clearly different is how he treats Bond -- and specifically Lazenby -- as less the subject and more the object of his camera.
In all the Connery films, he got the typical attention of the star, which is to say the camera not only loves on him but the direction tries to frame the actor in dominant and complimentary ways. Connery in particular benefitted from this, but that's because part of his strength is to command the scene. Hunt, like the New Wave directors, was less interested in that. He treats Bond less like a subject in many scenes and more like an object among many. Consider how often the camera is distant from Bond, for example, or obscures his face or body.
Sure, there are still close ups and other traditional shots, but it's with less "promotion" of Bond and more "documentation" of what's going on.
The argument could be made that all this was calculated to hide Lazenby's novice acting skills, but, to me, it had the opposite effect. Because we get relatively few moments where Lazenby gets to command the screen, he's sometimes treated more like an afterthought in his own movie. On the other hand, Diana Rigg is often treated the opposite way. She gets much more attention from the camera even though she has less screen time. The same might be said for Telly Savalas as Blofeld.
Hunt was head of the curve. Certainly by the end of the 1970s, his style of directing would be pretty commonplace, to the degree that when John Glen directed For Your Eyes Only in 1981, his styling very much mimics Hunt's. But even as directing was moving away from the older styles, there were still remnants. For instance, Diamonds are Forever returns to the more traditional approach, though Guy Hamilton is trying for a looser but edgier style than he did in Goldfinger, which could be a Hitchcock film in the way it looks and feels. But by Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, even Hamilton is abandoning the stylings he used only 10 years earlier that set much of the pattern and formula of Bond films.
New Wave directors, you say? Might Hunt have therefore got his inspiration for the opening scene from the closing scene of just such a film - The 440 Blows?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Yep, though that still uses horizon lines and more or less places the subject in the center of the image. Consider how Hunt introduces Bond with glimpses of portions of his face and the quick zoom to lighting the cigarette, the more oblique shot of him running followed by the quick reverse zoom, and the various superfast cuts in the fight scenes (long before QoS). It’s all very much the sort of thing working against traditional directing and camerawork. With an established actor like Connery it might have worked better.
I'm sorry if this is not the correct section but, who is the blonde haired chap, I think he's another agent who appears firstly in the village then tries to approach Piz Gloria but is later taken care of by Blofelds men. I have never found out either the actor or the character name?
do you mean Shaun Campbell, as played by Bernard Horsfall?
he's in Fleming's book, he's Number 2 from Station Z in Zürich. This is a rather disturbing part of the book, as Bond has to deny knowledge of him and let him die to preserve his own cover, but still Blofeld now knows Bond is a spy.
At the sound of his name, the man on the ground stirred. He lifted his head and looked wildly round the room. He had been badly battered about the face and head with a pistol or a cosh. His control was shot to pieces. When his eyes lit on the familiar face of Bond, he looked astonished, then, as if a lifebuoy had been thrown to him, he said hoarsely, 'Thank God, James. Tell 'em it's me! Tell 'em I'm from Universal Export. In Zürich. You know! For God's sake, James! Tell 'em I'm O.K.' His head fell forward on the carpet.
The Count's head slowly turned towards Bond. The opaque green eyes caught the pale light from the window and glinted whitely. The tight, face-lifted smile was grotesquely horrible. 'You know this man, Sir Hilary?'
Bond shook his head sorrowfully. He knew he was pronouncing the death sentence on Campbell. 'Never seen him before in my life. Poor chap. He sounds a bit daft to me. Concussed, probably. Why not ship him down to a hospital in the valley? He looks in a pretty bad way.'
'And Universal Export?' The voice was silky. 'I seem to have heard that name before.'
'Well, I haven't,' said Bond indifferently. 'Never heard of it.' He reached in his pocket for his cigarettes, lit one with a dead steady hand.
The Count turned back to the guards. He said softly, 'Zur Befragungszelle.' He nodded his dismissal. The two guards bent down and hauled Campbell up by his armpits. The hanging head raised itself, gave one last terrible look of appeal at Bond. Then the man who was Bond's colleague was hustled out of the room and the door was closed softly behind his dragging feet.
To the interrogation cell! That could mean only one thing, under modern methods, total confession! How long would Campbell hold out for? How many hours had Bond got left?
Yes that's the chap, is his Identity ever revealed, saw a couple of scenes with him in on ITV4 last night and never heard his name mentioned.....
that I do not remember, I'd have to watch the film again.
I think he actually first appears in the safecracking scene, which was not in the book
I think you're correct @Unknown007 While Shaun Campbell is listed in the cast credits, I don't believe his name is ever mentioned in the film. Blofeld never uses it, Bernard Horsfall's character never says it, nor does Bond officially meet him and M never mentions him. This was probably an editing decision. There's either a cut scene or an excised scene from the script where Bond and Campbell meet, possibly before the break in to Gumbold's safe. Years ago I wrote a Fan Fiction adaptation for OHMSS and one of the alterations I made was to include such a bridging scene, as I had noticed the film doesn't properly explain who the blonde haired man is.
His name isn't mentioned at all, and he's only credited as "Campbell". His first name is omitted for, shall we shay, obvioush reashonsh.
Bernard Horsfall turns up in another Peter Hunt film, "Gold", in which he gets into a fight with Roger Moore early on, as well as another Hunt and Moore movie "Shout At The Devil".
As we see in the passage @caractacus potts quotes from 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service', Fleming's Bond is ready to abandon a fellow agent to his fate, when he has to. He's better prepared to do that than, say, Craig's Bond, who, for example, whines to M about her order to leave Ronson, in the PTS of SF. It's partly a generational thing. Fleming's idea of heroism was hardbitten, hewn during his wartime service in Naval Intelligence. Perhaps the Craig Bond of SF is a tad softer than he was in CR06, but if Vesper is right and he's "ex-SAS" he really ought to have been able to show as much metal as Fleming's Bond when it comes to having to abandon Ronson. (Bond's line in the novel, "Why not ship him [Campbell] down to a hospital in the valley?" is as far as he can go in trying to help out Campbell without breaking his own cover - but he, Campbell, Blofeld and the reader all know full well that this is useless.)
The film version of OHMSS spares Bond the dilemma that Fleming's Bond faces in the passage quoted from the novel - which is really no dilemma at all. Lazenby's Bond *isn't* put in a situation of having to ignore Campbell's direct pleas to support his (Campbell's) cover, but that isn't to say that the Campbell-related moments we *do* get in the film aren't highly effective, i.e. Campbell's sun-blinded point-of-view at Blofeld when Blofeld, posing as the Count de Bleuchamp, challenges him for trespassing on private property; or the dramatic moment when the gloating Blofeld points out, to Lazenby, Campbell's strung-up corpse.
The decision to omit from the film the passage quoted from Fleming may have had something to do with the difference in media between novel and film. In a film, we can't 'hear' the private thoughts of Bond. (The critical sentence in the passage is: "He knew [that] he [Bond] was pronouncing the death sentence on Campbell.") Had the makers of OHMSS been able to bag Connery as Bond, they might, on the other hand, have felt incentivised to work around the problem and find a way to adapt that passage: such a scene could have been powerful, as an illustration of Connery-Bond's ruthlessness when up against it, harking back to the spirit of DN/FRWL. (It's easy to visualise Connery performing this, as he 'sentences Campbell to his death': "He reached in his pocket for his cigarettes, lit one with a dead steady hand.") 'If only it had been Connery...' is, of course, quite a familiar conjecture in discussions about OHMSS, so forgive me for indulging it here, too...
Incidentally, I'm a huge fan of Bernard Horsfall, who plays Campbell. He had multiple appearances in 'Doctor Who', two with Patrick Troughton (including as a member of the Time Lord tribunal which sentences the Doctor to a change of appearance and exile to Earth), one with Jon Pertwee and one with Tom Baker, the latter appearance being notorious: Horsfall is seen drowning Baker in a freeze-frame for a cliffhanger in the serial 'The Deadly Assassin', a moment which provoked the ire of TV clean-up campaigner and busybody, Mary Whitehouse. My favourite show featuring Horsfall was, however, Season 1 of the grossly overlooked, brilliant BBC police drama of the early 90s, 'Between The Lines'. Horsfall plays Chief Constable Gordon, "a high-calibre woodentop" embarrassed to be leading an interview under caution with a Chief Superintendent of his acquaintance suspected of corruption. Daniel Craig plays an undercover Special Branch officer in an episode in Season 2.
good analysis @Shady Tree
I think in general the expectations of heroism in film are too simplistic to allow for such a no-win choice. A hollywood good guy can only be seen doing pure noble things. The audience would see Bond as an antihero if they saw him choosing to sacrifice an ally (and yet Fleming himself said Bond was never meant to be a role model).
The more I think of that's one of the more disturbing passages in all of Fleming. The villains do lots of horrible things, but that just proves how villainous they are. And there are scenes like Quarrels death, yet thats literally a battle scene where odds are one of them won't make it. But this page from OHMSS really takes us inside Bonds mind as he has to make a horrible choice for the greater good, and makes me realise I could never do his job.
@Napoleon Plural scanned and posted an interview with Lazenby from an 1983 issue of the US magazine Starlog. Its over here in the Man from UNCLE thread, because it came up in the context of Lazenby's cameo in the Return from Man of UNCLE movie, contemporaneous with the cinematic Battle of the Bonds. I don't want any OHMSS fans to miss it, because it gives a bit of insight as to what was going on his mind when he chose to quit, and some of the behind the scenes from his point of view.