Saturday, April 22, 2006

Lazenby--Best Bond ever?


In Slate, Dan Oko advances the--to me, at least--counterintuitive thesis that George Lazenby was the best Bond ever. Read the article. The argument isn't has crazy a it sounds. Here's a taste:

While it's not fair to call the Connery movies a corruption of Fleming's novels—in fact, with Connery's early success, the author even acknowledged the actor by giving Bond a Scottish birthright—the films, like the stories, had started to grow increasingly cartoonish by the time of Fleming's death in 1964 (several years before Lazenby's arrival.) With a new actor on deck for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the first-time director Peter Hunt took a chance to re-establish Bond as the brutish agent described in Fleming's early novels. The director also slowed the action down enough to allow this characterization to take hold. While Connery remains the prohibitive favorite for many fans, it took just this one movie for Lazenby to make the character his own. He turns away from the sly, self-conscious wit that made his predecessor a box-office draw and allows the wear and stress of being a secret agent to show through. Plus, given Lazenby's training as a martial artist, his fight scenes remain a high point for the franchise.

To the great pleasure of Ian Fleming readers, the film likewise hews closely to the 1963 novel. The audience is treated to Bond's professional doubts (he threatens to resign, and ultimately is forced to team up with villainous Draco to defeat Blofeld), and we witness Bond falling in love and getting married—for the first, and I imagine, the last time. OHMSS closes with Lazenby cradling the corpse of his bride, and the look of resignation on his face shows an emotional unraveling that the other fellows who played the role never came close to touching.

Posted by jwb at 2:56 PM   

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said:

I have always thought OHMSS to be one of the three best Bond films, after Goldfinger and Thunderball. The one thing I enjoyed about it is that there are absolutely no gadgets unless you count the safe cracker/Xerox machine. The alpine scenery is breathtaking, the ski chase is terrific, Telly is a great Blofeld, Diana Rigg is certainly one of the best Bond girls and its a great caper right out of today's headlines, i.e. WMD in the form of bacteria. However, I think you could have put any stiff in the Lazenby role and still pulled it off.
at 9:54 AM     

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