Fan favorite On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the dark horse of the Bond franchise
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: No Time To Die won’t be hitting theaters, but you can still enjoy some vintage 007 action.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
The last James Bond film of the ’60s would turn out to be the definitive Bond fan’s Bond film: romantic, unusually invested in Bond as a character, and about as beautiful as these movies would ever get, but still overflowing with those cheesy pleasures innate to the series. Not that it was widely loved at the time, or for many years after. But the decades have been kind to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a “serious” and gadget-free Bond that gives depth to 007 while delivering all of the classic super-spy movie’s goofy appeal without ever going full Roger Moore slide whistle—the glowering henchpeople, the travel porn, the sadism, the horrendous rear projection effects. (Turns out there’s something that looks even phonier than actors pretending to drive in front of a rear projection screen: actors pretending to ski.)
In many respects, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is probably the most significant outlier in the series. It’s the only Bond film that’s a faithful adaption of an Ian Fleming novel, and the only one to star the Australian model George Lazenby in the leading role. It’s also the only Bond movie that works chiefly as a love story, with a Bond girl who completely transcends the label, and the only one before the Daniel Craig era that appears to have been directed with pure aesthetics in mind—the best score in the series (and maybe one of the greatest ever) playing over gorgeous, snow-covered vistas that give way to eye-catching helicopter shots framed around lens flares and a secret lab lit like a Mario Bava movie.
Those pesky rear projection effects aside, there’s a kind of harmony between action and theme, the spectacular chases correlating with romantic pursuits, the bedroom eyes matched with some of the most wonderfully bizarre editing to grace a blockbuster of this period. Peter R. Hunt, who edited the first five movies in the series, directs the sequence where Bond meets Tracy (Diana Rigg) in a casino in extremely fast and agitated cycles of angles—in other words, like an action scene. Though a lot of Bond films tend to look flat and stolid (often in direct contrast to their sets, stunts, and exotic locales), On Her Majesty’s is populated with eccentric visual ideas—like the background of a wide shot coming into focus as a character puts on his glasses to glance over and going back out of focus when he takes them off.