On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
Directed by Peter R. Hunt
With the help of Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Unione Corse crime syndicate, and Draco's troubled daughter Tracy, James Bond tracks his archnemesis, Ernst Stravro Blofeld, to a mountaintop retreat in the Swiss Alps, where he is training an army of beautiful, lethal women.
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What critics compared On Her Majesty's Secret Service to
In a tribute to “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), we get an Aston Martin DBS, a reprise of Louis Armstrong in the end credits, and, during a conversation between Bond and M beside the Thames, a gentle echo of John Barry’s electronic score.
The nods to past films in the franchise are inspired, none more so than the use of Louis Armstrong’s gorgeous “We Have All the Time in the World” (the theme song from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service ).
Other fan-satisfying nods include lots of lovely geeky touches (a car with inbuilt machine guns, bionic eyeballs) and On Her Majesty's Secret Service as a repeated reference point.
Now, there are two exceptions and perhaps It’s only fitting that No Time to Die references On Her Majesty’s Secret Service explicitly by borrowing the John Barry/Louis Armstrong song, “We Have All the Time in the World.”
Bond procrastinates on his confession, asserting that they “have all the time in the world” (you’d think he’d be a bit careful bandying around those words, given that they’re the last thing he said to his doomed wife in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” a frequent reference point for the latest film’s music, themes and romance).
Perhaps that’s why they, Fukunaga and Waller-Bridge, more liberally reference On Her Majesty’s Secret Service , the 1969 entry starring George Lazenby that feels the closest tonally in the franchise to a contemporary film, not the least of which because it marks the only time before the Craig era where Bond let himself get semi-permanently tied down by the love of a good woman.
No , Skyfall turns up the volume of those undertones, making Bond’s tortured history a major theme, finding a fragile humanity beneath the character’s usually unshakable exterior of the sort not seen since George Lazenby broke down in tears at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service .
Helmed by American Beauty and Revolutionary Road director Sam Mendes —an unusual but effective choice—and arriving 50 years after Dr. No, Skyfall turns up the volume of those undertones, making Bond’s tortured history a major theme, finding a fragile humanity beneath the character’s usually unshakable exterior of the sort not seen since George Lazenby broke down in tears at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Reactions are going to be mixed, I suspect, but one thing is certain: in attempting to pilot the franchise backward and forward simultaneously, the filmmakers have delivered the most unusual Bond film since the truly great (and truly bonkers) On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1969.
Skyfall isn't strictly a "Bond formula" movie, there are no hollowed-out volcanoes, killer satellites or plans for world domination, instead it's more in the vein of the personal, character-driven outings like On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Casino Royale .
Skyfall , the 23rd official Bond film, is right up there with the very best in the series, on a par with Goldfinger , On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Casino Royale.
By also functioning as an action thriller, Inception fulfills Nolan's ongoing promise to craft works that are exciting as movies and exciting as films, layered with a Hitchcockian self-reflexivity about the dream escapism of movies themselves (Nolan has copped to Blade Runner , On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Topkapi being among his favorite movies, and their echoes are felt here).
Indeed, all those different dreamscapes give Nolan the chance to reprise what I can well imagine are some of his favourite episodes of cinematic derring-do and adventure – from James Bond’s alpine escapades in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to the scorching gun battles of Heat .
When you add in the complications of dream time (five minutes of reality is about an hour of dream time) which expands exponentially the deeper you create levels of dreams within dreams, and a third layer that plays out like a literal tribute to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (was this somehow a favorite lodged in the subconscious of one of these subconscious invaders?) it more and more resembles a movie created by the dreamers.
Otherwise, dreams amount to action scenes referencing other movies – Mission: Impossible, The Matrix, and the swirling snow-bound gun-battles of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
At the same time, there’s one level of the film where it seems to turn into Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), but it turns out to be O.H.M.S.S. with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) at its core.
(I counted nods to Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and there are surely others).
Then again, there's also a distinct On Her Majesty's Secret Service vibe as well.
After some business we needn't go into, Bond promises to find and protect White's estranged daughter, Madeleine (Léa Seydoux), now a doctor at a mountaintop clinic not unlike the one in On Her Majesty's Secret Service .
(In fact, she is four years older than Craig, which I think makes her the first “Bond girl” to be older than the actor playing Bond since Diana Rigg [born in 1938] starred opposite George Lazenby [born in 1939] in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.)
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Mostly, the project marks a return to what worked about the franchise — namely, Damon — suggesting the relief of watching Sean Connery step back into Bond’s shoes after producers tried to replace him with a suave male model in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”
The first was On Her Majesty's Secret Service, starring another freshman Bond--Aussie model George Lazenby, who took over from Connery in 1969 but never made it to a sophomore outing.
It's also the least silly film in the series since On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), giving it the illusion of something like depth.
She transcends it on the level of Diana Rigg in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, which was not surprisingly the last Bond film where Bond actually fell in love.
That would be a shame, because “Casino Royale,” though half an hour too long, is the first semi-serious stab at Fleming, and at the treacherous terrain that he marked out, since “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” in 1969.
Not since the phenomenal 1969 Bond adventure, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," has there been such an emotionally rich 007 story arc and payoff.
Despite its similarly frenzied cloak-and-dagger-on-crack shenanigans, including a ski-retreat escapade that all but bashes a DVD of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” over the viewer’s head, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” clearly means to be a less anarchic, more emotionally attuned experience than its predecessor.
Then there's what seems like a pointless trip to a spectacular Italian mountaintop ski station that at first smacks of a homage to On Her Majesty's Secret Service but then turns out to hold the potential solution to the world's great dilemma.
The movie mixes a horror film virus premise with a goofy James Bond parody right down to mimicking the snowy battles of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" accompanied by the best 007 score never used in a Bond adventure.
With its cobbled Euro courtyards and hell-bent car-chase scenes, it strongly resembles a Bourne movie, and its mile-high Red Room headquarters is an echo of the Alpine Blofeld lair in the long-ago Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service .
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Then Tommy Lee Jones shows up, wearing the wardrobe of a Eurotrash playboy, as a weapons dealer with a circular lair that evokes the one in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”
Harry has to shoot his way out of the billionaire’s mansion, in a snow/skiing scene reminiscent of the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.