|
"Same old James. Only more so." The changing of the guard is enacted with a wink, George Lazenby as the new 007 evinces a chivalrous streak under the cigarette-ad veneer. (His disguise with overcoat and pipe and specs posits Sherlock Holmes and Clark Kent as modalities.) Blofeld (Telly Savalas) on the loose, "bacteriological warfare... with a difference," Operation Bedlam tracks him down to an alpine private clinic. The patients are international lasses who devour their allergies for dinner, the hypnotic cure also turns them into sleeping cells for world domination. The spy has a go with the babes but his heart belongs to the suicidal Contessa (Diana Rigg) first seen walking into the ocean. "Why do you persist in rescuing me, Mr. Bond?" The best in the series, as marvelous a marriage fantasy as Hawks' The Big Sleep. The hero packs a kilt to the villain's lair, hops from bed to bed until bopped on the head, awakens to ponder the angel at the top of a Christmas tree. Chase from giant gears to cable car, down the mountain on skis into the fireworks fair, seemingly hopeless until the heroine materializes on ice skates. (The action spills into a stock car race and comes to rest in a barn on a note from It Happened One Night, just the thing to change "a bachelor's taste for freedom.") The astonishing rapidity of Peter R. Hunt's direction is a refinement from Russell's experiments in Billion Dollar Brain, with lens flares on whizzing shots adding to the abstraction. Louis Armstrong for the serenade, plus Flecker verses recited as Bond and his future father-in-law (Gabriele Ferzetti) ride to the rescue in the airborn cavalry. "There's always something formal about the point of a pistol." The hurt of the bullet-riddled finale doesn't emerge again until Campbell's Casino Royale. With Ilse Steppat, Lois Maxwell, George Baker, Bernard Lee, Angela Scoular, Catherine Schell, Desmond Llewelyn, Bernard Horsfall, Yuri Borienko, and Joanna Lumley.
--- Fernando F. Croce |