On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

Rating: C

Dir: Peter R. Hunt
Star: George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Gabriele Ferzetti

[22] Despite being a relative box-office failure, OHMSS has since acquired a good rep among Bond fans. In some ways, you can see why, not least for the ending which is astonishingly downbeat and helps explains both failure and rep. The major problem remains Lazenby, who sounds the part but looks more like Roy Castle and is given an appalling dress sense, largely consisting of hideous polo-necks. You can sense the script-writers were coming up with scenes for Connery and I can’t help wondering what he’d have made of it. Against this, it’s probably the best line-up of Bond girls ever (Diana Rigg, Joanna Lumley, Anoushka Hempel), the ski stunts are great, and it’s perhaps the last to be an accurate translation of the book.