The Incomplete Guide to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and Let It Be / Get Back
In which 1969 is tumultuous
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 2024
Released in 1969, it would have been considered nice - but now? wonders Vanessa.
The Prince Charles Cinema 2024 James Bond season remains in full swing, though my January promise to rewatch all movies before the end of 2024 has trailed. As a reminder, I pledged to judge the films on the characters’ social mores, plot and technical accuracy, and the ability to follow Bond’s footsteps.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, or OHMSS, as many refer to it, settled into the two-year production rhythm its predecessor, You Only Live Twice, established. It marked a new Bond, in George Lazenby, and departures from now-norm, such as in his marriage to Bond Girl Contessa Teresa “Tracy” di Vincenzo, or a lack of Q gadgets. While it was panned in its time, leading to a return by Connery, it’s been reappraised as a cult classic, and faithful adaptation of Fleming’s source material.
Allergic to love
I need to caveat this review: I am a sucker for romance, if that wasn’t clear based on previous writings. This is the first film Bond concedes he’s fallen in love, to the extent that he marries. And yet, the framing isn’t as romantic, alas: while the viewer knows Tracy has fallen for Bond as she confessed to her father, Bond is in Switzerland, seducing allergic heiresses for the job.
Another problematic aspect is how men view Tracy’s mental illness. Her father, Marc-Ange Draco the crime lord, is very chill about Bond and Tracy having sex, as instead he is very patriarchal about how to treat his daughter’s depression. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’m sure you can’t shag away suicidal ideation? There’s no rescuing it; this love story is bittersweet in many ways. (1/5)
George Lazenby with Joanna Lumley in one of her first acting roles.
Sowing doubts
OHMSS is light on Q and as such, appropriately light on gadgets. The only thing Bond either found in the local spy shop or had stolen by his father-in-law is a safe-cracking fax machine, which, admittedly, for the time, is a practical thing, but lacks any user need outside of the world of secret agents - I’m sorry, I really do wish I’d found a gizmo like it.
On the other hand, Blofeld’s blackmail scheme holds weight initially: he has determined a way to make crops and livestock infertile. His angels of death will disseminate this method in the belief their allergies are cured by hypnosis (doctors say “probably not”), and the cure will only be granted if Blofeld receives a full pardon for his past crimes and the title of Count Bleuchamp.
To sidetrack for a moment, it raises the question of whether SPECTRE would then be led by Number 2 (which subsequently begs the question of who replaced Emilio Largo after his death in Thunderball). Blofeld must have been very preoccupied with those questions from 1965 onwards, as the first seed banks - to preserve and modify seed variants - were started in the 1960s, making him just a tad too late to pull it all off. (2/5)
Swiss and bait
We start (the second scene) in Hotel Palacio Estoril, very near Lisbon. Bond supposedly gets the best room, which would set back the Service at least £632.62 a night in today’s money. The added bonus for everyone trailing Bond’s steps today, is the hotel is aware of its role, providing fan packets to peruse and a certificate to keep.
Blofeld’s scheme to get his fake French heritage proven cost him 1,000 guineas - in today’s money, that would be £1,050, but considering inflation, it would be £16,762.66. Perhaps chump change for a villain, but not for hobby genealogists.
Finally, Piz Gloria, the lair of choice for the movie, was actually a rotating restaurant under construction when location scouts came upon it. The production actually part-financed its completion. Much like Hotel Palacio, it pays homage to the film with a permanent exhibition on its lower level. You can reach it from Mürren for CHF 85.60 (£74.63), or CHF 108 (£94.15) from Stechelberg (return pricing for adults). That’s not including any food you might want to consume, so start saving! (3/5)
The descent into Mürren by cable car
Blofelled from grace
Much like this was the longest Bond movie until Casino Royale, this review is long. It covers a change in Bond, but there’s a change in Blofeld, and none of it is addressed in a logical manner (seriously: the book talks about both having plastic surgery to avoid the confusion of why these men who have met wouldn’t recognise each other).
The title sequence highlights the previous five films; the quip “This didn’t happen to the other guy,” where Tracy runs away from Bond’s rescue makes explicit a desire to establish continuity - which Broccoli and Saltzman needed. The cache of the previous movies was needed to establish trust in the new leading lad, an unknown George Lazenby.
The end credits roll, promising James Bond will return in Diamonds are Forever. But producers knew it wasn’t Lazenby, who refused to sign a 7-film deal as Bond would be archaic by then. Perhaps, with him, this would be true, but we will never know. While I judge harshly from a contemporary lens, I have a soft spot in my heart for a softer Bond. But no point in being sentimental when we’re about to get déjà vu: 2/5.
AN INCOMPLETE GUIDE TO LET IT BE AND THE BEATLES: GET BACK (1970/2024 & 2021)
When Disney+ launched, there was some suspicion that Disney was expecting its fans to pay for a back catalogue and a few Star Wars and Marvel spin-offs. After Disney acquired 20th Century Fox and some other plucky business moves, like owning Hulu and acquiring FX and the Starz banner under which they have been able to licence mature content to an international audience more easily, including The Bear and Shogun.
For me, the biggest arrival that showed that Disney was willing to invest in exciting risks was Peter Jackson’s masterpiece Documentary-come-Let-It-Be-remake-come-concert mini-series The Beatles: Get Back.
Using the same techniques to make the seminal They Shall Not Grow Old, where ancient footage and audio recordings were painstakingly remastered to make the rarest of footage from The First World War look like it was filmed with today’s cameras, Jackson compressed 55 hours of previously unseen footage into a mere eight hours of documentary, capturing in stark, intimate detail, how The Beatles came to an end. The final episode, which features the famous rooftop concert in full, and in real-time, is just magical to watch; I held myself back from watching it until the 2022 cinema screenings of the concert itself: The Beatles somehow just belong in a cinema as comfortably as they do headphones.
So it’s quite curious that last month, Disney+ released the original 1970 film, Let It Be. It’s a strange artefact of its time.
For the uninitiated, and as is made extremely clear throughout Get Back (which, confusingly, was what the album and film Let It Be were originally titled), The Beatles were in a bit of rut. They performed to an audience only once since the dramatic and chaotic tour of 1966, for a TV special, and wanting to mix their experimental mode and their rock and roll roots, they gave themselves a month to write and record the new album, produce some kind of interesting one-off concert, and make it work as television special; as they had done for
The result was the album, Let It Be, the famous rooftop concert, and the 1970 film, Let It Be. The world being a strange one, Abbey Road was recorded after Let It Be and released first, in September 1969, when John Lennon formally left the band.
One of the ways that The Beatles sustained themselves as a business throughout the 60s was the regular release of films; which were semi-musicals, (A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour).
The Long and Winding Road
The problem is that Get Back has treated Beatles fans so well with such a detailed and forgive me for repeating myself, intimate, understanding of how The Beatles empire was functioning at the time. Get Back features hours of meandering and chilling and hanging out and watching cleaners and hearing people mumbling. Let It Be by comparison is such a baffling way to present the story. At 90 minutes (including a new prelude conversation between Peter Jackson and Michael Lindsay-Hogg, it’s a speedy, fast-cutting film; but crucially, features no text inserts, direct interviews, or narration; its attraction is the fact that we’re in there with them for what we didn’t know was the grand finale of the band. If Get Back is like getting stoned and getting in the zone, Let It Be is like crack: unwilling to consider its subject and speeding through without emotional depth.
I say this as if its unenjoyable, it still is. It gets to the point, and after seeing some of the jamming, Lindsay-Hogg invites the audience to watch the live real-time full recordings of classics like Two of Us, Let It Be, and The Long and Winding Road whenever possible.
The explorations of Paul McCartney trying to keep his friends and band together are absent in Let It Be. The key conflict is a chat between Paul and George, dancing around whether or not Paul is getting on George’s nerves. It’s a striking conversation to watch, and you can understand how an intense friendship between these men had to give either the friendship or the business. The rooftop concert is charmingly presented as a sudden thing that just happened, which is somewhat true, the idea and preparation for it was at a very fast turnaround, but it does come out of nowhere as a spontaneous event in Let It Be. The ideas and development process is not present.
I understand how in 1970, the presentation of what was captured had to be condensed, and more sensitive, but it makes for a much lesser film. It’s simultaneously too close to its subject and too cold and distant. The main attraction for watching it on Disney+ is that every frame has been remastered in 4K and the sound is marvellous, and there is footage in this that was somehow not used in Get Back. It’s quite a tricky watch; it feels like something is hidden.
All of this is to say that you should not watch Let It Be and expect to get what so many got out of Get Back. Whilst we’re on the subject of Beatles in film, as special a place in my heart as Yellow Submarine has, if you’re interested in all this, Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary, Eight Days a Week was the first of the wave of Beatles 4K restorations; and ends on a 4K remaster of the Beatles’ final tour-show of 1966 at the The Shea Stadium, and apart from the rooftop concert film, its possibly the closest one can get to experiencing a Beatles concert a-la TV Festival/Concert coverage.
Is a 2024 remastering of a film that was supposed to indicate a close of a chapter of our popular culture that was The Beatles a potential close on the band? Of course not. Sam Mendes (Skyfall, 1917), is currently developing films, one biopic per band member, for release in 2027 (which has had some excellent casting rumours). Last year, The Beatles had a new hit record. ‘Aren’t they dead?’, a friend asked when I was telling her about Now and Then, ‘why would that ever stop them?’
Let It Be and The Beatles: Get Back are now streaming on Disney+. Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years is streaming on something called Lionsgate+ which is one of those weird add-on channels you get on services like Prime. It’s also on Blu-Ray.
Incomplete list of successful recasts
Since opinions are easily split on Bond actors, why don’t we look at cases where hiring a new actor for an old role was a raging success. To avoid the obvious, we won’t include the posterboy for this scenario, Michael J Fox, because we haven’t seen the public footage of Eric Stoltz in the same way as those that follow - no, our self-imposed purity means that we only count those who signed up for a sequel, or following pilot purchases.
1. Don Cheadle from Terrence Howard as War Machine in the MCU
Terrence couldn’t do the simple maths, that demanding more money than newly-successful protagonist Robert Downey Junior was getting, wasn’t mathing for the studio. Character actor Don Cheadle, on the other hand, could cash another Ocean’s-style check with the work that will see his family through an easy retirement.
2. Maggie Gyllenhaal from Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes in Nolan’s Batman trilogy
To be honest, Katie did a fine job, but she turned down the sequel in favour of a box office flop called Mad Money, which may have still been a good decision for personal reasons. But Maggie really sold the loss of the coin toss, after building a bit of an inner grit to the character, despite Nolan’s famous inability to write women.
3. Michiel Huisman from Ed Skrein as Daario Neharis in Game of Thrones
Ed Skrein is very good at playing bad people, but Daario needs to charm Dany’s horsehair pants off of her, so the recasting was appropriate. Particularly as the world was becoming more and more desaturated, and a pretty boy with dyed hair wasn’t going to fit in so well.
4. Melissa McCarthy from Alex Borstein as Sookie St James in Gilmore Girls
The bristly nature inherent to Alex just can’t shake is what makes her so great in the other Sherman-Palladino show, The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, as Susie Myerson, while this was Melissa’s opportunity to shine with prop and physical comedy, leading to earned further sitcoms and a leading-lady movie career.
5. Mads Mikkelsen from Johnny Depp as Gelert Grindelwald in the Wizarding World
Nobody needed as many movies in this series as were made, but ditching the eccentricity of Johnny Depp’s portrayal (particularly after the backstab of using the superb Colin Farrell in the first film) was the right move - especially after the PR uproar around his contentious split from wife Amber Heard - so in the third, and thankfully final, film, Mads grounds this performance to relative success.
What are your favourite cultural artefacts from 1969? What recasting moments were standout for you to the point of not even standing out?