One and Done… But It Should Have Been More

As we’re going through the various eras of the James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. franchise, we run across the weirdest little cul-de-sac of them all: George Lazenby’s one movie. Lazenby is the only actor in the EON series of films to only play the titular super-spy once (obviously we’re discounting the unofficial films in the franchise, such as 1954’s “Casino Royale” and 1967’s Casino Royale). And it makes for a weird discussion on multiple fronts because his era overlaps with another era, that of Sean Connery, and it both does and doesn’t influence what would have been Lazenby’s next film in the series.

I think we’d all dismiss Lazenby’s film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, outright if not for the fact that the film is actually really great. It’s a different kind of James Bond movie, which did turn off some fans of the franchise back in the day. It has a different pace and is less concerned with making Bond out to be a cool guy that drinks and womanizes and lives a carefree life that every single man in their mid-thirties apparently wanted. It violates all the trappings of the escapist cinema that fans of the series were looking for.

In fact, this is the one James Bond film where it’s absolutely clear that Bond falls in love with the Bond Girl he stars opposite, Diana Rigg’s Tracy Bond (née Draco). The two have such a strong connection, with Tracy becoming an equal to James in almost every way in the movie. She aids him, she helps him on missions, she fights for herself. In a different version of the franchise Tracy could have gone on to be a super-spy herself, getting her own series of films after marrying James at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Instead, though, the film kills her off in its final moments, a shocking conclusion to the movie that the franchise really didn’t know how to handle afterwards.

If Lazenby had returned to the series for a second film (which was initially expected until the actor left the role on the, one would argue incredibly poor, advice of his manager), we can look at Diamonds Are Forever for a glimpse of how Lazenby’s Bond would have handled his next adventure. That movie came out two years later, and it opens with Bond having spent all that time tracking Blofeld down so he could end the head of SPECTRE once and for all. If Lazenby had returned this clearly would have been a mission of revenge, Bond hunting down the man that killed his wife. Instead, with Connery in the role, it loses all that impact because Bond doesn’t play it like a man possessed. He acts like it’s just another mission. A ho-hum day at the office taking out a guy that has acted as his main antagonist for six previous films.

And you have to think that other aspects of the film would have been different as well. Tiffany Case is the main Bond Girl in the film, and you have to wonder if Lazenby’s Bond would have fallen in bed with her as easily as Connery’s did. For Connery’s version she’s just another girl, and he certainly liked enjoying the women that came along on his missions. But Lazenby’s character never really seemed interested in the women he slept with, none other than Tracy. They were part of the job, so he did what he had to, using seduction where needed, but it wasn’t something he seemed to enjoy. Would he have spent so long with Tiffany, or would their trysts have ended quickly so he could get back on task?

Of course, if Lazenby had stayed on for more than a single film, other aspects of the franchise would have gone very differently as well. Roger Moore stepped into the role after Connery, and he effectively got a cast-off script that was meant for Connery’s Bond instead with Live and Let Die. It’s like they cut-and-pasted a different Bond into the role but changed nothing else about the film. Moore didn’t get a proper introduction until his next film, The Man with the Golden Gun, and then he had a run of movies that felt far more suited to his take on the character (even if some of them were very silly and very bad). It took time for the franchise to form itself around Roger Moore.

Lazenby, though, had a fantastic introduction and one has to wonder, if he’d gone three or more films into the franchise, if the films would have suited him better. Live and Let Die wouldn’t have been built for Connery’s Bond, it would have been a Lazenby script. Whether he starred in it or not would have been another matter (one could see him jumping ship after two or three films if he hadn’t immediately left after one). But if we’d made it all the way to Moore’s third film, The Spy Who Loved Me, we’d have a script perfectly suited to his character. A female spy that is very much Bond’s equal, someone to remind him of Tracy, who he lost years before. The final movie does make a passing mention of Bond’s dead wife, but there could have been even more drama if the actor that had played opposite Tracy had still been in the role.

Not that I want to kick Moore out of the franchise entirely. There are plenty of people that enjoy his films, and he has a proper place as Bond. But it’s hard not to imagine what could have been, the ways the franchise would have formed very differently, if Lazenby had stuck around for a couple of more movies. Some stories likely would have happened in a different order. Other films would have been entirely different because the writers would have been writing towards a different version of Bond. Lazenby promised a different kind of James Bond era, and his one film gives us a taste of what could have been.

So from a certain perspective I can understand why fans don’t like Lazenby or his film. He came and went and the franchise pretended his adventure effectively never happened. Tracy is mentioned in passing a couple of times in the franchise, once (as noted above) in The Spy Who Loved Me, and then again when Moore’s Bond lays flowers at her grave at the start of For Your Eyes Only, and then just two more passing references to Bond having lost someone or having previously been married in Licence to Kill and The World is Not Enough.

But as far as Bond feeling the effects of his lost marriage, those moments don’t really come. In the novels Tracy’s death was a major turning point for the character, who became depressed and took to heavily drinking (even by his own standards). Eventually, in the book form of You Only Live Twice, he’s pulled from active duty and sent on a mission to kill Blofeld. He succeeds, but gets hit on the head and develops amnesia at the end of the film, forgetting who he is and taking up a life in Japan. None of that happens in the film series, and Bond effectively shrugs it all off to go back to being Bond again.

That leaves the Lazenby film as a curious one note, a might have been for the franchise that could have grown out of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service towards a different, and narratively more complex, series of films that what we actually got. The what ifs for the franchise make for an interesting thought experiment, looking at what we could have gotten if the actor had stuck around, and thinking about all the ways the movies we did get could have been formed around him. But as it stands, that’s not the franchise we ended up with, and what we have basically tries to act like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service never happened at all.

It’s sad, because Lazenby’s film is great, and it’s understandable too since Connery came back and it was pretty clear the producers, and the fans, wanted something more traditional at the time. But as the decades have gone past and the fans have steadily come around to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, we can all sit back and think about what might have been, and how the franchise could have gone if one actor had decided to stick around even for just a second movie…

Ranking Lazenby’s Films (Best to Worst):

1. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service