Film Review: On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

I hadn't watched this Bond film since it turned up on TV sometime in the late 1970s, and I remember it as being the worst Bond film ever and that George Lazenby richly deserved the meagre B-movie career (kung fu films, Emmanuelle sequels) he moved onto after his one shot at playing 007. Over the last year or so, however, I've been noticing that various critics and bloggers have been saying that OHMSS isn't really all that bad; in fact, some of them go so far as to say it's one of the best of the 007 films. And then I came across this recent blogpost by director Steven Soderbergh who unflinchingly describes it as the best Bond film, bar none. That did it. I rushed right out (metaphorically speaking) and downloaded OHMSS. Holy crap, Miss Moneypenny! This isn't just a bad Bond film, it's bad filmmaking by any definition, and I can only assume that its defenders are being willfully contrary.

Let's begin the dissection with Lazenby. The pro-OHMSS forces can talk all they want about his physicality, but the fact remains that he can't act, period. Another actor had to dub vast chunks of his dialogue, for God's sake! Lazenby is simply a stiff, awkward (watch him try, and fail, to walk across a room convincingly), wooden black hole at the centre of the film. It's actually a wonder that all his lines didn't end up being dubbed because his readings of even the simplest bits of dialogue are gratingly tone deaf. The legendary Bond quips escape from his lips and simply fall to the floor with a quiet thud, gasping for life. Considering that Lazenby was a male model and had never acted, an infomercial-quality thesping job was pretty much inevitable.

Soderbergh hedges his bets in his praise of OHMSS by saying that "cinematically" it's the best Bond film. I don't think he and I watched the same film. With one exception the editing is shockingly clumsy, creating glaring continuity errors and turning the fight sequences into something resembling the saloon brawls from bad westerns. And many of the action scenes are marred by the use of fast motion, which is used to speed up the action to the detriment of verisimilitude; it's really a kind of cheat, a means to liven up an otherwise flat action scene. On the plus side, the location photography is often spectacular, particularly the shots of the Alps. The final assault on Blofeld's mountaintop H.Q. is actually an excellent combination of action choreography, editing, and cinematography, but this 5-7 minute section hardly makes up for all the wonky filmmaking that surrounds it. I have a feeling that it's this short sequence that moved Soderbergh to call OHMSS "cinematically" the best of the Bonds.

I think even Soderbergh would have to admit that OHMSS's script is a clunker. There isn't one memorable line, and even Diana Rigg (playing Tracy Draco) can't bring things to life until she gets to show off her RADA training by reciting some lines of poetry by James Elroy Flecker, a relatively obscure Victorian poet. I suspect Rigg begged for this scene so she could briefly escape from the tedium of scriptwriter Richard Maibaum's words. Bond films are always sexist, but this one adds an extra level of creepiness with Draco, the father of Rigg's character, urging Bond have sex with her often so that she'll fall in love with him. Thanks, dad, you pervy bastard! Oh, and Tracy gets slapped upside her head by both Bond and her father. Charming. The script is so bland and witless I doubt even Connery could have rescued it, and I'm certain he would never have agreed to be part of the syrupy romantic montage that's used to establish Bond and Tracy's love affair.

So if you haven't seen OHMSS yet, save yourself from the pain and watch the spoof Casino Royale (1967) instead. It's not a lot better, but even Woody Allen makes a better James Bond than Lazenby.

"You've Had Your Six"

I feel I should write something to mark the 50th anniversary of the James Bond movies, but the internet's already clogged with lists of favourite Bond girls/films/gadgets/actors/locations so I'll keep things simple by looking at a scene in Dr. No that marks a turning point in film history and also helps explain the cachet of the Bond character. Here it is:



Pretty cold-blooded, eh? This was shocking stuff for 1962. Up until this moment heroes did not shoot unarmed villains, even the ones who were determined to kill them. Bond even gives his enemy a second shot for good measure, and it's a shot in the back, no less. And what makes this scene even more unusual for the time (and became a hallmark of the Bond series) is that James makes a quip as he kills his would-be assassin. "You've had your six" is a cricket reference, which makes this witticism at once one of the driest and also the most English in film history.

This one brief scene was, with its combination of lethal viciousness and humour, a watershed moment in film history. It was the first depiction of a hero who is absolutely ruthless and even cruel. The unwritten rule prior to Bond was that a hero always "played the game" more honourably than the enemy; unarmed men aren't to be shot, especially in the back, and levity has no place at a killing. Bond's role as a remorseless jester of death struck a chord with audiences, and I think the answer to why that happened lies in World War II. Bond is the personification of the character of that war. My dad and John F. Kennedy had only two things in common: they both loved James Bond and both were WW II vets. The things they saw in the war were never shown in films. When men died in war movies there was no blood, no viscera, and the Allies followed the rules of the Geneva Conventions to the letter. My dad and J.F.K., like millions of other vets, knew better. They knew first hand that war was about killing that was without remorse or regret and by any means possible. Bond was not fighting WW II, but the manner in which he waged his war against SPECTRE and SMERSH was an accurate reflection of what a large chunk of the viewing and reading public had experienced less than twenty years previously.

Bond's gallows humour also has its roots in the war. Thanks to some of the more recent histories of  WW II by writers such as Paul Fussell, Stephen Ambrose, and Max Hastings we have a better idea of how dehumanizing the war was for its participants. And one way they reacted to its horrors was to make fun of them. One of the great slaughters of WW II took place in the battle of the Falaise Pocket in Normandy, during which the entire German Army Group B was essentially wiped out. There were so many German dead they couldn't be buried, and the ones lying on the roads were simply driven over by Allied vehicles. My dad's unit drove through the pocket and he and his buddies, as he told me later, found the sight of pancaked Germans to be hilarious. Everyone took turns cracking bad jokes about the flattened enemy. And when he was part of a detail burying the dead the gags kept coming. The bodies, the ones not made wafer-thin by trucks and tanks, were bloated to an enormous size and their stomachs had to be pierced to release the gases before they could be moved. Cue the laugh track as Private Watson and the men manhandle blimp-like corpses emitting odours from Hell. So when Bond was cracking wise as he dispatched a baddie in some absurd way, what my dad and others were hearing was a very watered-down version of their own black humour.

The action hero as a pitiless, joke-spewing killing machine started with Bond, and soon became the norm for a great many other film heroes. The next in line was The Man With No Name character in Sergio Leone's westerns, although in those films the humour was more muted. In the ''80s and '90s Mel Gibson and Arnold Schwarzenegger built their careers around playing this kind of character.But divorced from the context of a war, these kinds of heroes begin to seem like homicidal maniacs, fantasy figures for sadists. As Bond celebrates 50 years in film, his main competition is represented by the Jason Bourne types: heroes who are more like hyper-efficient killing apps than flesh and blood people. There's something comforting in Bond having a taste for booze, games of chance, and casual sex. It makes him human. The soullessness of Bourne makes him less of a hero and more like one of the all-star villains Bond has bumped off over the years. And perhaps that's why Bond lives on and the other guys end up looking forward to doing cameos in the next The Expendables movie.

A Dear Genre Letter

Maybe not if you're a genre writer, according to some.

One of the more interesting skirmishes going on in the literary world right now is over the question of genre vs literary fiction. In a September interview in the The Guardian, Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson took a vigorous slash at genre fiction, and now we have Arthur Krystal in the Oct 24 issue of The New Yorker explaining the difference between genre and literary fiction and coming down firmly on the side of the latter as being the only one with artistic merit. That people still get their knickers in a twist over this issue is one matter (I partially discuss that topic here), but what's interesting about the Krystal article is that it reveals some of the weaknesses in the arguments for a clear divide between genre and literary fiction.

First off, Krystal makes the mistake (as does Jacobson) of taking a narrow view of what constitutes genre fiction. He describes genre as books that are "born to sell" and that "...employ language that is at best undistinguished and at worst characterized by a jejune mentality and a tendency to state the obvious." Without naming names, Krystal seems to be referring to writers like Danielle Steel, Lee Child and J.K. Rowling. The problem is that no one is claiming these kinds of mega-selling authors are producing quality fiction. What proponents of genre fiction are saying is that just because a book falls within an easily defined genre it should not be ignored or automatically assumed to be the product of a second-rate writer. Krystal's prejudices are very much on view when he says, "When we open a mystery, we expect certain themes to be addressed and we enjoy intelligent variations on these themes. But what we don't expect is excellence in writing..." As illogical statements go, that's a doozy. It's a writer's skill and imagination that determines excellence in writing, not the genre they've chosen. Saying genre overrules talent would be like saying a great architect's status is determined by what's contained in the buildings he's designed. According to Krystal's logic, a Frank Gehry-designed museum would be art, but if he designs a condo tower it's just a pile of bricks and mortar.

Krystal also avoids dealing with the fact that the line between literary fiction and genre is often so thin it's not worth arguing about. Is Moby-Dick an adventure story or literary fiction? Is Metamorphosis sci-fi or literary fiction? Is The Little Stranger supernatural fiction or literary fiction? The answer to all three is both. Aside from novels that are purely about psychological insight and analysis (and there aren't a lot of those), the majority of literary fiction incorporates some kind of mystery, adventure or quest, something that knocks the protagonist out of his usual routine and thereby reveals something new about his world and his character. The mystery might be as prosaic as why a wife ran off with her lover, and the quest might be going on the road to win back her love. My point is that novels, literary or genre, are almost always about a rupture in quotidian life. The difference between literary and genre fiction in this regard is usually only a matter of degree.

Another trap Krystal falls into is equating artistic quality with utility, as he shows when he says, "Writers who want to understand why the heart has reasons that reason cannot know are not going to write horror stories or police procedurals." The key word in that sentence is "understand." Krystal, like generations of high school English teachers, clearly feels that novels should have a purpose, a goal, and teach us something about ourselves or others. This view of literature as a didactic tool is old, dusty and blinkered. All kinds of art forms aren't "about" anything at all. Symphonies and instrumental jazz pieces are rarely "about" anything. The anger that greeted the advent of the Impressionists was largely to do with their subject matter not being deemed important or "about" anything. There is wide range of art that seeks to engage and play with the senses as its primary goal, and looked at in this way, genre fiction could be described as sensory literature. It can excite, arouse, anger and scare us, and the best genre fiction uses these emotions as a conduit for insight and ideas.

I'll happily admit that the vast bulk of genre fiction is formulaic and pedestrian, but there's certainly no proof that the same isn't true of literary fiction. And any list of the world's great literary novels would show a fair number of them are either genre or close enough to genre as to make no difference. One final example of the fine line between genre and literary fiction is found in that most literary of novels, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Probably the most memorable character in the novel's 3,000+ pages is the Baron de Charlus. He's an arch snob, a homophobic homosexual, and a raging antisemite. In short, he's an extraordinary, unlikely, larger-than-life character who could only exist between the pages of a book. And that makes him very much a character from genre fiction, which specializes in creating outsized characters who are too good, too bad, or too sexy to be true. The fact that Charlus is described with brilliant prose and an incisive intelligence doesn't alter the fact that with the addition of a hollowed-out volcano fortress and a death ray he'd make a superb Bond villain.

Film Review: Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

In the 1960s it was all about the spies: spies on TV, spies at the movies, and spy novels by the bushel. Harry Saltzman, not content with co-producing the James Bond films, bought the rights to Len Deighton's spy novels and made three of them featuring Michael Caine as British agent Harry Palmer. The Palmer character was intended to be the anti-Bond: a spy who was more civil servant than superhero, and whose adventures reflected Cold War realities. The first two films, The Ipcress File and Funeral In Berlin, followed this formula faithfully. The third film, Billion Dollar Brain, went in an altogether different direction. For one thing Ken Russell was hired as the director. Russell had a formidable reputation based on his work at the BBC, but Brain was his first feature. It's clear he wanted to make a big impression.

Billion Dollar Brain sits halfway between being a James Bond spectacular and a gritty, realistic spy story. That's probably the main reason it did poorly at the box office and with the critics. What everyone seems to have missed is that it's a brilliant piece of filmmaking. The fact that it didn't fulfill contemporary genre expectations is beside the point. Brain is simply a celebration of filmmaking magic. The visual exuberance and flair in this film is off the charts. Russell's shot compositon, camera movements, and use of locations is superb. The story is set in Finland in the depths of winter and I can't think of another film that's made winter look so glamorous, so cold and so beautiful. The visuals are matched by the score, which is courtesy of Richard Rodney Bennett. The music manages to suggest icy cold, romance and tension, and it does it in a lush, romantic style that includes the prominent use of a theremin; probably the first time a theremin was used outside of a horror or sci-fi film. All in all, this is one of the best film scores ever.

The plot conerns a deranged Texas billionaire, the wonderfully named General Midwinter, who's bankrolling an anti-Soviet uprising in Latvia. At the heart of his plan is a giant computer designed to co-ordiante the uprising. Karl Malden is Midwinter's point man in Finland, but he's actually skimming every dime Midwinter thinks is going to Latvia. Harry Palmer has to ensure that Midwinter's schemes don't lead to World War III. The story is not meant to be taken seriously. This is first and foremost a satirical look at Cold War fear and paranoia, particularly the kind that was coming out of the US. General Midwinter is a mad character who would be equally at home in Dr. Strangelove. His ranch is the scene of anti-communist rallies that have a certain pre-war German flavour, and his monogram, emblazoned on the side of his oil tankers, is also ominously familiar. Ed Begley gives a great, outsized performance as Midwinter, and the script gives him a score of juicy lines, my favourite being, "My arm is long and my vengeance is total!" The faint whiff of anti-Americanism may well have hurt Brain with US critics. What might have hurt it even more was it's sympathetic portrayal of the Soviets, led by Oscar Homolka as Colonel Stok. In one key scene Stok leaves a performance of The Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich to meet Palmer. The symphony, which is a tribute to the defenders of Leningrad, has left Stok in tears, and he explains its meaning to a sympathetic Palmer. That's not the kind of conversation Bond ever had with anyone from Smersh.

This is one of those films that has a score of memorable set pieces and scenes, too many to mention, really, but some of the highlights include Palmer being chased through a snowy woods by mounted troops; a primitive wooden ferris wheel turning by the side of a frozen lake; blackmarketeers ambushing a truck; and, most memorably, the demise of Midwinter, which is a direct and clever homage to Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. If nothing else, Billion Dollar Brain is the best-looking spy film I can think of, and its sly humour is probably more appreciated today than in 1967. The clip below has the film's opening credits (by the great Maurice Binder) with Bennett's amazing score.

Film Review: The Avengers (2012)

At this point in cinema history, comic book superhero films have formed their own distinct genre. This means that in the same way that James Bond films are only compared to other Bond films, comic book films can only be evaluated against their brethern. All comic book films begin with the handicap that their source material is intended for kids and teens. Some twentysomething hipsters might disagree, but the backbone of the comic industry consists of readers not old enough to vote. Given that the target audience skews young, these films are intended to be fast, noisy, violent and slick-looking, with plot usually taking a backseat and characterization reduced to the broadest of strokes. And by the standards of comic book films, The Avengers rates very high.

The main advantage this film has over others in the field is its humour. The minute a comic book film gets serious I really start to laugh. The worst in this regard are Christopher Nolan's Batman films, which struggle mightily to bring psychological depth and gravitas to a genre that's wholly unsuited for it. Superheroes are ludicrous creations, no more believable than elves or yeti. What's fun about superheroes are their powers and the bizarro villains they must face off against. Taking Batman seriously is akin to wondering why Yosemite Sam has a grudge against rabbits. The Avengers scores well in the comedy department; every bit of bombastic dialogue or over-top-action is balanced out with a one-liner or a sight gag. This saves the film from the angst-ridden pomposity of the Batman franchise, and gives us some relief from the almost non-stop action. You know humour was uppermost on the scriptwriters' minds when the villain's last line in the film is a dry witticism that might have wandered in from a Noel Coward play.

The Avengers also manages to do a good job of juggling a large cast of characters. In this kind of ensemble piece it's usually the case that several characters are shunted to the sidelines to make room for the big players, but in this film just about every character gets their fair share of screentime. Robert Downey Jr. is a stadout (no surprise) as Tony Stark, and he's matched by Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, who underplays his Bruce Banner character against Stark's plus-sized personality. The other actors are good (watch for a Harry Dean Stanton cameo!), although Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow doesn't really cut it as an actress or as someone athletic enough to engage in martial arts. Tom Hiddleston as bad guy Loki gets this year's Alan Rickman Award, given annually to the Brit actor who best combines on-screen villainy with scene-stealing acting. Congratulations, Tom!

Like all the comic book films The Avengers is fun and forgettable entertainment, but in the world of superhero entertainment it stands as one of the best to come along in a while. And I'm sure that it'll be miles better than the next mirthless, logy Batman film.

TV Review: Danger Man

Most people are familiar with Patrick McGoohan as number 6, the title character from The Prisoner. Before that series he became a star in Danger Man (called Secret Agent in the U.S.), a British TV series that ran intermittently from 1960-68. I recently got the whole series on DVD and have been pleasantly surprised at how it stands up.

Danger Man is a spy show, with John Drake (McGoohan) travelling the globe (as created on English sound stages) to catch double agents, moles, and so on. There are several factors that keep the shows entertaining even after nearly fifty years. The first is McGoohan. He's a compelling actor with an often eccentric way of delivering lines, and he's not above hamming it up, especially when he's called upon to play "roles" while undercover. In one episode he's a very proper butler, and in another he's garrulous playboy. McGoohan does both roles with a great deal of relish.

The series is also well-written and takes a realistic, non-James Bond look at spies and spying. In fact, some episodes, notably one set in the Middle East called Fish on the Hook, feel like something John Le Carre might have written. Spying is shown to be ruthless and, on occasions, a morally dubious activity.

One thing that's largely absent from the series is sex and romance. Spy shows and movies in the '60s were as much about babes as they were microfilm and thwarting the Red Menace. Evidently McGoohan insisted on a chaste spy show (he was a staunch Catholic) and this actually works to the show's advantage. Shows such as The Saint and the The Man From U.N.C.L.E. had to devote a lot of their plot time to getting their leads involved with an interchangeable series of curvy females. It was all rather juvenile and repetitive. Because Danger Man didn't have to waste time this way, more effort is put into plotting and characterization.

Not every episode is a gem. One titled The Paper Chase is directed by McGoohan and it doesn't add anything to his CV. It moves slowly and has a number of self-indulgent directorial flourishes. All in all, Danger Man is still worth watching unless you're adamant that TV spies must come equipped with female eye candy. The clip below shows the opening credits.

Film Review: OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006)

One of the early frontrunners for scooping some of the important Oscars next year is The Artist, a French film directed by Michel Hazanvicius and starring Jean Dujardin. It's been winning prizes at film festivals and it's set for wide release in North America on Dec 9. I don't doubt it's good because Hazanvicius and Dujardin created comedy magic five years ago in OSS 117.

OSS 117 is the codename for a secret agent who appeared in a huge number of pulpy thrillers in Europe in the 1950s. The novels led to some B-grade films and then, many years later, this spy spoof. Now, OSS 117 pre-dated James Bond, and his adventures didn't involve gadgets or supervillains, so bear in mind that this film is not riffing on the world of 007. Jean Dujardin plays Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, alias OSS 117, and he plays him as an arrogant, patronizing, self-centred, slightly dim and very French exemplar of Western imperialism circa 1955. A French agent has disappeared in Cairo and OSS 117 is sent there to investigate the disappearance. French-Egyptian relations are not improved by his visit.

French comedies sometimes choke to death on high decibel silliness, but this script is a superb mix of wit, satire, slapstick, and, yes, some silliness. What brings it all to life is Jean Dujardin. This is one of the great comedy performances in the last ten years, the highlight of which is a scene involving OSS 117 having to pass himself off as an Arab musician. Dujardin plays the scene as though he was Peter Sellers reincarnated, and Sellers at his most brilliant could not have done a better job.

There's a sequel to Cairo called OSS 117: Rio ne repond plus, and it's good rather than great. Dujardin's other films alternate between drama and comedy, and the ones I've seen have been so-so. One of his earliest comedies was Brice de Nice. It's fairly amusing, and he's very good, but it maxes out on French silliness. So hurry up and hunt down OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies so you can tell people that you knew all about Dujardin before he appeared in The Artist and was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar.

Film Review: The Outfit (1973)

I've written previously about the Parker novels by Richard Stark on this blog (you can read the post here), and this early 1970s adaptation of the novel by the same name comes closest to capturing the flavour of Stark's writing. Point Blank is the best film made from a Parker novel, but it's not really true to the spirit of the books. And although The Outfit feels more like its source material, it still manages to miss the boat. It's entertaining, but there's some wonkiness that's hard to overlook.

The first oddity is that short, balding Robert Duvall is cast in the Parker role. Now Duvall can play tough, but he just doesn't appear tough (why does he hold his gun in that odd way?), and Parker is certainly described as looking rangy and menacing. The second oddity is that his character is called Earl Macklin instead of Parker. I can't even guess why that change was made. Joe Don Baker plays Macklin's sidekick and he would have been a much better choice for the Parker character.

The story is one that Stark would recycle in Butcher's Moon: the Outfit has killed Macklin's brother in retaliation for he and Earl having robbed a bank a few years previously that was controlled by the Outfit. Macklin goes to the Outfit's boss and demands a payment of 250k as a penalty for killing his brother (such brotherly love). The Outfit refuses, and Macklin and his sidekick begin knocking over Outfit properties until they agree to pay the "fine." They try to double-cross Macklin and that turns out to be a bad idea.

And now a word about the Outfit. The Outfit is a feature of the old Parker novels, and it's one that now feels somewhat dated. To a certain degree it plays the role that SPECTRE did in the James Bond novels. Both are highly organized criminal enterprises with interests in all kinds of criminal activity. The Outfit is essentially the Mafia, only it seems to be run entirely run by WASPy types. In Parker's world, every city has a parallel criminal economy, and it's all run by the Outfit.

The scenes of Macklin knocking over Outfit properties are done very well, and a lot of Stark's terse, muscular dialogue makes it to the screen to great effect. The acting is equally fine, which isn't surprising given that cast is stuffed with veteran character actors, everyone from Elisha Cook to Robert Ryan. Some parts are more uneven. Bruce Surtees is the cinematographer (he shot a lot Clint Eastwood's films) and he gives some scenes a nicely gritty look, but a lot of other scenes just look like a made-for-TV movie. Macklin's relationship with his girlfriend, played by Karen Black, is pointless and has an unpleasantly abusive aspect. The ending is the biggest disappointment. It feels hastily assembled and finishes on a jokey note that is very un-Parker.

The Outfit is worth watching, but I wouldn't go out of my way to track it down.