“… All the Time in the World”
The common song and dance when it comes to my favorite Bond film (and one of my favorite films of all time), ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE is that, had it starred Sean Connery, it would have been the best Bond film and that by virtue of George Lazenby’s ascension from male-model obscurity into a single go-round in the role of a lifetime (though perhaps a life sentence), it is automatically not necessarily a lesser Bond film, but rather a conditional one, an exception to the rule.
This assessment is, for want of a better phrase, a crock of shit. Far from conditional, by throwing out all of those “rules” that defined the BOND genre (the series, even just six films in at that point, had already become a genre unto itself, a genre within a genre), OHMSS showed what Bond COULD be, a deconstruction of the myth to paint a cinematic (and no less action-filled, especially once he puts on the skis) portrait of a multi-dimensional human being made possible perhaps only because of the absence of Connery’s post-GOLDFINGER sleepwalkingly iconic portrayal; OHMSS, then, is not an exception to the rule, but rather the exception that should have been the rule.
(But.)
While I am and will forever be unapologetic in my love of Lazenby’s flawed and deeply human performance as Bond – indeed, it’s one of the great crimes of cinema (thanks to a combo of Connery’s frustration with the imprisonment of the role, Broccoli and Saltzman’s manufacturing of the money tree barbed-wire assembly line of the BOND genre, and Lazenby’s own youthful arrogance and short-sightedness) that he didn’t continue on in the role and that we were left with not only a single performance from Lazenby, but a sub-par conclusion to Connery’s tenure in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER and, well, Roger Moore – the film’s conclusion left me (in tears, as always) with a question: what if there’s a scintilla of truth to be mined in that aforementioned crock of shit?
What if, by some contractual magic and artistic grit, Connery had been allowed to play Bond in OHMSS not as the charismatic superhero of GOLDFINGER, THUNDERBALL, and YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE but as the human being of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE? Would Connery have, if given the chance to do something different with the role and free of expectations, inhabited the Bond that Lazenby gave us? Would his love of Diana Rigg’s Tracy have been so real? Would that final scene been so shattering, so heartbreaking?
What if, like Lazenby, Connery had suddenly announced during filming that OHMSS would be his final Bond film and imagine that, upon seeing the final film (though it adheres closely to the 1963 Fleming novel), audiences were left not with a pithy quip delivered by an icon of a fading decade but with an icon wholly subverted and broken and visible only between the spider-webbed cracks of the bullet-ridden windshield of his Aston Martin DB5 (not the DBS of Lazenby), cradling his dead bride, his fallen chance for humanity, and telling the policeman, telling himself, that “We have all the time in the world?”
What if?
