Basically giving up hope, I still said "Well, maybe we'll have a bye that day."
Because we'd already had one bye this year and it was only four weeks ago, I considered the likelihood of that pretty low.
And then, it came to pass. I just found out a few days ago, since they only set the schedule about two games in advance.
So now instead of coaching his basketball game next Friday, December 1st, I will be seeing Live and Let Die, The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me -- conveniently starting at 5 p.m., after I've already finished work for the day.
The next movie in the sequence would be Moonraker, the first Bond movie I ever saw, so that would be a wrap on all 25 Eon movies.
I watched them chronologically, but in two separate chronologies. Until I saw Dr. No in 2006, I'd seen every Bond movie from Moonraker onward in the order it was released. I then also worked my way forward from Dr. No -- with seven-year breaks between Dr. No and From Russia With Love, and between Goldfinger and Thunderball -- while continuing to intersperse the new releases as they came out. (Actually, there was one other chronological break, as I didn't see the 2008 movie Quantum of Solace until 2015.)
Now, as soon as I realized my availability for this small part of the Bondathon, I also realized I had some work to do. In order to remain chronological but watch only those three Moore movies that did not conflict with my work schedule, I had to watch the only George Lazenby movie, 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and the last Eon Sean Connery movie, 1971's Diamonds Are Forever. Fortunately, all the Bond movies are streaming on the Australian service Stan, to which I am a subscriber.
On Thursday night I got to work.
While I don't think I'll ever be able to remember the difference between certain Bond movies -- I could only guess at which events happened in Thunderball and which happened in You Only Live Twice -- On Her Majesty's Secret Service has a number of things to distinguish it.
For one, it's the only Bond movie starring Australian George Lazenby, who is still alive at age 84. In fact, he's only five days older than my dad, who is also still alive.
Then there was an event that I knew happened in this movie, I just didn't know when. So now it's time for me to issue a SPOILER ALERT for this 54-year-old movie.
Have you averted your eyes?
I had always known that OHMSS was the movie where James Bond gets married ... and also where his wife is killed on their wedding day.
I didn't have any idea how this actually played out, dramatically. But I had assumed it was an inciting incident sort of thing. We meet Bond's fiancee at the start of the film and get to know her for about 15 minutes, enough to feel a little more than surface-level sorrow when a bullet takes her out in her bridal dress. The rest of the movie, vengeance for Bond.
In fact, the event happens so late in the narrative that I thought I'd gotten it wrong that it even happened in this movie.
During a climactic fight on bobsleds between Lazenby and Telly Savalas -- Savalas took over the role of Ernst Stavro Blofeld from Donald Pleasance -- I thought there was no way for Lazenby and Diana Rigg to still end up at the altar in this movie. Not only is there an inherent comedic aspect to having a fight on bobsleds, but the Bond one-liners had been particularly groan-worthy. When Savalas finally exits the fight, it's by getting caught on a branch. "He's branched off," Lazenby quips, to no one in particular.
It was really hard to imagine transitioning from this silliness to Rigg's Tracy dying, but in the last five minutes of the movie, that's what happens.
After they've left the ceremony, Bond pulls the car over on a coastal road to remove some of the flowers from the outside of their car. They've been waxing poetic about how they now have "all the time in the world." Anyone who's ever seen a movie about a detective on his last case before retirement knows this is the kiss of death.
Indeed, Blofeld and his henchman drive by for a drive-by. Bond is missed but Tracy isn't so lucky.
The way Lazenby plays his last moments on screen as Bond really surprised me. You'd expect bottomless rage over the death of his new bride. Instead, he cradles her head in his lap and tells a passerby, who I guess doesn't know what's going on, "She's just having a little rest," weeping in a barely noticeable manner.
Roll credits.
Bold way to end a film. We get invested in Tracy for an entire film, rather than 15 minutes, and it remains to be seen what kind of revenge Bond will seek for her death.
And I have to wonder if how they do ultimately handle this was dictated the fact that Lazenby didn't return as Bond, which was his own choice.
Historically, to the extent that the character has any memory of the events in his own life at all, that memory has been limited to the time that a particular actor was playing James Bond. In fact, at the start of this film, there is a cheeky reference to this never happening to "the other guy." This was, after all, the first time James Bond had been played by anybody other than Connery.
With Connery resuming the role for one more movie in Diamonds Are Forever, I have to suspect the murder of his wife will not be the most recent event in the life of his James Bond. In fact, they might pretend if never happened at all, since referencing it might remind everyone that Connery's was taking up somebody else's sloppy seconds. Connery's ego wouldn't have that. They could possibly saddle Moore with the memory of these events in his first outing, but I guess I'll find out next Friday.
As for Lazenby, it's a shame he didn't want to continue as I do think he did the role proud. He was only 30 when the movie came out so he could have had a standard number of Bond outings and not even approached middle age. But, he just wasn't interested, and you have to respect him for that.
A couple other takeaways:
1) This was the most interesting editing I had ever seen in a Bond movie. It was the first Bond movie for editor John Glen, who is better known to Bond fans as the director of five straight Bond movies, those being Moore's last three and Timothy Dalton's only two. He was also editor of the two Moore movies before the first he directed, so I'll have to note if there is similar editing in The Spy Who Loved Me. The fight scenes are fast paced and exciting because each shot lasts a half-second less than you would expect for it to look clean. The jagged results at first seem like they could be poor or dated technique, but I'm ultimately landing in the camp that it was an intentional way of underscoring their rough physicality.
2) Before he finally picks up a machine gun at the end of the movie, the only other time Bond wields a gun is when he shoots the eye in the standard Bond opening. For the first 80 percent of this movie Lazenby engages in fisticuffs and knife-throwing only. I feel like I remember reading somewhere that this was something Lazenby wanted.
3) This was the only time I'd seen Rigg in a movie at this age, becoming familiar with her through her role on Game of Thrones and remembering that her final role was in a film I did not like, Last Night in Soho. She was a looker.
Okay, will tick Diamonds Are Forever off the list one of the nights in the next week, preparing me for the Bondathon ... or, about 1/8th of the Bondathon, in any case.
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