All Movie Guide

Supposedly, when Sean Connery refused to star in another James Bond movie, producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli vowed to show up the insolent Connery by literally "creating" a new Bond from the ground up. That's why professional model and TV commercial-spokesman George Lazenby is cast as 007 in the 1969 filmization of Ian Fleming's 1963 Bond novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service. As a result, the film is one of the few in the series that could boast more than a passing resemblance to the Fleming original. This time around, Bond quits the secret service when he is told to end his obsessive search for master criminal Blofeld (Telly Savalas). While trailing his quarry in Portugal, Bond falls in love with Tracy Draco (Diana Rigg), daughter of a notorious gangster (Gabriele Ferzetti). The elder Draco agrees to help Bond find Blofeld, with the implicit understanding that Bond will marry Tracy. Bond's mission takes him to a Swiss mountain retreat, wherein Blofeld is executing his master plan of destroying the world's agricultural economy. When all is said and done, Bond does marry Tracy, but the honeymoon ends in sudden tragedy. Hal Erickson

All Movie Guide

It wasn't as well received at the box office as the pictures that preceded it or followed it, but Peter Hunt's On Her Majesty's Secret Service was the finest of the James Bond movies and also arguably the last truly great movie in the series. James Bond, portrayed here by George Lazenby (in his only performance in the role) has spent nearly two years trying to track down Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas), the head of SPECTRE. He has been taken off the case by his chief (Bernard Lee), an action the pushes him to the point of considering resigning from Her Majesty's Secret Service, just as he opens a possible new avenue of attack on his quarry. Whilst in the field, Bond has chanced to cross paths with the Contessa Teresa Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), a beautiful but desperately unhappy woman, whom he rescues from one apparent suicide attempt and an embarrassing moment at a casino gaming table -- the Contessa, who prefers to be called Tracy ("Teresa was a saint"), is the daughter of Marc Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti), an industrial and construction magnate and also a crime boss, who is impressed with Bond personally as well as professionally, and would like to see him marry his daughter. Bond is, at first, unwilling to involve himself with a woman -- any woman -- on that level, but Draco's underworld contacts give Bond a vital clue to Blofeld's whereabouts that get him back on the case and hot on the man's trail. Journeying incognito to Blofeld's mountaintop retreat in the Swiss Alps, Bond finds the criminal mastermind posing as a would-be nobleman and also as a philanthropist, running a clinic devoted to the treatment and eradication of allergies. It's all a front for a surprisingly sinister (and scientifically valid) plot for international blackmail that would make any previous Bond villain quake in fear. And in the process of staying alive long enough to have a chance of stopping Blofeld, Bond discovers the Tracy is truly like no woman he's ever known before -- one special enough that he finds himself willing to give up his life as a free-living, free-loving bachelor. Bruce Eder

Product Details

• UPC: 883904139522
• Source: MGM (VIDEO & DVD)
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: DTS 5.1-Channel Surround Sound, Dolby AC-3 Surround Sound
• Editions: Subtitled, Dubbed, Repackaged
• Time: 2:22:00
• Sales Rank: 1,495

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• James Bond Ultimate Edition, Vol. 3
• United Artists Super Deluxe Gift Set (90 films)

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