Tag: The Avengers

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The best of the Bonds (Part 2)

 

© Penguin Books

 

Continuing my look at On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, both the best James Bond novel (published in 1963) and best Bond film (released in 1969).  We rejoin the book and film at the moment in their plots when Bond attempts to infiltrate the headquarters of his arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, high in the Swiss Alps…

 

Bond duly goes to the Piz Gloria, pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray – and here the film glaringly contradicts the continuity established by its predecessor.  At the climax of You Only Live Twice-the-movie Bond and Blofeld have a face-to-face confrontation, but in OHMSS Blofeld doesn’t recognise Bond at all.  Actually, Bond might be forgiven for not recognising Blofeld either, for the filmmakers decided to recast the role of Blofeld too.  Not only do we have Sean Connery replaced by George Lazenby in OHMSS, but we have the goblin-like Donald Pleasence replaced by the bigger and more physical Telly Savalas.  To be honest, Savalas is a shade too thuggish-looking for the role, but he’s believable when doing the strenuous things required by the script, such as leading a group on skis in pursuit of Bond and wrestling with him during a breakneck bobsleigh ride.  Much as I like Donald Pleasence, I couldn’t imagine the sinister English character actor bouncing about on a bobsleigh.

 

What’s officially going on in Blofeld’s clinic, Bond learns, is that a group of young female patients are receiving treatment for food allergies.  What’s unofficially happening is that Blofeld is brainwashing them whilst simultaneously developing various destructive bacteriological agents in his laboratories.  The brainwashed ladies are to become his ‘angels of death’ and, when they return home, they’ll release those agents to decimate whole species of livestock and crops.  Blofeld finds out who Bond really is but the secret agent manages to grab a pair of skis and stages an epic night-time escape from Piz Gloria.  Blofeld’s henchmen pursue, but Tracy turns up in time to rescue him.  Afterwards, he links up with Draco again and persuades him to launch an audacious attack on Piz Gloria using helicopters and his Unione Corse men.  Blofeld’s plans go up in smoke, although Blofeld himself escapes – despite Bond’s best efforts – using a bobsleigh.  Mission accomplished, Bond proceeds to marry Tracy, and things hurry to their tragic conclusion with Blofeld making an unexpected appearance during their honeymoon.

 

Both the book and film proceed along similar lines here, although it’s interesting to see how certain aspects of the 1969 film are expanded from what Fleming put in his 1963 book.  In 1963, Blofeld was content to wage bacteriological warfare against Britain and Ireland, devastating their wheat, chickens, beef, potatoes, etc.  By 1969, Blofeld has widened his horizons – it’s the whole world’s food supply he wants to decimate.  Accordingly, the ‘angels of death’ undergo an upgrade too.  In the novel they’re a prim, middle-class, goody-two-shoes bunch, all from the British Isles.  Rather disdainfully, Bond reflects: “The girls all seemed to share a certain basic girl guidish simplicity of manners and language, the sort of girls who, in an English pub, you would find sitting demurely with a boyfriend sipping a Babysham, puffing rather clumsily at a cigarette and occasionally saying, ‘Pardon’.  Good girls who, if you made a pass at them, would say, ‘Please don’t spoil it all’, ‘Men only want one thing’, or, huffily, ‘Please take your hand away’.”  One of them even takes umbrage when Bond jokingly compares them to the girls in the St Trinian’s films: “Those awful girls!  How could you ever say such a thing!”

 

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

 

In the film, the angels come from all over the world and they’re way more glamorous.  Indeed, a good number of the actresses went on to brighten up my adolescence during the 1970s with appearances in various cult films and TV shows.  There’s Angela Scoular, who also starred in an ‘unofficial’ Bond movie, the dreadful, zany, swinging-1960s comedy Casino Royale (1967); Catherine Schell, who’d be a regular in Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi series Space: 1999 (1975-77); Norwegian actress Julie Ege, who appeared in the kung-fu horror movie Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974), a co-production between legendary Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers and legendary British studio Hammer Films; Jenny Hanley and Anouska Hempel, both of whom appeared in Hammer’s ultra-tacky Scars of Dracula (1970); and the impeccable Joanna Lumley.  In the late 1970s, of course, Lumley would play Purdey in the revival of The Avengers (1961-69), The New Avengers (1976-77).  In fact, you could argue that OHMSS-the-move features three Avengers actresses.  In addition to Diana Rigg and Joanna Lumley, the face of Honor Blackman – who played Cathy Gale in The Avengers and Pussy Galore in 1964’s Goldfinger – is shown fleetingly during the credits sequence.

 

Nobly, mindful of Bond’s relationship with Tracy, Fleming has his hero seduce just one of the girls – something he does purely in the line of duty.  The filmmakers are less inhibited and for a little while on Piz Gloria Lazenby behaves like a fox in a chicken coup, shagging left, right and centre.  The movie also plays up the humour of the situation.  Sir Hilary Bray is supposed to be Scottish, so Bond dons full Highland dress before going to dinner with his hosts and their supposed patients.  Yes, after having a Scotsman play Bond for five films, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wait until he’s played by an Australian before they pop him into a kilt.  This enables the Angela Scoular character to use her lipstick to write her room number on the inside of Bond’s thigh, under the table, which prompts the following exchange: “Anything the matter, Sir Hilary?” “A momentary stiffness… caused by the altitude, no doubt.”  If the dialogue for this Bond movie sounds sharper than usual, it’s probably because Simon Raven, the famously dissolute English author, was hired to polish it.

 

When Bond escapes from Piz Gloria, Peter Hunt and his crew predictably pump up the action scenes beyond what was in the book, but I’m not complaining.  Even 45 years later, the scenes where Lazenby skis, runs, drives and fights for his life are very impressive and Hunt makes good use of his experience as a film editor – the action has a frenetic quality that, viewed now after the Bourne movies (2002-16), seems far ahead of its time.  Similarly ramped up is the climactic assault on Piz Gloria mounted by Bond, Draco and his gang.  In the book it comes across as a brief ‘smash-and-grab’ raid but in the film it’s a full-on battle, complete with grenades, flame-throwers and flying bottles of acid.  Rarely does the pulse quicken as much as it does here when Monty Berman’s James Bond Theme kicks in in the midst of the mayhem.

 

One change the filmmakers made to the plot that I think improves on the book is Tracy being captured by Blofeld.  In Fleming’s original, after Tracy come to Bond’s aid, she disappears into the background again.  In the movie, Blofeld triggers an avalanche that leaves Tracy unconscious and at his mercy, and Bond missing, presumed dead.  When Bond, who of course isn’t dead at all, goes to Draco for help, the Corsican mafia boss has a very real reason for giving him help – his daughter’s life is at stake.  It also allows Peter Hunt to show Savalas flirting, with an obviously menacing undercurrent, with Rigg at his mountaintop HQ.  Again, I don’t think poor old Donald Pleasance would have done the flirting bit very convincingly.

 

Fleming depicts Bond and Tracy’s wedding as brief and low-key, but again the film makes it a big, opulent affair.  M, Q and Miss Moneypenny (who’s tearful, for obvious reasons) are in attendance, as are Draco’s henchmen, many of whom spent the early part of the film getting the shit beaten of them by Bond.  However, both the book and the film converge for the ending, which is as melancholy and understated as it is shocking.  There hasn’t ever been an ending to a Bond film like this one – well, not until 2021’s No Time to Die.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

Indeed, it’s annoying that the filmmakers saw fit to follow this with 1971’s Diamonds are Forever, which gets Bond’s revenge on Blofeld out of the way in the first ten minutes, and then becomes a big, lazy, jokey and ludicrous Bond epic that would be the blueprint for Bond films later in the 1970s after Roger Moore had inherited the role.  For a proper, spiritual sequel to OHMSS, I think you have to look to the gritty Timothy Dalton Bond movie Licensed to Kill in 1989.

 

OHMSS-the-film received some unfavourable reviews and made less money than its predecessors, and for years it was regarded as the runt of the litter for the 1960s Bond-films.  Much of the animosity towards the film was because George Lazenby played Bond in it for the first and only time.  (By Diamonds are Forever, Broccoli had managed to patch things up with the truculent Connery and got him back into the role.)  Lazenby certainly isn’t a great actor, but I would argue that because this is a different sort of Bond movie, one where its hero appears vulnerable and wounded, the awkward and uncertain Lazenby actually fits the film.  He’s believable in terms of what the character has to endure.  I couldn’t imagine ‘Big Sean’ breenging through the movie in his usual manner and having the same emotional impact.

 

Happily, though, OHMSS has been re-evaluated and today is regarded as one of the best of the series.  In fact, when 007 Magazine ran a poll in 2012, it was voted the greatest James Bond film ever.  Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, who were running the Bond franchise in 2021, were so aware of OHMSS’s improved reputation that they tried grafting bits of it onto No Time to Die.  Both films share, for example, a figure grasping a trident in their credits sequences, Louis Armstrong singing We Have All the Time in the World on their soundtracks and, obviously, downbeat endings.  Though I feel No Time to Die’s nods to OHMSS only highlight the fact that it’s the lesser of the two movies.

 

A happier tribute to OHMSS occurs in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010).  When Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy and co. hit the ‘third level’ and find themselves on a snowy mountaintop battling opponents on skis, it’s obvious what film is being referenced.  Indeed, Nolan has more-or-less said that OHMSS is his favourite Bond movie.  (He’s also named Dalton as his favourite Bond actor, so he’s clearly a 007 fan after my own heart.)

 

And much of the film’s greatness is due to the fact that, no matter what innovations were brought to the table by the talented Peter Hunt and his crew, it owes a lot to the original Ian Fleming novel – which, for me at least, is the best of the Bond books too.

 

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

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The best of the Bonds (Part 1)

 

© Jonathan Cape

 

Today, I’ve learned, is James Bond Day – even though it’s a bit hard to celebrate the occasion when (1) the franchise now belongs to Jeff Bezos, who, with his vast fortune, private space programme and bald head, would make a good Bond villain, and (2) we currently have no idea who the next James Bond will be.

 

However, to celebrate the occasion, here is the first half of a lengthy treatise I’ve written about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: both the 1963 novel by Ian Fleming, which I think is possibly the best of the books, and the 1969 movie, which I think is definitely the best of the films.  For simplicity’s sake, I’ll abbreviate the title to OHMSS.  Oh, and if you aren’t familiar with the storylines of the book and film, be warned that his entry will be chock-full of spoilers.

 

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the tenth of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels.  He wrote it in early 1962 at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica.  Nearby, meanwhile, Jamaican locations were being used for the filming of the very first James Bond film, Dr No.  Thus, James Bond was undergoing a metamorphosis – from a literary phenomenon into something bigger, a franchise incorporating large-scale moviemaking and merchandising and whose central character would soon be an icon of 1960s pop culture.  Though the novels were refined examples of pulp fiction, Fleming – who was methodical about his research – at least tried to give them a veneer of believability.  With each successive film, however, Bond seemed to drift further from the realm of possibility and into that of outright fantasy.

 

OHMSS-the-novel feels different from its literary predecessors, but not because Fleming tries to take it in the direction the films were going.  He does the opposite.  It makes Bond more believable as a character, not less.  It’s ostensibly about the first face-to-face encounter between Bond and his archenemy Ernst Stavros Blofeld, who is head of the secretive and deadly crime syndicate SPECTRE.  But OHMSS also explores Bond’s emotional side and highlights his vulnerability.

 

Key to this is OHMSS’s sub-plot about the romance between Bond and Contessa Theresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo, a woman whose father, Marc-Ange Draco, runs a crime syndicate too, the Unione Corse of Corsica.  At the novel’s end, with Blofeld seemingly vanquished, Bond and Tracy get married – only for Blofeld to suddenly reappear in the final pages, spray their bridal car with bullets, kill Tracy and leave Bond as a babbling wreck.  As a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement noted at the time, this Bond was “somehow gentler, more sentimental, less dirty.”

 

When Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman got around to filming OHMSS six years later, five Bond books had been turned into movies and, already, the continuities of the books and films were hopelessly at odds.  In the books, Blofeld had made a ‘backstage’ appearance in OHMSS’s immediate predecessor, Thunderball.  In OHMSS’s successor, You Only Live Twice, Bond and he have a second and final meeting.  It’s the grim tale of the traumatised Bond hunting down and getting his revenge on Blofeld, much of it taking place on a bizarre ‘island of death’ off the Japanese mainland, whose deadly fauna and volcanic discharges attract a steady stream of visitors wanting to commit suicide.

 

In the Bond movie-world, though, Blofeld had featured in the backgrounds of From Russia with Love (1963) and Thunderball (1966) and then played a leading role in the film immediately before OHMSS, 1967’s You Only Live Twice – yes, the title that came after it in the book series.  As a result, there isn’t much grimness in You Only Live Twice-the-movie.  It’s a jolly science-fictional romp involving stolen spaceships, a secret base disguised as a Japanese volcano and Donald Pleasence playing Blofeld with a white jumpsuit, severe facial scar and fluffy white cat.  The film is a cartoonish thing compared with the book because, as far as the films are concerned, the murder of Bond’s wife hasn’t happened yet.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

When OHMSS began filming, the filmmakers – Broccoli and Saltzman, scriptwriter Richard Maibaum and director Peter Hunt, who’d worked as a film editor and second-unit director on the previous five movies – made the brave decision to follow Fleming’s book closely, right up to the tragic denouement.  So keen was Hunt to be faithful to the book that supposedly he carried a copy of it with him around the set, its pages marked with his own annotations.

 

At the start of OHMSS-the-book, it seems like business as usual for Bond.  As with the previous novels, he’s a sophisticated, money-is-no-object consumer of the sort of food, drink, cigars, clothes and cars that most of Fleming’s post-war, austerity-Britain readers could only dream about.  Although Fleming writes early on that “James Bond was not a gourmet.  In England he lived on grilled soles, oeufs cocotte and cold roast beef with potato salad,” a page later we hear him bitching about the quality of a meal he’s just had in a French eatery, about “…the fly-walk of the Paté Maison (sent back for a new slice) and a Poularde à la crème that was the only genuine antique in the place.  Bond had moodily washed down this sleazy provender with a bottle of instant Pouilly Fuissé and was finally insulted the next morning by a bill for the meal in excess of five pounds.”

 

However, the tone soon changes.  Bond is in France at the tail end of a mission to locate Blofeld, an interminable and fruitless mission that’s pissed him off to the point where he’s ready to hand in his resignation to M.  Then he crosses paths with the troubled but imperious Tracy.  In a pricey hotel-cum-casino she commands him: “Take off those clothes.  Make love to me.  You are handsome and strong.  I want to remember what it can be like.  Do anything you like.  And tell me what you like and what you would like from me.  Be rough with me.  Treat me like the lowest whore in creation.  Forget everything else.  No questions.  Take me.”

 

Later, on the coast, Bond intervenes to prevent Tracy from committing suicide and the two of them fall into the clutches of some heavies who turn out to be working for Tracy’s father, Draco, godfather of the Unione Corse.  Draco is delighted with Bond taking a protective interest in his daughter and urges him to marry her – offering a one-million-pound dowry as a sweetener.  Bond declines the marriage offer but agrees to continue romancing Tracy, if it’ll help her mental state.  He also manages to coax some information out of his would-be father-in-law regarding Blofeld’s whereabouts.  The super-villain, it transpires, is hiding in Switzerland.

 

The same events occur in the film version, although in a different order.  First, Bond saves Tracy from drowning herself, then he gets to know her intimately.  Also, the action takes place not in France, but in Portugal – Peter Hunt felt that by this time cinemagoers were overly familiar with the French coast.  Just before the credits kick in (and we get to hear John Barry’s instrumental OHMSS theme, regarded by many as the best Bond tune of the lot), there’s also some breaking of the fourth wall as Bond turns towards the camera and quips, “This never happened to the other fellow.”  For yes, this movie features a brand new James Bond.  Gone is the slurring Edinburgh brogue, hairy Caledonian brawn and insouciant Scottish scowl of Sean Connery – who by then, apparently, couldn’t even bring himself to exchange words with Cubby Broccoli – and in his place is the inexperienced Australian actor George Lazenby.

 

Actually, such a novice was Lazenby at the time that the only thing he was known for was appearing in a TV commercial for Fry’s Chocolate Cream.  I’ve heard a story that Broccoli saw him a barber’s shop, liked the ‘cut of his jib’ and picked him on the spot.  However, interviewed on the making-of documentary that accompanies my DVD copy of OHMSS, Lazenby claims that he already had an audition for Bond lined up.  He went to that barber’s because he knew that Connery had used it in the past and he thought it was his best bet for getting a ‘Bondian’ haircut.  The establishment was used by other people associated with the Bond movies and Broccoli happened to be there when Lazenby walked in.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

In contrast with the inexperienced Lazenby, the actress playing Tracy in the movie was already a star – Diana Rigg, who’d made a name for herself playing Emma Peel in the gloriously baroque 1960s TV show The Avengers (1961-69).  Fascinatingly, for a film series that’s often accused of de-humanising the books and emphasising big, dumb spectacle at the expense of characterisation, Tracy is a more fleshed-out character in the film than in Fleming’s novel.  She’s given more to do and, played by Rigg, she has a sparkle that’s missing in the rather aloof, ambiguous character that Fleming sketches.  Tales about how Lazenby and Rigg didn’t get on during the shoot are legion – most notably about Rigg munching garlic prior to the filming of scenes where Bond and Tracy kiss.  Director Hunt has disputed these claims, although I’ve seen at least one interview with Rigg where her comments about Lazenby are uncomplimentary.

 

Both the book and film show Bond getting an unexpected lead about where to find Blofeld in Switzerland – the College of Arms in London has had dealings with his adversary, who wants them to prove he is heir to the aristocratic title of ‘Compte Balthazar de Bleuchamp’.  This allows Bond to adopt the guise of Sir Hilary Bray, a College of Arms genealogist, and travel to Blofeld’s hideout, a mysterious medical clinic perched on top of the Piz Gloria in the Swiss Alps, where he promises to do some research in support of Blofeld’s claim to the title.

 

In the novel Fleming devotes a lot of time to the College of Arms, whose work clearly interests him.  It also allows him to explore the theme of snobbery.  As Sable Basilisk, a genealogy expert interviewed by Bond, comments: “I’ve seen hundreds of smart people from the City, industry, politics – famous people I’ve been quite frightened to meet when they walked into the room.  But when it comes to snobbery, to buying respectability so to speak, whether it’s the title they’re going to choose or just a coat of arms to hang over their fireplaces in Surbiton, they dwindle and dwindle in front of you… until they’re no more than homunculi.”  It’s satisfying that Blofeld’s snobbery is the weakness that allows Bond to ensnare him.  Mind you, some would say this is rich coming from Fleming.  His Bond novels, with their suave, sophisticated, well-travelled and well-heeled hero, have often been accused of snobbery themselves.

 

It’s also during this stage of the book we learn about Bond’s family.  For example, he’s informed by the College of Arms that his family motto – and coincidentally a title for a Pierce Brosnan Bond movie 30 year later – is ‘The world is not enough’, of which he says, “It is an excellent motto which I shall certainly adopt.”  And we learn that his father was a Scotsman who “came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe” (a detail honoured by the 2012 Daniel Craig Bond movie Skyfall), while his mother was Swiss.

 

Not that Fleming is complimentary about his parents’ nationalities.  Another genealogist, Griffin Or, says of the Scots in olden times: “In those days, I am forced to admit that our cousins across the border were little more than savages…  Very pleasant savages, of course, very brave and all that…  More useful with the sword than with the pen.”  Of his mum’s homeland, meanwhile, Bond snorts, ”(m)oney is the religion of Switzerland.”  M replies to this: “I don’t need a lecture on the qualities of the Swiss, thank you, 007.  At least they keep their trains clean and cope with the beatnik problem…”  (If M reckoned there was a problem with the beatniks, God knows how he felt in the late 1960s when the hippies appeared.)

 

Fleming gave Bond a partly Scottish parentage because, it’s said, he was impressed with the job Connery did of portraying his super-spy when filming of Dr No took place in Jamaica in 1962.  Dr No-the-film’s influence is detectable elsewhere.  In Blofeld’s Alpine base, which in the book is a ski resort as well as a clinic – in the film it’s only the latter – a character points out to Bond a certain lady among the fashionable skiers: “And that beautiful girl with the long fair hair at the big table, that is Ursula Andress, the film star.”  Andress, of course, was Connery’s co-star in Dr No and has a place in cinematic history as the first major Bond girl.

 

To be continued…

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

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One Donald I’m sad to see go

 

© Avala Film / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

It’s often said you don’t appreciate the value of something until after it’s gone.  I felt like that last week on hearing of the death of the great Canadian actor Donald Sutherland.  If someone had asked me to list my all-time favourite actors, I wouldn’t have thought of including Sutherland.  Yet when he passed away at the age of 88 – having kept working in film and TV until last year – it suddenly struck me how much I was going to miss him.

 

Sutherland was an actor who could inhabit a range of personalities and project many different moods and emotions, yet whom you always recognised as, basically, himself.  His characters might be heroic, dignified, fatherly, tragic, eccentric, sinister, venal, slow-witted, juvenile, gormless or demented – yet you always knew you were watching Donald Sutherland.  Whoever he played, he retained that unique quality of Donald Sutherland-ness.

 

Born in St John, New Brunswick, Sutherland graduated from Victoria University with an interesting-sounding degree in Engineering and Drama, then relocated to Britain in 1957 and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.  A few years later, he found his way into Europe’s then-flourishing horror-movie industry.  He appeared in the monochrome Italian-French chiller Castle of the Living Dead (1964), starring Christopher Lee, directed by Warren Kiefer, and with a 20-year-old Michael Reeves, who four years later would make 1968’s masterly Witchfinder General, working as assistant director.  No doubt for budgetary reasons, Sutherland was cast in three roles, most amusingly in drag, as a witch.  He played a good-natured simpleton in Hammer Films’ Fanatic (1965), a blend of the low-key psychological thrillers the studio made when it wasn’t cranking out full-blooded gothic-horror melodramas and the fashionable 1960s sub-genre of ‘hagsploitation’ – the hag here being a dangerous religious nutcase played by Tallulah Bankhead. If the cast wasn’t interesting enough with Sutherland and Bankhead, it also included Stephanie Powers, Yootha Joyce and Peter Vaughan, future stars of TV shows Hart to Hart (1979-84), George and Mildred (1976-79) and Porridge (1974-77) respectively.

 

© Amicus Productions / Paramount Pictures

 

The best remembered of Sutherland’s early horror films is Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), directed by Freddie Francis and produced by Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg – the first of seven anthology horror movies that Subotsky and Rosenberg’s British-based Amicus Productions would specialise in.  To be honest, I don’t think the film’s five stories are up to much, but the framing device, wherein five night-time travellers find themselves sharing a train compartment with the mysterious Dr Shreck (Peter Cushing), who uses Tarot cards to foretell each man’s future, is wonderfully atmospheric.  Dr Terror also has a fascinating cast.  In addition to Sutherland and Cushing, there’s Christopher Lee (again) and another horror-movie veteran, Michael Gough; trumpeter, tap-dancer and TV presenter Roy Castle; disc jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman; and the original M from the James Bond films, Bernard Lee.  Sutherland’s segment even has a fleeting appearance by his fellow Canadian Al Mulock, who along with Woody Strode and Jack Elam was gunned down by Charles Bronson in the astonishing opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

 

Sutherland also featured in 1960s British TV, most memorably in 1967 when he played a villain in an episode of the surreal and stylish espionage series The Avengers (1961-69) called The Superlative Seven.  This has Patrick Macnee’s debonair John Steed being invited to a bizarre fancy-dress party on board a private jet plane, which, after it takes off, is discovered to be remote-controlled.  Eventually, the plane lands Steed and the other, equally-baffled guests on a seemingly deserted island.  There, the party start to be murdered one by one.  As well as riffing on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), the episode has a science-fictional sub-plot where Sutherland attempts to create a race of super-soldiers.  And the guest cast includes Charlotte Rampling and Brian Blessed before they became famous too.

 

That same year, Sutherland turned up in Robert Aldrich’s loud, raucous and violent war movie The Dirty Dozen, about 12 convicts trained by the US Army and sent to France on a suicide mission against the Wehrmacht prior to the D-Day Landings   The movie contained so many famous actors playing characters who weren’t among the 12 convicts – Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker and Robert Ryan – that, over the years, folk have become confused about who actually played the Dirty Dozen.  I’ve even heard a few people declare that, with Sutherland dead, that’s all the Dozen gone.  Well, no – because actors Stuart Cooper and Colin Maitland, who played two more of the Dozen, are still on the go.

 

© Kenneth Hyman Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

The Dirty Dozen’s success led to Sutherland being cast in more World War II movies.  Most notable of these was 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, in which Clint Eastwood’s Private Kelly, a soldier in an American platoon in 1944 France, learns there’s a fortune in Nazi gold stashed in a bank behind enemy lines and persuades his fellow soldiers, including Sutherland and Telly Savalas, to help him steal it.  Sutherland’s character is a loopy tank commander called Oddball who, with a blatant disregard for historical authenticity, was added to the script to satirise the then-ubiquitous hippy movement.  He says spaced-out things like, “Don’t hit me with those negative waves so early in the morning!” or, “Woof, woof, woof!  That’s my other dog imitation.”  I suspect that for people my age – well, males my age – in the UK, Oddball is the character we’ll remember Sutherland best as, because British TV seemed to show Kelly’s Heroes every other week when we were kids.

 

Sutherland was also in 1976’s The Eagle Has Landed, playing an IRA man who aids some German commandoes, headed by that well-known German, Michael Caine, on a mission in England to assassinate Winston Churchill.  Of Sutherland’s performance, the best that can said is that there are non-Irish actors who’ve played Irishmen with worse Irish accents.

 

Another war movie was M*A*S*H (1970), Robert Altman’s scabrous black comedy set during the 1950s conflict in Korea, in which Sutherland played insolent and rebellious US Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce.  The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, was the third-most popular movie of its year and gave Sutherland iconic status.  I have to say that, though I like Robert Altman’s movies generally, M*A*S*H has not aged well.  Today, much of its humour feels juvenile and mean-spirited, especially when directed towards Sally Kellerman’s Major Houlihan character, rather than ‘anti-establishment’, which it was hailed as at the time.  Altman famously loathed the M*A*S*H TV show that was spun off from his movie and ran from 1972 to 1983, but I suspect time has been kinder to its gentler brand of humour.

 

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Productions / British Lion Films

 

Afterwards, Sutherland was in prestigious films like Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Fellini’s Casanova (1975) and Bernard Bertolucci’s 1900 (1975) – none of which I’ve seen.  But it’s in Nicolas Roeg’s masterly horror film Don’t Look Now (1973) that, of his movies I have seen, I believe he does his best work.  Don’t Look Now is an adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story in which a grief-stricken couple try to get over the death of their daughter by immersing themselves in a restoration project in Venice – only to be haunted by sightings of a small figure in a red coat who at least resembles their deceased daughter.  The film has two set-pieces at its beginning and end whose emotional impact has rarely been matched in the horror genre – Sutherland features heavily in both.  Films about the supernatural, despite focusing on death, memories of the departed and the possibility of an afterlife, don’t usually capture the feeling of grief that well.  But the pained, brittle performances by Sutherland and his co-star Julie Christie convey it with extreme poignancy.  With their performances augmented by Nicolas Roeg’s camerawork, visual imagery and memorably-elliptical approach to storytelling, Don’t Look Now is a film for the ages.

 

Though for me Don’t Look Now gives Sutherland his best role, it’s Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) that gives him his best image.  This is Hollywood’s second adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), wherein a low-key invasion of earth is staged by alien pod-people who gradually replace all the real people.  The image in question, now a popular meme, comes in the final moments when Sutherland, the film’s hero, reacts to another character by pointing at her, adopting a grotesque, gawking expression and emitting an inhuman squeal.  This tells us the pod-people have now replaced him too.  The original Body Snatchers movie, made by Don Siegel in 1956, was set in small-town America, but Kaufman’s version audaciously shifts the action to San Francisco, and the result is just as good.  Actually, I was going to say filmmakers have treated Finney’s novel well, for in 1993 Abel Ferrara directed another version that was decent too.  But then I remembered there was a fourth version made in 2007 with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and it was rubbish.

 

© Solofilm / United Artists

 

As he grew older, Sutherland’s work in films and television inevitably saw him shift from being a leading man to being a grizzled character actor and then an esteemed ‘elder-statesman’ guest-star.  His movies included star-laden Oscar-bait (1980’s Ordinary People), daft Alistair Maclean adaptations (1979’s Bear Island), slightly less daft Ken Follett adaptations (1981’s Eye of the Needle), overripe John Grisham adaptations (1996’s A Time to Kill), overstuffed British flops (1985’s Revolution), Sylvester Stallone movies (1989’s Lock Up), Clint Eastwood movies (2000’s Space Cowboys), paranoid Oliver Stone conspiracy thrillers (1991’s JFK), preposterous Roland Emmerich disaster movies (2022’s Moonfall) and Emma Thompson-scripted Jane Austen costume-dramas (2005’s Pride and Prejudice).

 

He made three films with his son Kiefer – who, when I first saw him onscreen in the 1980s, made me think, “Wow, he looks just like his dad!” – the afore-mentioned A Time to Kill, plus 1983’s Max Dugan Returns and 2015’s Forsaken.  And he featured in four Hunger Games movies (2012-15), playing Snow, the despot running the future North American territory of Panem.  I haven’t seen any of the Hunger Games series, but a future dystopian America ruled by a president called Donald sounds terrifyingly prescient.

 

Ironically, in the 1990s, Sutherland returned to his 1960s roots and started making horror movies again.  He was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), a clodhopping film that a few years later led to a sublime TV show; 1994’s The Puppet Masters, based on a short story by Robert Heinlein, which was a low-budget but not unenjoyable retread of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; 1998’s police-occult thriller Fallen, in which he rubbed shoulders with Denzel Washington and John Goodman; and 1999’s Virus, an Alien rip-off set on board a ship, in which Sutherland’s over-the-top villain is one of the few redeeming features – his old seadog is so sea-doggish he only lacks a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder.  Horror-adjacent is his role as Ronald Bartel in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991).  He’s an incarcerated pyromaniac whom William Baldwin and Robert De Niro’s firemen-investigators turn to for help when they’re trying to catch the person responsible for a series of deadly, fiery arson attacks.  Thus, he’s the Hannibal Lector of the fire-raising world.

 

However, while I write this, the Donald Sutherland performance that keeps coming to mind – accompanied by the lovely, plaintive song that accompanies it – is the one he essayed in the video for Kate Bush’s single Cloudbusting (1985).  He’s a kindly inventor who creates a rainmaking machine, only to be taken away by some sinister men in suits, who obviously believe there are things man was not meant to know.  This rather vitiates the song’s optimistic lyric, “Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen…”  It’s left for Sutherland’s son, played by Bush, to complete his work.  I visited the video on YouTube the other day and was touched to discover how the comments below were packed with people paying tribute to Sutherland.

 

© EMI

Posted on

The real Princess Diana

 

© ITV / ABC / Thames

 

2020 has been a rotten year and I suspect it still has more rottenness in store.  One of the many reasons why I’ve found it so godawful has been because it’s seen the deaths of two actresses who meant a lot to me, firstly because they both had leading roles in James Bond movies and I’m a big James Bond fan, and secondly because they both starred in one of my favourite TV shows, The Avengers (1961-69).  I’m talking, of course, about Honor Blackman, who died in April, and now Diana Rigg, who died last week.

 

I never got to see Diana Rigg perform on stage, where she appeared in plays by Edward Albee, Bertolt Brecht, Anton Chekov, Noel Coward, Henrik Ibsen, Molière, Jean Racine, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams and, obviously, William Shakespeare.  Nor did I catch her when, after becoming a Dame in the mid-1990s and being recognised as a national treasure, she appeared in prestigious TV productions like Rebecca (1997) or Victoria & Albert (2001), both of which resulted in her winning or being nominated for Emmy Awards.  I was living abroad and didn’t have access to English-language TV at the time.

 

I didn’t even watch her much-praised performance as Olenna Tyrell in the TV show Game of Thrones from 2013 to 2017, since I thought I should first read the George R.R. Martin books on which the show was based – something I’ve yet to get around to doing.

 

Despite what I’ve missed, however, I offer here a collection of Diana Rigg performances that I have seen and remember fondly.

 

Playing Tracy di Vincenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is ostensibly about James Bond (George Lazenby in his one-and-only shot at the role) tangling with his arch-enemy Ernst Stavros Blofeld (Telly Savalas).  However, it also explores Bond’s emotional side and highlights his vulnerability.  Key to this is OHMSS’s sub-plot about the romance between Bond and Contessa Theresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo (Rigg), daughter of the boss of the crime syndicate the Unione Corse of Corsica.  At the film’s end, Blofeld is seemingly vanquished and Bond and Tracy get married.  Then Blofeld makes a sudden reappearance in the final scene, sprays their honeymoon car with bullets, kills Tracy and leaves Bond as a babbling wreck.

 

Fascinatingly, for a film franchise that’s often accused of de-humanising the Ian Fleming novels that inspired it and emphasising big, dumb spectacle at the expense of characterisation, Tracy is a more fleshed-out character in OHMSS-the film than in OHMSS-the-novel.  She’s given more to do and, played by Rigg, has a sparkle that’s missing in the rather aloof, ambiguous character that Fleming sketches.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Particularly memorable is her appearance after Bond escapes from Blofeld’s Alpine headquarters.  Hunted by Blofeld’s henchmen, exhausted, frightened even – something that Lazenby, despite or perhaps because of his acting inexperience, conveys well – he takes refuge in a crowded Christmas market / ice rink in the local town.  Just as he thinks he not going to make it, Rigg comes to his rescue, unexpectedly skating into view in front of him like some heaven-sent angel of mercy.

 

Playing Sonya Winter in The Assassination Bureau (1969)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service wasn’t the only instance in 1969 of Diana Rigg rubbing shoulders with Telly Savalas.  In Basil Deardon’s black comedy The Assassination Bureau (based on an unfinished Jack London novel), she plays an aspiring female journalist in Edwardian London sent by Savalas’s unscrupulous newspaper proprietor to investigate a secret criminal organisation offering assassins for hire.  Armed with a bagful of money that Savalas has provided, Rigg brazenly hires this Assassination Bureau to assassinate its own chairman, Ivan Dragomiloff, who’s played by Oliver Reed.  Admiring Rigg’s audacity, Reed accepts the commission and, with her in tow, spends the movie zigzagging around Europe dodging the efforts of his own board of directors to kill him.

 

It’s a pleasantly silly film and, admirably, doesn’t waste any time in setting up its convoluted premise and getting into the action.  Rigg is delightful as the uppity Sonya Winter, determinedly doing her job and flying the flag for women’s rights amid a world of starchy, patronising male chauvinists.  Meanwhile, Reed had only just played the brutish Bill Sikes in Oliver! (1968) and at the time was in contention to play James Bond, although his reputation for drunken offscreen hi-jinks put 007 producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman off the idea.  His pairing with Rigg in The Assassination Bureau is no beauty-and-the-beast affair, however.  He dials down the roughness and dials up the charm so that their chemistry together is actually very pleasing.

 

© Paramount Pictures

 

Playing Edwina Lionheart in Theatre of Blood (1973)

Douglas Hickox’s brilliant comedy-horror movie Theatre of Blood has Vincent Price as an insane and hammily over-the-top Shakespearean actor who starts killing the snobbish London theatre critics who’ve bad-mouthed his performances, using murders methods borrowed from the Bard’s plays.  “They’re not going to start killing critics for giving bad notices, are they?” exclaims the campest critic Meredith Merridew, played by Robert Morley, who eventually meets a grisly fate modelled on events in Titus Andronicus.  As the corpses pile up, murdered in ways suggested by Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, Richard III, Henry VI: Part One and even The Merchant of Venice (Price rewrites it so that he can extract a pound of flesh from Harry Andrews), the youngest and least obnoxious critic, played by Ian Hendry, and the investigating police officers, played by Milo O’Shea and Eric Sykes, turn to Lionheart’s supposedly normal daughter, Edwina (Rigg), for help.

 

Distraught about what her father is doing, yet repulsed by the critics who destroyed his career, Edwina is initially a troubled and conflicted character.  Yet as the film progresses, it transpires that Rigg is having as much fun in her role as the Bard-quoting, soliloquizing Price is in his.

 

Taking the mickey out of herself in The Morecambe and Wise Show (1975), The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and Extras (2006)

Rigg never took herself too seriously.  She teamed up with Britain’s most famous comic double-act Morecambe and Wise for their 1975 Christmas TV special, where she appeared in the inevitable Ernie Wise-penned play.  This featured Rigg as Nell Gwynne, Eric Morecambe as Charles II and Wise as Samuel Pepys.  (“Have you read Ernie’s play?” demands Morecambe.  “Yes, I have,” replies Rigg.  “And you’re still here?”)  Better still is her appearance in The Great Muppet Caper, the second movie starring Jim Henson’s much-loved puppets, in which she plays the snooty fashion designer Lady Holiday, who’s robbed of her jewellery by a gang led by her devious brother (Charles Grodin).  Predictably, Miss Piggy approaches Rigg in the hope of securing a job as a fashion model and insists on showing Rigg her portfolio: “This is me reeking grandeur!”

 

And then there’s a 2006 episode of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s comedy show Extras, which is about a struggling actor (Gervais) trying to make ends meet with bit-parts and uncredited roles in films and on television.  This scenario enables the show’s gimmick of having real, famous actors and actresses play versions of themselves – usually twisted, unpleasant versions.  In this particular episode, Gervais gets a three-day job in a new fantasy film starring the then-17-year-old Daniel Radcliffe and Dame Diana Rigg.  The joke is that Radcliffe is a randy, boorish and clueless teenager.  Whilst eating with him in the studio canteen, Radcliffe tries to convince Gervais that he’s a man of the world by whipping a condom out of his pocket – he’s unravelled it but seems to think he can still put it on – and then accidentally pings it through the air to a nearby table, where it lands on the unamused Rigg’s head.  Radcliffe asks her for his ‘johnny back’ and gets a schoolmistress-ly reply: “May I have my prophylactic back, please?”

 

Later, Radcliffe sidles up to her and inquires, “You still got that catsuit from The Avengers?”  Rigg retorts: “Go away, Daniel.”

 

© BBC / HBO

 

And that brings me nicely to…

 

Playing Emma Peel in The Avengers (1965-67)

By the time Rigg joined The Avengers in the mid-1960s, the show, under the guidance of creator Brian Clemens, had gradually mutated from being a conventional action / thriller show with Patrick Macnee’s John Steed and Ian Hendry’s Dr David Keel as a pair of crime-fighters to being a television phenomenon that did everything on its own terms, both determinedly non-realistic and restlessly inventive.

 

Rigg’s tenure on The Avengers was surely its golden era.  With her Emma Peel character partnering Macnee’s now surreally debonair Steed, and the show being broadcast in colour for the first time, it was a self-confident cocktail of the funny, the silly, the fantastical, the baroque and, occasionally, the gothic and the kinky.  (The kinkiness factor came to the fore in an episode called A Touch of Brimstone, wherein Rigg dons a costume comprising a spiked collar, whalebone corset, black leather boots and a snake.  Funnily enough, this attracted the highest viewing figures of any episode in The Avengers’ eight-year history.)

 

Rigg brought to the show a bemused, unruffled quirkiness that was the equal of Macnee’s majestic imperturbability.  She was also his equal in being proactive, having no qualms about wading into fights to show off her martial arts prowess or hurtling around in a Lotus Elan.  As a villain in one episode remarked, “She’s well and truly emancipated, is that one.”

 

Rigg wasn’t comfortable about the fact, but Emma Peel also became a sex symbol.  She couldn’t well avoid it, being ephemerally gorgeous and clad in a succession of leather catsuits, mini-skirts and mod-inspired outfits that, inevitably, ended up being sold in the ladies’ fashion shops of the real Britain.  Wisely, though, sex was off the agenda in her character’s onscreen relationship with Macnee’s Steed.  The two indulged in a relaxed, platonic flirtatiousness and left it at that.  Macnee did get a kiss from her at the end of her final episode on the show, when she left him with the parting advice: “Always keep your bowler on in times of stress, and watch out for diabolical masterminds.”

 

Appearing at the height of the swinging 1960s, but tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted rather than smug, which is how I find many productions from the time, The Avengers, and especially the Emma Peel-era Avengers, projects a charming and not-taking-itself-seriously notion of Britishness that seems light-years removed from the discredited, embittered, clapped-out Britain of 2020.  The death of Diana Rigg, who’d been one of the last links with the show, just seems to emphasise that it’s now all in the past.

 

© ITV / ABC / Thames