cinema lunatic

Few people have achieved their names becoming an idiom in their lifetime. George Lazenby, who played James Bond in only one movie, is one of the few.

When someone says, "Why, he's the George Lazenby of the school board," others have a sense of what that means. That's not really fair. He did an adequate job with a better-than-average Bond movie.

The movie itself is fine, though Bond-girl Diana Rigg walks away with it. Lazenby doesn't have the acting chops of Sean Connery or Roger Moore, both of whom played Bond as a person with history. Lazenby has the habit of passing time between fight scenes and love scenes. But, he isn't awful.

People on the IMDB say (and we know they're all correct) that producer Cubby Broccoli thought that Lazenby could have been the best Bond if he had agreed to the five-picture deal. Who knows? On Her Majesty's Secret Service indicates a possible different direction for the franchise, with its emphasis on stunts. Lazenby, who was trained in skiing and martial arts for real, could have been a studly late-1960s, early-1970s action hero. The Vin Diesel of his time.

But instead, Lazenby is the answer to a trivia question, and we ended up the suave wit of Roger Moore--the Bond I actually grew up with, with a smart-looking tux and the air of someone who did what he did because it amused him. (Moore actually played that at a deeper level, but that's a blog for another day.) A thinking man's Bond. And what a shame for escapist entertainment if we had never had that.

Labels: Bond, O