(This is a revised version of a Persona
Paper post.)
(Spoilers)
Bond is driving along the coast when he
sees a woman walking into the ocean, apparently trying to drown herself. He
saves her and is attacked by a couple of guys. He fights them off, and the
woman gets in her car and drives off.
Bond shows up at a hotel and sees her car,
and learns it belongs to Tracy. He runs into her at the casino and pays her
tab. They spend the night together, but she is gone the next morning. Bond is
picked up by some goons, and meets Draco, a mob head and Tracy’s father. Draco
tells Bond of Tracy’s unhappy life and offers Bond a million pounds to marry
her, but Bond agrees to only date her for information Draco has on Blofeld.
During all of this, MI6 has been looking
for Bond. He goes back to London where M wants him off the Blofeld case. Bond
writes a letter of resignation, but Moneypenny changes it to a request for
vacation, which M agrees to.
So Bond has a whirlwind romance with
Tracy, and Draco lets Bond know about a lawyer Blofeld is in contact with. Bond
breaks into the lawyer’s office and finds out Blofeld is talking to an English
genealogist trying to claim the title of “Comte Balthazar de Bleuchamp.”
Bond poses as the genealogist and visits
Blofeld at this research station in the Alps. The station studies allergies and
Blofeld has cured several women of their various food allergies. Bond starts
visiting the women’s bedrooms, and discovers that Blofeld is talking to them in
their sleep. His plan is to send these women out with these plagues that would
destroy the world’s food sources. But he’ll stop if the world pardons him and
gives him his title.
Blofeld recognizes Bond (they met in the
last movie, although they were played by different actors) and Bond has to ski
down the mountain chased by goons. He runs into Tracy, who came looking for
him, and they escape. There’s a blizzard, and the two hide in a barn where Bond
proposes. More goons show up the next morning, and Blofeld sets off an
avalanche. They capture Tracy and think Bond is dead and buried.
Bond makes it back to England, but M tells
him that Blofeld’s ransom will be paid because the situation is too dicey.
Fortunately, Draco has his own goons and they fly in to take out Blofeld and
rescue Tracy. Blofeld tries to seduce Tracy, and she plays along to distract
him a bit.
The women with the plagues have already
left, but Bond manages to photograph their locations and Blofeld’s
communication equipment is destroyed. The station is blown up, Tracy flies off
with her father, and Bond goes after Blofeld. There’s a bobsled chase where
Blofeld gets hung up in a tree.
Bond and Tracy get married, but as they
drive off Blofeld – in a neck brace – drives by and a goon shoots at them. Bond
is unharmed, but Tracy is killed.
#
When I originally started this James Bond
movie rewatch, my thinking was that if I reviewed a Bond movie a week, I would
be reviewing Skyfall when Spectre came out. But that didn’t
happen, in part because of this movie. I rewatched it, had issues with it (which
I’ll get to) but then stuff came up and I never got around to writing up my
thoughts. Weeks, then months passed and I realized that I had forgotten some of
the story. I didn’t feel like rewatching it again so soon, and so things just
sort of ended. When I tried to get back in the reviews again, I ended up re-rewatching
this movie, but I just had it on in the background as I typed up my thoughts.
So what issues did I have with this? In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld has
thousands of technicians in a hidden volcano base and is working on starting a
war between the US and Russia. In this movie he has a couple goons in a little
house in the Alps and he wants to unleash some plague, but he’ll stop if they
give him a pardon and his title. How the mighty have fallen, I guess. But it
does seem a rather bland plot.
A bigger problem I have, is that at the
end all Bond has to do is walk a few hundred yards up the bobsled trail to put
a bullet in Blofeld to make sure he’s dead. But he apparently doesn’t do even
that. If he had, Blofeld would be dead and Tracy alive. Speaking of which, the
movie ends with Bond holding his dead wife, and then goes into the upbeat Bond
theme music. It’s a bit of a jolt.
Overall, I found the movie rather … bland.
I don’t have anything against George Lazenby, this was his only Bond movie, and
I think he could have been an interesting Bond. Perhaps with a better script.
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