Junk Bonds

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969): adapted from the Ian Fleming novel by Simon Raven and Richard Maibaum; directed by Peter Hunt; starring George Lazenby (James Bond), Diana Rigg (Tracy), Telly Savalas (Blofeld), and Gabriele Ferzetti (Draco): George Lazenby remains a mostly baffling choice to replace Sean Connery as James Bond. I say 'mostly' because I assume his status as an unknown fashion model caused the producers to believe that they would have much more control over him than they would over a more established actor.

Lazenby is terrible: wooden and totally absent of charisma. However, he isn't much helped by the movie. On Her Majesty's Secret Service is painfully long and slow.  It's also got some of the most ridiculous scenes in Bond history. A few problems...

• It wastes its best asset -- Diana Rigg as Bond's love-of-his-life Tracy -- by sidelining her for the middle third of the movie. 
• It gives Blofeld his least cinematically interesting Doomsday Plot (seriously, there's no way to dramatize a biological attack on the global food supply, so the film-makers don't even try). 
• It gives Blofeld his most pathetic Doomsday Goal (to be made a titled nobleman and be granted amnesty for all previous crimes).
• It dresses Bond up in a frilly shirt that's clearly the model for Austin Powers' frilly shirts.
• It puts Bond and Tracy through a car chase that puts them inside a car race inside a tiny oval, thus leading to Tracy asking not once but at least twice 'How do we get out of here?'. The way you came in, maybe?
• It involves not one (fine) but two (enough already!) downhill ski races.
• It involves a climactic bobsled race because Blofeld uses a bobsled to escape his mountain-top HQ and Bond chases him in another bobsled. What is this, the goddamned Winter Olympics? Eventually, the two of them end up in a wrestling match in one bobsled. OK, that would be an interesting Olympic event.
• It keeps the downbeat ending of the Ian Fleming novel for no apparent reason other than to see how a downbeat ending played with movie-goers, I guess.

Sean Connery would replace George Lazenby for the next Bond movie, (plus ca meme chose!) Diamonds are Forever, before giving way again to a new Bond. That would be Roger Moore, who would have a much more successful career than George Lazenby as 007. This stinker is not recommended except for its awfulness.

Becoming Bond (2017): written and directed by Josh Greenbaum; starring George Lazenby: Part documentary, part broadly acted docudrama, part George Lazenby's 77-year-old talking head. Becoming Bond tells the story of how Lazenby won and then intentionally lost the role of James Bond after only one movie (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), ostensibly because he refused to sign a 7-picture contract with the Bond producers. 

The Bond material is interesting but somewhat scanty -- the viewer will have to endure nearly an hour about Lazenby's pre-Bond life, which writer-director Josh Greenbaum seems to find nigh-endlessly fascinating. Your results will vary depending on how many scenes of Lazenby having sex, getting the runs, having sex, selling cars, taking LSD, and having sex you can tolerate. 

As another reviewer noted somewhere, you may also be distracted by the fact that the actor playing Lazenby looks and acts a lot more like Sharlto Copley than Lazenby. On the bright side, there's a lot of female nudity, if you look for that sort of thing in documentaries about George Lazenby.

If you're interested in the Bond movies, the movie is interesting though frustrating. Greenbaum spends perhaps 20 minutes on the material about On Her Majesty's Secret Service, far too little in a movie that clocks in at about 95 minutes. Lazenby himself comes across as a bit of a lucky yob, and the film itself strongly implies that he stopped acting after On Her Majesty's Secret Service, an implication belied by his dozens of IMDB screen credits after the Bond movie, including a stint as Superman's biological father Jor-El on the early 1990's Superboy TV series. The film also makes much of how popular Lazenby was as the new Bond, which seems like at least a bit of a stretch given that even adjusted for inflation, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the 21st highest grossing Bond film in North America out of 25. Lightly recommended.

The Living Daylights (1987): adapted from the Ian Fleming short story by Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum; directed by John Glen; starring Timothy Dalton (James Bond), Maryam D'Abo (Kara), Jeroen Krabbe (Koskov), Joe Don Baker (Whitaker), and John Rhys Davies (General Pushkin): Competent, occasionally bland movie introduced the world to Timothy Dalton as James Bond. He's fine, for the most part, though he and the film-makers strand Bond between Sean Connery's grimly mocking Bond and Roger Moore's self-mocking Bond. Like Rambo in Rambo III, Bond gets help from the Afghanis who would become the Taliban. Oops. Jeroen Krabbe and Joe Don Baker make for an underwhelming pair of Bond villains, while Maryam D'Abo is fine but a bit bland as Bond's (only) love interest. Lightly recommended.