Bond’s first queer director creates a masterpiece in which 007 gets a new face, goes undercover as a gay genealogist and finally takes a woman up the aisle. But his happiness is, perhaps inevitably, short-lived.

If this is your first time reading a re-view on LicenceToQueer.com I recommend you read this first.

‘Inspired by On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ by Herring & Haggis

“The name’s Bond, Flaming Bond?”

You might be expecting me to launch straight into a celebration or excoriation of actor George Lazenby - he has that Marmite effect on most people. But I’ll get to him in a bit.

I don’t believe you can discuss the queer aspects of Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service without first considering them in the context of the life, work and death of the film’s director: Peter Hunt.

No one bats an eyelid when we talk about a play by Shakespeare, a sculpture by Michelangelo, a symphony by Beethoven or a novel by Ian Fleming. All of these creators poured at least some of themselves into their works. So why do most people pay more attention to the actors in a film than who directed it? It is just because actors are more visible, literally in the scenes and not behind the scenes?

Since my late teens (when I started getting into ‘cinema’ and taking it rather more - too? - seriously) I have always sought to find out about a film’s director. While you can enjoy a film just by watching it, I don’t believe you can fully appreciate a work of cinema - on either the popular or arty end of the spectrum - unless you connect the dots with the on screen action and the off screen drama.

There are the famous directors whose styles are so recognisable across their body of work that their surnames can be used adjectivally: Hitchcockian, Lynchian, Spielbergian.

Some of these are household names. Most of them are white men. Relatively few of them are queer.

I believe it’s even more important to connect the dots between queer fimmakers and their works. We have a lot of catching up to do. For so much of cultural history, the contributions that queer people have made to their fields have been hidden or flatly denied. Sometimes the artist themselves has been the one doing the denying, which is completely understandable. It’s still harder to have a career in many fields if you’re queer. In these situations, where filmmakers have not ‘come out’ publicly, we must tread carefully. But to declare them No Go Zones would be to perpetuate the marginalisation of queer people and ignore their contributions to the arts.

The first time I found out that the director of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was queer was shortly after he died.

In a message board discussion about some of Hunt’s obituaries mentioning a “partner” called “Nicos”, one contributor perhaps spoke for many filmgoers in finding it “really surprising” to learn that Hunt was “gay” because “you don’t get more hetero than a bond [sic] movie”. In the next sentence they praised the film’s tone, which “is more sensitive than most” and called for “more gay directors for bond [sic]”. Although well-meaning, the implication here is that if a film has a gay director it will automatically be more sensitive, because gay men are (stereotypically) more sensitive. In the golden age of Hollywood, gay male directors such as George Cukor were often labelled ‘women’s directors’. Ostensibly, this was because they could elicit strong performances from women but the term was often applied pejoratively. The moguls thought ‘women’s directors’ were more sensitive and couldn’t directly manly pictures, like westerns, the progenitor of the modern action picture. Of course, this was nonsense, and many of the most ‘manly’ films in Hollywood history have been directed by queer men, and sometimes even by (queer and non-queer) women.

Hunt does not appear to have kept his homosexuality a secret from his closest colleagues on the Bond films. But for whatever reason, he did not identify as a gay man publicly in any source I can locate.

Homosexuality was not a fit subject for film, although this was changing - slowly. Hunt himself was an advocate for more films dealing openly with gayness. He once remarked in an interview that:

“I’m tired of hearing, almost every time there’s a gay-themed movie, that ‘It’s not about homosexuality, it’s about blah-blah-blah.’ I never hear a filmmaker or star saying a movie isn’t about heterosexuality, it’s about blah-blah-blah.”

To what extent does knowing OHMSS was directed by a man who was, for all intents and purposes, gay, explain why the film is, in many ways, different to the other entries in the series? And how does it affect how we see Bond himself in this film?

Unlike Bond, Peter Hunt was not afraid of commitment. At the time of his death he was in a committed relationship with his partner Nicos Kourtis, and had been with the same man for decades. Kourtis even worked with Hunt as his personal assistant on several of his post-Bond projects, including a film and a TV series. However, when Hunt died in 2002, the obituaries were conspicuously inconsistent. Only a few even acknowledged Kourtis’ existence. Some of those that didn’t mention a partner observed that he was “survived” by a son, whose name was given as either Kourtis or Kourtis-Hunt. Several mentioned neither partner nor son and closed out with the stock phrase “He never married”. It’s a code phrase you often find in obituaries of gay men which, along with summing them up as “a confirmed bachelor”, works both euphemistically and as nudge-nudge-wink-wink to prurient readers.

The convention of ending an obituary with someone’s marital status also reaffirms (if any reaffirmation were needed) how enshrined the institution of marriage is in society. Anxieties over getting married fuelled Bond’s creation: Ian Flaming sat down at his typewriter and wrote Casino Royale to distract himself from his impending nuptials.

Legally marrying someone of the same sex was not an option for any homosexuals until 2001 (the Netherlands got there first) and it’s still only possible in a few dozen countries. It’s a new idea for many queer people. But contrary to stereotypes, long-term committed relationships between homosexual are not novel at all. They’ve been going on as long as their straight equivalents.

So how should we read the apparent exclusion of Hunt’s life partner in many versions of his life story? Was it that classic: homophobia by omission? 2002 was not that long ago but many societies were less accepting back then. It is interesting to note that it tends to be the conservatively-minded publications which omit any mention of Hunt’s partner at all.

To factor out Peter Hunt’s apparent queerness would be to erase yet another another chunk of queer cultural history. He made colossal contributions to the Bond films. Quite simply, the Bond films as we know them would not exist without him.

Some would argue that the personal lives of filmmakers are of little consequence to the finished product, especially when the product is the work of thousands of people, as a Bond film is. Subscribers to ‘auteur theory’ argue the opposite: films can be seen as having singular auteurs (authors), just as most novels do. Usually the author is the director, the person who pulls together all the creative people (actors, writers, cinematographers, production designers, costume designers, etc) and unites them under his or her vision.

For a big budget film, the reality usually lies somewhere in between. This being Bond’s sixth screen adventure, the template was already set - to an extent. However, the producers have always been clear that the director is permitted a certain amount of lee-way in putting their personal stamp on things. A Terence Young-directed Bond film feels very different to a Guy Hamilton or Lewis Gilbert-directed Bond film, for instance. And as different as For Your Eyes Only might feel to Licence To Kill, these two films are recognisably creations of director John Glen, as are the three adventures in between.

Although he directed other films after OHMSS, Hunt only got one shot in the Bond director’s chair. Ordinarily, this would make it more challenging to determine a director’s ‘style’. But Hunt eschews the ordinary approach in several key ways. There have been copious analyses already of what we might term the ‘Huntian’ approach from a stylistic point of view and that’s not my focus here. But for me, two things stand out as different - even, arguably, queer - from the approaches taken by Young, Hamilton and Gilbert before him.

Firstly, his framing and composition are extraordinary, with foreground objects (particularly chairs) giving scenes wonderful depth of field. The technique renders even mundane shots like those in Moneypenny’s office unfamiliar and exciting. It’s like we’re seeing Bond’s world through new eyes.

And the shot where Tracy almost takes a shot at Bond, her hand moving into the frame and unholstering his gun while he examines himself in the mirror in the background, is instantly iconic, perhaps because of the gender role reversal implied (see analysis of Tracy below).

Also impressive is Hunt’s expressive use of sound. I am always struck by the exaggerated loudness of Gumboldt’s footsteps as he walks back to his office across the town square. It ramps up the tension considerably. Sometimes Hunt cuts out sound effects and dialogue entirely. In the iconic ski chase he allows Barry’s score to dominate the action and carry the scene. Lots of interviewers labelled Hunt ‘ebullient’. This aspect of his personality definitely comes across in the more exuberant parts of OHMSS.

Those who oppose the idea that films have single authors would observe that these creative decisions might be the work of the cinematographer or the sound editor. In the case of OHMSS, people observe that the screenplay hews closely to the novel by another man, Ian Fleming. And these people would have a fair point. But it’s the director who ultimately has the final say.

Hunt himself said in interviews years after the release of OHMSS: "I wanted it to be different than any other Bond film would be. It was my film, not anyone else's". The telling part of this phrase is “would be”. Although he had the benefit of hindsight, there’s a hint that Hunt suspected this would be a one off, never to be repeated.

On the evidence of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, it’s irritating that we didn’t get to see a further Bond film directed by Peter Hunt. Although I have a place in my heart for Guy Hamilton’s take on Diamonds Are Forever, we can only imagine the film that would have resulted like if Hunt had followed through on his intention to continue directing Bond. In interviews, he expressed a desire to continue the story from OHMSS, with a grieving, vengeance-fuelled Bond hunting Blofeld and Bunt around the world, perhaps similar to the way Quantum of Solace followed on moments after the end of Casino Royale.

Quantum of Solace gets a lot of criticism for its editing some of it justified. Arguably though, it only pushes to extremes the approach pioneered by Peter Hunt decades earlier. Even more so that directing OHMSS, Hunt’s biggest contribution to the series was as the editor of the first five 007 adventures. Given the epithet “The Man Who Cut Down 007” in his Guardian obituary, it’s hard to overestimate how much Hunt’s work defined the look and feel of those early Connery adventures, a legacy that continues to this day - and not just in Bond films.

You only have to compare the mostly classical editing of a film like Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, released three years prior to Dr. No, to appreciate how unconventional Hunt’s approach was. Even when the spy craze hit in the mid-60s and studios around the world started churning out espionage thrillers, most were slow to catch on to what made Bond so successful: Peter Hunt’s editing.

Hunt adopted a ‘hard’ cutting style which not only removed any boring bits (think of any scene where Bond boards a plane and then immediately arrives at his destination in the next cut) but he also removed frames from fight scenes that made the punches feel real without obscuring what was happening (something a lot of modern action movies don’t get right, adopting a rapid fire ‘montage’ approach which is merely confusing).

When it came to editing OHMSS, Hunt entrusted the bulk of the assembling the film to John Glen, who would be Bond’s most prolific director. Glen adopts Hunt’s approach throughout the film, right from the savage opening fight on the beach. Even so, the film is a departure compared with what came before, and not just because of the change of leading man and there being a sincere love story for the first time.

It’s the only Bond film, to date, to have a 90 second falling-in-love montage set to a romantic ballad. When film distributors baulked at the length of the film and asked for scenes to be removed, this was targeted for deletion, but Hunt put his foot down. He argued it was the heart of the movie and the whole thing would collapse without it. He was right of course.

Whether conscious of Hunt’s bold stylistic choices or not, audiences feel OHMSS’s difference keenly. It’s not uncommon for established critics (as well as those by fans on message boards, podcasts and YouTube channels), to describe OHMSS as “more sensitive” Bond film. This despite the fact that it has some of the most bloody, violent encounters in the series, including a henchman being mulched into bright red chunks after he falls into a snowplow (Bond: “He had a lot of guts.”), pre-dating a similarly darkly comic moment involving a wood-chipper in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo by nearly three decades.

Most ardent Bond fans don’t see an incompatibility with sensitivity and extreme violence. It cuts right to the heart of why we love the character so much: Bond is both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, reflected in the texture of the films themselves. Hunt’s ‘hard’ editing approach complements ‘soft’ elements such as the scenic photography and John Barry’s melodic, lushly orchestrated scores.

All Bond films mix the rough with the smooth, but the difference with OHMSS is everything feels more sincere. Recasting Bond helps. For all of the criticism of Lazenby, it would have been difficult for Connery to make us take his romance with Tracy seriously. You can’t say we aren’t forewarned. At the top of the film Lazenby even breaks the fourth wall to tell us “This never happened to the other fella”, just in case we didn’t get the message. Hitting the reset switch on the lead actor creates just enough ambiguity about the character for us to re-evaluate who we think Bond is.

One thing Bond is definitely not (according to Lazenby) is gay.

Lazenby maintains he only heard about the casting call for Bond during a threesome - we presume with two women. He also relates how he was rather taken by a mink coat originally intended to be Peter Hunt’s birthday present from the producers: “I got laid a lot in that mink coat.”

Having never owned anything in mink, I am quite possibly missing something here, but a mink coat does not strike me as being especially attractive to anyone, regardless of their sex. It’s not exactly ‘masc’ is it? Were Lazenby’s partners drawn to his feminine qualities, signalled by a mink coat?

Perhaps because of his Lazenby’s possibly-too-good-to-be-true model looks, the producers apparently hired prostitutes and sent them up to his hotel room to prove he wasn’t gay. Lazenby is fond of this story. But it raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions. For a start, how would this have proven anything? Presumably, the producers would have only had Lazenby’s and the prostitute’s testimonies to inform them of the meeting’s outcome.

Whether or not it happened (or how it happened) is inconsequential. In Lazenby’s mind (and possibly the producers’), being gay was incompatible with being Bond. And yet, in OHMSS, he spends nearly 40 minutes of the film pretending to be a gay man.

In order to infiltrate Blofeld’s hideaway, Bond must impersonate Hilary Bray, a respected genealogist. Bray is not identified explicitly as gay, which I would love to use as an excuse for not cottoning-on to his queerness when I watched the film as a child. In my defence, I didn’t know what a ‘gay man’ was supposed to be like, besides a collection of stereotypes.

But just because Bray doesn’t say he’s gay doesn’t mean he isn’t ‘coded’ as such. Bray himself appears in only one scene. Nevertheless, he leaves a clear, queer impression on us. He tells Bond that, to assist his mission, he will “lose myself among the churches of Brittany. I wanted to do brass rubbings there anyway.” A passion for brass-rubbing does not appear on any list of Stereotypical Gay Hobbies that I am aware of, but it’s intended to make us query how ‘different’ Bray is. When Bond adopts his guise, actor George Baker dubs Lazenby whenever Bond is under cover. Bond (as Bray) whinges to Irma Bunt that he’s not a good traveller, nor is he “a sporting man”. Upon meeting Blofeld’s Angels of Death he protests that “I’m afraid I’ve never had much to do with young ladies”. Such lines are intended to to be comic because we are well aware that James Bond is well-travelled, athletic and has been intimately acquainted with a copious number of women.

Bond even keeps up the act with the girls he seduces in order to obtain information. When his first conquest, Ruby, brings the subtext into the text by remarking “You are funny pretending not to like girls”. Bond (as Bray) replies “Well, I don’t usually, but you’re not usual.” He justifies it by claiming it was her “lipstick” on his thigh (the one that brought on the “slight stiffness” under the dinner table) that was the “inspiration. So are you”. He uses an almost identical formulation with the next girl, who actually takes the initiative by coming to his room: “Coming here like this was an inspiration. And so are you.”

The repetition is funny but it also makes it clear that Bond is going through the motions. The sex, as so often in Bond films, is mostly - or entirely - transactional. His mind is on the mission, even if other parts of his anatomy are not quite so easy to control. Happily though, his baser needs and the needs of the mission coincide. But even Bond/Bray has his limits. He follows up telling the second girl she’s an inspiration with a confession: “You’ll need to be”. But is it Bond or Bond-as-Bray doing the talking? It’s George Baker’s voice, suggesting that this is Bond-as-Bray speaking, even though it makes more sense for this to be Bond voicing his inability to perform to the audience. The aside is only intended for us, not the girl.

Lazenby’s voice does break through at various points, notably when he thinks he’s alone in front of the mirror after returning from Ruby’s room (“Hilly, you old devil”). These unguarded moments where Bond breaks cover remind us, if any reminder were necessary, that Bond is playing a role. So why doesn’t he break character when saying “You’ll need to be”?

Confusing matters is the surprising return of Bond’s gay genealogist persona when he returns to Piz Gloria to blow it up in the final act. After shooting dead a guard he repeats his line from earlier in the film: “Guns make me nervous”. Again, it’s intended to be comic, but it opens up the possibility that Bond/Bray may not be so different as we have been led to believe. Further evidence is provided by Bond’s lecture on “bezants” to the room full of girls. He claims his family crest has four of the “gold balls”. Several scenes before, we learned from the real Hilary Bray that Bond’s family crest contained three bezants. You could argue that because we don’t learn anything about Bray’s family crest, Bond could be staying in character. After all, Bond’s crest only had three, not four gold balls. But the joke doesn’t work unless we recall the earlier reference. However many bezants they have between them, Bond are Bray are intertwined.

According to most reports, the relationship between Lazenby and Hunt during the shoot was not harmonious. Who knew how Peter Hunt felt directing George Lazenby impersonating a gay man for approximately a third of the film?

Part of the reason why Bond may appear to be more “sensitive” in this film is a curious use of melody in the score. When he first arrives at Piz Gloria, John Barry accompanies Bond’s search of his accommodation (a Bond convention since Dr. No) not with the James Bond theme or the main title melody but with an instrumental march version of We Have All The Time In The World, the romantic ballad. Played in a lyrical but semi-military style, it creates the impression that Bond not only has the mission on his mind but also true love (with Tracy).

And yet, in the broadest sense, the central part of the film is not at all heteronormative. Heteronormative stories promote the view that the only true relationships are those between one man and one woman. Bond (while posing as a gay man) has sex with at least two (and it’s implied later, many more) women. True, he doesn’t have a ‘relationship’ in any traditional sense with any of them and (as in From Russia With Love) his philandering is essential for the success of the mission. You could say this about most Bond stories of course. But the difference is here, we know Bond is falling in love with a woman in his ‘real’ life.

Even the most open-minded viewers would recognise that he’s technically ‘cheating’ on Tracy with Blofeld’s Angels. It’s to the individual whether they attach a value judgement to this. Bond and the future Mrs Bond may have an open relationship, or she may just be very understanding about all he needs to do in Her Majesty’s secret service, but this is never explicitly articulated.

The sexual politics - and values - of the film are stated most clearly in the scene where Bond proposes to Tracy. While Bond acknowledges that “an agent shouldn’t be concerned with anything but himself”, Tracy is pragmatic, seemingly content with letting things “go on the way they are”. We presume they have had sex at some point before this and seconds later they unequivocally do take a pre-marital roll in the hay (literally and figuratively), which might still have shocked some viewers at end of the ‘swinging sixties’, but fewer than at the start of the decade.

Bond is the one to recognise that being both an agent and a husband would not be possible. For the only time (until Casino Royale, 37 years later), Bond tells a girl he loves her so much that he will have to “find something else to do” and retire from MI6.

Bond is not really Bond without his career. He’s certainly not 007. A telling moment is just after he has stormed out of M’s office with the intention of resigning. When he answers the phone in his office he corrects himself: “Double-0 se… James Bond here.” This sets up the later pay off, planting the seed of the idea that Bond retiring would not be so out of character. It helps to make the romance believable, even if we suspect it can’t end well.

Heteronormativity is anathema to Bond - both the character and the films as cultural artefacts (and business ventures) reject the idea that being wed to one woman would be bliss. Unlike in real-life, ‘happy ever after’ cannot be permitted to exist in the world of Bond. Happiness must be brief and/or inconsequential. Bond must be restless for the next conquest. What a contrast with the director of OHMSS, who appears to have had a happy, enduring love in his life - albeit with a man.

Should we even bother to note that one of the best films in the Bond canon was directed by a queer person? Many people have written about the making of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service but few have brought the director’s sexual orientation into the discussion. Does it add anything, or take anything away from the experience? Probably not for most viewers, queer or straight. But it does for some of us. As well as possibly inspiring future queer filmmakers, it shows that Bond has universal appeal, to both consumers and creators (and recreators) of the character. Despite the apparent ‘hetero-ness’ of Bond, it took a man who loved men to truly get beneath his skin.

I’m not going to claim that existential crises, like Bond undergoes on that Swiss hillside, are exclusive to queer people. We all have times where we question our identities. We don’t even know how Peter Hunt felt about his own queerness. He doesn’t appear to have been particularly conflicted, at least by the time he directed On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, although the fact that he was frustrated at the lack of homosexual representation in cinema suggests he had a discontent with society that most of us feel. And I’m not saying you have to be gay to have an insight into what it’s like for a character to re-evaluate their whole life and force themselves to start over again, as a truer, more authentic, happier version of themselves, but it certainly helps.

Ultimately, it’s too crude to claim OHMSS’s rejection of heteronormativity is the hallmark of a queer director. However much Young, Hamilton, Gilbert, Glen, Campbell, Mendes and the rest might have wanted Bond to end up settled, there was no way this contentment would ever be allowed to persist long into the next film. Most of Bond’s relationships don’t even last that long. It will be fascinating to see if Fukunaga stays true to form or subverts it with No Time To Die. Maybe Bond will get to live happily ever after for once?

Similarly, it would be insensitive to suggest that Lazenby’s body being on display at regular intervals is because of the director’s homosexual gaze. Connery was objectified just as much in his adventures. The only difference is Lazenby’s lack of chest hair, which could be considered to be less masculine. Clothing-wise, Lazenby can fill out a shirt as well as Connery (especially when wet) and the two share a predilection for scandalously short robes.

Lazenby’s and Connery’s Bonds are defined just as much through their accoutrements - the cigarettes, the car - as well as their snobbery (“Royal Beluga. North of the Caspian.”) and knowledge of perfume (“Isn’t le Bleur a little heavy for that?”). As if to balance out this stereotypically feminine fussiness, both are purveyors of Playboy (although it takes until the next film for Connery’s Bond to be revealed as a member of the club and not just an avid ‘reader’).

As is often the case, something (or someone) we consider to be very ‘different’ at first glance turns out to be not so different after all when we take a closer look.

A film’s final scene is notoriously hard to get right. When done badly, it leaves a sour aftertaste and makes us re-evaluate everything we have experienced up until that point in a negative light. Fortunately, OHMSS’s closing moments are note perfect. They also encapsulate everything that is queer - or not - about Bond and the director.

Hunt was the one who insisted that Tracy die at the end of this film and not at the beginning of Diamonds Are Forever, despite considerable pressure to avoid a ‘downer’ ending. With Tracy’s death, heteronormativity is taken off the table. Bond gambled - and lost. But it’s what happens next, in the dying moments of the film, that provide the perfectly apt - and heartbreaking - coda.

Lazenby intended to cry when cradling Tracy’s head in his lap but Hunt forbade it, curtly telling him James Bond doesn’t cry. Was Hunt correct to do so? Was he concerned that Bond would be seen as less masculine? Would people even suspect he might be (as the producers did regarding Lazenby) gay? Was the decision a symptom of the whole toxic ‘real men don’t cry’ British stiff-upper-lip nonsense? Was Hunt being true to the Bond character? Or was he just making the right decision to leave the audience in floods of tears?

Although Bond comes close to being allowed to cry in Licence To KIll, he wouldn’t be allowed to be fully lachrymose until the finale of Skyfall. And although I know that many fans find M’s death affecting, for my money, Mendes made a mistake. I sob uncontrollably at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service - because Bond does not. But when M dies at the end of Skyfall my eyes are dry. Different things make different people cry, of course. But it’s a weird quirk of cinema that having a character cry onscreen can often have the unfortunate effect of preventing the audience from doing so.

Hunt insisting that Bond repress his feelings is what makes On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s ending so impactful. Although we are sad that the wonderful, vivacious Tracy is dead, the tragedy is mostly Bond’s: he will always end up alone, and he’s going to have to find some way to live with that.

Friends of 00-Dorothy: 007’s Allies

We see M’s domestic situation for the first and only (until Casino Royale) time. He’s living ‘the confirmed bachelor’ lifestyle, alone apart from his manservant/butler Hammond and a large collection of dead butterflies and moths. The green velvet jacket accessorised with a yellow cravat is a fabulous style statement, a departure from his usual blacks and greys. What’s not changed is his antipathy to Bond’s “personal problems”, especially if the ‘problem’ is a woman.

With M unwilling to deploy government resources to rescue Tracy, Bond is forced to turn to his future father-in-law, Marc-Ange Draco. A father figure akin to From Russia With Love’s Kerim Bey, organised crime boss turned semi-legitimate businessman Draco is more obviously involved in murker activities. His dead wife’s photograph is shown on a table and he enjoys ‘playing chess’ (out of wedlock) with Olympe, his substantially younger assistant.

Moneypenny and Bond continue their usual game of chess outside M’s office but, as ever, neither seem very willing to make a move. Bond’s invitation to “Cocktails at mine, eight ish, just the two of us” meets with resistance from Moneypenny: “I’d adore that. If only I could trust myself.” When Moneypenny saves him from having his resignation accepted he asks “What would I do without you?” She replies: “My problem is that you never do anything with me.” Stalemate or checkmate?

As the film opens, Q is trying his best to interest M in radioactive lint, signalling to the audience that this won’t be a film that relies on gadgets (in contrast to the gadgetry-obsessed You Only Live Twice). To complete the mission, Bond will have to rely on his wits, his fists and other parts of his anatomy (especially when he gets to Piz Gloria). As he says to Q at the wedding: “This time I have the gadgets and I know how to use them.”

Shady characters: Villains

Before we meet Blofeld, Grunther takes Bond for a medical examination which happens off screen. Bond doesn’t sound especially happily at being manhandled by the burly henchman. So there’s that.

Aside from living up a mountain with only nubile young ladies as company, none of which he goes anywhere near, Blofeld is TOTALLY STRAIGHT. Ahem. In the novels, Fleming made Blofeld asexual, and some of this comes across in the films, although this is complicated somewhat by Blofeld succumbing to Tracy’s charms a little too easily after she had bad-mouthed him in the previous scene.

Blofeld’s plan is kind of gay: threatening to bring down an epidemic of sterility on all animal and plant life on Earth. When Bond suggests he might let it go as far as expanding the plan to include humans, Blofeld doesn’t preclude the possibility should his demands not be met. In other words, he has it in for the breeders. And what price must the world pay to stay fertile? Pardon his crimes and recognise his title. So basically, he feels inferior. Yup: pretty gay.

As Dr Lisa Funnell has observed, Irma Bunt is not the first female villain to be lesbian-coded. Rosa Klebb had a similar appearance and demeanour. In Women On Screen, Funnell says both characters “pose an overt challenge to Bond’s (hetero)sexual potency”. This is rendered rather more explicitly in Bunt’s case when she poses as Ruby to entrap Bond and blow his cover. Funnell also notes that it’s “interesting” that it’s Bunt who kills Tracy and not Blofeld, even though Blofeld has recovered from his injuries sufficiently to be able to drive. Does Bunt aim at Tracy on purpose? Is she jealous of Bond and Tracy’s heteronormative happiness?

You go gurls!

Tracy and Bond are well-matched. She’s not the first girl to appeal to Bond’s saviour complex, but she is, in his eyes, the most deserving. Perhaps because she is the least ‘girly’ girl imaginable.

On the immaculately-dressed, perfectly-coiffed surface, she’s the fragile, feminine one. She starts the film by attempting suicide, albeit after demonstrating a dexterity behind the wheel which first piques Bond’s interest (a classic Fleming device). When Bond first sees her in full, walking into the surf, the camera snakes down her glittery-dressed body. Although apparently an unambiguous example of ‘male gaze’, this time the director isn’t a heterosexual male. Employing a device that will later be adopted by Lee Tamahori in Die Another Day (Jinx walking out of the ocean, seen through Bond’s binoculars), the director distances himself from the gaze on a beautiful woman by making it clear that this is Bond’s point of view. In this case, we first see Tracy through Bond’s rifle sight.

Bond literally has a woman in his sights. So far, so typical. But the scene ends with the girl getting away, not just from the heavies but also from her saviour.

Bond saves Tracy again, at the casino table. But as we get to know Tracy, it’s Bond who is increasingly positioned as the fragile, needy, stereotypically feminine half of the couple. She first gets the upper hand by holding him at gunpoint in his hotel room and, although Bond slaps her, she makes it clear that he has no power over her. She’s the one who leaves him after their first sexual encounter, the casino plaques left in his drawer it clear to him there were definitely ‘no strings attached’. Bond is left visibly disquieted - and intrigued.

A significant difference with Tracy and earlier girls is we get more of her life beyond Bond. At her father’s birthday party, the film breaks away from Bond’s point of view and we see Draco’s matchmaking plot from her perspective.

Before the scene segues neatly into the un-Bond-like (but wonderful) We Have All The Time In The World montage, we have a series of cutaways showing the bullfighters being gored by their beasts, an apt metaphor for the puncturing of Bond’s overbearing masculinity that is necessary before Tracy can fall in love with him, and him with her.

Tracy and Bond have to separate, with Bond promising he will “catch up” with her after his “appointment”. Tracy is unconcerned at his lack of specificity: “The story of our life, James?”. Bond’s reply (“Just keep my martini cool”) could position Tracy as a 1960s housewife but it’s clear from Rigg’s performance that she won’t be waiting by the cocktail cabinet for Bond to get home after a hard day at the office.

When Tracy does reappear on the scene, the typical gender roles are completely reversed. In the nick of time, she saves Bond and does it in the best way possible to appeal to a petrolhead: by out-driving the enemy. The proposal follows shortly thereafter.

During the celebrated ski chase, Tracy shows herself to be supremely capable on the slopes, jumping off a rooftop and landing perfectly, earning even more of Bond’s approval (“Good girl”).

Tracy says she is no “saint”, but in Bond’s eyes (and ours) she can do no wrong.

Even when Tracy is captured by Blofeld, she resents having to play the damsel. Realising that a frontal assault on Blofeld will have to wait, Tracy employs subterfuge. She distracts him from the impending attack from her father and Bond by appealing to his ego, quoting poetry which paints him as the “master of the world”. The badinage between Tracy and Blofeld is one of the highlights of the film, principally because we know that Tracy has everything under control despite appearances to the contrary. It’s the classic ‘villain seduces Bond’ scene but in reverse - with the future Mrs Bond in the position of power.

The sequence was given added spice by Simon Raven, a friend of director Hunt who was brought onto the film late into production to provide “additional dialogue”. Raven did not bother to hide his homosexuality. His first published novel was about a romance between soldiers in the British army. Like Bond, he was thrown out of boarding school for sexual behaviour deemed to be inappropriate, although in Raven’s case it was sex with his male classmates and not, as in Bond’s, with one of the boy’s maids.

I always hate it when commentators assume that writers can only write characters effectively who match their own gender identity or sexual orientation. Daniel Craig was justifiably furious when an interviewer insinuated Phoebe Waller-Bridge was brought onto No Time To Die with the sole intention of making the female characters more rounded. Similarly, we cannot say gay men have a special insight into the female psyche, although throughout cinema history many critics have. More than anything, Raven’s contributions seem to have brought a more literary quality to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Diana Rigg delivers the lines with an elegance that is only matched by her ferocity in the fight with henchman Grunther in the next scene, as well as resisting her own father in an attempt to rescue Bond (again).

In the final scenes, Tracy is perfectly content: “Whatever happens, there’ll be no regrets.” Although she and Bond speak of their wedding gift to each other being children, it’s hard to imagine that Tracy would ever be reduced to being a mere baby-making machine. Even so, in narrative terms, equilibrium has been achieved. Tracy’s story starts with her being out of balance. She is literally about to end it all. Through Bond, she has achieved balance. Most popular narratives do this, either by coupling up a character or killing them off. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service does both.

Seconds before her death she thanks Bond for the best present she could have: “a future”. And then it is cruelly taken away from her.

In short, Tracy is the ultimate woman for Bond, in large part because she’s as capable as a man. She’s at least his equal and may even be better than him in some respects. No wonder she has to die.

As explored in the analysis of Bond himself above, he’s hardly monogamous in this film. But getting to know (in the biblical sense) Blofeld’s Angels of Death is, handily, part of the mission. The standout is Ruby Bartlett from Morecambe Bay, hardly a million miles away from where For Your Eyes Only’s Countess Lisl grew up (Bond screenwriter rule of thumb: endear us to a Bond girl with limited screen time by making her originate from the north of England). There’s nothing queer about Ruby or the eleven other girls, aside from the whole part where they’re being hypnotised to be sleeper agents of death to all plant and animal life on earth. Yes, that part. A bit like an evil version of Charlie’s Angels but more brainwashy. Maybe this should have gone under ‘camp’.

Camp (as Dr. Christmas Jones)

Five years before the release of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, In her seminal essay Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag declared that camp is “art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously”. Bond’s breaking of the fourth wall before the pre-titles definitely meets this description. A far subtler (and easy to miss) moment happens in the first shot of the film. On the DVD commentary, Hunt reveals that the man reflected in the Universal Exports sign is himself. It’s a subtle Hitchcock-like cameo, the director putting his auteur stamp on the film.

Although there are no lyrics to the title ‘song’ there are actually two songs in the film. Louis Armstrong’s gorgeous performance of We Have All The Time In The World soundtracks the falling-in-love montage. But there’s also the twee-in-the-extreme Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? which is used throughout the crowd scenes in Switzerland diegetically (I.E. in the scene rather than over the top of it). It’s a nauseating pastiche of Christmas tunes, used particularly effectively when Bond is trying to escape Bunt and her men. The saccharine-sweetness operates contrapuntally (against the on screen action), heightening Bond’s feelings of helplessness and isolation from the world around him. The child chorus sings “most of all, they need love” just as Tracy arrives to save him.

At the risk of sounding rampantly stereotypical, there is even more than the usual attention paid to the ‘look’ of this film. Some of the costume choices are ostentatious, exaggerating popular styles of the time. Personal favourites: Lazenby’s ruffled shirt and Diana Rigg’s Piz Gloria coat. And whoever decided to paint that casino purple should have been Oscar nominated.

For the first (and only) time, Bond enters the opening title sequence holding a pair of women’s shoes. We don’t find out what happens to them afterwards. Does he intend to keep them at the back of his closet and only get them out for special occasions?

When Draco’s henchmen kidnap Bond on his way to a golf match, he tries to defuse the tension by asking them “Perhaps we could make up a foursome?” which is definitely not par for the usual Bond course.

Queer verdict: 004 (out of a possible 007)

In many ways, a contrast with the five films that came before. But just as Lazenby’s Bond contrasts with Connery’s, they’re still essentially the same character. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service IS undeniably different, as its ‘gay’ director intended it to be. But the outcome is the same: don’t look for heteronormative happiness here. The big difference this time is we desperately want for Bond what many of us want for ourselves, regardless of our sexual orientation or gender identity: to find someone to love.

Queer re-view: On Her Majesty's Secret Service