Not my type of Bond film, quite boring and way too long.

George Lazenby took on the mantle from Sean Connery for this "007" outing and I think he did quite a decent job with this, more convoluted story. He takes on the guise of an heraldry expert sent to Switzerland to investigate and validate the claims of lineage of Telly Savalas, purporting to be the "Count de Beauchamps" - defined by lack of ear lobes, don't you know - but who really has plans to use a form of hypnosis to achieve world domination. This film has a bit more class and less innuendo that it's earlier iterations - and Diana Rigg adds a bit of mischief and panache as the boisterous, independently-minded "Tracy" with whom poor old "James" has a pretty torrid time. This story isn't so good, but that isn't Lazenby's fault - indeed I felt that he, Rigg and Savalas tried hard to create a sense of suspense and menace; as did Ilse Steppat as the no-nonsense "Irma Bunt" (is that an anagram?). A great Louis Armstrong song, too - what's not to like - it's a shame that Messrs Broccoli and Saltzman didn't give George another kick at the ball with a better screenplay.

This was the worst Bond movie of the early era. It has nothing to do with Lazenby being Bond. It's just that it was written to be just a depressing piece of trash for the Hollywood formula of the late sixties than went into the eighties. There is little scenery, little action, little to see of the bad guys. Bond is pretty much on his own in a "spy movie" instead of a "Bond movie". Bond is in a complex in a mountain surrounded by snow. If this wasn't the lowest budget ever for a Bond movie, someone was robbed. It is written with "hate", which was the standard of the late sixties through the eighties. As someone born in 1956, this was about all I was exposed to in art, film, TV, theater, religion, everywhere. It was the Hollywood formula, and to see anything else, you literally had to sneak off while everyone else was asleep and see something "not depressing" on your own. There's just too much of this hate in Art. It isn't Art. It's trash. It's also boring.