Latmag
September 2011
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House
New Sense of Repose in Quiet Streamline Effects
“ Vistas of inevitable simplicity and ineffable harmonies would open, so beautiful to me that I was not only delighted, but often startled. ”
April 2010
Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief, Chapter 5
Azanian Propaganda
“ It was from the least expected quarter, the tribesmen and villagers, that the real support for Seth’s Birth Control policy suddenly appeared. ”
January 2010
Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom, Pp. 406-7.
Jacob’s Summary
“ The biblical counterpart of Odysseus, Jacob must solve the fundamental human difficulties illustrated in the pre-Abrahamic chapters of Genesis. ”
September 2009
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place, Chapter 1: A Half-Life, p8-9
An Act of Courage and of Daring
“ In that I was a member of the Cabinet, protocol provided that I step out of Air Force One behind the President and ahead of Kissinger, who was also on the journey. Somehow Kissinger invariably reached the ground ahead of me. ”
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (paperback edition), p210-1
A Well-Scrubbed, Cute Little Boy
“ I couldn’t manage to be anywhere near a nun, let alone a pair of them, without a mind awash in my none-too-pure Jewish thoughts. ”
Ian Fleming, Diamonds are Forever
Rue de la Pay
“ It was natural to bring out the small change and jerk the handles and watch the lemons and the oranges and the cherries and the bell fruits whirl round to their final click-pause-ting, followed by a soft mechanical sigh. Five cents, ten cents, a quarter. Bond gave them all a try… ”
May 2005
David Pryce-Jones, “Jews, Arabs, and French Diplomacy: A Special Report”
The Zionists Must Understand
“ The Zionists must understand once and for all that there can be no question of constituting an independent Jewish state in Palestine, or even forming some sovereign Jewish body. ”
September 2003
Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, Chapter 1, General Principles of Expression
Purposeless Remnants of Habitual Movements
“ It is well known that cats dislike wetting their feet, owing, it is probable, to their having aboriginally inhabited the dry country of Egypt; and when they wet their feet they shake them violently. My daughter poured some water into a glass close to the head of a kitten; and it immediately shook its feet in the usual manner; so that here we have an habitual movement falsely excited by an associated sound instead of by the sense of touch. ”
Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in the Balkans
Were it Not for this Protector
“ Not the least annoyance was that given me by the persevering attentions of a mad or fanatic dervish, of most singular appearance as well as conduct. His note of ‘Shaitán‘ was frequently sounded; and as he twirled about, and performed many curious antics, he frequently advanced to me, shaking a long hooked stick, covered with jingling ornaments, in my very face, pointing to the Kawas with menacing looks, as though he would say, “Were it not for this protector you should he annihilated, you infidel!” ”
August 2003
Robert Graves, I, Claudius
Ask Me Anything
“ The drink was as remarkable as the food, and Caligula became so lively as the meal went on that, deprecating his own generosity to Herod in the past as something hardly worth mentioning, he now promised to give him whatever it lay in his power to grant. “Ask me anything, my dearest Herod,” he said, “And it shall be yours.” He repeated: “Absolutely anything. I swear by my own Divinity that I will grant it.” ”
G eorge Lazenby, the second actor to play James Bond for Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, was 25 years old when he entered the modelling profession. An Australian, he had come to England in 1964 after a couple of successful years selling cars in his own country. Tipped off by fashion photographer Chard Jenkins that he could make more money as a model than as a salesman, Lazenby soon progressed from thirty pounds a week selling Mercedes sportscars to five hundred a week modelling orlon fabrics and appearing in advertisements for British Petroleum. On the prompting of his agent, who knew about the search for a new Bond, Lazenby suggested himself for the role to Harry Saltzman, who was impressed by the Australian’s looks and physique.
By April, Broccoli and Saltzman had narrowed the field down to five actors. Besides Lazenby, they were considering John Richardson, who had recently starred alongside Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., and three young English actors, Anthony Rogers, Robert Campbell and Hans de Vries.
Elaborate action tests began in April 1968 when the full crew was assembled. Both producers were already aware that United Artists wanted to see some fighting footage of the Bond applicants. The archetypal Bond fight is spectacular and, although over in seconds, it is generally choreographed like a ballet, with shots of stuntmen and stars intermixed, and edited tightly. His performance in the test fight won Lazenby the role of Bond.
To choreograph the key battle, Peter Hunt hired George Leech, this time as chief of stunts, and the pair picked a sequence from the script where Bond is surprised by a would-be assassin in a hotel bedroom on the Portuguese coast. For the test, Leech asked the former wrestler Un Borienko to double the villain, a Union Corse gunman.
Uri Borienko had little experience in film fighting, and Lazenby had even less. Leech instructed both of them in the basic mechanics. Lazenby was good, physically, Leech remembers, so he could learn how to punch easily enough, but his main problem was learning not to flinch when a punch came his way.
Both producers considered that Lazenby was the perfect replacement. United Artists in New York agreed and plans were immediately finalised to sign up George Lazenby for shooting in the autumn.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the best of Ian Fleming’s later novels, had been postponed as a film project several times since its original publication in 1963. Originally, it was intended to follow Goldfinger, but when Kevin McClory came on the scene in 1964 with his Thunderball project, Secret Service was promptly shelved. When Thunderball was finished, it was felt that Secret Service was too similar (“a Thunderball on skis”) since it took place primarily in the snows of Switzerland.
Yet Secret Service was much more than this. It was an emotional story that revealed more of the world of James Bond. It starts with Bond ready to resign from the Secret Service rather than keep up his frustrating search for the elusive Blofeld. However, with the help of a Union Corse Cap named Marc-Ange Draco, Bond eventually finds the head of SPECTRE in the Alps, where he is plotting germ warfare against the United Kingdom. It is Draco’s daughter though, the ravishing Tracy, who makes this book much more than the average Fleming adventure.
Bond intends to marry Tracy once Blofeld is destroyed. Unlike Bond’s one dimensional girlfriends, Tracy is a fully developed character whose murder by Blofeld in the book’s closing pages leaves the reader distressed.
Once again scriptwriter Richard Maibaum was signed to adapt the story to the screen. Originally, it was planned to open the film in an English hospital where Bond is undergoing plastic surgery to change his face — a strategy designed to outwit his many enemies and to introduce Lazenby. It was an idea that everyone hated immediately and Maibaum was happy to throw it out. The plastic experimentation idea, however, was to resurface at the beginning of the next Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, in which Blofeld creates duplicates of himself to confuse the British.
Maibaum finally decided that Lazenby would be introduced in a normal way, in the new film’s teaser, in which, on the beach in Portugal, he rescues Tracy (Diana Rigg) from the ocean. Concluding the teaser, he added a little humour to ease the transition. After Lazenby disposes of the thugs on the beach, only to find Tracy running off in her car, Lazenby picks up her lost shoe and turns to the camera, saying in perfect seriousness, “This never happened to the other guy.”
Previously
The Great Haters