Montgomery Micawber-Mycroft shares his memories of the classic 1969 adventure film Where Avengers Dare, starring Clint Eastwood and Diana Rigg.
I remember vividly the first time I saw Where Avengers Dare. Ah, 1969. I was a callow youth of 16. I had just left school to start as a runner at Pinewood, and I was quite feverish when I strolled into the cinema in Leicester Square late that summer night.
Eastwood was an unusual choice for 007, but perhaps it made sense given the recasting of Blofeld with his fellow American Telly Savalas. The presence of the Nazis in their pomp in a Bond film puzzled audiences at the time, and indeed ever since, which perhaps explains why Sean Connery returned to the role for Diamonds Are Forever two years later, and the Nazis were quietly dropped. But despite the elements which don’t make sense there is much to admire here. I’ve always been partial to Matt Monro crooning ‘On Peaks Like These’. Oh, and such drama over the music! John Barry fell out with Eastwood over his wanting a jazz score, Quincy Jones stepped in, but then Diana Rigg hired Ron Goodwin to give a more martial score to her scenes. It’s almost like they’re two films yoked together.
And who can forget the daring opening sequence of a nude Diana Rigg running into the lake at Bregenz? I still marvel at the chutzpah of director Guy Hamilton who got it past the censor by insisting that she was not skinny dipping, her character fully intended to commit suicide, which necessarily removed any element of sexual titillation from the scene. And the censor fell for it! At my screening the entire row in front got a wallop from twenty teenage boys involuntarily kicking a leg out when we realised what was happening. A friend’s older brother, reading Medicine at UCL, muttered that he’d seen slower reflex actions from a patella hammer. But you must not suppose we were without finer sentiments. We all found we had something in our eye when Mary Ure’s WREN officer, brainwashed by the Gestapo, pushed Rigg out of the helicopter at the very end.
Regrettably this was the first Bond film with a ski chase sequence. Roger Moore took that to extremes with his Swiss domicile, of course. I always preferred looking at the Bahamas on a big screen. The famous story of Clint Eastwood cutting entire paragraphs of his dialogue so that he would speak only in haikus had made it to Pinewood as gossip before the film had even wrapped. Especially Telly Savalas laughing and saying “Whatever works, Baby”, and Clint replying “I’ve told you once now/ And will not say again, Tel./Don’t call me ‘Baby.’” That was thanks to workaholic Robert Shaw spilling the beans. He is a very fine 008, or “Blonde Bond” as everyone started referring to him as, but the continuity errors it set up when set next to From Russia with Love still boggle the mind.
There were some very odd films made at the tail-end of the 1960s, but for my money, as confusing as the baffling plot with Blofeld, Nazis, brainwashing, a mountain lair, double agents and Nazi gold is, the vim of it all carries proceedings along admirably.
Talking Movies 