That all changed in OHMSS: for one thing, we meet Contessa Teresa “Tracy” di Vicenzo right in the opening scene of the movie where Bond does indeed stop her from drowning herself. But their blossoming romance, initially transactional in nature, before becoming real, is one of the two main narratives of the film, and Tracy herself is the most complex female Bond character seen up to that point (and arguably, since, although Casino Royale’s Vesper Lind comes close). She’s also quite capable of taking care of herself, can handle the wheel in a car chase, and even saves Bond’s ass at one point. Tracy is a fully-realized character, which makes her ultimate fate even more distressing.
Do We Know Each Other?
Technically we first met 007’s arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld in From Russia with Love, but we only heard his voice and saw part of his body, which was the same way he was presented two films later in Thunderball. We (and Bond) only met the head of SPECTRE face to face for the first time in You Only Live Twice, where he was the movie’s primary villain and played by Donald Pleasance. OHMSS was the first 007 movie to carry over the same central enemy from the previous film, with Blofeld once again front and center, only this time played by Telly Savalas.
This made for some bizarre continuity problems in OHMSS. For example, even though they met just one movie before, Blofeld doesn’t recognize Bond at first because he’s wearing glasses and a kilt (posing as Sir Hilary Bray). Aside from his bald pate, Blofeld himself obviously looks and sounds completely different; at least there’s actually precedent for that in the books, where Fleming alludes to the master criminal using plastic surgery to change his appearance (which would also explain why he’s played by Charles Gray in the next film, Diamonds are Forever). In any case, OHMSS marked the first time that 007 faced the same nemesis twice in a row, which wouldn’t happen again until yet another iteration of Blofeld (played by Christoph Waltz) showed up in Spectre and No Time to Die.
Boys with Their Toys
Each of the first five Bond films was bigger in scope than the one before it, culminating with You Only Live Twice, in which the villain launches a spacecraft from a base hidden inside a volcano to capture American and Russian manned rockets and start a world war. Following that, and coupled with the fact that it was going to introduce a new James Bond, OHMSS acted as a “reset” of sorts; the gadgets were reined in, the oversized sets and vehicles were set aside, and while Blofeld’s plan still had global implications, it was designed to be enacted by sleeper agents and not spaceships or nuclear missiles.
Since then, every six or eight films, the franchise regroups in the same way. Following Moonraker, another (rather silly) space-based spectacle, there came For Your Eyes Only, still one of the most grounded and “realistic” installments in the series. After the antics of Pierce Brosnan’s farewell in Die Another Day, which featured an ice palace, lasers, and most infamously, an invisible car, the series rebooted with Casino Royale, perhaps the grittiest 007 film since From Russia with Love. The Craig era ended in No Time to Die with the villain hiding out on yet another secret island and unleashing a nanobot weapon that targets people’s DNA, so perhaps the next Bond will debut with an OHMSS-style reset as well.
Hitting the Slopes
While the five previous 007 movies had traveled to various exotic locales, ranging from Jamaica to Istanbul to Japan to, uh, Lexington, Kentucky, OHMSS was the first Bond film set in the wintry Swiss Alps, and the first in the series to feature a chase sequence on skis, a tradition that would continue in later films like The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights, and The World is Not Enough (Spectre also featured a chase down a snowy slope with Bond in a plane). Bond on skis became a reliable action trope over the years, and it was this entry that did it first. However, it also arguably did it best with Lazenby’s Bond being genuinely frightened he was outmatched and about to die throughout the chase whereas the other 007s always treat such a sequence as another day at the lodge.
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