The ending to On her Majesty’s Secret Service is brutal. However many times I’ve seen it, it always hits me like a punch in the gut every time I see it.
I guess that’s what she gets for leaving John Steed and running off to be a Bond Girl. Cathy Gale did the same thing, but somehow, it ended better for her, even though, in the Bond world, she started out as a villain.
When I saw SPECTRE for the first time, I was certain, as it got to the end, that it was going to end the same way as On her Majesty’s Secret Service, but it didn’t. I guess they saved that for a whole other movie, No Time To Die.
Of all the actors who have played the role, I think Brosnan was by far the best suited to the role, but his time came when they seemed to be rather badly scraping the barrel for good James Bond story lines.
Dalton, rather the opposite. I think he’s the actor, of those who ever played the role, who was least suited to it. In The Living Daylights, I got the impression that he couldn’t decide whether he was supposed to be playing Sean Connery or Roger Moore, and that he alternated between rather poor impressions of each. I think License To Kill is my favorite of all the movies, and Dalton did much better in it; perhaps because the movie put the character in so different a situation than in previous movies, that Dalton couldn’t look to his predecessors for examples on how to play the character in that situation, and was forced to put his own take on the character. Not the cold professional played by Sean Connery, nor the wisecracking buffoon of Roger Moore, this was an angry, vengeful James Bond, with no other purpose than to avenge the maiming of his best friend, and the murder of that friend’s new wife. It almost seems to me, thinking of it now, that this is almost the movie that they should have made after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with him out to avenge the murder of his own wife. As it was, his efforts to avenge Tracy ended up taking place around his professional duties, repeatedly running into and trying to kill Blofeld, and not succeeding until several movies later.
I know that’s not the case for me. My last name is not a very common one but neither is it unheard of. I’ve actually met two others with the same name as me as well as that of my brother, thanks to my father creating a family association and organizing reunions. There was a kind-of-famous plane builder in early 1900s with my name, there’s a cheese brand using my name and there was the main character in a movie with my name (never seen it however).
I’m not sure how Asimov would know for sure. It would be easier today I suppose to find out. What works in his favor is a foreign name, he was born in Russia.
We had Belgian friends in my family growing up. They said their last name is found only in Belgium. I asked a Belgian I met about it and he didn’t seem so sure nor have heard the name before. I meet people of all cultures all the time and often their name is new to me and may seem unusual but probably not in their country of origin. To say it’s unique in a country, maybe, but hard to prove. In the world, much less likely. In history, even less so.
Keeping with the subject of the thread, Tom Lehrer is 95. Sorry to hear about Peter Schikele’s passing, I have a record of him but never knew or checked if he was still alive.
He had a family so he knew several people with the same surname. His claim was that he was the only person in the world with his combination of first and last name.
If it’s not true, take it up with Isaac Asimov not me. Except he died in 1992.
Well, I know for a fact that Albert Brooks was not the only guy in the country with his name, for at least the first seven or eight years of his life. And that other guy, some of us have heard of him.
I assumed that you were quoting Asimov as saying that he was the only person in the U.S. with the last name Asimov. That’s not the case. He says that his father spelled the name as Asimov when he emigrated to the U.S. from Russia. His father didn’t know that much about the Latin alphabet as opposed to the Cyrillic alphabet. He says that most other people who had the same name when they emigrated to the U.S. spelled the name as Azimov since that’s closer to the pronunciation of it. That’s why there are now more people in the world who spell it as Azimov than who spell it as Asimov.
If what he was saying was that he was the only person in the U.S. with the first and last names Isaac Asimov, that’s probably true, but I don’t know how to check that. Incidentally, I don’t know how many living relatives he has in the U.S. Both of his wives are now dead. He had two children, Robyn and David. Robyn is alive. I don’t know about David. Did either of them get married or have children? He had a brother Stanley who is now dead. Stanley had three children, one of whom is named Eric. Eric has two children. That’s all I’ve been able to figure out from my search.
That’s what I remember from the third volume of his autobiography too. That and some websites I’ve searched through say that it appears that both Asimov and his son were what’s now thought of as being on the autism spectrum. It wasn’t called that back in those days though. Asimov thought that he and his son had the same psychological problems that made it difficult for them to interact with other people. Asimov was smart enough that he could get around those problems. His son wasn’t. That’s why he set up the trust fund for his son.
