10 Worst Things James Bond Has Ever Done
4. Breaking The Fourth Wall
The equally maligned and beloved On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) brought the first non-Connery 007 to our screens in the form of George Lazenby doing his very best, sometimes-kilted, ill-fated Sean Connery impression.
Whatever else this film and its leading man get wrong, the biggest transgression of all occurs in the opening sequence. Bond partakes in the usual rigmarole of saving the heroine and trading blows with gun-wielding henchmen, before delivering a pithy and terribly misjudged "This never happened to the other fellow" and looking straight down the barrel of the camera!
Does this mean... James Bond is self-aware? Does he know that he's a fictional character? Or that he's an actor replacing another actor?
Worse still, what does he make of us?
If Bond is indeed aware of the audience, a whole cannery of worms is opened, presenting issues that, frankly, the series never even attempts to address - not least of all Bond's often openly abhorrent behaviour.
Rather than packing this away as an unfortunate misstep in the vein of the original Casino Royale, (producers) Broccoli and Saltzman decided to canonise this outing with references to the film's events in subsequent releases, meaning Bond will always exist with one foot in our reality...