Post #636149 by Rum Dog on Sat, May 12, 2012 10:45 AM

On 2012-05-09 09:17, JOHN-O wrote:
Rum Dog... less monkey, more Eurospy. More cheesecake !!

I am not going to monkey around with some want-a-be Euro-spy trash. I am going with the real deal, the Bond franchise itself. What I have is the forgotten little step-child in the Bond series. I was fortunate to have viewed this fiasco during my sophomore year in high school.

After The Man with the Golden Gun was met with mixed reviews and lower than expected box-office receipts, Bond producers were in put in a scramble to find someone to salvage the franchise. They looked for someone who was British, who had a big name star power and sex appeal. After a rushed search which involved much panic they thought they had landed the perfect choice. Yes, the one and only Mick Jagger was cast as the martini sipping secret agent in the only unreleased film in the series. The film, For Special Services, performed so poorly with test audiences that Harry Saltzman burned the original footage and left the franchise in disgust to never return. I had the fortunate opportunity to be a member of one of these test audiences and was about the only one in the focus group who thought that the movie was salvageable. I especially liked a scene where Mick turned to the camera, winked, and said “Sometimes I just can’t get no satisfaction.” Everyone in the focus group, myself included, strongly objected to an implied theme of Bond being bisexual. (There was a scene where Jagger and David Bowie were shown in bed together talking). We all preferred Bond as a chauvinistic womanizer.

The film had a disjointed plot that basically had Bond going after Markus Bismaquer (played by William Holden) who was suspected of reviving the criminal organization SPECTRE. It turned out to be his wife who was actually the daughter of Blofeld. The movie ended with her being squeezed to death and eaten by an anaconda. The special effects of the time were not able to pull this off effectively to a realistic level.

I remember much of the movie took place at Bismaquer’s big mansion ranch in Texas where he dabbled in dealing in high end art. Bowie played a scrupulous art dealer. Barbie Benton was absolutely gorgeous as Bismaquer’s daughter Daisy. Dustin Hoffman was brilliant as Felix Leiter in the three minutes or so he was in the film. In the movie’s climax he came to the rescue of his daughter Cedar Leiter (Jean Shrimpton) who was Bond’s female sidekick agent.

I also remember how some in the focus group joked about how this is “Bond meets the Rolling Stones meets the TV shows Dallas and the Dukes of Hazzard” (both popular shows at the time). My buddy, who was also part of this focus group held at the Westminster Mall (CA), made the most stupidest suggestion of them all. He recommendend that Henry Winkler (The Fonz) become James Bond. Right or wrong, Roger Moore returned to the role a year or so later in 1977 in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Trivia Note: The current song, “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 is a surreptitious tribute to Mick’s failed attempt to capture the essence of Bond.