On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Factual error: Of all the characters, major and minor, who ever speak German in Switzerland, not one speaks Swiss German. The accents are very different (Swiss German can be almost incomprehensible to speakers of High German), and there's also different vocabulary. While some of the characters might just be non-Swiss speakers of German, at least the underlings at Piz Gloria should be speaking Schwyzerdeutsch.

Deliberate mistake: Blofeld doesn't recognize James Bond in this film, even though they met face-to-face in the previous movie, "You Only Live Twice." There is a production-related reason for this. Ian Fleming wrote "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" in 1963 (in which Bond and Blofeld met for the first time), and he wrote "You Only Live Twice" in 1964. However, "You Only Live Twice" was adapted for film first (in 1967), and "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" was adapted afterward (in 1969). Because the 1969 film was so faithful to its source material, Blofeld and Bond are basically meeting for the first time... again. The producers were aware of this continuity problem and intended to have James Bond undergo plastic surgery for "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (which would conveniently explain Blofeld not recognizing him, as well as the fact that Sean Connery had been replaced by George Lazenby in the lead role). But the plastic surgery idea was discarded in faithfulness to the novel, resulting in a glaring continuity problem between the 1967 and 1969 films.

Charles Austin Miller

More mistakes in On Her Majesty's Secret Service

James Bond: Moneypenny, what would I do without you?
Moneypenny: My problem is that you never do anything with me.

More quotes from On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Trivia: All of the guards at the clinic on the mountain have the Olympic rings on their orange tracksuit tops.

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Question: When Bond saves Tracey in the beginning and she drives off he comments "This never happened to the other fellow". I know this is a joking reference to Sean Connery, but what is Bond supposed to mean within the context of the film? Connery references aside, why would he be saying this?

Answer: It's an entirely intentional aside to the audience, the one occasion in the entire Bond series where the so-called 'fourth wall' (i.e. the cinema screen itself) is broken. As such, within the context of the film itself, it doesn't really have much of a meaning.

Tailkinker

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