Friday, February 14, 2014

Clarifying A Famous Bond Film Quote

This post is going to be a little unusual today as it's not book related.  Instead it relates to the film "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and arguably George Lazenby's most famous line as James Bond from that film.

Commonly on the web this line is quoted incorrectly as "This never happened to the other fellow".

When Mr Lazenby was in Australia in 2012 at a Q&A in Melbourne he explained that during pre-production and then when filming commenced for "OHMSS" he felt rightly or wrongly he was being treated differently to the previous Bond actor, Sean Connery.  So he started using this line with the film crew and producers.  And when it came to filming the scene on the beach when Tracy drives off into the sunset despite Bond having just rescued her, Peter Hunt liked the line so much he asked Mr Lazenby to repeat it for the camera.

The thing is, Mr Lazenby is Australian and here in Australia when we used to use the word "fellow" like so many other words in the Aussie language it was abbreviated.  So "fellow" became "fella", and the quote is therefore "This never happened to the other fella".

Pedantic ?  Yes.  But also correct.

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