an ongoing series by Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins

JAMES BOND ON PIZ GLORIA

Essay and Photographs by Walter Cummins

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) is one of the sillier James Bond movies. I can’t say it’s the silliest because I’ve only seen a handful, but this one makes little sense in plot continuity and character consistency. Mainly, it seems an excuse for long downhill ski and bobsled pursuits, car chases, explosions, glamorous ladies and locales, Bond lechery, the mowing down of bad guys in drab uniforms, and campy acting. George Lazenby, in his single appearance as Bond, demonstrates that he is no Sean Connery, the Bond archetype he had the misfortune of replacing. One feature that makes the film palatable is a young Diana Rigg, fresh from her leather-clad, martial arts-mastery as Emma Peel in The Avengers. Her character in the movie, the Contessa Teresa "Tracy" di Vicenzo, is no Mrs. Peel, with a baffling shift from an initially weltschmerz-ridden rich heiress who disdains Bond and to one who falls madly in love with him. Still, her presence does decorate the screen.

But the primary visual attraction of the film is its principal setting of Piz Gloria atop the Schilthorn peak that towers above the village of Mürren in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland. Of course, that judgment may be a personal bias because I’ve taken the cable car ascent to Piz Gloria several times and find great exhilaration in revisiting via the screen. But then Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Albert Saltzman, who produced the first group of Bond movies, wouldn’t have chosen the locale if they

hadn’t believed their audience would share my pleasure at being transported to such a height. While they invested millions for that view, I spent just a few Swiss francs for the gondola fare.
      The name of the mountaintop structure, Piz Gloria, is inappropriate for its Bernese Alps location. Piz means peak in the Romansch language that’s spoken by some 36,000 Swiss, predominately in the canton of Grisons, a distance away. Though used by less than one percent of the country’s population, Romansch is one of Switzerland’s four official languages, along with a version of German called Schweizerdeutsch, French, and Italian. The Ian Fleming novel on which the film is based was supposed to have centered in St. Moritz, in the Romansch-speaking region where Piz would have been an appropriate term. Probably, only someone with the mind of a pedant would care about the misplaced nomenclature.
      Certainly, the present owners of Piz Gloria in the Schweizerdeutsch-speaking Bernese Alps don’t. Piz Gloria, soon after the movie was made, became a multilevel structure with facilities for skiers to leave equipment while they visit rest rooms, gift shops, and what until recently had been the world’s highest rotating restaurant. The pace of that rotation is minimal, and a diner barely feels the continuous circling through a panorama of peaks.

View from Piz Gloria on a clear day

      The first time I made the ascent everything was enveloped in gray cloud, and—severely disappointed—we turned around and came right down. Another time the winds were so fierce it was painful to stand outside on the deck. On yet another the brilliant blue sky offered perfect visibility. Mountains and more mountains as far as the eye could see, and I have the photos to prove it. The most recent visit, just weeks ago, turned out to be a tease, with dense cloud cover at a cable car transfer stop called Birg that figures often in the movie; but rising to the restaurant level, we found peak after peak penetrating the clouds, conjuring an otherworldly transcendence.

Piz Gloria above the clouds

Probably the real reason the owners kept the name Piz Gloria was their ongoing flaunting of the place’s role in the Bond film, despite the decades since its release and the fact that few of today’s visitors are likely to have seen it. Yet people buy into the hype, frequenting the Bond exhibition gift shop to explore memorabilia and film clips, and posing on a deck with either of a pair of two-dimensional cutouts of Lazenby as Bond, a pistol in his hand. My own wife was

one of the posers, perhaps made giddy by the altitude.
      Today’s Piz Gloria does owe a more tangible debt to the film’s makers. The location scouts of the time discovered the place when it was still under construction, probably deciding that a glass-walled facility at a dominating height amid thick snow and accessible only by cable car was exactly what they were looking for. But the facility was still under construction. So the production team contributed to the cost of completion for exclusive use while filming. A win-win for the movie and the restaurant.
      In that temporary Bond world, a mad scientist named Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, played by a leering Telly Savalas, uses the facility to hypnotize a cadre of beautiful young woman to serve as unknowing agents capable of releasing biological agents that will destroy the world’s agriculture at his signal. Blofeld uses this threat to extract a huge ransom and to have himself recognized as an aristocrat called Count de Bleuchamp. Even with his extreme wealth and villainy he appears to have serious ego issues.
      Despite all the busyness of staged adventure, I consider On Her Majesty’s Secret Service static, finding much greater thrills in watching expert skiers swoop down the Schilthorn as they navigate hairpin curves, where a miscalculation would mean a steep plunge. That’s serious danger.
      George Lazenby did go on to a long acting career in less prominent roles, but roles more suited for his abilities. Diana Rigg, of course, enjoys great acclaim for her many stage and television performances. In 1994, she was named Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg, DBE. Unlike the evil but hapless Blofeld, Dame Diana did advance from playing a contessa to achieving a real-life title. It seems a number of people associated with the film went on to success. But anyone with the price of plane fare to the Swiss Alps and a cable car ticket can enjoy transformative rewards by ascending to what seems the top of the world and gazing out at a wondrous landscape of mountains.