Peter Hunt died the other day. Sitting in the small café where I sometimes end up having lunch with friends, across from two writers of some note, I mentioned this man's passing only to be greeted with a momentary glaze of non-recognition.

"Peter Hunt?"

I waited for a moment, hoping to see that glimmer of remembrance, but it was not forthcoming. Then, I mentioned On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Suddenly the table lit up. Stories, recollections, memories of who we were that many years ago, where we were when we first saw the film, tales of how hard it was to actually see the film since almost everywhere on earth it seems to have come and gone in the scheme of things like a flower blooms.

"He directed that?"

Yes. Peter Hunt directed that. He did a few films after that, but his later work never really approached his debut effort, but one has to reason that he had been editing the series since the beginning and truly had the feel for the character that made OHMSS what it is.

Hunt had a style, especially as an editor, that we have come to call the James Bond style. It defined the series, and in doing so, defined the term "action" for the last forty years. Hunt's quick cuts far outpaced the earlier action films of the '50s that seemed to suffice before Dr. No and especially From Russia With Love kicked things into high gear. To this day, his handling of the train fight on the Orient Express is looked upon in film classes as one of the all time great cutting jobs. Peter Hunt 1928 - 2002

Yet, as a director, Hunt's best work is most appropriately OHMSS. Hunt managed to take a first time actor and turn him into the world's number one action hero in one film. Lazenby for years complained that Hunt had left him alone, that he had been given very little in terms of direction. Hunt, on the other hand, claimed that he felt Lazenby needed to be left alone, that the only way he could get a natural performance from the first time actor was to let him go off on his own.

As to the film itself, OHMSS suffered from being the first non-Connery Bond (CR here omitted for clarity's sake) and from following the barely tenable You Only Live Twice. YOLT had been the first in the series to completely forsake Ian Fleming's source material for a science fiction plot that Fleming would have happily run scared from. Yet, the film did well at the box office although the producers did damn Feldman's Casino Royale as cutting into their profits. A change was necessary to continue the series. What kind of change? Well, that would come with Diamonds Are Forever, the introduction of humor over character and plot. But with the production of OHMSS, the producers tried taking a step back AND a step forward. They attempted to return to Fleming's material, always a good move in this author's opinion and a tried and true method of returning their audience to the theatres. But the step forward was an awkward one, the decision to film the best of Fleming's later work as is, with it's (at the time) surprise ending intact.

Marry off James Bond? Definitely. Kill his wife? Hhmm. But the decision was made. And it was the right one.

Hunt's visual style encompassed everything he had learned in his previous profession as editor. Witness the train fight in FRWL. Now place the same criteria into play on, say, a beach in France. It wouldn't work. So Hunt, knowing how he wanted things to look played with time. The cuts on the beach fight are quick, somewhat staccato, but nonetheless give the fight scene an impetus that leads us in a very short time from the introduction of a new James Bond into the heart of a storyline that for once held true through the whole film.

As a director, Hunt was working from one of Richard Maibaum's best efforts, but there are nuances he gets from the actors, including Lazenby, that are among the best of the series. While Hunt complained bitterly that Lazenby worked too damn hard to walk with his shoulders rather than his legs (best observed as Bond makes his way into the Casino before re-meeting Tracy early in the film), he knew the actor was more comfortable with the physical, therefore gave him larger, broader actions which he could pull off rather than delicate touches, which Lazenby obviously had difficulty with.

Why did the series continue without him? Simple. Economics led to Hunt's dismissal from the director's chair. OHMSS, while making a bit of money didn't come close to the blockbuster status that the film deserved. Critics were more than unkind, yet if you read their initial reviews, they're almost invariably bitching about Connery not being in the film rather than the film itself. Something to keep in mind.

As we ended lunch and prepared to go our separate ways, one of my colleagues turned and asked me which was my favorite Bond film. I paused. For me, there are only three Bond films that transcend their genre. Terence Young's FRWL, which is one of the essential thrillers of our time, easily on a par with Hitchcock, Goldfinger, pure escapism disguised as a spy film, and lastly, Hunt's OHMSS, which took everything Bond and pushed it over the edge into epic storytelling and tragedy.

Peter Hunt will always be remembered for his editing, for his direction, for giving us a film of memorable consequence. As an interpretive artist, he gave his best as his first, and we should all be thankful that he did.