I enjoyed him and the performance, but I know Donald Pleasence better as an actor. A lot of things I enjoy better in YOLT, but that’s just me. Ironically, Richard Maibaum said that he felt Largo was miscast. Typical Maibaum, criticizing others.
Typical of all of us, wouldn’t you say?
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No, we only criticizing Purvis and Wade.
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Yeah… that.
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I thought the consensus was it was Pleasance who was miscast. Up until YOLT we only saw ESB in silhouette, or as a voice from off screen, and that voice was deep and spooky. When we finally see Pleasance, Blofeld turns out to be small and slight with a high-pitched voice. Next to Renard, he’s probably the least physically imposing of all the Bond villains. The “dueling scar” is an obvious attempt to make him seem more threatening, but it’s equally likely to just further accentuate his fragility next to hulking, macho Connery.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Pleasance in a lot of things, and his Blofeld is kitschy fun in his way, but his casting was totally from left field and 100% counter-intuitive.
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On the other hand… there is something very strange, maybe even disturbing and alarming about Pleasance’s Blofeld, the way he looks, moves and talks, he almost seems to have something otherworldly about him.
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That’s what I like about DP’s Blofeld. His mysterious character is arguably what makes him great.
As for the three writers, EON has at times overused them. Maibaum thought he was the only person who could write Bond, when he had so much Fleming to work with. As with Purvis and Wade, it seems they always find a way for Bond to leave MI6. It’s getting old. But P & W are at least respectful of the people they work with. Maibaum always seemed to have criticism of someone, never himself, though. I lose respect for someone who does that constantly, like he did.
Wow, you knew Maibaum personally?
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What’s the mystery? How he got the scar? (I think the cat did it. Or maybe a Flowbee malfunction) How a little bald nebbish maintains a reign of terror over some of the most imposing killers in the world? Where he shops for Nehru jackets?
IMHO the unveiling of Blofeld in YOLT was the end of mystery: now we had a face where before we had only a voice, and frankly any reveal would run the risk of being a letdown. In my case maybe it was more of a letdown than it was for others. I was left to wonder if that cool voice from the earlier films was the result of Pleasance-Blofeld using an electronic filter. Kind of like the Star Trek episode where the scary monster version of Balok turns out to be merely a front for a 7-year old Clint Howard.
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Not personally. I feel that he definitely made his presence known with his viewpoints, not just his writing. Even now, he feels like a SPECTRE 
of the series, (in a good way 
he is missed at times).
So you assume and judge - that’s very internet of you.
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As a kid I was very surprised how much YOLT-Blofeld grew and became so cool one film later.
And the plastic surgery, man.
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That, my friend, is movie magic!
To be fair to MaxZorin - what he said about Maibaum has plenty to back it up.
For instance he did a long interview with Starlog in 1983 where he eviscerates a lot of the Bond folks.
He thought the lines he wrote were perfect but the actors didn’t deliver them well making his writing look bad (Adolfo Celi was mentioned)… his draft of the script was perfect but then they brought in other writers (Mankiewicz and Wood were mentioned) and they screwed it up… he said he had dialog as good as “From Russia with Love” but Roger Moore re-wrote them making his movies worse…
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It should be remembered Maibaum wanted Dr No to be a monkey and tried to write another chimp into OHMSS. And he proposed introducing Goldfinger’s twin brother as the villain in DAF (his dialog would have included explaining that Auric “always was a bit retarded.”). So Maimbaum was as fallible as anyone else, maybe more so. But I tend not to put much stock in what anyone says in interviews, otherwise I might mind Cubby claiming to have “discovered” performers who already had careers before he hired them,or claiming the latest Bond girl character was not the typical bimbo, when she was probably a bigger one than the last. That’s just producer talk, and Maibaum engaged in writer talk (“If I wrote it, it’s great, if someone else wrote it, I could’ve done it better, and if my lines don’t work it’s the fault of the actor”). It’s more a matter of the job title than a personal failing, to me. You need a certain degree of hubris to succeed in the biz.
As far as Pleasance getting “cooler” the next time around, maybe the real explanation for that scar was that he was a Charles Gray clone that had the mud baths go terribly wrong…
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Thank you, that’s the main interview that I was referring to. He wasn’t really much of a team player, it seems. There’s a interview or two on here where he shows pure evidence by saying he was the best. While he was more or less right about that, he had possibly the worst ego in the history of the Bond series, surpassing George Lazenby. Who he ripped apart while praising his own script. Most OHMSS comes from Fleming’s novel, Mr. Full-Of-Yourself.
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That’s the right thing to do.
We all have our grievances, and especially writers do not often get the chance to be interviewed, so venting will get blown out of proportion.
Fact is: every one involved will have been angry about creative differences. Maibaum was a team player, otherwise he would not have been called back again and again to work. Were all of his ideas brilliant? Of course not, nobody’s are. Do the outrageous ones get extra attention in the press? Definitely.
Interviews for promotion will NEVER get the truth out. Reading them is more for entertainment.
So, Max, please keep that in mind when you accuse Mr.Maibaum who was an essential part of the team which gave you so much pleasure.
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I know, he did. I’m willing to close this conversation on a positive note. Richard Maibaum helped give us the humor (without overdoing it), as later films did. He used Fleming well. He might have had some strong opinions on others and their viewpoints of his work. However, we all see things differently. That’s the fun of being a James Bond fan. At least, he (and presumably most of the other writers) don’t have these dishonors.
https://www.cbr.com/zak-whedon-on-joss-whedon-the-avengers/
https://www.cbr.com/kevin-feige-two-names-not-work-with-again/
Doesn’t surprise me. Both of their careers are done, due to their difficulties. Sadly, the MCU is still copying Whedon’s writing with trying to write poor, quippy one-liner humor. Joss Whedon doesn’t practice what he preaches.
While we don’t like waiting for new Bond material, at least Bond isn’t as overexposed at this point as the MCU. That’s my shocking Bond confession of the day. At least we have breathing space with James Bond.
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I learned this lesson early on as a young comic book fan. At some point I discovered The Comics Journal and thought, “Wow, a whole magazine where people talk about comics! This is for me!” Then I read a few issues and realized no it wasn’t, because all it featured are interviews with writers talking about what backstabbing, soul-killing louses editors are, editors talking about what arrogant, talentless prima-donnas writers are and artists putting both of them down, before each group turned inward to attack its own members, air gripes and settle old scores. Each interviewee was of course the only person to know the right way to do comics, struggling valiantly in a field otherwise uniformly populated by hacks and morons.
For similar reasons I learned to avoid interviews with cast members of the original Star Trek who seemed to live their entire lives in bitter resentment of fellow performers (or more likely, learned that airing that dirty laundry and maybe even exaggerating it was what it took to keep the press knocking on their doors even years after their careers were essentially over). It can be hard enjoying “entertainment” when you know too much about what went on behind the scenes, and hard staying a fan of folks who stoop to dragging their personal relationship failures into the media limelight to score a petty point or two.
Maybe that’s another reason I love Roger as much as I do. I’m sure there were folks he didn’t get along with, but he kept it to himself and continued to be a positive voice for the franchise long after he had to. Maybe that’s because was a genuinely positive person or maybe because he understood that while vindictive gossip and dirt-dishing is technically a form of “entertainment,” it’s ultimately a destructive one with no future. Although Grace Jones apparently pushed him to his limits…
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Perfect post.
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