If not for “we have all the time in the world” having eight words and not seven, that would obviously be the title for this post to abide by the site’s rules, but alas: this devastating line from the final moments of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service signals one of the most somber and emotionally resonant endings of any Bond movie.  And in my opinion (and I’d hope everyone, really), even more affecting than Bond’s death at the end of No Time To Die.  A personal tragedy on the scale of Tracy’s loss would have offered a far more compelling and thematically consistent ending, especially if the filmmakers had been willing to take the bold step of killing off Madeleine and Mathilde.  It really was a profound missed opportunity.

Returning to OHMSS, I’m also convinced that no other Bond actor could have delivered that final scene with the same raw sincerity and restrained heartbreak as George Lazenby.  For all the debates surrounding his short tenure, his closing performance stands as one of the most powerful moments of any Bond movie.  It’s a tragedy of its own sort that audiences were never given the chance to see Lazenby’s Bond channel that grief into a full-scale revenge story in a second outing.