For most movie fans who remember George Lazenby, it is for his one turn as James Bond in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. By most accounts, including his own, the fledgling actor soon got a bit too big for his britches and abandoned the franchise in search for greater fortunes playing characters he felt weren’t about to become outmoded by the changing times. While the Bond franchise thrived and mutated as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, Lazenby’s fortunes weren’t as good. After a few years of professional ups and downs, he found himself in Hong Kong appearing in a series of three films for Raymond Chow’s Golden Harvest Studios, the last of which is 1975’s A Queen’s Ransom.
In A Queen’s Ransom, Lazenby stars as an Irish Republican who has recruited a group of specialized assassins into a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth during a state visit to Hong Kong with Hong Kong action mainstay of the time Jimmy Wang Yu (The One-Armed Swordsman) and Bolo Yeung (Enter The Dragon) as part of the team. Charles Heung (Later of Mad Monkey Kung Fu and director Jing Wong’s God Of Gamblers series with Chow Yun Fat) is the police detective tasked with finding and stopping the group before they can carry out their plan.
Even barring Lazenby’s presence, A Queen’s Ransom is a fairly engaging thriller. But the addition of the former James Bond as the leader of a group of international assassins brings a little bit something extra to the film – the audience’s expectations of Lazenby. As the assassins’ first couple of attempts on the Queen’s life fail, I started to get the suspicion that perhaps his character might be a spy of the British government under deep cover to disrupt the assassination plans. I won’t say for certain if that’s how things play out, but it did leave me guessing to the point where I did not see coming an actual twist the movie throws at the audience during the third act.
A Queen’s Ransom also receives a boost in its production value courtesy of footage shot by the filmmakers during a state visit to Hong Kong by Queen Elizabeth. And it is not some shaky, newsreel-style handheld camera footage either. Everything showing the Queen and the pomp and circumstance of her visit is shot as deliberately the rest of the film, integrating seamlessly together in a way that helps raiser the tension.
Ultimately, while I would not say that A Queen’s Ransom is a vital piece of Hong Kong action film history of the time, it is still well worth checking out for Wang Yu’s performance, a somewhat twisty script and Lazenby playing the type of villain he might have squared off against if he had stayed with the Bond franchise for further films.
The new bluray release of A Queen’s Ransom (sometimes known as The International Assassin) from Eureka Classics sports a crisp new 2K transfer of both the domestic and international cuts of the movie. (The international cut loses part of a sex scene and tightens up a few random scenes.) The Hong Kong version features its original Mandarin soundtrack as well as an optional English dub and the export version contains its own English dub. Each version also sports their own unique and informative commentary track from either Frank Djeng and martial artist Michael Worth (Hong Kong version) or Mike Leeder and Arne Venema (International release). Some trailers and a short documentary featurette from Worth who has spent some tie training Lazenby for a subsequent film round out the disc’s offerings.
