There are quite a few rather worse Bond performances out there - even Connery did a couple that aren't as good.
I'm not sure I agree. I think Connery at his laziest still tops most of what Lazenby turns in throughout OHMSS.
Well, Connery at his laziest is still always very entertaining and iconic (and the same goes for Moore even when he's being a million miles away from Fleming's Bond), but entertaining doesn't always equal
good (e.g. the glacier surfing in DAD isn't good, but I
do find it entertaining, mostly on the level of unintentional comedy).
I detected not a single false note in Laz during this most recent of my many, many viewings of OHMSS. By any standards it's a remarkable debut performance, and I think he'd have gotten better and better had he carried on. He's got sex appeal, humour, class, athleticism and is a real badass - I really don't see what's not to like about Lazenby. And, as you say, he totally nails that final scene in OHMSS.
But as somewhat flawed as CASINO ROYALE's love story is, I don't think CASINO ROYALE's love story feels just as arbitrary. He doesn't go from shagging two chicks in a mountain lair to wanting to marry a gal within a day or so.
Going from shagging two chicks (three, actually, as the film seems to imply!) to wanting to marry another gal within a day or so
is possible, though! Perhaps on one level he was testing his feelings for Tracy. And when he saw her at the skating rink he realised that those feelings were real.
The story of CASINO ROYALE gives more development to Bond's role in the romance, and the why of it all, than OHMSS ever really manages.
Romance doesn't need a "why".
Eh, I think it ultimately robs the ending of much significance. Because there's nothing really leading into it, it's just... "Oh, there's a sad moment." It's not a moment that informs Bond as a character, because little else in the film has been done with Bond as a character. It just sits there.
Wow, I think you're severely underrating it, Harms. It's more than "a sad moment" that "just sits there" (like the series had given us so many sad moments by that point that we'd developed sad moment fatigue!) - it's still by far the most emotionally devastating moment in the entire history of Bond. There are things that move me in CASINO ROYALE and QUANTUM OF SOLACE, but nothing that moves me remotely as much as the ending of OHMSS. I'm not ashamed to say that I almost cry every time I see it, and I must have seen it dozens of times.
Neither am I sure what's lacking in terms of things "leading into it". Please explain what you would have added to give it a proper lead-in. Why should there be any telegraphing of OHMSS' shock ending, any more than there should be telegraphing of the shower scene in PSYCHO? The whole point, surely, is to suddenly cut the ground from under the audience's feet.