We all know the flip quote James Bond makes in the movie You Only Live Twice when he’s getting
ready to get it on with Karin Dor: “The things I do for England.”
Here’s a clip from the movie if you’re unfamiliar with it:
There’s a scene in the 1933 movie The Private Life of Henry VIII where King Henry VIII (played by
Charles Laughton) says, of his marriage to Anne of Cleves (played by his wife,
Elsa Lanchester): “Oh, the things I’ve done for England.”
I have always wondered if that quip in the James Bond movie
is specifically a joke on the above line from the Alexander Korda movie about
Henry VIII. Maybe it was just a cheap laugh written for the James Bond movie,
but the people who made that movie would have grown up watching Korda movies
like The Private Life of Henry VIII,
so it’s quite possible they remembered this one line and made that joke as a
winking reference to the earlier film. I don’t know if they knowingly referenced
it, but I wonder if they did it intentionally, and I’d like to know.
