A couple of years back I began looking at the first film of the various James Bond actors, then stopped after Live and Let Die. As our current can’t-load-images problem makes it frustrating to write about comics, I began looking for posts where we could reuse images we already have — hence this post (heavily re-edited from my own blog)
Every time there’s a new James Bond, you can count on hearing the same thing: This is the real James Bond. This is the hard-as-nails guy Fleming wrote about, much more so than any of those guys who preceded him. And so it was with Timothy Dalton, who took over from Roger Moore in The Living Daylights (1987). Like For Your Eyes Only, it’s another shot at getting back to basics. Spoilers included if anyone dcares.
(I’d use a Living Daylights poster but we don’t have one already uploaded)
British intelligence sends Bond to ensure Koskov (Jeroem Krabbe), a Russian general, successfully defects to the West. The USSR has sent an assassin to stop him; 007’s job is to shoot the assassin first. When Bond spots his target, Kara (Maryam D’Abo), he realizes she has no idea how to shoot. Rather than kill her he blasts her weapon out of her hands, scaring the living daylights out of her (this part comes from the same-name Fleming short story).
Safe in England, Koskov reveals that the new KGB head, Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies), is going to heat up the Cold War, and provides a list of intelligence figures on Pushkin’s hit list. Koskov’s promptly kidnapped, his handlers killed and the list destroyed. M assigns Bond to take out Pushkin, but 007 starts hunting Kara instead. When he finds her, he poses as Koskov’s ally and learns she’s Koskov’s lover. Her rifle was loaded with blanks. With her unwitting help, Bond begins tracking the real villains.
It turns out Koskov’s defection is a ruse. The general and his partner in crime, Whitaker (Joe Don Baker), have accepted a heavy down payment from Pushkin for modern weaponry to use in the Afghanistan occupation (back when Afghanistan was draining Soviet military might rather than our own). They’ve invested the money in diamonds to trade for heroin; after they sell the heroin, they’ll have money enough to buy the weapons and a huge profit left. Pushkin’s figuring this out, so he has to die.
None of which mattered as much to the critics as Bond spending all his time with Kara rather than a bevy of beauties. And he doesn’t move on her half as fast as usual. OMG, was it possible 007 was worried about … AIDS?
Writing this now, it sounds like a strange statement, even though I was around when AIDS was front-page news. After several years when it was nothing but a “gay disease” it became clear that it could infect straights too — and at the time, there was no cure. Get AIDS, eventually you die (for a detailed history, check out Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On [as noted at the link, the documentary Killing Patient Zero corrects the main weakness of Shilts’ book]).
The impact on pop culture was striking. The term “safe sex” became part of the language. TV, long uncomfortable with talking about birth control (isn’t telling people they can have sex without pregnancy encouraging immorality?) had characters referencing their condoms as a matter of course. In that light, it seemed perfectly plausible that even James Bond would be more careful about how many women he slept with.
Plausible, but I don’t think it’s so. It wouldn’t be the first movie Bond has one lover in (e.g. Diamonds Are Forever) and it sure looks like the woman Bond meets in the teaser is going to get horizontal with him. To the best of my knowledge, Eon Studios never claimed they were promoting safe sex and I’m sure they would have, had it been true. Perhaps they were indeed trying to get closer to the novels, where Bond isn’t quite as much of a tomcat.
I find the low level of sex less noteworthy than that Dalton is the only post-Connery Bond who smokes cigarettes (both Moore and Brosnan smoked cigars as 007). That would also be true to Fleming’s stories but obviously it lost out to our society’s growing distaste for the habit.
This is a good film and Dalton made a good Bond, with the same hard edge as Connery in Doctor No and Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. I also think my friend Ross has a good point, that Dalton approaches Bond as an actor—not that he’s giving a better performance or a better actor, but it feels like he’s trying to flesh out his character some. He genuinely shows some affection for Kara rather than just seeing her as a new conquest. Though as he tries to seduce her before she knows he’s lying about his identity, his affection obviously has limits.
Another distinctive point is that when a minor official rebukes Bond for not killing Kara, Bond snarls that he doesn’t give a damn about his orders and if M doesn’t like it, his resignation will be on M’s desk promptly. I can easily see Connery or Moore refusing a kill order in the same situation, but they wouldn’t show the same disrespect for the chain of command. The organization man was a lot less popular in the 1980s than he used to be and it feels like that was influencing the series. It would be even more pronounced in the following film, License to Kill, in which Dalton goes completely off the reservation to get revenge for a friend.
As in The Spy Who Loves Me, the Bond Girl is more important to the story than the Bond villain. D’Abo’s charming Kara is more memorable than Krabbe’s Koskov and there’s no Jaws or Oddjob on the villain’s side — Koskov’s hit man is a cipher.
Like a number of Bond films, the Cold War is the backdrop for the real plot. Sure, it involves the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but the villains of the piece are the renegades Koskov and Whitaker, traitors to both sides of the Cold War. By contrast, M and his Russian counterpart General Gogol (Walter Gotell) come together at the end to watch Kara give a concert performance. There’s hope for peace after all.
It’s a shame Dalton only got one more film to show his stuff, and that it’s a much inferior film. That doesn’t detract from how much I enjoy his debut.
If you’d like to pick up my book on the Bond films, you can find the links on my website or order a hard copy directly from me.
I’ve only seen this once, but I agree Dalton was good. I am often a Bond contrarian, so I like License to Kill a bunch.
Each new Bond seems to start off with a “back to basics” entry before they get gradually crazier. Moore stuck around so long he went through two of these cycles. But it’s a shame Dalton didn’t get to have his own Moonraker.
You have a point about the back to basics/back to spectacle cycle. For Your Eyes Only was one of my favorite Moores, too.
The back-to-basics films were usually in response to disappointing box office…not that they didn’t make boatlaods of money, but not as much as hoped and with more negative critical response. So, the usually went back to the source to try to reset things. The problem was really that they just kept pushing spectacle, to top the last film and usually went too far and then reacted by dialing it way back, and starting the cycle anew.
I loved Dalton and he was closer to Fleming than Craig, in my opinion, and the best actor to hold the role. Unfortunately, he didn’t get the best scripts. The problem was they were being written by committee and had been for a while. This factored into the lack of a really memorable villain, so we get a money-hungry Soviet turncoat and an arms dealer. The assassin was fine, if not colorful, they just didn’t give him any really cool scenes.
As far as I am concerned, the Bond films become a mess when the Broccoli kids take over, as producers, as Cubby requires then passed away. He had some clinkers, but he better understood what audiences wanted. Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson just had no clue and kept throwing things in the script and on the screen, to the point that product placement overwhelmed plot.
License to Kill doesn’t even work as a concept. A drug dealer should take bond about 20 minutes to destroy and be back at the card table by cocktail time. I mean, he was blowing them up in the teaser, in Connery’s day, not spending the whole film dealing with them. Plus, Robert Davi? Maybe if it had been an episode of Miami Vice.
And the dealer doesn’t even have a big scheme — at least Kananga in Live and Let Die has ambitions beyond just “I’m a drug dealer.”
I like Robert Davi as an actor but as a Bond villain he was sorely lacking in oomph.