Wow... it is really hard to believe that they were expecting Moore to return. A guy who is making you money is easier to rehire than to replace.. but I'm thinking it HAD to be clear by Octopussy if NOT For Your Eyes Only that Moore was not carrying his age well.. though he was good in FYEO... throwing in the teenage ice skater subplot was agonizing.
Whenever he said it would be his last they would always convince him to do just one more so he would come back and the cycle tended to repeat.
Also... it does seem trendy in the wrong kind of way... Bond had a built in core audience but by 1989 there were MORE impressive alternatives than Bond on hand.. big budget action guys who were closer to their audiences.. Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, Norris.. Was Van Damme even on the scene by then? But you are 100% right.. if they'd had a GOLDENEYE level production with Dalton at the helm they could have updated Bond, maintained him in the comfort zone audiences had with him and not looked like they were TRYING TOO HARD to catch up by trying to make Dalton into Don Johnson.
I admit.. I still haven't gotten through the Brosnan era.. what I've seen of TWINE is really dismaying.. I keep running into the scene where the blade cuts the pier in half and Robbie Coltrane and I keep watching but I get nothing from it. Even Connery in a pink tie getting waxed by Bambi & Thumper does more for me and I know that's wrong.
I think Bloodsport and Kickboxer had both come out but Van Damme isn't really Van Damme until Universal Solider that isn't until the early 90s.
That's from the backend of the movie where it kind of begins to fall apart. The first half is fairly good. There is a specific point in the movie were it all goes downhill (its not the obvious one for people who have seen it)
Short answer: Dalton's two movies were relatively unsuccessful at the box office. Longer answer: The promotion for the movies wasn't great, particularly Licence to Kill (the makers being unable to call it Licence Revoked due to Americans thinking it sounded like Bond wouldn't be able to drive! ), and I think that people had started to take Bond for granted by this point. There had been a movie pretty much every couple of years since forever, and it's unsurprising that the public were not too excited by the character after A View to a Kill. Brosnan was fortunate that, as well as it being a strong movie, Goldeneye came out when cinemagoers were hungry for Bond again. I think both The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill are pretty good Bond movies, but it's true that humour wasn't Dalton's strong point at the time (his delivery of the "Better make that two" line is incredibly stilted). The movies are also not exactly full of iconic moments or Bond girls.
It's not really that hard to believe, setting aside Roger's age for a moment. Roger was a known commodity, & as 007, a proven box office draw. And since the Eon film with Roger had beaten Connery's return as Bond at the box office, to Cubby anyway it was clear that he had the better choice. I'm the same about FYEO, but, I also like Octopussy as well. View to me is where Moore no longer worked in the role, due to his age, & the fact that it was just a terrible film.
This all the way. Despite the fact he was 55 in Octopussy he doesn't look that unconvincing in the action scenes. I also don't think the obvious cosmetic work he had done between Octopussy and AVTAK helped his appearance either.
Can't argue... Octopussy was certainly not a subpar Glen effort and there probably aren't many directors around who could handle that level of action and editing on his level. And who am I to speak as I'm not far off from Moore's age myself. Totally agree.. if someone is making you money you don't change horses. If Connery's film had been on time and the scripting and production been in place a year or two earlier and THEN Kershner had signed on to direct, results might have been different. Also... I think the look of FEAR on Moore's face when Grace Jones climbed on top of him didn't help matters... I always defend Moore by pointing out that Dolph Lundgren doesn't HAVE any facial expressions so he gets off easy by comparison!
Also gets a small cameo in AVTAK since he and Jones were dating at the time. Though this was before his role in Rocky IV so he was just a no-name walkon at the time.
I also think some of it was a matter of styling and presentation... Moore walking around like he was either on safari or going to a cocktail party covered a lot of sins. He clearly wasn't a health nut and a sag here and a bulge there in a silk shirt just aren't going to look nearly as good on him as it did on movie stars half his age which if the producers had been more frank about it could have been dealt with. Many of his contemporaries.. Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, James Garner were still doing fairly active roles with a few nods to their elder statesman status. But the sex symbol stuff should have been modified. It's just a pity that Moore's tenure didn't end a bit sooner but perhaps if the earlier production regime had been on point there might have been another film in that 72 - 80 time period.
I think there was meant to be one in 1976 rather than 1977. There were legal issues that arose after Harry Saltzman sold his half of the franchise due to his poor financial standing at the time of Golden Gun thus why there was a larger than normal gap between Golden Gun and Spy. I don't see how there could have been a space for another film in the 70s given how much larger the productions were by then compared to the early Connery films when they could crank out one a year through Thunderball.
I think that is the problem as well. Connery's films don't create the best experience.. and I think Connery was not always at his best.. but even at his WORST(DAF) he is like watching your grumpy dad on a bender and utterly watchable. I agree that Casino is the best and most credible Bond film yet made. Goldeneye would be second.. OHMSS would be third. Then there are the first four but those are always problematic. i give Lazenby a star for, if NOTHING else, setting the bar high for FIGHT SCENES. The credibility he had there carries him through the first 20 minutes of OHMSS like a boss. I watched Thunderball the other day and the ENDING plays like an episode of Get Smart.. and I feel I'm not giving Don Adams enough credit.. even his fight scenes looked better than Connery on the Disco Volante trying to get Largo off that wheel! Also the REAR PROJECTION shots always threaten to take you out of the experience. You'd think mounting a camera on the front of a car was ILLEGAL or something.
Meanwhile, the movie that I always saw (a British super-agent held in Alcatraz!) as being one of the best James Bond-ish flicks, has always been The Rock!
Roger Moore remains my favourite but with the exception of Daniel Craig who has been lumbered with terrible, humourless, sub- Bourne take on the stories and a tedious one-note take on the character (at least in the two films of his I've seen), they've all been excellent. The two Timothy Dalton films were a bit generic but he played Bond with real panache.
I remember an interview with Moore when "A View To A Kill" came out and they asked him if he was done. He said: "I'll do one more, if they ask...nicely."
The novels aren't part of this discussion. This is all about the Broccoli/Williams family and the Bond films of the last 60 years, and what the producers and casting people look for in a "perfect James Bond" actor. And I think I summarized their ideas pretty well. They've said as much in many, many interviews and documentaries.
I adore and cherish the original 20 films and defend all of them while admitting their issues. (Of which DAD has a painful amount of issues.) What I can’t stand are the modern films which to me are their own thing entirely. While each successive film has been worse, CR’06 killed me. I love all five first actors for different reasons and try not to play the ranking game-but Dalton’s take is without question not only still underrated but the closest and best interpretation of what Fleming put on the page. You do have to keep Book Bond and Film Bond separate as they follow different yet linked paths. The lack of knowledge of the novels is what I think turned most audiences against what he was doing and thus missed the beauty of those two films having the grace notes and flourishes of a traditional Bond film. For me they place Bond firmly in the real world of their time while building on the final three Moore films achievements-AND still remember they are a Bond film which I think was due to Cubby Broccoli’s (correct) insistence. Maibaum and Wilson wanted to do the prequel route in 1986 but it was nixed. I think all the 80’s films are underrated. They may not be flashy but the rise in criticism against Glen’s direction is I think overdone. Yes he came from editing and the second unit but the films work perfectly well. He may have not been an actor’s director but acquitted himself well overall doing a better job than anyone who has come after him. (I really like the energy Campbell brought to Goldeneye and the extremely difficult shoot on TND would have never been finished on time without Spottiswoode-but overall I think Glen was a better Bond director) And as for the cello case scene in TLD it does turn some people off. It was Glen’s idea and he had to convince everyone of its possibility. Since it is theoretically possible I’ve never had an issue with it. As for the two films I think TLD is an absolute masterpiece and the last truly great film through and through in the series. LTK suffers from the 1988 writers guild strike and being written by Wilson solo, the production hurdles in budget and shooting/processing in Mexico, MGM/UA never increasing the budgets through the entire decade, increasingly having to fight the ever changing mgm interference and being dumped into the 1989 marketplace with extreme competition and a pitiful marketing campaign. It also the last of an era being the final film produced by Cubby Broccoli and featuring the 80’s production team. All those aside it is a well made film full of interesting ideas and great things whose roughness does fit stylistically with the story being told. Some of the story elements don’t quite work but again the guild strike is to blame there as was evidenced in many 1989 releases. I really like what Alec Mills did visually on the Dalton films giving them a shaper edge over the softer more romantic look of Alan Hume on the final three Moore films. It’s unfortunate that LTK came out looking much cheaper-but again stylistically it fits the story and Mills purposely gave it a contrastier look to match the story’s edginess. Dalton’s third film is the great what if and should have happened. Unfortunately mgm’s financial nightmare led to legal hurdles that made the six year gap. When the dust finally settled EON was loyal to Dalton but indeed it was the new folks on charge at mgm who wanted to start fresh and get away from Dalton and the perceived failure of the two films in order to not just jumpstart the series but make mgm a industry player again. Eventually Dalton did bow out not wanting to commit to multiple films. Goldeneye was a make or break film like TSWLM had been and pulled it off with panache but one wishes we had at least been able to get one more film with Dalton before the legalities made everything turn nahsty. I should probably mention I’m a Bond obsessive. I’ve been doing homemade audio commentaries on my YouTube channel. (https://www.youtube.com/c/DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader)
Nice to see your love for Tomorrow Never Dies. Some of the Bond films get dated quickly but that storyline is just as relevant today.
TND is perhaps the biggest grower of the Brosnan era. It’s far more relevant today, Pryce’s Carver is outstanding and the film has truly great tight editing getting down under the two hour runtime for the first time in ages. The main issue was the scripting struggles that erupted after mgm saying no to the script at the eleventh hour. Bruce Feirstein came back and had to rewrite on set with extreme pressure on everyone. Roger Spottiswoode had his work cut out for him and then they had an extremely short post production period. I think the editing and pacing helps to hide many of the script’s shortcomings which really just needed time to finesse things. Ironically what mgm objected to was a story based around the Hong Kong handover which was the subject of Raymond Benson’s Zero Minus Ten published the same year. The area where TND has no equal is it’s sound mix. I love Goldeneye’s mix with some classic sound library effects mixed in but TND goes for broke in a 5.1 powerhouse that may be my favorite film sound mix period. Thank goodness they’ve never remixed it and when I pull out the dts Laserdisc (which I think slightly outdoes the Blu-ray hdma track) neighbors run for the hills.
Sean Connery - shenery shewing Bond. George Lazenby - dorky Bond. Roger Moore - bad joke Bond. Timothy Dalton - uptight Bond. Pierce Brosnan - ladies Bond. Daniel Craig - manic depressive Bond. Would be interesting seeing them all around the table at Thanksgiving as 6 sons. Sean would be the one who either slept with (or had a restraining order filed from) every female co-worker, George would be the college student with a steady girlfriend, Roger would be the "fun loving class clown bachelor for life" one, Pierce would be the married one other wives fawn over, Daniel would be in and out of rehab and Timothy would lecture them all, especially Sean, Roger and Daniel.
Connery was supposed to get the role of the estate keeper in "Skyfall." That was the part that Albert Finney handled. Supposedly, the studio felt that audiences would be "confused" by Connery's appearance in the film.
That wasn't the first time they tried to get him back either. They wanted him to be in Die Another Day as well basically as an elder James Bond who has a scene with Brosnan essentially confirming the horrid James Bond is a codename theory.
