ROGER MOORE'S
JAMES BOND

Among James Bond fans, particularly those who came to the character through the original Ian Fleming novels or the early Sean Connery films, it is not unusual to find Roger Moore's portrayal of 007 ranked low. Both his performances and the films in which he appeared are among the lightest and most overtly comical of the series. The chicken-and-egg question arises over whether Moore's performance made the movies bad or the movies made Moore look bad.

Roger Moore faced a challenge similar to the one George Lazenby did: how to win over audiences who were clearly not inclined to accept anyone but Sean Connery in the role of James Bond. With Lazenby the film-makers had tried to convince the audience that nothing had really changed; props and clips from the previous films, iconic images like the car, the cigarette case, the shoulder holster, the baccarat table, all crowded the opening scenes of the film in an effort to persuade us that Bond was still here, still the same. Lazenby was cast largely because he moved well and looked believable in the action scenes, two of Connery's many strengths.

Of course, it didn't work. Box-office totals for "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" simply didn't meet the expectations that the series had created. Audiences wanted Connery; when they got him back in "Diamonds Are Forever" they returned to the theaters. But now Connery was gone for good and the producers had to get the audiences to accept yet another Bond, something they'd conspicuously failed to do three and a half years before.

This time they went the other way. No introduction to the new Bond in the pre-credit sequence; Bond didn't appear in it at all, even in the form of an imposter or a mannequin, the only time in the series in which this was the case. No familiar John Barry music in the background; for the first time another composer was wielding the baton. M and Moneypenny had what seemed a particularly brief scene and it was not in the usual surroundings of the office but at Bond's flat. Q didn't appear at all. No Aston Martin; the only things Bond drove on land were a double-decker bus and a small plane. No SPECTRE, the organization that had been featured in six of the seven previous films. No Richard Maibaum, who had co-written six of the seven previous films. No cigarette case; this Bond smoked cigars.

The message seemed to be, "It's a whole new ballgame, folks."

Moore's performance, unlike Lazenby's, made no attempt to be a continuation of Connery's Bond. Moore brought a lighter, far less serious interpretation to the character. Where Connery had been darkly handsome, Moore was pretty. Where Connery attracted women with an aura of sexy mystery, Moore chased them with an air of insatiable schoolboy horniness. Connery's Bond looked equally at ease drinking in Pussfeller's Jamaican dive, eating with his fingers in a gypsy camp, visiting the dressing room of a Mexican dancer or impersonating a Japanese fisherman. Moore's Bond was as conspicuous as a "cue ball" in Harlem, wasn't sure whether being wasted was a good thing or not, and ended up swallowing the evidence he was trying to collect from a dancer in Cairo. When Jill Masterson lay dead in his hotel room, the look on Connery's face and the tone of his voice told the audience in no uncertain terms that someone was damn well gonna PAY for this. When Moore found Andrea Anders dead at their rendezvous, he congratulated the killer on his aim and looked like he was waiting for the chase scene to start.

Moore's most serious defect was in the area of Lazenby's greatest asset-- fight scenes. Moore almost always looked stiff and unconvincing in action scenes, a serious problem for a character with a license to kick butt. Examples include: the karate school fight in "The Man with the Golden Gun," where an obviously outmatched Moore, looking virtually immobile at the hands of the top student, suddenly and inexplicably connected with a roundhouse punch that the rawest freshman at that school should have been able to see coming and evade; and the hopelessly unconvincing "Moonraker" fight on top of the cable cars, where not just one but THREE actors all moved as though they were in the terminal stages of arthritis.

Moore was also an unconvincing Bond in many of his sex scenes. Connery and even Lazenby in bed with a woman looked like Jerry Rice catching a pass in the end zone; they acted like they'd been there before. Moore's inevitably lifted eyebrow and comically widened (or, sometimes comically narrowed) eyes always looked like a horny teenager anticipating his first sight of a naked breast. Somehow, when he was saying "Let's get out of these wet things," or "Perhaps it's time we joined forces," one always heard this tiny, painfully eager voice in his head saying "C'mon, let's shag, huh, huh, I said somethin' clever, so let's shag now, okay?" The scene in Q's Indian lab with Bond obsessively zooming the video camera in and out while focused on the secretary's cleavage was a perfect example of this, and seemed entirely out of character for a man as sexually experienced as Bond. Though he was, at least in his first few films, possibly the most classicly good-looking of the men who played Bond, Moore seemed unable to project the animal sexuality of the role and instead seemed an aging, rather obvious playboy.

Of course, not all of the blame for the deficiencies of the Moore movies can be laid on him. Moore didn't write the scripts or choose the sound effects or hire the other actors. The comical direction of the early Moore films clearly started in "Diamonds Are Forever" and the relative box-office success of that film's Bond-lite approach over the serious, straight-faced tone of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is what led to such silliness as J. W. Pepper, Nick Nack and Jaws, not to mention the horror of the amphibious gondola and the Keystone Cops chase of the fire truck. But it is disingenuous to believe that the comic excesses that infest Moore's films could have gone as far or gone on as long as they did over the lead actor's serious objections. Cubby Broccoli clearly wanted to keep Moore around. I suspect the trauma of replacing Connery was still so fresh in his mind that, having found a replacement the public would accept, he kept him in place at least two and possibly three films past the point where Moore was visibly too old for the role. In an effort to keep him interested, the films were deliberately geared toward Moore's preferences. The one exception to that rule, "For Your Eyes Only," was a recognition that the silliness could go no further than it did in "Moonraker" and it was time to dial back down. Even in that relatively straight and down-to-earth film we are still treated to the spectacle of the killer zamboni, the "delicatessen in stainless steel," the phone call between the Prime Minister and a parrot and the horror of Bibi Dahl.

Moore did have his moments. They tend to stand out in sharp relief from the majority of his work on the series and unfortunately they are few enough and far enough between that they are well-known landmarks in the span of Moore's films. The centrifuge scene from "Moonraker," or more specifically the end of that scene, is often sited as an example of Moore going well beyond his usual range of "left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised" to show a Bond shaken, exhausted and dangerously pissed off, all in the span of a few seconds and without the need for words. The scene in "Octopussy" in which Bond, disguised as a circus clown, desperately tries to defuse the nuke is a chilling, effective moment that successfully defies the obvious temptation to joke about Moore as a clown by working much better than most of his scenes in a tuxedo. The death of Locque and the mountain climb to St. Cyril's in "For Your Eyes Only" give glimpses of the Bond of old, the dangerous man who will do whatever is necessary to accomplish his mission. And the conversation with Anya in "The Spy Who Loved Me" about the death of her lover and the dangers inherent in "our business" showed a serious side to Moore's Bond that one wishes were more representative of his usual portrayal.

It must be acknowledged that at a time when the Bond series could easily have simply ended, when its original, highly successful lead actor had left and the first heady rush of mid-sixties Bondmania had long since ebbed, Roger Moore made the films that kept the public coming back for more 007. Whatever flaws he may have brought to the role, that achievement should endear him to all Bond fans. For twelve years and seven films, James Bond did return and the series did survive.

TIMOTHY DALTON'S
JAMES BOND

So we'd had twelve years of Roger Moore. Twelve years of amphibious gondolas and submersible Lotuses, Beach Boy music cues and slide whistle sound effects, raised eyebrows and horny smirks and stiff movements and wooden expressions. Seven straight films of an empty suit standing in until the stunt men were ready. And finally it became clear to EON what fans had known for years: Bond needed new and younger blood.

After a false start with Pierce Brosnan, disrupted by NBC's last minute decision to hold Brosnan to a fifth season of "Remington Steele," Timothy Dalton was issued the license to kill in the most abrupt change of direction for the series since the comic "Diamonds Are Forever" followed "On Her Majesty's Secret Service."

Dalton's portrayal of Bond stripped away much of the cinematic embellishments that had accumulated on the character in twenty-five years, returning to the literary source material for a version of Bond that had not been seen on screen since the first two films. Dalton's Bond did not have a gadget for every occasion or a punchline for every conversation; he didn't need them. James Bond was once again a dangerous weapon in his own right, a man whose toughness, resourcefulness and determination, not the laser beam in his watch, were his most important assets. Furthermore, Fleming's conflicted hero, the man whose human impulses often clashed with his professional instincts and responsibilities, was featured on screen where he had only been hinted at long ago.

Dalton was introduced as 007 in one of the best pre-credit sequences in the series. For the first time since 1969, it was possible to believe that the man we saw in the close-up inserts was actually capable of the stunt work being shown. This was followed by one of the few sustained sequences of Fleming adaptation since "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." In the course of ten or fifteen minutes, Dalton displayed cold professionalism preparing to carry out the dirty part of his job, annoyance at the bureaucratic pettiness of Saunders, wry amusement with Georgi's discomfort in the pipeline and a world-weariness in the conversation with Saunders in the car that had never before found its way from the pages of Fleming's books to the screen.

Another return to the literary roots of Bond was seen in the relationship between Bond and Kara Milovy. The typical Fleming formula (and there were certainly variations) had Bond becoming involved with one woman in the course of the adventure, protecting and/or rescuing her and usually ending up with her at the end of the book. In the 1950's, when most of the books were written, this pattern established Bond as a "womanizer." By the 1960's and '70's it was felt that a one-woman cinematic Bond seemed damn near monogamous and the pattern for the films inevitably included at least two women per film in Bond's bed. In "The Living Daylights," for one of the few times in the film series up to that time, Bond was involved with only one woman (discounting the brief encounter in the pre-credit sequence) and actually refrained from jumping into bed with her at first sight because his cover required it. Their relationship developed believably, with Bond coming to regret the deception he was practicing on her. By the time he called her beautiful in Afghan, it was clear that Bond had real feelings for this girl. It may not have been love, from this man to whom love had brought tragedy, but it was something more than "My eyebrow's up; time for the bedroom scene."

This is not to say Dalton's Bond has decided to tie it in a knot; he clearly enjoyed his flirtation with Lieter's "party girls" and in "Licence to Kill" he was back to the cinematic standard of two girls for every Bond. Women have always represented a mixed blessing for Bond; he takes great pleasure in them but his inability to resist their charms and his urge to protect them are potential weaknesses that are recognized and exploited by his enemies in both books and movies. The literary Bond was often on guard against this, though he usually fell into the trap anyway. The film Bond has often been portrayed as too randy to be concerned. (But not always; the "I find I live much longer that way" exchange in "The Spy Who Loved Me" comes to mind.) Dalton's Bond, while he savored the sweet stolen moments in the Viennese Ferris wheel or the drifting motor boat, seemed to know that they were also dangerous distractions from the perilous world in which he lived. That bittersweet self-knowledge provided a subtext that made moments like his appreciation of Kara's music ("It was exquisite,") more meaningful, an example of Bond, to steal a phrase from a later film, taking "pleasure in great beauty," as a respite from his professional life.

Subtext is an important ingredient in Dalton's portrayal of Bond, the thing that most distinguished it from the work of his predecessor. When Dalton was on screen the viewer could see his mind working on more levels than the dialog or surface activity. There were layers to Dalton's performance that had not been seen in an actor playing Bond since at least Thunderball. Dalton both cared about the role and had the tools to make it come alive.

"The Living Daylights" was written before Dalton was cast as Bond, probably on the assumption that either Moore or Brosnan would play the lead. Though the final product was tweaked to accommodate Dalton's no-nonsense portrayal it still includes a typical gadget-laden-car chase, the sledding-in-the-cello-case scene and a pair of villains who were somewhat difficult to take seriously. (At least they cut the anything-for-a-laugh flying carpet escape.) Nevertheless, a much harder-edged 007 was obvious in Dalton's portrayal. The scene where Bond confronted Pushkin showed a ruthless side of Bond which, though Moore had attempted it in various scenes through his films, he had rarely made convincing. There is no question in Dalton's performance that Pushkin will not survive the wrong answer to Bond's questions.

"Licence to Kill," written with Dalton in mind, not only broke completely free of the slapstick excesses that had plagued previous films but also played fast and loose with the whole Bond formula. The film seemed to have been written with one of the series best films, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," clearly in mind. Dalton's reaction when Della tossed him the garter so clearly showed the pain from the unhealed wound of Tracy's death that words were unnecessary and the horror and grief in his face as he discovered his personal nightmare replayed in Della's murder are unmatched in the entire series. The failure of the series to provide Bond a proper revenge on Ernst Stavro Blofeld is one of its most gaping holes, one that it was far to late in 1989 (and certainly is too late now) to mend. But by damn, THIS Bond was gonna get his pound of flesh for the maiming of his friend and the murder of his friend's wife!

The rest of the film followed Bond's single-minded pursuit of that revenge and its personal and professional costs. Bond's advice to Melina Havelock to "first dig two graves" came home to roost. In the end Bond was, as he often was at the end of Fleming's books, physically and emotionally battered, his revenge complete but his demons still not silenced.

Dalton's critics point to the disappointing U.S. box-office figures for "Licence to Kill" as proof that the audience rejected his version of James Bond. His fans counter by blaming the poor marketing and promotion given the film by a studio in the midst of economic upheaval and the many blockbuster films that opened at around the same time. The real answer to the question of Dalton's ultimate acceptance or rejection was lost in the legal battles between EON and MGM that followed the film's release and indefinitely delayed the next one. A six-year hiatus in the series after "The Man with the Golden Gun," which had similarly anemic ticket sales, might well have spelled the end of Roger Moore's reign as 007 also. What might have happened had Dalton gone on to make two or three more Bond movies can be (and has been) speculated upon endlessly, but it cannot be known.

I, for one, mourn the loss of those films.

Last time, we talked about Connery and Lazenby ; four down, one to go.

Next time, the continuing reign of Pierce Brosnan as James Bond.

Copyright © 2000 - 2002 Byron King