National Post (National Edition)
A ruthless man ... but also a man with a lot of self doubts who knows he's not infallible and who above all is cursed with the paradox of being a killer.
SEAN CONNERY WILL ALWAYS BE THE BEST JAMES BOND, BUT PEOPLE'S SECOND FAVOURITE IS A SURPRISE,
Something unexpected happened when Britain's prestigious Radio Times magazine polled readers on the cinema's best James Bond.
There was no uncertainty about who would top the list after the final round of voting.
The late Sean Connery, who created Bond on screen in 1962's Dr. No and remained with the franchise for another six movies, came out with 44 per cent of the vote.
The big surprise came with second place, where the initial assumption was that three actors would be in contention — Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan and current 007 Daniel Craig.
Instead Brosnan was bumped down to 23 per cent, with Moore, Craig and George Lazenby (who played Bond in a single movie, On Her Majesty's Secret Service) lagging behind.
The runner-up proved to be Timothy Dalton with 32 per cent and no doubt some fans will be asking — Timothy who?
Well, he was the veteran Shakespearean actor who took over the role from an aging Roger Moore and portrayed a decidedly lethal 007 in two films, The Living Daylights in 1987 and the startling Licence to Kill in 1989.
And then, with the franchise in limbo because of a years-long legal battle between Eon Productions, owner of the Bond franchise, and MGM, Dalton eventually vanished from sight and became the forgotten Bond.
The fact that he has reemerged from oblivion tells us something about the way in which the various inhabitants of the most durable franchise in film history can reflect the sensibility of the times.
With the 007 fan universe engaged in heated debate over who should succeed the retiring Craig, the case of Dalton is particularly intriguing.
Connery, who died late last month at the age of 90, may be the benchmark Bond, rescuing even his inferior 007 movies with his stylish, darkly sardonic presence.
Furthermore, although Connery became heartily sick of the character and was glad to be rid of him following release of the forgettable Diamonds Are Forever in 1971, he was still protective of the franchise that had brought him fame and fortune.
Back in the late 1980s, he
told reporters that if he were allowed to take three of his movies to a desert island, one of them would be his second Bond outing, From Russia with Love, because it came closest to the spirit of the Ian Fleming novels. And then he got on to to the subject of Dalton.
Connery tended to be discreet about the lengthy period when his friend, Moore, was jauntily engaging in an increasingly preposterous series of adventures. But on this day he was firm in his liking for the Dalton films because they featured less high-tech gimmickry and “crazy hardware” and marked a return to realism and believable characters.
Dalton would later stress that his 007 debut in The Living Daylights had already been written when he was hired and that it was in the style of most of the Roger Moore outings — “fairly lighthearted, comedic, spoofy, uninvolving.”
Its successor, Licence to Kill, was something else — tougher and meaner, perhaps the darkest entry in the 007 canon with its depiction of the vicious Latin American narcotics trade.
There were no entertaining fantasy villains like Dr.
No, Goldfinger, Blofeld and Pussy Galore. Instead, there was Robert Davi, terrifyingly realistic as a billionaire drug czar.
Licence to Kill was a movie that reflected the darker chaos smouldering outside the fantasy bubble. It ruthlessly crossed the line in allowing Bond's longtime CIA buddy Felix Leiter, to be hideously mutilated and his bride of a few hours to be murdered.
And it showed a distraught Bond turning rogue in his determination to bring down this evil. The result was a 007 film with the elements of an old-fashioned Elizabethan revenge tragedy
At the time Dalton told reporters it was going back to Bond's origins, “to the dangerous, extreme world of the Fleming novels.”
Director John Glen bluntly said Moore would never have been credible in such a film because of his light comic style. “There were actually times when you couldn't believe he would actually pull a trigger and kill someone.” Dalton's Bond was different: “He can do it ... he can kill someone.”
Dalton offered his own unflinching take on the Bond persona he wanted to portray: “... a ruthless man, a very tenacious man, but also a man with a lot of self doubts who knows he's not infallible and who above all is cursed with the paradox of being a killer.”
Although critic Roger Ebert rated Licence to Kill the best of the recent Bond movies at the time, its North American box office was disappointing. Some critics and moviegoers recoiled from the graphic violence and yearned for the jokey days of Moore. It was too much in the real world — unacceptably so.
It also suffered from an appalling marketing campaign, and because of MGM's protracted quarrel with the producers, a fed-up Dalton got tired of waiting to play 007 again and look leave of the franchise.
Today, the reputation of Dalton's 1989 Bond outing has increased, and it may well influence the choice of a successor to Craig, whose final Bond adventure, No Time to Die, still lacks a firm release date because of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the internet has been alive with speculation as to his successor, with favoured candidates including Henry Cavill, Idris Elba, Tom Hiddleston and (most controversially) Tom Hardy.
Talking to Postmedia several years ago, co-producer Michael Wilson looked back on a decades-long procession of six 007s — Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig — and suggested that their differences in style and sensibility reflected a franchise that constantly reinvents itself.
These views have been reechoed in recent weeks by co-producer Barbara Broccoli.
“He doesn't need to be a white man, not as far as I'm concerned,” she said, signalling a willingness to break with tradition.
And he won't be a facsimile of Craig who has made a powerful impact as Bond.
The role “will have to be reimagined in the way each actor has reimagined the role,” she explained. Nevertheless, the choice of a new 007 will be made in the kind of dark world that Dalton's Bond confronted 31 years ago. As for those persistent rumours of a female Bond, Broccoli has responded with a firm no: “We should create roles for women, not just turn a man into a woman.”