Which one is this? The first Timothy Dalton one.
Who’s who in this one? Dalton (Bond); Brown (M); Llewelyn (Q); Bliss (Moneypenny); Terry (Leiter).
Where did you first encounter this one? In theatres on my 11th birthday. It was a good day.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? There are a few, but the Über Bad is Jeroen Krabbé as KGB General Georgi Koskov, who wants to use his own defection to set up a massive narcotics and arms ring that crosses the Iron Curtain.
Who are the Bond girls? Beautiful Maryam D’Abo as Kara Milovy, who is so not a Bond girl that she’s nearly the best Bond girl.
Opening number? A weird title track by A-Ha (how do you work “the living daylights” into a lyric?) against the most blandly formulaic of the Binder title sequences, which features – surprise! – girls and guns.
What’s memorable about this one? Bond fighting on the side of the Mujahideen. Necros vs. Bond on a dangling pallet of opium, hanging out the back of a cargo plane in flight. Timothy Dalton. Gibraltar. The cello.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 8 – one of my favourites. A grand, finely-accomplished action-adventure picture.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? I think I’ve always mistrusted my own opinion because of all the contemporary Dalton flack, but there’s no way around it: this is a 10. Perfectly accomplished, one of the three best Bond films of all time.
I’ve jumped from Roger Moore’s Bond inauguration in 1973 with Live and Let Die, across fourteen years in which Moore made an uncontested record seven Bond movies, to land in 1987 with Timothy Dalton’s Bond inauguration, The Living Daylights. As I mentioned in my License to Kill piece, Dalton was the first “new Bond” ushered into the franchise in my lifetime, and as such I’ve always held him – and Daylights – in a kind of sentimental rosy glow. Revisiting the movie as an adult, though, I consistently come away more and more impressed by it. For epic scale and spy movie thrills, The Living Daylights is essentially themagnum opus of the initial regime of the franchise, a.k.a. the Broccoli years. It’s John Glen’s fourth consecutive kick as director, and with the enlivening presence of Dalton in the lead role, The Living Daylights shows the entire Bond team at the absolute height of their game. This is a masterful action/adventure movie.
Dalton is marvelously good in this one, playing the icy skill and enviable cool of 007 with balanced tenderness towards his leading lady. Dalton’s Bond is a seriously dangerous man; the secret agent as the dashing, romantic hero. In the showstopping opening sequence – where Bond takes part in a war games exercise on the rock of Gibraltar, which goes awry when an enemy agent starts executing the players – we enjoy a nice visual complication, given that this is Dalton’s first time in the franchise: we don’t know which of the players is our guy! But by the time Dalton has parachuted out of an exploding jeep and landed on a luxury yacht where a nearly-nude diva is complaining to her friend that she wishes she could find “a real man,” we see very clearly that this James Bond – Welsh, dark, and with a permanent glint in his eye – is the answer to a long, slack series of Moore films.
Even the Pretenders’ end titles theme, “If There Was A Man,” picks up the thread, and John Barry (in his final turn as series composer) weaves the tune into the film’s opulent romantic refrain. Barry’s score throughout is exceptional. His beatbox-enhanced take on the Bond theme may be a bit much, but he hits an all-orchestra high in the later sequences where Bond commandeers a Russian Hercules aircraft over Afghanistan. The soundtrack also makes brilliant use of the Pretenders’ “Where Has Everybody Gone?” as the secondary theme for this episode’s heavy, Necros. The nauseating whine of the pop song – through Neros’ overcranked headphones – precedes the villain onscreen at his every move, and Necros himself – tall, fit, blond, and carrying explosive milk bottles and a Walkman cassette player – is sharply memorable. There is a fine ‘80s action movie tradition of the psychotic blond Eastern European bad guy, and one can draw a straight line from Necros to Alexander Godunov in Die Hard.
The Living Daylights is the series’ last Cold War thriller – from back when Czechoslovakia was still called Czechoslovakia, to say nothing of the USSR. The post-title sequence finds Bond in a tux (with sniper-ready black camouflage flaps) at the symphony in Bratislava, masterminding the defection of KGB agent Georgi Koskov with Dalton’s trademark cold-burning intensity. The business with Kara and the cello, and the escape of Koskov across the border, is big, rich, and atmospheric; you can design whatever Ken Adam sets you like, but for spy movie thrills, nothing substitutes for the whackshit texture of the real cities that lived behind the Iron Curtain. The thrilling night moves in Bratislava form a perfect Bond short story, which here serves as the opening frame of a much larger, more complex adventure. Of course, the defection sequence comes by its novelistic precision naturally, being largely based on “The Living Daylights,” one of Fleming’s actual short stories. The Living Daylights, as a whole, carries that rigid intrigue of a spy novel throughout, up to and including such grace notes as the rifle in the cello case, and subsequently, my dad’s favourite Bond beat of all time – as Kara and James escape across the Austrian border, tobogganning through customs on an empty cello case.
The Living Daylights has my favourite Aston Martin (rockets behind the headlights, lasers in the hubcaps, snow claws in the tires, skis in the undercarriage, and a Batmobile rocket up its ass); my favourite Q gag (“Something we’re making for the Americans – it’s called a Ghetto Blaster!”); and one of my favourite Bond girls in Maryam D’Abo’s Kara. Innocent, delicate, and lovely – yet strong-willed enough to elicit Bond’s romantic sympathy, rather than disdain – Kara is an odd duck in a franchise full of bimbos, in that we can readily believe that she falls easily, and truly, in love with 007. We see Bond approach her with tenderness, rather than avarice, and are even surprised to see Bond order a hotel room in Tangier with a second bedroom! Change is in the wind, eye-batting Moneypenny notwithstanding, and there’s something wryly funny in a gaggle of Afghan raiders being shamed into action by Kara galloping off across the desert – a humour only partially dispelled by Kamran Shah’s muttered “Women!”
The delightful Kamran Shah, played by Art Malik (who would go on to play a more generic Middle Eastern terrorist in True Lies), represents one of the big political wuh-ohs of the movie, as Bond fights on the side of “the Afghan Resistance,” as he describes it, which makes it sound nobler than we might today find it. Of course, the Mujahideen were fighting the Russians at that point; the Americans were years away from becoming the supervillains of the world. Bond gets to play revolutionary hero and ersatz Lawrence of Arabia, while we leave the Cold War behind in a hail of capitalist motivation for our bent commie villain, Koskov – who, like Alan Rickman in (again) Die Hard, turns out not to be an avatar of political revolution but rather just another money-grubbing white man trying to get rich. (In the ‘80s, American-financed action movies had a prevailing interest in showing political or revolutionary aspirations from American enemies to be nothing more than greed in disguise.) Aside from the Mujahideen, The Living Daylights remains only slightly dated, as seen in the occasional glimmer of an ‘80s pop song, or the ludicrous spangled gown that Kara buys for the opera.
And to cap it all off, there’s Bond vs. Necros on the cargo bag full of opium, dangling out the back of a plane in flight… the tension of which is so enormous that even though I have known the outcome of the scene for 25 years, I still clutch my pearls every time that bag falls out the back of the plane with the two combatants aboard. The stunt-craft involved is incredible, and the Afghan sequences as a whole represent large-scale action chaos of a scale not attempted before or since in the Bond franchise. The Living Daylights is the series at its best – grand, exotic, and compulsively thrilling.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, The Living Daylights is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on November 11 and December 8. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.