Which one is this? Roger Moore’s last throw.
Who’s who in this one? Moore (Bond); Brown (M); Llewelyn (Q); Maxwell (Moneypenny).
Where did you first encounter this one? Me and my best friend became outright effing obsessed with this movie when it played on First Choice Superchannel when we were kids.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Christopher Walken as genetically engineered industrialist Max Zorin, who wants to drown Silicon Valley to take over the technologies sector.
Who are the Bond girls? Former Charlie’s Angel Tanya Roberts as dumb blonde Stacey Sutton, who is presumed to be a geologist, and Fiona Fullerton as KGB agent Pola Ivanova. More importantly, though, Grace fucking Jones as May Day, who functions as both villainess and panther-hot sexual plaything.
Opening number? The very definition of a decade in Duran Duran’s stunningly replayable “Dance Into the Fire,” which is set against a title montage of UV-painted naked chicks skiing and doing aerial cartwheels.
What’s memorable about this one? The Golden Gate bridge. Blimps. Bond inventing snowboarding (?).
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 8. Even as an adult I’ve maintained that A View to a Kill is better than you remember as a later Roger Moore vehicle.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? A soft and sentimental 6. It is better than people commonly think, but inconsequential overall.
I’ve spent more time with Roger Moore than anyone else in the course of writing From A to Bond, and I’m finally at the end; coincidentally, his last alphabetical entry is also Moore’s actual grand finale, with 1985’s A View to a Kill. Like Connery before him, Roger tried to quit the franchise several times, but Kill was evidently the last straw – even Moore professes not to like it very much. But having overcome dear Sean’s record (seven Moore films to Connery’s six, a record unlikely to ever be broken), Moore seems to be taking a confident victory lap with A View to a Kill, in the best possible way. There’s more gravity to his performance than there’s been since the ‘70s, in spite of the occasional dumb gag (snow bunny in the ice floe submarine; the Beach Boys song). He also looks younger than he has since Moonraker or thereabouts – which isn’t saying much – but I’m just glad to see him substantially less haggard than he was in Octopussy. A bit of the nip/tuck, James?
In addition to being Moore’s exit, A View to a Kill is also Lois Maxwell’s last appearance as Moneypenny; she looks about 65 here, so her status as an office sex symbol has long since passed into “handsomeness.” I owe her a salute nonetheless; she’s a damn sight more interesting, at least, than this entry’s key Bond girl, Tanya Roberts. Stacey Sutton, the State Geologist, is about as cringe-inducing as Dr. Christmas Jones, the nuclear physicist, and Roberts’ broken-voiced wail is, for my money, about twenty times more irritating than any amount of shrieking from Kate Capshaw in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. “James, don’t leave me! James, save me!” Please, James, don’t.
But both Moneypenny and Stacey pale completely in comparison to whatever the goddamn hell is going on with Grace Jones as May Day, Zorin’s lead enforcer / lover / Bond’s lover / holy crap it’s Grace Jones. There’s a tangy whiff of risky sexual boundlessness around Jones’ onscreen persona, whether she’s being wrestled to the ground by Zorin like a caged animal before a bit of sexual play that might or might not be rooted in sadomasochistic turn-on, or being horse-traded to Bond by her blond-haired lover for a night of “let’s see what the secret agent is like in bed.” May Day stalks into Bond’s bedroom with era-defining no-nonsense-ness, dropping her bathrobe and climbing wordlessly under 007’s covers. When Bond attempts to climb on top of her, May Day flips him over and rises on top, her naked, muscular back giving us the closest visual we’ll ever get to a gay Bond sex scene. Bond later describes the night as “restless.” No kidding.
In watching the film again I can clearly see that Jones isn’t very good, but it sort of doesn’t matter; she’s one of the core Bond icons regardless, and anyone who gets to go out while literally shaking her fist at the sky and shouting “get Zorin for me!” qualifies as an all-time high. Christopher Walken’s Zorin is great too, a grinning schoolboy psychopath, who executes one of the series’ best crony assassinations by dropping a turncoat business partner out the bottom of his boardroom… which is revealed to be housed on a blimp hovering over San Francisco Bay.
A View to a Kill goes to San Francisco for the back half of the picture, and the American milieu brings a strangely American approach to action set pieces – like the unlocked ladder in the nighttime fire truck car chase (and subsequent multi-police-car pileups and crashes), or the underground machine-gun mayhem in Zorin’s mine. The American scenes in A View to a Kill are a full-on orgy of destruction: large-scale chaos and pandemonium that only the world’s Rambos, John McClanes, and various Terminators can inflict. It’s terrifically entertaining, and follows logically on the kinds of mayhem we might expect 007 to bring to a major populated area, given any inclination to push his lever from “secret agent” all the way to “full tilt boogie.” What A View to a Kill is not is very classy, or very Bond-ish. It’s a mid-’80s action picture, and that has its charm, but there’s little wit about it.
I can’t honestly tell if the anthemic, full-orchestra version of “Dance Into the Fire” that rises as Bond squires an unconscious Stacey out of the burning San Francisco City Hall is a work of pure genius, or the silliest part of a score that vacillates between latter-day greatness (“He’s Dangerous” is a hell of a cue) and outright stupidity (there is an inescapable overuse of ’80s sexy-sax). I can say that I enjoy the short sequence where Bond – with a shotgun – defends Stacey’s empty home from encroaching thugs, but not nearly as much as the subsequent scene, where James whips a from-scratch “quiche des cabinet” out of the oven as though he’d just heated up some leftover Chinese, and romances the decades-younger Stacey over a glass of red wine. Is it fair to say that Roger Moore’s James Bond remains definitive, for Roger Moore? He wasn’t trying to live up to anyone, emulate anyone, or ride anyone’s coattails. He had his take, and he stuck to it. It worked at least half the time.
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, A View to a Kill is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on November 11 and December 11 and 28. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.