Stuff My Orders. I Only Kill Professionals

The transition from Roger Moore to Timothy Dalton is the first 007 transition I can remember. Most of the people I knew had been looking forward to Pierce Brosnan in the role (rumors of Sam Neill in the part also made me smile), so when Timothy Dalton was introduced it was a little bit more than a little bit of a shock. As someone who had grown up with Roger Moore in the part, and who hadn't even heard of Sean Connery until 1983's Never Say Never Again, the relaunch of 007 with a more saturnine leading man left me cold back in 1987. Because I didn't enjoy it the first time around, Dalton's debut, The Living Daylights, is a film I have watched from beginning to end at most twice in these last nineteen years, so my memories of its plot, and Mr. Dalton's performance had faded badly before tonight.

This last viewing has made me more sympathetic toward Timothy Dalton's performance than I've been in the past. While he did lack Roger Moore's comic timing, which made his scenes with Jeroen Krabbe, who was pressing to play up the humor in his role, seem strained and forced, I finally think I understand where he was going with his version of 007. Dalton's Bond is a man of conscience and honor in a world with precious little of either. Though he can be deceptive when he needs to be, he hates cynicism, and he wants to believe at all times that he's on the side of the angels. Dalton's Bond is a nuanced creature, perhaps too nuanced for what is essentially a film romance. But Dalton allowed his Bond more humor than I remembered, and though the Bond-as-sensualist aspect was regrettably pushed into the background, it didn't vanish entirely. Indeed, though many critics take Dalton's Bond as a clean break from Moore's, in one aspect at least it wasn't. Roger Moore has said in interviews that his key to Bond was a passage early in Goldfinger where Bond, on his way back from an assassination mission, reveals that he dislikes the violent parts of his job, and that his sensualism is a means of forgetting the ugliness in his profession. Dalton's Bond seems to be equally unhappy with the more brutal aspects of his job. For evidence I submit these two quotes, one from a Moore picture, The Man With the Golden Gun, the other from The Living Daylights:

MOORE'S BOND: There's a useful four-letter word, and you're full of it. When I kill it's on the specific orders of my government, and those I kill are themselves killers.

DALTON'S BOND: Stuff my orders. I only kill professionals. That girl didn't know one end of that rifle from the other. Tell 'M' anything you like. If he fires me, I'll thank him for it.

Dalton also uses the "useful four-letter word" line later in the picture. Despite differences in acting style and temperment, there is a connection between Dalton's portrayal and Moore's. Both need to justify the murders they commit on the basis of an ethical code. It's a code that went unmentioned in Connery's films or Lazenby's (or Brosnan's for that matter), so it seems to have mattered to Dalton and Moore in particular. Just thought I'd mention it. Onward.

Despite my increased sympathy for Dalton's portrayal, The Living Daylights still suffered from the same plot problems I remembered. The central one is that there are too many villains, and their goals are neither clear nor, it seems, particularly threatening. The plot bears some similarities to Octopussy, which also had a fair number of villains and involved secret Russian doings against the west. But Octopussy's advantage was that the major villain's plot, selling off Russian art treasures to buy the means to smuggle an atomic bomb onto a U.S. Air Force base to pave the way for a Russian invasion of Europe, was pretty damned threatening. In The Living Daylights, the plot is to...um...trick M.I.6 into killing the head of the KGB so that a Russian general will be free to sell Afghan opium, which will allow him to buy superweapons from a slightly unhinged Oliver North-y American arms dealer in order to...um...keep the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (yeah, like they were so happy there). Assuming you can follow this plot, and it took me three viewings of the film to get a firm grip on it, it's way too byzantine given its overall importance. By the time you understand it, you're not sure you care.

Another beef: Jeroen Krabbe's Koskov was supposed to be a brilliant manipulator, but I wondered while I watched why anyone in British intelligence believed his story about his supposedly derranged boss. His entire performance seemed like too obvious a put-on to me. (Yeah, intelligence services believing known frauds with lurid but politically convenient stories to tell; that's so unlike them.) It was clear that Bond saw through the act, but why he was the only one stumped me. Maybe if Krabbe had been more subtle, I'd have been more impressed with Bond's powers of perception and less inclined to think that "M" was a dink.

I did love the Aston-Martin they used, and the big blonde guy who went around killing people was meanacing enough, in a Red Grant/Erich Kreigler sort of way. The Afghanistan story was way too long, but the Vienna, Bratislava, and Tangiers sequences were well-paced and fun. Entertainment Weekly put Miryam D'Abo's Kara on their worst Bond girls list, but while I didn't think she was up with the greats, I thought she was fine as a naive civilian who was clearly meant to be out of her depth. It's a shame there weren't more Bond girls to entertain Dalton's 007, but, as Roger Ebert put it, audiences of the 1980s appeared to like action more than they liked sex. (Which makes 1980s nostalgia even more of a mystery to me.) But to the extent that The Living Daylights held together, Dalton earns credit as the glue. Even though James Bond plots are pretty standard issue affairs, Dalton's performance provided at least the illusion that Bond's decisions moved the story. I couldn't always follow the villains, but Dalton was always able to clue me in on why Bond made the moves he made. I'm grateful that he let me see the wheels turn in his head.

But the wheel turned onward, past Timothy Dalton. After a six-year hiatus, a rights dispute, and a lot of legal wrangling, James Bond returned again, this time with Pierce Brosnan as 007 (in a restoration, of sorts). Tomorrow I will be Onatopp of things with a review of 1995's Goldeneye.