It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think?
I though that Timothy Dalton came the closest to the original. In fact, the movie “License to Kill” is a lot closer to Ian Fleming’s “Live and Let Die” than the Roger Moore film of that name!
I liked “License to Kill” quite a lot… but I’m practically the only one! It was the least successful Bond film of the bunch, financially. I guess the mass audience prefers to tongue-in-cheek, gadget-driven Bond flicks.
^^^Timothy Dalton is my favorite Bond after Connery (Dr. No, From Russia… and Goldfinger, only, though).
However, I prefer The Living Daylights to Licence To Kill. I wish Dalton had come back for Goldeneye (I hear he was asked and turned them down).
Sir Rhosis
Well, there is more ‘spycraft’ of the realworld type in the books than is in the movies. You actually think spies are given such spiffy toys all the time? Most great spycraft is social manipulation and luck that exploding underwear and nuclear laser watches…most advanced spy toys are on the lines of bugs, taps, cameras and surveillance gear. The spy toy programs on the different documentary channels are fun to watch, and nothing like the bond movies…
Actually, read the books on the real espionage that was going on - way more engrossing than all of the nekkid titties and screwing Bond does.
Speaking of real espionage… didn’t the actual agent/spy who Fleming acknowledged somewhat basing Bond on just pass away a few months back? Anybody remember his name? It might be interesting to read his memoirs, if any, or accounts of his career and compare them to his literary/movie counterpart.
Sir Rhosis
To answer my own question, for those interested: the guy’s name was Patrick Dalzel-Job.
Sir Rhosis
SolGrundy, you might check with local bookstores in your area as when publishers do a major cover revamp of books, they some times include posters of the new covers with the book shipments to the bookstores. These don’t always get put up (I’ve got a couple of posters for the release of Henry Miller’s Crazy Cock that never made it up.), so you might just get lucky.
Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Brosnan was signed in the late 80’s to officially be the new Bond when his tv series Remington Steele was cancelled. There was a lot of publicity surrounding the naming of the new Bond, prompting the producers of Remington Steele to exercise an option in his contract to extend the series in a series of made for tv movies.
Having lost Brosnan, the producers (I think it was Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson by then) offered the role to Dalton, who had been considered earlier as a replacement for Moore, but had deferred, feeling he was too young, though it’s unlikely Broccoli would have dumped Moore anyway.
Dalton did The Living Daylights, which had originally been written for Moore, and License to Kill, which was written specifically for his version of Bond. EON was ready to continue making Bond movies with Dalton for as long as he wanted, but Kevin McClory intervened.
When Ian Fleming was shopping the Bond franchise around originally, before Broccoli and Saltzman finally bought it, he collaborated with McClory on an original screenplay for a Bond movie. Nothing happened with it, and Fleming sold the rights to the franchise and most of the books to Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Fleming later took the screenplay treatment he developed with McClory and turned it into the novel Thunderball, which was then adapted into the movie of the same name.
McClory, with some justification, cried foul, and attempted to claim that he owned the movie rights to Thunderball, the Bond series, Blofeld and SPECTRE. He sued for compensation, and was eventually awarded the rights to Thunderball, Blofeld, and SPECTRE, but not Bond. McClory had the right to remake Thunderball, which he did as Never Say Never Again, but could not make any other use of Bond. EON lost the rights to Blofeld and SPECTRE.
McClory, irrationally this time, continued to sue claiming that his collaboration with Fleming early on made him either the true owner of the rights to the movie Bond franchise, or in the alternative, gave him the right to use Bond in his own series of movies.
This was what was going on when everyone was set to start filming Dalton’s third movie in 1990. EON shut down production entirely until McClory’s suit could be settled. Had production goine on as planned, we likely would have gotten Dalton movies in 91 and 93, and Dalton likely would have continued as Bond throughout the 90’s, suppplanting Brosnan until much later or possibly entirely.
After four or five years of frustration, with EON consistently standing behind Dalton as the current Bond for whenever things were finally worked out, Dalton decided it would be a good idea to bow out to make room for someone new–the gap was too big and whatever momentum had been built up had been lost. Dalton had never really captured the public mindshare as “the” Bond, and it was too late to try to recapture what had been lost.
It’s too bad. I would have liked a couple more Dalton Bonds, but think that had he done one to be released in '91, then another in '93, that should have been it, as he would have been, like Brosnan now, pushing fifty. There was nothing more ludicrous than the heavily made-up 57-or-so-year-old Moore trying to play a youthful virile Bond.
Didn’t McClory finally get paid off or whatever and agree to stop trying to make anymore Thunderball remakes?
Sir Rhosis
I know he was behind the Sony version of Bond that was going to star Liam Neeson as Bond and Connery as the villian in yet another remake of Thunderball which was going to be called Warhead 2000. Eventually, MGM successfully stopped the effort in court.
Those covers are gorgeous, Sol. I too developed a mad desire to own the whole set for the covers alone; I hope whoever designed them has a long and fruitful career.
–Cliffy
from Casino Royale:
Sir James Bond: It’s depressing that the words “secret agent” have become synonymous with “sex maniac.”
What the movies did to James Bond isn’t as bad as what they did to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I clamor for a remake. A remake featuring a long sleek car-freak’s dream of a 12-cylinder 8-litre supercharged Paragon Panther that just incidentally kinda thinks for itself and can fly or make like a motorboat when necessary.
Actually, according to the IMDB’s trivia entry for Diamonds are Forever, Dalton was apparently first considered for the role as a replacement for George Lazenby following the failure of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The too young excuse makes sense here, as Dalton would have been a callow 24 years old at the time.
(Aside: I consider Lazenby to be underrated in the role, and OHMSS one of the better movies in the series.)
But it’s dead-on with the child welfare stuff… 
He’d have grown into the role, given another chance.
Incident to McClory’s noisemaking, the teaser sequence from For Your Eyes Only features a recognizable but unnamed Blofeld dropped down a chimney; a clear signal that EON was willing to write off the character.
It didn’t work. McClory continued work on Never Say Never Again, releasing it two years later with Max von Sydow playing Blofeld.
I don’t know if it is, but Ann-Margaret recorded a pretty cool song which makes like a Bong theme called “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” in the '60s.
Whoops! Freudian slip?! Bond theme!