Reportedly, some of the old James Bond films are unspooling again in cinemas in the United Kingdom to celebrate 60 years of 007 on screen. Twitter has been abuzz for the last couple of weeks with fans of the fictional super spy looking forward to seeing the entry Licence to Kill (1989) return to the big screen after many years.
It was nice to see such fervor for a Bond film where the spy is played by Timothy Dalton, an actor who is not usually thought of as a 007 fan favorite. His serious, scowling take on the secret agent is often contrasted unfavorably to the more suave, debonair interpretations of the character, which tend to be more popular. I’m not the biggest Bond enthusiast, but Dalton is my favorite Bond actor, and since he appeared in only two films of the legendary franchise — The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence to Kill — he remains one of the more underrated in the role, so it was good to see some enthusiasm on line for his portrayal.
This got me to thinking of the blogpost I wrote back in 2015 about Dalton being my favorite Bond. In my article, I wrote about my satisfaction that Dalton was being reappraised as one of the better Bonds after his outings had mostly been scorned upon release by fans of the series. (And by “the series,” I mean the franchise begun under producer Albert R. Broccoli and originally distributed by United Artists starting in 1962. A handful of films and TV shows featuring the character of Bond have been produced outside of this series, but they are not thought of as “canonical” by the fans.) I also repeated the story of why Dalton appeared in only two entries into the franchise: a legal dispute forced the series into an involuntary hiatus until after his contract to play the character had expired.
But turning my mind to the idea of Dalton as Bond also revived an old, half-forgotten memory. The time was about 1990, or sometime not long after Licence to Kill failed — unjustifiably — to live up to expectations at the box office. I was watching one of those TV shows of entertainment news, perhaps Entertainment Tonight. I seem to remember one of the talking heads saying that because of Licence to Kill’s underperformance, the Bond producers wanted Dalton removed from the role and for it to be recast with Pierce Brosnan, who was originally cast in the part but became suddenly unavailable and replaced by Dalton. However, this would have been before the legal squabble that derailed the Bond films for a few years until Dalton’s contract had lapsed, the reason we were told that he had stepped away from the series.
I started wondering: Was the narrative of Dalton’s tenure as Bond being cut short by the legal dispute merely a cover story for his being forced out of the role by Hollywood higher-ups because of his films’ lackluster ticket sales?
I posted my rumination on Twitter, and sure enough, several minutes later, someone replied to my post with a newspaper clipping from when Licence to Kill was still in release, a clipping saying that the “studio bosses” wanted the dour Dalton out as Bond and replaced by the more convivial Brosnan. Reading the newspaper clipping, said to have been published in the Irish Independent (perhaps interested in the story because Brosnan is from Ireland), it’s difficult not to suspect that Dalton was forced out of playing Bond by the studio heads, and the coincidental years-long legal dispute served as a face-saving story to explain why he didn't resume the role.
Given that Dalton was reportedly reluctant to take on Bond from the get-go suggests that his vacating the role — voluntarily or otherwise — wasn’t the most serious of blows, and his high regard for the 007 film series in his interviews in the years since his departure suggests that there are no hard feelings on his part.
Still, Dalton remains one of the most intriguing interpreters of James Bond on screen, and as I’ve said before, I’m sorry that he only got to play the role a paltry two times when his fellow Bond actors (except for the critically unchampioned George Lazenby) got to play the secret agent on multiple occasions.
But the enthusiasm abounding on Twitter for Dalton’s performance in Licence to Kill, and for the film itself, implies that the actor and his movies are finally finding their audience after all this time. I hope so. I think that Timothy Dalton’s two efforts as James Bond, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, will age better than some other films in the series.
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