The first James Bond movie I can recall seeing was The Living Daylights, one of the two Timothy Dalton outings; its most memorable moment featured Bond and his latest girl sledding across an Iron Curtain border atop a cello case. “We’ve nothing to declare,” he cried to the guards. “Except this cello!” the girl chimed in.
At the time, believe it or not, the Dalton movies were what passed for Gritty Bond — a 007 who womanized a little less and scowled a little more. They were also, perhaps not coincidentally, only middling performers at the box office, and they gave way to the Pierce Brosnan era, whose campy absurdism (think Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist named Christmas in The World Is Not Enough, or Brosnan parachute-surfing a tsunami in Die Another Day) escalated from one film to the next, asymptotically approaching what might be called the Roger Moore Horizon.
Comments