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I have tried that approach, but I honestly yhink only a handful of the jokes are funny. Most of them are just tacky to me.
Mine is that whole "HEY! CURLEY!" thing Jill St. John does so poorly--and the reactions of the other badly acting people are even worse! "HEY LADY!" "O-okay lady, you win." That scene is DAF in a nutshell for me.
“You handle those cubes like a monkey handles coconuts!”
There’s no way that line could have worked anywhere but Vegas.
Unlike many on here, I don’t rank DAF at or near the bottom, instead it’s somewhere in the middle for me. I’d much rather watch it than some of Roger’s entries and virtually all of Brosnan’s tenure. It’s got some good things going for it, like Jill St. John 8-> , cool car chase and Shirley Bassey’s best Bond theme by far. It’s not a total wash.
I too have it in the middle, above all Brosnans and most of the Moores, except TMWTGG and OP.
It is odd all of his Bonds bar one are set there and that one still has an American cop in, now you mention it.
Maybe the most unlabelled of all Bond girls .
Yes, but the US also gave the world Jackie O. and Grace Kelly (from Philadelphia, no less!). :)
DAF works better for me when it sticks to Fleming's novel--Wint and Kidd closing down the pipeline.
I think it's interesting to try to figure out the mindset of the producers with each film. With OHMSS, they announced DAF, perhaps as a reference to the wedding ring.
And in 1970, DAF *was* probably the best choice of novels to adapt. It has a narrative, it isn't controversial (LALD) or forbidden by Fleming (TSWLM). The only other options they had were TMWTGG and MR. They weren't yet delving into the short stories.
Even Goldfinger has Felix Leiter, even if he’s a Canadian actor.
That entire scene at the gas station is one of the worst individual scenes of the entire series, and that's saying something considering that it's in a film where several other scenes seem determined to compete with it. It's one thing that they set and shot the film in trashy Vegas at the peak of its trashiness and when it arguably was at its ugliest as a city, but they LEANED into it and that scene is an encapsulation of it.
I'm honestly kinda surprised, very pleasantly, but surprised nonetheless, that the Bond franchise not only survived Diamonds Are Forever, but was able to pretty much just continue on right away with Roger.
People came back for Connery and perhaps him continuing on afterward. Didn't matter if people thought it was the biggest POS Bond film at the time, Connery just had that power
Yes, the return of Connery as Bond was the unique selling point of the film. It's a bit like when people say if they stood a donkey for a vacant safe seat in a UK parliamentary constituency and put a blue or red rosette on it people would still vote along party lines for the donkey. In other words voting for party above all else, even the candidate. In that analogy Connery is the rosette in terms of popularity amongst the cinema going public and the donkey is the film itself. In the same way people went to see DAF for Connery and his return as Bond was for them evidently worth the price of entry alone. Plot, script and character came very much second for people. In fact the producers of course spent a lot of the film's budget to secure Connery's return which goes some way to explaining the uncharacteristically lacklustre explosions and special effects seen in the finished film.
That's why I'll say that a second movie with Lazenby as Bond might have killed the franchise dead,,whatever their approach. And Sean Connery was the sole element needed to make DAF a commercial success. Whatever the approach. They could literally have gone French Connection with a gritty revenge plot and still get away with it.
And that's not even getting into Saltzman or McClory in the '70s.
It might be a little controversial, but not that much. Many people here rate it very highly, me included. I think I would probably rank it at nr 3 currently, with only FRWL and CR ahead of it.
Basically, the James Bond of this film isn't really anything like the Bond of the books or other EON films. If this were a completely original film, and the novel didn't exist, you could change his name and few reviews would make any comparisons to James Bond.
And on the other side of it, if this were a completely original EON story, I suspect it wouldn't trouble the top ten lists of all that many fans.
I really don't tend to nitpick Bond movies, but so many things jump out as wrong in this one. The fact that there is no reason for Le Chiffre to torture Bond for his password is a big one (he can't use the password, and Vesper can get him the money without it anyway). Or how easily things come to Bond in the film. He checks the timestamp on an SMS, goes to the casino, pops in a security disc, and there's the sender, standing right in front of a camera (the one Bond chose), sending the message. He doesn't win at cards with wits or bluffing: he just gets the best cards. (And they all get pretty damn good cards) And Vesper seems to kill herself mostly because her literary version did. Bond's reaction is also unlike anything from the novel.
Technically, I find the Dutch angles and dissolve cuts (often to scenes in the same room, just a little while later) to be a bit corny.
Anyway, great performances all around, just not much like EON's or Fleming's Bond. I don't hate it at all, but when I want to watch a Bond movie, I want it to be like a Bond movie, so this one just doesn't come up much.
Back in the 70s the series was not established as it is now. But I remember after LTK and the future of Bond seemed very grim.
And i LOVE Fiona Volpe.
I don't think LTK damaged anything. It was just released in a gauntlet of films in the summer of 89. Personally, I think if it was released in any other point in the year, it would have deemed more successful. I never read too much into the financial issues and lawsuits in the early 90s, but I don't think LTK was the factor
I think LTK may have suffered a bit because of the violence and tone of the film, especially coming after the Roger Moore era. Nowadays we as Bond fans don’t really think twice about it but it was a huge departure from what had come before, and audience just wasn’t ready for it. There’s also the factor of poor marketing, and the last minute title change.
I could be wrong, but I remember reading that, if LTK had been more financially successful, MGM's sale at cut-rate prices of the 007 library at the end of 90'/beginning of 91', which initially angered Cubby and resulted in the long years of legal trouble that froze the franchise, probably wouldn't have happened, or at least things would have been different because Bond would have been seen as something much more profitable. So, although LTK did not damage anything when it was released, its mixed box office numbers will therefore be a handicap afterwards.
Had Bond 17 been able to go into production shortly before the start of the legal disputes, and released in the fall of 1991, facing little serious competition, things could probably have been different as Cubby may have had a possible box office success to play in the balance, questioning MGM's politics.
I think the long hiatus and uncertainty between LTK and GE can be explained by many factors, both internal and external. LTK could have been better packaged, could have looked more Bondian, could have been released at a better time. But by itself it would just have been a disappointing entry, at least un terms of popularity at the time. The end of the Cold War also played a role I think. An issue that GE resolved seamlessly, but at the time it seriously challenged Bond's relevance.
That's partly true but you need to remember that the Berlin Wall was still standing at the time of LTK's release in June and July of 1989 and didn't come down until November 1989. There's also the fact that the previous Dalton film TLD the Cold War wasn't actually a backdrop to the machinations of the plot. There was a conscious effort to move away from the Cold War in this film with South American drug cartels and a personal vendetta on Bond's part being the focus of the plot instead. I suppose one could say that the writing was on the wall (unintentional GoldenEye reference there!) with the glasnost and perestroika Soviet reforms under Gorbachev being the order of the day but the Cold War hadn't officially ended during LTK's release. The Soviet Union was still very much in place and I'm sure few at the time could have predicted what was to occur in the latter part of 1989. I'd imagine that a bloodless coup was beyond most people's wildest imaginings at the time.