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Not working with the actors it doesn't surprise me. It's fortunate there were a lot of strong actors including Louis Jordan, Walken, Krabbe, Malik, Davi, Rhys-Davies, who could handle themselves and were memorable. It's some of the female roles that especially suffer: Tanya Roberts, Kristina Wayborn, Talisa Soto. Carey Lowell's performance has gotten passes from a lot of fans, but I find a good number of her line deliveries wooden and unconvincing.
Maybe it was okay to be hands-off with Dalton. I'd have just let him run with it given his preparation and ideas of how he wanted to play Bond.
Tanya Roberts openly called John Glen out for not caring about her or character. It’s not like she was the greatest actress to begin with, RIP.
Right. And the editing styles are vastly different between OHMSS and TSWLM/MR. For the former it’s clear Hunt was calling a lot of the shots when it came to how to edit scenes, especially with fights. They have the trademarks that Hunt was known to contribute in the prior films. I don’t think Glen really inherited that for TSWLM/MR, because they’re pretty languid, especially MR. Likely more suited to Gilbert’s style, but still.
Killer One OK, let's get into the hockey uniforms and be ready when this guy shows, up and we'll puck him to death !
Killer Two What ? These uniforms notoriously are the ones, in all of sports, which take the most time and most help to get on ! Do we have an hour's time before he arrives ? Come on, let's lure him to a soccer field -- much easier to change into those uniforms -- and then just kick him in the balls !
Killer Three OK, but no headers to the balls. Not my cup o'tea, mate.
Killer Four Speak for yourself ! He's dreamy ! Why don't you just give me a chance to seduce him and distract him for a few days and then the big boss can get done whatever it is they're up to this time ?
Killer Five Never mind, you prattling idiots. Too late. He just left the arena.
As an editor Glen learned at the feet of Peter Hunt and was trusted by him--that's why he edited not merely OHMSS but also Hunt's Gold, and directed the second-unit on Hunt's Shout at the Devil. As editor of TSWLM and MR he could not be as experimental as in OHMSS, but his work is still adroit and the best edited scene in MR--Bond in the centrifuge--shows some of that OHMSS-style cutting.
Glen was not the best dramatic director in the series, but it's perverse to knock the performances in his films and ignore how frequently comatose those in the Gilbert films were. Glen was the right man to take the series back to reality after the excesses of the Gilbert era. The idea that other directors would have done better with the same progressively shrinking budgets and progressively worse marketing is probably wishful thinking and influenced by the bungling of LTK's release, which Glen wasn't responsible for.
+1
Seems pretty absurd to knock Glen down for some wooden performances. If Carey Lowell was wooden, how do you describe Lois Chiles? Or Barbara Bach for that matter...
Good point. These more experienced actors were more likely able to "direct themselves" than some of these ingenues (and some were just bad actors hired for their looks).
Back to FYEO, the buck should stop with the director but did it? I'm pretty sure Cubby insisted upon the jokey end to not-Blofeld, and the hockey and ice skating scenes were an attempt to cash in on the Olympics.
And Spotiswode/Armstrong in TND with Mendes in SF.
It also depends what you're counting in CR- are you including the airport scene? I think it's great but I know quite a few Bond fans don't rate it (which I think is mad).
And surely something like the LTK tanker chase he would have been overseeing quite a large proportion of, as it was such a substantial part of the film. And it's one of the best in the entire series.
It didn't do too well though. It probably didn't help Dalton either.
For me only the carpark chase rates in TND for "action cleverness." And yes, the parkour and airport chases in CR. Aside from the PTSes, I don't rate much of the action in either SF or SP.
I grew up with Glen's Bonds so I am biased, but I think, of all the things to slam Glen on (tonal inconsistency, erratic performances, Dalton's LTK hair), action is not the one.
The PTS in TND is one of the best action sequences in the whole series if you ask me, extremely punchy and inventive and full of invention and tension. And SF you have the excellent PTS (which of the 80s ones I'd say only TLD comes close to it) together with the whole climax. They easily match or outstrip the 80s ones.
In Glen's autobiography he writes about arriving on location and going straight to the editing van, where he expected to find the assistant "editor and his female assistant hard at it. I gazed downwards and instead discovered them both on the floor, hard at something else." His autobiography has many stories about the shooting of that sequence, though he gives credit to Wooster for shooting most of it.
Some other excerpts of interest:
"MGM/UA were giving us a bit of a hard time about budget control since Licence Revoked was budgeted at approximately the same level as every Bond film since Moonraker. This hadn't posed too much of a problem with For Your Eyes Only, but by the end of the 1980s it was becoming a bit of a struggle to make ends meet without compromising the quality expected of a Bond film. We remained economically minded and extremely efficient, but we were making first-division action films on a fraction of the budget available to our principal competitors in the US.
"Our problems were compounded by the by the Thatcher government's unfriendly attitude towards film-makers in England and for a while it was looking impossible to balance the books." Eventually it was decided to film most of the film in Mexico.
"I don't think we knew what we were letting ourselves in for when we decided to go Mexico, but we had to stay within the budget and that was that...the fact that we were based in Mexico meant that much of the casting was done from local or American agencies....Things were difficult in Mexico from day one. The bureaucracy was a nightmare and everyone was so poorly paid that bribery and corruption were rife - if you wanted anything done, a backhander was obligatory."
"...Things ended in a bit of a sour atmosphere, unfortunately - I was feeling a little unwell and Tim wasn't in the best of moods either. The whole thing was a bit of an ordeal and Tim and I had a bit of a slanging match across the pool. I don't know whether to put it down to tiredness at the end of the schedule or the accumulated tension of what had had been an unusually arduous shoot."
"...Another boardroom shuffle at MGM/UA initiated a period of uncertainty at Eon and the ensuing deadlock between production company and distributor meant that production of the James Bond series was put on hold. During that hiatus period, shortly after the release of Licence To Kill, Cubby phoned me with some bad news. He told me that MGM/UA had decided that when the new Bond film went into production, it should have a new director at the helm. I had been hired only on a picture-by-picture basis, so I didn't take the news personally. 'I think it would be a very good idea to get someone new in,' I responded. 'It will give the series some fresh blood.' My admiration for Cubby was undimmed and I closed the conversation by sincerely thanking him for the wonderful years we'd had together."
The lack of any truly memorable action in SF is part of why I don't rate it higher. The skyscraper fight is unique and well-executed but not a showstopper or one that would rate among the best fights. The fight in the casino is surely one of the worst.
The PTS sequence, Bond getting shot aside, isn't one of the better ones, IMO. The motorcycle chase only reminds me how much better the MI movies are at presenting such chases. Train action is also done better in previous Bond films and later in SP.
Interesting reading, thank you.
One thing I noticed was how when GE, CR, and SF were big hits with an appropriate amount of set pieces, EON in all three cases follow those films up by adding MORE set pieces.
So if Bond 26 has minimal set pieces and then they hype up Bond 27 as having more action, I’m going to take that as a grim warning.
I find it odd how TND has some really great stuff and then TWINE’s action is really quite poorly directed. Feels like one of the directors of those two must’ve been getting more involved.
Fun fact, it was my very first Bond film (if you don’t count NSNA). I watched it on Pay-Per-View after hearing my friend hype about it. After the garage sequence, I switched the TV to something else because that’s how much it bored me. I was 11. I would never actually try branching out to other Bond films until years later when I gave GE a chance due to playing the video game a lot.
That was very interesting. Thanks for the post!
Financially and critically no. Some cracks show - the stuntmen in AVTAK, made for tv feel especially in LTK - but given the constraints with budget and alleged Dalton clashes with Glen the films didn't fall apart.
I used to like it a lot because of the novelty of Bond going rogue. It's still a cool breakthrough, but it's got a lot of issues that's now hard for me to ignore which is why I rank it just above the bottom five.
Many compare TLD and LTK, but to me Dalton is the only common denominator… they are strikingly different films.
I agree with all of this. TLD is easily a top five contender for me. I think because this was a new Bond, Glen had to push himself much harder than he would have with Moore. It resulted in a very solid entry. However, I think he was way out of his depth with LTK.