Roger Moore’s run as Bond ended with a bit of a whimper. While A View to a Kill was interesting primarily because of a young Christopher Walken’s turn as a sadistic villain, Moore descended toward the typical, stunt-double-filled character that riddled the end of Connery’s run as well. Enter Timothy Dalton, who replaces Moore in The Living Daylights. Even though the title is lifted from a cliché expression, the film itself gives a bit more life to the series.
Dalton-as-Bond also deviates from his predecessors. Classically trained for stage and screen, Dalton is a different type of handsome than Connery and Moore. His accent is softer, and his features more pronounced. The round chin of Moore is replaced with a sharp one that V’s into higher cheek bones that create darker pockets for shadowy eyes. Characteristic to the Dalton tandem in the Bond franchise, these features make Bond a bit more villainous, a rogue agent, one that can’t always be trusted to follow protocol. In previous films, there were allusions to Bond being a loose cannon, but too much insouciant charm emanated from Connery, Moore, and even Lazenby. Dark they were not.
But Dalton is, which ties perfectly to the subtext of The Living Daylights, which might be the first film to criminalize the Americans and give the nefariousness a face. In previous films, most chaos was caused by SPECTRE. The Americans and Russians were pawns in the plots to create nuclear war. In films like Dr. No, From Russian with Love, or Thunderball, the countries’ respective stubbornness aided in the conflict, but they were rubes.
Here, the arms dealing Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker, who also appears in two of the Brosnan-as-Bond films as a different character) is the unhinged American partaking in the armament of global combatants. In effect, The Living Daylights becomes the most politically satirical Bond released in quite a while. While it might get lost in the shuffle of Uber-Patriotism 80’s films like Rocky III, Rocky IV, Red Dawn, and their ilk, it’s a bit more poignant than its soft, overt company. Those films were all about an us versus them mentality. The good versus the evil. In contrast, The Living Daylights flips the villain on its head and encourages a method of paranoia-driven containment. There is no one we could trust because our allies and our own are cashing in on mutually assured destruction.
What might be the most anachronistically entertaining about this film is the assistance we get from the Afghani Mujahedeen. Of course, two-and-a-half decades removed from our partnership with the Afghans against the Commie Reds, this scenario seems appropriately out of another world.
For the last ten years, we have been so bombarded with terrorist warnings and the appropriateness of politically correct racism that the Muslim men offering to help Bond are tinged with our expectations that they will double cross him in the long run.
All in all, The Living Daylights unknowingly continues to play on our senses of paranoia that continue to grow as the decades – and out global interests – change.
