By all accounts, he had a grand time making the film - and living in London during the 6-month-shoot - and it comes across in his performance. (Sign of progress, I guess: When she ends up in bed with Bond, she gets to be on top.) Walken, as Zorin, is his usual unpredictable self. The Golden Gate Bridge finale includes back projection Alfred Hitchcock would be proud to call his own.Īs the unforgettable henchwoman May Day, Grace Jones' unique, angular features and "not gonna take your shit" attitude instantly vaults her to the Bond villain Hall of Fame. (Kudos to the location scouts.) The massive underground aqueduct set is vintage 007 Studios at its best. Zorin's spacious, especially ornate French mansion - actually the gorgeous Château de Chantilly - provides plenty of stunning backgrounds and architecture porn. The production team makes sure there's plenty to look at. The plot - as nonsensical as it might be - moves along, leading Bond through a mystery that sees him on horseback, in the back of a sinking car, manning the hose atop a runaway firetruck in San Francisco, trapped in an underwater mine, and then eventually on top of the Golden Gate Bridge. So, straight out of the gate you have a film with oddly infantile humor and a leading man approaching latter era Hugh Hefner, refusing to act his age or ever ponder that his latest conquest is young enough to be his granddaughter. I almost went a little further, though, because after just 5 minutes of A View to a Kill I wanted to turn it off. I just knew I had gone far too long in life without seeing what a Christopher Walken Bond villain performance looks like. I didn't even know about the Duran Duran song, which is indeed quite catchy. I.didn't know any of that before giving the film a chance. Moore later wished he had, writing in his autobiography that A View to a Kill was his least favorite Bond outing since he was too old, couldn't stand Jones, and never sparked with Roberts. This, the common argument goes, is a Bond film with a killer song and memorable performances from Walken and Jones, but you're still perfectly fine with skipping it. However, it does speak to the way people not only treated A View to a Kill in 1985 but continue to do so all the way up to 2020. Oliver's anecdote, of course, is but one isolated incident. They weren't there for Bond, they were there for Duran Duran."īond. "Half the audience got up and left after the opening title sequence had run. "I vividly remember seeing A View to a Kill on its opening night," he told the authors of Nobody Does It Better. This was pop culture commentator Glen Oliver's reality in 1985. This isn't actually a hypothetical on my part. The infamous 007 Studios at Pinewood literally caught fire - due to an accident on the set of Ridley Scott's Legend - during pre-production. They'll at least sit through the rest of it, right? I mean, surely they wouldn't have put all the effort and money into heading to a movie theater just to hear a song. Hopefully, they'll like what the rest of the film has to offer. So, to a good chunk of the people in your auditorium, A View to a Kill is just a way to hear the new Duran Duran song through movie theater speakers. The steady MTV play for the music video - which the band filmed on the Eiffel Tower and scripted to end with a literal "killer accordion" joke - sure didn't hurt. The result was a Bond first: a US #1 hit. The rest of the band reunited for not only the rare opportunity to join the Bond franchise but also to work with composer John Barry. Bass player John Taylor - who would much rather be James Bond than the bass player in one of the biggest bands in the world - pitched the concept of writing a Bond song to franchise producer Cubby Broccoli. The 5-piece New Wave group with every member a heartthrob has already flirted with breaking up, splintering off into two side-projects earlier in the year. Duran Duran was on the crest of a wave."Īh, yes, Duran Duran, aka the reason your View to a Kill screening seems to have so many teenage girls in the front rows. She'll later admit, "We had a lot of elements in that movie that we thought would attract a youth audience, Grace Jones being one of the main things. Meanwhile, one of the future stewards of the franchise - Barbara Broccoli - was turning heads on the set as a hyper-competent assistant producer eager to infuse some new blood into her father's empire.
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