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Tuesday, November 6, 2012

James Bond Retrospective: Part 4 Timothy Dalton

Timothy Dalton was originally going to be cast instead of Roger Moore, but at the time he was 22 and he turned the role down believing he wasn't old enough.  Well, when critics finally had enough of Roger Moore, again we try to re-cast 007. 

For "The Living Daylights" a lot of names were thrown around but the most notable is Pierce Brosnan.  He was all set to do the role, but his television show, Remington Steele, got picked up again so he couldn't play James Bond.  Dalton made a pretty good career doing stage shows and television roles.  His film roles before Bond are fairly unremarkable. 

Many of the problems with why the Dalton movies were unsuccessful were behind the scenes problems rather than problems with the final product.  They were no longer doing Ian Fleming novel renditions and trying desperately to come up with compelling stories.  Also with as much as Roger Moore was roasted over open coals for his slapsticky Bond, they tried to make this new 007 much more serious.

And that's probably the biggest problem in a nutshell.  The movies are too serious.

The movies themselves are actually quite good, but they just never seemed to have that same Bond feeling from the previous movies because they dealt too much with real current events; for example the inclusion of the Mujahideen to help Bond fight the Soviets.

Dalton was to appear in a third Bond movie but production kept getting pushed back and he went on to other projects.

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