9/25/2023 0 Comments Tanya roberts a view to a kill![]() ![]() They’d both been stars of ‘60s British spy shows that shared key traits with Bond – The Saint and The Avengers, respectively – with the result that the duo’s warm, bumbling, everything-stops-for-tea scenes seemed too, well, before the ‘80s. ![]() If a “conservative” attitude to women helped weaken the offering, so too did the very ‘60s pairing of Moore and Patrick Macnee, who played establishment figure Sir Godfrey Tibbett. (She also gave then-boyfriend Dolph Lundgren his first movie role he was cast as a security guard the day he accompanied her to a film set.) Moore said he struggled to establish a relationship with Jones, though she said she enjoyed working with him and was cold to him only to stay in character. A Bond movie is, for all the appearance of sex and violent, a fundamentally very conservative franchise.” “They had wanted me to be in Octopussy, in the title role … but there was some anxiety about having a black woman as a villain. “The James Bond producers had really wanted me to be in a Bond movie, because in the 1980s, with the franchise threatened by changing times, they were chasing fashion and looking to reach a wider audience by involving more pop and rock,” Jones wrote in her 2015 book I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. The moment when May Day decides to support 007 and turn on Zorin, principally because Zorin has spurned her, is cited by many as the switch-off moment, and it certainly weakened the proposition of her character. They’d previously rejected the idea of Miss Moneypenny being promoted to M, believing that Bond wouldn’t take orders from a woman. Meanwhile, the world may very much have been ready for a madwoman in the form of May Day – but the people behind Bond weren’t quite there. But Bowie declined, saying he “didn’t want to spend five months watching my stunt double fall off cliffs” and calling the script “workmanlike.” Sting, Mick Jagger and Rutger Hauer are also named as having been considered before Walken took the job. Despite that, the role of Zorin was written with David Bowie in mind, in another attempt to capture a more populist position. He became close friends with Moore, to the extent that they spent Christmas together at Moore’s Swiss home during filming. Walken, as he said himself, didn’t need much help to be perceived as a psychopath. Now, what’s better than one arch-villain? Why, two, of course, and the teaming of Christopher Walken as Max Zorin and Grace Jones as May Day was certainly dynamic. And while there were some great sequences – the opening ski chase was fun but pointless, the airship “murder button” that turns a stairway into a chute (talk about over-engineering), high-jinks on the Eiffel Tower and some horse-race gallivanting – it just didn’t feel strong enough for most viewers. It was rooted in fact, but that didn’t prevent it from being rather unconvincing. The story suffered from a midlife crisis too – something about computers being the future and the money men behind Silicon Valley holding the key to the future and techno-fear. Moore himself was said to have decided it was time to go when he discovered he was older than love interest Tanya Roberts’ mom. But many reviewers felt that the star, who was now 57 and the oldest actor to play the role, had aged noticeably in the intervening two years. That meant A View to a Kill arrived on a supporting bounce. Moore’s previous outing, 1983’s Octopussy, was one of the best-received movies of the series, at least at the box office. ![]()
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