Another View (to a Kill): Roger Moore’s farewell

A View to a Kill’s poster

By Nicolás Suszczyk, Guest Writer
Three decades have passed since Roger Moore bid farewell to the role of James Bond with A View to a Kill, directed by John Glen.

The film had a striking marketing campaign, an effective cast and realistic action sequences, but nowadays it remains hidden in the hall of shame by many Bond fans.

There are issues: Roger was getting old, turning 57 during production. The film is way too Americanized. See the “Dick Tracy” police captain lifted out of an Police Academy film. Bond has lost his mystery and his lethal side compared to the Sean Connery days, perhaps.

But why is it that some Bond fans still keep A View to a Kill close to their heart?

Maybe because it’s Roger Moore’s Bond farewell party – and it is done with a lot of style: KGB, explosions, ski chases, dances into the fire, lots of women, luxury, exotic locations. Moore said goodbye in his way.

Delivering punches to his adversaries like when he played The Saint, drinking his trademark Bollinger champagne, smiling to young ladies with his rather evident wrinkles and adopting a snobbish alias (James St John Smythe, pronounced Sin-jin Smythe), the third official 007 threw out a party and we were all invited, before the dark side of Timothy Dalton’s dangerous Bond debuted onscreen in 1987.

Music is a key element of every party. In the case of A View to a Kill we had not only master composer John Barry, but the popular teen idol band Duran Duran, with a rocking main title song that reached No. 1 in the U.S. charts.

Band member John Taylor confessed to be a Bond and Barry fan and approached the composer to sing the title song. Barry, surprised by the young man knowledge of his career, agreed. It was a hit. Every trailer and TV spot voiceover reminded the audience Duran Duran performed the title song.

Former KGB agent Max Zorin was effectively played by Christopher Walken, providing the first ruthless and fiercely violent villain on the series. He guns down his accomplices while trying to escape from a flooding mine and enjoys it. He orders an intruder thrown alive into a propeller. He tires to maim 007 atop the Golden Gate with an axe.

Grace Jones as May Day also provided a shake off as an exotic beauty, a deathly henchwoman who gets close –- literally — with the aging Moore. She was prominently featured in advertisements for the film which asked if James Bond had finally met his match.

On the other side, we had Stacey Sutton, portrayed by Tanya Roberts. Irresistible and charming, Roberts was perhaps not so memorable in acting, but definitively memorable in beauty and sweetness with every expression and glance with her incredible blue eyes.

The action sequences of the film took a realistic approach –- well, if we forget Moore used doubles — with Willy Bogner’s direction of the opening sequence in Siberia, where 007 escapes the KGB troops on skis, snowmobile and an improvised snowboard.

In the style of the Moore era of parodying popular culture (as the Close Encounters of the Third Kind tune in Moonraker or the Tarzan yell in Octopussy), a cover version of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” song is heard as 007 (actually stuntman Steven Link) “surfs” the snow successfully evading the KGB, but then the dramatic John Barry tune returns as Bond down a pursuing helicopter by shooting a flare into the cockpit.

Then we have Bond pursuing May Day through the Eiffel Tower and through the streets of Paris with a destroyed Renault and escaping the incinerated City Hall in San Francisco with his girl, in a thrilling scene where you’ll seriously wonder if he’ll survive or how he will do it.

A bit satirical and gag-filled scene is the part where Bond boards a fire truck and evades the police, yet Barry’s music brings needed drama to this sequence. Besides the Police Academy films with the silly cops, this action scene is unadultered Moore Bond fun, as is the fight atop the Golden Gate between Bond and his nemesis perpetuated on the film’s theatrical poster. A scene that is not out of drama, thrills, suspense and it still has Moore’s humorous touch.

The very last scene of Roger Moore as James Bond harkens back to the first shot we saw of him in 1973’s Live and Let Die: with a woman.

In his debut, Moore was with Italian agent Miss Caruso in his apartment following a mission. Unlike Sean Connery’s and George Lazenby’s detail close ups before their “Bond, James Bond” moment, Moore let himself be introduced in his incurable playboy fashion.

In A View to a Kill, 007, presumed missing, is sharing a shower with Stacey as Q’s robotic dog observes them. He throws a towel right over the device’s camera-eyes.

It’s pretty logical. The playboy won his girl on his farewell party.