Blame for Dalton not doing another film or two really belongs to United Artists. It entered freefall in 1988, when Kirk Kerkorian, who'd monkeyed with MGM/UA for years, put 82 percent of it up for grabs. There were various attempts at purchase and takeover, and by 1990 production was halted on all films, including Dalton's third Bond, though the script was ready. The same year MGM/UA was purchased by Giancarlo Parretti, who looted the company before it was foreclosed on by Crédit Lyonnais in 1992. Eventually production resumed, but under new head John Calley, who wanted Brosnan.
MGM/UA's mismanagement was also why LTK was made on the cheap and so badly promoted. UA hadn't bothered adjusting the budget for a Bond film since 1979 and EON had to economize by shooting in Mexico in substandard facilities. A dying company could hardly be expected to advertise a film very well and LTK's promotional campaign might have been the worst for any Bond film. It's infuriating to think how corporate mismanagement cut short Dalton's tenure.
That’s interesting @Revelator I’ve always read it was due to the amount that Eon was getting for the sale of films for television showings and they were feeling shortchanged.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
hopefully one day someone can use AI for the power of good to reconstruct these unmade DaltonBond films. I think there were two or more scripts in progress when the series ground to halt? I'm always curious what they would have looked like if completed.
Review of Goldeneye by Janet Maslin - Nov. 17, 1995 - NYT
“Goldeneye" unveils Pierce Brosnan as the coffee-bar James Bond: mild, fashionable and nice in a very 90's way. Mr. Brosnan, as the best-moussed Bond ever to play baccarat in Monte Carlo, makes the character's latest personality transplant viable (not to mention smashingly photogenic), but the series still suffers the blahs.
Today's Bond does have the Internet and a credit sequence resembling a pretentious music video. And he has a girlfriend with advanced computer skills (Izabella Scorupco, a deep-voiced model who looks as good as Mr. Brosnan, which is saying a lot). Still, he often seems adrift. And this film is missing such basics as the cold war and the James Bond theme music. The absence of the latter is sure to throw some audience members into a two-hour Pavlovian twitch.
Judi Dench, as the first woman to play his supervisor, M, is on hand to call Bond "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur" so that you won't have to. But the real problem is not a matter of Bond's antediluvian quirks. It's that "Goldeneye" bears no stamp of Ian Fleming beyond its title, which was the name of his Jamaican home. This film's screenplay, by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein from a story by Michael France, features only flat repartee and fairly desperate homages to the Fleming style.
And so many other action films have borrowed from the Bond formula in the 33 (yes!) years since "Dr. No" that this one has a hard time looking special. A plane, a motorcycle, a huge dam, a bungee jumper and nerve gas all feature in the opening sequence, yet it still lacks the novelty that starts the best Bond films off with a bang. And Mr. Brosnan, who makes a fabulous clothing model and has mastered the one dramatic mode this role requires of him (wry), is not at his most believable during action scenes. When Bond rides in a tank through St. Petersburg during a scenery-crunching chase scene, Michael Dukakis comes to mind.
Clinging desperately to the idea of Russian villainy for old times' sake, the plot involves Russian gangsters trying to exploit a secret space-based weapons program to sabotage financial markets in the West. And its chief villain is 006 (Sean Bean), who was once Bond's colleague and now calls him "Her Majesty's loyal terrier." Beyond this, it's enough to note that character actors include Robbie Coltrane as a Russian hood and Joe Don Baker as a C.I.A. man, and that settings can be drably industrial unless the film is pointedly visiting Switzerland or the Caribbean, where it practically screams about the scenery.
Though 006 has the poor form to bait Bond about his past, wondering theatrically whether all those vodka martinis can silence the screams of all the men Bond has killed, most of "Goldeneye" is relatively restrained. Martin Campbell, who previously directed the sci-fi prison film "No Escape" with Ray Liotta, supplies shootouts and explosions at reliable intervals, and without any special frills. The film's gaudiest feature is a vicious Russian named Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), who bites and claws her lovers and has a way of confusing sex with death. Her nutcracker thighs, not to mention her name, suggest that the Bond babe is as ready as 007 was for a timely overhaul.
In the product-placement department, BMW, Perrier and the becoming Bond wardrobe are all advertised. "Goldeneye" is as much a merchandising event as it is a wishfully nostalgic movie.
END OF REVIEW
A deservedly dismissive review from Janet Maslin, in fact she doesn’t go far enough. For some unknown reason this entry gets a lot of love on this site (something I’ve never been able to understand), maybe they should have gone with Sean Bean as Bond instead, at least we would have had a charismatic Bond. It’s odd that I quite like Brosnan in virtually everything else he did, but for me, he’s just an interloper playing Bond.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Thanks for that @chrisno1 I never watch adverts but that one is excellent - last ones I remember seeing were those Leonard Rossiter / Joan Collins ads for Cinzano (?) where he spills the drinks over her.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
TOMORROW NEVER DIES by Janet Maslin - December 19 1997 - NYT
No need to feel badly if the right watch, drink, cell phone, etc., don't turn you into James Bond. They don't really do it for Pierce Brosnan in "Tomorrow Never Dies," either. Despite Brosnan's best efforts to be lethally debonair, the Bond franchise has sacrificed most of what made this character unique in the first place, turning the world's suavest spy into one more pitchman and fashion plate. This latest film is such a generic action event that it could be any old summer blockbuster, except its hero is chronically overdressed.
This is not to say that "Tomorrow Never Dies" won't be an international success like "Goldeneye," which wasn't much better. But it should fare best in corners of the world where nobody knows how little the title means, or how accurately it reflects the rest of the film's shallowness. Closer than ever to cartoon superhero status, Bond is seen battling ridiculous odds, dodging computer-generated explosions, delivering lame bon mots and boasting pitifully about his sexual prowess. All that gives this an up-to-date sensibility is the audience's awareness that M (Judi Dench) and Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) could sue him for sexual harassment on the basis of his small talk.
This film does have a lively villain in Jonathan Pryce, as a media mogul who dreams of everything from manufacturing his own war to marketing software with bugs (so that customers will have to upgrade for years). Pryce reigns mischievously over an empire that Bond must infiltrate, and he also has a wife (Teri Hatcher) who is one of Bond's approximately one million ex-flames. Ms. Hatcher, like Brosnan, speaks in a perfect monotone, and so does Michelle Yeoh, the Hong Kong action star who is meant to kick some life into the series.
The film's other attempts to show Bond in a romantic light are so hopeless that it's a lucky thing his partnership with Ms. Yeoh's character, the svelte and athletic Wai Lin, stays confined to toylike weaponry and flat double-entendres.
"And now a word from our sponsor," muttered the critic beside me, as the camera offered a good look at James Bond's vodka bottle midway through the so-called story. (The humor-free screenplay is by Bruce Feirstein, author of "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" as well as "Goldeneye." The workmanlike director is Roger Spottiswoode.) Indeed, despite Bond's mission to defeat the evil mogul, product plugs are the film's most serious business, especially since the audience may be bored enough to start looking at labels.
The film's two best supporting turns come from Vincent Schiavelli, who has a cheerfully outrageous scene as a torture expert, and from a nice, smart BMW that works on remote control. Hiding in the back seat, Bond pilots the car through a tire-screeching chase. Don't try this at home.
END OF REVIEW
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Review of Casino Royale by Bosley Crowther 29 April 1967 NYT
More of the talent agent than the secret agent is flamboyantly evident in Charles K. Feldman's "Casino Royale," which opened at the Capitol and Cinema I yesterday—and that despite the fact that the screen is crawling with secret agents of all sexes and sorts. It is absolutely teeming with wild impersonators of James Bond, ranging from David Niven to Woody Allen and from Ursula Andress to Deborah Kerr. It clatters and bangs with 007's trying to pull the all-time double-oh-cross on all future aspirants to Bond-olatry. But it is still the triumph of the talent agent, which Mr. Feldman used to be.That is because he has made it on the premise that the more writers and directors he could put to work and the more actors he could cram into his picture, the more impressive, if not the better, it would be, and the more energy and noise would be projected by the sheer human multiplicity.As a consequence, he had twice as many writers working on the script as the three that are named in the credits. He had six directors shooting segments of it — and so conglomerate are their efforts that you have to consult the program to tell where one left off and another began. And he has a cast of so many, at least 14 of whom are ranking stars, that the screen appears to be a demonstration of the population explosion at its peak.Furthermore, since he wasn't paying (Columbia Pictures was), he spared no expense in buying the most elaborate and fantastic sets and the finest outdoor locations in London, Scotland and points east and west to enclose his completely Brobdingnagian burlesque on the crazy cult of Bond.You would think, with so much going for him, that he would harvest a residue of fun—and he does, especially in the beginning, when a quartet of representatives of Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union call upon the aging Sir James Bond to come out of retirement and help combat the growing power of Smersh, which has been killing off secret agents more rapidly than the automobile.It really gets off to a fast start as Sir James, whom David Niven plays as though he were a clubmate of the latter-day urbane Sherlock Holmes, goes to Scotland to see the widow of the untimely murdered M, head of British Intelligence, and finds her running a buzzing hive of female spies. With Miss Kerr playing this fuzzy lady and Mr. Huston directing this phase (as well as playing M in the first scene), it looks as though the film is grandly launched.And it continues to clip along nicely as Peter Sellers, who is supposed to be the world's great authority on baccarat, is recruited to simulate Bond and confront the demon baccarat ace of the evil system, performed stupendously by Orson Welles. The game between these two in the Casino Royale, which is the only thing in the Ian Fleming novel of the same name translated to the film, is a jolly tangle of two notoriously able scene-stealers.But all of Mr. Feldman's scriptwriters and fortune tellers have so cluttered the rest of the film with wild and haphazard injections of "in" jokes and outlandish gags — such as having Joanna Pettet play the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and Sir James, or Woody Allen come on as Sir James's nephew, Jimmy Bond, for one of his interminable surrealistic monologues—that it becomes repetitious and tedious. And since it's based more on slapstick than wit, with Bond cliché piled upon cliché, it tends to crumble and sprawl.It's the sort of reckless, disconnected nonsense that could be telescoped or stopped at any point. If it were stopped at the end of an hour and 40 minutes instead of at the end of 2 hours and 10 minutes, it might be a terminally satisfying entertainment instead of the wearying one it is.
END OF REVIEW
A pretty fair review. I was bored to tears when I saw this in 1967, I was expecting a “normal” Eon style movie. I’ve seen it a few times since (but not for a long time) to try and see what Feldman was trying to achieve but it’s neither funny or exciting. Barring a couple of decent gags the whole thing is dreadful and Bacharach’s score and The Look Of Love is the only redeeming feature.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Joanne Pettet is wonderful to look at 😁 Niven, Orson & even Sellers are wasted on this. Yes, great music. There is the skeleton of a really good uberspoof rattling in its Mephistopolian coffin trying to bring structure to the infernal mess. Sadly, he stays buried in cinematic purgatory.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 26,706Chief of Staff
I think that’s a pretty fair review…I do like CR67 more than most, I find it quite enjoyable for the most part…although I suppose I agree with the reviewer saying the film could have been 30 mins shorter…the music throughout is terrific 🍸
Comments
Blame for Dalton not doing another film or two really belongs to United Artists. It entered freefall in 1988, when Kirk Kerkorian, who'd monkeyed with MGM/UA for years, put 82 percent of it up for grabs. There were various attempts at purchase and takeover, and by 1990 production was halted on all films, including Dalton's third Bond, though the script was ready. The same year MGM/UA was purchased by Giancarlo Parretti, who looted the company before it was foreclosed on by Crédit Lyonnais in 1992. Eventually production resumed, but under new head John Calley, who wanted Brosnan.
MGM/UA's mismanagement was also why LTK was made on the cheap and so badly promoted. UA hadn't bothered adjusting the budget for a Bond film since 1979 and EON had to economize by shooting in Mexico in substandard facilities. A dying company could hardly be expected to advertise a film very well and LTK's promotional campaign might have been the worst for any Bond film. It's infuriating to think how corporate mismanagement cut short Dalton's tenure.
That’s interesting @Revelator I’ve always read it was due to the amount that Eon was getting for the sale of films for television showings and they were feeling shortchanged.
hopefully one day someone can use AI for the power of good to reconstruct these unmade DaltonBond films. I think there were two or more scripts in progress when the series ground to halt? I'm always curious what they would have looked like if completed.
I'm not sure that's quite a respectable credo by which to live!
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Review of Goldeneye by Janet Maslin - Nov. 17, 1995 - NYT
“Goldeneye" unveils Pierce Brosnan as the coffee-bar James Bond: mild, fashionable and nice in a very 90's way. Mr. Brosnan, as the best-moussed Bond ever to play baccarat in Monte Carlo, makes the character's latest personality transplant viable (not to mention smashingly photogenic), but the series still suffers the blahs.
Today's Bond does have the Internet and a credit sequence resembling a pretentious music video. And he has a girlfriend with advanced computer skills (Izabella Scorupco, a deep-voiced model who looks as good as Mr. Brosnan, which is saying a lot). Still, he often seems adrift. And this film is missing such basics as the cold war and the James Bond theme music. The absence of the latter is sure to throw some audience members into a two-hour Pavlovian twitch.
Judi Dench, as the first woman to play his supervisor, M, is on hand to call Bond "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur" so that you won't have to. But the real problem is not a matter of Bond's antediluvian quirks. It's that "Goldeneye" bears no stamp of Ian Fleming beyond its title, which was the name of his Jamaican home. This film's screenplay, by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein from a story by Michael France, features only flat repartee and fairly desperate homages to the Fleming style.
And so many other action films have borrowed from the Bond formula in the 33 (yes!) years since "Dr. No" that this one has a hard time looking special. A plane, a motorcycle, a huge dam, a bungee jumper and nerve gas all feature in the opening sequence, yet it still lacks the novelty that starts the best Bond films off with a bang. And Mr. Brosnan, who makes a fabulous clothing model and has mastered the one dramatic mode this role requires of him (wry), is not at his most believable during action scenes. When Bond rides in a tank through St. Petersburg during a scenery-crunching chase scene, Michael Dukakis comes to mind.
Clinging desperately to the idea of Russian villainy for old times' sake, the plot involves Russian gangsters trying to exploit a secret space-based weapons program to sabotage financial markets in the West. And its chief villain is 006 (Sean Bean), who was once Bond's colleague and now calls him "Her Majesty's loyal terrier." Beyond this, it's enough to note that character actors include Robbie Coltrane as a Russian hood and Joe Don Baker as a C.I.A. man, and that settings can be drably industrial unless the film is pointedly visiting Switzerland or the Caribbean, where it practically screams about the scenery.
Though 006 has the poor form to bait Bond about his past, wondering theatrically whether all those vodka martinis can silence the screams of all the men Bond has killed, most of "Goldeneye" is relatively restrained. Martin Campbell, who previously directed the sci-fi prison film "No Escape" with Ray Liotta, supplies shootouts and explosions at reliable intervals, and without any special frills. The film's gaudiest feature is a vicious Russian named Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), who bites and claws her lovers and has a way of confusing sex with death. Her nutcracker thighs, not to mention her name, suggest that the Bond babe is as ready as 007 was for a timely overhaul.
In the product-placement department, BMW, Perrier and the becoming Bond wardrobe are all advertised. "Goldeneye" is as much a merchandising event as it is a wishfully nostalgic movie.
END OF REVIEW
A deservedly dismissive review from Janet Maslin, in fact she doesn’t go far enough. For some unknown reason this entry gets a lot of love on this site (something I’ve never been able to understand), maybe they should have gone with Sean Bean as Bond instead, at least we would have had a charismatic Bond. It’s odd that I quite like Brosnan in virtually everything else he did, but for me, he’s just an interloper playing Bond.
Sean Bean as OO7? Imagine James Bond drinking Yorkshire Tea - no thank you very much !
Regards the review, I think she's taken a misery pill, but it is only my opinion. I agree about the terrible music.
Does he drink Yorkshire Tea? I’m sure he’d be just as happy sipping a vodka martini 😁
I am guessing he drinks it...
Thanks for that @chrisno1 I never watch adverts but that one is excellent - last ones I remember seeing were those Leonard Rossiter / Joan Collins ads for Cinzano (?) where he spills the drinks over her.
TOMORROW NEVER DIES by Janet Maslin - December 19 1997 - NYT
No need to feel badly if the right watch, drink, cell phone, etc., don't turn you into James Bond. They don't really do it for Pierce Brosnan in "Tomorrow Never Dies," either. Despite Brosnan's best efforts to be lethally debonair, the Bond franchise has sacrificed most of what made this character unique in the first place, turning the world's suavest spy into one more pitchman and fashion plate. This latest film is such a generic action event that it could be any old summer blockbuster, except its hero is chronically overdressed.
This is not to say that "Tomorrow Never Dies" won't be an international success like "Goldeneye," which wasn't much better. But it should fare best in corners of the world where nobody knows how little the title means, or how accurately it reflects the rest of the film's shallowness. Closer than ever to cartoon superhero status, Bond is seen battling ridiculous odds, dodging computer-generated explosions, delivering lame bon mots and boasting pitifully about his sexual prowess. All that gives this an up-to-date sensibility is the audience's awareness that M (Judi Dench) and Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) could sue him for sexual harassment on the basis of his small talk.
This film does have a lively villain in Jonathan Pryce, as a media mogul who dreams of everything from manufacturing his own war to marketing software with bugs (so that customers will have to upgrade for years). Pryce reigns mischievously over an empire that Bond must infiltrate, and he also has a wife (Teri Hatcher) who is one of Bond's approximately one million ex-flames. Ms. Hatcher, like Brosnan, speaks in a perfect monotone, and so does Michelle Yeoh, the Hong Kong action star who is meant to kick some life into the series.
The film's other attempts to show Bond in a romantic light are so hopeless that it's a lucky thing his partnership with Ms. Yeoh's character, the svelte and athletic Wai Lin, stays confined to toylike weaponry and flat double-entendres.
"And now a word from our sponsor," muttered the critic beside me, as the camera offered a good look at James Bond's vodka bottle midway through the so-called story. (The humor-free screenplay is by Bruce Feirstein, author of "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche" as well as "Goldeneye." The workmanlike director is Roger Spottiswoode.) Indeed, despite Bond's mission to defeat the evil mogul, product plugs are the film's most serious business, especially since the audience may be bored enough to start looking at labels.
The film's two best supporting turns come from Vincent Schiavelli, who has a cheerfully outrageous scene as a torture expert, and from a nice, smart BMW that works on remote control. Hiding in the back seat, Bond pilots the car through a tire-screeching chase. Don't try this at home.
END OF REVIEW
🙄
She doesn't like it then.
Review of Casino Royale by Bosley Crowther 29 April 1967 NYT
More of the talent agent than the secret agent is flamboyantly evident in Charles K. Feldman's "Casino Royale," which opened at the Capitol and Cinema I yesterday—and that despite the fact that the screen is crawling with secret agents of all sexes and sorts. It is absolutely teeming with wild impersonators of James Bond, ranging from David Niven to Woody Allen and from Ursula Andress to Deborah Kerr. It clatters and bangs with 007's trying to pull the all-time double-oh-cross on all future aspirants to Bond-olatry. But it is still the triumph of the talent agent, which Mr. Feldman used to be.That is because he has made it on the premise that the more writers and directors he could put to work and the more actors he could cram into his picture, the more impressive, if not the better, it would be, and the more energy and noise would be projected by the sheer human multiplicity.As a consequence, he had twice as many writers working on the script as the three that are named in the credits. He had six directors shooting segments of it — and so conglomerate are their efforts that you have to consult the program to tell where one left off and another began. And he has a cast of so many, at least 14 of whom are ranking stars, that the screen appears to be a demonstration of the population explosion at its peak.Furthermore, since he wasn't paying (Columbia Pictures was), he spared no expense in buying the most elaborate and fantastic sets and the finest outdoor locations in London, Scotland and points east and west to enclose his completely Brobdingnagian burlesque on the crazy cult of Bond.You would think, with so much going for him, that he would harvest a residue of fun—and he does, especially in the beginning, when a quartet of representatives of Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union call upon the aging Sir James Bond to come out of retirement and help combat the growing power of Smersh, which has been killing off secret agents more rapidly than the automobile.It really gets off to a fast start as Sir James, whom David Niven plays as though he were a clubmate of the latter-day urbane Sherlock Holmes, goes to Scotland to see the widow of the untimely murdered M, head of British Intelligence, and finds her running a buzzing hive of female spies. With Miss Kerr playing this fuzzy lady and Mr. Huston directing this phase (as well as playing M in the first scene), it looks as though the film is grandly launched.And it continues to clip along nicely as Peter Sellers, who is supposed to be the world's great authority on baccarat, is recruited to simulate Bond and confront the demon baccarat ace of the evil system, performed stupendously by Orson Welles. The game between these two in the Casino Royale, which is the only thing in the Ian Fleming novel of the same name translated to the film, is a jolly tangle of two notoriously able scene-stealers.But all of Mr. Feldman's scriptwriters and fortune tellers have so cluttered the rest of the film with wild and haphazard injections of "in" jokes and outlandish gags — such as having Joanna Pettet play the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and Sir James, or Woody Allen come on as Sir James's nephew, Jimmy Bond, for one of his interminable surrealistic monologues—that it becomes repetitious and tedious. And since it's based more on slapstick than wit, with Bond cliché piled upon cliché, it tends to crumble and sprawl.It's the sort of reckless, disconnected nonsense that could be telescoped or stopped at any point. If it were stopped at the end of an hour and 40 minutes instead of at the end of 2 hours and 10 minutes, it might be a terminally satisfying entertainment instead of the wearying one it is.
END OF REVIEW
A pretty fair review. I was bored to tears when I saw this in 1967, I was expecting a “normal” Eon style movie. I’ve seen it a few times since (but not for a long time) to try and see what Feldman was trying to achieve but it’s neither funny or exciting. Barring a couple of decent gags the whole thing is dreadful and Bacharach’s score and The Look Of Love is the only redeeming feature.
I was surprised at how far the reviewer got before thinking the film crumbles, since I think it fell apart well before the end of the card game.
Yes, the music is the best thing here.
Joanne Pettet is wonderful to look at 😁 Niven, Orson & even Sellers are wasted on this. Yes, great music. There is the skeleton of a really good uberspoof rattling in its Mephistopolian coffin trying to bring structure to the infernal mess. Sadly, he stays buried in cinematic purgatory.
I think that’s a pretty fair review…I do like CR67 more than most, I find it quite enjoyable for the most part…although I suppose I agree with the reviewer saying the film could have been 30 mins shorter…the music throughout is terrific 🍸