007 Mission Files: ‘A View to a Kill’

After the huge success of Octopussy, the producers were able to convince Roger Moore to return for another go around in A View to a Kill. Albert “Cubby” Broccoli was so happy with Moore’s time as Bond that he wanted him to overtake Connery’s six films and become the longest tenured Bond actor. Of course, if you include the unofficial Never Say Never Again, they both played the character seven times.

A View to a Kill gets a lot of criticism from critics and fans alike, but I actually like this Moore outing. It isn’t his best, but it’s fairly well made with a modern feel; it’s the first time an Oscar winning actor was cast in Christopher Walken as Max Zorin, and I remember seeing it on TV on a regular basis since it was released in the year I was born. It was one of the major Bond films of my youth, so I guess it holds a special place for me.

The movie was released in 1985 and actually states that it takes place in May of 1985. It had a budget of $30 million and brought in $152.4 million worldwide thanks in large part to their efforts in marketing toward the MTV generation. Duran Duran did the theme song and Grace Jones starred as one of the major villains.

The film opens with Bond in Siberia. This is the first time in the series where James Bond’s mission has taken him into Russia. He’s there searching for the body of 003. He finds it just in time to retrieve a microchip from his copse before being chased off by group of Russian troops. He is able to elude them by snowboarding on the blade from a wrecked snowmobile. He gets to a submarine that is disguised as an iceberg and is able to escape with the female agent waiting inside for him.

When Bond returns to London with the microchip, Q informs him that it is a replica of a chip produced by Zorin Industries. They’re worried about the possibility of an EMP destroying microchips in London and leaving Britain vulnerable to attack. M sends Bond to investigate Zorin.

Bond begins by meeting with a French agent named Aubergine in a restaurant at the Eiffel Tower. He tells Bond that Zorin will be auctioning off some of his horses, but he is assassinated by Zorin’s bodyguard May Day before he can give Bond too much information. James chases May Day all the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower, but she jumps off and opens a parachute.

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Bond gets to the bottom and steals a taxi to chase May Day as she floats across the city. The car gets destroyed more and more as he goes along, losing the top and eventually the back half. May Day lands on top of a party boat and escapes in a speedboat with Zorin.

M sends Bond to the horse auction posing as James St John Smythe with their horse specialist Sir Godfrey posing as his chauffeur. During a party the first night they arrive, Bond finds a check made to S. Sutton for $5000. He takes photos of people around the party with a hidden camera in his ring, including Zorin’s associate Dr. Carl Mortner who muses about selective breeding in both horses and humans.

Bond and Sir Godfrey infiltrate a hidden lab in the horse stables. It appears that Zorin’s horses always win because they are being injected with steroids during the race to give them an extra boost. He also finds that Zorin is hoarding microchips in a time that there is a surplus. Meanwhile, May Day realizes that Bond is the same man that chased her at the Eiffel Tower, but James and Sir Godfrey are able to return to the mansion before their disappearance is discovered.

The next morning, Zorin meets Bond in his office and uses facial recognition software to learn Bond’s identity. Zorin invites Bond to go riding while Sir Godfrey goes into town to contact M. May Day kills Godfrey while he’s getting the car washed, and Zorin injects Bond’s horse with steroids so he goes crazy. Bond is able to escape, but climbs aboard Godfrey’s car only to find May Day waiting for him. He is knocked unconscious and the car is dumped in a lake. Bond awakes to find the car filling with water. He is able to escape and breathe air from the tire until Zorin and May Day leave.

Zorin then goes to a racetrack to have a secret meeting with General Gogol. Gogol is upset that Zorin, one of his KGB agents, killed Bond without authorization. Zorin tells Gogol that he no longer considers himself a KGB agent. He then goes to a meeting with some of his associates where he unveils his plans to destroy Silicon Valley to corner the microchip market. One man rejects the ploy and is quickly dealt with. After that everyone else falls in line.

Bond follows Zorin to San Francisco and meets with CIA agent Chuck Lee in Chinatown. Lee is able to identify Dr. Mortner as Hans Glaub, a Nazi doctor that had experimented with steroids in concentration camps. After the war, the Russians sheltered him and had him continue his experiments on pregnant women. It is speculated that Zorin may have been one of the few of the children to survive his testing.

James decides to investigate one of Zorin’s pumping stations that night. He encounters a Russian agent Pola Ivanova, whom he’s had other encounters with in the past. He is able to steal the tape recording of Zorin’s meeting from her.

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The next day Bond goes to the Department of Conservation to look deeper into Zorin’s oil interests. While he’s there, he recognizes Miss Sutton from Zorin’s party and follows her home. Bond sneaks into the house, but he’s soon found. Just then, a group of Zorin’s henchmen break into the house. Bond is able to chase them off and earn Sutton’s trust. He makes her dinner and locks up the house to keep her safe for the evening.

The next morning Lee comes over and they discuss Zorin’s plan. They realize that he’s trying to destroy Silicon Valley and Lee leaves to get reinforcements. However, he is immediately killed in his car by May Day.

Sutton and Bond head to the Department of Conservation to find more information, but they’re caught by Zorin and May Day. Zorin then kills Sutton’s boss and plans to frame Bond for the murder. He traps Bond and Sutton in an elevator and sets the building on fire to cover his trail.

Bond and Sutton are able to escape, and the next day they go to an abandoned mine where Zorin had been shipping explosives. They find it to be very active and sneak in posing as workers. They are spotted by Zorin and forced to flee deeper into the mine with May Day in hot pursuit. Zorin ignites the first round of explosives, flooding the mineshaft with water and killing hundreds of workers. Those that don’t drown are shot by Zorin.

May Day is upset that Zorin would do this while she was still in the shaft, so she decides to team up with Bond to stop the second wave of explosions. They take the bomb out of the pit full of explosives and May Day gets it out of the mine before it explodes. Meanwhile, Zorin finds Sutton and takes her onto his blimp. Bond comes out just in time and grabs on to one of the guide wires. The wire gets tangled on the Golden Gate Bridge, and Bond and Zorin fight on top of it. Zorin eventually falls to his death and Dr. Mortner accidentally blows up the blimp.

Like I said at the top of the article, I do enjoy this movie. I concede that the plot is a little convoluted and the movie is a little long. They spend about 45 minutes focused on Zorin’s horse racing, which has nothing to do with the rest of the story.

Also, Zorin’s plan is to destroy Silicon Valley so that his microchip company won’t have as much competition. However, microchips aren’t made in Silicon Valley. The companies located in Silicon Valley just use microchips in their products. So, Zorin isn’t destroying his competition. He’s destroying his customer base.

I will say that his plot to set off a man made earthquake and flood Silicon Valley, which is pretty much stolen from Superman, works better than the producer’s original plan of somehow redirecting Haley’s Comet to strike the area. Still…it’s Christopher Walken being overly Christopher Walken. You’ve gotta love it!

I’m not a big fan of the theme song. It’s okay. It probably lands in the middle of the pack for me. It’s at least up beat, but it’s very 80s. The producers were trying to cash in on the popularity of Duran Duran, and to that effect they did succeed. This was the only Bond theme to reach number one in the US charts.

Initially both the theme song and the role of Zorin were offered to David Bowie. He eventually turned it down to star in the movie Labyrinth. Sting was next approached, which makes since because the character was initially modeled after him. Sting also passed. They gave the song to Duran Duran obviously, but offered Zorin to Rutger Hauer, which would have been awesome. Ultimately they went with Christopher Walken, who’s kind of perfect for the role.

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There are two big cameos in the movie. First is the third appearance of Maud Adams. She was visiting the set in San Francisco one day while they were filming at the fish market. She happened to get caught on camera in the background.

This was also the first on-screen role for Dolph Lundgren. He was dating Grace Jones at the time, and he came to visit her the day they were shooting at the track. They needed another henchman and he fit the build, so they put him in costume and told him where to stand.

This isn’t mentioned in the movie, but if you think back to Moonraker, it is said that Hugo Drax purchased the Eiffel Tower and his application to move it was refused. Somewhere, in an alternate timeline, the Eiffel Tower sequence in this movie took place somewhere else. Think about it…

One more weird Bond connection before moving on. At dinner, Bond makes a quiche for Stacey. This is in reference to a popular book at the time called Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche by Bruce Feirstein. He later went on to write GoldenEye.

Cars: Bond is chauffeured in a 1962 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud II. GEORGOUS car. It was actually owned by producer Cubby Broccoli, but of course they found a replica to push into the lake.

Bond also drives the blue 1984 Renault 11 TXE which was used as a taxi in France. I’m not sure how happy the company was at seeing how easily their car was destroyed. That probably wasn’t great marketing for them.

One of the most memorable sequences involves Bond and Stacey driving a fire truck through San Francisco. The regular stunt driver was too short to reach the pedals, but Moore had at one time been licensed to drive vehicles like this for his job after the war so he was actually the one driving the fire truck.

I also have to mention Zorin’s blimps. Both were made by Airship Industries. There was the larger SkyShip 600, where he had the meeting with his associates, and the more compact SkyShip 500, which was quicker and had more maneuverability. Only a Bond villain would need two blimps.

Allies: Robert Brown returns for his second appearance as M and third overall. His role is somewhat limited, but he does make it into the field for a couple of scenes.

Desmond Llewelyn returns as Q for the twelfth time. His role is also pretty minor, but he does have a couple of one-liners for 007.

This is Lois Maxwell’s fourteenth and final time playing Miss Moneypenny. No matter who else they get to play the character, she defined the part. It was clearly time for her to move on, and leaving with Moore made a nice ending to their runs. If you add up all of her screen time through the fourteen movies she appeared in just one hour of film and said less than 200 words, but she still has a place in the hearts of Bond fans.

Geoffrey Keen makes his fifth appearance as Sir Frederick Gray the British Prime Minister of Defence. I’ve come to realize that his character is useless. He always appears in the room with M and just kind of takes up space. I like having him there as a third opinion on how to proceed I guess, but it always just feels like he and M are just chumming around. Especially since Keen and Brown both first appeared in the same film.

General Gogol is back for the fifth time, again played by Walter Gotell. It’s hard to say if Gogol is a friend or foe in this one. He has some ties with Zorin, but he also scolds him when he believes that Zorin has killed Bond without authorization. The final scene shows him in M’s office toasting to the success of defeating Zorin…HEY WAIT! What is the head of the KGB doing in M’s office? I don’t care how close they become. That seems like something that wouldn’t happen.

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Speaking of the KGB, Bond also has a run in with Pola Ivanova. She was a Russian agent that Bond had come across on previous missions. Originally this was supposed to be Anya Amasova from The Spy who Loved Me, but Barbara Bach was unable to return.

Chuck Lee is Bond’s CIA contact in this film. Originally it was going to be Felix Leiter again, but since they were exploring Chinatown while in San Francisco they thought it would make more since for a Chinese character to be working at the fish market. He has quite a bit of information for Bond and is a big help before he’s killed by May Day. He was played by David Yip, fresh off an appearance in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He also had a short-lived TV series called The Chinese Detective.

I loved Patrick Macnee’s appearance as Sir Godfrey Tibbet. He had been friends with both Ian Fleming and Roger Moore going back to his days on The Avengers. He and Moore have a great rapport, and they’re a lot of fun to watch on screen together. Macnee also narrates all of the “Inside” special features on the DVDs and Blu-rays except this one since he had a role in the film.

Bond also interacted with the short-lived French agent named Achille Aubergine played by Jean Rougerie. He was also dispatched by May Day.

Bond Girls: Stacey Sutton is the primary Bond girl in the movie. She doesn’t even appear until about an hour into it, then she’s absent for another half an hour before they really get into her character. Basically, Zorin destroyed her father’s company and he is trying to buy her off. She also works for the Department of Conservation, so she is able to assist Bond in figuring out what Zorin is up to. She’s played by former Charlie’s Angel Tanya Roberts. More recently she could be found playing Donna’s mom on That 70s Show. She was offered the role after the producers saw her in The Beastmaster.

May Day is a very brutish Bond girl played by Grace Jones. She was kind of a female Jaws. She could beat the crap out of anyone, but it took her a long time to recognize James Bond. Just because he gives you a different name doesn’t mean he’s a different person.

Gadgets: This was a fairly light gadget movie. The ones Bond had were mostly understated, like a Sharper Image credit card that could also pick locks and polarized sunglasses that allowed him to see into the house from outside. The only crazy gadgets were a submarine shaped as an iceberg and a little remote control robot that Q uses to “spy”. It’s about the size of a small dog, so it isn’t very discrete.

Villains: Max Zorin is the primary villain in the movie, played by Christopher Walken. He’s the product of Russian experiments with steroids on fetuses, so he’s supposedly exceedingly intelligent and powerful. We really only see the side effects of his insanity as he kills all of his employees. Walken was the perfect person to play the character.

Dr. Carl Mortner was an escaped Nazi scientist. The Russians took him in after the war and had him run the experiments on Zorin, among others. Max has taken him in as a sort of father/advisory figure. Wiloughby Gray plays Mortner and he kind of just comes off as a confused old grandfather. He gives way too much information to Bond before even questioning who he is and ultimately blows up Zorin’s blimp by mistake.

There are a lot of other minor villains that pop up throughout the movie. People like Scarpine and Jenny Flex who are honestly just hard to keep track of. The movie is too long and has too many of these bubble characters for any of them to have a clear purpose.

I like A View to a Kill for what it is. I understand that a lot of people think it’s one of the worst of the series, but it was one that I watched a lot as a child. It’s worth the fun of seeing Walken, Jones, and Macnee for me to watch it from time to time. It’s also the end of an era as both Moore and Maxwell make their final appearances.

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Since this brings us to the end of the Moore era, we can wrap up his time as Bond. He’s not my favorite Bond, but I do see his appeal. I understand why so many people like him. He’s charming, suave, and sophisticated, yet he can make a joke and immediately lighten the situation. Connery was an intense Bond, and Moore went the opposite way. He saw the movies as a fun adventure instead of life or death. Here’s my ranking of Moore’s seven films:

  1. Octopussy – Geriatric James Bond dressed as a clown.
  2. For Your Eyes Only – I don’t hate the movie, but it’s very forgettable. I just watched it a month ago, and I can’t tell you what happens. I really dislike the faux “Blofeld” cold open.
  3. Moonraker – I loved this movie as a kid, so I really don’t have to say much more. It’s Bond in Space, cashing in on the sci-fi craze of the late 70s.
  4. The Spy Who Loved Me – Again, this wasn’t a terrible movie, but the villain was boring and old. He was trying to hoard the entire world’s supply of Worther’s Originals or something?
  5. A View to a Kill – This is way higher than a lot of people would put it, but I think it was a good way for Moore to go out. Great performances by Walken and Macnee.
  6. The Man with the Golden Gun – Simple plot with really good villains. Christopher Lee and Herve Villechaize should have worked together more.
  7. Live and Let Die – Great locations, a decent plot, great characters, and a little scary. One of the best all time Bond movies.

Like most Bond actors, Moore’s movies got worse as they went along. My list almost goes in order from first to last except for A View to a Kill. Sometimes the series just needs new blood, and we’ll get it soon.

How would you rate Moore’s Bond films? Do you prefer Moore or Connery? Sound off in the comments below.

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