It remains a considerable shame that Timothy Dalton was denied a third film as James Bond. Dalton's Bond was lean, almost lupine, and the menace resided entirely in the man himself. A certain stillness, the controlled intensity of the voice, the way his eyes could harden in an instant, those were his weapons. He could radiate a cold, professional ruthlessness that felt entirely authentic, the sort of quiet lethality one associates with the literary Bond of Ian Fleming's novels. Crucially, he could switch off the coldness. There was charm there, a capacity for warmth that made the ruthlessness more potent by contrast. One never doubted that this was a man who killed when required and who was equally capable of being a civilised gentleman when the Walther was holstered. Dalton's classical training showed to his advantage. The stage-honed ability to modulate presence, to hold a scene with little more than phrasing and stillness, suited the character of Bond perfectly. The danger from him was intellectual and psychological as much as it was kinetic. In that respect he was, to my mind, the closest we have come to Fleming's original conception: the professional secret agent living on the edge, capable of being both refined and feral, not a superhero but a thoroughly dangerous man. The third film that might have completed the portrait was already taking shape when circumstances intervened. By the spring of 1990, Michael G. Wilson and Alfonse Ruggiero had completed a detailed outline treatment for Dalton's third Bond. It opened with a catastrophic explosion at a chemical weapons laboratory in Scotland, set off when robotic devices ran amok. The principal antagonist was Sir Henry Lee Ching, a brilliant, thirty-year-old British-Chinese entrepreneur and electronics prodigy of distinctly unsound mind. His scheme turned on a computer virus capable of paralysing military and commercial systems worldwide, with the approaching handover of Hong Kong supplying both motive and setting. The action would have carried Bond through Hong Kong, Japan and mainland China, culminating in a Die Hard-style confrontation inside Sir Henry's hi-tech high-rise, which Bond would enter via the sewers and waste-pipe before dispatching the villain with a welding torch to the face. The intention was to retain the grounded ruthlessness of Licence to Kill while introducing more ambitious technological spectacle. Dalton later recalled that a script existed which he regarded as "quite a good story," one he would have been enthusiastic to make into "a real scorcher" that synthesised the best of his two completed films. Directors were being interviewed, and the production was advancing when the legal difficulties froze everything. Those difficulties arose after Licence to Kill, when MGM/United Artists, already in financial straits, was being acquired by Pathé Communications under Giancarlo Parretti. To finance the purchase, Parretti proposed to sell off television and home-video rights to the studio's catalogue at sharply reduced rates; the Bond films, still the most valuable asset, were included. Danjaq, the Broccoli family's holding company that owns the 007 rights, sued on the grounds that the proposed sales violated the long-standing distribution agreements originally struck with United Artists in the 1960s. Countersuits followed, and the litigation dragged on, bringing all production to a halt. By the time the matter was settled, Dalton's original contract had expired. He initially indicated he did not see himself continuing. Later, he reconsidered and offered to return for a single picture that would consolidate the strongest elements of The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill. The producers, after a five-year gap, insisted he commit to four or five further films. Dalton judged that "too much, too long" and declined. It is a shame because, in my honest opinion, he was the quintessential James Bond. #TimothyDalton #JamesBond #TheLivingDaylights #LicencetoKill

I will say this, there has never been a bad M. Bernard Lee set the archetype; Robert Brown held the line; Judi Dench sharpened it, and Ralph Fiennes inherited the chair with the right dry gravitas. It helps that he was a teenage devotee of the Ian Fleming novels. The part demands a certain temperament, and the casting has respected it. This is opinion of course, people are free to disagree. Just like I disagree with the belief that an organisation like SPECTRE could never exist. The claim that organisations such as SPECTRE are unbelievable ignores real twentieth-century intelligence history. SMERSH was real: established in 1943 under Viktor Abakumov and answerable directly to Stalin. It was the Red Army's dedicated counter-intelligence service, tasked with eliminating spies, saboteurs, and "anti-Soviet elements." Its name Směrť Špionam meant Death to Spies. It operated with the ruthlessness one expects of a wartime Soviet security organisation. Another parallel to such an organisation is Operation Trust. Between 1921 and 1927, under Felix Dzerzhinsky's Cheka and GPU, the Soviets ran a fake monarchist resistance organisation that deceived White Russian émigrés and Western intelligence for years. It pulled in financial investments from the West, eventually drawing the Ace of Spies Sidney Reilly into the USSR to his death. It was controlled opposition at its most elegant. The apparatus already possessed the networks, the taste for deception, and the personnel. Operation Trust was unmasked in the spring of 1927, principally through the defection of Eduard Opperput. He disclosed that the Monarchist Union of Central Russia had been under GPU control from the outset. The revelation effectively ended the operation, and the Soviets shut it down. One need only imagine a shift from state service to private profit, an embezzlement, a few faked deaths, for something SPECTRE-like to appear. Unfounded, yet such a concept is structurally far from impossible. Ian Fleming's literary Ernst Stavro Blofeld remains the most convincing version of the character. Born in 1908 in Gdynia to a Polish father of German descent and a Greek mother, educated in history, economics, and engineering at Warsaw, he sold intelligence to both sides during the Second World War from Turkey before founding SPECTRE as a private criminal-intelligence syndicate. Its methods, terrorism, blackmail, extortion, and the sale of information, were those of a sophisticated criminal mastermind. No foster-brother gimmick was required. The films often simplified Blofeld and the Craig-era familial twist of a foster-brother unnecessarily strained credibility even further. The one credible aspect was the organisation's goal. In today's world, an organisation of SPECTRE's resources would seek to own the instruments of surveillance rather than merely evade them: the better to observe the observers and to corrupt the stream with omission and fabrication. In the film, Max Denbigh, portrayed by Andrew Scott, presses for Britain's entry into the Nine Eyes global surveillance agreement while campaigning to abolish the Double-O section. SPECTRE funds the merged Joint Intelligence Service and stages terrorist attacks to generate demand for the system, securing unrestricted access once it is live. In a profession defined by the absence of trust, centralisation multiplies the cost of a single penetration. Distributed agencies impose friction and compartmentalisation; a consolidated apparatus creates one high-value target. Operation Trust worked on the same principle, turning the opposition's own channels against it. Once the means of observation and the means of deception sit in the same hands, the distinction between the intelligence service and the criminal enterprise it is meant to combat begins to dissolve. It becomes SPECTRE. 🐙 That's what I liked about this film: that and it's the only Daniel Craig Bond film with a happy ending. #JamesBond #SPECTRE #DanielCraig #RalphFiennes