Jake’s Take: One Image from A View to a Kill (John Glen, 1985)
A look at the titles and a listen to the music.
Choice for you/is the view to a kill.
Between the shades/assassination’s standing still.
Similar to my post on Diamonds Are Forever, A View to a Kill marks a convenient opportunity for me to reflect on important essentials of the series in the context of an otherwise bad film. Those essentials? The title sequences and the music—both scores and themes.
Overall, with their vibrant hues and tantalizing silhouetted bodies in motion, the title sequences themselves are hugely influential and have been often imitated and seldom equaled. A View to a Kill’s titles are perhaps the most resolutely 80s of the lot. They don’t hold up well in and of themselves, but rather as a testament to ways in which the Bond films are, to varying degrees, stylistic documents of their time. And while everyone will justifiably sing Maurice Binder’s praises over his decades of Bond work, Robert Brownjohn’s titles for From Russia with Love and Goldfinger established the look of the series’ title sequences every bit as much as Binder’s. I won’t rank all of the titles like I have the films, but I will say that my favorites are Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and those of the first three Craig films.
The image above also spells out the dominant force behind the sound of these films. Scoring almost half of the series’ installments, John Barry’s masterful brass, strings and synth have propelled action scenes to unforeseen heights and have rendered equal parts romance and tension with elegant simplicity. As much as we all love “The James Bond Theme” proper, I know of no Bond fan who doesn’t put the theme to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service on the top of their instrumental list. In A View to a Kill, I love the piece where Bond brings Stacy down a ladder from fiery City Hall to a slower instrumental version of the theme song. In this scene, Barry’s score imbues an otherwise rote rescue with an undeniable grandeur.
And then there are the theme songs. Whether they foreshadow the story of the film, like “You Know My Name” and “Skyfall,” or are an assemblage of cool instrumentation and seeming nonsense lyrics, like “A View to a Kill,” what is true for the scores is true also for the themes: how they sound within the context of the film is every bit as important as how they sound apart from the film. For an excellent ranked list—albeit one with which I don’t entirely agree—I’d point you to a recent article by my colleague and fellow Bond aficionado David Klein, which ranks all 24 Bond themes (and includes links to listen). For my part, my favorite themes are “Live and Let Die,” “Nobody Does It Better,” “You Know My Name,” and “Skyfall.” The best scored films are On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Quantum of Solace.
On the subject of A View to a Kill, it is an unabashed rehash of Goldfinger, with microchips as the new bullion and another magnate looking to increase his wealth and corner the market through disaster. Christopher Walken is the film’s highlight as psychotic industrialist Max Zorin. With lines like, “Intuitive improvisation is the secret of genius,” he rises above the rest of the material in a manner similar to Christopher Lee in The Man with the Golden Gun.
In the end, if there is a lesson to be learned from this film—as my wife would say—it’s that you should always check the backseat of your car for Grace Jones. You never know when she’s going to show up there.
Rankings
2. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
5. From Russia with Love
7. Thunderball
9. Goldfinger
10. Dr. No
11. For Your Eyes Only
12. The Spy Who Loved Me
15. Octopussy
17. You Only Live Twice
19. Moonraker
20. Live and Let Die
21. A View to a Kill
22. Diamonds Are Forever
23. The Man with the Golden Gun