A View to a Kill (1985) was Roger Moore's seventh and final screen appearance as James Bond, a role that he had inherited from Sean Connery. Following quickly on the heels of Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill took its title from a 1960 short story by James Bond creator Ian Fleming, but the screenplay was an original story written by Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum, The plot has Bond (Moore) finding a microchip in the locket of a dead fellow agent, which Bond's tech expert "Q" (Desmond Llewelyn) finds to be able to withstand nuclear explosions. The technology was bought by Zorin Industries, headed by Max Zorin (Christopher Walken, in a role that Bond producer Albert Broccoli once considered for musician David Bowie) who wants to create a monopoly in microchips by destroying Silicon Valley. Also in the cast are Tanya Roberts, Grace Jones, Patrick Macnee, Alison Doody, Lois Maxwell and Dolph Lundgren in his film debut.

Production ran from August 6, 1984 until January 1985, with principal photography shot at Pinewood Studios in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, England, where a special "Albert R. Broccoli 007 Stage" had been built for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), but that stage burned down just as production on A View to a Kill was set to begin. Crews were able to rebuild the stage to its original size in a little over four months, but it necessitated having the repair crew work while the sets themselves were being constructed. While interiors were being filmed at Pinewood, as many as six units were working simultaneously in places as diverse as Iceland, Switzerland, Paris, Chantilly and several locations around San Francisco, California, including Potrero Hill, the Civic Center, Fisherman's Wharf and China Hill, with the pier scenes shot in Richmond. According to Daily Variety, the production brought $4 million to the local economy. Although the film's climactic sequence was set on top of San Francisco's iconic Golden Gate Bridge, it was actually filmed by using three separate scale models created by Peter Lamont. Likewise, the Eiffel Tower Restaurant's interiors were filmed at Pinewood, with exteriors shot at the tower in Paris. Surprisingly, according to director John Glen, the film came in $5 million under the projected $35 million budget, despite being two weeks over schedule.

A View to a Kill premiered on May 22, 1985 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, only a few yards from the Golden Gate Bridge, making it the first James Bond film to premiere outside of London. A special royal charity gala for the Prince of Wales Trust and the British Deaf Association was held in the British capital on June 12th, the day before the film went into general release in the UK. A View to a Kill was the highest grossing Bond film to date at the UK box office, earning $604,376 in only 11 days. By 1998, the total worldwide gross had exceeded $152 million, despite reviews like Janet Maslin's in The New York Times. In it, she called the latest effort in the Bond franchise "strenuous to watch, now that the business of maintaining Bond's casual savoir-faire looks like such a monumental chore. The effort involved in keeping Roger Moore's 007 impervious to age, changing times or sheer deja-vu seems overwhelming, particularly since so much additional energy goes into deflecting attention away from him and onto the ever-stronger supporting characters whose presence is meant to rejuvenate the Bond formula. But as the scenery improves, the Bond films lose personality [...] A View to a Kill should be no surprise to anyone who has seen the other recent Bond films with Mr. Moore and no strain on the intelligence or memory of anyone else." The film may not have won over the critics, but its title track, performed by Duran Duran, became the first Bond film to reach the top of Billboard Hot 100 charts.

SOURCES:

AFI|Catalog. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58416-A-VIEWTOAKILL?sid=45052805-4ded-4284-9529-582e5dd82e4d&sr=16.57039&cp=1&pos=0
A View to a Kill (1985). (1985, May 24). Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090264/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1
Maslin, J. (1985, May 24). THE SCREEN: JAMES BOND. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/24/movies/the-screen-james-bond.html

By Lorraine LoBianco