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