The Living Daylights (1987) is the fifteenth James Bond film and the first to star Timothy Dalton as 007. Directed by John Glen, the film marked a shift away from the lighter tone of the later Roger Moore era and presented Bond as a colder, more serious and more professional intelligence agent. The story begins with a mission involving a defecting Soviet general, Georgi Koskov, but soon develops into a larger plot involving weapons, diamonds, Afghan resistance fighters and international arms dealing. Maryam d’Abo plays cellist Kara Milovy, whose relationship with Bond becomes central to the story, while Jeroen Krabbé, Joe Don Baker and John Rhys-Davies appear in major supporting roles. The Living Daylights combines Cold War espionage with large-scale action, and stands as one of the more grounded Bond films of the 1980s.
The Living Daylights was filmed across several countries, with Gibraltar, Austria, Morocco and the United Kingdom forming the main production base. The pre-title sequence was shot on the Rock of Gibraltar, using the steep roads and military landscape for the training exercise and Land Rover chase. Austria plays a particularly important role in the film, both as itself and as a stand-in for Bratislava in what was then Czechoslovakia. Vienna locations include the Volksoper, Sofiensäle, the Prater and its Giant Ferris Wheel, Schönbrunn Palace, the Gasometer and streets in the Währing district, while the snowy border escape was filmed around Weissensee and Carinthia. Morocco was used for the North African and Afghan sections of the story, including Ouarzazate and Tangier, with the Forbes Museum in Tangier standing in for Brad Whitaker’s villa. Studio work was completed at Pinewood Studios in England, while additional British locations were used for specific material. The result is a Bond film with a broad but coherent location identity, moving from Gibraltar’s rock and military roads to Vienna’s opera houses and fairground, then onward to Austrian mountain landscapes, Moroccan desert locations and the controlled scale of Pinewood’s studio sets.
Wiener Riesenrad
Wiener Riesenrad has appeared in The Third Man (1949), Scorpio (1973), The Living Daylights (1987), Before Sunrise (1995), Woman in Gold (2015) and Sachertorte.
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