Queer re-view: Licence To Kill

Dalton’s second and final adventure has a fated bromance driving its Shakespearean rampage of revenge, with a cold-hearted hero, a warm-blooded villain and a very capable girl with a disdain for feminine clothing. And what IS going on with that Felix Leiter cigarette lighter?

If this is your first time reading a re-view on LicenceToQueer.com I recommend you read this first.

‘Inspired by Licence to Kill’ by Herring & Haggis

“The name’s Bond, Flaming Bond?”

Licence to Kill is the ‘unconventional one’ in many regards. This isn’t the first time 007 has been reluctant to follow orders but it’s the first time he does so for entirely personal reasons, losing his licence to kill in the process. And then he goes and kills loads of people anyway.

Bond couldn’t care less that villain Sanchez is a massive drug dealer. He only cares that he maimed his best friend, Felix Leiter. Oh, and also he killed Leiter’s wife, but that’s not important for very long.

What is important is seeing Bond on his first true rampage of revenge. We had a five minute glimpse of this in the pre-titles sequence of Diamonds Are Forever as Bond tracked down Blofeld for the death of his own wife, although this motivation is never mentioned and when Blofeld turns up alive in the second half of the film Bond doesn’t take it personally. Licence To Kill is not the final time we get to see Bond in full-on revenge mode. In all of Brosnan’s and Craig’s adventures, the personal and professional are inextricably linked.

We don’t see ‘red mist’ Bond again until Quantum of Solace though. Bond’s motivation this time is the death of Vesper and it sends him down a path from which he almost doesn’t come back. I would contend that it’s not just the ‘impressionistic’ editing which makes some Bond fans feel frosty towards Quantum of Solace. For some, this film’s Bond is too cold-hearted for comfort. Similarly, although Licence To Kill has been reassessed in recent years, it rarely tops the list of people’s favourite Bond films. A lot of queer people like it though. Why?

Personally, I have always been drawn to it, perhaps because the whole thing has a frisson of something truly dangerous about it. This goes well beyond the superficial. Yes, it’s more violent than any Bond films that came before. It’s the first time we see the main character truly bleed. But the really dangerous thing about it is the desire to have Bond behave in ways which some felt as being contrary to the character, especially when compared with Roger Moore’s comparatively straight-laced portrayal of only four years before. 

Bond is unrepentantly Machiavellian in Licence To Kill. Of course, spies are not known for being open books. Being less-than-truthful sort of goes with the job description. In Licence To Kill he uses a Universal Exports ID to pose as someone looking to buy a shark. But Bond’s behaviour in this film goes well beyond adopting an alias or a disguise. He pretty much tells Sanchez who he is, using his forced retirement from MI6 to conveniently cover his true purpose: to get close enough to Sanchez so he can orchestrate a coup to grâce that will satisfy his bloodlust.

Bond has multiple opportunities to kill Sanchez - his singular purpose. But Bond waits until everything aligns perfectly, aptly employing a gift from his best friend Felix, a cigarette lighter inscribed with both of their first names in fact. Leiter is one of the few people who get to call Bond by his first name.

The lighter performs a dual purpose in the narrative itself: it’s an elegant way of informing Sanchez ‘why’ Bond wanted him dead and is also enables an otherwise unarmed Bond to perform the cathartic killing. But there’s more to it than that. It’s not the first time we’ve had a lighter associated with Felix Leiter. The first time was a double entendre on the Leiter/lighter homophone in Live And Let Die, the other time David Hedison played Felix. This time around, it’s most definitely not played for laughs.

I would argue that that tiny Dunhill cigarette lighter carries the whole (queer?) meaning of the movie. (If you’re in the UK, no double entendres about ‘fags’ please)

In film-making terms, it’s a ‘motif’, an object that recurs throughout the story to stand-in for something. Probably the most famous motif in cinema history is ‘Rosebud’ in Citizen Kane, although it’s only right at the end we realise what this physical object actually is and what it represents.

Like Kane’s Rosebud, the lighter makes little logical sense when you stop to think about it, but it does make emotional sense.

Bond smokes in this film, for the final time until Die Another Day in fact, thirteen years later. But he doesn’t use the lighter conspicuously. After Felix (and his soon-to-be-dead wife Della, more on her later) gives it to best man Bond at their wedding, it doesn’t reappear until seconds before Sanchez’s death. Making it more obvious would draw attention to a potential plot hole: are we supposed to believe that Bond has kept this on his person the entire time? What if Sanchez had found the lighter? At one point, we are even told that Sanchez has arranged for Bond’s clothes to be washed and he ends up being undressed by someone in Sanchez’s household (Sanchez himself?) after being ‘rescued’ from the clutches of an MI6 agent tasked with bringing Bond back to London. In all this time, Sanchez didn’t see a lighter inscribed with the names of a woman he’s recently murdered and her husband who he fed to his pet shark?

True, the idea of smoking is kept in our minds when Bond uses a detonator disguised as a packet of ‘Lark’ cigarettes, an instance of product placement that led to producers having to place an anti-smoking health warning on the end credits. This tides us over until the final reveal at the end of the tanker chase, just as we might be on the verge of forgetting about the lighter. Motifs are tricky to get right: if you remind an audience too often you risk weakening their pay off. The makers of Licence To Kill get it just right. Director John Glen’s background in editing probably helps. The lighter functions as a potent reminder of Bond’s motivation and the pain he feels about Sanchez’s treatment of his best friend. It’s also like a lightning conductor for a queer reading of the film.

The relationship between Bond and Leiter is the emotional backbone of Licence To Kill. It’s satisfying a film for most people but especially appealing to queer audiences who are seeing Bond take personally the attack on a male ally for the first time. Usually, they die, are briefly grieved for and quickly forgotten: Quarrel in Dr. No, Kerim Bey in From Russia With Love, Ferrara in For Your Eyes Only, Saunders in The Living Daylights, Sharkey in this film. Bond feels momentarily sad and he gets a degree of catharsis from enacting revenge on their killers. But Licence To Kill is the first time a whole narrative has been built around grief for a best buddy.

When Sanchez has met his hellish end, there is a brief moment where Bond is on his own with just his Felix lighter and his feelings. Framed off centre, suggesting the character is off-balance psychologically, Dalton plays it as if he’s about to break down in tears. This is something George Lazenby was instructed not to do even when reacting to the death of Bond’s wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service twenty years earlier. It would take another twenty three years for Bond to finally be allowed to have a good blart, in 2012’s Skyfall, following the death of mother figure M.

The melancholy, reflective guitar music in this moment, by Michael Kamen, doing his first and only Bond score, is quite unlike anything heard in a Bond film up to this point. And then the moment is past. Perhaps sensing that 1989 audiences wouldn’t accept a Bond dwelling on his feelings, the editors quickly cut away to the principal Bond girl driving the sole surviving tanker onto the scene to give Bond a lift back to a fairly ‘safe’ heteronormative finale. 

The producers have said that Licence To Kill was designed, from the outset, “to break the iconic figure of Bond and release the human being beneath”. Bond is deconstructed in many ways: he doesn’t even bother to drink his Martini for a start. And for two thirds of the story, he steadfastly refuses to see the funny side in anything, or even respond in a recognisably human way. A highlight is Bond’s expression as Felix’s betrayer, Killifer, is torn apart by the same shark than chewed chunks out of Leiter. Sharkey is repulsed and briefly looks away. But Bond stares on, stares through, as dead-eyed as the shark.

Intriguingly, it’s only when Bond is ‘outed’ as working against Sanchez (by Dario no less, see below) that a great weight seems to shift off Dalton’s shoulders. His first genuine quip (“I think he came to a dead end”) leads us into the climactic tanker chase. Throughout this late third act, it’s like he and the film are allowing Bond to have a lot more fun. There’s even a gag involving flying pineapples. The chase is one long sigh of relief that crescendoes with Sanchez’s death.

For most of the film, Bond is entirely focused on staying ‘in the closet’. Dalton, a veteran with the Royal Shakespeare Company, gives him Iago-like qualities, sowing seeds of doubt with Sanchez like Iago does with Othello, playing everyone off against each other. Just as in the play Othello, Bond/Iago adamantly refuses to reveal his secret, even when it threatens to tear him apart and others are threatening him with death. When Sanchez finds out Bond is his enemy, Bond refuses to tell him why they’re not on the same side, almost savouring his secret and enjoying how much it makes Sanchez uncontrollably angry, like a betrayed lover. 

Iago is not just one of Shakespeare’s most despised characters but also one of the queerest. In Shakespearean terms, it’s Bond who is Iago’s analog, working behind everyone’s back for personal gain, making pleasantries with (and taking tea with) people while plotting their downfalls. It’s entirely incidental that Bond foils a massive drug deal and the film doesn’t expect us to take much interest in the villain’s plan.

‘Machiavellian’ is rarely used as a compliment. There are even some less-enlightened examples of our species who see LGBTQ+ people as being universally ‘Machiavellian’ with our ‘gay agenda’ and plots to somehow invalidate their existences. Clearly, these people need help. But some of them will be Bond fans and I’m willing to bet some of them don’t especially like Licence To Kill for its queered presentation of the Bond character.

Friends of 00-Dorothy: 007’s allies

With an emotional detachment James Bond would be proud of, 007 devotee John Cork refers to the wedding of Felix Leiter as a “civilian social obligation”. It’s certainly an unusual situation for Bond to find himself in and he looks ill at ease in many shots. Most of the time Bond at a wedding he stays just long enough to destroy it. In the Moore-era, the films had a perverse enmity for wedding cakes (Live and Let Die, A View To Kill). It’s almost as if driving a speed boat through or jumping from a bridge onto a wedding cake is a way of rejecting heteronormativity. Or maybe it’s just funny.

Besides Felix’s wedding in Licence To Kill, the only other time we spend this long around nuptials is at Bond’s own, something which there is a call back to following this film’s pre-title sequence. Just as with Bond’s own marriage, this one is short lived.

It’s a harrowing sequence which results in Della Leiter being murdered - and, it is heavily implied, raped. Felix has a disagreement with a shark which Sanchez has try to eat him, losing a limb and almost dying. It’s curious that the producers waited this long to do something horrible to Bond’s best friend. He’s been in seven films by this point, played in a variety of different ways, from reliably bland (Diamonds Are Forever) to tongue in cheek (Goldfinger). Fleming certainly didn’t have this restraint, the maiming taking place in the second Bond novel, Live And Let Die, an element which the film Licence To Kill reproduces closely.

As in Licence To Kill, the Felix of the novels lives to fight another day, recovering enough to share in some of Bond’s most iconic adventures with the help of a hook in place of a hand. There’s a feeling that Felix’s return was something the Bond producers would have been open to if Dalton had been given a third outing. As it stood, Felix was retired for the duration of Brosnan’s tenure, not returning until 2006’s Casino Royale.

By the end of Licence To Kill though, ol’ buddy Felix is looking surprisingly chirpy for someone whose almost-death motivated his best friend to go on a bloody rampage. As he sits up in bed on the other end of the phone to Bond, there’s no hint at the trauma he’s experienced. There’s no mention of Sanchez. There’s not even a mention of Della. Too painful to talk about? David Hedison’s performance doesn’t give us this impression. Of course, the scene comes in the final moments of the film, and the laws of the multiplex mean everything needs to be wrapped up happily. Bond hurries away from the phone and into the arms of his latest amour.

At the end of Licence To Kill, Felix is single again. If the character had continued into Dalton’s third film would he have ‘moved on’ like Bond did for the most part? He doesn’t exactly seem ecstatic about the idea of getting married at the start of the film, seemingly more excited at the prospect of going fishing on his honeymoon than exploits in the bedroom. Are we to believe he has really had enough of the playboy lifestyle he exhibits in The Living Daylights and he wants to settle down? Wedding nerves are entirely appropriate for male characters in a story originating from the typewriter of Ian Fleming, a man who started writing Casino Royale to take his mind off his impending marriage.

Bond’s and Leiter’s friendship reads as authentically deep in Licence To Kill, more sincerely than in most of Felix’s appearances. They are colleagues who also see a lot of each other outside of work, when time permits. The last thing they pledge to do in the film’s coda is catch up for a fishing trip, presumably not in the manner of the protagonists of Brokeback Mountain.

And yet, so much of Licence To Kill’s story hinges on Bond hunting down previous acquaintances of Felix, most of whom are male. There’s Killifer, the man who sells him out for a million dollars. Bond delights in seeing him dangle and then fall to his death. Sanchez, of course, is someone who has monopolised the time and thoughts of the workaholic Leiter. Is there a sense that Bond is stalking Leiter’s exes? Is his violence a physical manifestation of his jealousy?

Unlikely. But it’s fun to speculate. However we read their relationship, it’s probably the closest Bond comes to loving another human being - or being loved. As the inscription on the pivotal cigarette lighter says: “Love always”.

The other ally with an expanded role is Q, accompanying Bond for much of his mission. They share a room but the filmmakers take pains to show separate beds. Bond hopes Q doesn’t snore and we never find out whether he does or not. In fact, we find out next to nothing about Q until the openly gay Ben Whishaw takes over in Skyfall and even then there are only tidbits about cats, pyjamas and a liking for ‘Earl Grey’. The only person who knew the backstory of Desmond Llewellyn’s Q was Llewellyn himself, who revealed in interviews for Licence To Kill that the producers permitted him to chose a different tie in each film to give Q some history, many from various sporting clubs. We know more about his sporting predilections than his personal preferences. Nevertheless, Q takes on another dimension here, humanising Bond in a story where he can feel removed from the audience’s sympathies. He’s even on hand to soften the blow to Pam when she finds out about Bond’s indiscretion with another woman: “Field operatives must often use every means at their disposal to achieve their objectives.” It doesn’t work of course, because Pam is Pam (see below).

Sharkey operates as a surrogate Leiter in plot terms. His death re-galvanises Bond’s bloody course of action just in case we have forgotten what is motivating 007 now he’s lost his Double-0 status.

Moneypenny is criminally underused in Licence To Kill, at her most feminine costume-wise and reduced to crying into her hanky because Bond is likely in danger. Despite M’s earlier confrontation with Bond, he is surprisingly sympathetic towards Moneypenny’s concerns, whereas the audience just want her to get a grip. Fortunately, Samantha Bond’s incarnation in six years time will do exactly that.

Shady Characters: villains

Sanchez’s credo is best expressed in his maxim: “Loyalty is more important to me than money.” Actor Robert Davi himself ad libbed the line, perhaps sensing that the audience might be confused about some of this choices made by his character, who is something of an enigma. His psychology is fascinating and Davi’s nuanced performance makes him a more complex figure than most bad guys.

He’s not the first villain to accept Bond into his inner circle a bit too willingly. He’s very similar to the Scaramanga of The Man With The Golden Gun novel in this regard. On the surface, everything appears to be a business deal, but really it’s personal. Long before Donald Trump became President of the United States, Davi drew a parallel between Trump and Sanchez, saying that his character would be Trump “if Sanchez was in legitimate business.” It's an amazingly prescient comment considering that Sanchez is essentially running a country in Licence To Kill.

Anyone who slights Sanchez personally gets their comeuppance sooner or later. In the pre-titles he arranges for his lover Lupe to receive the gift of a human heart - the one belonging to his rival for her affections. He’s never particularly affectionate towards Lupe, preferring to kiss his pet iguana (again, another ad lib from Davi). He merely needs to possess a beautiful woman. It’s a power fantasy.

He uses sexualised metaphors to represent his encounters with Bond, telling him at their first face-to-face meeting that he has “big cojones”. When he has Bond strapped to a conveyer belt which is seconds away from macerating him, feet first, Sanchez says: “When you’re up to your knees, you will kiss my ass to kill you.”

Licence To Kill’s ‘seduction scene’ is one of the series’ most curious. Ever since Dr. No, the villains have attempted to bring Bond over to their side. The difference this time is that Bond wants to be brought into Sanchez’s inner circle. He lets the villain think he’s been seduced. To that end, it’s interesting how it’s Sanchez who gets up to serve Bond a cup of tea, asking Bond if he wants milk and sugar. In the frame, Sanchez towers over Bond but Dalton’s body language shows Bond is in charge. As explored above, it’s a rare case of Bond in truly Machiavellian mode. He seems to be enjoying the deception.

Sanchez seems besotted with Bond. In one of the most homoerotic scenes in the Bond canon, Sanchez appears at the end of Bond’s bed (in Sanchez’s house), apologises for waking him up and tenderly calls him “hermano” (brother in Spanish). Bond is shirtless throughout the scene. Sanchez is clearly attracted to him and Bond presses his advantage, sowing the seed of doubt about there being “only one guy?” who is not on Sanchez’s side. As if the filmmakers realised the homoerotic nature of the scene and they needed to ‘straighten’ things out, they have Lupe diving into Bond’s bedroom only seconds after Sanchez has left, kissing Bond like a character in a farce or a screwball comedy.

If anything, it only heightens the transgressive feeling of the scene. Bond is playing all sides for his own ends, like Terence Stamp’s omnivorously sexual character in Theorem, the 1968 film directed by gay filmmaker Pasolini.

Dalton was no stranger to playing queer, or at least being the object of queer people’s affections, as he was the apple of Anthony Hopkins’s character’s eye in The Lion In Winter, towards the start of Dalton’s career. Apart from in his two Bond movies, the first thing I saw Timothy Dalton in was a glossy 1992 TV drama, Framed, in which he was the robber to David Morrisey’s cop. Even then, as a ten year old, I sensed there was more to their relationship than the writers could get away with at the time.

Robert Davi appears to have been relatively open to giving his character some less-than-conventionally masculine traits. Sanchez is the only Bond villain to be man enough to wear a pink shirt. The costume department even went to the trouble of dying Robert Davi’s shirts pink on purpose as they didn’t have any on the location shoot. Davi himself noted that “I can pull off a pink shirt. I’m not gonna be any less than a guy for it.” Many people are surprised that the conventional association of pink = girls, blue = boys only dates to the 1940s, the decade before Davi's birth.

Certainly, out of Sanchez and Bond, Sanchez is the more loving one. He’s very tactile with other male characters, especially Dario for whom he holds a special affection.

In a 2022 interview on the ‘Really, 007!’ podcast, Davi validated this reading:

“There’s almost like a homoerotic moment when I grab him by the face. You don’t know what it is… and that’s pretty early on to do that in a Bond film, to not be afraid of. Because in those cultures there is that affection, and who knows where it ends, or not?”

“I wanted it ambiguous. I didn’t want to define it. I didn’t want to be his father, I didn’t want to be his uncle. And I wanted people to buy into ‘could they have been lovers?’. Who knows? Could there have been something there? I wanted to leave it open because I thought it was interesting. However it was interpreted, it’s what it was.” 

Benicio Del Toro plays up to this, making Dario jealous when the “new guy” Bond appears on the scene.

He’s not the only one - Truman Lodge in particular seems aggrieved at Bond’s insinuation that Sanchez’s existing staff are less than competent. Perhaps Lodge’s jealousy is merely professional. Perez, on the other hand, one of the more taciturn henchmen, seems to take things more personally.

Perez is played by Alejandro Bracho, who became famous in Mexico for playing a bisexual villain on a 2004-2006 telenovela called, appropriately, Los Sanchez. In Licence To Kill, his reactions to Bond are a mixture of lust and jealousy, especially when he delays his exit to the room where Bond has just had a shirtless conference with Sanchez. His gestures are slightly effeminate, his gaze lingers - on Bond. A rival for Sanchez’s affections?

But it’s Del Toro who is Sanchez’s favourite. He is responsible for the sickening delivery of the “we gave her a nice honeymooooon” line which makes it pretty clear that Della was raped as well as murdered. There’s no telling who performed the sexual assault - Dario is in charge of a whole group of henchmen in the scene when they break into the Leiters’ residence. The character’s choice of weapon presents a range of possibilities too. Knives are not used as commonly as guns in Bond, which are, paradoxically, more PG-friendly. When they turn up in a film, they usually mean something. In the classic queer film Rebel Without A Cause, a character is told “only punks use knives”, punk being a slang term for homosexual in 1950s America. Fans of the horror genre are also familiar with the deeply discomfiting, psychosexual nature of knives which goes well beyond their obvious power to cause injury through penetrating merely flesh.

So it’s interesting that when Sanchez and Bond finally get physical, it’s Sanchez who is holding a machete to Bond’s face. Furthermore, the supposedly ruthless drug dealer hesitates to strike, telling Bond “You could have had everything.” Bond’s retort (“Don’t you want to know why?”) seems a bit of a non-sequitur, as if he doesn’t want to go there. 

What could Bond have ‘had’? It’s a line that prefigures Silva in Skyfall. Although Sanchez is not a fallen MI6 agent like Silva or Trevelyan in GoldenEye, he is still something of a mirror image of Bond. If anything, he’s often more like the Bond we’re familiar with than the Bond we’re presented with in Licence To Kill. He almost monopolises the quips, taking relish in “cutting overheads” when he’s finally had enough of Truman Lodge’s fiscal whining and ordering his henchmen to “launder” the money stained with Milton Krest’s brain matter.

You go gurls!

Not for the first time, the publicity machine behind Licence To Kill wanted to make it clear that the girls were moving with the times. In a TV special called Bond '89, Dalton himself told viewers that the time had passed for girls being merely “decorative”. Someone clearly didn’t tell the highly decorative gangster’s moll Lupe Lamora, although she does have something of Tiffany Case’s ruthless individualism and does help Bond in significant ways (mostly by keeping her mouth closed).

It’s Pam Bouvier who queer audiences might champion as one of their stronger role models however. She first appears wearing a wig (a good start) and when she has her haircut, it’s stylishly short (even better?).

Her most striking look is under cover as Bond’s executive secretary. She balks at having to play the subservient role but is told by Bond Isthmus is a “man’s world”. In retaliation, she chooses a suit which is almost like a parody of Bond’s traditional tuxedo. Even Bond does a double take.

Although she dresses in more typically feminine clothing later on, it is always with a hint of disdain. She takes pleasure in tearing off the bottom half of one sparkly dress so she can reach her concealed gun (this tearaway dress was based on one Lupe Lamora actress Talisa Soto wore to set one day and the writers made it part of the story). Actress Carey Lowell was similarly disdainful of dressing up. She turned up to her audition for the role of Pam in jeans and a leather jacket and was told to come back the next week, but dressed appropriately for a Bond movie. She turned up in a pink dress and got the role.

Even so, Lowell resisted the idea that her character would be a “babe” and Barbara Broccoli backed her, steering the story so she didn’t just become as “accoutrement”.

Beyond her appearance, Pam’s whole identity is amorphous. She will try her hand at anything - and usually succeeds. She takes on a range of traditionally masculine jobs, including harbour pilot, truck driver and, er, drug-running pilot. This sometimes causes consternation, as with the objectifying glance of the captain of the Milton Krest who soon gets his comeuppance as Pam ploughs his boat into the harbour. Licence To Kill is not on the side of the misogynists, which makes the scene where Bond rummages around up her skirt to find her gun quite alarming, intentionally so I would argue.

As we have established (above), this film’s villain probably is more like traditional film-Bond than the Bond we get in Licence To Kill. The same might be said for the principal girl. She certainly does the whole secret agent gig a lot better than Bond does. In their first proper meeting (after briefly sharing screentime at Felix’s wedding), Bond stands out like a sore thumb in the Barrelhead Bar. Pam orders a “Bud with a lime” Bond his cue to do the same. She also brings along a shotgun which, while not exactly subtle, shows Pam knows the depth of the danger she’s getting into. She takes a further precaution of wearing a bullet-proof bra too, a look Bond would struggle to pull off convincingly. We’re a long way from bras being used as weapons, as in Diamonds Are Forever.

In the ensuing bar fight, she saves Bond’s life several times while he gets to do a Buster Keaton routine involving swinging on lamps and battling a swordfish. Bond shows out of his depth he is by thanking her with the word “touché”, as if he was in a 18th Century duel and not a fist fight in a Floridian biker (boater?) bar in the height of the 1980s. As if to make it clear that Pam has thoroughly emasculated him, they even compare the size of their guns, with Bond’s found wanting. She makes a similar point by prodding Dario in the crotch with both barrels.

In the next scene, she’s the one who makes the move on Bond and, later on, she downs his Martini in one. She’s a bit of a klutz with gadgets, although if no one tells you that the Polaroid camera fires a deadly red laser beam how are you supposed to know?

A ‘bouvier’ is a breed of dog, an especially powerful one. It’s also the maiden name of two great American heroines - Jackie Kennedy and Marge Simpson (although The Simpsons had only just been brought to life when Licence To Kill was release). Pam encapsulates both aspects - the strength and the beauty.

Camp (as Dr. Christmas Jones)

Power ballads were popular in the 1980s and the song Licence To Kill is one of the most powerful. The lyrics are suitably aggressive for a song about a loose cannon secret agent/killing machine:

Say that somebody tries to make a move on you

In the blink of an eye, I will be there too

And they better know why I'm gonna make them 'em pay

Till their dying day

It’s definitely the kind of song you can belt out to bring some glamour and mystery to doing the washing up. Gladys Knight is well known for being a LGBTQ+ ally, as is Patti LaBelle, the singer of the closing number ‘If You Asked Me To’, which was covered by gay icon Celine Dion.

The Barrelhead Bar is one of the most un-Bondian locations in any Bond film. It’s essential a pub meets a strip joint. They even have table dancers, one of whom Bond ends up peering up at during the bar fight. Dalton’s mind is elsewhere, making his reaction quite funny, although the cinematic gaze is perhaps more prurient. However you take it, it’s a conspicuously macho moment that pushes an already too-assertively heterosexual scene over the edge into camp territory. The location of Key West, Florida is well known as a gay hotspot. If Bond had tried to search out one of his more customary cocktail bars I’m sure he would have found less rough and ready companions.

Bond has his licence revoked at the house that once belonged to Ernest Hemingway, an author who was so hypermasculine that many have speculated that he was closeted. Certainly we know he enjoyed experimenting with women’s clothing before his wife put a stop to it. A Farewell To Bras?

Q disguised as a mustachioed Mexican gardener is either camp/hilarious/cultural appropriation depending on how you stand.

Professor Joe Butcher, the televangelist/drug pusher character played by Las Vegas showman Wayne Newton is comically camp. Bless his heart.

Licence to Kill marked the last time a Bond film came out in the Summer which is arguably one of the reasons it failed to set the box office alight. As many queer people know, coming out doesn’t always go to plan but it usually works out for the best in the longer term. Licence To Kill’s critical reappraisal is proof of that. [Yes, I am fully aware of how much I’ve tortured that analogy.]

Queer Verdict: 005 (out of 007)

You don’t have to go far beneath the super-serious surface to find the queer interest. But many viewers probably don’t see past the ‘macho’ action and Bond’s apparent lack of real feeling towards anyone, ignoring the fact that the whole story is built around his love for another man: his best buddy Felix; his brother from Langley; his one true friend. Licence To Kill may be the ‘hardest’ and ‘grittiest’ Bond film, but at times it’s so ‘masc’ we all know it must be hiding a secret.

References

Machiavelli, Niccolò (1513) The Prince

Really, 007! (2022) Behind Licence To Kill - Robert Davi interview Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPx9misxeiw

Shakespeare, William (1603) Othello

Behind the scenes quotes taken from the DVD extra features, including commentary from Michael G. Wilson and John Cork.