Before Casino Royale, was this the most brutal, hardest hitting Bond movie?

I'm a big fan of Licence to Kill. It was my favourite Bond film until 2006's Casino Royale. But I never liked Leiter's 'wife being raped to death' (how is that possible? On second thoughts, I don't want to know). I appreciate this was meant to be a hard-hitting 'realistic' Bond with brutal levels of violence (and to be fair, it wasn't the first time the franchise had dealt with rape - I believe it is at least implied during Dr. No that Honey Ryder survived such an assault), but I always thought the implication that Leiter's wife was raped before her murder was egregious and unnecessary. Why couldn't it simply be a murder (which would still be awful, of course, but less disturbing in terms of the distress Della, Leiter's bride, would have gone through)?

Admittedly, part of my revulsion is, in part, due to my appreciation for the actor playing Della, Priscilla Barnes, who I found extremely attractive and appealing in a wholesome, 'All-American' sort of way, that contrasted her with some of the more typically exotic and harder-edged Bond women, but irrespective of the actor playing the part, the (mercifully) offscreen rape was an unnecessarily gratuitous detail in order to motivate Bond's vengeance.

The shark eating scene, and even the exploding head, as visually disturbing a moment as that is, (along with other henchmen being fed into industrial cocaine shredder and impaled on a forklift truck), I could take in view of the overall grittier, darker aesthetic, but sexual violence, particularly where women and children are concerned, should always be evoked and referenced in fiction sparingly IMHO, especially genre fiction.