Live and Let Die is Roger Moore's first outing as James Bond. It features Yaphet Kotto as the eminently watchable Dr. Kananga (really, when they get around to The Historic First Black Blofeld*, I'm just going to throw this in their faces) and "introduces" (a lie; this was her fourth film role) Jane Seymour (not Henry the Eighth's third wife (as far as we know - there is voodoo in this movie, after all) or the Canadian actress of the same name) as a Tarot card reader who loses her powers once she has sex. This is only the second most bizarre supernatural occurrence in this film. It stars, however, Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi, against whom the rest of the cast demonstrates their prodigious acting skill by not simply fading into the background in the face of this madness.
*Are Black people even allowed to play villains against white heroes these days? Surely you can't have a white guy beating up a black guy on screen in Current Year and expect audiences to root for him. I know that Chiwetel Ejiofor is being set up as Benedict Cumbersquatch's enemy in a Doctor Strange sequel, but other than that? (By the way, Ejiofor is 44 - 5 years younger than Idris Elba! - eminently watchable in anything he's in, and wouldn't be a bad choice for Bond.)
On rewatch, a couple of things immediately stand out. Moreso than any other Bond's first film except OHMSS, which doesn't count (obviously), Live and Let Die perfectly highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of Moore's entire tenure (the Moorera, if you will). Those strengths and weaknesses can both be described in two words: Roger Moore.
Allow me to explain.
Roger Moore is indubitably one of the best things to ever happen to the Bond Films. They needed him (or something so like him that it might as well have been him) to fill Connery's tux (not a joke about Sean's ballooning waistline in his last two films, but it could be) without, ah, actually filling Connery's tux. What do I mean by that? A second thing that I noticed on rewatch is that this film goes out of its way to avoid making the mistakes that drowned poor George Lazenby in Connery's trappings. In George's first three scenes, he drives an Aston Martin, wears a tuxedo, plays baccarat, and (I think) orders a martini shaken, not stirred. I'm not too positive about the last one, but he's got to do it somewhere in the film (them's the rules) and I'm struggling to think of another point where he could have done so. Anyway, the point is this: in George's first three scenes, he does a lot of things associated with the Connery Bond. In Roger's first three scenes, nay, in Roger's entire first film, he does none of them.
No Aston. No tux (trivia fans, this and You Only Live Twice are the only Bond films to do that). No baccarat, just a quick rummy game at the end. No martinis. (How do I know that George orders a martini at some point in his film? Because, trivia fans, the internet has insisted, and therefore it must be true, that Roger Moore is the only Bond actor to never utter the line "shaken, not stirred." UPDATE: Ah, I see I'm wrong; Lazenby gets a martini in Draco's office, but it's Draco who says the line. That "Rog is the only Bond actor to never______" must be "drive an Aston Martin.")
And yet he's still James Bond. He has the charisma, wit, and screen presence that Lazenby lacked (I again stress that Lazenby was almost perfect for the one film that he did - but let's not pretend he could have withstood the madness that was chucked in Moore's direction on a bi-yearly basis). True, Moore never gives you the impression that he's in the least bit of danger - he's James Bond and he'll get out of it in time for tea and a good rogering, don't you worry about that. So if you're looking for earnest realism a la OHMSS (a film where the villain's plot hinges on hypnotizing young women to love farm animals), you're in the wrong place. But then, this is Live and Let Die, the only Bond Film to date where the supernatural absolutely exists.
The epitome of this stoic/placid approach to Bond comes during the climax, where Bond is confronted with the most bizarre of all Evil Henchmen to ever grace a Bond Film: Baron Samedi, the Voodoo Lord of the Dead, whose head Bond promptly attempts to blow off. Samedi rolls his eyes at this, promptly resurrects himself, and laughs in Bond's face. (Granted, there is an alternative interpretation of these events, namely that the first Samedi is just an animatronic dummy, but that makes even less sense if you think about it for two seconds.) I put it to you that no other actor who ever strapped on the shoulder holster could have handled that, and half of them would probably have quit on the spot. In other words, Moore, like Lazenby before him, was flawlessly cast for his first film.
It's a shame that after this, the villains tend to get more and more muted* until we arrive at Moonraker and Moore and Michael Lonsdale are competing with each other to see who can emote less, but that's for later. The point, for now, is that Moore does fantastically against the colorful (er) villainy on display here.
*A shame except in the case of The Man With The Golden Gun, where Christopher Lee gets less interesting the more animated he gets.
Is he Book!Bond? Flagrantly not. But that's okay; Dalton epitomized Book!Bond and relatively few people (hi) seem to like his tenure. Moreover, given that Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die contained a chapter titled "N----- Heaven," best to keep the books far, far away from this one, yeah? (Actually, briefly on the subject of the novel: yes, yes, the keelhauling sequence got moved to For Your Eyes Only, and the Leiter/shark encounter to Licence to Kill*, but I'm convinced the random shot of the shark fins after Bond, Solitaire, and Quarrel Jr. escape from San Monique (the first time) is a reference to the novel's end (Bond blows up Mr. Big's yacht with a limpet mine, and the villain gets eaten by sharks. Couldn't be done on their budget/censorship, so they changed it to a hateful fart joke).)
*Same Leiter, appropriately enough, and hang on; if Bond hadn't interfered in Kananga's operation here, surely he would have driven the likes of Sanchez out of business?
But why do I say that Roger Moore is also a huge weakness of the Moorera? Well, this is still early days for him, where he's looking at least five years younger than he actually is,* so I'm not going to go the tired old ageist route, at least not here. In his very first scene he's required to tell us that he and one of the recently-murdered agents "shared the same bootmaker," a line only Roger Moore could ever pull off, and pull it off he does. Fantastic, bully for him, but it's this sort of nonsense that his Roger Mooreness allows to permeate the rest of the production. Lazy writing: Roger can handle it. Inane villainy: Roger can handle it. A parade of increasingly-vapid "actresses" who get younger and younger relative to a Bond who starts abruptly showing his age: Roger can, er.
*Moore was 45 for this one, the same age that, according to the books, MI6 agents face mandatory retirement from 00 status. (Book!Bond is 37, in case you were wondering; basically the same age as Craig in Casino Royale or Connery in You Only Live Twice. Lazenby did his when he was 30 and everybody else was at least 40 when they started, so those are the only two films where Bond's close to his literary counterpart's age.)
No wonder the franchise had some awkward lurches after this. They coasted for years on Roger Moore being able to carry on calmly.
Right, yes, that's a thousand words of spilt ink before I get to the elephant in the room. Obviously, this could not be made in Current Year. Though, really, the worst offender is the obviously dubbed-in dialogue during the airport chase - "I can't find the brake!" &c. The main villain and his many distinct henchmen* aren't exactly written as horrible caricatures (well, okay, YMMV on the cabbie who'll take you to a KKK rally for the right price). Or if they were (Yaphet Kotto, for one, apparently didn't think very highly of Tom Mankiewicz's script), they aren't played that way. And, come on, Bond's first foray into the Fillet of Soul, "clever disguise Bond: white face in Harlem," that stuff's funny.
*Aside from Samedi and Tee Hee - and more on them in a mo - we have Whisper, Adam (the main antagonist for the boat chase), the funeral stabber, the staff at the Fillet of Soul, the Oh Cult saleswoman, the cabbie with the very distinct sideburns/hairdo - it does go on, to the point where, at the end, when Kananga's lair is staffed by a bunch of faceless goons wearing red shirts and jeans, it feels like a letdown. (God, how have I not talked about the fashion in this film? As painfully dated as some of the gangster pimp wear is, Kananga's white suit and red shirt during the "butterhook" scene is sublime.)
And do note that the single most racially-charged joke in the entire film comes at the expense of the dumb white hick. (For those of you who don't remember, and I can't blame you, Sheriff Pepper tells his brother-in-law to get involved in the boat chase. The (white) brother-in-law gets knocked out by Adam (who is black), who steals his boat. Pepper boasts to all the other cops as the boat goes by, but his back is turned, so he doesn't see that he's telling a bunch of southern lawmen in 1973 that he has a Black brother-in-law.)
Only question about Sheriff Pepper is if he was a sergeant first. I wouldn't ask but for the artist doing the title song - appropriate that Paul's doing the song here given a) Connery dissed the Beatles back in Goldfinger and now Connery's gone for good, and b) having died in 1966, he's well accustomed to all the voodoo on display here. On the subject of the music, herewith the rote observation that there's just not enough of the score to spread over the film's runtime; what there is of it is very good (anything that incorporates the title song is great, and "Bond to New York" is splendid), but its absence is at times noticeable.
But having mentioned Pepper, of course, one should mention the boat chase, which does drag a bit. But really everything between Bond's escape from San Monique and his return there (where the island's lighting gets in on the supernatural by fluctuating wildly depending on whether it's on a properly-lit stage or done in day-for-night on location) is padding, bracketing the actual explanation of the villain's plan (refreshingly, not "hold the world ransom" for the first time since Goldfinger - well, probably; Blofeld might have actually been trying to start WWIII in You Only Live Twice, which raises the question as to why: he only has a volcano lair, not an underwater base or a space station from where to ride out the carnage and radioactivity) with a pair of chases. Connery's only boat chase (in From Russia) was practically over before it began, so perhaps they'd forgotten about it and thought it was original. Still ends with Bond exploding the bad guy using a convenient canister of gasoline.
As to the stunts, well, they mostly hold up, and the fun of the series using crap rear-projection instead of CGI tells us that Roger Moore actually was on the boat for at least part of the boat chase, and that's just delightful. Enjoy it while it lasts, because the Moorera ends with A View to a Kill, a film in which the stuntmen probably play Bond for more of the film than Moore does. Would have liked the Bond/Kananga fight to go on a bit longer (or be rewritten; again, it's a fart joke horribly delivered*), but there wasn't all the time in the world on this one.
*No, really. Bond pulls the pin on a compressed air pellet, shoves it down Kananga's throat, and then Kananga rockets head-first into the ceiling and explodes accompanied by what is unmistakably a raspberry.
Which was kind of the point. The production team's consensus was that OHMSS - which is textually a continuation of the Connery films but with Bond's character not-so-subtly rewritten while nevertheless retaining all his old superficial trappings - was a failure (a consensus that would not be challenged until 1981, 1999, or 2006, depending on your reading of For Your Eyes Only, The World is Not Enough, and Casino Royale). A soft reboot was in order. Yes, we still have Bernard Lee as M and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny, and yes, we'll start letting The Continuity seep back in shortly, and yes, we have the gunbarrel and an "oh my word is she naked?" title sequence.
Appropriate enough; Live and Let Die is a "same but different" rehash of Dr. No: British agents murdered in the opening, Bond sent to investigate, goes to Jamaica-pretending-to-be-a-fictional-island, doesn't drive his iconic car but does get help from Leiter and a guy named Quarrel, villain uses local mythology (did you forget about the dragon?) to scare away/control locals, presence of Bond's bachelor pad, absence of Desmond Llewellyn. Etc. Moore's Bond would likewise be "same but different." And he does it well. Hard to imagine him in Dr. No, to be sure, but far harder to imagine Connery in this. What would any of the other Bonds have done with Baron Samedi?
Come to think of it, this might be the only Bond Film with both a top-notch henchman (Samedi, although Julius Harris as Tee Hee is also visibly enjoying himself and gets a few great lines in too) and a top-notch villain. (Which is another way of saying "no, I haven't forgotten about Yaphet Kotto.") Yes, I know a lot of people don't find the "Mr. Big" makeup convincing, but he's only wearing it for maybe three minutes before the reveal and he plays it so well. In fact, he's not given enough credit. He doesn't play two characters; he plays three. Kananga is calm and controlled, while Mr. Big is more than a bit unhinged and blustery. After the reveal, the two personas merge. The Kananga we meet at the beginning of the film wouldn't be all Blofeld-y in the lair at the end, nor would he erupt in rage at Solitaire once her betrayal was revealed. Fantastic performance all the way through, the sheer manic glee when he's slicing Bond's arm being a highlight. Distrust any Top Ten Bond Villain list without him on it. One thing does irritate, though: in his first meeting with Bond, he wisely immediately orders Bond's execution. ("Names is for tombstones, baby. Take this honky out back and waste him!" might just be the best response to that "Bond, James Bond" blather ever committed to film.) Smart, but he doesn't bother with this in any of their subsequent meetings. Doesn't have Rosie just murder Bond in his sleep, doesn't have Tee Hee snap his neck post-"butterhook," doesn't even just shoot him when there's a perfectly good unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism on hand for the climax.
Three loose threads: how on earth does the Queen of Cups card make its way into Bond's possession, so that he may know Rosie Carver's treason (hang about, is this the only Bond Film with a Bond Girl who shares her surname with a later Bond Villain*)? Second, at the start of the "butterhook" scene, Mr. Big says that Bond killed "one of the brothers" in Harlem; did he? Don't recall. Thought he just knocked out the two goons in the ghastly alleyway. And third, whatever happens to Mr. Big's entire operation? The guy who stabs Hamilton and Strutter gets away; the employees of the Fillet of Soul restaurant chain are all on the payroll, and they let Felix leave without even a shark nibble. I know that often individual mooks are ignored in the big explosion at the end of the show, but I count at least three significant baddies (funeral stabber, Fillet waiter, sideburn cabbie) who don't get their just comeuppance here. Just as well, I suppose; if Samedi can resurrect himself at will, who knows if any of these badhats actually stay dead.
*There's a close call in the reverse with Jacques Bouvar (the guy who dresses as a woman only to be found out because he opened the car door himself - oh how times have changed) in Thunderball and Pam Bouvier in Licence to Kill, but that's it off the top of my head.
Anyway that's my reaction to Live and Let Die, having rewatched it for the first time in a few years. I'd love to shove it up a few places on the rankings but I can't be bothered to work out exactly where it should land. Tremendously entertaining, which is really all that matters, anyway. Couldn't be assed to do a full commentary either. Probably will do more entries like this.
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