Live and Let Die

Ignoring a Roger Moore who presents a bit of a distraction for viewers watching the series in order, Live And Let Die is an excellent example of how pop culture helps the Bond series survive throughout the decades. The growing concern of a drug-using society at the time is featured, and an immensely popular Paul McCartney does the title theme - indicating that the Bond series need not be rooted solidly in the three-piece suit days of 1962. Jane Seymour gives an excellent performance in her "introductory" role (although it was her fourth film). A bit of black magic and voodoo intertwined with gadgetry and high-tech machinery will have the viewer wondering if, indeed, there was magic in the movie after all - indeed, the cards WERE always right under Solitaire's power. Magical or not, Live and Let Die provides an interesting doorway to the other five Moore pictures - J.W. Pepper returns and Tee Hee seems to be Jaws' forerunner.

I first saw this in the early 90s on a vhs. Revisited it recently. This is the eighth film in the Bond series and the first to star Roger Moore as James Bond. Here 007 is sent to New York to investigate the deaths of three British agents, leading him to Kananga n Mr. Big, thereby trapping him in a world of gangsters, dictator, drug traffickers and voodoo occultists.

Here Bond faces Dr. Kananga, Baron Samedi (a paranormal entity), ferocious crocodiles, a venomous snake, Tee Hee, a henchman who has a pincer for a hand, Dambala, a henchman with a penchant for snakes and wears a goat pelt on his head, Whisper, a fatty who cannot speak properly and various henchmen in red tshirts and blue pants.

Bond gets to cool off with Madeline Smith, Jane Seymour and Gloria Hendry, a babe with an amazing toned obliques n rectus abdominis.

The film has a lovely boat chase which is amazingly well photographed in Louisiana around the Irish Bayou. I am a big fan of movies shot in the marshy areas n the bayou of Louisiana.

In the novel, Tee Hee is a henchman without the metal claw and he breaks the little finger of Bond's left hand.

In the novel, Whisper's quiet voice is attributed to a bout of tuberculosis during infancy.

Although I have always regarded Sean Connery as the best of the actors to play Bond, I have never (unlike some Connery diehards) regarded the casting of Roger Moore as his successor as a mistake. Moore brought a different interpretation to the role, one which owed something to parts he had played in two adventure series on television, Simon Templar in "The Saint" and Brett Sinclair in "The Persuaders". Whereas Connery's tough, gritty Bond allowed something of the hard man below the surface to show through, Moore played the character much more as a suave, sophisticated English gentleman. (Connery's Bond, like the actor himself, was definitely Scottish).

The villain of "Live and Let Die" is Kananga, the leader of the small Caribbean island of San Monique. (Shouldn't that be Sainte Monique?) For a Bond villain, Kananga's ambitions are surprisingly limited, with no scheme for world domination. He has, however, close links to the New York underworld, and has hatched a plot to flood the American market with heroin. Kananga is deeply superstitious, and employs the services of Solitaire, a beautiful young woman with the power to foretell the future through the use of tarot cards. As with a number of the other films, much of the plot of this one revolves around Bond's ability to win over the villain's female accomplice.

The Bond films, of course, are all dependent upon a stylised formula involving adventure (especially chase sequences), exotic locations, beautiful women, evil villains, memorable music and a generous (but preferably not too generous) helping of humour. When all the elements of the formula come together, the result can be a highly enjoyable piece of entertainment. "Live and Let Die" has, by and large, got most of the elements right. Its main asset is the lovely Jane Seymour, one of the most beautiful as well as one of the most talented of the Bond Girls, as Solitaire. She was one of the youngest of the Bond Girls, being only 22 a the time the film was made (Honor Blackman and Maud Adams, for example, were both in their late thirties when they starred in a Bond film), but despite her lack of experience turns in a very good performance. Her Solitaire is not a strong action heroine like Pussy Galore or Anya Amasova, but a passive figure, melancholy and fatalistic, troubled by her psychic powers but at the same time frightened of losing them. As such she has rather more depth than the average Bond heroine.

Roger Moore is also good in this film; in 1973 he was still clearly youthful enough to be convincing in the role and makes the most of it. As the villainous Kananga Yaphet Kotto is adequate, but he does rather suffer the fate of being outshone by the two secondary villains, his henchman Tee Hee (the man with the metal arm and claw for a hand ) and Baron Samedi with his demonic peals of laughter. (Curt Jurgens suffered a similar fate in "The Spy who Loved Me", where Richard Kiel's Jaws turned out to be more memorable than his own Stromberg). There are some exciting chase sequences, particularly the one in the old bus across San Monique, and the waterborne one through the Louisiana bayous. I didn't much care for the character of J W Pepper, a rather stupid redneck Louisiana sheriff with a thick Deep South accent who was obviously intended as the film's main comic relief. (He makes another appearance in "The Man with the Golden Gun"). Nevertheless, there was some successful use of sardonic humour, such as the scene where a man, watching a traditional New Orleans jazz funereal, asks "Whose funeral is it?" and is told "Yours" immediately before being stabbed to death. The music was also good, especially Paul McCartney's brilliant theme song. My overall view is that this is, together with "For Your Eyes Only", the best of the Roger Moore Bond films. 7/10

After all the physical stuff with Sean Connery, Roger Moore will always be the true James Bond to me. Understated humour and a lot of Britishness. I love it. And, needless to say, Jane Seymour is positively enchanting.

Was Roger Moore channeling Austin Powers in 1973? There's a scene in this, his first go-round as 007, where Bond is tied up and his arm is cut to draw blood and attract some hungry sharks swimming below. Moore twitches his eyebrow and asks: "Perhaps we can try something in a simpler vein."

Those sharks don't need any frickin' laser beams on their heads to get you to smell the Austin. Moore gets a lot of blame for turning the Bond movies into weakly-plotted farces, ignoring that the series had been moving in that direction since "Goldfinger" and that the previous installment, Sean Connery's final EON bow "Diamonds Are Forever," was every bit as goofy. Also, Moore could deliver a more serious Bond when the script allowed, and two of the finest Bonds ever, "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "For Your Eyes Only," were his.

But there's no getting around this, "Live And Let Die" is a dumb movie. The gadgets are silly, the villain's scheme is ill-defined, the storyline is frenetic and unengaging, the action is plodding and overlong. Moore starts out not quite know how to play Bond here, while the movie requires him to play the fool sauntering through Harlem in a double-breasted suit like the Prince of Wales waiting for some natives to show him around.

But this film makes me smile, in part because I'm young enough to remember what it was all about when it came out. If this was Bond for the cheap seats, it at least delivered the goods, with some vivid supporting characters, a knockout visual style, amazing title music from Paul McCartney, and most importantly for Moore's future in the series, drop-dead quips. My favorite is when the nasty Tee Hee twists his pistol muzzle out of shape with a metal pincer arm, then giggles when he hands it back: "Funny how the least little thing amuses him."

Julius Harris is menacing but charming as Tee Hee, mostly mute except when he sticks Bond in a gator pond and suggests the best way to disarm the beasts is to try and pull out their teeth. Chief villain Yaphet Kotto has his moments, too, but with odd shifts of character. In the beginning, he's stone-cold Ron O'Neal in "Superfly," and at the end, he's plummy Charles Gray in "Diamonds Are Forever." Jane Seymour is Bond's love interest, and why she goes off with him is another of those things best not thought about long.

There are two great characters in this movie, though, bigger than just about anything seen in a Bond movie before who kind of work in tandem in overhauling any objections about this film being too "cartoony." Clifton James is redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper, who throws off one madman line after another while Bond is off on one of his long silly chase scenes. James mugs through every scene he's in, rolling his tongue around, playing off everyone and everything, and delivering every hackneyed Southern stereotype to such righteous perfection it's enough to make cotton sprout out of his ears. Bond purists who whine should just take their vodka martinis shaken not stirred and let the rest of us enjoy the craziness. The series is supposed to be fun; if you want serious espionage go watch "Smiley's People." (I grant you Pepper shouldn't have returned in the next Bond film; that was a mistake.)

The other great outsized character is Geoffrey Holder as perhaps the most mysterious figure in the whole series, Baron Samedi. Is he supernatural? Is he just crazy from the heat? He's certainly different, a guy who sides with the bad guys without quite being one of them. The always-eerie quality of his appearances, either dancing in a big hotel production number or quietly sitting in a cemetery playing a flute, make you question whether there ain't something to that voodoo after all.

It's silly bashing Pepper but praising Samedi, they are both equally so unreal, in a way that's in tune with the rest of the movie. The best thing to do is enjoy the different kinds of fun on offer. Frankly, not having these guys around might push this film on the bad side of Spinal Tap's "fine line between stupid and clever," the side where "A View To A Kill" and "Moonraker" are on.

But "Live And Let Die" is a winner. It's a fun movie that brings me back to younger days, when my heart was an open book. It's a nice transitional film for the series in that Moore managed a mostly smooth entrance to the role of Bond. And it has one of the best final shots in movie history. That's all I'll say there; you know it if you saw it.