Live and Let Die

The previous entry in the series, Diamonds are Forever, whilst commercially and fairly critically successful (at the time at least), was not enough to prevent Sean Connery from jumping ship upon completion of the film. This left producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli back in the unenviable position of finding a new actor to portray Bond.

United Artists, the distributors of the films were pushing for an American to take up the role, seeking Burt Reynolds or Adam "1960s Batman" West, however Saltzman and Broccoli insisted that the job be given to a British actor. In the end, the spotlight was cast back to before the film series existed, finding Roger Moore who was considered when Dr No was in production. Considering how Moore played the part of Bond, it is unsurprising that Adam West was also in contention, for much in the same way that West played Bruce Wayne/Batman, Moore's tongue is firmly planted in his cheek, and accompanied by an arched eyebrow of camp.

Whilst this lighter tone was certainly the new theme for Moore's seven film run in the series (a record yet to be broken, although Daniel Craig has been in the role the longest due to protracted production times between films, even before COVID-19 hit), Live and Let Die certainly starts out more grounded for the most part. Here we have Bond investigating the suspect goings on of Dr Kananga, the Prime Minister of fictional Caribbean island San Monique, and the deaths of 3 MI6 agents investigating the good doctor.

Through this plot, we get a more realistic (by Bond film standards anyway) villain's plot involving gangsters and drug dealing, but sprinkled throughout are uniquely Bondian touches, and some supernatural flourishes that are completely unique to this film in the series. So whilst Dr Kananga's plan is to flood the black market with free drugs to create an immense demand for his product, he still finds the time to surround himself with extravagant henchmen. Be it Tee Hee who has a metallic pincer for a hand after an crocodile ripped it off, or most interestingly Baron Samedi, who is either a flamboyant performer dressing up as the voodoo lord of the dead (although I am (un)reliably informed by Wikipedia that Samedi actually originates from Haitian Vodou, with practitioners of this religion often distancing themselves from the word voodoo, being something very different from their religion).

Considering this not atypical mangling of non-Western cultures by blockbuster films, it is probably appropriate to address the elephant in the room with this film. Live and Let Die, like many Bond films, was inspired by the trends of the time. In this case, the primary inspiration, other than the source text (which is next level problematic, just have a Google for the chapter names for a start...), was the "blaxploitation" era of film making. This is a subgenre of the "exploitation" genre, which itself focused on more lurid and extreme content than mainstream movies. The "blaxploitation" subgenre was meant to be aimed at an African-American audience, and whilst this may have been the case, there was criticism levelled at them for continuing to place black people in negative roles, such as criminals.

What we have with the Live and Let Die film, is a movie where all white people are portrayed as good, and all black people bar one or two are evil. Throw in a virginal maiden who needs to be saved from the "monstrous" black villains by the white saviour Mr Bond, and the problems just pile up and up. One could say that the introduction of the overtly racist, white southern Sheriff J.W. Pepper is a way of addressing racist attitudes, but let's be real - he is there for comic relief, and it is a Bond film - the filmmakers had zero interest in tackling those issues in this film. Contemporary critics have tried to examine the film's problems in a more favourable light, in particularly noting that Dr Kananga, played by Yaphet Kotto as one of the better villains in the series (although his method of death is ludicrous even for a Bond film), is never portrayed as anything but sophisticated, intelligent, and calculating, and that this in and of itself, went against the grain of many depictions of black people in film at the time.

But look, I'm just a geeky white guy, without the knowledge, education, or experience to comprehensively address this topic, other than to say it is in the film, and it is not particularly comfortable viewing (Sheriff J.W Pepper's arrest of a black character in the film is even more unpleasant noting the protests currently taking place in America).

If you can look past the above issues, what you do have is a competent, if unadventurous introduction of Roger Moore in the role. He goes through all the required hurdles of being Bond, bedding any woman within a 5 mile radius of himself, getting into well choreographed brawls with various henchmen, and verbally sparring with verbose villains. Whilst the supernatural intertwining with the drug trade and blaxploitation films, combined with the exotic locations, gives it a Bondian edge, the plot itself is still fairly by the numbers, and nothing audiences wouldn't have already seen in the past films.

Moore certainly seems instantly comfortable in the role, and whilst the oldest Bond actor when he started out in the job (45), he still tackles the fight scenes with enough believability. However, perhaps more so than Connery, Moore is likely the instantly recogniseable attitude of Bond. Whereas Connery was sharp and dangerous, Moore is witty and aloof, playfully dancing between action and one-liners, this is the image of the unflappable secret agent, dodging death without a hair out of place.

Unfortunately, this unwavering sense of casualness  pervades the action itself, in particular a boat chase which more or less takes up a quarter of the film's run time. It just seems to go on and on, seemingly with end or real spectacle, just shot after shot of Bond simply driving through bayou rivers and wetlands (although in filming it they did unintentionally set a Guinness World Record of a speedboat for longest jump at the time - 110 feet). The capture of Bond and escape from a crocodile farm, prior to this sequence, is a highlight however, with an amazing real stunt involving Bond jumping across three crocodiles to escape (check out the Youtube clip to the right for some insane footage of Ross Kanaga, the owner of the crocodile farm - and where they got the villain's name from - completing the stunt, after quite a few close calls...).

The female leads in the film also fail to break new ground in most aspects, save for Gloria Hendry, playing CIA agent Rosie Carver, as her dalliance with Bond is the first interracial relationship in the Bond series (naturally, as with the rest of the film's gender and racial politics, this is a case of one step forward, several hundred back, she is revealed to be a double agent, working for Kananga, and is swiftly killed). Jane Seymour plays the virginal psychic and damsel in distress, Solitaire. In the film, her psychic powers are linked with her virginity, and when Bond cons his way into sleeping with her, the animosity between him and Kanaga also becomes inflected with some chauvinistic envy from Kanaga that Bond has "touched" her when it was his "destiny" to do so...

The above may sound like I've a fairly negative view of the film, but purely from an entertainment perspective I think it is one of the better in the series. It just becomes very difficult to detach the messy politics inherent in the film, which have only grown messier by the years, and most recently by the hour. Amongst all of this is a new, more urbane Bond film, that manages to mix in Bondian fantastical elements with a more down to earth plot. With Roger Moore films that follow, the scales would tip much further into flight of fancy, but in his opening salvo, he walks the tightrope of absurdity and danger with ease.