LIVE AND LET DIE
1973
Directed by Guy Hamilton
Written by Tom Mankiewicz (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)
A man comes, but he didn't travel quickly, and he brought the opposite of destruction; he did have purpose. Change was in the cards, so to speak, for James Bond, and of course change had happened once already when Sean Connery stepped away the first time, meaning there's some alternate universe out there where George Lazenby remained Bond for a whole run of films; and I don't think that would've been so terrible. But he flamed out after only one, obliging Eon Productions to pay Connery a thane's ransom to return for Diamonds Are Forever, and they would've gone on paying Connery practically whatever he would have asked, except he did not ask.
This time around, however, Eon wasn't put on any desperate search; they knew exactly who they wanted. This was Roger Moore, an actor considered all the way back in 1962, though they'd never auditioned him then, and an actor some histories indicate they approached again in 1967, but geopolitics got in the way of their original plans for The Man With the Golden Gun, and Moore had to bow out. His absence of official status hadn't stopped him from making his first appearance as Bond already, in a sketch on Mainly Millicent a good nine years before becoming Bond for real. And if Moore had made a secret vow that he would be James Bond one day, I don't see how the resume he'd built over the previous decade would look much different: even leaving aside The Saint, he was an enthusiastic participant in the 60s' cycle of Bond knock-offs, by way of 1969's Crossplot, amounting to a nearly-fully-formed prototype for his own, particular Bond.
For all that, there was still continuity behind the camera, with the next Bond film being, by-and-large, the product of Bond veterans: director Guy Hamilton; stunt coordinator Bob Simmons (now performing second unit directorial duties, sans credit); writer Tom Mankiewicz; cinematographer Ted Moore; some fraction of the editorial collective. Some key names are missing: composer John Barry was taking a break, as was production designer Ken Adam—even so, art director Syd Cain (who curiously eschewed the title "production designer" on this one) had done the job before, and, like Moore, had a history with the series going back to Dr. No. But experience wouldn't have represented any iron-clad guarantee anyway: that much of this veteran Bond team can only be called "veteran" because they worked on Diamonds Are Forever, the first bad Bond, is suggestive—the good news being that it's not as completely determinative as I'd remembered. Well, whether they were already sure it would be Moore's debut or not, Eon had selected Live and Let Die as their next Bond, and of the three 70s Bonds that Hamilton oversaw, without ever coming anywhere close to delivering another Goldfinger, Live and Let Die is, at least, the best of them, a state it achieves by being either barely good or only a little bad, but also making a promise, with Moore, that things could get better, even if this would promise would remain deferred.
It does emphasize Eon's increasingly fast-and-loose relationship with Ian Fleming's novels: with their eighth Bond movie, they were finally getting around to the second Bond book. There might've been reasons they'd let it molder at the bottom of the stack for as long as they did, and Live and Let Die , you understand, is one of the racist ones, though it came as something of a relief that its reputation as one of the most racist ones arguably arises more from its proximity to its audience than because it's the most racist one (a title I doubt Goldfinger shall surrender). Make no mistake: it's racist, but more as a matter of fundamentals than racial animus constantly bleeding across the page, which is at least more readable. Fleming's 1954 novel, anyway, is the one about how Black America—or at least Black American crime—is ruled by an evil communist voodoo gangster. And, right there, we can already say, "that's a weird canard," in Fleming's insistence that Black Americans, being black, sure must be committed believers in Goddamned Vodoun (or, rather, Obeah). Maybe in Jamaica, where Fleming lived, this made superficial sense to the white writer; but this dumb foreigner had plainly never heard the phrase "Great Migration," and the novel isn't even so much as set in Louisiana.
On the other hand—and I'm not even sure how facetious I'm being!—it's also about as close as to woke as we're ever likely to find Fleming: he takes surprising pains to lay out something akin to a genetic equality for humanity, and carefully describes his villain, Buonaparte Ignace Gallia—like Bert I. Gordon after him, known as Mr. Big—as the inevitable result of decolonization (about which Fleming's less aggrieved than you'd expect), with those of African descent naturally soon to produce their own great scientists, philosophers, statesmen, and so forth, but because greatness is amoral, unfortunately also their own great criminal masterminds. Later on, Big's scheme will be revealed to involve the privateer hoard of Captain Henry Morgan, and Fleming will scowl at the slavery of Morgan's Jamaica; and all throughout, Big will be consummately evil, but also afforded more of a real personality than maybe any of Bond's literary villains thanks to Fleming inflecting the evil monologue scenes with a certain sense of overcompensation, like Big perceives a need to prove to his white adversary his genius, though, at least to the extent any Bond villain ever can, he does. He also manages to damage Bond in ways few other members of his rogue's gallery have, and with as much panache as any (this multimedia franchise's obsession with sharks begins here), and Big's villainy motivates what I'm willing to declare must be the peak death scene in any Bond novel, and relatedly its best action scene and best climax; the ending of Live and Let Die—a novel that, in truth, does feel like it flips a damn switch to "actively good" only about halfway through—is amazing. Where the book falters, of course, is its transnational racial monolith based around those spurious ideas about black superstition, as well as in Fleming's still very-much-operative racial hierarchy, which means that if Bond's going to fuck, which he will, it won't be a black woman, and so this means the woman he does fuck will be the black man's white slave, something that Fleming is not nearly as sensationalist with as he could've been, though it's a shadow out of which the movie makes even less headway than the book does.
In fact, the movie is in some ways more racist—predominantly in an anti-black way, obviously, but if you've seen it you know it can eventually even be racist against white people—and, two decades down the road, it's more retrograde. Mankiewicz's decision to take on this source material in the 70s was down to his apparently sincere belief that he could tap into the hot new subgenre of blaxploitation, and if you could, conceivably, make a blaxploitation movie with a white lead, that lead probably still shouldn't be 007, and I fail to see how making a blaxploitation movie with two white leads intends to work. What irritates me the most about this adaptation, however, is simply that it blows off so much of what was cool about the novel—basically all its best parts get abandoned, and if we take comfort in knowing that Felix Leiter's horrible maiming*, and Bond and the Bond Girl being subjected to certain death by being dragged across a shark-infested sea, would each find a place in later Bond movies, that isn't much of a help right now, in this Bond movie. Meanwhile, Big's master plan in the novel, regarding the secret smuggling of pirate gold on behalf of SMERSH? Big's master plan in the movie is selling heroin. Not to destroy the decadent capitalist democracies, mind you. Because heroin makes money.
And so we kick off with an opening sequence, and, bucking formula for perhaps obvious reasons, Bond is absent from it (though you'll notice Moore, if you're looking, in the new gun barrel sequence). The opening, instead, presents a triptych of increasingly-hoary racial enmity: the technological assassination of the British representative at the U.N.; the bizarre murder of a British agent and the subsequent spiriting away of his corpse in the midst of a musical New Orleans funeral (the movie does partly set itself in Louisiana); and finally the torturous ritual sacrifice of yet a third British official in a "Vodoun" by which I mean movie voodoo ceremony on the island of
We now find Bond in his apartment, coitus interrupted by M (Bernard Lee) and Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), in a farce that sees Bond attempt to squirrel away an absconded Italian agent (Madeline Smith), though what I noticed on this watch is that Desmond Llewelyn is not in this movie whatsoever, and I harbor some suspicion that the odd beat with M's crabbiness over Bond's fancy espresso machine (apparently representing more high-flying lifestyle porn in 1973), particularly the sneering line "That's all it does?", must be an artifact of a draft where Q was here, as is the subsequent bit where the main gadget this time (a sometimes-useful, sometimes-not electromagnetic wristwatch) actually gets explained by Bond, to M. Either way, Bond is sent to New York, immediately almost getting himself killed on the cab ride into town in a swell automotive action scene, in which Eon impressively managed to close down a major artery into Manhattan for the purpose—but let's put a pin in "vehicular action" for now—before hooking up with Felix (David Hedison, more towards the "nonentity" side on the Felix Leiter scale, but also with a much-reduced role from a book where Felix is almost a deuteragonist). Bond tracks his would-be assassin to Harlem, and not only is the movie objectively more "every black person is a fifth columnist" than Fleming's novel was, it subjectively feels like it more, as the montage of black characters tracking Bond makes the conspiracy feel more omnipresent. As far as paranoid thrillmaking goes, at least it's functional, and it even comes with a twist (though the first deceptive appearance of CIA agent Harry Strutter (Lon Satten), actually only following Bond for his protection, is separated by more screentime without Satten than it probably should be to land); and I'm sure it would play better in a foreign clime, because I think I should be offended as an American.
Bond falls into the clutches of Mr. Big (let's, uh, hold off), and discerns that Big's sprawling-but-mostly-ordinary criminal operation, notwithstanding his switcheroo walls and gadget-enhanced pimpmobiles—evidently the phrase had been coined!—must have something to do with Kananga (Yaphet Kotto), ruler of San Monique. But what really excites Bond's interest is Solitaire (Jane Seymour), so named because of her enforced maidenhood but also her tarot divinations**, of immense value to Kanaga and Big, for she has real magic to her, and can see the future. The future Bond shows her is that she's destined to be his primary sex partner this film, and he, shall we say, plays his cards right in this respect once he escapes easily-escapable death in New York and heads to San Monique, site of Kananga's opium plantation. On arrival, Bond meets the CIA's asset on the island, Rosie Carver (Gloria Hendry), though being a black woman she's not breaking barriers in the sense of "not actually being a servant of Kananga, king of all black people in the western hemisphere." (In fairness, Strutter and later Quarrel Jr (Roy Stewart)—the clunky result of chronological scrambling, somewhat requiring Dr. No's Quarrel "Sr" to have been roughly twelve when he sired him—are both through-and-through good guys, so it's not literally every black speaking part.) This gets Rosie laid, because there are some barriers being broken here, but also dead; after all, Bond still has Solitaire to liberate (because even here in 1973 the official Bond Girl would be white), which he does, though it only goes about half according to plan. Bond makes his way back to America, specifically the environs of New Orleans, shutting down Kananga's pipeline in pursuit of the movie's most robust action, only to descend again upon San Monique to rescue Solitaire a second time and destroy Kananga, who, turns out, was Mr. Big, which you might have twigged from the uncanny, inflexible, gray-black mask Kotto was wearing while he played him.
So the faithful-in-adaptation part of Live and Let Die is that it also doesn't manage to be more than middling till its halfway point, though it's geographically flipped, so that while the novel got good as soon as Bond made it to the Caribbean, the movie waits until he's back en route to America, and it's still never always good. But it is better, and while it's a fuzzy demarcation, we might as well say that the moment it gets better is when Kotto takes Mr. Big's face off, which has the benefit of freeing his performance from its heretofore robotic constraints, and allows him to escape the fate of being a severely boring Bond villain. But the secondary cast is at least partly a problem here. The villainy averages out to reasonably fine: Big's no. 2 henchman Whisper (Earl Jolly Brown) is portly and quiet, though I'm not sure you'd be apt to realize that his gimmick is "a raspy, low voice" until Big calls him Whisper, which I don't believe occurs till about the hour forty mark; and Tee Hee (Julius W. Harris), his main henchman and heavily-reimagined from the book, gets the performance I probably like best of all the antagonists here, thanks to the partial swap of sharks for crocs in this Southern-set thriller, whereupon it falls to Harris, rather than Kotto, to be the one who gleefully explains to Bond which Triassic monster is going to be devouring him. He also has the merit of being Bond's very first (unambiguous) cyborg villain, menacing the spy with an artificial arm that, until the very last scene of the movie, comes off like what it is, a glove under Harris's sleeve, though I still appreciate Hamilton's diligence in ultimately revealing the whole apparatus. Leiter I've already covered. Rosie, and Hendry's performance thereof, which is mostly screaming at voodoo snakes (already-dead ones!) and voodoo effigies and such (though at least I like her ironic "if all else fails, cyanide" quip as she consents to being bedded by Bond), is actually much less an expression of racism than this franchise's early-70s crusade against its female characters generally; and I feel like it ought to be recognized more often that the Hamilton-Mankiewicz trilogy specifically is—by a lot—the very nadir of Bond movie sexism, nothing one "check out this useless broad" caricature after another. Rosie is at least not the nadir of the nadir, albeit partly because she isn't in the movie much, though she's required to be useless to the point of creating something close to an out-and-out plot hole.
Then there's Solitaire, and I assume Seymour is a sturdy actor, going by her lengthy career, but I've never seen her be anything like "good" in her 70s genre-babe work; she's allowing her character to be defined, principally, by gaudy voodoo costumes and her breasts (so I somewhat repeat myself), just sort of neutrally floating through the movie, though in Seymour's defense she's not exactly being well-nourished by a screenplay that thinks it's given her an arc of conflicted loyalty and hasn't. Honestly, that's tolerable enough, but Solitaire bothers me on a higher level, and it shouldn't even be possible that she could be dull: this is the James Bond movie with magic in it.
This is baked-in by the book, but the book leaves alternative explanations open; there's a bit here where Solitaire's clairvoyance is tested with random numbers, and while she gets them wrong (because Bond has fucked the magic out of his new girlfriend), apparently she would have gotten them right. The supernatural isn't even limited to her: there's also Baron Samedi—I guess the actual Baron Samedi (Geoffrey Holder)!—though he moonlights as a performer for tourists. It's fundamentally a further disaggregation of book-Big (whose underworld legend rested upon presenting himself the god's zombie), and I guess I even find him to be agreeable texture here, notably in a final frame gag that'd be appropriate bleak comedy for a horror picture (if somewhat less so for a movie that concludes "James Bond will return in A Completely Unrelated Film"), though, being divine, Holder gets relegated to flitting about the margins being ineffectual creepy, at best, and goofy at worst. (Live and Let Die was cheaper than Diamonds, which was cheaper than On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and while more money probably got to the screen than Diamonds, because of Connery, it doesn't look that way on the soundstage shooting, especially the horror-adjacent material. "San Monique" feels like it came from Hammer rather than Eon, and elsewhere Moore's just throwing around a surfeit of semi-cool Bava/Halloween decoration garishness in the colors to do "mysticism." But at least Hamilton and his editors aren't crawling through the movie, like they did back on Diamonds.) Anyway, it's just enough hinting towards the supernatural that it's almost annoying it doesn't commit harder: I don't even know if I'd be opposed to a Bond movie, especially a 70s one, that really invested in parapsychology. But that's not what Live and Let Die is doing. Therefore the question: "what is Live and Let Die doing?"
Well, at least one thing it's doing is being a solid action movie. This is somewhat eventual, but it gets there, and has some terrific stunts courtesy Simmons, though of course it's also a tremendous showcase for the Black Stuntman's Union (Eddie Smith seems to be the representative person to name), given an full feature's opportunity to be badass. I mentioned the first car chase, and Live and Let Die, ahem, lives or dies on its vehicular action; so maybe I will let it live, after all. (But not all of it is vehicular action: Ross Kananga, owner of that croc farm, and the namesake for the invented component of this film's two-faced villain, told Simmons he could skip on the backs of his reptiles like stones in a river, and Simmons said "from the waist down, you're James Bond now, mister," and it's hair-raising stuff.) But there's another nice car chase in San Monique, involving a double-decker bus getting a haircut, very Hal Needhamesque in a rather appealing way; and a comic plane chase—the joke is it never gets off the ground, though the joke's sold well, especially by Moore's polite hijacking of an elderly student pilot's aircraft—and I find that fun, and also fairly Needhamesque.
It'd be hard to see any way around Live and Let Die not being a huge influence on Needham's future career given the film's centerpiece action setpiece, an enormously sprawling bayou speedboat chase that does some amazingly impossible-feeling things with those boats, especially the way it considers "water" to be an entirely optional surface for their operation. This is also a comic chase, in good ways and bad, the good ways being the substantial collateral damage and the adorable comic framings where we patiently wait for the chase to resurge out of the background to ruin some doofuses' days; the bad ways are all Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), a glob of sentient chewing tobacco wearing the skin of a man, whom the filmmakers not named "Bob Simmons" have presumably deployed in their level best attempt to ruin his extremely awesome sequence. I'd remembered him as having succeeded, but that's probably because I've seen Golden Gun too recently, and it's pretty horrible to think that we can consider Sheriff J.W. Pepper another time.
But the rad speedboats come close enough to the end that it's not entirely to the film's detriment that its actual conclusion is split between Bond crashing a stagebound voodoo ritual and skulking through stagebound caverns (the end of Big is... actually Goddamn insane, beyond "good" or "bad"), and from his first lines, Live and Let Die has had one other important thing going for it. That's Moore himself, and part of the film's problem is that it might've wanted to be a back-to-basics Bond, or even back beyond the basics—in its quotidian street crime angle, even in matters of form like its return to a 1.85:1 aspect ratio—thereby trying to box Moore in to being a thug, and general blunt instrument, the exactly wrong form of Bond for that actor. Moore's mostly able to kick that "serious Bond" box apart—not that I imagine it was ever going to survive being a Bond movie in the 70s anyway—pushing it to a fizzier, sillier, comic bookier place. Moore's Bond is not yet complete; I think it was more complete in Crossplot already, and Moore's first Bond screenplay gives Moore's Bond virtually no opportunity to show off his bourgeois classiness besides coffee-making, unless condescending to a bartender about what "neat" means somehow counts. But at least Moore looks immaculately sleek in a coat in New York, and looks good, elsewhere, in other things; his suavity is assured when he unzips a dress with pure magnetism. (Moore, older than Connery, is of course still his youngest here, and the Moore fan may even be taken slightly by surprise in the action sequences when he sometimes, like, actually does shit.) So Moore himself is where he needs to be, and great things are afoot in the way he handles this movie's stupidest Bondian puns—"There's no sense going out half-cocked" is wonderful, thanks to Moore's read of it—and the joy he takes in Bond's insouciant superiority is already distinguishing him from Connery, in a good way. Moore, I've said, is my favorite Bond. That has very little to do with this Bond movie, but you can see my favorite Bond from here.
Score: 6/10
*There's nothing in the movie as splendidly cruel as the note left for Bond: "He disagreed with something that ate him. (PS. we have plenty more jokes as good as this.)"
**Tarot ain't exactly some major pillar of West African diaspora religion, either.
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