Which one is this? Blaxploitation Bond!
Who’s who in this one? Moore (Bond); Lee (M); Maxwell (Moneypenny); Hedison (Leiter).
Where did you first encounter this one? When the franchise was released to DVD in the early 2000s.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Yaphet Kotto as Dr. Kananga/Mr. Big, who is using a dual identity as a Caribbean dictator/American drug lord to flood the market with free heroin, thereby inciting a monopoly.
Who are the Bond girls? Future Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman – Jane Seymour – as virgin Tarot-reader Solitaire, and Gloria Hendry as Bond’s first African-American love interest, Rosie Carver.
Opening number? One of the best title tracks in the whole series via Paul McCartney’s rock mainstay, which widens and redefines the Bond sound in a manner that remains influential today. Maurice Binder’s title sequence is a disturbing collage of nude Caribbean women, voodoo skulls, and blood-red flame.
What’s memorable about this one? Sheriff G.W. Pepper. Mr. Big inflating like a balloon. Crocodiles. The boat chase. “Names is for tombstones, baby.” How not Roger Moore-y Roger Moore was.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 7 for funkiness.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? Another bingo. Keeping it at 7.
The best thing you can say about the Bond franchise is that at 22 entries (soon 23, and not counting the “unofficial” ones), it’s available in so many flavours and colours that one can scarcely fail to find one that’s to one’s taste. This presents natural challenges in terms of both expectation and consistency, but it still means that everyone can have a favourite Bond movie, and that the one you’re watching is just as likely to be someone’s as not. Live and Let Die, a big, trashy piece of oldschool racial terror, is as good a bet as any, if you’re into ‘70s exploitation movies and black magic. It doesn’t fit within the franchise proper as anything more than an exception that proves the rule, but it’s got some great sequences, and sure as hell looks and feels like entirely its own thing.
The engine of the story is the reliable old assignment of “other” upon a race and culture which differs so wildly from proper British whiteness that it can be treated as little better than a carnival funhouse ride. In this case, blacks – and the film goes well out of its way to suggest that every person of dark skin, everywhere from Harlem to New Orleans to the Caribbean and all the way back to Africa, operate as a kind of secret society / voodoo hive mind – are given the condescending “strange, exotic, frightening!” treatment. Black-centric cultures and environments in Live and Let Die are relative warrens of hidden doors, secret traps, and concealed communication devices, all of which serve to act as a two-hour series of snares into which 007 repeatedly becomes entangled, and then sets himself free. One would do well not to look too closely at Live and Let Die’s various offences and bigotries, but they are so low in concept and unvarnished in execution that they’re largely laughable for their profoundly naïve simple-mindedness.
I do wish Yaphet Kotto, as Mr. Big and Dr. Kananga, was a more effective villain. Kotto brings debonair charm as Kananga that neatly rivals Bond’s, and the sequence of Mr. Big pulling off his latex mask – leaving a skull-like shred of used skin, through which he peers menacingly at Bond – is quite startling. It largely comes to nothing, though; Kananga’s plan is too complex to follow for half the movie, and too trivial to care much about for the rest. Essentially, he is using mock black magic and voodoo mysticism to create a protective shield of fear around his secret Caribbean heroin fields, all while living a double life as a mobster in Harlem. This nearly qualifies as a smart inversion of the batshit exploitation we’re witnessing onscreen; it does not, however, carry the picture.
To further and deepen the queasy undertones, we have Live and Let Die’s female lead. Jane Seymour is as beautiful a Bond girl as has graced the series, but there is something profoundly disconcerting in the fact that we meet her as a virgin with demonstrative clairvoyant powers, who then falls for a card trick by Bond and has sex with him – thereby fulfilling a prophecy that she would lose her sixth sense when she lost her virginity. Bond literally fucks the special powers out of her, converting Solitaire to the dragged-around-by-the-hand sort of dope that we usually see in female leads in action movies. Solitaire spends the rest of the movie apparently so addicted to her newfound sexuality that her eyes are constantly scanning for the next available bed. Given the cost of her sexual maturation, I suppose we can at least be glad she enjoyed it.
And yet, for all this, Live and Let Die is not an unpleasant watching experience, even though the movie is basically hogwash. The first two acts work only in fits and starts, as strange phantasmagoria of the mystic (voodoo tribal dances!) and non-mystic (pimpmobiles!) grace the screen in equal measure. Things pick up considerably in the third act, however, which achieves a kind of trashy simplicity that is endlessly entertaining to watch. A lot of this is down to the crocodile escape and subsequent boat chase down the bayou, where director Guy Hamilton and his stunt team treat speedboats like hovercrafts, constantly jumping them out of the water and skittering them across lawns only to plop back into the next tributary for another roaring go in the river. It’s a grand, brilliantly designed action set piece, and so visceral that you can nearly smell the gasoline.
In his first turn as 007, Roger Moore gives a nicely unshowy performance. He’s a calm, even lazy, conquestor of women – he calls all of them “darling” – and the word to best describe Moore’s take on the secret agent is “smug.” The low-key approach here nonetheless works well within the otherwise lunatic milieu Bond is running around in, and as his swath of destruction stretches from Louisiana to San Monique (“What are you, some kind of doomsday machine, boy?” Sheriff G.W. Pepper asks), the arched Moore eyebrows stand him in good stead. You could almost believe the naughty little boy didn’t mean any of it.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, Live and Let Die is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on November 10, December 25, and January 20. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.