7 / 10
Official trailer
Moore Arrives
Live and Let Die is Roger Moore’s first Bond film, and it’s an odd, uneven, very entertaining introduction. Sean Connery had come back for one last film, Diamonds Are Forever, and gone again, and the producers needed a new Bond who wouldn’t simply be compared to him. They found Moore, a television star from The Saint, and deliberately built a film that looked nothing like the Connery years: no Blofeld, no Cold War, no Q, no gadget car and no dinner jacket in the first scene.
Guy Hamilton, who had directed Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever, directed it, and Tom Mankiewicz wrote the script, loosely based on Ian Fleming’s second novel.
It came out in 1973, made a great deal of money, and established Moore firmly in the role. I give it a 7. It’s fun, it has two of the best stunts in the series and the best theme song, and it has problems that have become harder to ignore with every passing year.
I have a soft spot for this one, and it’s mostly Moore’s fault. He walks into the role like a man invited to a party he’s sure he’ll enjoy, and for long stretches I enjoy it with him. Then Harlem, the voodoo scenes and that gas pellet ending remind me why the number stops at 7.
A Different Kind of Bond
Moore’s Bond is lighter, wittier and more relaxed than Connery’s.
He smokes cigars instead of cigarettes, drinks bourbon instead of vodka martinis in several scenes, and treats most dangers with raised eyebrows and a quip. The producers were careful to avoid anything that would invite direct comparison, and the strategy worked. Audiences accepted Moore as a different Bond from the first reel.
The problem, visible even here, is that Moore’s Bond rarely seems in real danger. He’s a gentleman amused by the situation, and the film is so busy being fun that it forgets to be tense. It’s the start of the lighter, more comic tone that would define the next decade of the series, for better and worse, and you can see both the charm and the weakness forming.
Moore is very good at what he does here, and he’s more convincing in the action than people remember. He was forty-five, older than Connery had been in any of his official Bonds, and he makes the role his own immediately. By the end of the film, the question of whether anyone could follow Connery had been answered, and Moore would go on to play Bond for twelve years and seven films.
I like how little Moore strains here. He doesn’t try to do Connery, and he knows he doesn’t need to. My complaint is the one the whole decade would earn: I never once worry he’s going to lose.
For Writers
The producers deliberately removed every familiar Connery element, the gadgets, Q, the dinner jacket, so Moore would never be judged against his predecessor.
When you write a new version of a familiar character, keeping all the old trappings invites comparison and almost always loses.
List the elements readers most associate with the character’s previous version, and leave most of them out of the first new story. Bring them back later, once the new version is established.
The Plot
Three British agents are murdered in quick succession, in New York, New Orleans and the Caribbean island of San Monique, and Bond is sent to find out why. The trail leads to Dr. Kananga, the dictator of San Monique, and to Mr. Big, a gangster who runs a chain of soul food restaurants in Harlem.
They turn out to be the same man. Kananga is growing enormous poppy fields on his island, protected by fear of voodoo, and he plans to give away two tons of heroin free through Mr. Big’s restaurants, flooding the American market, putting the Mafia out of business and creating a vast new population of addicts who will then have to buy from him alone.
It’s one of the more grounded plots in the series, a drug lord’s business plan, not a scheme to hold the world to ransom, and it gives the film a different, grittier feel. Yaphet Kotto plays Kananga with real intelligence and menace, and he’s a much better villain than the film around him deserves.
Solitaire
Jane Seymour plays Solitaire, Kananga’s fortune teller, a young woman who can see the future in tarot cards as long as she remains a virgin. Kananga relies on her readings for everything, and she’s kept a prisoner in his palace, in white robes and elaborate headdresses.
Bond wins her by stacking a tarot deck so that every card she draws is The Lovers.
The trick is clever and, looked at now, a rather manipulative way to seduce a frightened young woman. Once she sleeps with him, she loses her power, and her life is in danger from Kananga. Seymour was twenty-two, in her first major film role, and she gives Solitaire a fragility and dignity the script doesn’t always give her.
She’s also one of the few Bond women whose power is mysterious.
The film never quite explains whether she really sees the future, and her readings are right often enough to be unsettling. The tarot cards appear throughout the film, and the production commissioned its own deck. It became a collector’s item. It’s one of the few eerie touches in the series.
The Crocodile Farm
Captured by Kananga’s men, Bond is left stranded on a tiny island in the middle of a pond full of crocodiles at a farm in the Louisiana bayous. He escapes by running across the backs of a row of crocodiles to the shore, and the stunt was real.
Ross Kananga, the owner of the crocodile farm where it was filmed, performed it, and the filmmakers liked his surname so much they gave it to the villain. He reportedly made several attempts, and a crocodile bit him on at least one of them. The shot in the finished film shows him running across the animals, and few stunts in the whole series match it.
It’s also typical of the Moore era at its best: a simple, ridiculous, completely real piece of danger, filmed without cheating, that no amount of computer effects could match. Watching it now, knowing that the man on screen is really running across the backs of living crocodiles, is still enough to make you hold your breath, and it’s the one image from the film that everyone remembers.
That run is the reason I rate the film a 7. I can forgive a lot of sagging middle for a few seconds of a real man, a real farm and real crocodiles, and I doubt anyone would get it past an insurance company today.
For Writers
The crocodile stunt was real, performed by the farm’s owner, and the villain was named after him. The film’s best moment is also its simplest.
In an action scene, spectacle isn’t the same as tension. A single, clear, physical danger the reader can picture is often more gripping than a large battle.
Design one action moment around a simple, visible threat and a simple, desperate solution. Describe it so clearly that the reader could draw it. Action Writers’ Phrase Book is worth a look on this.
The Boat Chase
Bond steals a speedboat and is chased through the bayous by Kananga’s men and by the local sheriff, and the sequence is one of the longest and most elaborate chases in any Bond film. Boats race through narrow channels, cut across lawns, crash through a wedding party and, in one famous stunt, leap across a road and over a police car.
The jump was designed to go a modest distance and went much further, setting a record for a boat jump at the time. It’s an exciting sequence, and much of it was done for real on the water, with stunt drivers taking enormous risks. It still looks spectacular.
It’s also where the film introduces Sheriff J.W. Pepper, played by Clifton James, a loud, tobacco-chewing Louisiana lawman who becomes the comic relief of the chase. Audiences loved him, and he returned in The Man with the Golden Gun. He’s a broad caricature, and your tolerance for him will vary.
The Theme Song
Paul McCartney and Wings recorded the theme, and it’s one of the best Bond songs ever written. It starts as a gentle ballad, explodes into a thunderous orchestral rock section and swings into a reggae interlude, and it captures the film’s mix of danger and fun perfectly. It was nominated for the Oscar and has been a concert staple ever since.
I’d put McCartney’s song at the top of the Bond list without a second thought. It does in a few minutes what the whole film keeps trying to do, lurching from sweet to explosive to goofy, and it gets away with every swerve.
George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, produced the song and wrote the score, the first Bond film not scored by John Barry since Dr. No. Martin’s score is solid, blending the Bond theme with funk and Caribbean rhythms, and it gives the film a sound unlike any Bond before it.
Baron Samedi and Tee Hee
Two of Kananga’s henchmen are as memorable as any in the series. Tee Hee, played by Julius Harris, is a giant, always-smiling man with a metal claw in place of the arm a crocodile took. His fight with Bond on a train at the end is a fine bruising brawl, and his claw is one of the great henchman gimmicks.
Baron Samedi, played by Geoffrey Holder, is the voodoo spirit of death, or a man playing him, or something in between. Holder was a dancer, choreographer and actor, and he gives Samedi a towering, laughing presence. The film never settles whether he’s supernatural, and his final appearance, laughing on the front of a train after apparently being killed, leaves the question open.
The Stereotypes
This film borrows heavily from the blaxploitation films that were popular in 1973, like Shaft and Superfly, and it does so in ways that were uncomfortable then and are worse now.
Almost every Black character in the film is a villain, a henchman or a voodoo worshipper. Harlem is presented as a menacing, alien place where a white man is conspicuous and in danger. The voodoo scenes treat a real religion as a horror prop.
It’s the film’s biggest problem. It’s not simply dated. It builds its sense of danger out of racial fear, and a modern audience feels it immediately. Yaphet Kotto and Gloria Hendry, as the double agent Rosie Carver, the first Black woman to be romantically involved with Bond, do what they can with their roles, and Kotto in particular brings real dignity to a part that could easily have been a caricature.
None of this means you can’t enjoy the film. It means you should watch it with open eyes, as a film of its moment that got a great deal wrong about the people it depicted. Knowing what it gets wrong makes it possible to appreciate what it gets right, including Kotto’s performance and some of the best action filmmaking in the Moore era.
For Writers
The film builds its danger out of racial fear, and a modern audience feels it immediately. Its flaws are part of its foundations, beyond dated details.
If you write about people and places outside your own experience, the easiest source of menace is often the reader’s unfamiliarity, and it can turn characters into props. For every character who poses a threat in your story, give them a motive and a point of view of their own. If you can’t, reconsider what they’re doing in the story.
The Ending
Bond destroys the poppy fields, rescues Solitaire from a voodoo sacrifice and confronts Kananga in his underground lair, where both men end up in a shark tank. Bond forces a compressed gas pellet, meant for killing sharks, into Kananga’s mouth, and Kananga inflates like a balloon and explodes.
Kananga’s death is where the film loses me.
Kotto has spent the whole film building a smart, frightening man, and the script pops him like a party balloon for a laugh. It’s the Moore-era reflex at its worst: when in doubt, go for the joke. Then Tee Hee attacks on the train home, Baron Samedi laughs from the front of the engine, and the film ends on a note of uncanny mystery I’d happily have built the whole climax around.
Where Live and Let Die Falls Short
The stereotypes, above all, and the tone. It lurches between grit and slapstick. Sheriff Pepper is funny for a while and outstays his welcome, and Kananga’s death is ridiculous. Moore’s Bond, charming as he is, rarely seems to be in danger, and without danger the action scenes can feel like stunts performed for their own sake. The film also runs a little long, and the middle sags between the big set pieces.
On the other side of the ledger: the theme song, the crocodile run, the boat chase, Kotto, Seymour and Geoffrey Holder.
It’s a 7. It’s a fun, flawed introduction to Moore, and it’s more memorable than several of the more polished films that followed it. If you’re working through the Moore era, start here, then jump to The Spy Who Loved Me. It’s where his Bond finally found its full form.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Its villain gets a business plan instead of a doomsday weapon. Kananga wants to corner the heroin market, and the grounded goal makes him more believable than most Bond villains.
For an antagonist, a small, concrete, profitable goal can be more frightening than a grand scheme, because the reader can imagine it happening.
Give your villain a goal you could explain to a banker in two sentences. Then work out what they would do, step by step, to achieve it.
The Verdict on Live and Let Die
Yes, with open eyes. I give it a 7 because the good parts are good enough to hold it up: the best theme song in the series, the crocodile run, the boat chase and Yaphet Kotto doing far more with Kananga than the script asked of him. What drags it down is the racial fear it runs on, which gets harder to sit through with every passing year, and a finale that throws away its best villain for a gag. That’s a fun, flawed introduction to Roger Moore.
