Live and Let Die (1973) - film review

When three British agents are assassinated whilst spying on Dr Kananga, the president of San Monique, a small island in the Caribbean, James Bond is sent to New York to investigate.  Kananga has great fun playing the benign dictator but he is in fact the head of a drugs trafficking operation that threatens to swamp the entire western world.  For want of something better to do, Bond follows Kananga to San Monique, where he encounters the beautiful fortune teller Solitaire, a marsh filled with hungry crocodiles, dark voodoo ceremonies and a man with a nasty right hook, of the metal variety...

Roger Moore’s silky smooth debut as agent 007 helped to re-energise the Bond series in the early 70s but did a pretty good job of alienating its most loyal fans.  Despite its success at the box office, Live and Let Die was reviled by the critics, who saw Moore (known at the time for playing Simon Templar in the TV series The Saint) as a poor substitute for Sean Connery.  The film’s imperfections have been amplified by the passage of time, so that today its toxic concoction of racial stereotyping, sexual innuendo and seriously bad jokes is really hard to swallow (spitting is preferable).  One suspects that the decision to cast Roger Moore as Bond had less to do with his suitability for the role and more to do with with the implied connotations in his name...

Live and Let Die suffers from the fact that it was made when blaxploitation was at its height.  Whilst not intentionally racist, the film’s portrayal of African Americans is hardly flattering.  Even the black villain of the piece is a walking cliché, having none of the menace and depth that we expect of even a half-decent Bond villain.  Of course, at the time, black did not mean cultural diversity but voodoo witchcraft, and so we have to endure the sight of black natives dancing half-naked around a totem pole.  Sorry folks, this is not Bond.  This is a white supremacist’s version of Tintin, spiced up with some unimaginably tacky low-grade eroticism.

Guy Hamilton, the director of Goldfinger (1965), one of the absolute best Bond films, had clearly lost the Midas touch by this stage.  It’s not a good sign when the action sequences, which are usually intended to accelerate the pace of the narrative, merely slow things down to an unendurable crawl.  Throw in a comedy sheriff who is on day release from The Dukes of Hazzard, a load of black actors who have yet to be issued with their Equity cards and enough sexual innuendo to fuel a few hundred really bad Carry On films, and what you end up with is this fiasco masquerading as a Bond movie.  And as for that theme song by Wings...  If you’re going to scrape the bottom, you might as well do it in style. 

The fact that Live and Let Die was such a huge commercial success meant that there was unlikely to be any appreciable upswing from this artistic nadir in the short term.  In fact, this bargain basement monstrosity served as the template for the next half dozen or so Bond films, providing Roger Moore with plenty of opportunity to arch his eyebrows and knock out the kind of suggestive quips which nowadays would send a budding Don Juan headfirst into the nearest accident and emergency ward.  In this latest incarnation, agent 007 not only had a licence to kill; he also had free reign to dish out as much camp silliness as his audience could stomach. In the 1970s, not the most culturally discriminating era in human history, that was one helluva lot of camp silliness.  Now, Mr Bond, is that a Walther PPK in your holster, or are you extremely pleased to see me..?

© Chris Alderton 2010

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