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Starring Roger Moore, Yaphet Kotto,
Written by Tom Mankiewicz from the novel by Ian Fleming, Produced by Albert
Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, Directed by Guy Hamilton.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
When Sean Connery opted out of the James Bond role, the 007
series took a tumble. George Lazenby's On Her Majesty's Secret Service did
respectable business, but fear for the franchise brought Connery back forDiamonds
Are Forever while Danjaq decided how to reinvent Bond for the 1970s. The
result was 1973's Live and Let Die, which confirmed 007's turn toward
comedy. New Bond Roger Moore already had a strong association with secret agent
work on Television, and was considered a master at straight-faced quips.
Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz had apparently been chosen to
penDiamonds are Forever because of his script for The Sweet Ride, a
1968 movie set in Las Vegas. Diamonds veered in a more comedic
direction, making heavy use of "funny" homosexuals as perverted
villains. Bond fights gay assassins on a pleasure cruise and grapples with
lesbian killer-girls in a desert hideaway. Blofeld appears in drag. Live
and Let Diecontinues the trend of self-spoofery. Moore's unflappable Bond beds
all the girls as if he possessed a license to ****, and confronts most threats
with an arched eyebrow and a really lousy joke: "Butterhook!"
... "I'm just being disarming, dear."
The original Bond diet of intrigue and danger has been
jettisoned in favor of a series of cartoon adventures and chases. Bond gets
caught in revolving café tables and booths that drop like elevators through the
floor. Because Roger Moore isn't very physically adept or graceful in motion,
the major set pieces have him piloting vehicles that perform all the action.
007 jumps behind the wheel of an English-style double-decker bus and wrecks an
airport in a runaway Piper Cub airplane. By the time we get to the main set piece,
a speedboat chase in a Louisiana bayou, Live and Let Die has lowered
007 to the level of a Roadrunner cartoon. The action is often spectacular,
especially those awesome boat jumps. Mankiewicz comes up with some good Buster
Keaton-style sight gags, such as the wedding party demolished by the
grass-hopping speedboats. The new direction is funny and exciting, but it
abandons most of what made James Bond 007 unique. Roger Moore's Bond is
essentially a clown.
Live and Let Die has extensive location shooting in New York and Louisiana,
and although many voices seem to be post-dubbed by UK talent, the movie employs
quit a few American actors. The bad guys are all black, from the fat henchman
Whisper (Earl Jolly Brown) to the amusingly lethal Tee Hee (Julius Harris) with
his mechanical claw. Tom Mankiewicz enlivens the movie with touchy content that
the English producers could never navigate on their own. Instead of downplaying
the film's black villains, Mankiewicz lampoons America's race divide with a
wholesale parody of the Blaxploitation craze. In print, the movie reads like a
provocation. Strutting around as the epitome of class-conscious England, Bond
sleeps with Gloria Hendry's Rosie Carver as casually as he beds the first
scene's Miss Caruso (Madeline Smith). Black thugs threaten 007 with knives and
guns and gloat over him with toothy smiles. Bond outwits them only half the
time.
At the top of the heap is Kananga, a "respectable"
diplomat with a secret identity as Mr. Big (the great Yaphet Kotto), a brutal
drug baron. The racist politics favor the prejudices of right-wing Brits: Even
though Kananga / Big rules a Caribbean island, the inference is that black
politics are a sham and that the UK's newly independent colonies need her
paternal governance. On the side of the blacks is magic, in the form of
Solitaire (Jane Seymour) a beautiful fortuneteller in the employ of Mr. Big. As
in a classic myth, Solitaire's super-power will vanish if she loses her
virginity. This gives the movie a good reason to claim that Mr. Big has never
slept with Solitaire, thus maintaining racist standards. Of course, it's
perfectly acceptable for the black Rosie to be bedded by Bond. It would seem
that Solitaire would be an ideal planning assistant for "M" back in
London, but Bond has no trouble "curing" her of her prognostic
talents. When the show ends, Solitaire is just another ordinary conquest, ready
for the 007 Home for Cast-Off Girl Friends.
The fun comes when Bond interacts with Mr. Big's hoodlum
minions. Some of the Harlem wisecracks are pretty funny, and the black cast's
pimp-mobiles and other accoutrements contrast well with Moore's snooty etiquette.
Bond may get the best of them, but as he's just a clown, the joke's really on
him. Yaphet Kotto was very proud of his opportunity to play a bigger-than-life
Bond villain; a starring role in a James Bond film is a big step up from the
usual grindhouse opportunities. Black moviegoersloved Live and Let Die. I
remember the audience uproar of approval for one particular exchange drowning
out the soundtrack for at least half a minute
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