Bond-arama: No. 008 Live And Let Die (1973)

This was one of the hardest to rank. There is much to love here. The film has a really cool blaxsploitation feel to it and it’s pure fun, suckas. The funeral scene is iconic. Jane Seymour is gorgeous. The theme song and title are two of the best. But then there are the problems. The problems are what keep this one at No. 008 of 0023.

Plot Quality: Our story opens with the assassination of three British agents. One is at the UN, one is in New Orleans and one gets killed in a voodoo ceremony in the Caribbean island of San Monique. Bond is called in to investigate. He lands in New York only to have his driver killed in an attempt to kill Bond and make it look like an automobile accident. Bond pursues a lead on the killer into Harlem, where he stands out: “You can’t miss him! It’s like following a cue ball.”

Bond finds himself captured by Mr. Big, the most powerful black gangster in the country. Bond escapes and in the process learns that there is a connection between Mr. Big and Dr. Kananga, Prime Minster of San Monique. Bond travels to San Monique to investigate. There he meets CIA agent Rosie Carver, who is basically incompetent. She’s also working for Kananga and she leads Bond into a trap, but he escapes. Bond then stumbles upon Solitaire (Jane Seymour). She’s Kananga’s psychic and Bond tricks her into sleeping with him. They then escape from Kananga to New Orleans, where Bond wants to check out a restaurant owned by Mr. Big, the Fillet of Soul, from which Mr. Big is distributing heroin.

Bond is met immediately by Mr. Big’s thugs, but he escapes. Then he’s recaptured at the restaurant, learns that Kananga is Mr. Big, and is sent to be fed to crocodiles. Once again, he escapes and a classic boat chase through the Louisiana bayous takes place. Eventually, Bond escapes and then pursues Kananga back to San Monique, where he blows up the heroin fields, kills Kananga and his henchmen, and rescues Solitaire.

As plots go, there’s not a lot here. Instead, action gets substituted for plot as the film involves numerous chase scenes. The bus chase is decent and the plane chase is stupid, but the boat chase... the boat chase is spectacular. The plot is entirely believable however, and Kananga’s scheme is one of the better ones. The characters are all interesting and memorable too - this isn’t License to Kill where you can’t remember anybody except the main actors. Here you remember everyone, from incompetent Rosie to fat Whisper to the Voodoo Baron to the man with the hook for a hand to the little guy who kills at funerals. The dialog is fun too with lots of over-the-top slang. The images are iconic, like the powerboat flying through the air, the deck of cards that are all lovers, Bond jumping onto the backs of crocodiles, and the Olympia Brass Band doing the funerals. This film has a travelogue film too, even if it takes place in gritty areas.

Against this, however, you have a couple problems. Bond very much feels like a passenger in this film and he survives because of the nonsensical decisions of the bad guys, not because he’s a great spy. The ending comes a little to easily to Bond as well. Sheriff J.W. Pepper is an abomination as the fat, racist Southern-cop stereotype. I’ve seen him called the Jar Jar Binks of the series, and I can’t disagree with that.

But in the end, the positives far outweigh the negatives and have kept this as one of the more popular films. Indeed, it is the rare Bond-a-thon where this one doesn’t feature prominently. The film also made $851 million (in 2013 dollars) at the box office, which blows away all the later films up to Skyfall and puts it at No. 4 in the series (behind Thunderball, Goldfinger and Skyfall). So they did something right.

Bond Quality: This is Roger Moore’s first outing as Bond and boy is he stiff. As we’ve discussed before, Bond needs to project a suaveness, a cold-bloodedness, and a sense of humor. Moore doesn’t really achieve any of that in this film. For one thing, in keeping with the blaxsploitation theme, Bond is repeatedly presented as hopelessly square and out of his element... dumbass honkey. It’s hard to be suave when you pretend you don’t even understand obvious slang which the audience will know. He also comes across as a clothes horse, and a prissy one at that. Connery spoke about his tailor in passing, but you never watched him shop for suits. Sadly, we get to watch Roger pick out his favorite suits; it feels wrong. And there’s really only one moment where he’s cold-blooded (with Rosie) and he doesn’t even go through with that.

What he does have going for him is competence and that his confidence builds throughout the film. He looks the part too. And all told, there is a sense of potential. At this point at least, he seems like he will be an adequate replacement for Connery. Unfortunately, this may have been his peak as Bond.

The Bond Girl: Jane Seymour plays Solitaire, Kananga’s Tarot Card reading psychic, and she’s great. She’s not the most active of Bond girls, but she brings a strong sense of emotion to the film and solid chemistry with Moore. In particular, she helps make Kananga feel like someone to fear, rather than the clown he would appear to be without her cringing when he speaks, and she helps sell Moore as a lover, something that gets harder and harder to believe in Moore’s later films. She also helps sell the whole voodoo aspect of the film, and she becomes a much better prize for Bond than just stopping a drug dealer. In many ways, she is essential to the film, which is rare for Bond girls.

Villain Quality: The villain is Yaphet Kotto, who plays duel roles here. As the film opens, he’s Mr. Big, the biggest, baddest black criminal in the US. As the CIA explains, “You name the racket and they say he has a black concession.” We soon learn, however, that Mr. Big is really Prime Minster Kananga of San Monique in disguise.

Kananga’s plan is to give away two tons of heroin for free on the streets of America. His goal is to drive the Mafia out of business and to double the number of addicts in the US. Then he will monopolize the market and start charging. This is actually a brilliant plan as it’s very realistic as it would cost him nothing to do this and it would be effective, as evidenced by other companies who “dump” products to take over markets. It’s also quite threatening, given the mess this could make of the country and the power he would have over this army of addicts who were totally reliant on him. It was also topical, being little more than a year after Nixon gave his “War on Drugs” speech. All told, this is a scheme worthy of Bond’s attention; it’s not just Bond fighting a drug dealer.

Kotto does an excellent job too in the role of Kananga. He portrays an interesting mix of sane and crazy. On the one hand, his plan is very rational, but on the other hand, he seems to genuinely believe his own lies. He cynically uses voodoo to keep the San Monique locals from snooping around his poppy fields, but then believes it himself when it comes to Solitaire. He’s maniacal too, but thinks he’s just a businessman. Even his language changes significantly when he’s Mr. Big, all slang and jive, compared to when he’s the very erudite and educated Kananga. It’s like he has a split personality. And that give him a neat edge that many of the other villains lack. Compare his tightly-wound personae against the tired villains Moore would face in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker or flakes like Zorin in A View To A Kill. He feels much more maniacal and much more dangerous than those lame honkies.

There are problems with Kananga, but they aren’t with the character or his plan. The problems really come up with his henchmen. For example, he has either corrupted Rosie Carver or planted her in the CIA, but that reeks of being too coincidental and she seems too incompetent to be hired as an agent. His henchmen Whisper is enormously fat and can only whisper, but he isn’t someone you would hire to do the things he does. His main henchman Tee Hee has a hook for an arm, but the physics behind it are distractingly wrong, e.g. he can’t bend the barrel of a gun. Baron Samedi is cool and menacing and an excellent character, but ultimately proves to be pretty pathetic as he gets killed with just a single shove. Even more questionable, each of the characters in the organization, from the cabbie to the fat waiter, somehow appear wherever Bond goes. This feels phony. And with Samedi, Tee Hee, Rosie, Whisper and the cabbie all having ample opportunities to kill Bond in cold blood, but none even trying, the film has a high “Why didn’t he just ___?” quality to it.

This affects Kananga too as he is the first James Bond villain to truly engage in a Rube Goldberg approach to killing Bond. Each of the prior guys had reasons they did what they did, even if simply shooting him would have proved more effective. This time, Kananga does what he does because the script calls for it, and that ads an air of silliness to the films. In some ways, his insanity helps us swallow his Rube Goldberg attempts to kill Bond... but not quite enough.

All in all, this was a good film. The villain is lively, well-written, and has a great plan. The Bond girl is special. The film has a cool vibe. It is an iconic film with iconic images that even casual fans know, and it’s pure fun. It has also proven its staying power. So the film deserves a high ranking. But there are significant problems that make the film feel less than it is. Those keep the film from going any higher. So here it sits at No. 008 of 0023... can you dig it?