Live and Let Die

And none the worse for it, since every Bond film needs a fresh spin on the same old formula. Roger Moore's first outing as JB is, in equal measures, comical and action-packed. You'll never get bored. But it's definitely the weirdest Bond ever with loads of utterly bizarre moments.

It begins with M turning up at JB's house in the early hours while he's pumping some Italian agent for information (don't you just love his initialled dressing gown). Before sending him to America to investigate a Harlem pimp known as Mister Big he delivers some gadgets from Q-Branch, including a very useful watch. Q himself, or Major Boothroyd if you want to call him by his proper name, doesn't make any appearance in this one.

Standing out like a Muslim in an airport, almost every single black person JB encounters in Harlem is on Mister Big's payroll. And they've got a seemingly endless bag of tricks to play on him. The funny thing about Moore is that he's very proper and British and doesn't think anything of walking into a tough Harlem bar while dressed up like the Duke of Edinburgh. His stunned reactions when they mess with his head are seriously funny.

The action then moves to Lousiana and a savage Caribbean island as JB uncovers a massive heroin plot. There's a particularly long speedboat chase across a bayou where JB encounters Sheriff J.W. Pepper, the most stereotypical southern redneck ever. Think of Texas Businessman from The Simpsons and you get the idea. JB also gets to dodge a hundred hungry Gators and do, many times over, Solitaire, Mister Big's Tarot card reader.

I'm not sure what kind of formidable villain uses a Tarot card reader to help him do business but when you also surround yourself with a hook-handed maniac called Tee-Hee, a quiet fat guy called Whisper and a seemingly unkillable voodoo high priest called Baron Samedi then you really do become a serious baddie. Right? He even goes on a big speech about how his master plan works before attempting to kill JB slowly. Obviously this makes much more sense than just shooting him right away. When will they learn?

Despite being the oldest actor to debut as Bond (at 46), Moore does look younger than Connery. And while Sean was gruff and Scottish, Moore is perpetually calm and refined, even in the face of danger (fingers being chopped-off, snake in the bath, being eaten by gators/sharks). Everything that the British once thought they were. He has a certain sarcastic edge that the other Bond actors lacked. While some of his films may have been the sillier of the franchise, Moore has always been my favorite. And the massive revolver and holster he uses at the end is so much more masculine than the usual, wimpy as hell, Walther PPK.

And, as much as I am no fan of Paul McCartney, you gotta love that theme song! Exciting and iconic at the same time. And also yet another juxtaposition in the weirdest Bond movie ever.

MI6, Harlem, Pimps, Paul McCartney, Gators, Heroin, Voodoo, Snakes, Sharks, Clairvoyance, Rednecks, Afros, Fake Afros, Fillet of Soul, Human Scarifice, Scarecrows and a small-headed man in a Top-Hat who lost a fight with chickens. Is this a Bond film or did the whole world just go insane?

I first saw this in the early 90s on a vhs. Revisited it recently. This is the eighth film in the Bond series and the first to star Roger Moore as James Bond. Here 007 is sent to New York to investigate the deaths of three British agents, leading him to Kananga n Mr. Big, thereby trapping him in a world of gangsters, dictator, drug traffickers and voodoo occultists.

Here Bond faces Dr. Kananga, Baron Samedi (a paranormal entity), ferocious crocodiles, a venomous snake, Tee Hee, a henchman who has a pincer for a hand, Dambala, a henchman with a penchant for snakes and wears a goat pelt on his head, Whisper, a fatty who cannot speak properly and various henchmen in red tshirts and blue pants.

Bond gets to cool off with Madeline Smith, Jane Seymour and Gloria Hendry, a babe with an amazing toned obliques n rectus abdominis.

The film has a lovely boat chase which is amazingly well photographed in Louisiana around the Irish Bayou. I am a big fan of movies shot in the marshy areas n the bayou of Louisiana.

In the novel, Tee Hee is a henchman without the metal claw and he breaks the little finger of Bond's left hand.

In the novel, Whisper's quiet voice is attributed to a bout of tuberculosis during infancy.

Ignoring a Roger Moore who presents a bit of a distraction for viewers watching the series in order, Live And Let Die is an excellent example of how pop culture helps the Bond series survive throughout the decades. The growing concern of a drug-using society at the time is featured, and an immensely popular Paul McCartney does the title theme - indicating that the Bond series need not be rooted solidly in the three-piece suit days of 1962. Jane Seymour gives an excellent performance in her "introductory" role (although it was her fourth film). A bit of black magic and voodoo intertwined with gadgetry and high-tech machinery will have the viewer wondering if, indeed, there was magic in the movie after all - indeed, the cards WERE always right under Solitaire's power. Magical or not, Live and Let Die provides an interesting doorway to the other five Moore pictures - J.W. Pepper returns and Tee Hee seems to be Jaws' forerunner.

Several British agents are killed in America and in the Caribbean. Despite the difference in how the murders occur they seem linked together by drugs. Bond begins to investigate and finds links between the American drug dealer Mr Big and the mysterious owner of a Caribbean island Kananga. While investigating Bond falls foul of both despite gaining the affections of Kananga's beautiful mistress Solitaire.

Roger Moore's first Bond is one of his best. The film wisely steps away from those regular bad guys the Russians and gets a new feel by actually having non-white main characters. The plot is pretty good and doesn't have the usual `take over the world' feel to it. There is plenty of silly stuff of course but the stunts are quite good and Bond has a new line in `eyebrow raised' humour.

Moore will never be the best Bond but he did make the role his own – adding an element of self-deprecating humour to the role. Yaphet Kotto is a good actor and makes a good bad guy. Jane Seymour isn't convincing as the mystic property of Kananga – she really should have been played by a black actress and it shows a lack of bravery on the side of the producers that they went with a white face as the lead Bond girl. Julius Harris is good as Tee Hee and Clifton James adds some comedy value as J.W. Pepper.

Overall this is one of Moore's best Bond movies and certainly stands out from previous films with numerous Russian baddies. Also the theme music is a really fun song from Wings.

Was Roger Moore channeling Austin Powers in 1973? There's a scene in this, his first go-round as 007, where Bond is tied up and his arm is cut to draw blood and attract some hungry sharks swimming below. Moore twitches his eyebrow and asks: "Perhaps we can try something in a simpler vein."

Those sharks don't need any frickin' laser beams on their heads to get you to smell the Austin. Moore gets a lot of blame for turning the Bond movies into weakly-plotted farces, ignoring that the series had been moving in that direction since "Goldfinger" and that the previous installment, Sean Connery's final EON bow "Diamonds Are Forever," was every bit as goofy. Also, Moore could deliver a more serious Bond when the script allowed, and two of the finest Bonds ever, "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "For Your Eyes Only," were his.

But there's no getting around this, "Live And Let Die" is a dumb movie. The gadgets are silly, the villain's scheme is ill-defined, the storyline is frenetic and unengaging, the action is plodding and overlong. Moore starts out not quite know how to play Bond here, while the movie requires him to play the fool sauntering through Harlem in a double-breasted suit like the Prince of Wales waiting for some natives to show him around.

But this film makes me smile, in part because I'm young enough to remember what it was all about when it came out. If this was Bond for the cheap seats, it at least delivered the goods, with some vivid supporting characters, a knockout visual style, amazing title music from Paul McCartney, and most importantly for Moore's future in the series, drop-dead quips. My favorite is when the nasty Tee Hee twists his pistol muzzle out of shape with a metal pincer arm, then giggles when he hands it back: "Funny how the least little thing amuses him."

Julius Harris is menacing but charming as Tee Hee, mostly mute except when he sticks Bond in a gator pond and suggests the best way to disarm the beasts is to try and pull out their teeth. Chief villain Yaphet Kotto has his moments, too, but with odd shifts of character. In the beginning, he's stone-cold Ron O'Neal in "Superfly," and at the end, he's plummy Charles Gray in "Diamonds Are Forever." Jane Seymour is Bond's love interest, and why she goes off with him is another of those things best not thought about long.

There are two great characters in this movie, though, bigger than just about anything seen in a Bond movie before who kind of work in tandem in overhauling any objections about this film being too "cartoony." Clifton James is redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper, who throws off one madman line after another while Bond is off on one of his long silly chase scenes. James mugs through every scene he's in, rolling his tongue around, playing off everyone and everything, and delivering every hackneyed Southern stereotype to such righteous perfection it's enough to make cotton sprout out of his ears. Bond purists who whine should just take their vodka martinis shaken not stirred and let the rest of us enjoy the craziness. The series is supposed to be fun; if you want serious espionage go watch "Smiley's People." (I grant you Pepper shouldn't have returned in the next Bond film; that was a mistake.)

The other great outsized character is Geoffrey Holder as perhaps the most mysterious figure in the whole series, Baron Samedi. Is he supernatural? Is he just crazy from the heat? He's certainly different, a guy who sides with the bad guys without quite being one of them. The always-eerie quality of his appearances, either dancing in a big hotel production number or quietly sitting in a cemetery playing a flute, make you question whether there ain't something to that voodoo after all.

It's silly bashing Pepper but praising Samedi, they are both equally so unreal, in a way that's in tune with the rest of the movie. The best thing to do is enjoy the different kinds of fun on offer. Frankly, not having these guys around might push this film on the bad side of Spinal Tap's "fine line between stupid and clever," the side where "A View To A Kill" and "Moonraker" are on.

But "Live And Let Die" is a winner. It's a fun movie that brings me back to younger days, when my heart was an open book. It's a nice transitional film for the series in that Moore managed a mostly smooth entrance to the role of Bond. And it has one of the best final shots in movie history. That's all I'll say there; you know it if you saw it.