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FILM REVIEW – LIVE AND LET DIE.

Roger Moore’s first and best outing as 007, with a stunning voodoo themed opening titles song by Paul McCartney & Wings, set to a display of burning skulls and snakes, instead of the usual cavorting bikini clad girls.

Moore is more intense and straight faced than in his later adventures, with fewer one line gags as he dispatches the villains, (only Tee-Hee, literally cut off his own mechanical arm and thrown from a train to his death provokes a groan inducing pun ‘Just being disarming, darling’.

The plot is simplicity itself; a Harlem gangster, Mr. Big (Yaphet Kotto) plans to flood America with free heroin in vast quantities and then make everyone pay him to help keep up their addictions. Bond, as a white Caucasian spy in Harlem, is easily identified, and completely out of his depth - as were each of the agents sent before him), and captured. Much of the film is Bond getting captured, escaping, and getting chased repeatedly before he finally uncovers Big’s Haitian drug fields and secret underground lair.

Some of the best chases and stunt work in any Bond movie occur here. There is a bus chase in which Bond takes the top deck off a double decker by ramming it into a low bridge. There is a nerve wracking stunt involving a man using a line of alligators as stepping stones to get from an island trap to shore before they can eat him. The speedboat chase, with the boats gliding across narrow strips of land, has never been bettered. The reaction of the traffic cop, Sheriff J. W. Pepper is priceless) ‘what are you boy? Some kind of doomsday machine?’

Jane Seymour as the tarot card reading Solitaire is gorgeous, but given little to do. Another memorable role is that of David (Al) Hedison, as Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA friend. Hedison was Captain Crane in the TV series of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, as well as the first actor to play The Fly.

There is countless classic Bond moments here; the slow funeral scene in Harlem that erupts into a carnival when the watching special agent is knifed and finds out that it is his funeral. Unique to a Bond movie is the treatment of Baron Samhadi, who is a voodoo Shaman, rising from a coffin full of snakes unscathed, but killed when Bond throws him back into it. The film ends with a shot of Samhadi riding the back of the train taking Bond and Solitaire home, and the Baron laughing. This is the only image of pure occultism and supernaturalism in any Bond film to date.

This was the first Bond film I ever saw, and still one of the best, though Connery was certainly a better Bond than Moore, this shows how good Moore could be in the role.