Skyfall Countdown Day 8: The Living Daylights

November 2, 2012November 5, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

This was almost Pierce Brosnan’s debut as James Bond. It was clear to all involved after A View to a Kill that it was time for Roger Moore to exit stage left, and for the James Bond series to begin anew with a younger face. Brosnan’s popular TV run as Remington Steele was ending and he had tested successfully for the part, beating out dozens of other contenders including Sam Neill and Lambert Wilson (the Merovingian from the Matrix sequels). Pre-production was underway, the remainder of the cast was set, and then, NBC decided to drop a spanner in the works. The network retained a 60-day option to commit Brosnan to another season of Remington Steele, and, seeing dollar signs in the publicity that his impending debut as James Bond was generating, decided to exercise it at the very last minute. Albert R. Broccoli did not want the Bond movies to be reduced to advertising for a TV show that had already been cancelled once, and so a change had to be made – opening the door for Timothy Dalton.

The trailers for The Living Daylights used the tagline “Dalton – Dangerous,” trying to play up a return to the hard-boiled intensity of the Ian Fleming novels, a characteristic that had been abandoned in the recent Bond films and that Dalton himself was keen to bring to his interpretation of the role, describing 007 as “a man living very much on the edge of his life.” The plot would borrow a kernel from Fleming’s eponymous short story and expand it into a topical Cold War thriller, borrowing heavily from the Iran-Contra affair which dominated the news in the mid-eighties. Bond is assigned to protect the defecting Soviet General Georgi Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé), who warns of a plot by his colleague General Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies) to murder Western intelligence agents in the hopes of igniting a war. As Koskov escapes, he is targeted by a beautiful female assassin, whom Bond makes a split-second decision to only wound instead of kill. The assassin winds up being Koskov’s girlfriend, a Czech cellist named Kara Milovy (Maryam d’Abo) whom Bond befriends after Koskov is apparently re-abducted from British custody by the KGB. The trail leads to exiled American arms dealer Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker), who is working with Koskov in a scheme to use Soviet military funds to buy and sell opium from Afghan rebels instead. Koskov’s “defection” has been a ruse to try and convince the British – and by extension, Bond – to eliminate the innocent General Pushkin who knows too much about their plans. Allying with mujahidin rebels led by Kamran Shah (Art Malik), Bond leads a battle at a Soviet air base in Afghanistan to destroy the opium and spoil the deal.

While the characters and the grand plans of the villains are scaled back somewhat, the spectacle is not. The movie feels enormous. Its canvas is much broader and has a much more international flavour than the previous entry, with visually sumptuous locations ranging from the slopes of Gibraltar to the opera houses of Vienna, from the quaint English countryside to vast Moroccan deserts standing in for Afghanistan. And the progression from one location to the other is more organic, as though the story is leading us there naturally, rather than forcing in a bunch of exotic places just for the sake of variety. The energy of the chase scenes has been amped up considerably by having a younger, more physically capable actor in the lead, as Dalton throws himself into as much of the fray as nerve (and insurance) will allow – you could hardly see Roger Moore, even in his prime, jumping on the roof of a Land Rover as it speeds along the winding roads of Gibraltar as Dalton does in the exciting teaser. And yet, there is something of a battle going on within the very tone of the movie as the filmmakers can’t seem to let go completely of their less appealing instinct for the gag, as much as they want to embrace Dalton’s more serious side. Dalton struggles somewhat to project a dark soul even as his Bond finds himself in preposterous situations like steering a cello case down a ski slope. In fairness, this stemmed largely from the uncertainty in the pre-production phase with the script being geared more for Pierce Brosnan’s perceived persona, and consequently, one-liners that might flow smoothly from Brosnan’s Irish tongue clatter clunkily on the floor as Dalton utters them. When Dalton is required to be intense, he’s in his wheelhouse – brooding over the corpse of a murdered colleague or putting a gun to Pushkin’s head. Interestingly enough, Dalton became a lot more comfortable in comedy as he grew older and settled into himself – he’s hysterically funny in Hot Fuzz. But here it’s clear which arena he prefers, and he soldiers on gamely despite the filmmakers’ insistence in looking for laughs in all the wrong places.

Another choice was made in this new era of Bond to make him a one-woman man, despite the implied one-off dalliance suggested at the very end of the teaser. Maryam d’Abo as Kara is a definite step back from the glamour girls that populated the Bond movies up to this point; while nothing to sneer at looks-wise, she’s not the larger-than-life figure that one comes to expect from 007’s romantic interests. Operating very much in her favour, however, is that no attempt is made to prop her up as “Bond’s equal” – she is an innocent, working-class woman caught up in something well beyond her everyday experience. But that makes her a far more appropriate partner for this more down-to-earth James Bond. The bad guys, too, are cut from a more sedate cloth, with no cackling or cat-stroking – Joe Don Baker, who would return to Bond in a different role later on, is an adequate stand-in for Oliver North, and Jeroen Krabbé is almost too likable as Koskov – it’s a bit difficult to accept him as a threat, particularly when he’s hugging everybody within sight and the filmmakers elect to turn him into Wile E. Coyote at the finale, in another one of their struggles with consistency of tone. A couple of “where do I know that guy from” faces fill out the cast, with Andreas Wisniewski, a.k.a. the first guy Bruce Willis kills in Die Hard, taking the role of explosive-milk-bottle-wielding henchman Necros, and John Terry, best known to fans of Lost as Jack’s father Dr. Christian Shephard, as the (brief) new face of the long-absent Felix Leiter. And the boisterous John Rhys-Davies is always a delight even if he’s not in the movie very much.

This would be the late John Barry’s final turn at the podium for James Bond, and he ended his tenure as much as he began it, by pushing the music in new directions with the inclusion of synthesized rhythm tracks to accompany the action, a tactic embraced and expanded upon by his spiritual successor David Arnold. With these new elements, the music has an energy and a pulse to it that was absent from the lilting string-heavy scores of his two previous Bond works, intensifying the movie’s pace. He also co-composed three different pop songs whose themes resonate throughout the score – the title track (with Norwegian rock group a-ha) and “Where Has Every Body Gone” (the theme for Necros) and the love theme “If There Was a Man” with the Pretenders. And Barry himself makes a cameo appearance conducting the orchestra at the film’s close – a suitable sendoff for the man who more than anyone defined the sound of James Bond, and for that matter, spy movie music in general.

The Living Daylights is not perfect; as I mentioned it does suffer from an inconsistency of tone and the final act is bloated and longish, with one climax coming on top of another as all the disparate plot threads are tied up (not helping is a similar musical phrase used to score each big moment). But it does what it needed to do in 1987 – free 007 from the burden of Roger Moore, update him to the modern era and set him off on a journey toward adventures bold once more. With Timothy Dalton established in the role, the next movie would be able to tailor itself specifically to his strengths as a performer and to the qualities that he brought to the cinematic James Bond. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be somewhere audiences wanted to go.

Tomorrow: Licence to Kill and the long dark night.

Skyfall Countdown Day 9: A View to a Kill

November 1, 2012November 2, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

Alas, in our grand journey across the history of the cinematic James Bond we have come to what for many, including myself, is its lowest ebb. Beating up on A View to a Kill is rather like kicking a puppy, and plenty of bandwidth has been devoted already to tearing apart its myriad flaws. It’s clear, based on the general plot, that the filmmakers were trying to remake Goldfinger with another megalomaniacal, commodity-obsessed villain – in this case, Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) and, with a nod to the burgeoning era of personal computing, microchips. For 1985, a computer-wielding bad guy would have been groundbreaking – think of all the many thrillers that have been released in the last twenty years involving hackers wiping out the hero’s identity, credit rating or what have you. But apart from one brief scene where Zorin uses a digital camera to deduce Bond’s true identity, A View to a Kill keeps computers very much in the background. In a way, the movie’s major mistake is that it is trying to dangle a toe two minutes into the future while keeping its other foot anchored firmly in 1964, failing to recognize that audiences, and James Bond, have grown up. They want more than outlandish gags and double entendres, but unfortunately, that’s all A View to a Kill is serving.

With suspicions aroused that industrial magnate Zorin is leaking secrets of electromagnetic pulse-resistant microchip technology to the Soviet Union, Bond is put on the case, traveling to a horse auction at Zorin’s French estate where he bandies wits with the bad guy and his henchwoman May Day (Grace Jones) and finds that Zorin is using his microchips to cheat at horse racing. After narrowly escaping a drowning in a Rolls Royce, Bond journeys to San Francisco, where with the assistance of geologist Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts), who harbors a grudge against Zorin for having destroyed her father’s oil business, he discovers that Zorin is planning to manipulate California’s fault system to create a double earthquake that will flood and destroy Silicon Valley, leaving him as the sole purveyor of all microchips on the planet. As with most basic Bond plots, when they are outlined briefly like this they seem like a solid basis for a thriller. However, given Roger Moore’s advancing age (he was 57 at the time of filming) and his inability to perform action scenes without excessive use of stunt doubles, the decision was made to treat said scenes as comedy and play everything tongue-in-cheek – a tragic misjudgement that mars the entire experience. Gone is any sense of danger, of suspense, of doubt that Bond will survive the day. In its place are broad double-takes, wild, emphatic gestures and hammy acting by bit performers; in essence, the worst of 1920’s-era silent movie slapstick. Director John Glen cheekily describes it as “James Bond meets the Keystone Kops,” but the problem is, the Keystone Kops aren’t and never were funny. Humour has its place in Bond but should be kept dry, like his martini. A View to a Kill is 007 as a broad parody of himself, the classic hero of yore reduced to stumbling buffoon. Indeed, given the tone, one could simply swap out Moore for Leslie Nielsen. (Moore’s own comments in hindsight suggest that he might have preferred that option.)

What is doubly frustrating is that many of these scenes (like the extended sequence with the San Francisco police cars falling off the lift bridge) could be lifted neatly out of the movie without making a dent in the integrity of the narrative. I’m throwing down the gauntlet here to an ambitious Bond fan with ready access to editing software to do a “Phantom Edit” of A View to a Kill that rids it of some of the less inspired choices on display, like the screaming and gesticulating French cab driver running after Bond, or the applauding drunken homeless man watching Bond carry Stacey down a ladder from the burning San Francisco city hall, images I only wish I could expunge from my memory as easily.

For his part, Moore is not helped by the other actors, none of whom seems to understand what to do with the weak script. Walken, while delivering his lines with the same peculiar cadence that has generated fodder for impressionists the world over, is subdued and lacking in his usual charisma; it’s almost as if he is worried about coming off as camp so he dials it back, regrettably to a less interesting level. Despite an extensive history revealed as the film goes on (Zorin turns out to be the result of a Nazi doctor’s experimentation with steroids on pregnant women) we never get a sense of who he is or what drives him, beyond the simple motivation of greed. (Ian Fleming’s villains always received detailed personal histories as he attempted to examine the nature of evil.) Tanya Roberts’ dressed-down part as Stacey, bikinis exchanged for long, demure dresses, consists largely of shrieking “James!” as she lands in one peril after another. And Grace Jones as May Day seems to be on another planet entirely. Bond himself is uncharacteristically neutered in this movie – he wears dowdy brown suits, flirts like a creepy old uncle and, in one of the most stereotypically emasculating moments of all time, bakes a quiche. It’s as if the filmmakers wanted to both acknowledge and ignore the age of their leading man, probing way too far into his tender side and keeping him from coming off like a lecherous senior citizen without completely abandoning the ruthless ladykiller of the past. But it’s a shaken and stirred concoction that simply does not gel. He who tries too hard to please everybody will end up pleasing no one.

Is there anything worthwhile to be found? Well, Duran Duran’s theme song, which remains the only Bond song to hit #1 on the Billboard charts, is terrific. The story goes that guitarist John Taylor, somewhat in his cups, approached Albert R. Broccoli at a party and asked when Broccoli was going to hire someone decent to do the title track. The sound is Duran Duran at their peak, yet it’s indisputably Bond, and it remains the movie’s most enduring feature, still achieving regular radio airplay almost 30 years later.

The fundamental error common to the worst Bond movies is the failure to develop the character of James Bond – failure to give him an arc to follow or a journey of personal evolution to undertake. Failure to give the actor something to sink his teeth into. Throughout his lengthy but controversial tenure, Roger Moore was rarely given any substantial material to play, which is a shame, because when he was, he proved he was up for it (see: The Spy Who Loved Me.) Bond instead became merely a vehicle for propelling the plot, a cog in the grand wheel of an elaborately choreographed action sequence, and the filmmakers abandoned the qualities that make him unique. (Until Christopher Nolan took over, the Batman movies suffered the same problem.) The reason James Bond is popular is not because audiences bust a gut watching him drive half a car across Paris or dangle from a loose fire engine ladder as he careens through the San Francisco streets. He is not popular because he can snowboard away from hapless Soviet soldiers while a bad cover of “California Girls” plays in the background. He is not popular because of the women he tangles with or the villains whose schemes he foils. Set all the elaborate accoutrements aside; he remains popular because he is James Bond. And any filmmaker approaching a new 007 adventure who forgets that, as happened here, does so at his peril.

Tomorrow: A new Bond, an old attitude.

Skyfall Countdown Day 11: Octopussy

October 30, 2012October 31, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

On an episode of The Simpsons in a flashforward to Lisa’s wedding, Homer is being introduced to her London-born fiancé and comments, “You know what I like about you English people? Octopussy. Man, I must have seen that movie… twice!” Which is something of an apt observation on Roger Moore’s penultimate romp as James Bond. It isn’t a movie that leaves a lasting impression, or indeed, much of an impression at all, at least, not a positive one. The villains are dull, the relationship with the leading lady doesn’t go anywhere, and the visibly aging Moore is less comfortable with action scenes, resulting in an over-emphasis on slapstick. And since the movie is set in a former British colony, where would we be without some condescending observations on the local culture, including the highly questionable choice of mocking extreme poverty? Octopussy is indeed a many-tentacled beast of a movie that doesn’t know if it’s trying to be a Cold War thriller or a Peter Sellers “birdie nom nom” comedy.

The murder of 009, who turns up dead in West Berlin clutching a fake Fabergé egg, puts Bond on the case of a jewelry smuggling ring that seems to be centered on India and the traveling circus of the beautiful Octopussy (Maud Adams, returning in a new role after taking a golden bullet to the breast in The Man with the Golden Gun), whose father Bond once permitted to honourably commit suicide rather than face the disgrace of a court-martial. Octopussy herself is being duped by her business partner Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan), an exiled Afghan prince who is collaborating with the mad Soviet General Orlov (Steven Berkoff) to smuggle a nuclear bomb onto a U.S. Air Force base and detonate it in the hopes of persuading the West to disarm its nuclear deterrent and give the Soviets a free path to conquer Europe. Although the outline is taut, the execution is languid, and the biggest reason is the character of Octopussy. The early drafts of the screenplay had her in a more active role as the first fully-fledged supervillainess of the Bond series, but she was softened in rewrites to wind up – after some initial misdirection – as merely a rather unobservant dupe in a scheme masterminded by two men, and thus, considerably less interesting, both for Bond and for the audience. Her interactions with Bond bear no spark, and no tension apart from one contrived argument where she explodes in an unprovoked hissy fit. There’s no compelling reason these two people should be together, despite both insisting that they are “two of a kind.” They really aren’t. They’re two characters who fall for each other because the screenplay forces them to, otherwise Bond doesn’t get a girl this time. The true antagonists of the piece, Kamal and Orlov, are similarly sketchy – Kamal, while effectively performed by Jourdan with his refined accent, seems to have no apparent motivation for taking part in the grand plan of mass murder, and while requisite 80’s movie villain Berkoff does his best to devour the scenery, he is ultimately too stupid – gunned down by armed guards at a border crossing while chasing a train on foot – to be much of a threat. As for the other main performers, Maud Adams is attractive but not compelling, and remains remote and buttoned-up when she should be sensual and provocative. Kristina Wayborn as Octopussy’s second-in-command Magda provides quite a bit more heat, even if she is made up in the over-glammed big-hair style that was early 80’s beauty, but her “seductive” line delivery sounds like she’s reading a grocery list.

India is an exotic location as befits a Bond movie, but its presentation rings false. Someone once observed that in Octopussy,India looks like what it would be if the British had never lost it. It’s full of white people; old British brigadiers frequent the casino where Bond plays backgammon with Kamal Khan, and even Octopussy’s army of femmes fatale residing in her floating palace are all light-skinned. (The two main women in the cast are both Swedish.) The three-wheeled car chase is like a trip through someone’s stereotypical idea of an Indian carnival, with action scenes built around a sword swallower, a fakir lying on a bed of nails and another walking across hot coals. As an ally of Bond’s battles a henchman with a tennis racket, we see a crowd of Indians whipping their heads back and forth in unison as if they were the audience at Wimbledon (with accompanying sound effects). And the poverty of India is used as a punch line for two heartless gags involving Bond throwing money out into the masses (a beggar even does an over the top double take when two stacks of rupees land in his bowl). It’s left to Vijay Amritraj, as Bond’s tennis-wielding local contact, to try and bring some dignity to how Indians are portrayed, but still Bond can’t help making insensitive comments like “This’ll keep you in curry for the next few weeks,” when handing him a wad of cash. Before Bond leaves India behind for the less colourful climes of Germany in the second act, director John Glen’s love of slapstick rears its ugly head in an embarrassing “Most Dangerous Game”-inspired jungle hunt. To escape Kamal Khan’s palace, Bond impersonates a corpse, frightening off its handlers with a ghoulish Dracula laugh, and runs into the wilderness, where he, in short order, tells a snake to “hiss off,” commands a tiger to “sit!” and in what in many ways is a low point of the entire Bond series, swings across vines while emitting the Tarzan howl, only to be finally rescued by a passing tourist boat (again, full of white people!) India is a land much more complex than how it is depicted here, and it deserves better than to be reduced to a collage of cartoons for the amusement of the old colonials. Of course, proving that the movie’s patronizing portrayal of foreigners isn’t confined to India, Bond is given a ride later on by an overweight German couple who attempt to ply him with sausages and beer.

Moore seems unengaged and weary of the role. His 007 contract had expired, but he was persuaded to sign on again as with the release of Never Say Never Again looming with Sean Connery back as the lead, Broccoli did not want to chance having to introduce another new actor as James Bond. Too much energy and attention, likewise, is diverted from where it should be – writing and performance – instead to the staging of increasingly outlandish gags, reducing Moore himself to little more than a prop to facilitate them and taking the Bond series down to the worst of 1920’s silent movie comedy. All pretence of seriousness and suspense is abandoned at the climax, when Bond is attempting to defuse the nuclear device while in full clown makeup, and the movie goes on for another twenty minutes as Bond chases down Kamal Khan in a lifeless denouement. It has not escaped my notice in writing these reviews that Bond seems to operate in a series of approximately ten-year blocks, where at the end of each comes a movie that is creatively exhausted and a franchise drifting with desperate need of a shakeup. The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974 was the limp end of the first ten years, and with Octopussy coming out in 1983 it would not be long before time was up on Bond again and things needed to be refreshed. But it would first fall to Kevin McClory, and later Broccoli’s own Eon Productions, to show us how deeply Bond could drive himself into the ditch.

Tomorrow: Connery comes back to say never again, again.

Skyfall Countdown Day 12: For Your Eyes Only

October 29, 2012January 3, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

Halfway there! Hope you’ve been enjoying the daily retrospective journey through James Bond’s past. While Moonraker had been a tremendous box office success, it tested the patience of Bond fans by pushing their hero, some would argue, much too far into the realm of fantasy. Recognizing that this was a dangerous path, the filmmakers elected to do what they usually do when they realize they’ve strayed: return to the pen of Ian Fleming. For Your Eyes Only was a collection of five short James Bond stories, and the decision was made to combine two of them – the eponymous tale and Risico, along with a sequence that was omitted from the screen adaptation of Live and Let Die, to craft a screenplay that would exchange lasers and explosions for the shifting alliances and unexpected betrayals that marked the best Cold War spy thrillers.

After an unrelated teaser that bids a metaphorical farewell to Bond’s past by visiting the grave of his wife Tracy and dumping a mysterious, cat-stroking “wheelchair villain” into a smokestack (Kevin McClory was still claiming ownership of Blofeld), the plot proper begins with the destruction of a British spy ship off the coast of Albania. On board – the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator, or A.T.A.C., which looks like an adding machine but can issue orders to Britain’s entire submarine fleet. The Soviets want it, and the British want it back. After the British point man in charge of the salvage operation is murdered by a hitman, survived only by his daughter Melina (Carole Bouquet), Bond is put on the case to figure out who is responsible. The lead dries up when Melina unexpectedly puts a crossbow bolt in the hitman’s back; however, following up on the man who paid for the hit, Bond journeys to the ski slopes of Cortina, where the helpful Aristotle Kristatos (Julian Glover) points him in the direction of a notorious smuggler named Milos Columbo (Topol). But all is not how it appears, and Bond discovers that Kristatos himself has been the one supervising the Soviet attempt to steal the A.T.A.C., with Columbo turning out to be a useful ally as Bond and Melina race against time to secure the A.T.A.C. before Kristatos can turn it over to his Soviet masters in a finale set on a mountaintop monastery in Greece.

The ingredients are there, and the actors are game, but there are a couple of major flaws. First up is a huge hole in the plot. Imagine you are told there is a treasure out there somewhere. In fact, you are told exactly where it is. You are told that the treasure is incredibly important, that there are other people after it and it’s critical that you get it first. Step one then would not be wasting days figuring out who those other interested parties are – would it not be, I don’t know, recovering the damn treasure? Yet this is exactly the course of For Your Eyes Only’s first two acts. As important to Britain’s national security as we’re advised the A.T.A.C. is, Bond sure takes his sweet time in getting around to finding it. It’s never explained why it seems to be a greater priority for Her Majesty’s Government to determine who else is pursuing the A.T.A.C., when they’ve established quite clearly that the Russians would be the likely suspects. Of course, if Bond went after the McGuffin immediately, the movie would only be a half hour long. So we have an extended sequence set in the Olympic park at Cortina for a diverting dose of winter action. After a contrived beat designed to maneuver Bond to the top of a ski jump, the chase begins, scored by Bill Conti in an over-the-top disco motif more suited to ABC’s Wide World of Sports highlight reel. Director John Glen, who cut his teeth shooting second unit for and editing the ski scenes in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, has a really bad habit, evident throughout the five Bond films he directed, of cutting away frequently to show crowd reaction shots – people staring agape, spilling drinks on themselves, cows mooing, etcetera, as Bond speeds by. This detracts from the experience of the innovative stunts by slipping a barrier between us and them, like an additional proscenium – as if the movie is reacting to its own spectacle instead of giving the audience the freedom to do it. It robs the scenes of their intensity and any potential drama or suspense by reminding us, blatantly, that these action beats are all meticulously staged. Instinctively we know that, but we like to pretend there’s some spontaneity. Glen does much better near the end of the movie, his comedic instincts played out, in staging Bond’s ascent up the side of the mountain where Kristatos’ hideout is located. It’s a scene without gadgets, where Bond’s ingenuity and skill is required to get him out of a jam, and scored suspensefully (without disco) by Conti. Of course, Glen has to have a last laugh, and jams in an unfunny cameo by a Margaret Thatcher impersonator just before the credits roll.

Glen is another in a long line of Bond directors better at action than managing performances, and while there are some strong actors in this movie, they don’t have a lot to work with; the supporting roles are underwritten as usual. This time, at least, the secondary characters have more of their own arc, in the shape of the rivalry between Kristatos and Columbo, and Melina’s quest to avenge her parents. Faring best is Topol, who channels Kerim Bey in his role of the pistachio-chewing smuggler, a likable rogue we’re happy to see on Bond’s side. As the central villain, Julian Glover as Kristatos presents himself as debonair enough at first, until his duplicity is revealed and he then displays the requisite amount of sadism – tying Bond and Melina together and dragging them behind his boat in the hopes that they’ll be eaten by sharks (the scene lifted from Live and Let Die) and, just so we’re sure about his evil, smacking around his young blond protégé, Bibi (Lynn-Holly Johnson). More understated and sinister a presence is his lackey Locque (Michael Gothard), the silent, square-rimmed glasses-wearing thug whom 007 dispatches by kicking his car over a cliff, in a classic Bond scene that Roger Moore didn’t want to film (he felt that his version of Bond would never be that cold-blooded). Leading lady Carole Bouquet, best known as the face behind Chanel No. 5, is a greater beauty than she is an actress, and scenes in which she’s required to display the seething rage of a woman consumed by vengeance come off more like she’s upset that room service was late. Radiant, however, in an all-too-brief cameo as Columbo’s doomed mistress is Cassandra Harris, the then-Mrs. Pierce Brosnan. (Producer Albert R. Broccoli is alleged to have made a mental note of Brosnan’s 007 potential while dining with them one night on location.)

For Your Eyes Only is a movie with the right intentions, but its aspirations are undercut by its reliance on the sillier aspects of the previous Bond films. What was most frustrating about Moonraker was not so much its fantasy setting but by its frequent descent into camp, and it seems like the wrong lesson was learned here. Verisimilitude is critical to what For Your Eyes Only wants to be, but instead, it goes the other way, never missing an opportunity for a bad joke and undermining the ability of the audience to take it as seriously as say, From Russia with Love. There’s fun and then there’s trying too hard to be funny, and this movie is most definitely the latter. And it’s a shame.

Tomorrow: Eight arms to hold you.

Skyfall Countdown Day 13: Moonraker

October 28, 2012October 29, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

I’m a NASA junkie and have been since before I can remember. My family took me to Cape Canaveral when I was eight, and my most treasured acquisition from that trip was a plastic model of the space shuttle Discovery that my father and I built and painted together. When Moonraker’s iconic gunbarrel opened to the sight of a space shuttle being carried on the back of a 747, my younger self was utterly enthralled. The funny thing about James Bond for me is that I look at them with two sets of eyes – the kid who can be wowed by anything, for whom watching Bond was a way of bonding with his dad, and the older, more cynical bastard who always notices the wires dangling from the spaceship. Everything critics say about Moonraker is true: it’s silly, it’s out-there space fantasy, it’s the worst of every excess the Bond series ever suffered, and it’s fundamentally a transparent attempt to leech off the success of Star Wars. But damn if I don’t still dig it. I can acknowledge its flaws, I can shrug at the ludicrous spectacle of lasers flying left and right and the outright goofiness of the entire endeavour. But I can still load it up on a rainy Sunday afternoon and groove on it. Perhaps it’s just that the brand of James Bond is so enduring that even the lesser movies contain something of value – perhaps its “wow factor” continues to appeal to our inner kid.

Ian Fleming’s original novel, which takes place entirely in England, revolved around an English industrialist named Hugo Drax who has built a giant rocket to be deployed as part of Britain’s defense system. Bond discovers that Drax is actually a German consumed with loathing for all things English who intends to aim his rocket at the heart of London instead. For the movie however, trying to top the spectacle that was The Spy Who Loved Me, and seeking to cash in on the late 70’s cinematic space craze, anchoring the plot to earth was not even in question. When the aforementioned space shuttle is hijacked in midair, and after a breathtaking opening freefall fight that required 88 separate jumps to capture on film, 007 travels to California to investigate the shuttle’s disappearance and match wits with Drax (Michael Lonsdale), rewritten here as the billionaire private contractor behind America’s space program. Pursuing the trail from a glass factory in Venice to the carnival-filled streets of Rio de Janeiro and finally deep into the Amazon jungle, Bond and CIA agent Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles) discover Drax’s plan to wipe out the human race using a nerve gas developed from rare orchids, prior to repopulating the planet with his version of a master race of perfect physical specimens. Rocketing into orbit, and with assistance at a timely juncture by U.S. space marines, the two agents lead a battle aboard Drax’s space station to destroy the gas and save humanity. The kid thinks “This is the most awesome thing ever!” The old guy grumbles “Good grief. Where’s my copy of From Russia with Love?”

But there are a couple of things both sides of me can agree on. Ken Adam, in his 007 swan song, does a masterful job. He takes clunky real-life NASA equipment like the centrifuge trainer and gives it a polished, futuristic look. Drax’s Amazon base, which combines modern, almost German expressionist vertical lines with the crumbling limestone of an Incan temple, would be a suitable enough locale for a Bond film finale. But even it pales next to the space station, for which Adam’s challenge was to differentiate it substantially from the Death Star and the rotating wheel of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a modular creation (described as a mobile in space) and its interiors are a perfect balance of practical function based on extrapolation from then-current NASA technology, and a sleek designer’s touch. With all respect to Adam’s successors, no Bond villain’s lair would ever look like this again, or make such a lasting impression on first view. It had to, really, given the images throughout the movie that precede its grand reveal. The visual effects throughout the climactic battle, supervised by Bond veteran Derek Meddings, still hold up extremely well today, and credit must be given to Meddings’ team for a reasonably accurate depiction of the space shuttle’s takeoff and flight in 1979 given that the shuttle did not launch in real life until 1981. The action beats are solid, with the opening fall from the sky, a gondola chase through the canals of Venice and a fistfight aboard the cable cars of Rio standing out as highlights (spoiled somewhat by being punctuated with misguided attempts at comedy, but more on that later). One of the most haunting deaths ever depicted in a Bond movie occurs when Drax’s assistant Corinne Dufour (Corinne Clery) is hunted down through a forest by killer dogs. John Barry returns and abandons the electric guitar and swinging percussion that characterized his early Bond work in favour of a more mature sound that uses sweeping strings and a choir to depict the vast emptiness of outer space.

Now, to the elements that the older man can’t forgive so easily. As I indicated yesterday, I love the spectacle of Bond, but I want that spectacle to have some meat behind it, otherwise it becomes, as Shakespeare would put it, a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Bond himself really has no character arc here, no personal journey to fulfill other than serving as the wrench which jams the engine of Drax’s master plan, nor is his relationship with the underwritten Holly Goodhead anything more than a happenstance of proximity – that is, she’s the only “good girl” in range. As sinister as Michael Lonsdale is, with his refined French accent draping itself lovingly around lines like “You defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you,” he, like Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me, is too straightforwardly evil to be a truly compelling foe for our hero – there are no layers to his villainy, no motivation other than the usual line about civilization having become corrupt and needing a reset. In fact, the only character who has any kind of growth in the movie is Jaws (Richard Kiel), who finds love and morphs from remorseless killer-for-hire into a just-in-time good guy (apparently a request made by director Lewis Gilbert’s grandson). Instead of character beats, we get comedy, and a regrettable trend toward silent movie era slapstick that will only grow over the next few films. Jaws himself is portrayed as too much of a bumbling oaf to ever represent any kind of threat to Bond, and as a result the first two thirds of the movie are devoid of any serious suspense. Even in Live and Let Die, Bond had to occasionally use only his wits to extricate himself from danger, but in this movie he always has the right gadget at the right time. (A couple of machine-gun toting thugs oblige Bond by simply watching agape as his gondola transforms itself – verrrrrry slowly, mind you – into a car for an escape across the Venice piazzas.) We need to have at least some sense that Bond might be in over his head to invest ourselves in his surviving, and unfortunately it doesn’t happen in this movie.

But there come moments, however, when you simply say the heck with all of that, and let the kid take over and get lost in the fantasy. Moonraker is such a strongly designed film that the visual elements forgive the flaws in performance and narrative choices, and is worth a look by the older, more discriminating you for that reason if nothing more. The kid will be wowed by the laser beams and the explosions and the half-naked gorgeous women, and whether we want to admit or not, sometimes, especially with James Bond, that’s enough.

Tomorrow: For Your Eyes Only comes down to earth but brings the wrong luggage with it.

Skyfall Countdown Day 14: The Spy Who Loved Me

October 27, 2012October 29, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

spy — “What do you mean you think Pete Best was a better drummer?”

The most common complaint about the James Bond film series among Ian Fleming purists is that they stray too far from the original books. The screenwriters would keep the title, a few of the characters and maybe one or two scenes, but generally be permitted to make things up from scratch. The Spy Who Loved Me, released on July 7, 1977 (or 7/7/77) is a case where not only does the movie have absolutely nothing in common with the Fleming book, but it’s because Ian Fleming himself wanted it that way. The novel, a low-key tale told from the first-person perspective of a woman named Vivienne Michel (and containing Fleming’s misogynist and dubious observation that “all women love semi-rape”) with Bond appearing only late in the story, was a source of embarrassment for the author, and he stipulated when selling the rights that no material from it could be used, save the title, should a film adaptation be undertaken. This must have been liberating to Albert R. Broccoli, now the sole producer in charge of James Bond following Harry Saltzman’s departure, and having to chart a course back to respectability after the disappointment that was The Man with the Golden Gun.

The core element Broccoli latched onto, wisely, was the idea of Bond as spectacle. The previous few films had been very gritty and muted, in keeping with the early 70’s trend in cinema, but Broccoli knew that 007 fit more comfortably alongside the widescreen epics of the previous era. He rehired Lewis Gilbert, the director of You Only Live Twice, and commissioned a story – after an abortive attempt to bring back Blofeld and SPECTRE that was thwarted when Kevin McClory’s lawyers reared their heads – that would see Bond pitted not against a villain merely interested in selling drugs or cornering the renewable energy market, but against an utter madman with designs on destroying the entire world. As the story begins, one British and one Soviet nuclear submarine have gone missing, stolen out of the water it seems by someone who is able to track their movements. James Bond and Soviet agent XXX, Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) are assigned by their respective governments to Cairo to trace the origin of the tracking system, and team up to pursue the architect of the entire affair: billionaire, webbed-fingered Karl Stromberg (Curt Jurgens), who is obsessed with the oceans and intends to accelerate what he feels is the inevitable decline of civilization by using his captured subs to start a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Adding a wrinkle to their reluctant collaboration, Bond has unknowingly killed Amasova’s boyfriend during a previous mission, and she has sworn that once their mission is complete, she will take her revenge.

Clearly this was not a tale that could be told in the buttoned-down, economic manner of the last two movies. Spectacle requires a spectacular talent in the designer’s chair, and for Broccoli, there was only one name who could measure up: Ken Adam, fresh off winning an Oscar for Stanley Kubrick’s period costume drama Barry Lyndon. Adam’s sets open the movie up beyond the reach of the most imaginative audience member. The staple of the villain’s lair this time was the interior of Stromberg’s enormous supertanker, large enough to contain three nuclear submarines and so large in fact that not only did the world’s biggest soundstage have to be built to contain it, but the film’s director of photography Claude Renoir could not see from one end of it to the other. (In what has become the worst kept secret in the James Bond canon, Adam invited Kubrick himself to the set to advise on how to light it properly.) Each set, from the warmth of M’s office to the sterile environs of General Gogol’s retreat, from the curves and spheres of Stromberg’s underwater home to the sandy brickwork of Q’s Egyptian laboratory, brings with it a lush and meticulous character that occupies the screen with as much presence – and in some cases, far more – as the actors wandering through the space.

Until recently, Bond movies were never renowned for their great acting, and while The Spy Who Loved Me is a visual banquet stretching from ski slopes to desert dunes and finally beneath the waves, the supporting performances are just a few notches above bread and water – doubly ironic given that this is the movie where Roger Moore finally cast off the shadow of Sean Connery and came completely into his own in his interpretation of James Bond. Gone for good is the macho cruelty and slapping women around. In its stead is a polished gentleman who kills when he has to, even if it is with great reluctance and only as a last resort. Moore was never better as Bond than he is here, both in physical presence and manner, blending his ability to play quips with a forceful dramatic presence, particularly in the scene when Anya discovers that Bond is responsible for her lover’s death. In that brief moment, Moore unveils the darkness lurking beneath the playboy surface, reminding those audience members who might aspire to be James Bond that his life, despite its exterior appeal, is destructive to the soul.

If only the actress opposite him in the scene could provide a solid counterpoint; alas, Barbara Bach, wife of Ringo Starr, is not up to the challenge. She’s fine as eye candy but doesn’t really have the chops to be a leading lady, speaking her dialogue with unchanging facial expressions in an accent which defies location (but certainly isn’t Russian). Caroline Munro, as Stromberg’s bikini-wearing, helicopter-flying accomplice Naomi, radiates more character and sex appeal in one seductive wink at Bond than Bach manages in an hour and a half of screen time. Jurgens is effectively creepy as Stromberg but is as straightforward and one dimensional as the anonymous henchmen he sends after the heroes, and is not as interesting a social foe for Bond. The most memorable villain is of course Richard Kiel as Jaws, the unstoppable behemoth with the metal teeth. Without speaking a word, Kiel injects his lumbering brute with personality and a sense of humor, making him oddly likable even though he kills several innocent people (and eats a shark).

Despite not being so surefooted with his actors (Moore excepted), director Lewis Gilbert stages action extremely well and keeps the pace tight even in sections where it would be natural to let it sag a little. The geography of the massive final battle between Stromberg’s men and the captured British and Russian naval crews aboard the supertanker is capably handled with no confusion ever about who is doing what to whom (Michael Bay, take notes!) Interestingly enough, the movie’s signature moment occurs within the first ten minutes. The filmmakers had seen a print ad with a man skiing off a mountain precipice and contacted the stuntman in question, Rick Sylvester, who confessed that the photo had been faked but that he could execute it for real. A small filming unit spent weeks hunkered down in the Arctic waiting for the right conditions. Finally, the weather broke and Sylvester had one chance to nail it – and when audiences watched James Bond, pursued by Soviet gunmen, ski over a sheer cliff ostensibly to his doom, only to be saved by a parachute emblazoned with the Union Jack, theatres exploded in cheers. It was the surest indication that James Bond was back in the biggest way possible. Marvin Hamlisch, who had achieved the rare feat of winning three Oscars in a single year, supplied his services for the music and composed for Carly Simon the movie’s famous title song to reinforce this point: “Nobody Does it Better.” In that moment, at that time, nobody did.

Tomorrow: Moonraker shoots for the stars and gets lost along the way.

Skyfall Countdown Day 15: The Man with the Golden Gun

October 26, 2012October 29, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

Art, like life, is in making choices. The Man with the Golden Gun is a movie full of bad ones. Rushed into production following the release of Live and Let Die, it is a pedestrian effort that reeks of exhaustion and a lack of inspiration on the part of the major creative team, despite some game efforts from those working beneath them. The movie should work – it has exotic locations, impressive stunts (including one of the most amazing car jumps ever seen on film up to that point) beautiful women and a complex and fascinating villain performed by a legendary actor. That it doesn’t is just proof that even with the best intentions and the best people, things can still go spectacularly wrong.

At the height of the 1973 energy crisis, and with a solar power expert who holds the key to resolving it missing, a mysterious golden bullet etched with “007” sent to London puts James Bond on the trail of famed assassin Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee), the titular man with the golden gun who charges $1 million per hit. Bond travels to the Far East, assisted and hindered the bumbling Mary Goodnight (Peter Sellers’ ex-wife Britt Ekland), and finds that the bullet was sent by the villain’s mistress Andrea Anders (Maud Adams), longing to be free of her sadistic partner and believing that Bond is destined to be her liberator. When the missing solar expert, Gibson, winds up on the receiving end of one of Scaramanga’s golden bullets, Bond discovers the assassin’s collusion with a leading Chinese industrialist to use Gibson’s invention, the “Solex Agitator,” to secure a world monopoly on solar power, and the stage is set for a final confrontation between Bond and Scaramanga on the villain’s private island – a winner-take-all shootout inside Scaramanga’s house of mirrors and wax recreations.

Christopher Lee, who has more screen credits than anyone else in history, was Ian Fleming’s cousin and transformed the thuggish character from what is considered to be Fleming’s weakest Bond book into a cultured, erudite man of wit and refinement who kills for money, playing him as the morally ambiguous, dark side of James Bond (the cultured, erudite man of wit and refinement who kills for queen and country), in an extension of the theme of the social confrontation between good and evil we saw in the last movie. Lee is incredibly charming in the part, even eliciting our sympathy when he tells Bond the touching tale of how his best friend as a child was a circus elephant who was murdered in front of him, and never, somewhat to the detriment of the story, lets his freak flag fly. Indeed, Scaramanga’s “diabolical” plan to spread solar power franchises across the world doesn’t sound like one that needs to be foiled, particularly in the modern era where we’ve seen countless innocent thousands die in wars for oil. One wonders if things would be better if Bond were to simply leave him alone, rather than saving the status quo for Halliburton and Exxon. Furthermore, Bond’s characterization in this movie is off; he is inexplicably angry throughout much of the film, snapping frequently at Mary Goodnight, threatening to blow the genitals off an uncooperative bullet maker and slapping the put-upon kept woman Andrea around like a rag doll. Even though great care was taken in the previous movie to separate Moore’s portrayal of Bond from that of Connery, here he’s like Connery’s little brother on amphetamines. With our hero acting so unpleasantly out of sorts (even M is in a more-than-usual bad mood in this movie, telling Q to shut up every chance he gets) and the bad guy’s ambitions seemingly in the better interest of humanity, we end up rooting for the wrong person.

The supporting characters are a mixed bag. For better or worse, you keep expecting Herve Villechaize as Scaramanga’s manservant Nick Nack to yell about “de plane, boss, de plane!” Soon-Teck Oh lends some dignity to the proceedings as Bond’s Hong Kong police contact Lt. Hip, welcome since the portrayal of the Asians in the rest of the movie verges on Charlie Chan-esque buffoonery, as interpreted by condescending British patricians bitter about the loss of the Empire. Bond tries to communicate with a family in Macau by speaking slower. The Chinese industrialist plotting with Scaramanga is named “Hai Fat” (in the original script he was to have a brother named Lo Fat, ha ha). A naked swimming beauty is named “Chu Me.” Bond defeats an evil sumo wrestler by giving him an atomic wedgie, while a truly stupid sequence in which Lt. Hip’s two nieces force Bond to stand aside as they make kung fu chop suey out of a gang of pyjama-wearing ruffians has to end with the last guy pulling a stupid face as he gets kicked in the groin. If that weren’t enough, we also have J.W. Pepper to cringe at again, this time on vacation in Thailand in one of the biggest story contrivances in the history of motion pictures, calling everyone “pointy-heads” – at this point all you need to complete the gamut of cultural insensitivities is to have someone order “flied lice.”

Served atop this rather unappetizing concoction is a healthy helping of blond bimbo. It’s been a while since I read the book, but I recall Mary Goodnight being considerably more capable as Bond’s assistant in Fleming’s pages than in the personage of Britt Ekland’s screen version. Whether she’s getting stuffed in a closet, locked in the boot of a car, almost frying Bond with a laser beam by accidentally backing her bum into a control panel or inadvertently causing a solar power plant to blow sky high, she makes you wish she were the one who gets hoisted atop the mast of Scaramanga’s junk rather than Nick Nack at the end of the movie. Clearly a lesson was learned here, for this would be the last time a female character in a 007 movie would be written so inanely – as audiences decided they don’t like a hero dragging a screaming nincompoop along on his adventures (a lesson apparently lost on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas when they were making Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.) Andrea Anders is much more dour and human, and her story is worth exploring, but she gets killed off halfway through the movie. Maud Adams made an impression on the producers however, and would get the chance to survive to the end a decade later in Octopussy.

John Barry came back for this entry, but needn’t have bothered – his work here is dull, the title song performed by Lulu as a bad Shirley Bassey impression is uninspired, and Barry has since apologized for choosing to include the sound of a slide whistle over the amazing barrel roll jump that takes place in the middle of the movie (hint hint, makers of the remastered edition!), taking all the drama and suspense out of a spectacular feat – of course, the script doesn’t help by having Bond quip “Ever heard of Evel Knievel?” before hitting the gas. The peculiar islands of Phuket in Thailand are a striking backdrop for the movie’s finale, but Ken Adam’s touch is sorely missed in the production design department, and the funhouse setting of the final showdown reminds one of Berthold Brecht in its extremely spare, minimalist approach – and not in a good way, as it just looks like the production ran out of money. The movie sort of lurches and wheezes to its conclusion, shepherded at each stage it seems by a director rather bored with the entire endeavour and eager to finish the day’s shooting so he can get out on the golf course. Much as you may be able to detect how I feel in writing this review of it.

James Bond would need a three-year rest after this movie to “go away and dream it all up again,” to cite U2’s Bono. It would be the last film for a couple of major Bond veterans, including director Guy Hamilton, and producer Harry Saltzman, who was forced to sell his half of the James Bond rights back to the studio following some unsuccessful side ventures. In a way, it was just as well that these two called it quits, if The Man with the Golden Gun was to be typical of their contributions going forward. Bond could not survive another affair so listless and so lacking in the panache that had first made him so special to the world.

Tomorrow: 7/7/77 is a lucky number for James Bond.

Skyfall Countdown Day 16: Live and Let Die

October 25, 2012October 26, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

At the close of the 1960’s, as the bloated big budget studio production of the past gave way to the grittier, more hard-edged and personal films of the 1970’s, gone was the glamour and fakery of the soundstage in favour of the grime of impoverished city streets, with small-scale stories that keyed in on the struggles of everyday life. The escapist fare that was the James Bond series had to find a way to survive in this new era as well, and with the permanent departure of Sean Connery, they had, in essence, carte blanche to start over. One cinematic trend that intrigued returning screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz was the rise of the blaxploitation film, with movies like Shaft, Super Fly, Blacula and Across 110^th Street proving the box office potential of this genre. Coincidentally, Ian Fleming’s second James Bond novel, Live and Let Die, had been set in Harlem and featured a black villain. Mankiewicz decided to contemporize Fleming’s somewhat dated tale by changing the bad guy’s M.O. from smuggling pirate’s treasure to distributing heroin, and, in keeping with Bond’s penchant for a wide array of exotic locations, expanded the scope of the story beyond Harlem to include a jazz funeral on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, a high-speed boat chase through the Louisiana bayou and a final showdown on a fictional Caribbean island.

After three British agents are killed within 24 hours of each other, Bond is sent in to investigate whether there is a connection linking the deaths. Following a blundering escapade in Harlem and a timely escape from the thugs of local gangster “Mr. Big,” Bond travels to the island of San Monique, where he discovers that its Prime Minister, Dr. Kananga (Yaphet Kotto of Across 110^th Street) is concealing vast fields of poppies to produce mass quantities of heroin. Looking into the final death in New Orleans, Bond discovers the key to the entire mystery: Dr. Kananga and Mr. Big are one and the same, and Kananga intends to conquer the world in a much different way than good old Blofeld – he wants to corner the American heroin market by giving away two tons of it for free, through the soul food restaurants in the United States owned by his “Mr. Big” persona.

After some questionable casting suggestions that included Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood and even Batman‘s Adam West, Albert R. Broccoli put his foot down and insisted that Bond be played by an Englishman. Roger Moore had made a name for himself on television as The Saint, and was keen to both distance himself from that image and distinguish his portrayal of Bond from that of Sean Connery (he once cracked that he had to learn how to say “My name is Bond, James Bond” instead of “My name ish Bond, Jamesh Bond.”) Screenwriter Mankiewicz was also acutely aware that even though the movie would be showcasing black actors, the majority of them would be playing villains who would ultimately meet their ends at the hands of a white guy. With that in mind he decided to craft scenes that would see Bond for the first time totally out of his element, bested frequently by his adversaries’ ingenuity and outclassed by their coolness. That approach would not have worked with Connery – his Bond was always in command wherever he went – but Moore’s ability to survive sticky situations with his wits instead of his fists lent itself perfectly to this artistic choice. Consequently, Live and Let Die becomes mainly a social conflict between the hero and the villain, with the favours of the beautiful leading lady the linchpin of their showdown.

That leading lady, a then-22-year-old Jane Seymour as Solitaire, is arguably the most unique Bond girl of the entire series, for two reasons: she’s a virgin (at first), and she possesses supernatural powers. Solitaire can see the future with her tarot deck, and her abilities help keep Kananga one step ahead of his enemies, Bond included. However, it seems that even Solitaire must submit to the will of her cards, and when they foretell that she and Bond will become lovers, her visions vanish forever between the sheets. (Interestingly her period of mourning for her lost powers is extremely brief, as Solitaire comes to enjoy sex with Bond, and Seymour characterizes this subtly by adding a degree of maturity to her delivery of her lines once the forbidden fruit has been sampled.) Seymour is utterly ravishing in this part, whether in glamour make-up in high priestess mode, or in more casual clothes with her goddess’ mane of hair flowing out around her. And it’s refreshing to see a Bond girl role that has its own complete character arc – even if that arc does lead to more familiar damsel-in-distress territory towards the end of the film. Considering the majority of the Bond girls that follow are either fellow spies or other forms of government agent (inevitably referred to by hack entertainment journalists as “Bond’s equal”) Solitaire remains memorable – just because she is so wholly different, and because such a departure from the Bond girl norm has, somewhat regrettably, never been even tried since.

Sean Connery was a bruiser, and Roger Moore is incredibly not, so the action set pieces lean more towards extrication by gadget and/or sheer inventiveness rather than bare knuckles. (It would not have been unexpected, had Connery starred in this film, to see him jump into the crocodile pool to wrestle each one in turn, rather than leap across their backs to safety as Moore’s Bond does.) Moore is the “gentleman spy,” who is more apt to disarm his enemies with a cutting remark or a handy wristwatch magnet rather than a headlock or a knee to the stomach. But it works here, mainly because Moore is still young, and the style is trying to adhere in the realism of the 1970’s while keeping one foot in the 60’s Bond largesse that had proven so popular. The major misstep is the inclusion, in the massive boat chase that occupies the latter half of the second act, of the hapless redneck Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James) who finds himself flummoxed over and over again by Bond’s antics. It was an ill omen to include this kind of observer character, and he and his ilk would reappear frequently (as I will describe with great chagrin in later posts) as the series wore on.

One area where Live and Let Die knocks it out of the park, however, is in its music. There’s an interesting story, and perhaps a testament to the eclectic nature of producer Harry Saltzman’s tastes, that when he first heard Paul McCartney & Wings’ rocking theme song, he thought it was a good demo but that Thelma Houston should sing the final version. Luckily Saltzman lost that battle – and any Bond fan should put hearing McCartney do this song live on their bucket list. (B.J. Arnau provides a rendition of the theme midway through the film that is perhaps more towards Saltzman’s liking.) McCartney’s long time Beatles producer George Martin takes over for John Barry and supplies a funky accompaniment to the proceedings that incorporates jazz, Dixieland, Caribbean rhythms and of course the iconic Bond theme into a fusion that is both signature 70’s and unmistakably James Bond.

Live and Let Die is not highly regarded by critics, who are both predisposed to prefer Sean Connery over Roger Moore, and unhappy with the movie’s racial undertones. True, despite Mankiewicz’s intention to make the black villains formidable characters, they do all receive cartoonish sendoffs, the worst fate saved for Kotto’s Dr. Kananga, who explodes after being inflated into a balloon by a shark gun. And the scene of the very white Moore pointing a gun directly into the face of a black woman (Rosie Carver, played by Gloria Hendry) after just having had sex with her is uncomfortable no matter what era you’re watching the movie in. For long time Bond aficionados, it’s a bit strange watching 007 wander through burned-out urban ghettos after seeing him stroll through Ken Adam’s fantastic sets in the previous films. But there remains a style and verve here, helped along greatly by Martin’s music, Moore’s breezy introductory performance and the stunning Seymour, that leads you to forgive a great number of its sins, and just enjoy it for what it is – a tribute to the trends of its time, and a unique page in the history of James Bond.

Tomorrow: For Roger Moore, things get worse before they get better.