I'm going to watch all of the James Bond Films [Please avoid Spoilers for Goldeneye or later Bond movies]

Cafe Society
102

Fun project! I happen to be in the process of watching all films as well, but have overtaken you. Currently in the final stretch with Daniel Craig.

Regarding Diamonds are Forever: eh. Not memorable at all, except the killer duo Mr … and …, which I believe have been the model for many bantering killers in other movies and series. Plenty O’Toole’s role was far too short to have any meaning, the plot was a mess and full of holes. But it is a Bond movie and therefore enjoyable despite all the above.

It is a testament to their longevity that you can still watch these movies, even if they are somewhat camp by now.

103

Live and Let Die (1973)

Yeah, I jumped right into the Roger Moore era. I thought maybe I had seen Live and Let Die before, but I definitely had not. I would have remembered this. I have to say, I kind of loved it.

Let’s get right to the cringey parts. I suppose from a 2021 perspective, there’s a fair bit of racism here. But it’s 1973. Shaft, Super Fly, and a host of other “Blaxploitation” movies were big hits at the time. Apparently, the producers had previously been squeamish about filming this particular novel because it featured black villains, but decided the time was right. I say: Whatever. A Bond villain is a Bond villain, race be damned. And you could say the same about a Bond girl as well – Gloria Hendry was delightful, even if her character turned out to be a double-crosser.

I also read that the producers wanted to make Moore’s Bond explicitly different from Connery’s. I fixed myself a vodka martini – shaken, not stirred – before I settled in to watch, only to see Bond order “bourbon, no ice.” And he smokes cigars instead of cigarettes. None of this really mattered. The biggest difference was in the way Moore carried himself. Connery’s Bond was suave and sophisticated, but in a relaxed, loose kind of way. Moore was stiff and erect (get your mind out of the gutter, you know what I mean), almost, but not quite, to the point of being robotic in his mannerisms. It works, but it is indeed very different. Took a while to get used to.

But here’s the main thing: Regardless of who played Bond, or whether the bad guys were racist stereotypes or not, this movie was a ton of fun. I love New Orleans, and I loved all the scenes in New Orleans and the bayous. Everything at the gator farm was pure gold. The boat chase scene rivals the bobsled chase from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as my favorite action sequence so far. Yaphet Kotto’s Kananga was a suitable bad guy, and Tee-Hee, Whisper, and Samedi were all memorable henchmen. Young Jayne Seymour was gorgeous and enthralling.

The plot? I guess there was a plot. Kananga talks about cornering the heroin market, so yeah, there you go. But this one was all about the ride, and what a ride it was.

And I have to talk about the theme song. I was torn between Live and Let Die or Goldfinger as the most iconic Bond theme, but after watching this movie, I have to give it the nod. The way bits of it kept popping up in the score at just the right moment, and then hearing Brenda Arnou’s wonderful rendition in the New Orleans club… There’s no doubt.

With all due respect to Sir Sean, this might be the most fun I’ve had watching a Bond movie so far.

Next up: The Man With The Golden Gun

104

I dont think those roles were anymore racist stereotypes than the myriad evil German or Russian. Villains have to be over the top to be interesting and to avoid any appearance of racism would be to exclude blacks from those roles.

105

Live and Let die has a couple great bits:

Bond with that “hog’s leg” .44 magnum that looks bigger than his jacket
Sheriff JW Pepper (who shows up again the TMWtGG) classic retort: “Secret AGENT? On WHOSE side?”
The boat chase

In the weird part: the fact that it looks like every car on the NYC freeway scene are 1973 Chevys.

106

Live and Let Die was the second Bond film that I saw when it first came out (although by the time I saw it I had been able to watch all the others at revivals, except OHMSS), and I was disappointed. Moore (who I still thought of as “The Saint”, the role he played in the TV series) seemed to take the role too lightly, and it wasn’t until much later that I warmed up to him.

As a habitual “credit reader” I saw that there was a credit at the beginning about scenes with sharks, and was looking forward to something like the scenes where Connery (and the stuntmen playing Bond) appear to be in Largo’s pool with the sharks, and was hoping for something similar here. I was severely disappointed when all the shark scenes looked as if they could have been shot through the window at an aquarium. There was no sense of immediacy or danger. I felt ripped off.

I liked Yaphet Kotto as Mr. Big/Katanga. It was the first role I’d ever seen him in. The idea of the two being the same person wasn’t all that much of a surprise, but I was impressed by the makeup. It’s the first time I’d ever seen a black man disguised as another black man – something you seemed to se with white guys villains all the time, it seemed. Give the Bond people a star for innovation.

That said, the hole Bad Guys operation being exclusively (?) black (if there were any white guys in the bunch, I missed them) was pretty uneasy, even in 1973 when the film came out. True, it was the era of all those blaxploitation films (as Mad magazine pointed out in their satire a couple of years later), and, true, you had black guys on the Good Guy side, too, but they were treading awfully close to the line, and having the Bad Guy Organization be almost one color was not good.

And I was severely disappointed in Kotto’s demise. That was the most ludicrous death of a Bond villain in the entire franchise.

Every Bond film has at least one scene where you’re impressed by Bond’s ingenuity and cleverness. The Boat Chase scene was impressive, but what I really liked was the scene where Bond is escaping in the double-decker bus (which clearly isn’t flashy and can’t go that fast), yet he outmaneuvers his pursuers and ends it with an excellent trick. That’s the kind of thing I go to these movies for.

107

I think my 3 favourite Bond movies are Goldfinger, Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me – two Moore movies and one Connery.

108

Mine are Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and For Your Eyes Only. One Bond actor apiece.

109

Darling, I’ve a small confession to make; try not to be too upset: the deck was slightly stacked in my favor.

110

Usually I’m not a big fan of '70s era supernatural mumbo-jumbo (e.g. sasquatch, ESP, UFOs), but I get chills when Solitaire is doing her tarot card reading.

“A man comes. He travels quickly. He has purpose. He comes over water. He travels with others. He will oppose. He brings violence and destruction!”

111

Mine are The Living Daylights, Skyfall, and From Russia With Love.

112

It bugs me that, in the movie, her powers are real. (she also lies, but the mumbo jumbo is real). Moonraker aside, Bond isn’t supposed to be sci-fi/fantasy.

113

I think it’s more that she and Kananga believe her powers are real. “A man comes. He comes over water. He will oppose. He brings violence and destruction!” Well, they’re running a criminal drug organization on an island. That’s not too much of a stretch. Solitaire feels uneasy about the enterprise and is worried that the authorities are coming to bust it up. She attributes this to her “sight.” That doesn’t mean it’s real.

114

That’s not an example of it – that move was as subtle as a sledgehammer.

115

Mine are Casino Royale, and that’s all, because I can’t get past the plot hole of Bond going on missions when pretty much everybody has already been reduced to ionized particles.

116

Brosman knew when to take it seriously and when not to with sean it was too serious or roger it was he took it too lightly or like for granted

117

As a fan of Remington Steele, I really wanted PB as Bond. But then they gave him probably the worst films of the entire franchise.

[I’m a fan of the often overlooked Timothy Dalton, but I’ll save my comments until this films come up in this thread.)

118

You know, given the oft-heard refrain about how movie after movie involves Bond being at the mercy of folks who neither kill him straight off nor suspect that he’s yet again about to serve as the delivery system for an incredibly useful gadget in some innocuous housing, it occurs to me that attempting to take the stories even a bit at face value could well mean concluding that, hey, a Roger Moore type who constantly works at cultivating some kind of lighthearted please-underestimate-me vibe is one of the few things that could make this plot make sense…

119

I liked Diamonds are Forever. Wint and Kidd are fun to watch, and I found the theme song haunting.

120

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)

There’s definitely some good stuff here, and there’s definitely some not-so-great stuff.

Roger Moore’s performance is solid. Much as I enjoyed Live and Let Die, It seemed to be the least… Bond-ish of all the Bond films so far. Here, in Moore’s second go-around, he really inhabited the 007 character in a way that he hadn’t in LALD.

Christopher Lee was terrific as well. So much going on beneath the surface, Lee really fleshes out this strange man with a weird gun fetish and a penchant for deadly hide-and-seek games. The Bond girls, Britt Ekland and Maud Adams, were stunning of course. Herve Villechaize made a great #2 bad guy. Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewelyn, and Lois Maxwell deliver dependably.

Even before I knew what was going on, I loved the carnival fun-house stuff at the beginning. That Scaramanga’s backstory provided a reason for it being there made it all the better. And it was nice to see it called back at the end. But what should have been a thrilling cat-and-mouse climax kind of fell flat for me. Bond posing as his own wax figure was entirely predictable, and Scaramanga’s demise seemed rushed and quite unspectacular. At least Chekov’s Liquid Helium came into play with the technician guy, but what was he even doing there, really? Quite a superfluous character.

Oh, and speaking of superfluous, Clifton James is back as J.W. Pepper, the Louisiana State Trooper from LALD. He has another run-in with Bond while vacationing with his wife. I guess people liked him and wanted him back. OK, I get it; do a silly little cameo and then get on with it. But then… he encounters Bond again while he’s… shopping for a car at an AMC dealership while on vacation in Hong Kong? Huh? Even for a Bond movie, we’re stretching credulity a little too thin here.

There are a few things that could have been iconic 007 moments, yet somehow just didn’t rise to the occasion. The car that converts to a plane, for instance. In context, it was completely unnecessary; why not simply have a plane hidden in the warehouse and switch over? Much less trouble. Then when it took off, it did nothing at all except fly away. What a wasted opportunity.

In fact, there was quite a bit of wasted opportunity in this film. I found the exposition to be rather interesting, and should have been building to something very big - but it just never did. The stakes stayed relatively low, and there was no big wow-factor action set-piece. I guess the corkscrew car jump was supposed to fill that role, but it was all of four seconds of footage – even in slow motion! – and undermined by a cartoon sound effect.
That stunt, like this whole film, could have – should have – been a whole lot better.

Next up: The Spy Who Loved Me

121

The corkscrew jump bugged me as a kid. I said, “Boy the bridge is really damaged in just the right way, isn’t it?” As I get older I’m like,“Oh, ok it’s a stunt ramp, for jumps.” Older still, I’m like “why did someone put a stunt ramp right there? No one is going to go out there and watch. Plus it’s a hazard. Some yayhoo or secret agent might use it.”

The thing that bugs me more is the Solex Agitator actually works. How come we don’t have cheap solar power? Electric cars? And ray guns! People who say all 20 (excluding Craig) Bond movies are the same person, I ask you, how come we aren’t running on solar power?

For me the only good thing out of JW Pepper is his line in LALD, when the feds tell Pepper that Bond is a “secret agent”, and he goes “on whose side?!” Other than that, he’s just a racist cracker caricature who probably belongs to the John Birch society and rails against “godless commies”, and who is one breath away from using the N-word.

(In a bit of fanwank continuity, I’d like to think the never-seen-before-or-since Space Marine blasters in Moonraker were based on Solex tech. But that’s not really likely, is it?)