Just saw this 1973 James Bond movie (Roger Moore’s debut in the role, IIRC) and was amazed. I’m not one to cry “racism” at the drop of a hat, but it was pretty blatant, I thought. Every black character except one (a CIA agent, who doesn’t make it to the end of the movie) is in league with the bad guy, “Mr. Big,” whose day job is prime minister of a Haiti-like country called San Monique but is also a heroin producer. There’s a cab driver who could be Stepin Fetchit’s grandson, a turncoat female CIA agent (different from the one I mentioned before) who’s both incompetent and very easily scared, and lots of hard-drinking, wildly-dancing, ghetto-talking extras.
Anybody else seen it lately? Was there any criticism of it as racist at the time it was released? I understand the original Ian Fleming book is about the same, including a chapter called “Nigger Heaven.”
I thought that it was more blaxiplotation then out and out racism. Just a bad facet of a bad movie which only had two things going for it: the awesome and totally un-Bond-like theme song and the opening scene (“Who’s funeral is this?” “Yours.”)
I was more than a bit troubled with it when the film was released back circa 1973, but it didn’t much seem to bother anyone else. I suspect some people thought it cool that a black guy could be a Bond villain.
Interesting thing, in any case – this is the only movie I’ve ever seen where a black guy wears an elaborate makeup disguise to completely change his appearance. Look at all the movies with white guys doing this – List of Adrian Messenger, Sleuth, etc. But no Black guys. I still don’t think I’ve seen it with someone of Asian ancestry. It’s rare with women, too, for that matter.
“Black Hawk Down” (the movie) was also extremely racist. All of the “villains” in the flick were black. While there were one or two black US soldiers shown, they looked EXACTLY like the “villains” except for the different uniform, facial features, and language.
Not all things from different eras age well. The Sean Connery Bond films were absolutely of their time but didn’t make such an obvious effort to be hip to the latest trends. Heck, one of Connery’s lines was that the Beatles were best taken with ear plugs. The early 007 was the sort of man who read Playboy which means he didn’t have to tell you he was cool, he knew it and everyone else did. In the '70s there seemed to be much more effort put into making Bond seem current rather than timeless. The result was flared slacks, lapels that could eat Cincinnati and crapfests like LoLD. I can imagine the pitch, “take a sauve masculine secret agent but make him prissy and fopposh and put him in Harlem.” Crap on a stick. I have to admit though the song was terrific and Yahphet Kotto was way cooler than Blofeld. I also liked voodoo man Geoffrey Holder’s hearty laugh but I kept expecting him to say “HAHAHAHA, the un-cola.”
Of course if you want proper blaxploitation nobody does it better
waka-chika-waka-chika
Can you imagine if Jack had drawn Soul Story? I shudder to think but OTOH I tingle with delight at the possibility of a parody tract. Jack’s on tracts have had the “suck” dial turned up to 11 lately so I could do no worse.
This points out an element of race material, you can do it to your own race but it’s a different matter when an outsider does it. Chris Rock can have an HBO special about nothing but the N-word but a white comedian couldn’t.
As I recall, Fleming’s deal with “Chigroes” was that they had the intelligence of the Chinese and the cunning of the blacks, and considered themselves above the blacks in Jamaica’s racial hierarchy.
Fleming vacationed every year in Jamaica, but he wasn’t the most racially sensitive of sorts. The only positive black character in his novels I can recall was Quarrel, who trained Bond in scuba diving in Dr. No and was torched by a flame thrower in Live and Let Die. Bond liked him, but Quarrel knew his place, calling Bond “Captain”, apparantly exactly as it should be when whites work alongside blacks.
And for the love of all that is good and holy, please don’t. I’d like to scour that film from my memory, at least, if I can’t actual abolish it from existence.
Live and Let Die was an attempt to cash in on the then popular blaxipoliation craze. One might as equally–and pointlessly–take umbrage at Goldfinger for defaming Koreans (off of Auric Goldfinger’s minions were Korean.)
Taking any Bond film–especially the generally exreable Live and Let Die is going way to far.
Going by old films I’ve seen, it seems common to assign an appellation to people you don’t know well; e.g., ‘Chief’, ‘Mac’, ‘Doc’, ‘Governor’. I took Quarrel’s ‘Captain’ to simply be such an appellation, not a sign of submission.
