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 After a false start with On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the arrival of 1973's Live and Let Die truly marked the end of Sean Connery's reign as James Bond. Roger Moore, best known from television's The Saint, was taking over. He not only brought a different way of portraying 007 but his character took on a different sort of adventure than audiences were used to. But whoever said the old adage that change was good obviously didn't have Live and Let Die in mind, as just about everything new that the film tries to leave its own mark on the Bond franchise ends up blowing up in its overcooked face.
Roger Moore &
Jane Seymour
Three MI6 agents have been killed under strange circumstances. When it's discovered they were assigned to keep tabs on Dr. Kananga (Yaphet Kotto), a diplomat from a small Caribbean nation, Bond is dispatched to investigate. His quest begins in New York City, where a run-in with some unsavory villains leads to a connection not only with drug kingpin Mr. Big, but also with Solitaire (Jane Seymour), a woman with the power to accurately predict the future via tarot card reading.
Teaming up with sultry CIA agent Rosie Carver (Gloria Hendry), Bond heads to Kananga's island home, where he discovers that his criminal operations take place under a cloud of voodoo superstition. But hocus pocus or not, Bond's got a job
Roger Moore & Gloria Hendry
to do, and once he learns Kanaga's nefarious plans to flood the American drug market with free heroin, he must race to stop the maniac from causing the number of addicts in the country to skyrocket.
Live and Let Die made two major changes to the Bond formula, both of which turned up decidedly mixed results. First was that the rough and rugged side of Bond's personality has been apparently tossed out the window. In its place was a more suave and smarmy Bond, which unfortunately never seems to mesh well with the character's acts of derring-do. The idea was to have Bond come across as more sophisticated and self-assured than before.
For the most part, Moore's performance makes him look like a jerk, treating his job to stop Kananga with the same attitude a teenager uses when asked to take out the garbage. The second alteration is that rather than stopping the megalomaniac du jour from taking over the world or at the very least threatening the unleash a miniature apocalypse, the criminal ilk Bond deals with here are pretty small potatoes.
 Live and Let Die was purposefully made to emulate the blaxploitation movies of the time it was released, and as such, the flick puts world domination on the back burner in favor of providing a more realistic enterprise for the antagonists to engage in. Unfortunately, this approach misfires in a big way; instead of depicting Kanaga's organization as a vast and complex one that Bond can't easily escape from, the film creates the unsettling image of just about every black character in sight having it in for Bond. There's just something inherently wrong with the idea of Bond being called a "honky," traipsing around Harlem like he's the second coming of Shaft and going up against a drug lord with an unnecessarily complex evil plot. Some characters, especially Clifton James's redneck sheriff, seem airlifted from completely different movies, creating a constant clashing of styles and agendas that the film never recovers from.
Don't get me wrong; Live and Let Die isn't a total wash-out. The stunningly gorgeous Seymour, a couple choice action set pieces, and a devious hook-handed henchman serve as reminders of what made the Bond series an endearing cinematic staple to begin with. But when stacked up against much more smooth and well-constructed Bond pictures, in the case of Live and Let Die, it's best to live and not watch.
Director: Guy Hamilton
Writer: Tom Mankiewicz, based upon the novel by Ian Fleming
Cast: Roger Moore, Yaphet Kotto, Jane Seymour, Clifton James, Julius W. Harris, Geoffrey Holder, David Hedison, Gloria Hendry
Rating: PG (sensuality, violence, and some profanity)
Classic Movie Guide Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Run Time: 121 minutes
Studio: United Artists
Format: Color, widescreen
Photo credits: United Artists
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