This review of Live and Let Die (1973) is part of a wider rewatch of the James Bond series to mark its 60th anniversary. 007 has always been my favourite movie franchise, and I wanted to see where each film ranks within the series. Please check out the main blog post for my rankings of this and the other twenty-four official films and links to the movie reviews for the rest of the franchise.
Long Review and Film Summary
Live and Let Die is the first Roger Moore Bond film and has been one of my favourites for a long time. After this re-watch and listening to the episode of From Rewatch With Love on it, I can see the issues that it does have. We’ll look at the good things in this movie first. The opening titles set up the story that will run throughout this movie with three different agents being killed, one in New York City, New Orleans, and San Monique. We also see a range of places that we’ll come back to, including the Fillet of Soul restaurant, where an agent was killed by a Jazz Funeral procession, which is a fun and interesting way for someone to die in a Bond film. We learn that all of this is being operated by Kananga/Mr. Big (played by Yaphet Kotto), a corrupt Caribbean Prime Minister who doubles as a drug lord, with poppy fields in San Monique. I’m not going to go into too much detail on the overall story as there’s a lot to say about a few of the characters. David Hedison has to be one of my favourite actors so far to play CIA agent Felix Leiter, he’s a big part of the story in this film and is always cleaning up Bond’s mess. One of my favourites is when he’s talking to the owner of the Flight School, whom 007 has destroyed and scared his student half to death. Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi is amazing as well, however, the Voodoo in this film is a mismatched/fictionalised representation of Voodoo, drawing inspiration from two actual practices of Voodoo that are related but distinct, although this doesn’t make a real difference to the film, as it’s still interesting. Sheriff J.W. Pepper (played by Clifton James) is one of my favourite characters from the franchise.
He is a racist hick certainly, but he has some of the best lines in this movie and gets his just deserts when his patrol car and the police car he commanders are destroyed during one of the most epic boat chases in the Bond franchise. Now for the problems, the fact that Solitaire (played by Jane Seymour) believes her powers for reading tarot cards only exist as long as she’s a virgin, with both Dr. Kananga/Mr. Big and Bond (especially when he stacks the deck with ‘Lovers’ cards to sleep with her), using that against her is abhorrent. We also have Rosie Carver (played by Gloria Hendry), a junior CIA agent and Bond’s first black co-star, and the fact that she is evil and secretly working for Kananga is not a good look for the film. If we look at the good points, the movie is well written, acted, edited, and paced. If we weigh them against the bad, which I’ve only very briefly outlined, there’s much more to say. Please listen to the From Rewatch With Love episode on it for a more in-depth analysis. This movie is still up there for me. I love Roger Moore as Bond, he’s kind of a jerk, but more empathetic than Connery’s Bond. This film is one of Moore’s best, in my opinion, with a top-tier title song by Paul and Linda McCartney.