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Directors: Guy Hamilton, Lewis Gilbert, John Glen

By Roderick Heath

Roger Moore’s death at the age of 89 last week was a sad moment in spite of what was obviously a well-lived life reaching a natural end. There was a sting I didn’t expect in losing Moore and his image, his unshakeable veneer of savoir faire and eternal boyish good-humour, and the fact that Moore had often never quite gotten his due. Certainly not a thespian of enormous range, Moore nonetheless shared a fate common to many actors in that he made difficult things look sublimely easy and remained perpetually patronised as a result. Moore is for the most part associated with his lighter roles, his dashing playboy heroes in the James Bond films and the TV series like Maverick, The Saint, and The Persuaders. His greatest talent was as a comedian placed in apparently dramatic circumstances, where his poker-faced whimsy and way with a perfectly sculpted wry look could bring the house down. But he could get gritty and command the screen with force when he wanted to, as he did in several films made between stints as more familiar characters, including Basil Dearden’s doppelganger chiller The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), two films he made with former Bond director Peter Hunt, the mining thriller Gold (1974) and the seriocomic war epic Shout at the Devil (1976), and two he made with Andrew V. McLaglen, ffolkes (1980) and the rowdy mercenary drama The Wild Geese (1978), where he’s introduced executing the drug dealer responsible for causing deaths with bad product in a manner bluntly contrasting Moore’s usual image. But Moore’s greatest claim to fame is, inevitably, as 007. And also his greatest claim to infamy, for Moore was doomed to be described as perpetual second-fiddle and tailor’s-dummy fill-in for Sean Connery in the role. Yet Moore’s stint as Bond was so far the busiest of any actor to date, racking up seven films in twelve years.

Looking back on Moore’s stretch as 007 with the gracing interval of a few decades and three other actors in the part, his is now identifiable as just another phase in the character’s surprisingly unshakeable tenancy in pop culture, a phase that defined the character at one of several possible extremes, and mapped out its share of high and low points. The reason Bond has been trending back to a tougher, gamier edition ever since is bound up with that very modish popularity of Moore’s take. Watching the series through again a couple of years ago, it struck me that when Timothy Dalton took over the part with 1987’s The Living Daylights, he used more facial expressions in various scenes than Moore did in his entire occupancy, and yet Dalton simply never seemed eased into the part so well. Ian Fleming’s Bond, under his veneer of classy traits and official duty, was an emotionally dysfunctional creature chasing after jolts of livewire excitement to his general existential numbness. This was an aspect of the character Connery captured well even as the film adaptations began to obey certain cues in Fleming’s stories and drifted towards becoming modern-day editions of classic pulp heroic tales of Fu Manchu and Bulldog Drummond, and Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang’s serial thrillers. Moore’s Bond adapted to the louche, jaunty mood of the 1970s, a seductive charmer, the driest of vodka martinis, quite often confounded by the strange sights his job thrusts before him but never entirely out of his depth. He could be offhandedly violent but usually only when snatching his chance before bigger bullies and insolent toerags. He was, in short, the perfect Boy’s Own hero for a series that embraced its status as disco-age entertainment, combinations of action movie, slapstick comedy, soft-core gaze-fest, and travelogue fantasia.

Live and Let Die was helmed by Guy Hamilton, who had left an indelible imprint on the series with his first try at it, Goldfinger (1964). Hamilton had found a way to push the series towards a gaudier, flashier, more knowing brand whilst not entirely losing contact with Terence Young’s lean and cool first entries. Hamilton had been brought back for Connery’s one-off return to Bond Diamonds Are Forever (1971), produced as antithesis to George Lazenby’s solitary run in the part, Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). Lazenby’s film is perhaps still the greatest Bond film, but its relative seriousness and tragic finale, as well Lazenby’s indifferently received performance, saw it written off by many as a miscalculation. Diamonds Are Forever, on the other hand, gave audiences exactly what they seemed to want, glib and glitzy thrills without a solitary thought. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had laboured to introduce Lazenby in a manner that at once gave him instant iconic lustre whilst also authenticating him as the direct continuation of Connery. Live and Let Die takes the exact opposite approach of simply discovering Moore in the role, lounging in bed with a gorgeous Italian spy (Madeleine Smith). Bond was now an interchangeable part of his own franchise. Up until Live and Let Die, the Bond films had been a cultural force unto themselves, defining a central fantasy of the age. With this entry you can sense one aspect sneaking in that would both help keep Moore’s films spectacularly popular but also a tad facile: aping of trends. Live and Let Die mixes together the vogue for urban cop thrillers and Blaxploitation flicks with Hammer horror and some nods towards real-life fixtures on the news landscape of the day, including the early days of the war on drugs, and a villain modelled after ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, then dictator of Haiti.

Fleming’s source novel had shown off both some of his finer gifts, like his pungent way with atmosphere and cunning for harsh violence, illustrated in vignettes when Bond’s CIA pal Felix Leiter is lunched on by a shark, and also his least charming traits, like the gross racism constantly apparent in a story pitting Bond against Mr Big, an American gangster and agent of the Russian spy group SMERSH. The film’s answer to this problem was simply to offer up one of the series’ usual conspiratorial cabals in fly drag. As a result, Live and Let Die became perhaps the purest pop-art moment the Bond film has had to date and also the instalment that seems most in thrall to the series’ deep roots in Feuillade and Lang-style thrillers. Here we see Bond contending with portals that suddenly open up between normality and the underworld, with a villain who rules over two worlds with disguises and who uses the paraphernalia of superstition to terrify and exterminate enemies, complete with scary craft-art voodoo idols that disguise hidden cameras and poison darts. A stylistic cue was presented by Paul McCartney and Wings’ theme song, a helter-skelter venture into raucous rock, setting the scene for the film’s fever-dream plunge into such madcap climes. Maurice Binder’s traditional opening credits took up the cue in presenting fiendishly beautiful, trippy images of blazing skulls and satanic fires and juju-eyeball lovelies.

Some liberation came from the fact Live and Let Die was the first Bond film since Goldfinger not to use SPECTRE as the antagonist, and the filmmaking team, headed by impresario producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, were eager to take a risk in sporting black villains. One way the film mediated the idea is with humour, as it takes its bad guys fairly seriously, and instead presents an archetypal redneck sheriff, J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), as figure of clumsy comic relief and bogus authority, haplessly trying to keep up with Bond and his enemies as they carve a path through his parish: what had been a strict cultural power a decade before is now a figure of utter ridicule. There was even hope of making the Bond girl Solitaire black too, but fear of getting the film banned in certain overseas markets like South Africa nixed that idea. Instead Bond has a brief tryst with klutzy double agent Rosie (Gloria Hendry), and indeed that was cut out in some markets. Yaphet Kotto, who had made his name the year before in Superfly, was also eager to take on the part of designated villain, Dr Kananga, who also poses as Mr Big, head of a shadowy criminal enterprise that spans the US using the Fillet of Soul bar chain as a cover for his operations. Kananga is himself the president of a small Caribbean nation, San Monique, pictured gassing on about post-colonial politics whilst enriching himself by growing vast fields of opium poppies and planning to muscle his way into the North American drug trade by dumping two tonnes worth of free samples on the market. He has a pet fortune teller, Solitaire (Jane Seymour), whose virginity he guards jealously to preserve her sortilege genius, and a coterie of impressive henchmen, including mechanical-handed Tee Hee (Julius Harris) and the gangly Baron Samedi (Geoffrey Holder), who plays Emcee to Kananga’s reign of terror based in voodoo worship.

An obvious issue with Live and Let Die’s assimilation of Blaxploitation tropes is that genre depended on black protagonists to mediate their morbid fixation with the bleak side of urban life. Bond is the whitest guy around, although he had also helped foster new heroic figures like John Shaft. By this point in his career, Bond finds himself contending for the first time with a cultural landscape rapidly turning unfriendly to his status as a rich, smug, quick-draw, highly libidinous Caucasian male – a motif that would extend through the Moore years as he would be confronted with aspects of feminism and détente-era niceties. Bond’s adventure into Harlem in the film’s first third sees him isolated and curiously helpless in a way he’s never been before, as one character quips, “like following a cue ball,” and he has to be saved by a black CIA agent, Strutter (Lon Satton). The film gets a kick out of this, but also interestingly points out the path that would see Bond safe for another forty years. Whilst his films would readily reflect changing mores, the filmmakers had accidentally struck upon a truism: the more retro Bond’s style became, ironically the more appeal it retained. The supernatural aspect of Live and Let Die is also one that makes it rather unique in the Bond canon. The film takes the idea that Solitaire can really see the future seriously, and exploits this aspect to lend the film some tangy atmosphere, even to provide perhaps the most stylish moment in any Bond film: Solitaire’s anticipation of Bond’s arrival is visualised with her laying out tarot cards on a table, upon which is projected the image of Bond’s plane on the wing, with the promise that he “brings violence and death.” The paraphernalia of Kananga’s operation reveals the voodoo terror to be so much smoke and mirrors, there’s a suggestion right at the end that Baron Samedi really is the spirit of death lurking eagerly around the corner, Bond’s eternal friend and foe. Bond seduces Solitaire by taking advantage of her susceptibility after she keeps turning up ‘The Lovers’ in her tarot deck, by convincing her to go to bed with him with a stacked deck. Bond experiences momentary guilt at his ploy, only for Solitaire to eagerly embrace adult sexuality with a sly smile.

This last touch helped show off a defining trait of Moore’s Bond, his commanding ease as a seductive presence and way with a double entendre perfectly attuned to the oncoming disco era’s predilection for erogenous exaltation. The early Bond films had done a large part to midwife an age in which sexuality was no longer a hanging matter and where it was generally acknowledged that everyone was hunting pleasure in the sack, but had mediated this by couching them in rigorously macho terms. Moore simply took the edge off the machismo. Meanwhile the film throws up a raft of mischievous touches, like the recurring joke of a New Orleans street funeral being held for one of the luckless do-gooders watching it, to Bond constantly dropping through secret hatches in Fillet of Souls into the midst of Kananga’s operations, and roasting a snake snuck into his hotel room by improvising a flame thrower with a spray can. Only the slightly languid pace of Live and Let Die counts against it, as it seems to keep building to show-stopping action scenes and then throttling off, trying to whet the appetite for the epic boat chase in the last third that sees Bond trying to outrun Kananga’s assassins through the bayous in stolen speed boats, a brilliant parade of stunt work (one boat jump was the longest ever staged at the time). The finale sees Bond venturing onto San Monique to rescue Solitaire from one of Kananga’s cod-voodoo sacrificial rituals along with ally Quarrel Jnr (Roy Stewart), son of his former assistant from Dr. No (1962), in a sequence that splits the difference between The Devil Rides Out (1967) and dance number. Holder, a magnificent presence rarely utilised by film, is particularly memorable with his demonic laugh and physical grace, and Kotto comes into his own in the inevitable confrontation with Bond, alternating between gentlemanly bonhomie and feral grit as tries to knife our hero, before Bond force-feeds him a gas pellet that sees him blow up like a balloon and explode.

Hamilton also directed Moore’s second film, The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), which sported Christopher Lee as a born Bond villain but only afforded him a sluggish, ramshackle entry. Resolving to provide a true showstopper with the next episode, Broccoli brought back another legacy director, Lewis Gilbert, who had helmed 1967’s You Only Live Twice, one of the most spectacular movies in the series. The Spy Who Loved Me could well be considered the design classic of Moore’s films. The film’s most famous flourish, punctuating the usual pre-credit sequence, apexes with Bond skiing off the edge of a great cliff, only to open a parachute festooned with a Union Jack, a perfect ideogram for and encapsulation of the series’ wry tributes to parochial values and commitment to ridiculous yet breathtaking spectacle. The rest of the film comes at you as a perfect parade of essentialist Bond tropes that still loom large – a monstrous plutocratic bad guy with a plan to end the world, his environs of aseptic, asexual futuristic technocracy, a hulking henchman assassin, fast-paced globe-trotting, and plentiful opportunities to get laid. The plot sees Bond pitted against his Russian rival and opposite Agent XXX, aka Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach), in competition and then collusion for evidence that will explain why nuclear submarines belonging to both East and West keep vanishing at sea. The two spies follow the chain to shipping magnate and genocidal maniac Karl Stromberg (Curd Jurgens) and his plot to restart human life under the sea after starting World War III.

The Spy Who Loved Me secured Moore’s superstar status as Bond and started the series back on track for record-breaking profits, for unsurprising reasons. It’s an act of grandiose showmanship, utterly confident in itself, avoiding all discomforting matters and even playing the Cold War for laughs as mutual spy bosses M (Bernard Lee) and KGB chief General Gogol (Walter Gotell) readily team up to take on a common enemy. But it also sports many of the problems with the Moore years. In particular, it idles along for nearly two-thirds of its running time, proffering an assemblage of regulation tropes and diversions lacking real wit, as Bond contends with Stromberg’s heavies and Amasova’s frenemy attentions. The series devolution into self-mockery and referential gags had become corny by this point, like playing the Lawrence of Arabia (1962) theme over one scene, and pushing the beloved gadgetry to the point of silliness as Bond is kitted out with a Lotus sports car that turns into a submarine. Amasova was evidently intended as a feminist-era answer to Bond after the series had dodged the problem for a while with dim-bulb comic-relief heroines, like Diamonds Are Forever’s Tiffany Case and The Man With The Golden Gun’s Mary Goodnight. But the film doesn’t quite commit to the notion, and Amasova emerges as rather less convincingly tough and kick-ass than some others amongst Bond’s previous roster of heroines. Amasova does beat Bond at his own game when she seduces him and then knocks him out to get a valuable microfilm reel off him, but is reduced to regulation damsel-in-distress status by the end when Stromberg kidnaps her with evident intent of using her to repopulate his corner of the Earth. Not helping is the fact that Bach is painfully wooden in the role. Caroline Munro makes far more impression in a much briefer part as one of Stromberg’s crew, a bikini-clad flirt who gleefully tries to riddle Bond’s Lotus with machine gun holes whilst giving him a saucy wink.

Stromberg himself is a solid series villain with Jurgens offering silken sadism in his abode, festooned with baroque accoutrements but actually contained within a colossal submersible city, a private sanctuary where he can dine, plot world domination, and feed underlings to sharks in peace. Richard Kiel’s hulking henchman, dubbed Jaws because of his penchant for breaking necks with his deadly steel teeth, rightly became an instant hit and permanent reference point in the Bond lexicon. Eventually The Spy Who Loved Me springs into a last act that, although essentially just a replay of You Only Live Twice, nonetheless pulls out so many stops that you don’t care much. Bond, Amasova, and the crew of a US submarine are captured by Stromberg’s sub-swallowing super-tanker, the Liparus. Bond stages an escape, breaking out the captive crews of Yanks, Brits, and Russkies to seize control of the ship in a brilliantly-staged battle on a colossal set (built inside the specially-constructed 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios, then the largest movie stage in the world). The no-expense-spared solidity of the settings and special effects here give the film a special kind of stature. Another of this entry’s singular flourishes was Carly Simon’s earworm theme song “Nobody Does It Better,” fittingly an ode to the thrill of a lover who’s not terribly good for you but so utterly accomplished as bringer of the big O you can’t quit them. Composer Marvin Hamlisch repeats the song at the very end as a Broadway chorus tune, a genuinely funny acknowledgement that the series had reached a pinnacle as pure crowd-pleasing ham.

The next instalment, Moonraker (1979), pushed many aspects of The Spy Who Loved Me even further, annexing the sci-fi craze sparked by Star Wars (1977) for the series’ box office highpoint. But many also came away feeling this was a bridge too far for the franchise in pushing towards total cartoonishness. When the time came to make For Your Eyes Only, John Glen, who had served as editor and unit director on several previous entries, was promoted to director, a role he would hold for the next five films. Glen’s credentials as series helmsman were obvious – he knew how to cut and shoot action and corral such elephantine production values. But unlike Hunt, the last director promoted from the crew ranks, his brand of flash was also rather anonymous, and when the series needed shots of fresh style to back up the changeover to Dalton, it instead trundled on until reaching a crisis point in the late ‘80s. All that was a long way in the future, however, when For Your Eyes Only was released to instant, colossal success, sufficient to save United Artists from oblivion after Heaven’s Gate (1980). Originally projected as an opener for a new actor in the role whilst Moore was having one of his legendary rows over pay with Broccoli, For Your Eyes Only stands as evidence the series had tried the art of the gritty reboot 25 years before Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale (2006), paring away fantastical elements and trying to get the series back in touch with its roots as still-cavalier but more human-scaled adventuring.

The pre-title sequence also offered a call-back to another era in the series, as Bond, after visiting his dead wife Tracy’s grave, is almost killed when his helicopter is taken over by remote control by a bald man in a wheelchair and a white cat on his lap – evidently supposed to be old nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (John Hollis) attempting a last act of revenge. Except that Bond manages to regain control of the chopper, scoop him up on a landing prop, and dump him into a factory chimney. This makes for a coldly amusing line scratched through a bit of unfinished business in the series, after rights disputes prevented a more thorough conclusion. The plot stakes when the story proper gets going still invoke worldwide menace but in a more convincing fashion. A British spy ship, the St. Georges, disguised as a trawler, is accidentally sunk by an unexploded mine caught in its nets, the secure, highly secret coding system that allows control of NATO nuclear systems left intact aboard. A marine archaeologist, Havelock (Jack Hedley) is hired by the Secret Service to locate the wreck, but he and his Greek wife (Toby Robins) are assassinated before the eyes of their daughter Melina (Carole Bouquet) by a Cuban contract killer, Ferrara (John Moreno). Bond is sent to follow in Havelock’s footsteps, and he tracks down Ferrara hoping to learn who hired him.

Bond soon finds Melina has the same idea: she plants an arrow from her crossbow in Ferrara’s back, and his hirer, Belgian hoodlum Locque (Michael Gothard), absconds whilst Bond and Melina dodge the wrath of bodyguards together. Bouquet’s Melina was probably the best Bond girl since Diana Rigg’s Tracy twelve years earlier, Bouquet’s powerful jawline and mystic-green eyes perfect for a heroine who explicitly compares herself to avenging Greek heroines like Electra (although even Bouquet still couldn’t escape the Bond girl curse of being listlessly post-dubbed). Her program of revenge stirs both Bond’s sympathy and caution. Bond finds his job complicated not just by Melina’s itchy trigger finger, but also by the enmity of two smuggling organisations with roots in the Greek resistance of World War II, one run by Kristatos (Julian Glover, who had been one of Moore’s rivals for the part of Bond years before), an anglophile and seeming samaritan, and that of Milos ‘The Dove’ Columbo (Topol). Kristatos paints Columbo, his former partisan partner, as the villain trying to obtain the coding device for Gogol. But Bond learns the hard way that Kristatos is the real villain, and must contend with his coterie of thugs, including fake defector and Olympian Erich Kriegler (John Wyman), and Locque, who runs down and kills one of Bond’s casual lovers, a fake Countess (Cassandra Harris, married to Pierce Brosnan at the time) who works for Columbo. Bond gets salty vengeance by pushing the trapped Locque off a cliff inside his wrecked car, before teaming with Melina to study her father’s log and track down the St. Georges.

The desire to stretch the now well-worn Bond formula in some new directions manifested here in some tweaks both slight and significant, including offering a glimpse of singer Sheena Easton as her sultry theme song for this entry plays in the credits, and signing off with a gag as Bond ignores a phone call from Margaret Thatcher (Janet Brown), the only time a Bond film ever nodded to a contemporary politician. This return to a down-to-earth take on Bond doesn’t always pay off as potently as it might have, in part because the pacing problems that would dog Glen’s entries are apparent, and the film still strides languidly through some regulation franchise business, like visits to swank casinos and doomed side romances. Kristatos and Columbo make for interesting villain and ally, but don’t quite seem able to carve a space large enough for themselves, and Glover gives a distracted performance. An annoying subplot sees Bond contending with teenage maneater Bibi (Lynn Holly-Johnson), an ice skating protégée of Kristatos, which seems present to sneak in some youth appeal given Moore was over 50 by the time, and to demonstrate there are some thresholds Bond just won’t breach. For Your Eyes Only also had to deal with the death of Bernard Lee, whose brief but inimitable turns as the crusty M had always been a series highlight. After offering a string of brilliant action sequences, the film builds to a climax that plays out with a weird lack of good action.

These problems are however more than matched by the plusses, which include location work in the Italian Alps and the Greek isles filmed with fervent colour by Alan Hume, and a trio of excellent action set-pieces. The first is a combination ski and motorcycle chase that sees Kriegler trying to run down Bond, careening down snowy slopes and traversing a bobsled course. The second is an underwater battle when Bond and Melina find the St. Georges and obtain the coding machine, but then have to fight one of Kristatos’ henchmen in a pressure suit, and another in a submersible. The third comes when Bond, backed up by Melina and Columbo, climbs a cliff to Kristatos’ hideout in a former monastery at Meteora, only for the stays for his roping to be knocked out one by one by a goon. There’s also a terrific sequence in which Kristatos keelhauls Bond and Melina behind his yacht, their bodies grazing coral crops and both desperately snatching for air, until Bond manages to tie their tow rope around a rock and snap it. Here For Your Eyes Only manages beautifully to tie together the more often divided spirit of the Bond series, the serial-like situation of peril mediated by an eminently credible and gruellingly physical sense of danger. Although he would remain for the most part a fairly stolid director, Glen manages some good directing touches here, based in his feel for editing, as when he repeatedly cuts away from Bond and Melina in the ship to the viewpoint of the approaching hardsuited goon, raspy breathing and menacing perspective ratcheting up surprisingly creepy anticipation. Later, the lights of the enemy submersible are glimpsed like the eyes of some great underwater beast far off in the murk. Glen warns the audience each time something is about to happen, but then holds off the reveal for a few beats longer than expected, so he can land the punch as a shock.

Moore himself took the turn towards a tougher brand of Bond in his stride, perhaps reflecting the recent ventures he had taken out of this zone in other movies. The actor doesn’t quite bring the same ease to the part he did to The Spy Who Loved Me, betraying the fact he knew he was getting a bit old for this sort of thing, and seeming a little strained by proceedings. But that also helps lend some depth to his performance, as Moore does the necessary trick of spinning on a penny from flip to gravitas when confronted by reminders of how brutal and irrational human beings can be, and then indulging the streak in himself, as when he kills Locque. His desire to present Bond as essentially a gentleman is apparent observed as he coaches Melina through a spasm of hate and determination to press ahead with killing her enemies, and when he fends off Bibi’s advances with careful deflection and spry quips. The punch-line, in which Bond cheats Gogol of his prize by throwing the coding machine over the cliff and declaring this act the essence of détente, has a laconic kick that does seem worthy of Fleming’s creation. Another of Moore’s charming if not so purposeful qualities was his declining skill in the rough-and-tumble aspects of the role – the odd karate kick was generally the limit of his action man cred by this point. But this opened the door for the incredible stunt work that recurs throughout all entries, particular in For Your Eyes Only, which testify these days to a lost world of gutsy glories, in such contrast to our CGI-riddled days, when even the most lightweight movies really were made and not processed. These three films certainly confirm that Moore’s Bond days were uneven, but just as readily speak of how, at their best, they offered sublime entertainment.