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6
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8 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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This
was my very first 007 film. I saw it at an air
force base theater in Texas when I was 11 years
old. Back then I thought it was absolutely the
coolest movie ever made since... well, The
Omega Man. While time has certainly tempered
that adolescent assessment, 1973's Live
And Let Die remains a fairly solid entry
in the venerable action-adventure series, providing
an unusual debut vehicle for the Bond-Lite persona
of Roger Moore. (Or, as he's now known, Sir
Roger Moore.) The film jettisons many of the signature
James Bond flourishes —
something that was done deliberately to avoid
comparisons between Moore and Sean Connery. For
the first and only time since From
Russia With Love established the pre-titles
teaser, the character of Bond does not appear
until after the opening credits. It was
the first in the series to use a rock song (Paul
McCartney's Top 10 hit) for its theme as opposed
to a 'power ballad'. The standard version of Monty
Norman's famous James Bond theme music is never
heard. There is no meeting in M's office in which
our hero receives his mission briefing. Q, Bond's
crotchety gadgeteer and comic foil, doesn't have
a single scene in the picture. Bond never orders
a martini "shaken, not stirred"; here he prefers
bourbon and water. For his commando raid at the
climax of the movie Bond dispenses with his familiar
Walther automatic, instead arming himself with
a long-barreled .44 Magnum revolver. (Perhaps
a little Dirty Harry
influence there.) With its Caribbean voodoo motif,
Live And Let Die
is also the only Bond film to feature supernatural
elements.
Two British agents and a CIA
man on loan from the Americans, each investigating
the prime minister of a small Caribbean island
called San Monique, are all assassinated within
a 24-hour span. Secret service chief M (Bernard
Lee) shows up at Bond's flat early in the morning
to quickly brief him on the situation and get
him on the next flight to New York City, where
the chief suspect, Kananga (Yaphet Kotto), is
currently in residence at his nation's consulate.
Once there Bond is to team up with old CIA buddy
Felix Leiter (The Fly's
David Hedison, who'd reprise the role in 1989's
Licence
To Kill) and follow the politician's every
move. Bond's mission is simple: find out why the
three agents were killed. Obviously they were
on to something. But what? An attempt on Bond's
life is made almost as soon as he arrives in the
Big Apple, linking "two-bit island diplomat" Kananga
with the elusive Mr. Big, America's most powerful
black gangster. Captured by thugs in Harlem —
the dapper Englishman naturally sticks out like
a sore thumb —
007 is brought to Mr. Big's lair for dispensation.
Though his meeting with the organized crime head
is brief ("Names is for tombstones, baby!"),
Bond makes an impression on Big's personal psychic,
the mysterious Tarot-reading Solitaire (22-year
old Jane Seymour, one of the most beautiful of
all the Bond Girls). 007 escapes, of course, and
next trails Kananga to the warmer climes of San
Monique. Here he encounters voodoo hexes and a
foxy double agent (Gloria Hendry) out to set him
up. He's also reacquainted with Solitaire, who
performs the same fortune-telling services for
Kananga as Mr. Big. A bit of seduction and a little
basic cardsharking soon sees her won over to Bond's
side. Willingly, Solitaire leads Bond to Kananga's
secret: acres and acres of opium poppies, grown
under camouflage nets and protected by the island's
government.
From here on out the film is
nothing but a series of chases, captures and escapes,
virtually devoid of any plot. This makes for a
fast-paced ride, ably choreographed by director
Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger).
In his debut outing as Bond, Roger Moore successfully
puts his own stamp on the character without resorting
to the silly excesses seen in his later 007 films;
his humor is archly dry rather than the 'wink,
wink, nudge, nudge' variety. (To this day I still
get a chuckle out of the scene in which Bond,
being escorted away by Mr. Big's henchmen to be
executed, blithely quips to Solitaire, "Now
promise me you'll stay right there. I shan't be
long.") In his turn as the series' first (and
to date, only) black master villain, Kotto (Bone)
gives a strong performance, providing a worthy
opponent for Bond. His Kananga is rather like
a house cat —
given to sudden, disparate mood swings, indulging
an inbred sadistic streak as he toys with the
mouse he's cornered. (Only this mouse is armed
with gadgets from Q Branch.) He's backed by not
one, but two, larger-than-life lieutenants: Tee
Hee (Julius Harris), a giggle-prone enforcer with
a mechanical arm, and Baron Samedi (dancer/actor
Geoffrey Holder), a voodoo witchdoctor. They're
suitably menacing whenever Kotto is off-screen;
unfortunately Harris' pincer-hook looks quite
fake in a number of shots and Holder isn't given
much more to do than bray his trademark baritone
laugh. As Bond's love interest, Solitaire, the
young (and utterly gorgeous) Jane Seymour acquits
herself quite well. And the redneck antics of
Clifton James' buffoonish Louisiana sheriff, J.W.
Pepper, never fail to get laughs. (It was a mistake,
though, to bring him back for a totally unwarranted
appearance in the follow-up film, 1974's The
Man With The Golden Gun.)
A sizable chunk of Live
And Let Die was formulated on the fly,
as scenes and set-pieces were adapted or completely
rewritten whenever the filmmakers happened to
stumble on a cool place to shoot during location-scouting.
The result is a Bond movie even more episodic
than most, held together by the thinnest of plots.
The look of the film is also less expensive than
the five previous Bond adventures, as if the producers
were hedging their bets with Moore after the less-than-warm
reception audiences gave George Lazenby in On
Her Majesty's Secret Service. They needn't
have worried. Moore was up to the challenge, aided
by a couple of thrilling set-pieces that still
rank high in the Bond canon —
I speak of the escape from the reptile farm and
the 13-minute boat chase that follows. Nowadays
they'd be done with CGI crocodiles and explosions.
Bah!
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The
James Bond Special Edition DVDs were first released
in 1999-2000, then were withdrawn from the market
by MGM in 2001 — only to be partially reissued (7
titles only) in 2002, when Die
Another Day opened in theaters. Just last week
(Nov. 18) MGM re-released the remaining Bond DVDs
in two multi-disc box sets; as far as I know, these
titles will not be sold individually and will only
be available in the box sets. (And these sets will
be withdrawn in mid-2004... Rumor is, MGM will repackage
the Bond series yet again in 2006. Just how
many times are they going to do this?) Currently,
Live
And Let Die
is part of the James Bond Special Edition DVD
Collection Volume 3, which also includes Thunderball,
OHMSS, Octopussy,
A View To A Kill and
Die Another Day.
Live And Let Die
doesn't fare quite as well as most of the DVDs in
the series in terms of A/V quality. While color
balance is excellent, grain is readily apparent
and instances of speckling indicate no real restoration
work was done on the print used. Now don't get me
wrong... The film looks significantly better than
it ever has on VHS or TV broadcasts, and seeing
it in its original aspect ratio is an added benefit.
I personally have a bigger problem with the audio,
which, while serviceable enough, is the flat, somewhat
thin-sounding original mono mix. It gets the job
done but doesn't do any favors to the score or sound
effects. A newly-created 5.1 Surround track is definitely
warranted here. (2006, perhaps?)
While
the A/V specs aren't exactly anything to write home
about, MGM has packaged the film with enough bells
and whistles to please any Bond aficionado — terrific,
fan-pleasing extras are one of the big strengths
of the Bond Collection DVDs. Along with the
spiffy animated menus and expected assortment of
trailers, TV/radio spots and photo galleries, the
disc features two audio commentaries: the first
is an okay cut-and-paste job collating the recollections/anecdotes
of most of the major cast and crew members; the
second is a 'live' session recorded by screenwriter
Tom Mankiewicz as he actually watched the film.
(The latter track, while sparser, is the superior
one.) An excellent 30-minute 'making of' documentary,
Inside Live And Let Die, reveals just what
a make-it-up-as-we-go-along project the movie truly
was, and provides a fascinating glimpse at all the
stunts that went wrong (some quite a few times)
before a good take was finally secured. Mankiewicz,
Hamilton, Moore, Seymour, Kotto, Hendry and Harris
are among the participants.
11/25/03 |
| UPDATE
OOP for a couple of years, Live
And Let Die was reissued in December 2006
by MGM. This completely remastered 2-disc edition
— meticulously restored, given a new 5.1 Surround
audio mix and featuring additional extras — is a
part of The James Bond Ultimate
Collection Vol. 3, which also contains four
other 007 films. |
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