LIVE AND LET DIE
THE BOOK
Date: 1954
Author: Ian Fleming
“This is the most racist book I’ve ever read, and I’m including Gone with the Wind in that.” — Joan Carr, December 2022.
That’s my wife, for those who don’t know, and this was her first comment as she read Live and Let Die a little bit ahead of me. (I was still soldiering through all the Casino Royale adaptations.) It turned out to be one of many times she would hoot and read aloud some vile bit of verbiage.
My reaction after I read the book was to quote actor Sean Bean (as quoted by actor Maisie Williams): “Aye, ye’re not wrong about that, gal.” Live and Let Die is virulently racist. But so is most pop culture I’ve consumed from the pre-Civil Rights era, so it doesn’t surprise me. I accept it as reflective of the time
I do have to say it’s a bit over the top. The racism is both casual and overt. Even when Fleming tries to be complimentary, he’s condescending. And his attempt at “negro” dialect is painful.
(To be fair, his white American dialogue is unconvincing, too. His attempts at depicting how Americans speak more casually and slangy than Britons comes off as almost child-like.)
But there’s a lot of opportunity for racism, because Bond’s foes are primarily black.
The head bad guy, who is black, is described as a genius frequently. And some black people — like a porter on Bond’s train to Florida — are heroic. I think this is Fleming genuinely trying NOT to be racist. But given his status and viewpoint, he just can’t help it.
But as I say, this is a book from the 1950s, and this is how a book from the 1950s is going to depict black people. You shrug and move on.
THE PLOT
Bond investigates the appearance of a lot of 18th century gold coins in New York’s Harlem. This is a concern for MI6, as the profits from sale of the coins appear to be funding SMERSH. Bond and sidekick Felix Leiter, the CIA agent introduced in the first book, discover that behind it all is a black kingpin named Mr. Big or The Big Man (his real name is Buonaparte Ignace Gallia, initials BIG), who is both a criminal kingpin and a Russian agent.
Bond goes from Harlem, where the coins are laundered and distributed in Big’s nightclubs; to St. Petersburg, where the coins are brought into the country by boat; to Jamaica, where the coins originate (Bloody Morgan’s pirate stash, discovered by Mr. Big on Surprise Island in Jamaica, which he owns). Along the way, Bond contends with assassination attempts by various Mr. Big associates, all of whom are black and speak in a bizarre sharecropper patois.
In St. Petersburg, Bond discovers The Big Man hides the coins in the tanks of exotic, poisonous fish in his bait shop/warehouse in Florida. CIA agent Felix Leiter discovers that being half-eaten by a shark is painful.
In Jamaica, Bond takes a walk in a diving suit across Shark Bay to Surprise Island, where he fights an octopus and is (of course) captured. Solitaire was kidnapped from The Everglades Hotel earlier, and The Big Man intends to kill them both by dragging them behind his boat across a reef.
This obviously doesn’t succeed — Bond is still alive for a third book — but I won’t spoil the ending.
BOND AND THE BOYS
I’ve noticed in both books that Bond isn’t cold and efficient with men he considers friends. He’s warm, voluble, complimentary — bubbly, even. His friends (Leiter, station chief Strangways, Quarrel, etc.) respond in kind. He gets daily massages and nursing from Quarrel, who “speaks softly” while kneading his muscles.
Meanwhile, he doesn’t share nearly as much of himself with women that he is obviously (too obviously) trying to bed.
Let me digress to say that I do understand Fleming’s take on the male-female dynamic. Bond straight up tells us he considers women “recreation” and a reward for getting the job done. This is the second book where Bond has used the phrase “award-taking” as reference to sex as his due after a mission.
It’s misogyny of the first order, but probably also fairly representative of the era, at least in Fleming’s upper-class England. And this is the male-wish-fulfillment genre, so various women do respond to Bond’s cringey efforts at flirting. I suspend my disbelief, and accept that Bond’s clumsy overtures somehow work.
But what I don’t fully understand is Bond’s boyish enthusiasm with other men. It borders on homoeroticism, especially since it occurs to me that if he spoke to women with the same emotional honesty and openness he does to Leiter, his success in the sexual arena would be more plausible.
I don’t think bi-curious is Fleming’s intention, so I have to figure out what it is. My best guess is that it’s a holdover from upper-class, all-male British high schools like Eton, which Fleming attended for two years. Maybe this behavior was the social norm among upper-crust boys. That’s my working theory as I approach the rest of the oeuvre.
Of course, that grown men in these books still act like high school boys is a concern in its own right. But, like so much of Bond, we must accept it as what Fleming considered appropriate and admirable in his time and place, not what we would consider appropriate and admirable today.
FLEMING ON AMERICA
I noted in Casino Royale that the Americans were relegated to funding Bond’s heroics, not performing any of their own. It led me to speculate on what Fleming’s attitude toward his overseas cousins might have been. In that book, I decided he considered Americans amusing rubes to be tolerated for their wealth.
This book takes place mostly in America (until the third act in Jamaica) so there is considerably more information to work with.
But Fleming is so contradictory that I can’t come to any conclusions yet. In some passages he says lovely things about America and Americans, but in others he refers to a country covered in trash, and of the “great hard continent of Eldollardo.” Fleming seems equal parts impressed and disgusted with the United States in this book, so my conclusions are equally mixed.
ACTION SCENES
This is a much more action-packed book than Casino Royale, and Fleming’s prose meets the moment. There are scenes that are genuinely thrilling or chilling, like the climactic “keelhauling.” And, hey, Bond actually gets to use his gun this time.
Given the riveting (and terrifying) torture scene in the first book, a pattern is emerging. It appears that, while he’s not so good at characterization and dialogue, Fleming has quite an inventive imagination for action, and writes it well.
Not all of it works. The elevator-table scene involves the sort of preposterous, unnecessary gadgetry that got the Pierce Brosnan movies into critical hot water. There are a lot easier ways to kidnap people, strap them in a chair and torture them for information. (See: Casino Royale.) Going to the expense and trouble of building a silent elevator mechanism under chairs and a table, which are presumably bolted to the floor, but somehow disguised so that trained espionage agents will not notice, to kidnap people (instead of just putting a gun to their heads and saying “come with me”), and then arranging a timed blackout in a packed nightclub to operate it (instead of just turning out the lights when you feel like it), and then going to the expense and trouble of building a desk with a handgun built in (instead of just holding someone at gunpoint) is sublimely silly.
But Bond and Leiter aren’t very convincing as trained espionage agents, either. They swan about Harlem for “reconnaissance” in Mr. Big’s territory, their pale faces glowing in a sea of black, constantly under observation and taking no care for their personal safety as they bar-hop. They go to a nightclub full of The Big Man’s torpedoes and continue drinking until they are (easily) captured.
Later in Florida, they do the same sort of dangerous “reconnaissance,” where they practically dare “The Robber,” Big’s lieutenant, to shoot them. Failing to get killed in that manner, they get drunk at their hotel, and Felix decides to go after The Robber without a plan, without backup (available from the CIA and FBI with a phone call, plus Bond right next door), and probably still drunk. That he only got half-eaten by a shark is a lucky break. It would have been a lot less bother to just shoot him.
Speaking of which, Lieter’s fate seemed at first a waste of a good character. But then I realized that Leiter could continue as a sidekick, only one who wouldn’t be going on mission. Whether Fleming planned this or not (and I suspect he did), this keeps Leiter available as a CIA liaison (a lack of one wouldn’t be plausible in most missions, given America’s post-war stature), but one who won’t be competition for Bond in the action department.
In short, crippling Leiter permanently relegates him (and the Americans) to a support role, leaving it to Bond (and the Brits) to save the world.
Getting back to action scenes, the “keelhauling” scene is an imaginative highlight in this book, as was the torture scene was in Casino Royale. I’m impressed with this aspect of Fleming’s writing.
Other observations:
- Bond literally name drops the title of the book in conversation with Strangways. I laugh when they do that in movies; I laughed here.
- The “my darlings” between Bond and Solitaire came out early in this book, just as they did in Casino Royale with Vesper. Not only is that a phrase I’ve never heard a real, live person use, but it makes Bond look even more caddish than usual in that he uses these endearments on a woman whom he will obviously dump before the next book.
- My wife and I both noticed with amusement that, no matter the urgency of a situation, Bond will always take time for breakfast. The closest he came to skipping the meal was when he got the message that Leiter had gone after The Robber all by his lonesome some three hours previous. Even knowing his friend was in peril, Bond still managed some coffee and rolls before racing after him.
- There are couple of meals in this book which are mentioned but not described. I was almost disappointed! Fleming’s enthusiasm for describing food and drink is obvious, and he has a copious vocabulary for doing so.
- Bond’s drinking is truly prodigious. His BAC must be at least .007 at all times.
- There’s a lot of moving around in this story (London to New York to St. Pete to Jamaica), just as Casino Royale took us to the ultra-fancy Royale-les-Eaux, France. I think it’s obvious, and kinda cool, that Fleming wants to entice his middle class, 1950s readers with exotic places they will never visit.
- Obviously, New York and St. Petersburg aren’t exotic by American standards. But Fleming was likely still writing for a British audience at this point. Wiki helpfully informs me that the first two books sold poorly in the U.S., whereas Live and Let Die sold out its first printing in Britain and went to a second, and Casino Royale sold out three printings and went to a fourth.
- When flying over Cuba, the narrator remarks that it’s the richest island in the world. Boy, is Fidel Castro going to poke a hole in that idea a few years after this book! Still, this is a strange thing to say. Isn’t Japan an island? Hong Kong? Singapore? Hawaii? Australia? Great Britain? At least one of those was probably wealthier than Cuba in 1954, especially per capita. (There’s a reason there was a revolution in 1959.) I guess it depends on your definitions, which brings us to ...
- Jamaica is depicted as pretty wealthy, too. I think that was probably just from a white colonizer’s point of view. (And Fleming, having an estate there, was one of those.) That probably explains his Cuba remarks, too.
- I thought "The Robber" was a goofy name for a serious character. But then I realized its derived from the warehouse where he works, The Ouroboros. You just have to mispronounce it as O-robber-us. I think that's a connection Bond discovers, but I didn't realize that as I was reading — I just thought he was having an epiphany.
THE MOVIE
Date: 1973 (Movie #9; Eon movie #8)
Adapted by: Tom Mankiewicz
Director: Guy Hamilton
Starring: Roger Moore (James Bond), Yaphet Kotto (Kananga/Big), Jane Seymour (Solitaire), David Hedison (Felix Leiter), Bernard Lee (M.), Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny), Roy Stewart (Quarrel)
Notable songs: “Live and Let Die,” written by Paul and Linda McCartney, performed by Paul McCartney and Wings
The movie takes a lot of liberties with the book, but the basic structure is there. One thing that isn’t missing is the racism.
It’s not the same sort of casual racism that existed in the ‘50s, though. Here we have a movie that Wiki helpfully tells us was filmed at the height of blaxploitation, so it’s a different breed of racist claptrap — one where, presumably, black people are in on the joke. That doesn’t help it age any more gracefully.
So we have jive talk and afros and ‘70s outfits and, of course, dancing: Nightclub dancing, street parade dancing, voodoo dancing. The one thing I got out of all this concentrated ‘70s blackness is that it made Roger Moore’s stiff, pasty-white Bond look painfully out of date and out of his element.
Which is not at all my only complaint about this movie, which I now remember seeing back in 1973 … and it was the James Bond movie that made me stop watching James Bond movies for 14 years. It’s simply bad, and Roger Moore’s weak debut (after all those Sean Connery movies) doesn’t improve it any.
THE PLOT
Bond is assigned to investigate the death of three MI6 agents in the Americas, one in New York, one in New Orleans and one in the fictional island of San Monique.
He begins in New York, where he escapes an assassination attempt (mirroring the bomb in Print Bond’s hotel room), the warlord of the Caribbean island of San Monique. Kananga is there to speak at the United Nations. Bond meets up with CIA agent Felix Leiter and runs afoul of Mr. Big, the kingpin of Harlem, whose skin is grayish (like in the book). He is kidnapped, meets Solitaire, a Tarot reader. (Again, mirroring the book.) As opposed to the book, this Solitaire’s powers are depicted as genuine from the get-go, but she will lose them if she has sex.
There’s some sort of link between Mr. Big and Kananga, so Bond continues his investigation in San Monique. He is met by Quarrel Jr., the son of agent Quarrel, killed in Dr. No when Bond was still Sean Connery. He also meets young CIA agent Rosie Carver (“It’s only my second mission!”), who is a double agent and killed by Kananga’s men when her cover is blown. Solitaire is there for some reason, held by … Kananga? Mr. Big? Whatever, Bond frees her and beds her, making her useless to Mr. Big.
Since Big will now kill her, Solitaire accompanies Bond to the third investigation in New Orleans. They are immediately kidnapped by Mr. Big, who pulls off his gray face — it’s gray because it’s a mask — to reveal he is also Kananga. He monologues his cunning scheme, which is to grow poppies in San Monique, where the locals are cowed by voodoo, transport heroin to New Orleans and then distribute it free at Mr. Big’s nationwide chain of Fillet of Soul restaurants/nightclubs to drive other drug traffickers out of business while creating lots of new addicts. He then tests Solitaire’s powers, but she fails the test and he knows she’s no longer a virgin. He sends Bond with henchmen Tee Hee and Adam to be eaten by crocodiles, and takes Solitaire to San Monique to be sacrificed to Baron Samedi, king of the loa. Instead of, you know, just shooting them.
Bond escapes (of course) and kills Adam (among others) in a speedboat chase. He goes to San Monique and blows up the poppy fields, kills Baron Samedi and rescues Solitaire. But Kananga captures them again (like in the books, Bond gets captured a lot), and begins lowering them into a shark tank (as opposed to death-by-reef in the book). Bond escapes again with a heretofore unseen gimmick in his watch (we knew it was magnetic, but didn’t know it had a saw), and kills Kananga by shoving a compressed-air capsule into his mouth. (He explodes comically.)
The authorities arrive and Leiter accompanies Bond and Solitaire to a train station in New Orleans for the trip back to New York. “What will you do on a train for seven days?” Leiter wonders, because he is evidently unfamiliar with the concept of sex. Sad. Anyway, Tee Hee has smuggled on board for one last attempt to kill Bond, which fails.
CHANGES FROM THE BOOK
As noted above, the movie follows the basic spine of the book, with Movie Bond going from New York to New Orleans to San Monique, much like Print Bond went from New York to St. Petersburg to Jamaica. But the reasons for the trip — and the bad guy’s plot — are entirely different, which has good points and bad points.
Good points: The plot in the book was really complex and headache-inducing, involving pirate booty being laundered into funding for SMERSH. How did SMERSH get hold of pirate treasure? Why would they need a ganglord to launder it? And if they did, why use one in New York as opposed to, say, Miami or Tampa?
The movie tidies all this up by removing the tangential SMERSH connection and making Mr. Big’s plan a plain old 1970s heroin-smuggling operation. In this scenario, it makes perfect sense that a New York gang would forge connections in the Caribbean (or somewhere else south of the U.S.) to set up the farm-to-consumer supply chain. This new narrative explains Bond’s north-south trek better, which transforms from New York-St. Petersburg-Jamaica to New York-New Orleans-San Monique.
But here come the bad points: Without SMERSH, Bond’s connection to the story gets pretty weak. Yes, he’s investigating the murder of MI6 agents, but why were they in the Americas sniffing around a drug-running operation anyway? The FBI should be handling Mr. Big, and the CIA or DEA should be breaking up the Caribbean organization. Bond isn’t a cop, and MI6 doesn’t investigate drug-running in the U.S. As to the Caribbean, Britain didn’t have many interests there in 1973.
And while the movie has a number of decent action sequences — the boat chase is quite good — it left some significant bits from the book completely out.
For example, Bond’s walk across the Surprise Island bay in a diving suit, and his battle with an octopus, are omitted. (This is where he gamely gave up whiskey for a week, and cut down to 10 cigarettes a day, to train!) And we don’t get to see pirate booty. You can’t have enough pirate booty.
Another omission is Leiter’s encounter with a shark. I’m not happy that Leiter was maimed, but it did raise the stakes in the book. In the movie, no danger — to anyone — ever felt real.
In the book, Big’s face is grayish because he has a heart condition. The movie includes the gray face, but makes it the result of Kananga wearing a mask. Since neither the gray face nor the heart condition were vital to the plot of the book, they should probably have just omitted it for the movie and streamlined Kananga/Big into one guy instead of inventing a complicated reason to include the gray face.
One omission I applaud is the movie leaving out Bond and Leiter’s “reconnaissance” in Harlem and St. Petersburg. It almost got them killed more than once, proved useless and made them both look like idiots.
Some other changes are somewhat cosmetic, but worth mention. In the book, for example, Tee Hee breaks Bond’s finger (which was stomach-churning), whereas in the movie, he just threatens to cut it off. In the movie, Bond is initially captured with a turning wall in a nightclub, but the elevator gag turns up later in the movie as well.
And there’s a New Orleans funeral trick unique to the movie (adios, agents Hamilton and Strutter), because the book didn’t go to New Orleans. As I now recall, the Li’l Capn didn’t understand how the funeral bits were connected to the rest of the movie in 1973. Now I understand many things better, among them that sometimes screenwriters make an excuse to use local color, even if it doesn’t serve the plot very well.
CHANGES IN THE CHARACTERS
James Bond: There’s no sense going over the “who’s your favorite Bond” debate again, as everyone has their opinion and nobody’s going to argue them out of it.
But in the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that Roger Moore is my least favorite Bond. (So far, that is; I haven’t experienced Pierce Brosnan yet.) Much of the reason I like Connery, Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig is the sense that they are dangerous. I feel that there’s barely restrained rage inside those tuxedoes, which may explode into violence any minute. Even George Lazenby seemed a bit dangerous, as he was usually the biggest guy in any scene.
I just don’t feel that way with Moore. When he punches someone and they fall down, I simply don’t believe it — I think it much more likely that he’d break his hand. He just seems too effete to be an effective hand-to-hand fighter. His chief weapons seem to be an arched eyebrow and a cheeky remark, and his natural milieu a cocktail party. He ‘s also too old (45 when filming Live and Let Die) and just can’t help having a Dad bod.
So I wasn’t likely to be crazy about Moore’s debut in any case. But worse, the screenwriter kept giving him all those lame, immature, badly delivered sex puns. Ick!
Mr. Big: In the book, The Big Man had many of his followers convinced he was voodoo spirit Baron Samedi, and he always had a Samedi shrine nearby. The movie split that into three parts (sort of) by having a separate thug playing Samedi, while Mr. Big (a kingpin in New York) and Kananga (a warlord in San Monique) were presented as two people, but were secretly the same guy (played by Yaphet Kotto). There were plenty of voodoo symbols, and the “Oh Cult” shop (ha!), but no Samedi shrines (since we actually had a Samedi, played by Geoffrey Holder of the memorable ‘70s 7-Up commercials).
Kotto delivered a terrific performance in Alien, and I was hoping he’d be awesome here. Sadly, his Mr. Big was reserved to point of coma, and his line delivery seemed hesitant. And I said above splitting the character (presumably to get us the mask, and hence the gray face on Big) was a mistake that just robbed Yaphet Kotto of screen time.
Solitaire: Solitaire in the movie is very similar to the one in the book, with the addition of establishing her clairvoyance as real. The book wisely left it fuzzy whether she had powers or not, as magic and/or ESP shouldn’t exist in Bond’s world (any more than they do in ours). Bond had “respect” for her intuition, but that’s far as it went. So I didn’t much care for that. Also, in the movie she loses her powers if she has sex, which of course she does with Bond, which I guess is a metaphor of some kind.
It does help to explain why Mr. Big isn’t taking sexual advantage of a sexy girl who is essentially a slave. (Which he probably did in the book. Fleming doesn’t even raise the specter of that image, letting the audience guess if they are inclined to. That seems the better play.)
Felix Leiter: Bond’s CIA sidekick doesn’t do much of anything in the movie that he did in the book, which is a good thing, since he lost an arm and leg there. Played by David Hedison (Journey to the Bottom of the Sea, The Enemy Below), Leiter is mostly seen in some sort of command post, making snarky remarks to Bond over the phone. That’s actually a much more natural setting for a CIA agent than bar-hopping in Harlem and St. Petersburg.
Even Movie Leiter thinks Movie Bond’s trip to north Manhattan was dumb, sarcastically remarking on Bond’s “disguise” as a white guy parading around black Harlem. He would probably be disgusted at Print Leiter doing the same thing.
The Henchmen: Tee Hee (Julius Harris) goes from a minor, short-lived henchman in the book to Big’s main enforcer in the movie, one with a powerful (but really fake-looking) mechanical arm. Whisper (Earl Jolly Brown), who is like The Shadow’s Burbank in the book, is just another enforcer, notable only for being fat. (The Burbank bit was far cooler.) Meanwhile, characters like Adam (Tommy Lane) and Dambala (Michael Ebbin) are invented for the movie (which was unnecessary, since the book offered plenty of names they could have used, like Flannel, Blabbermouth Foley, McThing and Sam Miami).
Quarrel: This Quarrel is the son of Quarrel, thanks to the movies producing the books out of order, but it doesn’t matter, since he doesn’t do much.
Strangways: He is Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Film.
Rosie Carter: Played by Gloria Hendry, Rosie is a turncoat CIA agent invented for the movie, whose only significance is that she’s the first black Bond girl. In the scene where she is killed, one wonders why the bad guys didn’t simply kill Bond. (Actually, I wondered about that several times.)
I will admit that this hookup generated the best exchange in the movie:
Rosie Carter: You don't understand, sir. They'll kill me if I do.
James Bond: And I'll kill you if you don't.
Rosie: But you couldn't. You wouldn't. Not after what we just done.
James Bond: Well, I certainly wouldn't have killed you before.
Sheriff J.W. Pepper: Maybe because I live in the South, I have never found the fat, racist, stupid Southern lawman funny. I didn’t find Pepper (Clifton James) funny when I watched this movie back in 1973. I didn’t think this comic-relief archetype was funny in Smokey and the Bandit four years later. I didn’t even like it when Cartman was demanding people respect his uh-thar-it-tie in South Park. This movie had enough strikes against it without throwing in a lazy cliche. Especially a wink-wink one that starts down the road to self-parody.
The James Bond Encyclopedia asserts, “Live and Let Die plays like a Marvel comic book version of a James Bond film. Its plot is superfluous (something about drug smuggling that is never properly explained or dealt with), its characters are fantasy types … and its direction uninspired. It does, however, have some good action sequences.”
I agree. This is a movie aimed at the immature, with a number of plot holes, a weak script and some bad acting. With Casino Royale I preferred the 2006 movie, but with Live and Let Die I think the book — with all of its faults — is probably the better choice.
Fun Facts to Know and Tell
- Producer Cubby Broccoli, producer Albert Saltzman and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz ran across an alligator/crocodile farm when scouting locations in Jamaica, with a “Trespassers will be eaten” sign. They loved it, and Mankiewicz included the sign and the farm in the plot (transplanted to New Orleans). The owner, Ross Kananga, performed the stunt where Bond runs across the backs of the crocodiles. His surname was used for Yaphet Kotto’s bad guy.
- South Florida is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles are found together in the wild. Just another reason to avoid the state.
- Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz is the nephew of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who wrote Citizen Kane and is the subject of the 2020 movie Mank. Yes, he’s a nepo baby.
- “Live and Let Die” was the first Bond theme song in which John Barry was not involved. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart for three weeks and was nominated for an Academy Award.
- There is debate over the “Live and Let Die” lyrics, where some people hear prepositional doubling (“But if this ever-changing world in which we live in”), or even tripling (“But in this ever-changing world in which we live in”), others hear a completely grammatical line (“But if this ever-changing world in which we’re living”). McCartney himself isn’t sure what he wrote.
- Jane Seymour’s real name is Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg.
THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
Date: 2019
Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment
Creators: Van Jensen (story), Kewber Baal (art), Fay Dalton (cover)
Once again, this book adds little to the discussion. It is word-for-word from the book, although not every word, and adopts the first GN’s approach where Bond’s observations and descriptions are broken out of the narrative/dialogue into a separate font and color (white). I consider this is welcome innovation, that is only really possible in a graphic novel format.
As to the art, I found it only barely serviceable, and just a notch above mediocre. I say that with no satisfaction.
This is the last of the Dynamite adaptations — there were only two — and I can't say I'm sorry they're done.
Replies
Well done, Cap! I'm really enjoying these. I will come back later (probably tomorrow) to add some additional color commentary. I wanted to read the entire thing without interruption first. If I respond as I read, I often find (in posts such as this) that you anticipate me a bit later on, as you did twice here.
I've never read a James Bond novel and this description is not making the case that I should.
I certainly have never been inclined to compare any James Bond novel against the movies that bear the same name. I would say "adapted into movies," but I understand that the longer the movie series went on, the less the movies had to do with the books to the point that some of them only have the title and lead character in common. (There are people who think that's terribly important, but I don't understand why.)
That said ... I do have a soft spot for Live and Let Die, the movie. It's the first James Bond movie I ever saw, back when movies appeared on network television a year or so after appearing in theaters. Youngster that I was at the time, I let all its terribleness wash over me uncritically along with its positives, like the speedboat chase and Geoffrey Holder and Yaphet Kotto (who starred in many a Blaxploitation flick back in the day; so did Julius Harris), and the Paul McCartney and Wings title tune. And the youngster still in me wins out over the adult me and won't let me watch Live and Let Die with the critical eye the adult me would use to pick it to shreds.
But, no, Roger Moore doesn't rank as a worthy Bond, but I'll still take him over Pierce Brosnan.
Oh, yeah -- Sheriff J.W. Pepper IS quite terrible and quite unfunny.
Youngster that I was at the time, I let all its terribleness wash over me uncritically.
This made me laugh out loud, and start mentally listing all the times that young me also allowed terribleness to wash over me uncritically. What a great phrase!
Hey Cap, I'm sure you're aware of it, but I did a viewing project a few years ago of the Connery/Moore Bond films here.
Yes, and I’ve moved it to the Captain Comics channel with my own Bondian threads. I’ve tried to create a separate Bond channel but Ning is not cooperating. Maybe i’ve hit a limit.
Randy Jackson said:
As I recall, what I had to say about Live and Let Die was that it wasn't a good movie, but it was a fun movie. Kind of like. Bob Haney script. If you start thinking about it too much you notice all the holes in the plot, the characters acting off-model —yet at the same time you aren't upset because you had fun.
But so is most pop culture I’ve consumed from the pre-Civil Rights era, so it doesn’t surprise me. I accept it as reflective of the time
There is plenty of racism in Britain, though it oesn't always have the same targets or manifest in exactly the same ways as it does in the U.S. Something called The Black and White Minstrel Show ran on the BBC from 1958 to 1978. Even Doctor Who has had its cringey, and don't even get me started on Monty Python's Flying Circus.
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And his attempt at “negro” dialect is painful.
Pretty much every such attempt that I've seen was painful.
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I think this is Fleming genuinely trying NOT to be racist. But given his status and viewpoint, he just can’t help it.
As opposed to guys like Lovecraft or Howard who were just racist.
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But what I don’t fully understand is Bond’s boyish enthusiasm with other men. It borders on homoeroticism
"Borders", Hell. I wonder what's really going on in the heads of these guys who are so desperately "heterosexual", but that's probably best left alone. As for British public schools, I'm reasonably certain that a fair amount of "don't ask, don't tell" behavior went on in those places, evem among guys who "walked the straight and narrow" the rest of their lives.
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I noted in Casino Royale that the Americans were relegated to funding Bond’s heroics, not performing any of their own. It led me to speculate on what Fleming’s attitude toward his overseas cousins might have been.
I've always noted a certain amount of disdain for America and Americans in British popular culture. (Pretty much every "American" character in classic Doctor Who was a caricature, and the new series hasn't been entiely free from it, either) My feeling is that to this day, the British have never quite gotten over the loss of Empire and the loss of their status as the dominant power in the Western world to those upstart Yanks.
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But Bond and Leiter aren’t very convincing as trained espionage agents, either.
I always had a hard time buying into Bond as a character, because I thought "Spies are supposed to be inconspicuous. The best spy is the one that carried out their mission and you never knew they were there." I bet that the best spies are Joe Nobody types that you wouldn't look twice at, not flashy "sophisticates".
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My wife and I both noticed with amusement that, no matter the urgency of a situation, Bond will always take time for breakfast.
Well, it is the most important meal of the day, Skipper!
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Isn’t Japan an island?
Technically, it's one big island, three medium-sized islands, and and over a hundred small islands, but your point is valid.
When I was watching the movies, I noticed that Bond was a very good agent, but not a terribly secret one. Almost every infiltration he makes is discovered instantly.
“This is the most racist book I’ve ever read, and I’m including Gone with the Wind in that.” — Joan Carr, December 2022.
It turned out to be one of many times she would hoot and read aloud some vile bit of verbiage.
I did once tell you, "There's more where that came from." If that was her first comment, I'm sure that was the "negress chauffer" scene, which occurs early on.
"Even when Fleming tries to be complimentary, he’s condescending."
I also mentioned Felix Leiter's "Personally, I like Negroes" speech.
"...the 'keelhauling' scene is an imaginative highlight in this book."
That motif will be folded in to another movie.
"Lieter’s fate seemed at first a waste of a good character."
We haven't seen the last of Felix Leiter.
"Fleming has quite an inventive imagination for action, and writes it well."
Agreed.
"Fleming’s enthusiasm for describing food and drink is obvious, and he has a copious vocabulary for doing so."
Agreed.
"Bond’s drinking is truly prodigious. His BAC must be at least .007 at all times."
Ha!
"Fleming, having an estate [in Jamaica]..."
The name of his house was "Goldeneye" (later used as the title of a movie but otherwise unrelated). I've seen pictures of it... it's not all that impressive, hardly an "estate" (of course, I don't know how much land it sits on, but the house itself is quite small).
"It’s simply bad, and Roger Moore’s weak debut (after all those Sean Connery movies) doesn’t improve it any."
Ooh, you're not going to like many of the Moore films going forward... not that this one is so good, but it is, at least, (more or less) faithful to the source material.
"He is met by Quarrel Jr., the son of agent Quarrel, killed in Dr. No when Bond was still Sean Connery."
Okay, so you know that.
"(He explodes comically.)"
"He always did have an overinflated opinion of himself."
"Another omission is Leiter’s encounter with a shark."
That scene, too, will be folded into a later movie.
"Much of the reason I like Connery, Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig is the sense that they are dangerous."
Back when the Living Daylights was playing at the theater, someone (it may have been Peter David) pointed out that, in order for an actor assaying the role of James bond to be successful, he must be equal parts lover and killer. Roger Moore made a convincing lover and Timothy Dalton made a convincing killer, but Sean Connery was able to play both convincingly.
"Strangways: He is Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Film."
There is a reason for that. (See Dr. No.) Strangways is the catalyst for the action in that book/movie and, having already introduced "Quarrel, Jr." for this movie, I don't think that would have worked for Strangways. ;)
"Maybe because I live in the South, I have never found the fat, racist, stupid Southern lawman funny."
I've got some bad news for you. The "beloved" (according to once source) Sheriff J.W. Pepper will be back in The Man with the Golden Gun (one of three movie-only characters to make back-to-back appearances on screen).
“But if this ever-changing world in which we’re living”
I wish I heard it that way. (I hear the "prepositional tripling.") Perhaps Sir Paul should rerecord it and enunciate.
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