Jamaica

The James Bond Project #9: Live and Let Die (1973)

~ Randy Blazak ~ 19 Comments

January 24, 2025

This series is intended to evaluate each product of the James Bond film franchise through a feminist lens, and the relevance of the Bond archetype to shifting ideas of masculinity in the 2020s.

Live and Let Die (1973, directed by Guy Hamilton)

Now we’re into “my” Bond. The era of Roger Moore. And we’re still in America. Director Guy Hamilton and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz are back to give us a Bond version of a seventies blaxploitation film. Producers couldn’t bribe Sean Connery (with $5.5 million) to put his white dinner jacket on one more time so the scramble for the next Bond began. Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Anthony Hopkins, and (again) Burt Reynolds were considered but the license to kill went to Roger Moore (the first English actor to play the role), who had long been considered for the job. In the 1960s, Moore starred in The Saint, a British mystery thriller series, so he was 007 in training. Moore’s Bond comes off as more bourgeois than Connery’s, making his snarky quips much more funny. Maybe the comedic writing was just better in the seventies, but Live and Let Die has plenty of laugh out loud lines.

Live and Let Die is not a European film. The action takes place in New York (starting at the UN, then moving to Harlem), New Orleans, and the fictional island of San Monique. (Producers wanted to use Haiti, but the instability of Papa Doc Duvalier’s island forced filmmakers to move back to Jamaica and invent a tropical name.) There’s no Blofeld this time (but there is an underground lair!). Instead we get Mr. Big, a drug kingpin who has relationship with a Caribbean dictator named Kanaga (played by Yaphet Kotto, who had just played in the blaxploitation flick, Across 110th Street). The primary Bond “girl” this time is played by 21-year-old actress Jane Seymour. Since Pussy Galore (Goldfinger), the formula for the Bond girl has been a woman who is somehow in league with the bad guys who Bond peels away with his swarmy charm and Dudley Do-Right ethos. Here Solitaire (Seymour) is a psychic tarot card reader (as long as her virginity is intact) who belongs to the criminal Kanaga. Damsel in Distress Alert!!!

I didn’t see this movie when I came out the summer of 1973 (I was 9), but I knew all about it. The theme song was written and performed by Paul McCartney and Wings and was a radio staple that summer. I first saw it on TV a few years later and loved much of it, especially bayou boat chase that included a stunt that put the movie in the Guinness Book of World Records (which was like the Bible for kids in the 70s). As a boy in the Southern Klan town I was certainly challenged by the portrayals of black culture in the film that I found mostly frightening (especially the voodoo scenes). On its first TV screening the version that the Atlanta station showed removed the interracial kiss from the film. I missed out on that moment watching it age ll, but it was returned to the film by 1977 and, as a 13-year-old boy, I was already indoctrinated into the racist trope of black women as “sexual,” and was fixated on that scene. (The woman in question was CIA agent Rosie Carver, played by model Gloria Hendry.)

Live and Let Die was released at a time when “blaxploitation” films, made mostly by black filmmakers, started to find white audiences. Movies like Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972), and Cleopatra Jones (like Live and Let Die, in theaters the summer of ’73) were known for their gritty portrayals of black urban life, where black crime was often contrasted to the deeper crimes of racism. Live and Let Die contained many of these motifs and the images of James in Harlem capture a picture of urban decay that has long since gentrified. The film also finds great humor in the man out of place theme with Bond in his suit across 110th Street. “Can’t miss him. It’s like following a cue ball.” There’s a scene in a Harlem bar where Bond explains to a black waiter that ordering his whiskey “neat” means no ice, to which the waiter says, “Oh, we charge extra for that.” Brilliant.

Live and Let Die was hugely successful and worthy of our feminist analysis and probably a discussion about the portrayal of blackness as well.

Driver of Action – Maybe because there was (another) new Bond to introduce to the world, Roger Moore is the star of the show. We do get CIA agent Felix Leiter back in the fray (and a clever joke about a “Felix Lighter”). Felix (this time played by David Hedison) has, like in the last film, a team of unnamed CIA operatives, but this film is all about Bond in America, like a fish out of water. Everyone else is a  bit player.

Role of Violence – One might make the case that the violence in LALD is ramped up because it’s Bond vs. black gangsters (This time Mr. Big smacks the Bond girl instead of James), but it’s a pretty standard body count, including four MI-6 and CIA agents. As has become tradition, the carnage is saved for the end of the film, including 007 opening fire on a voodoo gathering. The climax of the film has James and Solitaire dangling over a pool of sharks (lordy) that end with 007 literally blowing up Mr. Big (his guts raining down into the shark pool). And after that, Bond battles Tee Hee, Mr. Big’s metal clawed henchman, tossing him out of the window of a moving train. Moore is less physical than Connery and Lazenby’s Bonds (at 45, Moore was 16 years older than Lazenby). He’s also more likely to rely on wit than weapons.

Vulnerability – This one is less clear. Moore is stepping into an established caricature that is forged on a popular formula. James shaving while sitting in the bathtub is about as “naked” as we are privy to witnessing. We do get to see James’ kitchen, complete with art deco tiles and espresso machine (Paging Martha Stewart!), but we still know little about James when he’s not 007-ing. Even his relationship with Rosie, the bumbling CIA agent posing as “Mrs. Bond” is more predatory than empathetic. Moore’s more bougie Bond is still walled off.

Sexual Potency – Bond is back. James quota of bedding three women is achieved in Live and Let Die. Bond’s first scene is him in the sack with a beautiful Italian agent, Miss Caruso, who has to hide in the closet when M and Moneypenny arrive at his apartment to give him his next mission. After they leave, he uses his cool magnet watch to unzip her dress for another round of “bonding.” In San Monique, he makes its with (double) agent Rosie in another interracial romp. When he calls her out for working for Mr. Big, looking for answers, he says, “And I’ll kill you if you don’t.” Having just had sex with him, she says, “But you couldn’t. You wouldn’t. Not after what we just done.” And his uber-creepy retort is, “Well, I certainly wouldn’t have killed you before.” Just a bit rapey. Finally, he beds the virginal Solitaire by tricking her with a tarot deck stacked with “Lover” cards so he can hit his quota. Even though her impropriety with Bond spells her death, she wants more 007 and begs him to come back to bed. “There’s no sense in going off half cocked,” he says in the best line of the film.

Connection – This new Bond is supremely detached, even from Moneypenny. When Rosie is killed, there’s not even a pause. There’s a reference to an MI-6 agent who was killed, and Bond says, “I rather liked him. We had the same hat maker.” That’s it. Even Felix is just a resource at the other end of a phone line. We do get the Bond/Bond girl end scene, this time not on a boat but a train to New York, headed for perhaps for some more cocking, somewhere south of Harlem.

Toxic Masculinity Scale: 5

Summary Live and Let Die has a racial subtext that is a bit rough in 2025. Let’s start with the good news. Producers hired a ton of black performers for this film. Scenes shot in Harlem, New Orleans, and Jamaica are populated with black bodies. Cabaret singer B. J. Arnau’s soulful version of McCartney’s theme song is a high point of the film. Having said that, the movie is rife with racial stereotypes, from “pimp mobiles” and black gangsters peddling heroin in hollowed-out Harlem, to “mystical blacks” dancing with snakes and chanting voodoo mumbo. As a dumb white kid in rural Georgia, the film didn’t make me want to advocate for black people, it made me afraid of them. It was a spin on that “mystical black” trope when Geoffrey Holder, who plays voodoo-practicing Baron Samedi, became the pitchman for 7-Up in the “Uncola” commercials a few years later.

Contemporary viewers are likely to pin LALD as both racist and sexist. You’ve got the southern white cop who calls black men “boy” and you’ve got Bond who calls every woman “darling.” You get the sense that all the movements toward equity that we starting to become institutionalized in society in the seventies are kept at arms length by the WASP male fantasy of Bond. It’s a fair start for Moore, who comes in as a more older “gentleman” than Connery, which might lead one to think we’d get a Bond with a little more introspection. (You learn things as you age!) Instead we get sardonic raised eyebrows and lies to get women’s underwear off. That’s not an evolved man.

The action scenes in this movie are absolutely spectacular. I could watch the boat chase a hundred times. The surprise appearance of an underground lair with sharks is a chef’s kiss gift to Bond fans. And the one liners, delivered like a Blofeld laser, are side splitting. (“Butterhook!”) The score by Beatles producer George Martin is epic. And the voodoo and alligator scenes are completely terrifying. There’s so much to love in this film, even if Bond is stuck in a world that has left him behind. As Sheriff J. W. Pepper says to Bond, “What are you? Some kinda doomsday machine, boy?” No, just a device to preserve the old order.

Next: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

The James Bond Project #8: Diamonds are Forever (1971)

The James Bond Project #7: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

The James Bond Project #6: You Only Live Twice (1967)

The James Bond Project #5: Casino Royale (1967)

The James Bond Project #4: Thunderball (1965)

The James Bond Project #3: Goldfinger (1964)

The James Bond Project #2: From Russia With Love (1963)

The James Bond Project: #1: Dr. No (1962)

The James Bond Project: #1 – Dr. No (1962)

~ Randy Blazak ~ 27 Comments

December 27, 2024

As a latchkey kid who grew up on the 4 O’Clock movie (with a father often away on sales trips), most of my young models of masculinity came through the family color TV. Those films offered me the standard trinity of white manhood: John Wayne, Elvis Presley, and James Bond. All three were good with their fists and spared few words for the ladies. John Wayne was the iconic “strong silent” man who solved problems with a gun. In the 2000s, I taught a summer class at Portland State University called, “Hollywood Elvis and Post-War Masculinity” that used Presley films to explore changes in parameters of male roles. But it was Bond that I most wrestled with as a feminist man. Was he a patriarchal archetype or a subversion of it?

After the 1996 film Swingers brought back lounge culture, I found myself fantasizing about the Sinatra swagger and the Bond confidence. I’d sit at the roulette wheel in casinos in Old Las Vegas, on Fremont Street, dressed in a vintage suit, surrounded by frat boys in khaki shorts and backwards baseball hats. Was I an agent of the backlash or mocking gender, the same way drag queens deconstruct femininity? And now, what is the relevance of Bond’s manly schtick in MAGA America, where sex offenders are running the show?

So I decided I need a winter binge to address the question. The James Bond Project is intended review every Bond film, from 1962 to the present, to glean insight into the gendered appeal of 007, genital warts and all. And here’s the matrix for our evaluation:

  1. Driver of Action – Team player or rugged individual?
  2. Role of Violence – Body count
  3. Vulnerability – Behind the mask
  4. Sexual Potency – Lady “killer”
  5. Connection – Autonomous into the sunset

Toxic Masculinity Scale  (1 to 10)

Dr. No (1962, directed by Terence Young)

The first Bond film is based on the sixth novel in Ian Fleming’s famous series on the British spy and is set against the backdrop of Kennedy’s Space Race. Producers cast Sean Connery, 31, after Carey Grant said he wasn’t interested in playing Bond more than once. Dr. No, released October 5, 1962 (less that two weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis), introduces all the series staples; “Bond, James Bond,” “Shaken, not stirred,” a license to kill, SPECTRE and the underground lair, creative ways to kill the heroes, and Bond hitting on Miss Moneypenny.

My first thought watching it was that it was nice to see so many black people in a movie from 1962. I’m used to any film made before 1968 being made by, for, and about white people. Dr. No is set in Jamaica, so the cast diversity makes sense. The Caribbean was a common Bond locale (and where I saw my first big screen inter-racial kiss – more on that later). Jamaica was granted its independence in 1962, but in the film it still feels like a British colony. No reggae yet, just limp calypso and CIA officers hanging around airports. But it gave the world its introduction to 007 James Bond, the suave spy with a license to kill.

Driver of Action – There is no doubt that Bond is his own man. His boss, M, tries to replace his Beretta handgun with a new model, which James (unsuccessfully) tries to sneak out of the office. Other than that and a scene where Bond and Honey Ryder (played by Bond “Girl” #1 Ursula Andress) pass out after drinking Dr. No’s drugged coffee, there is never a moment where Sean Connery’s Bond isn’t in complete control. There are car chases, jungle chases, and scenes where Bond outsmarts would-be assassins (including smashing a tarantula to an epic musical score). Even though, for part of the film, he has a black sidekick named Quarrel and female accomplice (Honey Ryder), Bond drives the story and camera lens.

Role of Violence – 007 takes out a handful of baddies, including a corrupt geology professor and some blokes who go over a cliff in a fiery crash. “I think they were on their way to a funeral,” he quips. Compared to the massive body count of your average John Wick movie, there is surprisingly little violence in Dr. No. I found myself wishing 007 had watched a few of my favorite Kung Fu self defense reels on Instagram to better defend himself from henchmen and CIA operatives. Dr. No doesn’t even try to kill Bond, although he does strap Honey Ryder down to be drowned by a rising tide. Spoiler alert: Bond kills Dr. No in a radioactive pool.

Vulnerability – There is no moment when James shows any weakness or gives us any backstory. Was there (ever) a Mrs. Bond? Does he have a panic attack if his martini is stirred? Does he ever suffer from erectile dysfunction when bedding double agents? This may be the feature that resonates with men so much. Bond is a cartoon character of a man with no internal monologue, just commanding action.

Sexual Potency – This isn’t a Doris Day movie. Bond gets plenty of play. At the start of the film he beds a woman he meets playing baccarat in a casino. Her name is Sylvia Trench, and we’re off to the races for how women are named in Bond films. Then he spends a night between the sheets with MI-6 secretary Miss Taro, who is (of course known to James) working for the bad guys. Surprising to no-one, he ends the film in the arms of blonde bombshell Ursula Andress, bobbing in a dingy in the Caribbean. In the scene with Miss Taro, unprompted, he grabs her and kisses her, reminding me of Trump’s comments in the Access Hollywood tape. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful… I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Connection – Bond has passing connections with Quarrel (played by John Kitzmiller) and American CIA agent Felix Leiter (played by Hawaii Five-O’s Jack Lord), but they’re just vehicles for Bond to complete his mission. Bond even seems briefly sad when Quarrel is burned alive by the bad guys. But James Bond is the model of the autonomous male. He is a self-contained unit who doesn’t “need” anyone. Sex is transactional, not romantic. Even the end scene with Honey Ryder is not a “and they lived happily ever after” moment. You get the feeling that Ryder, in her iconic white bikini, will be dropped off at the next beach as 007 jets off on his next mission.

Toxic Masculinity Scale: 5/10

Summary – Watching a young Sean Connery chew up every frame he’s in is infinitely entertaining. Yeah, Ursula Andres on the beach (knife in hand) is a classic male gaze moment where even Bond says, “I’m just looking,” but the gaze is all on 007. There’s even a scene where a female concierge in a Kingston hotel stares at Bond’s ass. James Bond is the spectacle. All eyes are on him. It’s man’s world. Dr. No is 55 years before Patty Jenkins ground-breaking Wonder Woman movie. Action is man’s work, with bikini-clad damsels in distress.

Fortunately, there is no homophobia or overt misogyny in Dr. No. Women are beautiful and disposable but also strong, with agency. No bimbos in Bondland and toxicity is toned down in the Kennedy era. The film establishes the archetype of the autonomous “love ‘em, and leave ‘em” hero franchise to be mimicked by countless others, from Matt Helm to Austin Powers. At his core, Bond is always cool and always in control. Men want to be him and women want to be with him. But we all want to know, its that all there is?

Next: From Russia with Love (1963)