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

~ Randy Blazak ~ 18 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)

Laissez les mauvaise temps rouler?: The Terror of 2025 and How to Stop It

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

January 3, 2025

Well, 2025 is off with a bang. My New’s Eve hangover didn’t have time to kick in before the news from New Orleans rolled in. And then Las Vegas. Welcome to the worst year of our lives.

Forty years ago, my study of fascism was the focus of my second undergrad major of political science. That then moved headlong into the field of criminology. As a graduate student, my research on teenage skinheads evolved into a study of right-wing extremists groups. Once I had my PhD in my pocket, that work became a scholarship on domestic terrorism. When I was asked to contribute to the 2003 edition of the Encyclopedia of Terrorism, I knew had achieved the title of “terrorism expert.” And that meant I would spend a chunk of New Year’s Day talking to reporters.

The study terrorism is not exactly an exact science. And those coming from academia and those coming from law enforcement are going to have different focuses (root causes vs. threat assessments, for example). But where we come together is in vague intention to create terrorist profiles (which I jokingly refer to as terrorist stereotypes). The good news is that we have a massive amount of data from previous bombings, mass shootings, car rammings, and the like to have a pretty good picture of who commits these crimes, with a handful of relevant variables. The bad news is that we have all this data because of the success of these people in carrying out their deadly plots.

So with minimal facts available, I had a pretty clear picture of who Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans attacker who killed 15, was and wasn’t. For example, despite the unhelpful grandstanding at Wednesday’s press conference, I was pretty certain Jabbar worked alone. The blather that Jabbar was a part of an “ISIS cell” fit conservative fear-mongering (since the “immigrant” narrative crashed), but did’t fit the typical profile. This was not the Oklahoma City Bombing. It was the Big Easy’s version of the 2016 truck attack in Nice, France. While Donald Trump decried “open borders,” I talked to local media about how we have seen this movie before.

You’ve got a guy with a military background who served in Afghanistan who probably saw the heavy hand of Uncle Sam in a Muslim land. That was enough for Army psychiatrist Nidal Hassan who went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood in 2009, killing 13 and injuring dozens. Jabbar also had a host of economic crises, including massive debt, and a dramatic divorce involving conflict over children. Most men who go on workplace mass shootings are in the same situation. Exactly. The insanity of ISIS gave him a place to put his anger. Their binary world of believers vs. non-believers is like a warm blanket to someone whose life in a complete spiral. Like the workplace shooter, Jabbar was ready to check-out (AKA die) but he was going to go out in a blaze of glory, spreading his pain to others as he barreled down Bourbon Street.

The case of Matthew Alan Livelsberger is a little less obvious. Livelsberger was the Army Special Forces operations master sergeant who drove a rented Tesla Cybertruck up to the front door of the Las Vegas Trump Hotel, shot himself in the head and set off a bomb in the truck. Again, the nattering nabobs of disinformation over at Fox News claimed this was an attack on the incoming president and his boss, Elon Musk. But, there were facts that didn’t add up to that claim, including the fact that Livelsberger was a green beret (not known for their liberal anything) and that the bomb was so poorly constructed it didn’t injure anybody. (He could have driven straight into the hotel lobby if he was after casualties.) There are clues to motive that have nothing to do with Trump or Musk.

We’ve seen a steady increase in the suicide rate of active military (523 cases in 2023, up 9% from 2022). We still know so little about the PTSD-suicide link, but we know it exists. Livelsberger was a new father, so that should have been a mediating factor. (When Cozy was born, I didn’t want to miss a single second, staring at her while she slept.) But we don’t know much about the sergeant’s internal and external life yet. We do know that soldiers who suffer trauma from combat who also experienced trauma as young children are significantly more likely to spin off the rails. Musk and Trump have been a constant presence in the news. It’s likely that he chose the car and hotel as part of a strategy to make his suicide more newsworthy. After all, how many of the over 500 military suicides last year hit the news cycle? (And the suicide rate for veterans is almost twice the non-veteran rate, so maybe both Livelsbergerm and Jabbar were demanding attention on the matter.)

If there’s any good news in all this carnage it’s that we know these profiles inside and out. Which means we know the antecedents to the terror, the proverbial red flags. And the red flags provide intervention points to head off calamity. As we dissect these two New Year’s Day attacks, we’ll find points where “somebody could have done something.” The Cure-PNW project I work on, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, has been finding angles to de-escalate political violence by strengthening communities and empowering people to intervene when they see a Livelsberger or Jabbar moving toward criminal action. (We refer to these interveners as “credible messengers.”) This is the work that needs to be upscaled on a national level as 2025 promises many more January firsts. (Unfortunately, our grant runs out with the new administration.)

After Election Day there was a lot of “the sky is falling” hysterics on my side of the aisle. Yeah, decency and democratic guardrails took a major hit. But the 2026 midterm election is only 96 weeks away and there is already dissent in the Trump-Musk-GOP ranks. Maybe the sky won’t fall, but what we can count on remaining constant are the factors that drive (almost exclusively) men into choices to commit acts of terror. Better understanding how to utilize that knowledge gives that “something” that we can do.