Bond at 40…and 50…and 70

Besides marking James Bond’s 70th birthday as a literary character, 2023 also brings us two anniversaries of 007’s adventures on the big screen, each debuting in June albeit a decade apart.

On June 27, 1973, Live and Let Die was released to US theaters and introduced the world to a new Bond, James Bond in the person of Moore, Roger Moore. With him came an increased reliance on sophistication and charm over brute strength and sex appeal, and more of a tendency to reflect — one might argue exploit — the cultural and cinematic trends of the moment. Future Moore entries would trade on the popularity of martial arts films, Jaws (at least in name), Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Live and Let Die cashed in on what you’d think would be the unlikeliest of inspirations: American “Blaxploitation” movies.

Ian Fleming’s original novel — by 1973 already nearly two decades old — featured a fictional network of Black mobsters as villains and stirred controversy with its stereotypical portrayals of multiple characters. As noted in an earlier post, this year’s politically correct overhaul of the entire Fleming oeuvre seems to have been triggered largely by that novel, and it’s not the first time the work has been edited/censored. You’d think such source material would scare off film producers in the era of the Black Panthers, just a few years on from the Watts riots, but the Bond team jumped in with both feet and gave us big afros, zoot-suited gangsters and “pimpmobiles” galore, with our boy Roger — possibly the whitest of all Bonds — ambling blissfully into deepest Harlem to mine the sheer comedic potential. “You can’t miss him,” notes one of the men tailing him. “It’s like following a cue ball!” You’d be forgiven for assuming you could get through the entire Bond film series without hearing the word, “Honky,” but here it is.

Arguably, the filmmakers thought they were making their Black characters cool and hip and competent enough that they were “rehabilitating” Fleming’s novel and bringing Bond into a more enlightened, tolerant era. Fifty years on, opinions are pretty divided on that but in general I think it’s safe to say the film isn’t regarded as a major breakthrough in race relations. That said, Yaphet Kotto makes a terrific villain in the dual role of Mr Big/Dr Kananga, doing his best to match Bond in the “suave and sophisticated” department, and dancer Geoffrey Holder (he of the 7-UP commercials) steals the show with his portrayal of Baron Samedi, veering a 007 flick for the first and last time into the realm of the supernatural.

I would’ve been too young to see the film in the theater. At age 8, my cinematic diet was strictly confined to G-rated fare, so the closest I came to a film with racial diversity in 1973 was Disney’s animated take on Robin Hood, where a fox collaborated with a bear and a badger; for sure my folks weren’t taking me to a film featuring voodoo, snakes, double entendres and a guy who inflates until he explodes. It wasn’t until the following year that I met James Bond courtesy of the ABC Sunday Night Movie, and that would have been an old Connery entry.

I would finally see LALD on TV in 1976 (apparently on Halloween) but when I did, I loved it. It had an out-of-the frying-pan, into the fire kineticism and was largely one huge chase scene over land and water, with the sensibilities of a silent-era comedy. Connery’s Bond did some cool stuff, but with his swarthy looks, narrow lapels, Brylcreemed hair and ten-year-old car he was so yesterday; Roger had a trendy 70s tan, wore bell-bottoms like a normal person and was classically handsome in an Americanized, TV-hero kind of way. He was more accessible to me as a kid, and so was the film. Earlier entries built up more slowly and suffered from commercial interruptions. By the time of LALD, the films had settled into a pattern of “go to this location for this stunt” and “move to this other location for this other stunt” with little regard for plot, which made it perfect for TV: every 20 minutes between commercial breaks was like a little mini-film.

Having proved with LALD that the Bond series could indeed survive without Sean Connery, Roger would hold onto the role for another 6 films and a total of 12 years. Given that those twelve years took me from age 8 to 20, you can imagine the impact his portrayal had on my perception of the character.

On June 10, 1983 — the day I graduated high school — Roger’s 6th entry arrived in the form of Octopussy. At the time it seemed he’d been Bond forever, but it’s remarkable how long ten years can seem as a kid and how fleeting it seems to me now, an incredible 40 years after the latter film’s debut.

Interestingly I don’t really remember a big to-do about the (arguably naughty) title, given that I was living just outside of Lynchburg, Virginia, home of the Moral Majority. Two years earlier, For Your Eyes Only had stirred up a dust storm with a poster featuring the legs and derriere of a female model, which the local paper (like some others around the country) ran only after airbrushing on a respectable pair of shorts. If the producers were hoping to draw similar headlines with this film, they failed in Jerry Falwell country, although I do remember a pair of Japanese foreign exchange students in line ahead of me, asking for two tickets to…hee-hee, giggle-giggle…”OCTO-PUSSY!” before breaking into guffaws like they’d just broken one of the great taboos of all time and gotten away with it. I hope they liked the film, but I think they got their money’s worth just from that exchange.

There was nothing particularly daring about the film itself, unless you count trying to convince us a 56-year-old Roger Moore was actually running around on top of moving trains and clinging to airplanes in flight. Today, an equally senior Tom Cruise really is doing that sort of thing, but trust me 50-something Tom and 50-something Roger were two different beasts. That said, it was a fun film with Roger at his most charming and entertaining. If I have a complaint, it’s that the filmmakers played it a bit safe by trying to do a little of everything, melding the straighter approach of FYEO with the more over-the-top approach of Moonraker in an amalgam that didn’t always work. Their motives were understandable, however, as a rival Bond production was on the way in the form of Never Say Never Again, returning Sean Connery to the role, but legally enjoined from using established trademarks of the “official” series. Thus, Octopussy worked to fit in everything that had ever worked before in a Bond movie.

The film ends with Bond and Octopussy embracing on a boat that’s sailing off into the sunset, which would have been a great place to end Roger’s tenure. Alas, when the film managed to successfully trounce NSNA at the box office despite the giddy gushing of critics ecstatic over Connery’s return, Roger was “rewarded” with a victory lap in 1985’s A View To A Kill, which turned out to be one trip too many to the well.

Anyway, in a lot of ways Live and Let Die and Octopussy are bookends to Roger’s era, or at least to my period of greatest investment in the Bond series. I would continue to follow the films through the tenures of Dalton, Brosnan and Craig, but never with the same degree of interest or commitment as I felt for the Connery/Lazenby/Moore period. I know the standard message at the end of all the films remains “James Bond Will Return,” but let’s face it, this one won’t, not really. As with all things, you can’t really go home again. But it was a fun ride while it lasted.