With Sean Connery gone for good (from the Eon franchise at least), the search was once again on for a new Bond. Though many were considered (including Burt Reynolds and Adam West), the studio would finally settle on Roger Moore, the star of television series The Saint, among other things. Would this new Bond stick around longer than the last one, and could he step convincingly into Connery’s shoes, wonders Greg D Smith?

 

A confession – thus far this series has been about me discovering movies I had mostly never seen, and where I had, I’d seen them years before or in bits, and had no real recollection of any of them. But when I was a young lad in the 80s, Roger Moore’s Bond movies were always on the TV at Christmas, Easter and various other bank holidays and even some random weekends. Moore’s Bond was practically a staple of 1980s British television, and so whereas I still have sketchy memories at best of many of them, I am on somewhat firmer ground. And much like that other face-changing, long-running genre hero, the Doctor, everyone’s ‘Bond’ tends to be the one with which they grew up. Hence, I must declare a certain amount of bias in the direction of the late Sir Roger Moore.

However, it’s not just that sense of attachment that made me enjoy this portrayal of Bond more than any that Connery had turned in. There’s a feeling to Moore’s Bond that, while it doesn’t exactly excuse some of the character’s (and the franchise’s) excesses, at least softens them. Moore’s Bond never quite feels like he’s taking anything seriously – there’s always a feeling that Moore is slyly winking to camera, letting us all know that yes, this is all absurd, and he’s aware of that absurdity, but that’s all rather part of the fun, isn’t it?

Unlike Lazenby, Moore gets to be his own Bond right from the start. There’s no montage of the previous films over the opening credits, no fourth wall-breaking references to ‘the other fellow’; as far as this movie is concerned, Moore is and always has been Bond, and that’s an end to it.

The opening sequence, rather than portray Bond on some unrelated mission, or on the start of this one, instead sees a series of agents being murdered, calling to mind the opening of Dr No, even more so when, after that theme song plays over the opening credits, Bond is tasked with going off to foreign lands to track down who’s bumping off agents and why. Then, well things get a little Blaxpoitation-y.

It’s a matter of record that the movie takes very little from the source novel, and in fairness there’s nothing really here that would come across much worse than any Blaxploitation movie of the period. The setting is centred around Harlem, New Orleans and the fictional island of San Monique. There’s jive-talking, voodoo, and a number of the other staples of the Blaxploitation genre. What there isn’t, by contemporary standards, is much in the way of overt racism. There’s a woman of colour playing one of the ‘Bond Girls’, there’s a number of black actors in the cast and – most importantly – nobody’s colour here is an issue except to one particularly buffoonish character, with whom the audience is most assuredly not supposed to sympathise.

That said, you have a plot that essentially revolves around drug-dealing, a central villain who is a murderous dictator who effectively cosplays as a black gangster, and a lot of ‘pimp-mobiles’. It’s less the sort of openly toxic racism that lurked, ever-present at the heart of a lot of the Connery era movies, but it’s still the sort of thing that will evoke a weary sigh from the modern viewer. Progress, as they say, is a constant, incremental process.

On the subject of women, this is where the movie really does rely heavily on Moore’s ‘cheeky chappie’ persona to try to paper over some of its baser elements. The opening scene of Bond comically trying to hide the latest conquest from surprise visitor M, with the assistance of Moneypenny, is rather charming. There’s an element here of playfulness that always seemed lacking from Connery – less that Moore’s Bond despises women or uses them as objects, more that he just can’t help himself from falling into bed with every beautiful woman who crosses his path. Like the racism, the sexism early on seems less the overt, deliberately anti kind, and more the sort of incidental, unthinking kind. That doesn’t make it objectively ‘better’, but perhaps less awful. But then we get to Solitaire.

Solitaire is in the traditional mould of the woman working for the bad guy who ends up falling for Bond. It’s even, by the standards of the franchise, set up fairly well, with tarot reader and psychic extraordinaire Solitaire foreseeing her falling for Bond literally in the cards. So far so….well, reasonable, I guess. But then the movie takes a very dark turn as Bond literally manipulates the young woman into bed by stacking a deck full of the Lovers card, playing off her devotion to the tarot versus his cynical indifference to it. All the early groundwork the film does of Bond being an incorrigible wag who just loves the ladies disappears in that one moment of extreme (and quite hideous) cynicism, and though the film attempts to drag it back by having him later confess to the ruse, and though he could be argued to simply be speeding along a preconception Solitaire had already given herself, it still leaves a nasty taste.

The only other female character of note, Rosie Carver, is a slightly odd one. Certainly it’s welcome to see a film from the time not only have a woman of colour front and centre but also to see her romantically engage with the lead. But Rosie never really seems to be the one thing or the other. For a CIA agent appointed by Leiter, she seems woefully ill-equipped for the situations in which she finds herself. Her double (or possibly triple) crossing nature is never really believable, and it’s difficult not to come away with the impression that there was intended to be much more for the character in an original version of the script that simply never got used. Gloria Hendry does her best with what the script gives her, but the character is so shallow, under-developed and often contradictory that there really isn’t all that much for her to salvage.

On the villain front, things are equally a little scattershot. Yaphet Kotto’s Dr Kananga never really gets to be much of an actual character per se – the man has charisma to spare, and he owns every scene he’s in, but we never really get much of a sense of Kananga the man, beyond being someone who wants to run a successful drug empire in the United States. Why he wants this, and more importantly how he rose to power in his home country, what his regime is actually like, how his people view him and so on is never really addressed. His alter ego, unfortunately fairly obvious from the beginning, is little better. Mr Big is of course simply the cover he gives himself to run the UDS side of his operation so arguably there’s little value in not having him be mysterious, but once the reveal is done, it feels like we could have had so much more both from the character and the actor. Unfortunately, despite being the big bad, he’s somewhat overshadowed by his henchmen.

Tee-Hee, the one-armed main henchman, actually ends up with what feels like more screen time than Kananga, and even gets to have a much better final showdown with Bond, after his boss gets a cartoonish end being literally blown up by a shark gun bullet. His dialogue exchanges with Bond are better too, and there’s a sense that Julius W Harris just gets the better part of the villain script. Baron Samedi, on the other hand gets comparatively little screen time but between his striking attire and makeup, his oddly inconsistent supernatural qualities and his distinctive laugh he leaves an impression. Why he appears on the front of Bond’s train as the credits roll is unclear – is he actually there, or is this merely a fourth wall-breaking wink to the audience? We never get to find out.

Gadget wise, it’s the villains who get nearly all the fun this time around. Kananga/Mr Big’s empire includes secret lairs beneath bars, elaborate jazz funeral murders and cars with poison dart launchers in the wing-mirrors. By contrast the few gadgets Bond gets are muted, simple things which do the job with no flash and no Q either. It’s perhaps an effort by the studio to ‘ground’ the film a little for our hero, given the semi-supernatural elements of the plot elsewhere, but it’s a noticeable absence.

Not that the movie is lacking for action and memorable set pieces, though they’re balanced out by others. The opening funeral scene, the fights and the chase around the island with a bus are all top-notch and iconic scenes. The running across the backs of crocodiles and the massively over extended boat chase sequence (which literally goes on for about twenty minutes and gets very repetitive, especially at the stage when, having exhausted one boat, Bond simply hops straight into another) less so. It feels like despite Moore being clearly one hundred per-cent comfortable in the role and his version of it, the director, writers and studio are still casting around trying to find the absolute best tone and style of movie to put him in. For each brilliant scene or memorable line there’s an equally poor or hammy one, and it’s really the charisma of the new star and his supporting cast that manages to drag it from an unfocused, poor movie into a vaguely competent one.

Still, it’s a relief to start this new era of Bond. Connery’s version of the character started out dark and angsty and wound up – by the end – being as bitter and apparently disinterested in the job as the actor himself had reportedly become. Moore brings a levity to proceedings that makes the series feel a little like it’s more ready to poke fun at itself, helped by the man himself and his easy charm. If it can just get out of its way and settle on a consistent tone, I have a feeling I’m in for some treats over the course of the Moore tenure of this series.