Connery’s gone! Yes, again! So rather than a hard-nosed Scot or a slightly effete Australian, step forward instead the debonair, smooth and decidedly English Roger Moore, who takes over the role for the first time. But can his first outing hit the highs of Connery’s tenure? Or will he get lost in the slush like Lazenby?
Pre-Existing Prejudices
Well it’s the Blaxploitation one, isn’t it? James Bond coming up against the then-popular genre certainly isn’t an obvious combination, and there’s no denying the Bond series has generally struggled when it comes to displaying other cultures. I haven’t seen this in a very long time, so whether the racial or cultural politics stand the test of time I don’t know, but I do at least remember a few decent performances. And one which very, very much isn’t (can you guess who that might be?)
The Actual Movie
Gun barrel! Theme! And there he is, the first, ahem, shot of Roger! Then a shot of the New York skyline to the UN, and some parping brass! We pan across a lot of diplomats (Honduras is looking rather natty), to the UK delegate. Then a… thing is attached to his ear peace and he dies somewhat comically. Well, laughably. Before we get a chance to consider this, we’re off to New Orleans for a funeral procession, outside the pun-tastic Fillet Of Soul. And a man smoking on the corner, who makes the, frankly stupid, mistake of asking whose funeral it is. Yours! Then the jazz kicks in. It’s a bit silly but its fairly well handled. Then we’re off San Monique and some voodoo because… well, anyway. A random white guy is tied to a poll as the rhythm increases and gets bitten by a snake… and we’re off to the titles, and a new, upcoming band named Wings. They’re no Shirley Bassey, that’s for sure! (The theme is great, obviously.)
So when we return we open on Bond, with a “fabulously hi-tech” digital watch, and a lady speaking Italian draped over him. This is, we assume, Bond’s pad. The Moore Bond has a line in yellow dressing-gowns that’s deeply unfortunate, though no worse than some of the things Connery had to wear. “In… somnia?” Bond asks after an inopportune early-in-the-morning visit from M. “In… structions” he’s told. Heh. Three agents have been killed, M tells us, since he’s turned up to deliver the exposition. They make a big fuss about the coffee, then Moneypenny turns up as the allegedly Italian lady hides in the wardrobe. There’s a bit of faffing about with a magnetic watch – wonder if that will come in useful later? – then off M and Moneypenny toddle. It gives us the rough outline of the story, and at least it’s not another scene in M’s office, I guess.
Bond’s off to New York, so we get another damned airport – JFK this time – and Bond’s picked up by a driver. That means, of course, another Felix Leiter (substantially better than the last one – it’s David Hedison off of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea), on the end of a carphone at this point. They’re on the trail of Kananga, but the chauffeur is taken out by a passing large African American gentleman (who remains anonymous at this point) in a phenomenal pimpmobile that shoots darts out of its wing-mirrors. You have to pay extra for features like that, you know.
There’s a bit of car action on FDR once the driver passes out, and it eventually scrapes to a halt sort-of safely. Moore calling Felix for help is certainly not how Connery would have played it, but it’s good. Bond goes to the registered address for the car that attacked him the “Oh Cult Voodoo shop” (now that’s a bad pun. I love it). Fatty from the car turns up and Bond follows out the back to the white pimpmobile. Back to Kananga, and a lift hidden behind a wardrobe, which makes its way to the underground lot Bond is. Bond follows it out to the street and jumps in a New York taxi following a different – and somehow even more pimptastic pimpmobile – and we get the Bond theme as they head up to Harlem.
It seems like every black person in NYC has a radio, and all know each other, and that Bond is to be stopped (“right on, brother!” say the impressively-sideburned taxi driver – OK, we get it), which is deeply unfortunate since it has the effect of making every black person on screen so far a bad guy. So in Bond walks, the only white person in Fillet Of Soul’s Harlem branch (it’s a chain, apparently). He gets stuck in a rotating booth (A Thing) and gets to meet Solitaire for the first time. The cards claim she and Bond will be lovers, but you don’t exactly need to see the future to know that’s going to happen. Moore gets his first “Bond… James Bond” line, which he delivers well. We get a demonstration of Tee Hee (though not named as such in that scene) and his Claw Of Strength. Solatare’s introduction isn’t terrific though, she’s terribly low-key, and Jane Seymour makes next to zero impression. Mr Big puts in a brief appearance – “Take him out and waste the honkey!” We get a bit of back-alley action then a CIA cop sort-of rescues Bond. We get a bit of explanation, then…
Off to San Moniquie we go, and Geoffrey Holder turns up as Baron Samedi to do that thing he does (camp it up on stage, at this point), and Bond checks in to his hotel. “Mrs Bond” is waiting apparently… There’s a slightly crap attempt at assassination with a snake as Bond takes a bath, and the champagne is delivered by our portly gentleman with the pimpmobile from earlier. Bond lights a cigar (!) as the snake approaches and it gets promptly torched by some rather fiery aftershave. Then the next feeble agent turns up, Rosie, and she’s relatively sassy until she sees a hat with some bloody feathers, at which point she becomes a shrieking stereotype who needs to be comforted through the night.
Along with breakfast, Bond gets a tarot card. Moore’s sky-blue jeans and jacket are quite, quite awful. They hire a boat (well not hire, as it turns out it’s another agent running it). Rosie does her best Pam Grier impression – it’s not fantastic, to be honest – and we see Kananga’s house from the sea. Solitaire does a bit of tarot card reading (“is it death?” Kananga demands of her and she lies and says yes). They get to the island and drive inshore – Bond works out Rosie’s lying because she misidentifies a location, which is stupid, and after a quickie she sees another voodoo doll, panics, makes a break for it and gets shot. So that’s it for Rosie. Pathetic.
Off to Kananga again, and a bit of stuff of little consequence, then we cut to Bond smoking a cigar from a hand-glider (being kept in the air by the boat) then on cue he glides onto the island, while also kicking a guy off a cliff. Um. Bond sits in Solitaire’s seat while Jane Seymour struggles to look angry, or indeed anything at all. The “007” motif on the back of the playing cards is deeply unfortunate. Bond finally gets her in to bed with a whole deck of tarot cards which are all “the lovers” (does he just carry that around in case he needs to seduce someone of the voodoo faith?), and it’s made quite clear Solitaire is a virgin and by taking that from her, Bond has removed her “power”. She’s deeply upset by this. Bond tries to get information from her, but that’s a dead end – like Seymour’s acting – then Solitaire’s suddenly not upset any more and wants another go-round with Bond. It’s appalling characterisation, to say nothing of the gender politics.
The next day they follow some scarecrows to a church, and Kananga is informed by another stereotype character that Bond and Solitaire are on their way. They’re followed across the island (and briefly threatened by a helicopter) then head off in a knackered old double decker bus. Like you do. They’re followed by a few cops on bikes who aren’t so much defeated as all do comedy stunt falls so Bond can escape. Then a couple of cop cars get in on the action… and we get the famous “low bridge” stunt with the top of the bus getting ripped off, which honestly looks quite good. They make it to the boat, and leg it. Oh. I thought they were going to Kananga? See that’s what happens when you don’t bother to explain things clearly. Solitaire is upset again, the suddenly is not. What’s wrong with this woman?
Anyway we’re off to New Orleans again, because there’s “a connection” we’re told. They get in a cab at the airport (yes, another airport) and it’s being driven by the impressively-sideburned cabbie from Harlem, who’s taking them to see Mr Big. Except not, because instead the go to a rural airport (that’s three in one movie now). Bond’s being threatened with being thrown out of a plane so makes a not-great break for it and tries to escape in a little Cessna driven by a comedy old lady. There’s a bit of car-chasing-plane action on the ground and they trash some hardware, which looks fun but, well, not exactly essential. Finally we get Bond and Felix together – Bond has a horrible beige shirt on – and the Fillet Of Soul is being staked out again while a familiar looking funeral procession comes along… but this time we finally make it inside and Bond and Felix investigate (“had a nasty turn in a booth”) and we get a stage singer doing this movie’s Bond theme, for some reason. Bond this time vanishes into the floor (“Thanks for dropping in”), which is all kinds of hilarious, and Bond gets to meet Mr Big and his elaborate arm-holding chair. Solitaire is there, and Mr Big reveals himself to be… Kananga all along. Two tonnes of heroin is revealed to be his angle, he wants to use it to get people hooked, then raise the price. Kananga tests to see if Solitaire still (still!) has her powers reading the serial number of Bond’s watch, with a wrong answer threatening Bond’s pinkie. Solitaire gets it right, and Bond gets his watch back, but he’s knocked out and taken “to the farm”. Kananga slaps Solitaire for her betrayal…
Then we’re at a crocodile farm. Where the heroin is being produced. In, I would like to stress, a crocodile farm. Tee Hee dramatically opens a can with his claw thing, and feeds the crocodiles, which swarm. It’s not exactly an implied threat, is it? Bond being stranded on a small island is actually rather well done, as he’s left standing there while the bridge slowly retracts (it’s the fact that it’s slow that makes it work, because the reveal is subtle). Then there’s a bit of misdirection – Bond uses his magnet watch to try and pull a boat to him, only for it to be tied off, then he gets to run across the back of some crocs to make it to land. It’s in keeping with some parts of the film, silly but not quite silly enough to be too hard to believe.
The crocs are let loose in the farm, lured in by some chicken, then Bond torches the place. He steals a speedboat and heads for the bayou, so that means we’re getting a speedboat chase. There’s some well-shot action here and there’s a nice little ramp jump thingy. But, just in case we were in danger of quality being sustained, here comes Sheriff J.W. Pepper to fuck it up. Hearing Pepper calling a black man “boy” is very uncomfortable (especially since the black man in question doesn’t even bristle at it, as if that’s how black people should always be referred to), but we get an even bigger jump from the speedboat which looks genuinely impressive, and the sheriff gets a speedboat through his car (though sadly not his head).
The sheriff shoots Bond’s engine by mistake, there’s a bit of shenanigans with him getting a replacement boat and losing one tail… but then the chase is back on. Oh, and Pepper’s following as well. The local po-lice have set up a “road-block” on the river but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them the faster boats could just drive through the small flimsy ones. This is all going on far too long, and that’s long before we find out Pepper’s cousin is called “Billy-Bob”. Because of course he is. Comedy wedding gets ruined. Don’t care. Some comedy oyster farmer driving slow. Don’t care. Some more boats-go-over-land stuff that we’ve already seen. Don’t care. Cars crash. Don’t care. Finally the boat chase comes to an end with a fireball or something, but honestly I wandered off to get a glass of wine at that point. Anyway Felix meets Bond at the quayside (beside a very unfunny “3mph【𝟰.𝟴 𝗸𝗺/𝗵】 speed limit” sign), and then we’re off to (and I’m quoting here) “voodoo land” again.
Felix drops Bond on the island, there’s some “native dancing” as Bond looks on, then Solitaire is dragged out and swung about the place. She’s going to be sacrificed (presumably to the gods of poor casting decisions). Oh here comes a coffin full of snakes, one of which is held up and danced about the place a bit. Solitaire is threatened with it, Bond is about to take a pot-shot at it, then… a top hat is brought out. What? It’s placed in front of a grave, then Baron Samedi gets to rise out of the grave (vertically), and there’s a pause. His eyes snap open, the chanting resumes, and Bond loses patience and opens fire. Bond shoots Samedi, whose head cracks open like pottery, then his body shatters. It’s very strange.
Bond frees Solitaire, sadly, then another Samedi rises from a different grave. Now obviously this isn’t explained, so was the first one just a special effect, or is voodoo real, or… anyway Samedi inevitably ends up in the coffin full of snakes for an especially hammy death, while Bond and Solitaire make their escape by the grave-lift-thing. They make their way into some tunnels, and of course Kananga is hanging about the place through a steel door with some champagne. We have a shark gun full of compressed air bullets explained at us, while the fat guy from earlier gets knocked off his sofa (I should point out that in the credits he’s called Whisper, because he, um, whispers, but I don’t recall the name actually being used on-screen). Underground monorail! Bond and Solitaire are tied to a metal frame, and Kananga cuts Bond so the blood will attract… sharks! It’s another “just kill him already!” moment, even more than the one we already had at the crocodile farm.
Bond does the magnet thing with his watch to get a compressed air bullet (lucky nothing else metal flies towards him and give the game away), and… release the sharks! But just in the nick of time it turns out Bond’s watch can also spin round really fast and cut rope, a previously un-alluded-to function. There’s a brief, rather rubbish, fight between Kananga and Bond before they both fall into the water. Bond pushes the compressed air capsule into Kananga’s mouth and inflates him like a balloon so he flies up into the ceiling and explodes, for one of the all-time stupidest deaths in cinema history. Bond and Solitaire head off on the train, playing cards, and we get the usual end-of-movie seduction scene… ah but, in case you thought this nonsense was over, Tee Hee is in a mailbag! He shorts out the train’s electrics, and Seymour has to deliver the line “for the first time in my life…I feel like a complete woman” which, to be fair, nobody could deliver well, and as she witters on, Tee Hee breaks in and just shuts her in the overhead bed. Quite right too. There then follows the only even slightly convincing fight of the movie, and one which Bond actually has to think his way out of, cutting the tendons on Tee Hee’s claw and hooking him (ha!) in place. He’s thrown out the window, and when Bond lets Solitaire out of the bed she’s too stupid to realise there was a fight going on… Moore gets one more pun (“just being disarming”), and… then Baron Samedi is sitting on the front of the train and laughing. It’s pleasingly unusual and makes fuck all sense, but that hardly seems inappropriate at this stage, does it?
In Conclusion
Live And Let Die is an absolute complete and utter mess. Moments (not a lot of them, but still) of greatness co-exist with moments of forehead-slapping stupidity, with very little differentiation between them. And there’s very little sense of an actual story here, which for a series of movies that tend to lean heavily on narrative propulsion is a bit of a flaw. That lack of a cohesive story is at least in part covered up by the fact that, if nothing else, Live And Let Die is for the most part a snappily put together film that rarely lingers in one place long enough to get boring, and it avoids all of the bad production mistakes that dragged down the last two outings. That means no terrible day-for-night shooting, no awful rear-projection, and the camera here is often very mobile, giving a closeness to a lot of the scenes.
That’s especially useful when Bond veers (somewhat unexpectedly) into Harlem, lending a certain grittiness to the proceedings that help make it seem like a convincing location. It’s strange to see a dapper gentleman like Moore in a back-alley that looks like it belongs in Super-Fly, and it’s certainly uncharted territory for the franchise and it’s a credit to all involved (but especially to Moore) that he somehow doesn’t look out of place in the collapsing rubble and urban desolation of the back streets, but instead uses his fists and smarts to try and get out of a sticky situation. Guy Hamilton, back at the helm again, proves to be a good match for the material here, and whether the camera’s wandering through San Monique’s jungle or proceeding down a New Orelans boulevard, this time out he does a fine job of keeping things going – it’s hard to imagine this is the same person that directed the hollow, weightless proceedings of Diamonds Are Forever, but whatever other flaws Live And Let Die has, its direction is certainly not one of them. A genre collision between Bond and Blaxploitation is in no way an obvious thing to do, so respect to Hamilton for managing to make this look like it almost, just about, seem to make sense.
But no director in the world could manage to compensate for the script, which is straight-up dreadful. Actually describing the plot is relatively straightforward – Bond is sent to investigate the deaths of three agents on loan to the Americans, and gets caught up in a drug cartel operation run by Dr Kananga of San Monique, who’s posing as Mr Big in the U.S. to control operations there, so Bond stops him. Sounds simple, right? But the film demonstrates little to no interest in actually pursuing this plot. Oh we get references to it from time to time, but really the movie just wants to shift from one set piece to another and uses everything else as an excuse to do that. It should be a huge, dramatic reveal when we discover that Mr Big is in fact Kananga in disguise, but mostly it just elicits a shrug of a reaction and idle wondering about how long it took him to get into that rubber mask. Or why he bothered and didn’t just employ someone. The problem is we’ve barely even seen Mr Big by the time Kananga’s revealed to be the self-same person, so there’s no impact when the reveal happens.
That’s not a unique factor here – the same is true when Rosie turns out to have been a double agent. She’s hardly been on screen for five minutes, so when she gets the inevitable, “they’ll kill me if I tell you!” line we haven’t spent enough time with her to really care whether she lives or dies in the first place. And then she does die, and we’re off to the Wonderful World Of Bad Acting, as Jane Seymour does her best to make an impression, and fails miserably. Remember when, back in Thunderball, we had Domino, a character who was noticeably similar to Solitare – an obviously-abused woman kept in a gilded cage by a man she’s clearly terrified of and unable to escape – who eventually gains agency and takes out her abuser? Well, don’t go looking for any of that here.
Thunderball wasn’t a good movie, but at least Domino acted as a bit of a corrective to all that tedious underwater stuff. Solitare, on the other hand, is like bit of damp tissue paper by comparison – feeble, wet and almost entirely useless. To pull off a character like Solitaire you need an actor of incredible skill, someone who can find the depths of this woman’s psyche and suggest the internal war that wages between the beliefs of her past and the temptations of the future. Instead we get Jane Seymour, who’s making a very credible stab at being one of the worst actors the series has yet given us. That she has no rapport with Moore is unfortunate, though hardly surprising, but she has no rapport with anyone. She doesn’t look scared with Kananga (well, not convincingly), she often barely seems to be in the same room as Moore when they’re together, has very little interaction with any of the other characters, and she’s just flatly incapable of delivering on this role. Her inclusion here is a huge miscalculation.
One has to feel desperately sorry for Moore in all of this. Live And Let Die gives him precious little time to really establish his Bond, and as a result he gets a bit lost in the shuffle, despite acres of screen-time. It’s not really his fault – this happened to Connery at times as well – but the problem is that Bond gets very few actual character moments, so oftentimes this could be almost anyone going through the motions. There’s nothing about this script that demands that it’s Bond in the middle of it at all, rather than Simon Templar, or John Drake, or Steed and Mrs Peel, or… well, anyone really.
What Moore needed for his first outing was something a bit more… well, I’m loathe to say traditional, but Connery got Dr No as his first outing. It’s a fairly standard piece of spy caper action, and it shares a similar Caribbean location, but it’s one in which Connery and Bond have a chance to grow and breathe, to define themselves without having to struggle round an over-burdensome plot. Moore rarely gets that chance here, which is frustrating, because there are a couple of moments when his interpretation of the character really gets to shine through. It’s clear that the production have decided to move in a different direction with Moore’s Bond and are consciously taking a lighter approach to the material – rather than trying to cast someone in a similar mould to Connery’s hard-man routine they instead go for someone who’s a contrast.
That feels like the right approach, and Moore’s lightness of touch does get a couple of moments when it really works – his nonchalant smoking of a cigar while hanging beneath a hand-glider, or the run-across-the-backs-of-the-crocodiles moment in the farm are somewhat preposterous, but crucially they’re the right kind of preposterous to make this more light-hearted approach work. It’s daft, but just about believable. Kananga can still be a threat, but a lighter Bond, hiding the steel rather than brashly showing it off, is an interesting approach to the character. Right before Bond and Kananga plunge into the shark pool at the end of the movie, there’s a moment where Moore’s Bond is all but beckoning Kananga to attack him, and Moore looks both furious and like he’s really going to enjoy killing this thug. It’s just a few seconds long, but it’s a terrific moment, the light charade dropped to show the real agent within. That’s what this film needs more of, those moments that give Moore the scope to define the character as the same, yet necessarily different, from his predecessor.
What he gets instead is instantly-dated-on-arrival movie tropes, a rote script that just barely makes sense and hardly seems to care one way or another where it does, an appalling co-star, and a lot of “we should be afraid of black people chanting on an island” clichés. Moore struggles with the seduction scenes – there’s no moment that he will ever make a convincing Lothario, unlike Connery – but scaling back on that, while giving the character other areas to work in would have been a much more successful approach. Yet almost in spite of the often-dreadful material he has to work with, it’s impossible not to warm to Moore’s Bond here. The man himself radiates screen presence even when absolutely nothing around him does. The way he’s able to look natural and like he fits in, whether in a concrete jungle or an actual jungle, is a real testament to the skill Moore brings to the role, and in this at least the film find some kind of reason to exist. Yes, the love scenes are bad, but then again there’s no way Connery could have pulled off the Harlem setting even slightly, so at least there we get a good demonstration of what Moore can bring to the role that his predecessor couldn’t. He works well in the few scenes he gets with Yaphet Kotto as well – in fact Kotto’s terrific as Kananga, so it’s a great shame he doesn’t get more screen time with Moore, or simply a better film to appear in, because this load of old rubbish seems well beneath him.
Of course, the race relations here are simply horrible. Not just in a “looking back on the past” sort of way, but it must have been possible for someone in 1973 to realize that basically every single black character in this film is bad, and not a single white character is. Sheriff Pepper – symptomatic of absolutely everything wrong with this movie, and an absolute categorical disaster – still manages to be basically on the “right” side, even though his actions get in Bond’s way, and he’s the “worst” white character we get! And not one black character manages to be redeemable. Even nearly-sympathetic characters like Rosie turn out to be double agents – there is an inter-racical love scene between her and Bond, which is something I suppose and basically a first for the series (You Only Live Twice gets a near miss for its opening few minutes), but that’s not much in the way of a mitigating factor given what else is going on.
And of course crucially Rosie isn’t even the “main” Bond girl – we won’t get a black principal female in the series until Halle Berry turns up in the 2002 (!) unless you want to count Grace Jones, though she’s the antagonist, not the traditional “Bond girl” in the way Berry is. Kananga remains the only black principal antagonist even now. So just to count them off – every single African American character in New York is out to get Bond, our principal villain is black, his two principal henchpeople are black, the double-agent is black, and as for the voodoo island of San Monique… I mean, where to begin? It’s every woo-woo native caricature imaginable – even the name of the island implies a colonial past, with Great White Saviour Bond sweeping into rescue the poor white woman from the clutches of the evil black people who rule.
Oh and of course Kananga is deeply superstitious, believes in “the cards” and the island is littered with “dolls” and “scarecrows”, some of which have camera eyes and handy built-in traitor-dispatching guns. This is all openly racist, in other words, in a way that no Bond has even been until now, not even with Connery in slanty-eye make-up. Fear the black man, this film tells us, because you can be sure he’s up to no good, no matter where in the world he is. It’s hard to imagine that Bond looking uncomfortable in a Harlem soul food joint would be one of the least racist elements in the whole movie, but here we are. At least the pimpmobiles in Harlem look cool – the stuff on San Monique is just every lazy racial cliché of voodoo you could think of. It’s awful.
So yes, Live And Let Die is bad. Often very bad, and occasionally as bad as the Bond series will ever get. In it’s tone-deaf, clumsy handling of race and gender the film is an absolute categorical failure. It’s well shot, for the most part uses it’s locations well, and occasionally even manages to be compelling which helps cover at least some of the deficiencies on show here, but it’s all in the service of absolutely nothing. As a launch vehicle for Moore’s lighter, more easy-going interpretation of Bond it’s an outright disaster, giving the man himself too few moments to show why we should care now that he’s in the driving seat, and rarely letting us witness how this new Bond is going to work. None of that is remotely Moore’s fault, and his avuncular, charming version of the character is the sole redeeming feature of a film that is 100% dependent on the charisma of its leading man not to sink without trace. Moore deserved better. The audience deserved better. Everyone deserved better.
Live And Let Die is absolutely dreadful.
What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut?
Not as easy to decide as you might imagine. I mean, obviously there’s Sheriff Pepper, that goes without saying, and about half of the speedboat chase, which starts impressively then just goes on for way too long to sustain interest (despite a few impressive-looking stunts). The problem with cutting this film is a lot of the scenes and locations are quick in-and-out ones – even Harlem, certainly a distinctive place for the Bond series to go to, is only on-screen for about fifteen minutes. And since we’re in Harlem, the bluff of Mr Big can go too – it contributes next to nothing, and is far too low in the mix to care about. Of course it would be great to cut all the terrible racism and sexism, but then you’d only have a title sequence. I mean, Paul McCartney knocks out a good Bond theme and all, but you need a bit more than that. The stuff with Whisper is completely dispensable, but the fact he’s a vast gentleman who’s very quietly spoken is… well, not crucial, but distinctive at least. Let’s go for 10% – Pepper can go, the pointless Mr Big sub-plot can go, and then we’re stuck with the rest.
Quip Level
Well it could have been a lot higher, all things considered. Moore’s Bond is a different thing from Connery’s, and his puns and one-liners are delivered in a much more arch fashion, as one would expect from an actor like that. There’s a charm to the way Moore delivers them, though, so even when they’re fairly bad or contrived (that final “disarming” one) the man delivering them is enough of a smooth gentleman to be able to pull it off without it being too cringe-inducing. Though the number of them does increase as the film wears on, Moore never loses his ability to deliver them, and the majority are fairly low-key at this point in his run. I think we’re relatively safe with a Medium this time out, but watch this space…
2017 Cringe Factor
If this film were an absolute paragon of race relations, gender politics, and a sensitive portrayal of a fragile and abused woman coming to terms with her place in the world, this would be about as cringey as it is humanly possible to imagine. And it will come as absolutely no surprise to discover the reason for that is Sheriff J.W. Pepper, one of the very worst characters ever to grace the silver screen. From the first moment his crushingly unfunny, agonisingly awful stereotype wobbles his way on screen until his final, impotent, angry-stomping on the quayside, there is not a single occasion where this character has a redeeming moment, nor one where he even manages to justify his place within the film itself. If it had been a necessary character, but badly acted (see: Seymour, Jane) that would be one thing, but his inclusion is the very definition of pointless, and contributes nothing. He is, to put it mildly, fucking terrible.
Of course on top of that you also have the gender politics, which even by Bond standards are poor, with Solitare flipping from distressed, to horny, to rebellious, and back again, sometimes within the same scene but almost never with a sense of reason or purpose. She’s just a prop, and the film makes no bones about treating her that way. And there’s one bizarre scene she has by the plane, where she briefly appears to be on Kananga’s side, then isn’t. Oh and of course the way the film deals with race which is, at it’s least awful moments comes across as “fine, it was the 70’s” (some, but not all, of the Harlem-set material) to, at it’s worst, phenomenally patronizing portrayals of voodoo culture, island life, the remainder of the Harlem scenes and… well you get the point.
JG Judgementally Comments... 