I write these Bond reviews with the expectation that everyone has seen all the movies, if not read the all the books. So, tread as carefully as it seems prudent.
I was sensitive to blunt racism in this one, but Fleming brushes against it time and again, and ultimately loses his footing. He attributes quite a bit of smarts and acumen to the Negro (still the common term) criminals Bond battles, but nonetheless the very notion of a white man rescuing a lovely white woman from the clutches of a black mobster has a whiff the Klan would be most comfortable with. The attempts to capture the idiom of speech patterns of Harlem and the Black community elsewhere are often jarring on the ear. He puts this mush-mouth jargon only with black characters, not unlike the regrettable movies of some years earlier.
The "Big Man" himself actually put me in mind of the Spider-Man villain the Kingpin. Change the details of skin color and the descriptions are identical. A great shark scene from this novel was not used in the movie but shifted to the later License to Kill. And the keel-haul sequence gets used in For Your Eyes Only. It's interesting to read the novels as we meet characters out of order often. Unlike its predecessor this book has Bond travel quite a bit, from London to NYC to Florida to Jamaica. In this novel in the Jamaica section, we encounter Strangways and Quarrel for the first time, as in the films of course we meet them in Dr. No.
One idea that bubbles through these early Bond efforts. Bond dislikes women. Bond likes men. The books are not necessarily homoerotic (I don't discount utterly though), but the only people Bond has any real attachment to are his male allies Leiter and Quarrel. The women in the two books so far -- Vesper and Solitaire -- are objects to be won. When Vesper betrays him, it's the damage to his male ego that bothers him, not the loss of her eternal love. Solitaire is just a hottie he wants to bed.
Live and Let Die is Roger Moore's first turn as the super-spy James Bond and to my mind his best. Moore still looks quite dashing and a glimmer of the glow of youth somehow still radiates from him as he walks the streets of NYC or dances across gators in the backwoods of Louisiana. Yaphet Koto is wonderful as the uber-villain "Mr. Big" though the gray bulbous form from the novel is revealed to be a ruse.
The lurid voodoo tropes are maintained, but this time they distract not from a criminal gang stealing pirate gold for the purposes of SMERSH, the Soviet spy network, but a corrupt Carribean politician who run runs a drug empire. "Solitaire" is played by the ravishing Jane Seymour in her breakout film role. Also, on hand is the outstanding Geoffrey Holder as "Baron Samedi", and he almost steals the move with his unforgettable laugh. Julius Harris as "Tee Hee" is a proper villain and gets an ending a proper villain deserves. This one was produced during the "Blaxploitation" era and pays homage to that movie genre with characters like Gloria Hendry as Bond-girl "Rosie Carver". And we get the debut of "Sgt. J.W. Pepper", played by Clifton James. This cracker cop will return in The Man with the Golden Gun.
This one is a hoot. I always enjoy it bit more than I think I will because I always find some new details I'd missed which adds to the mix. It's too bad that it's a steady decline for Roger Moore after this one.
James Bond Returns in From Russia with Love!
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I thought the Robert McGinnis poster design was one of the best.
ReplyDeleteHis stuff is always just so very sexy.
DeleteYou didn't mention the Paul McCartney theme-song which includes the grammatically incorrect line "But if this ever-changing world in which we live in".
ReplyDeleteYeah. The Bond movies had the cache to get a Beatle to write a tune.
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