Not too bad for an old Bond movie, but still, to never watch again. Roger Moore is different but not too much. He has the elegance and cocky attitude of Bond, and while he may be a bit less charismatic than Connery, in this film he makes a somehow softer Bond, which is not bad at all.
The sstory shows a lot of voodoo superstition but not real, what instead appears to be real to the characters is thee girl’s power to read tarots and predictt what will happen.
Apparently she was always absolutely right until Bond came along…
He’s called in because British agents have been killed, one at a United Nations conference, one in New Orleans and one in San Monique, a Caribbean island.
The opening titles show right away “Roger Moore as James Bond-007” so no surprise this time… good, those are not good surprises, but things to know in advance. It also says “introducing Jane Seymour”, was this her first film? Really? One hell of a debut role, a Bond girl with lots of screen time…
This time M gos to find Bond directly because after a mission in Rome he’s now having his fun with an Italian agent, Miss Caruso, who now hides while an embarrassed Bond hopes he doesn’t see her. Caruso hides, Moneypenny sees her but doesn’t tell :-)
Bond is sent to investigate, one of the agents was keeping an eye on Dr Kananga, San Monique’s Prime Minister.
Bond’s watch can turn “into a hyper-intensified magnetic field, powerful enough to even deflect the path of a bullet at long range, or so Q claims” - luckily for him we don’t see him dodging bullets like Neo, no.
M: “I feel very tempted to test that theory right now” :lol: sometimes M feels like a 00-sitter. :-p
Dr Kananga is now in New York so Bond will go there and meet up with Felix.
I don’t really understand the thing with the cars with identical plate numbers, what was up with that?
Bond’s driver is killed.
Solitaire foresees that a man is coming who will oppose bringing violence and destruction. Bond is brought in front of Mr Big - his men all call him baby or Jim :lol:
When Bond appears, Solitaire’s cards show her the High Priestess and the Lovers…
Kananga goes back to San Monique so Bond follows. Someone puts a snake in his bathroom but Bond burns it. A black girl, Rosie Carver, enters with a gun, says she’s with the Cia and was asked to help out. She says Felix’s suggestion in dealing with Bond was “if all else failed, cyanide pills”, but when she sees a hat with a bloodied feather on her bed she gets scared, she’s all begging “please don’t leave me alone tonight”…
Bond wants her to take him where agent Baines was killed. She mistakes a man helping Bond for an enemy and points a gun at him. “As I was saying, Quarrel, a lousy agent, but the compensations speak for themselves. Rosie Carver, meet the man who shares my hair brush” so she apologized, and the man said “you might have even killed me if you’d taken off the safety catch”.
Still, she’s very very pretty and he calls her darling.
Solitaire is telling Kananga about the man coming via water, all very true, but she also saw again the Lovers card and didn’t say it. Kananga - we’ll soon see that he and Mr Big are the same person - ordered Rosie to do something: she’s scared of voodoo magic, and Big has convinced people that he’s Baron Samedi reincarnated, or something, a divine or spiritual being connected with the dead, a sort of Charon, but with a tall hat and a clean but otherwise zombie-like appearance.
Bond knows there’s a trap and wants answers from Rosie, he wants her to talk: “they’ll kill me if I do” - “and I’ll kill you if you don’t” - “but you couldn’t. You wouldn’t. Not after what we’ve just done” - “I certainly wouldn’t have killed you before” … no words… :-/
When Rosie sees some kind of voodoo totem, death-warning, Rosie runs terrified and is killed.
Bond then finds himself another girl sneaking into Solitaire’s room and “tricking” her with a tarot deck made only of Lovers cards. Still, jokes on him because he shouldn’t have bothered, she was convinced already by her own cards. They have sex and then he asks for “a little bit of information”, sure that she’ll now tell him everything. But she can’t now. “The power… I’ve lost it. The High Priestess is wife to the Prince no longer of this world. The spiritual bridge to the secret church. It’s my fate. By compelling me to earthly love, the cards themselves have taken away my powers”.
“The physical violation cannot be undone” is a really bad-tough phrase, and yet this is Bond so she doesn’t appear to be very regretful. She may miss her cards and she sure fears Big’s reaction when he learns she’s lost her power, she fears for her life, but this is Bond so she looks very eager to keep doing it.
Of course he says he’ll take her away ‘after’ he’s discovered everything, and when they’re caught it’s Bond-luck again: Big tests Solitaire’s powers and yet when she fails he doesn’t have Bond’s fingers cut like he threatened before. For no reason, he lets him go whole.
Bond discovers that “Voodooland was just poppy fields”, and the whole thing is “a simple matter of heroin smuggling”. Bond keeps the girl around because, as I said before, she’s quite eager, and also because she’s “a valuable piece of merchandise” and if they want her back they’ll show themselves. They’re caught, of course, and taken to Big.
Did Solitaire fake-attack Bond to pretend she’s not on his side? What was that?
Cia agent Strutter, who mocked Bond in Harlem for entering certain places with his white face, doesn’t seem as knowing in New Orleans. To give him credit, many others have fallen for this fake-funeral march scene. Quite good though, I liked it. :-)
People start moving, slowly, solemnly, a woman crying, then a man stabs the agent and the coffin that was being carried around empty gets now filled with him.
Big is very upsett that Bond “stole” Soliatire, and keeps asking “did you touch her?” Because now she has no more powers, and he wanted her to stay useful and untouched until he himself chose to do the touching… :-/
The “trespassers will be eaten” sign was funny; the bad guy wants to leave Bond to be eaten by alligators and crocodiles together, but Bond hops on their heads instead and sends them after the bad guys. He sets the place on fire and escapes on a boat. And here a rather long boats chase starts. They fly over the roads with those boats, more through gardens, land in a swimming pool, wreck a wedding, speeding on land as if it was water. A sheriff kept chasing after them too, and is quite upset when told who he is: “secret agent? On whose side?”
So they plan to set Voodooland on fire with bombs, while he goes to save Solitaire. She’s about to be killed voodoo style, bitten by a snake while people dance and yell. There are machines and underground caves and labs, to keep people believe in voodoo so to control them. Now, the agent who died this way didn’t appear to have any particular outfit, but of course the girl ha her hair loose to her back an is wearing a light white dress…
Big doesn’t seem too bothered, says “the poppy’s a very sturdy flower” so Bond’s and Cia’s efforts so far were only a “relatively minor nuisance”. He asks about Bond’s special anti-sharks gun, so we can learn about it and recognize it later. It uses “compressed gas pellets”. Bond sees Big’s “underground monorail” that they use to carry the heroin, and again because it is Bond the villain goes: “correct again Mr Bond, what a quick study you are. Let me show you exactly how it works” !!
Bond and Solitaire are tied up and Big makes a couple of cuts on Bond’s arm to attract the sharks. Bond uses the watch to cut the ropes and to get him the shark-gun bullet: when he fights Big, he kills him by pushing that down his throat so Big inflates because of the compressed gas and explodes.
After this it’s over, I guess nobody even tries to stop him if there’s no big bad boss shouting at them.
Bond and Solitaire choose to travel by train because it’ll be a 16 hours journey and Felix wonders what can they possibly do for 16 hours…
Bond just has to kill the bad guy with the hook and then the girl is all his.
Last image is of the laughting man. Not sure what he represents, but I liked him, he was fun and intriguing.
James Bond is Roger Moore
Kananga-Mr Big is Yaphet Kotto
Solitaire is Jane Seymour
Leiter is David Hedison
Rosie is Gloria Hendry
M is Bernard Lee
Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell
Tee Hee is Julius W. Harris (the man with the hook)
Baron Samedi is Geoffrey Holder (the laughing man or the various Samedi to come out of the cemetery in voodooland?)
There is no Q!!!
The ending credits state “the end of Live and Let Die. James Bond will return in The man with the golden gun”
ITA agente 007 vivi e lascia morire
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