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Daniel Craig’s James Bond era was very particular as to how it paid tribute to other Bond eras. Obviously, Sean Connery got his dues. That Aston Martin DB5 turned up in Skyfall, Spectre and No Time To Die, and there’s an austere brutality to Craig’s Bond that recalls both Connery and Timothy Dalton. Dalton’s Aston V8 turned up too. George Lazenby was welcomed back into the Bond tent in No Time to Die, which paid repeated tribute to his one and only outing in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
As we come to the 50th anniversary of his first Bond film Live and Let Die, though, Roger Moore has yet to have his valedictory pat on the back. His films get fleeting nods here and there, but by and large it feels like Craig’s era attempted to keep the giddy, eyebrow-arching spirit of Moore’s era at arm’s length. Pierce Brosnan’s later films had been happy to flirt with the hovercraft gondola end of Moore’s output, and that was exactly where Casino Royale didn’t want to go. Therefore, Sir Rodge was on the out.
It’s not just the on-screen vibe which feels out of kilter either. Moore was always very endearingly uncool: according to his friend and stunt double Rocky Taylor, when Moore came out of the office in which he had officially signed on for Live and Let Die, he danced around shouting, “I’m James Bond! I’m James Bond!” In his diaries of the making of Live and Let Die, he reveals that his favourite food is tripe – “Italian style”. It’s not quite “shaken, not stirred,” Rodge.
He was a chintzy Bond for a chintzy age, the spirit of the long Seventies who looked odd in a post-Spielberg, post-Arnie, post-Rambo action-adventure world. Then he looked even more odd in A View to a Kill (fans suspected that he’d some work done before shooting and couldn’t blink properly).
In later life he was a beloved and unapologetically campy figure, still metaphorically wearing the frilly shirt and velvet blazer as he smoothly and classily navigated the many sofas of the light entertainment industry. Nobody ever made being an ex-Bond look like more fun; Pierce Brosnan’s good-vibes-only outlook seems to have been formed in Moore’s image.
Live and Let Die found Bond at a crossroads, having hit the ejector seat on Lazenby then got Connery back for the queasy, wig-assisted Diamonds Are Forever. Five decades on the Bond franchise is at a crossroads again, and whoever ends up captaining Bond into its next era there are a lot of moves which it could steal from Live and Let Die as the first and most wildly ambitious reboot in the series’ history.
There are lots of things about Live and Let Die which feel very bad now, of course. I mean, almost all the black characters are bad guys and almost all of them die, while Yaphet Kotto who played Mr Big was dropped from the promo rounds after doing a black power salute during a photoshoot. His treatment was such that around the film’s release Kotto found himself alone in a bar, crying. It’s a blaxploitation flick that neglected to include many black people in its making, and that’s enormously to its detriment.
But the things that Live and Let Die does well could be retooled for a new Bond. It’s easy to forget now that Bond movies are their own genre with their own particular beats and conventions which lift them away from spy movies at large, and that they needn’t necessarily be. Adding a twist of heist thriller, say – or whodunnit, or folk horror, or Western – would freshen things up without losing the Bond-ness everyone’s after.
Bond himself is a mutable figure too. There’s something slightly mid-Atlantic about Moore’s Bond in Live and Let Die. He drinks bourbon, smokes cigars when he’s parasailing, flaps about in double-breasted suit jackets. The unknown territories he ventures into aren’t just lairs and paradises, but hard-bitten Harlem. The Britishness of Bond is one of its most pronounced flavours, and putting him in a big American city only makes it more deliciously pronounced.
And there’s a lesson in the theme song too. It can bang, you know! Having a Bond theme song which bangs is allowed! It’s legal!
While Live and Let Die has its problems, it was a reimagining of what Bond could be at a time when it really, really needed it. The next reimagining will be of a billion-dollar juggernaut rather than a rapidly decaying property, so you’d bet against Bond 26 being too much of a U-turn. But it could do with a little of Moore’s boldness to make it work. Imagine it: Taron Egerton/Aaron Taylor Johnson/Daniel Kaluuya/whoever gets the gig saunters up to a bar. He raises an eyebrow at a young lady a few barstools away. “I’ll have a bourbon,” he says. “And a bowl of tripe – Italian style.”
