1971-1973: Faces Both Familiar and New
If there’s one thing people are afraid of, it’s change. The only time people seem to want it is election season, but as far as everything else is concerned society prefers a state of familiar equilibrium. The James Bond series is no different, for whenever the public is faced with a new actor playing the starring role, it seems we like to tear them apart before they even hit the set. Before Casino Royale, when Daniel Craig was introduced to the public in a ceremony which was wholly unnecessary, he rode in on a motorboat. The problem? He was wearing a life jacket.
People, looking for any fault they could, unloaded on Craig, calling the use of a life jacket a very un-007 move. Of course this is a ridiculous complaint, as Craig is merely an actor and has zero experience actually shooting people and engaging in death-defying stunts. Happily, Craig would go on to create an entirely new, and entirely convincing Bond when it mattered. Now, to a generation of filmgoers, he will be the definitive Bond.
However, to this day many Bond purists believe Sean Connery to be the one and only actor who mastered the part. Gene Siskel once said on At the Movies that Connery was the only actor to play the part that was even adequate. I have a problem with this point of view because one is assuming that a character cannot be changed as time goes on. One thing that’s been impressive about the series is its ability to alter the character over time to fit the strengths of each actor, and just because Connery does it one way doesn’t mean the rest are doomed to march to the same drum.
Back in the late 60’s people were less forgiving. When George Lazenby (who?) got the part in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the public responded by only making the film a moderate hit. Soon after, Lazenby left the role thinking he was bound to go on to unimaginable fame and stardom, and so producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were left again without an actor. The public began to believe that there wasn’t anybody on the planet who wanted the part.
To respond to this, the filmmakers decided to go after Sean Connery, the actor many saw as the only man for the part. Connery wasn’t exactly jumping for joy at the prospect, demanding a small fortune, but so determined were the filmmakers that they fulfilled his every wish. They had their James Bond back.
Sadly, Diamonds Are Forever, Connery’s return, was the weakest film yet in the series’ run. Despite the flashy look and the excitement of seeing Connery back in his element, the tone does not match what Connery had done in his first go-round. When I say this, I don’t mean that Bond films can never be funny, but comic relief is supposed to be an afterthought to the action and the dry wit. With Diamonds Are Forever, the Bond films take a turn for the cartoonish and campy, something that can be traced to the work of screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz.
This was Mankiewicz’s first job as 007 screenwriter, but he would go on to write the next two films as well. Mankiewicz accomplished much in other jobs, but his tenure as screenwriter for the James Bond films caused the series to regress into something it was never meant to be: kooky.
Despite all the Americans that would be involved with the series, James Bond was always meant to be a fundamentally British series, something the filmmakers accomplished up until the Mankiewicz “era.” When examining his films, it becomes obvious he doesn’t really like the characters he’s writing, as Bond treats them cruelly almost from start to finish. The writing of Tom Mankiewicz was overly cynical and tried too hard to be funny in all the worst ways. Of course, the Bond movies at their best can be quite funny. We viewers only complain about the attempts at humor when they fail, and sadly for Mankiewicz he could never quite pull it off.
After On Her Majesty’s Secret Service showed the world what a serious, ambitious Bond film could achieve, Diamonds Are Forever can only look like a substantial step in the wrong direction. While Las Vegas and Connery’s Bond are a match made in heaven, the film never clicks. As I said before, the supporting cast is rife with obnoxious American whiners who hate each other and the audience can never find a way in. Despite the occasionally memorable character (such as Jimmy Dean’s Willard Whyte), Diamonds Are Forever falls flat in all the wrong places. I haven’t even mentioned the film’s greatest sin: Blofeld has hair.
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| Even the fake Blofelds have hair. |
Despite the film’s many flaws, Diamonds Are Forever was (predictably) a smash, as audiences around the globe rushed to their local multiplex to see Connery return to the role which was rightly his. In the wake of this success, Connery decided to walk away from the series once again, so the role was once again vacant. A search that included everyone west of the USSR ensued (both Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds were considered, dear lord), but ultimately the part went to Roger Moore, former star of The Saint.
Roger Moore is, decidedly, not Sean Connery. He’s much more of a joke-cracking wiseguy, but less cold-hearted. He’ll still kill the bad guy, but only when he absolutely has to. Where Sean Connery would punch you in the face and steal your girlfriend, Moore would consider that a very un-gentlemanlike thing to do. He’s the kind of secret agent you’d like to have a drink with, which is the criteria we should base all important decisions on, don’t you think?
It took everyone a few films to figure out exactly what to do with Moore as Bond, and as such in his first film, Live and Let Die, Bond comes off as a bit uninteresting. Despite that, Moore does a rather good job with the material he’s given, and makes Live and Let Die an enjoyable film if not a perfect one. Of the three Mankiewicz-penned Bond films, this is the strongest.
Live and Let Die is an acceptable spy film if little more than that, thanks to a memorable cast of characters around the periphery. Above all, Geoffrey Holder’s Baron Samedi remains a classic Bond villain, if only because he’s especially freaky. The film, as a whole, may not handle race with the most delicacy, but it remains an engaging film throughout, something other Bond films of the era can’t claim.
If the film is infamous for one thing above all else, it’s Sheriff J.W. Pepper, the Louisiana police officer who shows up and bumbles his way through an otherwise exciting boat chase. This is a man that has no place in a Bond film, and as such he does everything in his power to keep Live and Let Die from being more than adequate. Nonetheless, somehow Mankiewicz got it in his head that everyone liked this character, and Sherriff J.W. Pepper would come back in The Man with the Golden Gun in what would become my pick for the most intolerable sequence in the series. More on this next week.
One thing Roger Moore has over Connery and Lazenby is that he seems to truly enjoy being James Bond. Where Connery grew tired of the role and Lazenby never really gave it a chance, Moore wanted to be James Bond for the foreseeable future. When Moore got the role for Live and Let Die, few could have predicted he would keep it for the next 12 years. At the beginning, he was 46, already a little old for the most famous superspy in the world. His final film, A View to a Kill, would be released when Moore was 58. His tenure would be long and commercially successful, though to this day people routinely call Moore the weakest Bond. This is something I wholeheartedly disagree with. It’s just that his Bond was different than the others, and the material did not play to his strengths as much as it should have. It’s true that the Moore era has some of the weakest films in the series, but when one examines the failures it is rarely the fault of Moore himself, but instead the movie around him. His second film, The Man With the Golden Gun, would be released just one year after Live and Let Die, and to this day it remains my pick for the worst Bond film ever made.
Next Week: The Man with the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me are released, and show the world how to use Roger Moore (and how not to use him.)
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