Highly Overrated But Still Good

Great Film overall

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

"Live and Let Die is the first James Bond film that starred Roger Moore in the lead role as Agent 007. Like Sean Connery before him, Moore would make seven Bond films. His would be over a 13-year period, with one other star before his last film. That, incidentally, was Connery 12 years after his sixth appearance in the role. One thing interesting about the Bond series is that each actor who has had the role four or more times has started with high ratings, and by the time of their last films, their ratings have reached their lowest point. The box office results also reflect this. All of the films continue to make good at the box office, but the later ones of each lead actor have less spectacular rates of return. It just seems that audiences get tired of the same actor as Bond after a while. In this film, Moore showed that he would be likely to stay in the role. He is a capable Bond in all aspects. His physical challenges aren't as many or spectacular as in the earliest films. But his cunning and alertness are quite sharp. This film mixes a little exotic Caribbean travel with visits to the U.S. First, New York, and then New Orleans and the bayous of Louisiana. A big chunk of the story was filmed in the latter and in Jamaica. For excitement, this movie has the best boat chase episode of any film I can recall. It lasts a long time, involves several boats, and has some fantastic scenes. These include boats shooting across patches of land, jumping barriers, crashing through a boat block, and crashing and exploding. All of the cast are very good. After this film, Jane Seymour became widely known and her star rose fast. Most Bond films have one bad guy character who stands out for something special about her or him - size, mechanical body parts, strength, etc. In this film, it's Julius Harris as Tee Hee. He is both very tall and has a metal claw hand - or clamp hand. However, he turns out not to be so tough as other Bond opponents have been in the past. The characteristic unusual encounter of a Bond film in "Live and Let Die" is with a congregation of alligators and crocodiles. The IMDb filming locations lists Jamaica Safari Village for shooting of the crocodile farm scenes. Jamaica has native crocs but not alligators, and Louisiana has alligators but not crocs. The scenes clearly seem to show both reptiles. My guess is that the tourist village in Jamaica also has some alligators in captivity, along with the native crocs. A bunch of snakes of various types also got in on the action of this film. This film shows a strange and interesting aspect of culture in some of the Caribbean islands. Early Spanish explorers and settlers brought the Catholic religion to the islands. Christianity clearly is against superstition and occult practices. Yet, some places where voodoo had existed before retained its beliefs and practices, mixing them in with their Christianity. The scenario of the voodoo ceremony has a scene when Tee Hee appears to rise from a grave. The many people are on their knees and rapidly and repeatedly crossing themselves. One very strange thing in this film was the funeral parade in the French Quarter of New Orleans. In both instances when the two separate events are shown, the streets otherwise are empty of people except for the throng in the parade and a secret agent and an assailant. I can't imagine any day when there wouldn't be many people seen on the streets of the Quarter. The plot for this film has some holes or blanks. We never learn why the British ambassador to the U.N. is killed in the beginning. The ending is also unusual and odd. Most Bond films end with the good guys defeating or rounding up the bad guys. But nothing is shown of the dozens of men and women in New Orleans who staged the funeral parades to cover murders. There were many folks involved in the crimes in this film that seem to get away with murder. These are just some of the different aspects of this Bond film. The curious treatment of some things, or lack thereof, make it seem that the filmmakers were running out of time or money and needed to tighten up the script. The end result was little pieces being removed that answered the questions and tied it all together logically. But for those glaring miscues or oversights, this film would have scored nine stars in my rating. Here are a couple of favorite lines from the film.James Bond, "A sort of junkie's welfare system."Kananga, "That heroin will be very expensive, indeed, leaving myself and the phone company the only two growing monopolies in the nation for years to come."

The best movie I saw of Bond with Roger Moore at the helm.Bond has to stop a Black drug dealer, who works with voodoo and witchcraft. An interesting and far better proposal than to blow up the world with nuclear weapons. The action scenes are electrifying enough and well assembled. The element of humor is here, and it is placed almost perfectly.If you talk about Jane Seymour, what a beautiful woman, with a cleavage to make a woman very envy. The crocodile scene is one of the best in movie history.The villain is one of the best I've ever see in the bond franchise,a villain that had a great desire to kill innocent people. A villain who deals with drugs and disgraces the lives of many. And still working with voodoo and witchcraft, could not exist anything better. Excellent and cohesive proposal. I highly recommend it.

Directed by Guy Hamilton and with a script by Tom Mankiewicz, this is the eighth film in the franchise and keeps Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli as producers. In this film, the first in which Roger Moore embodies the British spy, franchise tries to survive at two powerful factors of danger: the departure of Sean Connery after several years giving life to 007, and the unstoppable evolution of the world, with the seventies bringing a radical change in the audience. Thus, producers and screenwriter tried to attract new audiences, in particular the black public, attracted not only by black actors but also for some locations. Another subject that the film will address, and that was on the agenda during these times, are drugs and trafficking.In this film, the British agent will fight an American drug baron but gets lost in the black neighborhood of Harlem, where he cannot pass unnoticed and almost finds himself in danger. The track eventually leads Bond to Louisiana, where the persecution of bandits brings us the hilarious Sheriff J. W. Pepper, who worked not only as a film comic element but also as a severe criticism against the conservatism of white society in the southern states. We must remind ourselves that this movie was released at a time when American society was in deep transformation, largely thanks to the struggle of black society for respect, equality and civil rights, which were denied until then, particularly, in the South. The film then heads to the Caribbean, to an island that was probably inspired by Haiti and where the audience is faced with superstitions and beliefs as voodoo or magic.In these film, Roger Moore proved that could hold his role, and the agent could survive Sean Connery. In fact, he even manages to be much more English, while maintaining the habit of never losing his composure whatever the situation. The villains were in charge of Yaphet Kotto and Julius Harris, the latter in the role of Tee Hee, the man with the metal arm. Geoffrey Holder embodies the Baron Samedi, Haitian voodoo character who enters this film. The bond-girl was Jane Seymour, the role of the tarot reader Solitaire.For many people, "Live and Let Die" is one of the oddest films in the franchise because of the amount of unusual elements featuring: "blaxploitation", magic, voodoo, superstition, drugs. And these people aren't without reason. Today, this film is strange and doesn't leave many memories, like many films of the seventies. There are even those who think that is the worst movie of the franchise. Perhaps. But it helped to keep Bond alive and adapted him to a new era. For posterity stays the good performance of the elegant and humorous Roger Moore and the introduction song, written by Paul McCartney and who would receive, years later, a new life through the cover of Guns N'Roses.

Say what you want about James Bond movies, that they are traditional or clichéd or predictable, but if you look at them in the spirit of their age you'll notice that there is often a lot of clever market research and marketeering involved. Bond's interstellar adventure "Moonraker", for example, got released around the same time as the immensely popular "Star Wars" films and thus at the height of the Sci-Fi cinema revival. Well, "Live and let Die" also cashes in on a contemporary very profitable movie trend, namely the rise of the so- called "Blaxploitation" cinema. These are films with an ensemble cast existing almost entirely of black actors/actresses and often dealing with organized crime and gang wars in New York City. Of course James Bond himself is still white and typically British, but for the first time in eight films his opponents are Afro-Americans with heavily pimped cars. 007 is sent to the United Stated in order to find the connection between the murders of three British secret agents in New York, New Orleans and a small Caribbean island named San Monique. He quickly finds out that all heroin sales in Harlem are being controlled by a certain Mr. Big, and he gets his deliveries straight from President Kananga of San Monique. Kananga is surrounded by large henchmen with arms of steel, petrifying high Voodoo priest and sexy virgin Tarot Card readers. "Live and let Die" is a hit 'n miss Bond classic, in my humble opinion. Some vital aspects are disappointingly weak, like the predictable plot twists or the awful attempts to insert redneck humor, while other aspects are very unique and even downright genius, like spectacularly staged action sequence and an overall fantastic cast of characters. Yaphet Kotto is terrific as the evil but superstitious Kananga, but his accomplices are even cooler, most notably Julius Harris as the humongous Tee Hee and Geoffrey Holder as the spooky Baron Samedi. Jane Seymour, in one of her very first on-screen appearances, depicts one of the most breathtaking Bond girls ever and her character – Solitaire the vulnerable card reader in custody of President Kananga – is also quite absorbing. Highlights in "Live and Let Die" undoubtedly include the (fake) funeral rite in the famous streets of New Orleans, the chase with the typically British double- decker bus and the rather tense execution attempt at the crocodile/alligator farm. The famous speedboat chase through Louisiana is far too overlong and over- stuffed with lame comical interludes (although hillbilly Sheriff J.W. Pepper was apparently popular enough to re-appear in next year's "The Man with the Golden Gun"), but the voodoo rituals and artifacts are effectively scary. None other than Paul McCartney wrote and sang the beautiful title song and Roger Moore does an adequate job in his very first Bond performance. He was already 45-years-old in this film and by the time of his seventh and last Bond film in 1985 – "A View to a Kill" – he was embarrassingly overaged.