MI6 looks back at the "Live And Let Die" premiere in 1973, and what the press had to say...

Live And Let Die - The Premiere & Press
25th July 2005

On July 6th 1973, "Live And Let Die" had its World premiere at the Odeon Cinema in London's Leicester Square. The UK premiere was attended by a mixture of crew, cast and famous faces most importantly the new face of 007 - Roger Moore. Moore had just returned from a world promotional tour, the aim of which was to separate himself from the legendary Sean Connery - all of which was summarised in his published diary.

The movie went on general release within the UK on July 12th to an unsure public who gave the latest James Bond outing only mediocre success. Opening in the US a week earlier on the 27th June, the eighth Bond film went up against Power Productions horror sequel "Scream Blacula Scream", Paramount Pictures "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" and Walt Disney Pictures "Charley and the Angel". Other films out on June 27th included "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing", A Touch of Class", "Blume in Love", "Battle for the Planet of the Apes", "The Last Sheila" and "Shaft in Africa". "Live And Let Die" went on to earn $35,400,000 during its run in the US.

December ushered the new Bond into Norway on the 13th with a K-16 rating, with Finland and France having to wait a further eight days. December 22nd saw the debut of "Live And Let Die" on Swedish cinema screens. The film averaged 9,862,000 Swedish Krona with general admissions of around 954,000 people.

What The Critics Said... "Live and Let Die" is the ninth James Bond picture, and not exactly the best. It has all the necessary girls, gimmicks, subterranean control rooms, uniformed goons and magic wristwatches it can hold, but it doesn't have the wit and it doesn't have the style of the best Bond movies. This may have something to do with the substitution of Roger Moore for Sean Connery as 007. Moore has the superficial attributes for the job: The urbanity, the quizzically raised eyebrow, the calm under fire and in bed. But Connery was always able to invest the role with a certain humor, a sense of its ridiculousness. Moore has been supplied with a lot of double entendres and double takes, but he doesn't seem to get the joke. The plot this time begins in the usual way, with the disappearance of what are inevitably described as "three of our best men." One died in New York, one in New Orleans (during a funeral that turned out, alas, to be his own) and one in the Caribbean. Needless to say, a string of coincidences link the murders and they seem to lead to Mr. Big.

Mr. Big is played, I guess, by Yaphet Kotto. I have to guess because either I wasn't listening or it was never quite explained whether Kotto was fronting for Big or was really Big all along and just pretended to front for him. Not that it matters; the movie doesn't have a Bond villain worthy of the Goldfingers, Dr. Nos and Oddjobs of the past.

The bad guys, indeed, are a little banal. In the past, Bond has conquered evil scientists bent on enslaving the world. He has broken up a scheme to destroy our space satellites with laser beams. He has, let's see, saved the dollar by protecting our gold supply (something the current administration is less successful at). That's big-time stuff. But this time, all the bad guys are doing is growing a billion dollars worth of heroin in order to take over the illegal dope industry from the mob. (They're black, but the movie's ads mercifully refrain from promising they've got a plan to stick it to the man, maybe out of deference to Bond's British origins. This is, after all, Discover America summer.)

There are a few elements every Bond movie absolutely must have, and "Live and Let Die" has them. It opens, of course, with a meeting with M and the faithful Miss Moneypenny. It has Bond arriving at the Caribbean hideout by man-bearing kite. It has a spectacular chase (this one involves speedboats, but isn't as much fun as the great ski chase two Bonds ago). It has a spectacularly destroyed villain (he swallows a capsule of compressed air and explodes). It has the girls. And it has Bond exhibiting his mastery of the better things in life by asking room service for a bottle of Bollinger - not cold, but "slightly chilled," please.

And it does, to give it credit, have the one basic Bond scene that always seems copied from the previous Bond movie: The penetration of the underground citadel. This scene always begins with Bond pressing a bidden lever or discovering the secret door. Then there's a shot of a vast underground cavern, which is filled with uniformed functionaries who hurry about on mysterious scientific errands.

Bond slips unobserved from one hiding place to another; is discovered; eludes his pursuers; watches as six hired goons hurry past; and then goes through another door and unexpectedly finds the villain waiting there for him. The dialog here is always the same, something like "Come in, Mr. Bond, we've been expecting you . . ." And then . . . but do you get the same notion I do, that after nine of these we've just about had enough? - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun- Times

"Great stunts and a cool theme song, but the Harlem scenes aren't quite superfly enough for me." - Dan Lybarger, Lawrence Journal-World Live and Let Die, the eighth Cubby Broccoli-Harry Saltzman film based on Ian Fleming's James Bond, introduces Roger Moore as an okay replacement for Sean Connery. The script reveals that plot lines have descended further to the level of the old Saturday afternoon serial. Here Bond's assigned to ferret out mysterious goings on involving Yaphet Kotto, diplomat from a Caribbean island nation who in disguise also is a bigtime criminal. The nefarious scheme in his mind: give away tons of free heroin to create more American dopers and then he and the telephone company will be the largest monopolies. Jane Seymour, Kotto's tarot-reading forecaster, loses her skill after turning on to Bond-age.

The comic book plot meanders through a series of hardware production numbers. These include some voodoo ceremonies; a hilarious airplane-vs-auto pursuit scene; a double-decker bus escape from motorcycles and police cars; and a climactic inland waterway powerboat chase. Killer sharks, poisonous snakes and man-eating crocodiles also fail to deter Bond from his mission. - Staff, Variety

"What you will want to know is how Mr Moore's saintly feet fit into Sean Connery's discarded shoes. Comfortably, I'd say, rather than impressively. For all his easy, boyish charm he lacks the hard, sardonic quality of his predecessor... But I still think we shall grow to like the new incumbent well enough" - Felix Barker, Evening News. "Guy Hamilton's Live and Let Die is, brutally, an ultra effort to get Roger Moore onto neighbourhood screens as a surrogate for Sean Connery, an attempt in which he succeeds... A stand-out performance is allowed to one Clifton James, hugely funny and accurate, as a Deep South Sheriff in a film bounding with blacks. Not the best of the Bonds, but I was shackled while I sat" - New Statesman. "I confess that now and then I missed the handsome shark-mouth of Sean Connery. But Mr Moore is all right. The throwaway lines are neatly thrown away. Marooned on a friable hummock in the middle of a crocodile pool he may betray no more than the faint disquiet of a man wondering if he has swallowed a bad oyster, but then who wants Olivier-type playing in a crocodile pool? The elegance [for Mr Moore always looks a proper English gent] acquires a touch or irony; it will do" - Dilys Powell, The Sunday Times

"I didn't particularly like what they did to it. It was about nothing, a lousy cooking-some-dope- somewhere-in-the-jungle movie. That's not Bond at all. To process drugs in the middle of a jungle is not a Bond caper" - Richard Maibaum.

Whenever jungle drums begin to pound and witch doctors menace white girls at the stake, the days of the old Saturday matinee serials come to mind. The eighth Bond film, despite its costing nearly £3 million, is packed with cheap melodramatic perils of the kind that were being evaded by Pearl White and Helen Holmes (with far less concern and complication) over fifty years ago: snakes in the bathroom, voodoo scarecrows in the bushes, poisoned darts, the crocodile compound and, that old favourite, the shark pool. In this atmosphere, the mechanical miracles which we have come to expect from 007 (a less enterprising collection than usual) seem largely irrelevant ? and mostly trivial in their application. The emphasis is far more upon the equally time-honoured attraction of the chase, here given a whole series of variations which serve to ginger up what would otherwise be a tediously inactive narrative: the double-decker bus and the low bridge; the airport pursuit in which cars and planes are tangled into expensive ruin; the headlong power-boat chase through the Louisiana bayous in which Bond speeds his machine not just across water but through gardens and over cars as well. Though crisply filmed and edited, these sequences have a certain flavour of French Connection pot-boiling about them; and when it comes to the verbal exchanges, Bond has very clearly lost the spontaneous combustion of his early cinema years. The opening exchanges with Bernard Lee are embarrassingly ponderous, and the expectedly cynical laugh-lines so predictable that one winces as Roger Moore, with much nudging and winking, puts them across. Sean Connery could undoubtedly have made more of a meal out of "we'll soon lick you into shape", addressed to an apparently reluctant bedfellow (Roger Moore's delivery suggests schoolboy ignorance rather than proven ability); but even Connery would have had trouble with the final punch-line. Moore makes a very British 007, somewhere between Patrick MacNee and Fleming's original concept, but the style only works occasionally, as with his "Same time tomorrow, Mrs. Bell?" to the speechless flying pupil in the private plane he has just reduced to matchwood. Otherwise he develops his role charmlessly, from a clownish fall-guy in the first half to a caddish automaton in the second, as insipid and unmemorable as his female sparring-partners (a poorly upholstered collection by comparison with earlier Bond conquests). Somewhere at the back of the script is an ingenious idea about fates and furies, the Tarot cards being intended to guide Bond's actions more closely than he'd care to admit; while the curious encounters with Baron Samedi suggest a chunk of plot that nobody finally cared to face up to. But while we don't expect the 007 formula to be particularly complex or realistic, it's sad to find that the flavour has been so expensively diluted. Like the musical score for the film (honourably excepting the McCartney contribution), the same old notes are still being struck, but new hands seem to have mangled the life out of them.- Monthly Film Bulletin

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