BEFORE: Before starting this Bond chain, I would have described myself as a Connery man - if you'd asked me who the best Bond was, I would have had a stock answer ready. But those films have been SO low-rent that I'm anxious to watch the others. I could be a Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan fan after all.
THE PLOT: 007 is sent to stop a brilliant heroin magnate armed with a complex organization and a reliable psychic tarot card reader.
AFTER: In this one, Bond goes to the Caribbean and puts on blackface make-up to infiltrate a voodoo cult. Just kidding, but see how offensive that Japanese eye surgery really was?
I like how the overall look of the film is an improvement - I don't know much about different film stocks, but somehow things look more professional. For you old-school TV people like me, it's like the difference between "Rhoda" and "Lou Grant". But the use of obviously rubber snakes during the voodoo scenes is a bit of a step in the wrong direction.
This is a bit of a departure from the usual Bond plot, in that there's "thingy" to blow up, but the CIA doesn't let that stop them, they set their usual explosives and blow the villain's lair up anyway.
Twice this film shows one of the strange quirks in the Bond franchise, namely putting Bond in elaborate traps instead of just, say, shooting him. The villain will surround our hero with crocodiles or sharks, or put him in quicksand or something, and then just walk away. OK, maybe they've got someplace more important to be, but don't they want to savor Bond's demise? And they should know he's got some gadget on him that's going to save the day, so why would they walk away?
There's some comic relief here, including a pit-upon police sheriff, who seems to be similar to Jackie Gleason's character from "Smokey and the Bandit", only this one came first.
LOCATIONS: Harlem, Louisiana, San Monique (really Jamaica, OK that's two)
VILLAINS: Kananga, Baron Samedi, Tee-Hee
BABES: Solitaire (possible category winner, if you're a fan of 70's babes)
ALLIES: M, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter
PASTIMES: Tarot cards
CARS: Nope? Speedboats again.
GADGETS: Magnetic watch, exploding gas bullets
THEME: "Live and Let Die" by Paul McCartney & Wings. Good to see them giving the job to a young upstart like McCartney. That guy sure needed the work.
Also starring Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell (carrying over from "Diamonds Are Forever", Yaphet Kotto, Jane Seymour, Geoffrey Holder, Clifton James, Julius Harris, David Hedison.
RATING: 5 out of 10 crocodiles
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