1973 found the makers of the expensive luxury James Bond films in need of a way to regenerate the series after Sean Connery left. Legend has it that, sensibly, they asked a cat what they should do about the character of Bond, but that they misheard his response as "Roger Moore" and the rest is history.
Live and Let Die starts with some mannys arguing at the United Nations, New York City (thank you convenient establishing caption). A manny gets killed and the camera briefly shows us the main baddy for the film, Dr Kananga, witnessing the murder as though he is just another delegate, a clever way of introducing him early.
Then we see another manny get killed, this time in New Orleans, Louisiana (thanks second convenient establishing caption) and all the other mannys around him celebrate that he is ded.
San Monique is an Island in the Caribbean (thanks third convenient establishing caption), where a third manny is killed, this time with a snake used as the murder weapon.
The third murder takes us into the title sequence and theme song. This film has the best of all Bond theme songs. The title sequence tries to be scary with its skull faces, but it is impossible for us cats to be scared when such cool music is playing.
This is followed by some knockabout comedy with Bond, M, and Miss Moneypenny. M is there to give Bond his mission to investigate the pretitles killings, while Bond and Miss Moneypenny conspire try to keep M from finding Miss Caruso, who is hiding in Bond's house.
Sadly, this is one of the very few Bond films with no Q in it. Instead it is Miss Moneypenny who gives Bond his gadget for the film, which is a watch with a magnet in it. As soon as M and Miss Moneypenny leave, Bond immediately uses the watch to undress Miss Caruso.
"Sheer magnetism, darling."
Naughty bond, lol.
Bond arrives in New York, location of the first pretitles murder, and the baddys try to kill him straight away by making his car crash. He is soon following the baddys, but the baddys also have henchmannys following him. Even the taxi driver who takes Bond to the baddys' base is on their side.
The baddys' base is in a Fillet of Soul restaurant, which is how we know that it is not Number One who is the baddy this time. If it were, he would just spend all his time noming the fish instead of plotting world domination.
Bond falls for the old rotating restaurant wall trick and gets captured. He meets Solitaire, who is playing with her cards.
"Black queen on the red king, miss..?"
"Solitaire."
Bond actually guesses the card game she is playing is Solitaire before he asks her name, so maybe he takes her answer as just confirming it? She shows him her tarot cards and gets him to pick one for himself. He turns over The Fool, which is both a joke on one level - i.e. the straightforward reading that Bond is an idiot - but also has the deeper symbolic meaning of The Fool, that Bond is a seeker after knowledge at the start of a perilous journey.
Kananga is in his disguise as Mr Big, which is one of the weakest parts of the plot since they are so blatantly the same person. He calls Bond a "mother" (which is obviously short for motherfucker, but they wanted to keep the film's language suitable for kittens) and orders his henchmannys to kill him. Bond asks Solitaire for a card for his future. He pulls out The Lovers.
"Us?"
Solitaire looks genuinely taken aback by this, even as Bond is taken away by the henchmannys, and this is clearly the moment when she begins her character journey to eventually siding with Bond.
Bond defeats the henchmannys and escapes, meeting up with one of Felix's CIA mannys. Then Bond travels to San Monique where he does some classic spying stuff, scanning his hotel room to find the bugs the baddys have already placed there. While this could be considered a throwback to the earliest Bond films when he used to do this sort of thing more often, here it raises the level of intrigue because the baddys shouldn't have known he was there, but obviously they did. Maybe think about using a false name sometimes, Mr Bond?
The baddys send a snake in to kill Bond (which has shades of Doctor No trying to kill Bond using a pider), but he defeats it using a cigar and some aftershave.
Bond meets Rosie Carver, who claims to be a novice CIA agent on her second mission (helping the manny who got killed pretitles being the first). Bond and Rosie go to sea with "Quarrel Junior," played by Roy "Toberman" Stewart. They sail past Solitaire's house, and Quarrel says
"She's supposed to have the power of the Obeah."
a line that always gets a laugh from fans of Vampire: the Masquerade.
Kananga is getting a tarot reading from Solitaire over the 'phone. When he asks about the future she draws The Lovers again. Foreseeing that it refers to her and Bond, she lies to Kananga and tells him it is Death, and thereby takes another step away from him. As an aside, it's always the major arcana that appears in these sorts of things, isn't it?
Bond is suspicious that Rosie is really W-wording for the baddys, which of course she is, but when he tries to get her to tell him their plan she runs away and gets killed by her own side. An instrumental-only version of the theme tune plays over this scene which helps underscore how ruthless both Bond and the baddys are being.
It was Solitaire who warned Bond about Rosie, by anonymously sending him the tarot card of the Queen of Cups inverted. We have to take back what we said earlier about it always being the major arcana, this makes a nice change.
Kananga is annoyed that Bond is still alive even though Solitaire predicted Death, and for some reason this means he blames her for his plan failing. Rather than patiently explaining things like metaphor and symbolism to him, and how the Death card doesn't always literally mean some manny going "blargh i am ded," Solitaire instead gets "impertinent" which only makes him more annoyed with her.
Bond makes his way to Solitaire's house at night, when she is alone. She finds him playing Solitaire (steady on now) with her cards. Bond gets her to pick a card, and she draws The Lovers again - the third time it has come up for her (although, of course, Bond doesn't know about the second time). Bond moves in for a kiff, and we see that his entire deck is made up of The Lovers. Naughty Bond.
We did see Bond come out of a tarot card-selling shop earlier on, which must have been where he got them from. Presumably that means that somehwere there is a big pile of all the cards he didn't need: 78 identical decks, each missing its copy of The Lovers. It is amusing to think that somebody is going to find these and be very confused.
Bond has realised that the scarecrows we have seen around the island, and which scared Rosie so much, are to keep mannys away from a certain part of the island, so he heads there with Solitaire coming with him... er, accompanying him. You know what I mean, mew.
The baddys are soon aware of where they are and start chasing them. Bond and Solitaire take a bus to make the chase scene more exciting, especially when they have to go under a low bridge. They escape back to Quarrel's boat, and from there head to New Orleans where the remaining pretitles murder took place.
There Bond and Solitaire are immediately captured by the baddy taxi driver from New York. Taken to an airport, Bond escapes into a low speed car chase with him in a small aeroplane, complete with learner pilot Mrs Bell. This scene is mostly played for laughs, such as when they drive through some doors that are too narrow for the plane's wings, and Mrs Bell says
"Holy shit!"
(So "shit" was considered acceptable for inclusion but "motherfucker" wasn't. Mannys are strange.)
We see Felix's CIA manny get killed in the same way as the manny in New Orleans did in the pretitles sequence (although it cuts away once it has made its point that this is going to play out exactly the same). The baddys have hit upon an overly complicated way of killing somebody that has actually been successful, so they aren't about to change it now. Bond and Felix arrive just after they have hidden the body in the coffin and are taking it away.
In the restaurant Bond is too clever to fall for the old rotating restaurant wall trick a second time, but then he gets caught by the old sinking restaurant table trick, while the singer sings the theme song at him. So Bond isn't the only thing that is dropping here, mew.
Bond doesn't recognise that Mr Big is really Kananga in disguise, although to be fair to Bond this is because he hasn't actually met Kananga yet except when he is pretending to be Mr Big, so has no reason to suspect that Mr Big looks and sounds almost exactly like Kananga.
Bond provokes Mr Big until he pulls his mask and wig off to show he is Kananga really. The reason why the disguise was so poor is explained by the fact that we see the mask come off on camera, which makes for an effective moment, but means they couldn't get a different actor to play Mr Big and then switch them between shots.
"Quite revealing."
quips Bond.
Kananga reveals his evil plan to win a game of Monopoly by giving all his drugs away to the other players until he is the only one left. At least we think that is his plan, it is quite complicated and cats don't do drugs so we don't really understand what it means.
Bond is taken by the henchmannys to the place where they keep their drugs, as well as "quite a few thousand" crocodiles and alligators. The main henchmanny, Tee Hee, feeds some of them, and then leaves Bond behind to become crocodile noms.
Bond tries to use his magnetic watch to escape, but this isn't successful (subverting our expectation that, when used, a gadget will get Bond out of his predicament) and he has to instead escape by running across the backs of the crocodiles to reach dry land. This is a great stunt, though by its nature it is over very quickly.
Bond then mischievously lets the crocodiles into the base where the henchmannys with the drugs are to nom them (the henchmannys, not the drugs; crocodiles aren't stupid), before setting fire to the base and escaping in a speedboat.
More henchmannys chase after him in their own boats, while one of them goes in a car. He gets caught by everybody's least favourite komedy policemanny, Sheriff J. W. Pepper, at least until he sees the boat chase coming towards him and says
"What the f..."
(The second swerving of the word fuck in the film, and there's another from Sheriff Pepper a moment later.)
Sheriff Pepper joins the chase, and it escalates further when more police arrange for a "roadblock" (we think they mean riverblock, lol) across the bridge in the path of the chase. But both Bond and his pursuers just crash straight through it and carry on.
This is a lengthy chase sequence, but it is expertly choreographed so that the action changes things up frequently, with all manner of minor incidents to keep things fresh, such as when Bond's boat breaks down so he changes to another one that he finds nearby, or when the chase crashes through a wedding. Even Sheriff Pepper as the comic relief has his proper function within the plot, since his communicating with the other policemannys helps communicate to us viewers what is going on in the chase. This is useful because Bond has no dialogue at all throughout the whole chase.
Bond eventually makes it to Felix and Sheriff Pepper finally finds out who he has been chasing all this time.
"Secret agent? On whose side?"
We go back to San Monique for the final act of the film. The baddys are going to kill Solitaire in the same way as the third pretitles murder, with a snake. Bond sets some bombs, which look a lot like the bombs used by Blake in Star One, to blow up all of Kananga's drugs.
Bond runs in and rescues Solitaire just as the bombs go off. He shoots one Baron Samedi, which breaks like a statue, but then another one comes out and has a swordfight with him. Bond knocks this one into the coffin full of snakes, then takes Solitaire with him into the baddys' secret underground lair.
Kananga is waiting for them.
"Ah, Mr Bond, there you are. And Miss Solitaire as well. Hardly unexpected but most welcome."
Kananga is making a late bid to become the quintessential Bond villain. He even has "an underground monorail," as Bond points out with a raise of his eyebrow. He'll be trying to feed Bond to his sharks next.
Kananga actually has a reason for the platform lowering Bond and Solitaire into the shark pool descending so slowly, it is to "let our diners assemble." This gives Bond time to escape by using his watch to cut through the ropes tying him up, which is an ability we have not seen before this so feels like a bit of cheat, and doubly so when the magnetic ability we did see demonstrated didn't actually end up doing anything useful.
Bond and Kananga have a fight, which ends when Bond forces Kananga to nom the gas pellet from his anti-shark gun.
This causes Kananga to blow up like a balloon and then pop, in one of the most hilariously bad special effects ever seen - and we don't just mean in James Bond films, mew. Even though you only see it very briefly - a second or two - it is still awful, especially coming now at the film's climax. What were they thinking when they decided to go with this effect? Solitaire asks
"Where's Kananga?""Well he always did have an inflated opinion of himself."
responds Bond. Well we have to conclude that they needed to blow up Kananga so that this quip would make sense.
With Kananga defeated, the next scene shows Felix saying goodbye to Bond and Solitaire as they get on a train. Tee Hee comes in for one last fight with Bond. His fake arm makes him super-strong, but it proves his undoing when Bond cuts the wires that he uses to control it, and then throws him out the window. Solitaire asks
"Now what are you doing?""Just being disarming, darling."
Solitaire really does set him up perfectly for the quips, doesn't she?
The final shot of the film shows Baron Samedi sitting on the front of the train trolololing, and then he turns into a scary flaming skull as the credits roll, and the theme song plays one more time.
Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Very Expensive and Luxury
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