Sean Connery’s Bond is a tough, sexually aggressive and predatory character. He reflects the feeling of masculinity in jeopardy of his times, as swinging London gave way to the summer of love and sexual liberation. When Connery first played Bond, the Beatles sang only love songs, when Moore took over the mantle in 1973 with Live & Let Die, the Beatles were no more, there was only Wings.
Moore’s interpretation of James Bond reflects his times, from Black Power to Watergate, to Reagan. For Moore, Bond offered audiences an escape from the horrors and the monotony of their everyday existence into a world of absurd cartoon physics, wacky gadgets, gorgeous women, and terribly corny puns. Moore never took Bond too seriously, he knew it was absurd, and he knew that was what kept people coming in droves to see the Bond films.
Live & Let Die (1973), The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) are Moore’s best Bond films. The writing is taught, the sleaze is thick, and the glamour is tacky. In these films the milieu of Fleming’s novels are best preserved. Moore’s self awareness in his part, combined with this aesthetic made him more inviting in many ways than Connery had been, and certainly less predatory. The gigantic set pieces of Moonraker, Octopussy and A View To A Kill were yet to come.
As Roger Moore began his tenure as Bond in the early seventies there had not yet been Star Wars, nor had United Artists become so totally dependent upon the grosses of the Bond films for its survival. As all of this changed, the films grew and grew in there spectacle, to the point that Moore’s take on the character seemed out of place. By the mid-eighties, with Reagan in office, the chauvinism of Bond was no longer to be interpreted as a dark joke, but to be celebrated quietly (as it eventually would be in the hands of Pierce Brosnan). Bond couldn’t be “camp” anymore.
Given the progress of film technology, it is Moore’s excellent sense of camp that actually makes his films the most accessible in the pre-Brosnan era of Bond (Connery’s first two outings are by far the best, but the films that followed are equally as trite as Moore’s worst pictures). From a historian’s perspective, it is fascinating to watch Moore’s Live And Let Die in terms of their give and take relationship with Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite films as well as other films of the Blacksploitation genre.
Die hard fans of Bond today tend to be dismissive of Roger Moore’s contributions to the franchise, preferring the hard hitting antics of Daniel Craig or the classy and sleek delivery of sleaze of Brosnan’s Bond. But I remember as a kid in the third grade telling my father that I had seen two Bond films at a sleepover. He warned me to avoid the Roger Moore films. I didn’t do as my father asked because I wanted to see for myself; and I actually enjoyed them. They were funnier than the other films, and they felt more removed like a dream. Roger Moore’s version of James Bond is very much a dream.
The world of those films is not the serious matter of life and death we associate with the idea of Bond. Roger Moore knew he was inhabiting the “dreams” of young men, and his films reflect that; they invite us to share that dream, in all of its silly prepubescent logic.
