This is the tenth essay in a 24-part series about the James Bond cinemas co-created by Sundog Lit. I encourage everyone to comment and join in what we hope to be an extended conversation about not only the films themselves, but cinematic trends, political and other external influences on the series’ tone and direction.

No Shame: Guilty Pleasures and The Man with the Golden Gun

The act of claiming a movie as a “guilty pleasure” is a pre-emptory apology. You’re saying, “I love this movie, but before you pause to temper the abusive response flitting through your head or question my sanity, I also have to tell you that I know it’s really bad.” On one hand it’s noble to confess liking a movie that we, as a society, have deemed terrible. We each have individual opinions. We should confess and stand by them with conviction. On the other hand, no matter how you sugarcoat it, you’re still calling the movie you claim to love “a shitburger.”

So that said, let’s talk about the ninth James Bond movie, The Man with the Golden Gun.

While Golden Gun offers great potential and an exciting premise, it suffered because the filmmakers lacked the confidence to stick to their convictions. They added unnecessary humor. They made the villain’s threat global by force-feeding the screenplay, like a goose about to become foie gras, with a bunch of silly rigmarole about a stolen lens that can harness the power of the sun, rather than just allowing, per the initial draft of the screenplay, the threat to remain local (the threat to Bond). Other than squandering a perfectly good premise, they producers again wasted the opportunity to pave new ground for the Bond character and franchise. (They’d previously avoided using Fleming’s revenge premise contained within the novel You Only Live Twice as the cinematic response to the death of Tracy Bond.) A villain with no motive beyond besting Bond. Objectively, the movie’s more like the lazy scrapbook of a teenage girl who’s only scrapbooking because her best friend thought it would be a fun activity to share even though she’d really rather just people watch and drink an Orange Julius at the mall. Golden Gun takes on the appearance of a series of vignettes from a dozen different films slapped together into something that resembles a logical narrative. And by “resembles” I mean to say that it has credits to denote the beginning and the end.

Objectively, it’s a mess. Subjectively, I can’t help but love it. I suppose that would fit the definition of a guilty pleasure.

The Anti-Science Behind the Guilty Pleasure

The Oxford Dictionary defines the “guilty pleasure” as such: “something, such as a film, television programme, or piece of music, that one enjoys despite feeling that it is not generally held in high regard.”

So is the driving force behind the guilty pleasure more like love, like an irrational emotional attachment? Is it the need to protect a much-maligned movie in the way we would nurture a one-eyed stray kitten that has found it’s way to our porch? If we return to the idea that calling a movie a “guilty pleasure” is a pre-emptive apology, how does that reflect the way we value the movie watching experience? I select a movie to watch. I watch it. And while I’m watching said movie I’m experiencing, at the most basic level, a joy or a lack thereof. All of these star ratings and numerical grading systems are inherently based on that approximate level of enjoyment. More joy = like. Less joy = dislike. It should be as simple as that. But it’s not. And this is because we are social creatures. We cannot watch a movie in a vacuum. Our outward opinions are not only formed by enjoyment, but also expectation and the perceived quality of a film by everyone else.

Genre also plays a role. If we attend a scary movie with someone and they are not scared and instead find it unintentionally humorous, it is probable that our connection with the content on the screen will also have been broken, thereby lessening our experience. It all has to do with the proximity to the source. If we are made consciously aware that we are watching a film, i.e. a projection of something that is not real, rather than being absorbed in the characters and plot as if they were real, our emotional connection has been re-rendered as an intellectual connection. Community influences horror as well as comedy. It has been proven that a comedy is more enjoyable, i.e. funnier, when the experience is shared with larger numbers of similarly entertained viewers. To share one of my own experiences, I saw Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story during a matinee with a group of seniors who had clearly just walked in to see whatever was playing at the time. Their distaste hovered like napalm in humidity. But my subsequent viewing took place at home with a number of like-minded individuals. I loved it. And I wondered how I could have been so affected by the crowd to have not seen the brilliance of “If you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball.” But this only serves to highlight the fickle and malleable nature of our opinions; this does not even begin to speak to the potential effect of public shaming.

I took an informal poll on Twitter this week. I asked people to first name their favorite “guilty pleasure” movie then explain, briefly, why. The third and final question proved the most telling. Objectively, do you consider this movie to be bad? The titles included Dune, Batman Forever, Beerfest, Biodome and Earnest Saves Christmas among others (I’ll share more of the “data” in another post dedicated to this pseudo-science). I offered my own in the form of Police Academy 3. But of the many responses, all were nearly unanimous (there were a couple of outliers) in that they didn’t think their “guilty pleasure” was objectively a bad movie. And the more I considered this, the more I wasn’t so sure I considered Police Academy a fundamentally bad movie either. What does it aspire to be in the first place? Does it succeed according to those aspirations? I think it does.

Now, we’ve reached another critical point in this conversation. “Bad” is a highly subjective term and often just tossed about as a matter of opinion rather than objective criticism. To remove some of the frivolity from the notion of good vs. bad, let’s define a “bad movie” as a movie of relative filmmaking incompetence, specifically considering how it endeavors to entertain its target audience. When you toss about the idea of bad movies a certain handful of hall of fame entries immediately come to mind such as Plan 9 From Outer Space and Manos: The Hands of Fate, the latter of which was made infamous by the riffing of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Being such low-budget features, Manos and Plan 9 had their own share of production difficulties that contributed to their innate competency (or lack thereof). Again, consider for whom those movies were made. Did they incompetently miscalculate their audience? B-movies (perhaps Z-movies) such as these complicate the argument. It’s hard to call them failures despite it also being impossible to call them successes, unless you consider the fact that we’re still watching them and talking about them fifty years later, whereas better, more competent films from the same era have long been lost and forgotten. What difference does the quality of a film make when no one watches it or talks about it anymore? And yes, I absolutely mean to recall a closet full of sad, lonely old reels of celluloid kibitzing about how “kids these days just don’t respect their elders.”

The fact remains that the movies that people name as their favorite “guilty pleasure” are loved because they entertained with at the very least a marginal amount of competency towards their target audience. They were all mostly well-budgeted (the cinema version of well-endowed?) movies, often with slick production values. It could be argued that the least buzz-worthy movies are the forgettable ones at the intersection of marginal intent and marginal quality. But that might require some more frivolous high-concept consideration in an entirely different conversation.

The roundabout point being made here, specifically as it relates to The Man with the Golden Gun is that all of these opinions come with baggage, the baggage known as “frame of reference.” I learned from my survey that depending on their depths of cinematic exposure, the quality of the movies people named as their “guilty pleasures” varied wildly. This isn’t a knock against anyone’s devotion or exposure to cinema, merely a subjective observation. There are no right or wrong answers because, as I said, the confession of a guilty pleasure carries with it a certain garden-variety brand of shame. I’m not doing the judging. Those that answered the question were, in no small part, judging their own opinion relative to their own opinion of what is “good.” By and large, the more movies people had watched, the more often they chose movies that were universally considered terrible.

But this “universally terrible” branding comes with another caveat. If we love a movie that is widely considered rubbish, why is that movie not merely “underrated”? This is the fear of social criticism. If you stand to proclaim that Jaws: The Revenge is a beloved piece of cinema you are probably going to stand alone. And there will probably be judging. As people are generally social creatures who fear rejection, they will also unite to criticize an outlying opinion to reinforce that community. The differentiation between an “underrated” film and a “guilty pleasure,” however, is not only insecurity. The underrated movie is one that you have deemed misunderstood or under-heralded. And this is where we again return to objectivity. The true “guilty pleasure” movies then are movies that we enjoy, but which we also deem to be objectively terrible, ignored and appropriately-heralded because they’re just not worthy of a broader audience. This removes the confusion with being underrated.

But what of the shame?

The term “guilty pleasure” is a uniquely American idiom rooted in our culture of shame. In Spanish, the best approximation is placeres prohibidos (direct translation: forbidden pleasures) – a term that speaks nothing of shame, but rather sounds like a tawdry telenovela. It suggests something illicit, which is also a bit of a misnomer (unless you’re one of the many that claimed an affection for Showgirls). It is, however, less concerned with the assignation of shame. Even this is merely a work-around to explain the meaning of the American idiom. The Germans are too concerned with Schadenfreude (pleasure in the failures of others) to need to any further shaming. When I tried to research whether Eastern cultures have an approximation to the concept of guilty pleasure, I found nothing (but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it means the Interwebs have not been kind of my searches).

This American idiom has become so commonplace that we’ve swept the “guilt” part of the phrase under the rug. We know it’s there but choose to ignore it. We openly assign “guilty pleasure” to any form of entertainment we deem lowbrow to position ourselves as better or intellectually above it. We want to differentiate ourselves from the people who enjoy Britney Spears un-ironically. At face value, it seems like such an innocent term, but under increased scrutiny the term “guilty pleasure” is a particularly loathsome and mindless reflection of the unique ways in which we appreciate and enjoy culture. After all, it’s not like snacking on The Adventures of Ford Fairlane will eventually go to straight your hips.

The Inherent “Guilt” and “Pleasure” of James Bond

Many people consider the James Bond films to be low entertainment. When I’ve described this project, it has been occasionally met with some confusion as if to question why, of all things, would James Bond be worth so much time and effort. I get it. I hope after reading the eventual finished #Bond_age_ project they might have a change of heart, but I understand from where this negativity might come. In that Bond has spanned fifty years there is a wide swath of quality and a natural ebb and flow of cinematic competency influenced by contemporary ideologies and cinematic trends. Depending upon your perspective and time of introduction, the Bond oeuvre offers many reasons, if taken out of the context of the whole series, to disparage the entire enterprise.

At face value, the 23-film series seems to offer little consistency. The tone wavers between camp and legitimacy, according to the whims of the producers who’ve always overreacted to public criticism, no matter how misguided that criticism. The consistency is found in the character of James Bond. And while there are a handful of outliers that generally find their way onto most Top-Bond lists, every fan seems to have that one disparaged entry that they consider their own unique rough gem. Even the objectively bad Bonds are made watchable, even enjoyable based on the charisma of the actor playing Bond. And no actor rescued more questionable Bond films from certain doom than Roger Moore. (Some might disagree with this point. I will present my argument in full sometime in the near future.)

The Man with the Golden Gun took the simple core story written by Tom Mankiewicz in the first draft —a freelance assassin ($1mil per kill) wants to prove that he is James Bond’s equal by challenging him to a duel of (sociopathic) wits. Perfect, except that Eon refused to abandon the established formula to create something tense and local, a drama isolated around James Bond alone. Go ahead. Try to describe the plot of Golden Gun to someone unfamiliar with Bond. “So, British intelligence receives a golden bullet in the mail with 007 inscribed on the shell, making them think that Bond is the next target of the legendary assassin Scaramanga (a perfectly cast Christopher Lee, by the way), so Bond decides to track down Scaramanga before he becomes another notch in the assassin’s belt.” Pause. “And then there’s this thing about a ‘Solex Agitator’ which harnesses the power of the sun and, I guess it destroys things. If it falls into the wrong hands and… yada yada yada… bad things.”

(I apologize in advance for all the caps that are about to happen.)

And that someone who’s unfamiliar with Bond should, if they’ve been paying attention, question how this could be the same movie because THEY’RE COMPLETELY UNRELATED. Legitimate query. The “solex agitator” is like the MacGuffin that all MacGuffins aspire to be. Bond fans who’ve long suffered the megalomaniacal and irresponsibly broad Blofeld schemes can probably shrug off the incompatibility. Blofeld’s MacGuffins spoke to a consistency of character. But this isn’t Blofeld. This is Scaramanga. A modest recluse of a villain who lives on an island in Thailand and employs Herve Villachaize as his henchman. Some villains get Jaws. Jaws bites people. Nick Nack serves champagne and hides under couches. It’s completely bonkers!

And the legitimacy of the whole enterprise just goes down from there. The number of set pieces and plot points that are, well, apropos nothing continue to pile up like the mad cash Bond would have given the kid who fixed his motorboat had he not, instead, CHUCKED HIM IN THE RIVER. There’s a kung fu fight at a dojo that Bond escapes due to the benevolence of passing schoolgirls WHO BEAT UP AN ENTIRE DOJO OF MARTIAL ARTS EXPERTS. Sheriff Pepper, the hillbilly redneck sheriff last seen in the Louisiana bayou, JUST HAPPENS TO BE VACATIONING IN THE SAME CITY. IN THAILAND. And again joins Bond on a madcap Dukes of Hazzard-esque car chase that concludes with one of the best stunts in the history of James Bond. And that stunt, a 360 barrel roll (no special effects) off a crippled bridge across a river, is completely undermined by a SLIDE WHISTLE that John Barry included in the score of the film. The only known characteristic of the mysterious Scaramanga is A THIRD NIPPLE. Bond traipses around Thailand asking about the man with three nipples and everyone’s like “Oh, three nipples, yes. I know the man with three nipples – he is not one to be trifled with, nor is his freakish third nipple. Have you seen a man with three nipples before? Three nipples, wow. What a three-nippled freak.” I said it before, but I think it requires repeating. BONKERS. ABSOLUTELY BONKERS.

I’m just scratching the surface of how bizarre The Man with the Golden Gun really is. I didn’t even mention the wax museum and hall of mirrors. And despite all of these eccentricities and just incomprehensible filmmaking decisions, I end up defending this movie. In fact, before beginning the #Bond_age_ project I considered Golden Gun to be my favorite Roger Moore Bond. I have since gained a greater appreciation for how The Spy Who Loved Me perfected the Roger Moore Bond film, but that in no way cheapens my irrational affection for the three-nippled liquid insanity that is Golden Gun.

So I’m now going to ask myself the three questions I asked everyone else when investigating this guilty pleasure phenomenon and adjust it for #Bond_age_.

1. What is your favorite guilty pleasure of the James Bond series?

The Man with the Golden Gun

2. Short reason why you like this movie:

Despite a most frustrating refusal to pursue a potentially brilliant narrative, Golden Gun turns miserable failure into a bonkers joie de vivre. Christopher Lee plays Scaramanga completely straight (three-nipples and all) in the middle of a post-modern maelstrom of dissociation.

3. Do you consider this movie to be objectively bad?

Yes.

But I feel no guilt.

I really liked the thematic coincidences between Oingo Boingo’s “Dead Man’s Party” and the Skyfall title credits. So I mashed ‘em up.

Skyfall Remixed Opening w/ Oingo Boingo from James Patrick on Vimeo.

This is the ninth essay in a 23-part series about the James Bond cinemas co-created by Sundog Lit. I encourage everyone to  join what we hope to be an extended conversation about not only the films themselves, but cinematic trends, political and other external influences on the series’ tone and direction. The entire project is contained at 007hertzrumble.tumblr.com. Visit the tumblr for live tweet schedules, live tweet digests and brilliant Bond miscellany.

Of [In]human Bond[age] #9: What to write about when you’re writing about Live and Let Die.

Live and Let Die is a powder keg. Both behind the scenes and on camera, LaLD offers more controversy per minute than any other James Bond movie. This is a fact. It is incontrovertible and has been proven by very meticulous scientific research. Thus, pinpointing one talking point seems foolish. Instead, I’m going to try to make all the controversial pieces fit together in a mosaic of images and cultural artifacts in a roundabout way that somehow ends up shedding light on the movie’s two major talking points: Roger Moore taking the Walther from Sean Connery and the problematic topic of race. 

I’m going to begin by highlighting one word. Panic.

EON Productions may have maintained a strong chemin de fer face, but behind the confident facade the Saltzman and Broccoli partnership had, for the first, time shown serious signs fatigue. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had taken its toll on both producers. They’d tested their theory that they could stuff any monkey in a tuxedo and call him James Bond; the results were not what they’d hoped. Their test-primate, George Lazenby, had abandoned the post before Diamonds Are Forever and so they went back to Sean Connery, tails between their legs, hoping to repair their relationship with the actor by presenting pocketbooks agape. Connery took them to the bank. As a direct result Diamonds Are Forever suffered. Despite the unprecedented payday, Connery again reiterated that he would “never” return to the role of Bond. United Artists, in their infinite wisdom, wanted an American to play Bond. Clearly they thought domestic box office had been hurt by the “Britishness” of it all. In the past they’d tossed around the names of Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford (clearly, United Artists could not be left to their own devices). Harry and Cubby fought desperately to ensure that Bond would be played by a British actor, but the two had also fought amongst each other about who would become 007. Indeed, some trepidation could be understood considering the entire franchise perhaps hung in the balance. Cast the wrong actor and the series might have ended right there. How long were audiences going to jump from one actor to the next without any kind of continuity? Cubby and Saltzman had to cast an actor that wanted to stick around

When they committed to Roger Moore, they committed to a brand new direction.

In a 2012 GQ interview, David Williams asked Roger Moore about his defining moment as 007.  When Roger Moore didn’t have an answer, Williams suggested the moment in The Spy Who Loved Me when Bond drives out of the sea in the Lotus and drops the fish out of the window. Moore recalled: “Cubby said, ‘can you be dropping a fish when the car is waterproof?’ I said, ‘Cubby, it’s a movie.” Williams then suggests that Connery could never have pulled off that gag. Moore responds, “I think the difference between us is that Sean is a killer and I’m a lover.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t get to write about Moore’s best, The Spy Who Loved Me, for a couple weeks.  

But Williams touches on something that I find inherently interesting about the process that led to Moore’s casting in Live and Let Die. He isn’t Sean Connery. It’s inherently obvious, but it’s an important point to consider. Roger Moore could not play a role meant for Sean Connery. So why would EON take a different tact after desperately throwing mad cash at Connery to return?

The theory I’m running with is that Cubby and Saltzman knew that Lazenby had been at least partially correct by suggesting that Bond, in his current incarnation (the incarnation created by Connery), was a dinosaur that couldn’t survive the progressive 70’s. While they believed their creation not only transcended the actor but also the decade of his cinematic birth, they still had to tap into a cultural undercurrent, a zeitgeist perhaps, to perpetuate his relevance. In 1969, Bond had become self-aware in OHMSS, but had maintained a deadly seriousness about the Bond mythology. Diamonds Are Forever found a confused middle ground, mixing black comedy with stale Bond tropes that would come off as unintentional self-parody.

The failure of OHMSS stung. It was EON’s first attempt to redesign the Bond franchise for this new era, and audiences did not respond. Instead of staying the course, the Bond producers panicked. First they returned to their bankable star. A Band-Aid to suture a gaping wound. Without Connery and now without a discernible style, Broccoli and Saltzman took a look around at the cinematic landscape. Bond was no longer a trendsetter. The industry and audience had moved on. But what had the audience moved on too?

If there were one term that I would use to summarize the cinema of the 1970’s it would be “disenfranchisement.” The epic Technicolor films gave way to shades of black, small gritty dramas, grainy film stock and a rebirth of auteurism. None of this described James Bond. So Broccoli and Saltzman did what any good businessmen would have done. They began cherry-picking familiar elements from popular contemporary cinema. In 1971 (the year that Diamonds topped the box office), Shaft and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song made a more than respectable $12.1 million and $15.2 million respectively. 1972 had Shaft’s Big Score! Taking home another $10 million. The logic obviously went thusly: These low-budget blaxploitation films targeted a black audience but found broader crossover appeal. Add a budget and the name James Bond to the title and blammo! Success. And to a certain extent, Cubby and Saltzman were absolutely correct, but it all depends on your angle of approach.

Live and Let Die outperformed OHMSS but fell short of Diamonds’ Connery-inflated domestic gross. It excelled in the global market, however, despite being largely set in a dirty, dirty, oh so dirty New York City underbelly populated by criminals and hoods ripped straight from the aforementioned blaxplotation films. Jive was talked and jive was walked. And in the middle of all of it all, roamed James Bond. The result is a dated film of curious clichés, controversial stereotyping and alien (at least to the Bond series) genre tropes. The buoyed box office resulted in more genre-hopping for Bond’s next adventure The Man With the Golden Gun, which further disrupts the formula by adding martial arts, a genre made mainstream by Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (which debuted the same year as Live and Let Die).

This detour into pillaging pop culture resulted into arguably sub-standard Bond movies. Each has elements of interest and can be considered acceptable entries in the “Bad Bond Movies We Love” conversation, but both are made more interesting as studies of series endurance and transition rather than individual merit. Both are notable for their villains and experiments in Bond “otherness” or as some have put, “Bond in transition.” Both Roger Moore and EON went to lengths to introduce a new direction for James Bond. Bond drinks bourbon and smokes cigars (a reflection of Moore’s personal preferences). Moore errs on the side of snark instead of snarl and beds women with charisma (smarm?) rather than Cro-Magnon sex appeal.

Despite the relative success of Live and Let Die, audiences and critics were united: Roger Moore was no Sean Connery. There’s that kooky assertion again, but it was naturally the focal point of many of those reviews. Nobody it seemed, not the critics, not the movie-going public could agree on much of anything else regarding Live and Let Die. Here is an excerpt from a 1973 review, courtesy of Roger Greensplin of the New York Times that takes particularly harsh opinion of Moore:

There are three chases (four, if you stretch a point), including one by car and motorboat that gets so complicated it allows for character development. One actor, Clifton James, who appears only during the chase, gets fourth billing in the cast list.

The names above Mr. James’s do not seem so impressive. Roger Moore is a handsome, suave, somewhat phlegmatic James Bond—with a tendency to throw away his throwaway quips as the minor embarrassments that, alas, they usually are.

This observation should be met with some glee from #Bond_age_ live tweet regulars – we’ve turned Clifton James’ Sheriff J.W.  Pepper into an ironic folk hero. Greensplin refrains, in this short and largely conflicted review, from going into much detail about the particulars of Clifton James’ role, which perhaps is for the better. The subtext here is that Roger Moore’s portrayal of James Bond is not much more useful than a one-note, chaw-chomping, redneck sheriff from backwoods Louisiana. Which is, without a doubt, a brutal comment on Moore’s interpretation of James Bond (nor does it speak well of Jane Seymour or Yaphet Kotto). I singled this review out because it was the only one I read that didn’t contain the name “Sean Connery.” Which is no small feat. It also segued into the second half of my conversation about Live and Let Die with another (perhaps) unintentionally bold statement.

Torchlight, Voodoo drums. Dark bodies writhe in the mounting frenzy of some unspeakable tropical rite. Suddenly a door is flung open and framed within it stands a beautiful white girl held captive by two monstrous black men. Her filmy white gown scarcely covering the soft contours of her body, she is dragged — protesting — to a crude scaffold and there is tied fast.

As if by signal, the ranks of jeering celebrants open and there advances an executioner, laughing, stomping, hideously costumed. He holds a poisonous snake in his outstretched hands, a snake whose bite is destined for the smooth young bosom. . . .

Whatever the quality of this little scenario, you must admit that to stick it into a movie these days takes nerve. Merely to make a new adventure movie in which all the bad guys are black and almost all the good guys are white, and which includes in its climax the (near) sacrifice of a (recent) virgin—takes nerve.

At face value the statement “…all the bad guys are black and almost all the good guys are white” sends up red flags, sets off parked car alarms and causes otherwise bold scholars to cower. As a once (and always) self-employed scholar I don’t know if I’m any more qualified to make an assessment here, but according to rules of #Bond_age_ I’m charged with talking about these Bond movies with frankness and honesty. A conversation about Live and Let Die that avoids the topic of race is neither frank nor honest.

It would be easy to criticize Live and Let Die because of the apparent division between the (almost) all Caucasian “good guys” and the all African-American “bad guys.” Consider a few other points: Solitaire (Jane Seymour) is under the control of the black gangster Kananga (Yaphet Kotto). It is made explicit that she is a virgin and that because of her virginity she has the power to see the future through her tarot cards. Kananga has informed her that she will lose her power only when he decides (subtext: “You’re going to have sex with me when I decide.”) Bond, meanwhile, uses a stacked tarot deck to convince Solitaire that they were meant to be lovers and thus rob Kananga of his control over her. The racial dimension here is that she is a virginal white girl in need of rescuing from a black captor (that threatens sexual violence) by the white hero. Furthermore, there is the double standard that presents the miscegenation between Solitaire and Kananga as abhorrent but Bond’s encounter with Rosie Carver, a black woman, is treated as a non-event, a non-event, that is, before it is discovered that she works for Kananga and must be bumped off. In James Chapman’s Licence to Thrill, Chapman cites Richard Schickel’s review from Time to represent the critical backlash: “Why are all the blacks either stupid brutes or primitives deep into the occult and voodooism? Why is miscegenation so often used as a turn-on? Why do such questions even arise in what is supposed to be pure entertainment?”

All of this is problematic to say the least, but Live and Let Die does have one defense against all of those that would accuse it of racial bias. The black villains in Live and Let Die all seem to be far more intelligent than the white characters (who they repeatedly con and manipulate), with the exception of James Bond, of course, he who must survive to win the day and return two years later in The Man with the Golden Gun. Bond had been battling evil old white guys and Arian goons for years. It only stands to reason that he’d eventually have to face a villainous black man at some point. Other than the color of his skin, Kananga has no primary characteristics largely discernible from any other Bond villain. He boasts an elaborate scheme that is ultimately undone by James Bond, hubris, and irrational, boundless desires. Furthermore, that Bond requires help (it is an important distinction that he does not merely accept help) from two very agreeable black characters complicates accusations of cut-and-dry racism.

Taking all this into consideration, I’m of the opinion that the eighth Bond film isn’t racist so much as it is dated and misguided, that said, there are regrettable elements that provide enough fuel to sustain this argument, now, forty years after its release. Released during the decline of the blaxploitation genre, the Bond movies had ceased to be events rather than enjoyable film-going obligations. Bond had ceased to be its own genre. EON had become re-active rather than pro-active, making a genre-style of film outside their comfort zone as they searched for a new direction in the wake of the “Bondmania” Connery era.  This doesn’t excuse the unfortunate creative decisions, but it does help explain how the same people that made From Russia With Love and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service could also come up with Live and Let Die. It should come as no shock, however, that the same people who created the “barn scene” in Goldfinger could also overlook some of the more troublesome subtext in Live and Let Die.

It would require another misfire (and more questions about race and stereotyping) in Man with the Golden Gun before Broccoli and Saltzman would figure out how to finally use the actor that wasn’t Sean Connery and deliver one of the best pure Bond movies in the series’ history. Thank goodness that Cubby and Saltzman never listened when all those critics in 1973 (and again in 1975) suggested that it was time to put Bond out to pasture for his alleged crimes against humanity.

And just so I feel like I’ve talked comprehensively about Live and Let Die: crocodile hopping, hell yes.

This is the eighth essay in a 24-part series about the James Bond cinemas co-created by Sundog Lit. I hope this will become an extended conversation about not only the films themselves, but cinematic trends, political and other external influences on the series’ tone and direction.

Of [In]human Bond[age] #8: Remaking Diamonds Are Forever

With the power of distance and hindsight, how easy is it to criticize George Lazenby for breaking his seven-picture James Bond contract because he didn’t believe 007 would translate to the progressive 1970s? Roger Moore needed a little snark and a hinged eyebrow to revitalize Bond in the 70s and stabilize the franchise going forward through 1989. Four actors and 17 films later, the James Bond brand is as strong as it’s been since Connery’s prime (and arguably stronger  – Skyfall supplanted Thunderball as the highest grossing film in the series, including adjustment for inflation).

In 1971, however, Diamonds Are Forever, provided a lot of support for Lazenby’s decision to jump ship. When Lazenby broke his contract before the release of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Saltzman and Broccoli were again tasked with casting James Bond. The list of actors approached or known to have been discussed for the role is as curious as it is overpopulated. Burt Reynolds had been EON’s original choice but was unavailable. At the time Reynolds was slightly more than a TV actor but less than a legitimate movie star, known for his role on the short-lived TV series Dan August, supporting roles on Gunsmoke and The F.B.I., and a collection of notable Westerns. He had yet to become the 1970’s pop-culture sex symbol. It’s hard to understand EON’s motivation for selecting Reynolds other than as an attempt to appeal to a broader American audience. Would Reynolds affect a British accent? Can you even imagine that? I have so many questions about the plan for the series should he have been cast. After failing to land Gator, Broccoli and Saltzman hired John Gavin, another American actor who had just played a Secret Service agent in the (undervalued) espionage flick OSS 117. He certainly looked the part, but after the box office disappointment of OHMSS, Universal Studios clearly wanted an actor of some notoriety to bring back the masses. Instead of rolling with Gavin, EON managed to woo Connery back to the tuxedo with a then unheard of sum of $1.25 million (plus 12.5% of the profits from the U.S. release), a figure that would prove, at the very least, to cripple Diamonds’ special effects budget. The film looks muddy and more like a low-budget 70’s drama than the vibrant cinemascope Connery Bonds of the 1960s. That’s not to say that look couldn’t have worked. It just didn’t work for the movie they made.

But it wasn’t just the look of the film that proved off-putting.

As I mentioned in my last essay about OHMSS, EON reacted strongly to the poor turnout for the more serious and by-the-novel Bond film. As a result, Diamonds doesn’t directly acknowledge that Bond’s wife had been murdered by Blofeld in the final scene of the prior film. There are no overt references until Roger Moore places flowers on her grave in For Your Eyes Only. One might argue that another timeline shift in the Bond franchise has taken place (as we must assume to have happened in OHMSS for Blofeld and Bond to have not known each other), but contextually there’s no reason to believe this. Diamonds acknowledges (as one does a vague acquaintance passing on the opposite side of the street, awkwardly and with uncertain effort) a kind of revenge narrative by having Bond aggressively pursue Blofeld in the opening scene, but Connery doesn’t dive into the chore with the burning, white-hot rage of a 1000 dying suns. In fact, he seems burdened by the effort to, as we assume, avenge his wife’s death. Once Bond believes he’s dispatched the villain, the movie detours into uncharacteristically bleak humor and stateside drudgery. Almost the entire movie set in depressing Las Vegas of the early 1970s. The old-time glamor and Sinatra-style class (and the mob) had vacated. The masses migrated to the strip wearing Mickey Mouse t-shirts and cut-off Jordache jeans.

Suffice to say, James Bond does not belong in Circus Circus.

Bond also deserved better than the gum-smacking, double-crossing Tiffany Case (Jill St. John) who might have been the spiritual precursor to Jamie Lee Curtis’ character in Trading Places (except JLC’s prostitute with a heard of gold had far more depth). In fact, both primary Bond girls, Tiffany Case and Plenty O’Toole (Lana Wood) are treated without the reverence the series had offered prior leading women. The contrast is most notable by direct comparison. Perhaps the best Bond girl of them all, Diana Rigg, had immediately preceded them. As insignificant as it may seem there is a difference between being the object of the gaze, in film theory, and being merely an object. There’s just so much wrong or off with this movie. Insipid tanker-bound finale, prosaic shell-game tape swap undoes mastermind/villain during insipid tanker-bound finale, Smokey and the Bandit-esque car crash madness, two-wheel car chase climax without thrill, milquetoast Felix Leiter, Blofeld dressed in drag, Charles Grey miscast as Blofeld, disinterested Sean Connery playing Sean Connery rather than Bond…

Without further focusing on Diamonds Are Forever’s many shortcomings (too much negatively is just a downer), I’ve decided it’s time to embrace the movie it could have been.

Step 1: Remove Bond and embrace the grimy, grey, darkly comic feel

Every time James Bond (or a Bond series’ trope) intervenes during these fleeting high-points, the collision of worlds derails a pretty decent B-movie. DAF isn’t a Bond movie. Quite frankly, it’s shocking that the EON production team read this Maibaum script, then gave the go-ahead and continued to make a Bond picture rather than handing this over to someone like John Frankenheimer. Because of Connery’s oppressive salary demands, the production looks and feels like a low budget film. Without Bond, gritty and low budget makes a lot more sense. Dr. No was filmed for a fraction of the cost and looks far better than Diamonds Are Forever.

Step 2: Simplify

First the large cuts. Minutiae later. Completely excise the climax of the film on the converted oil rig. It’s the stuff of parody. Bad guys exploding into the air as if on trampolines bad. Remove Blofeld’s harebrained scheme to launch a satellite into space equipped with a laser. His entire plan after all is just to blackmail the world. That’s it. Nothing specific exactly. Throw up the satellite, flaunt a big button that could shoot a laser at any specified target on the planet. I’m picturing a Staples button myself. The movie needs to be brought back down to earth. It needs to be about the diamonds. No clichéd super villain schemes. Just real everyday shit. Diamonds. Money. Greed. Power. The dirty 1970’s. Grainy film stock. Vegas.

This movie needs to be stocked with assholes. Charismatic assholes, but assholes nonetheless. In the wake of Blofeld-type crazy, the movie would still need a shadowy puppet master pulling the strings, manipulating the characters with ease. The overhaul I’m suggesting might sound drastic but much of Diamonds’ existing structure can remain.

Step 3: Roll back the casting.

Bring back Burt. This movie was meant for Burt Reynolds, pre-playboy mode. Burt Reynolds, overdressed, in a tux sleazing around Circus Circus with low-life gangsters and carnival games. Good. Sean Connery as James Bond, so erroneously out of place it pains the actor playing the role. Bad. So. So. Bad.

While I consider Jill St. John as Tiffany Case one of the worst Bond girls in the series history, Jill St. John actually has serviceable comedic timing (semi-related note: maybe you recall that she appears in the “Yada Yada” episode of Seinfeld) but she’s terribly miscast. The role of Tiffany Case clearly wasn’t meant for an actress that excelled as a sexpot in lightweight, fluffernutter comedies. Tiffany Case requires a brazen and ineffable self-confidence. Let’s return to another name tossed about in the casting process of DAF: Faye Dunaway. Not only had Dunaway been on the short list for Diamonds but also for the role of Domino in Thunderball. She wasn’t cast in Thunderball and turned down the role here. But if there was a young woman acting in the 1970’s with bigger brass balls beyond her years than Faye Dunaway, I can’t think of an example right now.

And now considering Blofeld’s replacement. Charles Gray doesn’t say 1970’s puppetmaster to me. He also never wowed me as Blofeld. Good actor, but he doesn’t necessarily command a room. Consider for a moment, Edmond O’Brien.

He worked with Frankenheimer later, in 1974, so let’s just bump that up a few years. The Wild Bunch was two years prior and, man, does he have screen presence. Also, as a boy, he learned performance magic from neighbor Harry Houdini. Gotta have the beard. What a way to connect the evil logic of this operation to Las Vegas. A former magician, now out of work, but still living in Vegas running a small time criminal operation. He knows how the town works from the inside. He was there when it was great and now plans to turn it to rubble with a false diamond heist scheme, pitting criminals against each other. Goddamn, this movie writes itself. It’s broad and wildly implausible… but still, somehow, leagues more realistic than anything Blofeld ever conceived.

Step 4: Accentuate the few positives

With the Bond gloss removed, Diamonds would be free to focus on the elements that worked. Most notably the henchman: Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd. They are useful, silver-tongued comic relief (and not the Jaws in Moonraker kind either). Bruce Glover and Putter Smith are vicious sociopaths in Diamonds. They’re serial killers with employment. It would be wise to town down the in-your-face homosexuality, however. More subtext is required. And of course they’re dispatched with far too little effort by Bond at the very end of the film. These two should pose a continued and serious threat to Burt Reynolds’ operation. But the ongoing question would remain: who are they and who do they work for?

Two “action” set pieces can remain as well. The moon rover chase. Connecting the dots to a moon rover chase might be more difficult than it’s worth, however. While Bond being chased on the moon rover is comical, Burt Reynolds has proven he’s a master of vehicular-based comedy, which is why we can also leave in the car chase through the strip and the accompanying 1000 car pileup. This is a Burt Reynolds gig. Not a James Bond gag. That said, if we can’t work the moon rover into the narrative, I’d be okay with that. Remember? We’re simplifying.

Bond’s first stop in Vegas is the crematorium. Rather than merely wasting the bit on one scene, make the funeral home and crematorium the front for the diamond smuggling operation owned by the mysterious villain played by Edmond O’Brien. Once you find a way to logically incorporate a funeral business into a black comedy you best make sure it becomes a primary point of interest. Some of the in-humor with James Bond/Sean Connery would be lost here, but it’s a small price to pay to eliminate all the gags that fall flat.

Step 5: Fill in the blanks

Flesh out Tiffany Case. Add a few more brilliant cast members to give the supporting cast some bite. The only real difficulty will be in reworking the finale so that the new parts fall in with the old. Easy, you know, because writing a screenplay is just paint-by-numbers anyway.

I kid.

Roll credits.

It’s so easy there’s already an IMDB page for the brand new 1971 re-imagining of Diamonds Are Forever. (Click to magnify.)

Also here’s the poster my new Diamonds Are Forever.

This is the sixth essay in a 23-part series about the James Bond cinemas co-produced by Sundog Lit. I encourage everyone to venture over to Sundog to read other essays, comment and join in what we hope to be an extended conversation about not only the films themselves, but cinematic trends, political and other external influences on the series’ tone and direction. The entire project will be collected on the Of [In]human Bond[age] Tumblr.

Of [In]human Bond[age] #6: Solving the Murder of You Only Live Twice

Though one could potentially argue this point, the first four James Bond films were legitimate attempts to translate Ian Fleming’s character to the big screen. Though Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and Thunderball embellished the more winsome characteristics of 007, they ultimately remained largely free from the old “nudge nudge wink wink.”

The fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, however, represents a significant shift toward not only silliness but self-parody. How did this happen at the peak of James Bond’s global popularity? Why did EON change the formula? Was the shift even intentional? These questions lingered weeks after watching this polarizing Bond adventure. I decided to do some digging and along with the help of some irresponsible conjecture I feel like I’ve solved the murder case nobody knew they wanted cracked: who murdered James Bond’s You Only Live Twice? First a round up of the usual suspects:

(I never thought I’d get to combine Clue and Casablanca references in the same breath.)

Roald Dahl, in Japan, with the typewriter

The Ian Fleming book from which the movie is “based” is a dark, plotless revenge story that takes place in the aftermath of the death of Bond’s new wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It is devoid of action-packed thrills and considered impossible content for escapist entertainment. Due to prior commitments, longtime Bond screenwriter Richard Maibaum was unavailable to work on YOLT. Saltzman and Broccoli hired Oscar-nominated screenwriter Harold Jack Bloom to adapt the text, but ultimately rejected his work. They passed Bloom’s script along to longtime Fleming friend and children’s author Roald Dahl (who at that point had published, most notably, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach).

Dahl, despite having no screenwriting experience except for an in-progress script for The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling (he would later successfully adapt Fleming’s short Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), was given free reign with the script other than two essential components: the three-girl formula and the Japanese setting (more on this when we consider the guilt of the producers). Some of Bloom’s original script remains in the finished product, for which he retained an “additional story” credit. At the very least Bloom contributed Bond’s fake death and burial at sea and the ninja-attack climax. Since this is all we can know for sure, let’s assume that everything in between belongs to Dahl. After a strong opening with Bond infiltrating Osato Chemicals, Dahl filled the script with re-purposed elements from old Bond movies. He pilfered the narrative from Dr. No, turned car chases into autogyro vs. helicopter silliness, copied SPECTRE’s From Russia With Love henchman and sent the last half of the movie into a spiral of self-parody, ninja-training and preposterousness.

Behold Little Nellie

The timing could have been better.

Peter Sellers, at the cinemas, with rapier wit

By this point in the series, the Bond formula had been established.  Bond had been going about his business with near perfect success. Four films, all commercially successful – the last, Thunderball, being the highest grossing film of all. By now the movies had reached a cultural saturation. They were ripe for parody. Enter Casino Royale. Loosely based on the Ian Fleming novel, the film starred an ensemble cast and six different actors playing Bond (including David Niven and Peter Sellers) and aimed to send up 007 and the spy genre as a whole. Even though it is regarded as a self-indulgent clunker, Royale resonated with audiences growing weary of the popular spy genre formula. Released months before you Only Live Twice, the film banked a strong $42 million at the box office (almost half what YOLT would earn).

Mandrake, Lionel Mandrake.

It is curious then that the authentic Bond adventure goes so far over the top to be a parody of sorts it its own right. Had EON picked up on the same zeitgeisty moment in popular culture that inspired the producers and screenwriters of Casino Royale? The latter half of YOLT is a farce, Dahl’s script regurgitating vignettes from old Bond films in increasingly more laughable scenarios. For a fun time, follow the migratory scarring on the face of Donald Pleasance as Blofeld. Or the comically out of place Bond theme as 007 hovers in a miniature whirlybird fending off legions of baddies in a silly little bike helmet. It’s almost as if the film was made to prevent further parodies, like the insecure fellow at a party that makes fun of himself to pre-empt criticism. It also speaks to the nature of spectacle (as I talked about in my Thunderball bit) – the need to constantly surpass what came before. And with YOLT, the Bond team went bigger, sillier, more kinetic. It’s a jarring shift from the meditative and wholly earnest underwater stasis of Thunderball.

“What’s that? I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over my scar.”

If it sells, why change? But this paint-by-numbers filmmaking had begun to take a toll on the talent.

Sean Connery, at the barber, with the scissors.

Oh yeah. I blend.

The press attention while filming in Japan had proven overwhelming. Security had to be on hand at all times. One persistent Japanese photographer reportedly snuck into the bathroom stall to get a picture of Connery on the toilet. During interviews, even reporters addressed Connery as James Bond. The notoriously private actor had grown tired of the attention the role offered, especially in light of the eroding focus on the character of Bond. And in You Only Live Twice, Bond is given very little to do. After identifying Blofeld’s volcanic hideout, 007 takes on a middle management position, marshaling ninjas into the abyss, occasionally punching someone out until the climactic confrontation with Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld.

The series had begun in Dr. No with a character, an image, and very little else. YOLT is all flash and bang without any of the depth of the best films in the series. It’s clear that of Connery’s growing disinterest seeps into his performance here. The cocky vibrancy of his Bond had disappeared. Connery looked tired. He looked like he spent time between takes rolling his eyes at the corny dialogue rather than wholly embracing. But it’s not until Connery is given the Japanese Moe haircut and a little bit of eyeliner that his angst really translates to the big screen. He slumps. He slouches. Is he moping? He might be moping. Bond appears castrated by this attempt to blend in with the locals. And by “locals” I mean the clan of ninjas. (And curiously by “clan of ninjas” I mean what essentially amounts to a militia and not ninjas at all.) It’s just as bizarre on paper. A 6’2” Scotsman is supposed to disappear among a clan of ninjas just because he has a bowl cut and a bathrobe.

Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, at the drawing board, with their formula.

I must go back to the decision to pass the You Only Live Twice screenplay to an inexperienced screenwriter and children’s author – even a children’s author like Roald Dahl with a dark streak to his prose. But this just as easily could have been a bold stroke of genius. What really fails the longtime producers of the James Bond series is their steadfast insistence on paint-by-numbers. It is because of their strict insistence on the formula that Roald Dahl likely turned to prior Bond films for inspiration, lifting and regurgitating. Three Bond girls, check. One good (she survives), one shady (she dies at the hand of Bond’s enemy) and one downright evil (she is marginalized, courtesy of Bond). Need a chase scene, too. Don’t forget the henchman. Blond, tall, muscular. Mad lib the names.

But ultimately the problem wasn’t the formula itself (the formula clearly works) but the lack of a workable novel to ground the formula in the more restrained universe of Ian Fleming’s prose. Without a text, the filmmakers were left to their own devices. Saltzman and Broccoli’s limited vision collided with Dahl’s limitless imagination, the ignoble spawn of which turned out to be the slapdash déjà vu of You Only Live Twice.

In the end, however…

You Only Live Twice still manages to entertain because of the pure, misguided enthusiasm. Technically, the movie pops on screen. The cinematography in Japan, the massive sets and elaborate design work are arguably unparalleled by any of the other Connery Bond films. But the thrill feels hollow, empty, like we’ve done this all before and done it with a more exquisite focus on the character of James Bond.

At this moment in time, Bond needed the makeover he received for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a simplification and return to the foundation of the character. Instead he got a children’s bike helmet, a whirlybird and a not-ninja clan. It’s a polarizing entry in the series, a love it or hate it film that shows what would have happened to many of the other Bond films without the grounding presence of Ian Fleming’s writing.

The Identity of the Murderer is...

Nancy Sinatra, with her song, in the opening credits

(I swear I eliminated her with my Marlow-esque detective work.)

Fine. Let’s run with this. I can’t think of a worse Bond opener. The movie starts off on a sour note because of this slow-burning treacle. Nancy Sinatra’s too good for this material and Bond never deserved such a flaccid introduction (although it might be sad sack Japanese Bond’s favorite jam). While I didn’t see this twist coming and it doesn’t even make sense, I can’t say I can argue with it. Nancy did it. Someone rigged the game. Cheats.

Time to move on to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.