Roger Moore's debut as 007 was a bit wan but, in retrospect, probably his best outing. He looked pretty lean and mean for a 45 year-old. For a British audience, Moore (The Saint, The Persuaders) was the natural successor to Sean Connery.
Director Guy Hamilton makes this an expertly staged but somehow lacklustre affair. While the background voodoo theme is suitably bizarre, the main McGuffin about drugs smuggling is rather under-whelming for a Bond movie. Yaphet Kotto is a potentially strong baddie but has too little to do amid the familiar carnage and boat chases. And the introduction of the series' first out-rightly comic character in Sheriff JW Pepper presaged the self-defeating lapse into self-spoofing the films would increasingly take.
Nor does a heavy-handed score by Beatles producer George Martin help. Unlike regular Bond composer John Barry's music, Martin's is ponderous, overlaid onto the action rather than organic to it.
Still, Paul McCartney's blistering title-song really jolts Bond into the 70s. And Live and Let Die does have one of the best jokes in the entire series, in the opening sequence when a CIA agent, watching a New Orleans jazz funeral, innocently asks a nondescript fellow bystander: "Who's funeral is it ?"
Director Guy Hamilton makes this an expertly staged but somehow lacklustre affair. While the background voodoo theme is suitably bizarre, the main McGuffin about drugs smuggling is rather under-whelming for a Bond movie. Yaphet Kotto is a potentially strong baddie but has too little to do amid the familiar carnage and boat chases. And the introduction of the series' first out-rightly comic character in Sheriff JW Pepper presaged the self-defeating lapse into self-spoofing the films would increasingly take.
Nor does a heavy-handed score by Beatles producer George Martin help. Unlike regular Bond composer John Barry's music, Martin's is ponderous, overlaid onto the action rather than organic to it.
Still, Paul McCartney's blistering title-song really jolts Bond into the 70s. And Live and Let Die does have one of the best jokes in the entire series, in the opening sequence when a CIA agent, watching a New Orleans jazz funeral, innocently asks a nondescript fellow bystander: "Who's funeral is it ?"