Early Roger Moore Bonds

I watched a little bit of The Man With The Golden Gun on TV over the Thanksgiving weekend, and I was reminded how much I love the first three Roger Moore James Bond movies. I can understand why they are not well-loved by many Bond fans, especially those that saw the Connery films when they came out, and were used to the standard of From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. The Man With The Golden Gun was the first "grown-up" movie I ever saw in the theater, and it made a huge impression on me. I used to draw movie posters for it, and build the gun out of Legos (years later, I was talking to my friend Jason about it, and he said "yeah, I remember I really loved that gun. The first thing I did when I got home was build it out of Legos." Great minds think alike, right?) The Spy Who Loved Me was a big part of 1977, the year of Star Wars and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, for me--I had a matchbox version of the white Lotus Esprit with fins coming out, and man did I love that. It took me a while to see Live and Let Die, but a friend of mine told me about some of the voodoo stuff in it, and it really fired my imagination up. I know that a lot of Bond fans consider For Your Eyes Only to have been a great return to form for the series. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but is it any surprise that I found it boring compared to the others?

So yeah, these movies are campy as hell, but maybe in the light of the post-modern takes on 70's exploitation cinema that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have been doing, it's time for a rethink. These films had practically the same sensibility as Kill Bill 30 years earlier. Take the scene in Live and Let Die where Bond grabs a cab and suddenly finds himself in a 70's blaxploitation flick, complete with funky soundtrack, screeching tires and jive talkin'. The Man With the Golden Gun is even more extreme: Bond walks into a Shaw Bros. kung fu flick (complete with two teenagers in Chinese schoolgirl uniforms so charmed by their brief meeting with Bond that they're willing to take on a mob of martial artists for him), gets a sidekick straight out of a Burt Reynolds rednexploitation movie, all the while pursuing Christopher Lee!

In retrospect, Connery really fucked shit up by quitting one movie too soon. Connery should have done In Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Diamonds Are Forever should have been the first Roger Moore installment. George Lazenby should never have been let near the series. The guy's a total B-movie actor. If I were being attacked by giant locusts or flying saucers or The Creature from the Black Lagoon, I'd want him on my side, but he's just not Bond. There's no way you can convince me that when Lazenby walks into a room, every woman wants to fuck him, and every supervillain knows they are facing their match. Roger Moore is too nice to be Bond, but at least he's charming and charismatic.