Smelling the cinema zeitgeist, the Bond producers decided to hurl brand new 007 Roger Moore right into the middle the of the Golden Age of Blaxsploitation......
But we sincerely doubt the producers ever sat down and watched a Blaxsploitation movie.....
Otherwise they might have realized that in those movies, the black guys didn't get outfoxed, outwitted and out ass-kicked by a lily-white, debonair British white guy.......
But the BQ is forever thankful they went ahead anyway with the whole demented scheme of this movie, creating the weirdest entry in the Bond filmography........
Hamilton's condescension to the black villains in "Live And Let Die" fairly reeks of old school colonialism..........turning their culture into comic book evil......(jazz funerals turned into assassinations, voodoo ceremonies converted into MGM dance numbers)
Once again, the screenwriter, Tom Mankiewicz, cherry picks a few odds and ends from Ian Fleming's novel........(the only thing appealing to him being the heroine's holding on to her Tarot card acumen by holding on to her virginity....)
Nobody involved in the making of this film seems to know who or what this villain really is or was.........(his grand scheme consists of nothing more than selling a load of dope)......and by the time the film reaches its showdown, they turn him into yet a third character.......a grinning, giggling silly loon, behaving like a nasty game show host.......(or worse, the kind of bad guy you'd see in the cheapjack imitation Bond films from Europe....).Befitting Kotto's final goofy version of the character, the producers gift him with the most comically bizarre death in the entire series.........inflated like a birthday party balloon and detonated like a grenade-laced pinata........a demise so embarrassing that it's deliberately shown out of focus for barely half a second.........(evidently as humiliating for the filmmakers as it was for the actor....)
Half-hearted attempts at the usual Blaxsploitation tropes abound, including the addition of reliable Hollywood redneck Clifton James as a racist, moronic Sheriff......(we can't begin to describe his character......let's just say he's the white version of Kotto's inflatable balloon, just before exploding........)
Somehow the pure nonsensical fantasy of the movie pulled it through............we were all too occupied laughing at the jokes and the stunts.......why, we hardly even noticed that the film was depicting an all out race war.......(but then, we don't think Guy Hamilton and the producers gave it much thought either.....)
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