Roger Moore's 'Live and Let Die' Made Him Bond's Best — SkimNews
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- "Live and Let Die" (1973), the eighth James Bond film and Roger Moore's first as 007, screens in a 35mm print at Los Angeles's Vista Theater this weekend, part of a Bond programming run by Tarantino's Vista and New Beverly Cinema that has included "The Spy Who Loved Me," "Diamonds Are Forever," and "The Man with the Golden Gun"
- Roger Moore replaced Sean Connery, who had been lured back for "Diamonds Are Forever" (1971) after George Lazenby's one-off in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"; Moore beat out screen-tested candidates Jeremy Brett, Julian Glover, and David Warbeck, with Burt Reynolds briefly considered before being dropped for not being British
- Moore's Bond is characterized as softer and sillier than Connery's "virtually a sociopath," built on playful wordplay rather than a relish for violence; the film deliberately opens with Moore ordering bourbon instead of the "shaken, not stirred" martini to avoid one-to-one comparisons with Connery
- The film's Blaxploitation-inflected setting places Bond against heroin smuggler Yaphet Kotto in Harlem, New Orleans, and the Caribbean—a calculated pivot by producer Albert Broccoli that the author links aesthetically to "Cotton Comes to Harlem" and "Across 110th Street"
- Paul McCartney's title theme is called "an undeniable banger," while the author argues "The Spy Who Loved Me" is possibly the greatest Bond film overall—the entry where Moore's confidence peaked before his eventual fatigue in "A View to a Kill"
Why it matters: This is an opinion-driven film essay arguing, against the dominant Connery-or-Craig consensus, that Moore made the best 007—anchored in a rare 35mm screening at Tarantino's Vista Theater. The piece concedes even its own minority argument isn't airtight: contemporary critic Roger Ebert argued at the time that Connery was funnier and more self-aware than Moore.
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