LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)
After the success of Diamonds Are Forever, George Lazenby has decided to stay with Bond for good. Peter Hunt returns once more to the director's chair, but the producers decide to find a fresh, 'hip' source for the soundtrack: They hire producer George Martin, who gets Paul McCartney of Wings to write and perform one of the most memorable Bond themes.
The film itself opens on June 27, 1973, and stars George Lazenby as James Bond, Geoffrey Holder as Mr. Big, Jane Seymour as Solitaire, Rik van Nutter as Felix Leiter, Yaphet Kotto as Mr. Whisper, Bernard Lee as M, Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny, Desmond Llewelyn as Q, Sammy Davis, Jr. as Sam Shadytree, Norman Burton as Sgt. Kidd, and Evel Knievel as himself.
The gunbarrel opens up on a shot of a helicopter; within are M, the head of the CIA, Bond, and Felix Leiter. M and the CIA head brief the two agents, saying they will be going after the island stronghold of notorious drug dealer Mr. Big, who has been corrupting agents by addicting them to his high-quality heroin. Their mission is to go in, terminate Big, and destroy his private island, San Monique, and all of his drugs plants. The two heads bid them adieu, and 007 and Leiter strap up and dive out of the helicopter onto the island. They quickly make their way up to the main gates, where they detonate an explosive to distract the guards, and then move in to the main plant.
Meanwhile, inside, a mysterious man in a high-backed chair sits at a wall of camera monitors. Turning on a microphone, he intones, "Intruder alert! All guards to Level Three."
Bond and Leiter get to the stairwell. Felix asks, "We're not going to walk all the way up, are we?" 007 shakes his head, then points to a rappelling gun at the ceiling and shoots. "Not in the slightest," he replies; within minutes, they have reached the top.
As Mr. Big sits for a moment, the doors to his office begin smoking. Turning in surprise, he moves forward, but the doors blast open, and Bond and Leiter run in, guns drawn. Big stutters, "N-now, wait a minute--", but 007 fires twice, and the drug dealer falls to the floor, dead.
Bond looks at a mini-schematic he's carrying, and then walks over to a small door set into the wall; he opens it, revealing a dark and apparently-endless chute. "Goes straight to the reactor," 007 notes. Felix takes out a small device, sets it, then chucks it down.
LEITER: "Just the right amount of time to get the hell out of here!"
BOND (chuckling): "Bomb voyage, Mr. Big."
The two flee the room, as the ticking bomb falling within the chute counts down. They make it past a group of guards, duck into a processing room, then jump out of a docking port near the beachhead, where a helicopter, drawn to their tracker, has touched down. Bond and Leiter jump into the waiting 'copter, and it takes off.
The two share a moment of relief as the bomb detonates, engulfing San Monique in a roaring fireball; however, the aftershock of the blast knocks Felix out of the open helicopter. He desperately struggles to hang onto the edge as the roaring flames swirl below, and Bond grabs his hand to pull him up; his gloved hand, however, cannot hold Leiter forever, and he inevitably slips.
LEITER: "James!"
BOND: "Felix!"
Leiter has a pained look of acceptance on his face for a moment, then he tumbles; down, down, down into the raging inferno.
BOND: "FELIX!!!"
He looks back into the ‘copter for a moment, where the pilot looks stunned, then looks back into the inferno, tears streaking his determined face, haunted forevermore. As he looks down, we fade to…
OPENING TITLES: Featuring voodoo-like imagery of flaming skulls, dancing hands, black dancers, and Bond's silhouette making dramatic poses, with Paul McCartney’s band Wings performing “Live and Let Die”.
The final title irises into a shot of Bond slumped in a chair in M’s office. Q puts a friendly arm on his shoulder and says, “007, there was nothing you could have done.” Bond jerks away:
BOND: “I should have been able to hold on.”
Q: “But, James, you’re only human!”
BOND: “I’m a double-O; I know I’m better than this.”
At this, M enters the room and says, “Well, 00 or not, you still have a job here!” He dumps a dossier on the desk, and Bond picks it up and reads it. It describes one Adam Quelqu'un, a small fry in a large organization who’s agreed to tell MI6 officials everything he knows about the resurgence of heroin sales on both sides of the Atlantic; Bond is to officiate the defection. As 007 begins to object, M wags his finger at Bond and says, “What would she say?”; instantly, 007 is cowed.
We cut to the busy streets of Harlem. Bond wanders around for a moment, surreptitiously snatches an apple from a vendor’s cart, and begins casually munching on it. From around the corner comes Sgt. Kidd, the fellow who Quelqu'un made contact with; he berates Bond for having MI6 get involved in this, but 007 shushes him. The two watch as the sea of people begin to part, and a lone figure trudges towards them.
Suddenly, a shot rings out, and Quelqu'un falls into the dirt; Bond looks around, sees the shooter bolting from a window, and gives chase. Kidd stays where he is, tending to Quelqu'un.
Bond runs up numerous flights of stairs, all the way up to the roof, only to watch with dismay as the shooter jumps onto the next roof. Sighing with disbelief, 007 continues the chase.
Meanwhile, as Kidd kneels in the dirt, a funeral procession marches down the avenue. Kidd stands up respectfully, only for the procession to stop right in front of him. The sergeant asks an elderly black man in front:
KIDD: “Erm… whose funeral is this?”
ELDERLY MAN: “Yours!”
The man pulls out a gun, a shot rings out, and Kidd collapses in the street. Two pallbearers bring the coffin forward, place it on top of Kidd’s body, and lift it up; now carrying the sergeant within. Draping a colorful quilt over the coffin, the funeral suddenly turns into a joyous celebration, while Quelqu'un still lies in the street.
Back in the chase, Bond follows the shooter as he clatters down a fire escape. Giving chase through a busy street, the two eventually end up at the subway terminal. Bond gets very close, only to be separated from his quarry by a throng of people entering the car. 007 squeezes in, and slowly makes his way toward the shooter. Just as Bond is within arm’s reach of him, the shooter looks up and smiles eerily at him, rasping, “Samedi knows all.”
Before 007 can find out what he means, the shooter bolts, pushing out of the car. He jumps out… right into the path of another subway car. Bond is thus left on the first car, dejected, as it rushes away from the bloody scene.
Back at MI6, Q reports that Samedi is a voodoo deity, but Bond suspects something more down-to-earth as the cause of the heroin resurgence. After visiting Q-Branch to be equipped with a small detonator in his tooth "in case of emergencies", Bond hits the Harlem streets again to obtain Samedi's drug, called Black Saturday. Bond asks for the drug on the street, and is successful in getting it from a vendor; unfortunately, 007 is confronted by another funeral procession, which knock him out and entrap him in a coffin similar to Sgt. Kidd.
When Bond wakes up, standing over him is a beautiful woman; when he asks her name, she reveals it to be Solitaire. She tells him he’s inside the shady nightclub Samedi, and is about to say more when the owner, the mysterious Mr. Whisper, enters the room. Luring her away with a chance for some alone time, Mr. Whisper then takes the hidden packet of Black Saturday from Bond’s pocket. As two hoods hold him down, Bond is forced to ingest the Black Saturday, which causes him to go on a bad trip; he experiences frantic hallucinations over every kill he's made, and the guilt overwhelms him... and then, suddenly, he relives his wife's dying day, and an angelic vision of Tracy appears to him, hovering over him and beckoning him into a strange white light. Bond, sweaty and drugged, cannot resist...
Bond awakens in a dumpster. He searches himself for the Black Saturday, and comes up empty; dejected, he goes to a payphone to call MI6.
We then cut to headquarters, where Bond asks about the club Samedi and its owner, Mr. Whisper. Q delivers a large dossier to Bond, filled with the names of people who have gone to the club and never returned; all were either former or disavowed agents of the CIA and MI6. Bond asks Q about anyone named Solitaire, but Q replies that there is no one in the files by that name.
Now puzzled, Bond decides they should send in a black MI6 agent, John Robinson, to obtain some Black Saturday; unfortunately, the same elderly black man from earlier recognizes Robinson as looking too clean, and a large mob gangs up on him outside the drug dealer’s place and beats him to death. Fortunately for Bond, however, the mob is not able to find the packet of Black Saturday; it is duly sent to Q-Branch, who immediately recognize it as identical to Mr. Big’s product.
Bond then heads back to Samedi. He asks the doorman a few questions, but the man grows suspicious. Disappearing into the building for a moment, he reappears with a toaster, which he begins swinging by its cord at Bond, and the chase begins.
007 darts down the street, but the doorman is relentless; never stopping for a moment, never pausing for a breath, he continues on at a steadily increasing pace. In the midst of the chase, however, Bond is spotted by a passing Mr. Whisper, who immediately runs the other way, looking frightened, and goes up to a payphone, where he puts two coins in, dials a number, and says, "Yeah, Tee-Hee? Get me the Boss."
The chase continues as 007 rushes into a gas station, where he runs behind a building. The doorman, confused, looks about, finally sees Bond, and lunges for him. Just then, Bond sees a large bucket of water by the attendant’s door. As the man swings the toaster, 007 throws the water at him; the water short-circuits the toaster, electrocuting the man to death. While the doorman convulses faintly on the ground, the gas station attendant, attracted by the sound of the fighting, comes out of the office with a wet mop, looks about, and is startled by what he sees. With a grin of relief, Bond tosses the bucket at the attendant and says, “Thanks for the help.”
We then cut to a shadowy scene, as two hoods enter a dark room. A spotlight comes on and frames them in a halo of blinding whiteness. A deep voice rumbles, "Jasper, Garnet; why did you let Mr. Bond go?"
JASPER: "Well, we gave him some Black Saturday like youse ordered us to, but he went all funny, and we thought he was dead, so--"
VOICE: "So you dumped him? I told you to bring him to me AFTER YOU WERE FINISHED WITH HIM!!!"
GARNET: "Well, Your Lordship, w-w-we forgot--"
VOICE: "Not a word! No one trifles with Baron Samedi."
With that, a hole opens under Jasper and Garnet, and the two fall into an alligator pit, where they are horribly mauled to pieces.
After their screams die down, Samedi calls out, "You saw everything, Mr. Whisper?" Mr. Whisper comes out of the shadows:
MR. WHISPER: "Uh, yessuh, Boss; I did."
SAMEDI: "Then you know what to do, I presume?"
MR. WHISPER: "Boss, I--"
SAMEDI: "Find Bond! NOW!!!"
At this, Mr. Whisper goes running out of the room, crying, "Yessuh, Boss; I will!"
Back at MI6, M tells Bond that the CIA has found evidence that Black Saturday is being sold on the market in Las Vegas; Bond replies that he’ll track down the lead without fail.
Once in Las Vegas, Bond goes down to the Strip, where he asks around to see if any vendors are illicitly selling Black Saturday; he is told to go to Caesar’s Palace, where he attends a dinner show featuring the comedic stylings of one Sam Shadytree. During the show, he notices something being passed around to certain tables by an usher. As the man moves past Bond’s table, 007 swipes a few packets from his basket; looking at them in the dim light, he recognizes it instantly to be Black Saturday.
After the show, Bond slips backstage and confronts Shadytree in his dressing room; Shadytree claims he did nothing wrong, only to turn pale when Bond shows him the stolen packet of Black Saturday. Shadytree quickly confesses that without Baron Samedi’s support, he wouldn’t be able to be doing his nationwide shows; his last show, he boasts with pride, was at the Apollo Theatre in New York. At this, Bond realizes that Samedi’s heroin is trickling down due to distribution during Shadytree’s shows, and he beats Shadytree until the man cries out that he can get Mr. Whisper for Bond. 007 lets him go, and begins to hatch a plan.
The next night, Shadytree is again performing. After he finishes his set, Shadytree goes into his dressing rooom, and Mr. Whisper, after glancing around for a moment, follows him in. Suddenly, the door shuts, and Bond leaps from behind with a gun. After a brief struggle, Mr. Whisper manages to shake off Bond and runs out of the room; at this, Bond takes chase.
007 runs out to the parking lot, but Mr. Whisper has already gotten into his car and driven off. All seems hopeless, until Bond spots a passing Evel Knievel wheeling his bike out from behind a shed. Bond intervenes, saying, “I need to use your bike”, jumps on and guns off, leaving Knievel roaring in protest behind.
Mr. Whisper takes his car all around Caesar’s Palace, eventually going past the famous fountain; at this, Bond guns his bike and leaps over the fountain. Knievel runs up and says, “Hot dang! Did we get footage of this?”
Mr. Whisper then swerves into an alleyway, leaving Bond to crash his motorcycle into some trashcans. After getting up and brushing himself off, however, Bond sees Q in the parking lot, getting out of a familiar-looking Aston Martin. “Good old Q,” Bond grins.
007 runs over, opens the car door, and slides into the driver’s seat; with a roar, the transmission kicks in, and the car revs out of the parking lot, leaving an outraged Q to cry, “Hey, that’s my car!”
Bond looks over the dashboard and finds a button labeled JET ENGINE; pressing it, Bond finds the car rapidly catching up with Mr. Whisper. The two continue the chase through the desert, where the car gets clogged with sand, and Bond must then pursue Whisper on foot. Unfortunately, someone else has been tailing Whisper; as soon as Bond catches up with him, he finds the fellow dead with a scorpion jammed in his mouth.
Back at MI6, Bond bemoans the loss of his lead, while Q berates M for allowing Bond to treat his property like dirt; suddenly, Miss Moneypenny walks in, claiming someone sent something for Bond in the mail. They open the envelope to find a spool of tape; when they play it, the rumbling voice of Baron Samedi identifies himself, then reveals that Felix Leiter is alive, featuring him calling for Bond and screaming in pain.
We then cut to Bond, alone at his flat and drowning his troubles in vodka. There is a knock at the door; Bond opens it to find none other than Solitaire. She throws her arms around him and begs him to come to San Monique, claiming Felix is held there and that Baron Samedi will release him if he goes. Drunk with confusion, Bond carries her up to his bedroom, where she willingly parts with her virginity.
The next scene shows Bond and Solitaire boarding a chartered plane, where they head off by air to the torched remains of San Monique. As the plane flies over the island, the pilot admits he doesn’t want to land there, so he sends Bond and Solitaire off by parachute. The two land on a rocky outcropping, and make their way up to the entrance of the deserted plant.
As soon as they reach the gates, however, Solitaire turns on Bond, holding a gun to his head. Armed hoods appear out of nowhere, and the last thing Bond sees is the inside of a bag over his head before he’s knocked out.
When Bond comes to, the familiar rumble of Baron Samedi inquires as to his health. Bond looks about and sees that he is in a shadowy, dark place. A blinding white light shines down upon him, and Samedi intones that “the test has begun”: With that, the floor opens up under Bond, and he falls into a pit of alligators.
Staying deathly still, Bond moves not an inch, and so the alligators grow disinterested in Bond; at this, a small door opens up on the side of the pit, and Bond warily goes through; he is immediately confronted by the alluring smell of poppies, and he exits a tunnel to find himself at the start of a giant underground field of poppies.
As he wanders through, however, Bond begins to experience a drug flashback, and he once again sees the angelic vision of Tracy; this time, though, he is able to break free of the hallucinogenic, and manages to navigate the poppy field. At end, a humble oaken door opens for him, and Bond confidently walks inside, only to be confronted by the sight of Felix Leiter!
Felix is asleep, in chains, and badly burned. As Bond comes closer, he realizes that there is glass between them. He angrily pounds on the barrier, only for harsh, derisive laughter to well up from some unholy darkness beyond Bond’s sight.
VOICE: “He’s not going to wake, you know; he can’t hear you.”
BOND: “Who are you?”
VOICE: “How can you not remember me, Mr. Bond?”
At this, the owner of the voice steps out from the shadows, and Bond is stunned by who it is: None other than Mr. Big, back from the grave. Big laughs again, then motions for Bond to follow him.
MR. BIG: “Come, Mr. Bond; we’ll have dinner.”
Mr. Big, being the gracious host that he is, hauls Solitaire off to be whipped with a stingray tail for doodling Bond, while 007 himself gets to share a nice meal of fried chicken brains with Big as he first explains that the man Bond shot was merely a double, then expounds upon the organization he works for:
BOND: “Well, whom do you work for? I’m sure the Russians wouldn’t want you peddling dope for their men.”
MR. BIG: “East and West do not matter to me, Mr. Bond; I work for CHAOS.”
BOND: “I’m sorry?”
MR. BIG: “CHAOS: Consortium for the Hastening of the Annihilation of Organized Society. We aim to bring about a new world order!”
BOND: “By making addicts out of poor blacks?”
MR. BIG: “No, Mr. Bond, something far greater; by selling heroin to both sides, I mean to destabilize the fighting men of their services, and thus cripple Intelligences.”
BOND: “And that is the aim of your whole organization?”
MR. BIG (laughing): “Mr. Bond, you do not seem to realize that I am merely one branch of an enormous organization! The Samedi guise I adopted was merely a ruse to get you on my trail; I have heard much of your skill, and you have passed my test.”
BOND: “Well, since that’s all said and done, do you think could you let me go, then?”
MR. BIG: “Unfortunately, Mr. Bond, the time for playing games has long passed. Peridot, Tourmaline; get my boat ready! Mr. Bond and his paramour are going on a little cruise.”
Mr. Big decides to send Bond and Solitaire to a lethal death. Tying them to the back of his boat, he goes over coral to make sure the two are torn to pieces. 007, however, decides to use the detonator drilled into one of his teeth; he bites down on it, and every long-abandoned mine in the vicinity, including the one under Big's boat, lights up, and Mr. Big is blown to kingdom come. As Bond and Solitaire float in the water:
BOND: "Looks like Big went out with a bang."
The two swim back to land, where Solitaire leads him to the entrance to Big’s hideout; she presses a button, and a small portion of the mountain slides away, revealing a hidden passageway that leads straight to Felix. Bond grabs an axe off the wall and smashes the glass; it breaks, waking Felix, who, though drugged and hazy, recognizes Bond at once. 007 frees him of his restraints, and the two men grasp each other in friendship.
Bond, looking through his things in Big’s luggage room, comes across another one of MI6's small exploding devices. He sets it, then tells the others to run; as they rush down the mountain, the whole top is blown off, and piles of debris come rushing down, all the way to the shoreline.
The three finally reach the shore and are greeted by Q, who has been waiting for them in his motorboat. When Bond asks him how he knew, Q replies, “007, I know you better than I know my own gadgets!” They all get in, and, as Solitaire tends to Felix, Q revs the boats, and the forsaken San Monique shrinks further and further into the distance.
As Solitaire tends to Felix, he asks, "What's your name? Really?" She responds, "Della Latrelle". They share a moment between them, then look to Bond, who is still surveying the ruined island. We cut to a long shot of the boat skimming off to the horizon, and "Live and Let Die" strikes up as we transition to the credits.
The credits end:
THE END
OF
LIVE AND LET DIE
JAMES BOND
WILL RETURN
IN
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN
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So, what do you think? Any comments, questions, or critiques would be greatly appreciated.
