Live and Let Die

The Dead Slave (Japan)
Murder Under Water (Netherlands)

Producer: EON

Released: 1973

Best line:
Bond seduces Solitaire, holding out a deck of Tarot cards. She selects the card, "The Lovers." Bond caresses her gently.
Bond: "You knew the answer before it was given. Strangely enough, somehow, so did I..."
Bond drops the cards behind him - they are ALL "The Lovers."

Worst Line:
In response to a question of the whereabouts of Mr. Big (who just exploded): Bond: "Oh, he's all over the place." (The line was deleted.)

A Nice Rogering

Sean Connery turned down the then astronomic sum of $5.5 million to play James Bond.

Realizing that Connery was now an impossibility, EON cast a new 007, in the person of Roger Moore. Moore had reportedly been a contender for Dr. No, but had lost out to Connery.

Moore on why the producers forced him to get a hair cut: "They thought it was too long, and United Artists thought I was too fat. I told my wife they wanted a skinny actor with no hair."

Good Cut

Besides Moore's hair, another good cut was a scene where Bond is reunited with Dr. No's Honey Rider (Ursula Andress). The idea was dropped after Connery refused to play Bond. It was felt that Andress and new 007 (Moore) had no previous chemistry to which audiences could relate.

Undercover

Broccoli and Saltzman originally wanted to cast an African American as the female lead, but, nervous about the inter-racial overtones, and uncertain of Roger Moore's star potential, they cast Jane Seymour (born Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg on February 15, 1951).

Seymour was unhappy that the Bond people had to pad certain parts of her body for the part. "It wasn't me - I'm not terribly in favor of push-up bras."

Director Guy Hamilton: "I made the villains black in Live and Let Die, and I got plenty of flack from the black community. I said, "Do you want to be taken seriously? Do you want to have parts for black actors? You can't all be Hamlet.'"

Anxious to attract the 'blacksploitation' market, the producers cast an African American to play Bond's female sidekick and love interest, Rosie Carver. They chose Playboy Bunny Gloria Hendry of the New York Playboy Club.
On her love scene with Moore, she said: "I aroused him and he aroused me. It's only human." Gloria Hendry: "I had only met Roger Moore for the first time about an hour or so before having to do the love scene. We both just settled into it... and had fun with it. The black-white bit doesn't bother me: I've had white boyfriends in real life. We're all just human beings, right? When you put out the light, the only important thing is that two people share good vibrations."
The South African government ordered the interracial love scene eliminated before the film could be shown there.


Films, main The Seventies


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