Bond, Part III
OK, we've made it up to the early Roger Moore years. We're talking Bond of the 70s, when gadgets ruled the day and the series didn't take it very seriously. In particular, we're talking Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker.
The common themes of these films, other than Roger Moore and his dry humor, include villains with absurdly large and complex secret layers, increasingly elaborate and unrealistic chase sequences, riffing off other major film trends, and Jaws.
Let's recall the criteria in this series of evaluations again:
- Bond – who the actor is, how good he is, and what he brings to the role
- the Villain- Mr. Big, Scaramanga, etc. I judge the films on how compelling the villain is.
- the Bond Women – some films have few, some have many, but I’m pretty sure all have at least one. The quality ranges from Denise Richards’s absurd nuclear physicist to, of course, Mrs. Bond herself, not to mention Pussy Galore
- the Good Guys – M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter in his many incarnations and other sidekicks
- the Henchmen on the other side like Jaws, Oddjob, and Nick-Nack.
- the gadgets – not just judging how neat the gadgets are, but whether they were unwisely allowed to take over the film (as often happened with the later Roger Moore filims)
- whatever else I happen to think of
And now we move to
