Like Britain, he had to be clever because he could no longer be overwhelming.
It may be that the way things were in childhood will forever remain, for you, the way things ought to be. Roger Moore was my James Bond, the Seventies 007, and for me there can be no other.
Moore, who died aged 89 in Switzerland today, took the wheel of a hugely successful franchise and expertly steered it in a new direction, tongue planted in cheek. Out went the imposing stare; in came a twinkle in the eye. The first English Bond — after the Scot Sean Connery, who quit the series following 1967’s You Only Live Twice, and the Australian George Lazenby, who starred in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — was, improbably, a couple of years older than Connery (who would return for the curtain calls Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 and Never Say Never Again in 1983). Tall and trim, Moore never looked especially comfortable with a gun in his hand and wasn’t particularly imposing as a tough guy. Today his managers would beg him to beef up in the gym if he wished to retain any hope of being employed.
Sean Connery, with his big shoulders and his swaggering physicality, his touch of cruelty and menace, was a much larger screen presence than Moore. But it was Moore’s lighter touch — the arched eyebrow, the deadpan sense of humor, the movements graceful rather than aggressive — that was perfect for the times, when the ideal of screen manhood evolved from the irony-impervious scowl of John Wayne to the sardonic smirk of Burt Reynolds and the puzzled uncertainty of Warren Beatty.
If Connery’s Bond was a fantasy figure who projected British might, Moore’s Bond was a synecdoche for the new role of Britain — no longer the lion of the globe, it would measure its influence in soft power. For more than half a century, Britain has exerted its primary influence not through its troops and warships but in its popular culture, particularly in pop music, which without its British elements would scarcely be recognizable today. Moore’s Bond, like his country, had to be clever because he could no longer be overwhelming.
Who can forget how, in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moore’s Bond socked Richard Kiel’s steel-toothed thug Jaws in the midsection as hard as he could — and was rewarded by being picked up and rammed against the ceiling by his much larger foe? Yet Bond won that round when he used Jaws’s deadliest attribute against him — by electrocuting his mouth with a lamp. What better illustration is there of the superiority of fancy footwork over brawn than in Live and Let Die (1973), when Moore’s Bond finds himself on a rock in the middle of a pond full of ravening crocodiles, uses the beasts as stepping stones and smartly walks away from them without even loosening his tie? On a hunting trip with the villain Hugo Drax in Moonraker (1979), Moore’s Bond fires in the direction of a bird on the wing. “You missed, Mr. Bond,” says Drax. “Did I?” asks Bond as the henchman he shot falls out of a tree.
None of these scenes would have been as droll with any of the other Bond stars playing 007. Roger Moore brought a touch of debonair West End drawing-room comedy to the kiss-kiss and bang-bang, his ironic detachment providing sly counterpoint to how absurdly plotted the films were. (If Drax was determined to have Bond killed while the latter was staying on his estate, he could easily have shot Bond himself and made it look like an accident later.) The franchise-defining one-liners that accompanied the dispatch of a baddie or a frolic with a Bond girl sounded wittier and more natural coming from Moore, who unlike Connery would have been right at home in a Noel Coward piece. “Miss Anders — I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on,” Moore’s Bond told Maud Adams in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).
Roger Moore brought a touch of debonair West End drawing-room comedy to the kiss-kiss and bang-bang
The Spy Who Loved Me is as blundering in its plot as the other Bond films, but the reason so many fans remember it as the best or nearly the best in the series is Moore’s archness — the impeccable way he drove his white Lotus Esprit into the sea and out again, pausing on the beach only to drop that fish out the window like an unsuitable hors d’oeuvre. Escaping from certain death with Russian spy Barbara Bach in a submersible pod that doubled as a ’70s love nest at the end of the film, Bond disdained to comment on the havoc around him and turned his attention to a surprise stowed in the pod. “Maybe I misjudged Stromberg,” he says. “Anyone who drinks Dom Perignon ’52 can’t be all bad.” With a single line (“Let’s get out of these wet things”), he convinces the foe sworn to kill him to sleep with him instead, then closes the curtain on his bosses as they peer through the window.
As for the opening of the same movie, it was the most memorable one of the entire series: Bond getting in a gunfight with several attackers on skis, then running out of mountain, flying off a cliff, and hovering in space for 15 breathtaking seconds before opening his parachute — his Union Jack parachute. That sequence was the quintessence of the era of Bond’s Moore, panache in extremis.
Here’s to you, Roger Moore. Nobody did it better.
READ MORE:
Saturday Night Fever Wouldn’t be a Blockbuster Today
Hollywood Virtue-Signaling Began in the 60’s
James Bond’s Roger Moore & William F. Buckley: A Memory
— Kyle Smith is National Review’s critic-at-large.