9. Live And Let Die: Kananga Gets Out Of Hand
Roger Moore fans, avert thine eyes: the next five entries are all from his films. The reason this list is dominated by the Man Who Was Rupert Excalibur ffolkes is simple- his films are ridiculous. He started as he meant to go on with Live and Let Die, a Blaxploitation flavoured Bond movie where a man says 'take this honky outside and waste him' and another man asks 'waste him, is that a good thing?' (that other man is Bond). It's an agreeably campy way to spend an hour and fifty five, although it does feature a deeply disturbing sub-plot that threatens to boil over into actual proper racism. Welcome, if you will, the reverse tonal shift- a scene that is far more unpleasant and disturbing than anything else in this otherwise jolly twaddle. Said sub-plot involves Solitaire, a young medium employed by the villain, Dr Kananga, to read the future. Whether or not she has genuine powers is left ambiguous (as is the case with all the supernatural elements in the movie), but Kananga prizes her highly and as a result refuses to let her engage in sexual relations with anyone- save himself, at some unspecified point in the future. This is as much a threat as a promise, since Kananga has done it before, to Solitaire's unseen (and presumably dead) mother. There's also a sharp contrast between Solitaire's virginal beauty and the hulking villainy of Dr Kananga (backed up by his henchman Tee Hee, who leers menacingly at the prospect). You can probably guess what happens next, but if you can't, then she loses her v-plates to a man with the initials JB (not John Barrowman). That sequence of events would be iffy enough in its own right- 007 manipulates her into bed with a rigged pack of Tarot cards- but the movie's implicit suggestion, that Bond has saved Solitaire from the sexual attentions of a villainous black man, veers dangerously close to then contemporary prejudices about miscegenation, particularly in the United States, the film's primary setting and biggest commercial market. This undertone is revealed in an uncharacteristically charged scene, where Kananga, having discovered Solitaire's deception, backhands her and rants "When the time came, I would have given you love. You knew that. You knew that!" Yaphet Kotto's bellicose performance, set against Jane Seymour's pathetic Solitaire, suggest a much heavier, darker movie- one that thereafter fails to materialise. The fact that Bond is absent from the moment only heightens the sense of its complete disconnect from the rest of the film. Of course, it's already been established that 007 has first dibs on a veritable Miss World tournament of exotic babes- Kananga and Solitaire, being a black man and a woman respectively (just in case that wasn't clear) have much less sexual freedom. What we're left with is five uncomfortable minutes of film that look remarkably reactionary and more than a little squalid forty years on. Given the sensitivity of these issues (particularly at the time), I can only wonder why the film-makers thought the best place to raise them was shortly before Bond jumps across some crocodiles. At least that scene was convincing.