Live and Let Die (1973)

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Live and Let Die (1973)

Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.

This is a voodoo-blaxploitation Bond movie, with a dose of the Dukes of Hazard with a crazy Louisiana Sherriff and a speedboat chase. It's one of the old-fashioned Bonds where 007 (Roger Moore) seduces all the women and uses a lot of gadgets (including a powerful magnet watch that lets him unzip his girlfriend's dress without her knowing.) And as usual, the bad guys try again and again to kill him with sharks and crocodiles and snakes, but they're too stupid to just shoot him when they have him tied up (just like the running gag with Dr. Evil and his son in the Austin Powers movies.) This is also the Bond movie with the most snakes and the most snake scenes. There are three snake scenes, four if you count a scene with a stuffed snake, and there is some snake art to go along with the voodoo snake theme.



Just before the opening credits, when we her the great Paul McCartney and Wings song, we see some Zombie cultists on the fictional Caribbean Island of San Monique dancing outdoors at night in front of a church with a voodoo priest who wears a goat head for a hat. A white man tied to a pole has blood thrown onto his face by one of the dancers. The voodoo priest dances around with a big green and yellow snake that he eventually holds up to a British agent's face to terrify him then he makes the snake bite the man to kill him. It's all pretty ridiculous - the snake is a fake rubber prop, though it is very realistically made, it doesn't even bite the man, and no snake would kill a person that quickly except in the movies.


There are also a few examples of snake-representation in the movie. During the opening credits we see a hand holding a gun that has a snake painted on it and down the arm. After Bond goes to New York City to begin his investigation of agents who have been killed, someone kills his driver. He trails the killer to a voodoo shop where he pretends to buy a stuffed toy snake that looks just like the killer voodoo snake on the island. He asks the saleswoman to wrap the snake "lengthwise" to distract her so he can snoop around the back of the store. Bond's love interest in this movie is a woman named Solitaire (Jane Seymour.) She's a fortune teller called The High Priestess who uses Tarot cards to see the future. She works for the main villain of the movie, Kananga (Yaphet Kotto), who runs a heroine growing and smuggling operation from the island. She sometimes wears enough eye make-up to make Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra make-up artist jealous, and she also sometimes paints a snake on her forehead. Just because. She also has a nice pair of gold snake candlesticks on her fortune-telling desk.



Bond flies to San Monique to continue his investigation and checks into a hotel. He turns on the water for the bathtub. As he turns the water off we see a metal door open above the shower and a snake crawls out of it. Then we see Bond in the bathtub shaving, then the snake crawling down the pipes, etc. until just as we expect the snake to get to him, someone knocks on the door and Bond gets out of the tub. When he gets back to the bathroom he lights a cigar and picks up an aerosol can of aftershave. (In the '70s everything came in ozone-destroying aerosol cans.) Now we see the snake crawling on the bathroom floor towards Bond. Finally, Bond sees the snake in a round portable mirror. He makes a face, then spins around, sprays the aftershave towards the snake, and uses the cigar to light the spray. With this makeshift flame-thrower, he burns the snake to death. Then he casually turns around and uses the aftershave on his freshly-shaven face. Because he's James Bond, who is always unfazed by danger. The snake is a harmless king snake. The snake bar-b-que is probably a fake snake prop but you never know. Maybe they sacrificed the kingsnake to the gods of box office gross.

Then Bond hears someone at the door and sees a gun pointing into the room. He burns the hand with the cigar and throws the intruder on the bed. But she turns out to be a C.I.A. agent named Rosie Carver (Gloris Hendry) who he has not met yet who is pretending to be his wife in order to assist him. He apologizes and sends Mrs. Bond into the bathroom where she immediately screams when she sees the charbroiled snake on the rug. Being a woke sensitive man, he makes a dumb mongoose joke then seduces her. Yeah, this is the old James Bond. He'd never get away with that today.





Back on the island, the outdoor voodoo dance club is hopping. Some voodudes bring in a coffin and set it down. The goat-hatted man we saw before opens the coffin and we see that it's full of snakes. He takes out the same green and yellow snake he used before, this time to use on the current Bond girl in bondage, Solitaire, who is carried overhead through the crowd and tied to two barber poles. After dancing around the place holding the snake, the goat man holds the snake up to Solitaire's face, but instead of letting it bite her, he goes back into the crowd as they watch a man painted like a skeleton rise from a grave. It looks like the same tall man we have seen a few other times in the movie. Then goat man goes back to Solitaire with the snake, but before he can let it bite her, Bond shoots. It's not clear if Bond hits goat man or the snake, but we see both of them fall on the ground, apparently dead or wounded. Bond then shoots a the tall skeleton man but discovers it's only a statue. But then the real tall painted man rises out of the grave (using an elevator system that leads into Kananga's underground drug-smuggling lair.) He picks up a machete, and so does Bond, and they go at it. But Bond quickly overtakes him and knocks him into the open casket still full of snakes (that mysteriously have not all crawled away.) Skeleton man makes a groaning noise then apparently dies instantly. Only in the movies... The coffin is full of real and fake snakes. We see Boa Constrictors, Ball Pythons, Burmese Pythons, Corn Snakes, and others I can't identify. The usual assembly of non-venomous snakes that we typically see standing in for deadly ones in the movies. There are also some good crocodile scenes you can see here.