Sir Roger Moore1927-2017

It sounds morbid, but I've been meaning to write an obituary for Roger Moore since 2013. I had the immense fortune to interview him for the Empire podcast in the previous October, and while it was everything you'd hope for from an interview with Roger Moore, it did strike me that he was a Very Old Man (he'd just turned 85 that week), and his delicate shuffle and hushed tones suggested that he might not be long for this world. Every now and again I wondered whether to make a start, but each time I put it off - partly because I'm lazy, but mostly because I didn't want to admit that he might not actually be immortal. He, too, evidently decided to put off dying until he'd written a few more books, performed a few more sell-out shows and generally enjoyed the absolute shit out of his ridiculously charmed life. Turns out James Bond is pretty goddamn hard to kill after all.

Still, the day when Twitter could at long last break out its "Roger no Moore" gag has finally arrived, so only now do I sit down to gather my thoughts about the first 007 to ascend to the great damp-fannied-Bond-girl-filled boudoir in the sky. This isn't going to be a biography (read his books for that, they're terrific), but it is going to be tediously personal, so please forgive me if I uncharacteristically go off on a boring ramble about James Bond and Roger Moore for once.

Like most people my age, I was introduced to Rog (and Bond) by my dad and ITV. I'm ashamed to say I can't remember which Bond film I first saw on the telly, but I do know that that's how Roger first exposed himself to me: unconvincingly beating up lesser-paid stuntmen without getting a hair out of place, before making a terrible quip, throwing back a goblet of fizz and sucking the face off an alarmingly young lady who would then probably try to kill him. It's a lifestyle to which eight-year-old me immediately aspired, and has disappointingly failed to achieve thus far. But then I'm not Roger Moore, and nor is anybody else - not least the three actors who took over his role but, for various reasons, chose not to emulate him.

Because how do you follow Roger Moore? You can't, so you don't. You wouldn't get away with it, partly because the world has mercifully moved on from finding sexism and racism funny (not that that was the backbone of Rog's humour, but it would be disingenuous to ignore it), but mostly because with the twinkle of a baby blue eye, the gentle elevation of a beautifully-coiffed eyebrow and a wry grin, Rog's Bond could get away with pretty much anything. I loved this about him when I was a kid, hated it when I became a dull Bond purist in my twenties and have now made peace with it for what it is: cinema history, for better or worse. 

It's easy to dismiss that mercurial run of films that somehow frequently defied quality control to keep James Bond afloat in the '70s and '80s despite increasingly fierce competition in the action movie market. Rog didn't single-handedly turn the franchise into self-parody, but his name and eyebrows were front and centre when Ian Fleming's cold, cruel secret agent glided past a double-taking pigeon in a hover-gondola or defused an atomic bomb while dressed as Bingo fucking Dimples the clown. You can groan all you like (and believe me, I have), but try and imagine any other Bond actor pulling that shit off. Moore turned the Bond films into Roger Moore films, and there's nothing wrong with that in a franchise which frequently needs its pomposity bubble bursting.

*pop*

Look closely at Rog's Bonds, though, and you'll find it wasn't all cringe-inducing misogyny and pensioners fucking Grace Jones. Occasionally that RADA training and twenty-odd years of pre-Bond acting experience paid off: witness the scene in The Spy Who Loved Me where Bond reveals to his female Russian counterpart that he murdered her lover with a flare-firing ski-pole, or watch him boot a villain off a clifftop in For Your Eyes Only as revenge for the death of a colleague - those are the moments where Fleming's Bond briefly comes alive, and incongruous as it seems it proves that Roger Moore was indeed capable of being somebody else other than Roger Moore.

But could he be somebody else other than James Bond? That's what I decided to investigate when I embarked on That's Rogertainment!, an ill-advised attempt to watch all of Rog's non-Bond films; a project which began in earnest and tailed off somewhat as life got in the way. But of all the actors in the world I wanted to watch more of, it was Moore. Something about his indefatigable attempts to keep plugging away at something he clearly wasn't very good at but which paid for those homes in Switzerland and Monaco made me hungry to see what else he'd achieved in his time. The answer is a fucking shitload, a mere fraction of which I've managed to catch. But I recommend all of it, no matter how bad: North Sea Hijack sees him as the comically-named Rufus Excalibur ffolkes, cat-loving head of an aquatic counter-terrorist unit; Shout At The Devil has him visibly attempting to keep up with a sozzled Lee Marvin before smearing gravy browning on his face and donning a turban; Bullseye is basically Moore and Michaels Caine and Winner having a supermassive megajolly on camera for 90 minutes regardless of literally everything else in the world. Embodying the term "movie star" (in stark contrast to the term "actor"), Rog deployed his overabundance of charisma at every turn to ensure that he at least was always watchable, even if his films were frequently quite the opposite.

But if you want to see the man at his best, check out 1970's madgasm The Man Who Haunted Himself, which I have yet to cover on That's Rogertainment! - a failing I hope to correct very soon. It's a film I love so much I screened it in a cinema on my thirty-tenth birthday, complete with an audio introduction recorded on request by the man himself. That's the kind of guy Roger Moore was: 100% aware of how much his work meant to his fans, no matter its quality, and frequently happy to accommodate those fans' requests. There are numerous stories on Twitter right now that people have told about how lovely Rog was when they met him; see how many equally enthusiastic tales you can dig up about his co-Bonds. Maybe they'd rather move on, but Roger's acceptance that fate dealt him a winning hand with 007 and his gratitude for that make his death that little bit harder for Bond fans.

So as much as I love his Bond (a love which, frankly, has seen peaks and troughs over the years), I consider myself one of the lucky ones whose memories of Roger Moore are enhanced by having spent a brief amount of time in his company, which is why I have to bookend these ramblings with that 2012 interview. I got to ask him about The Man Who Haunted Himself, I got to shake his hand and see up close and personal how immaculately turned out he was, and I got to make a cack-handed attempt to explain the plot of Inception to him. Throughout all of this he was an absolute joy; a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire who insisted we didn't call him 'sir', suggesting we could call him 'Charlie' if we liked. I've no idea why. They say never meet your heroes, but 'they' have obviously never met Roger Moore: a hero for the ages. Rest in peace, Charlie.

Richard Kiel1939-2014

"                                          "

- Jaws, The Spy Who Loved Me / Moonraker

BlogalongaBond / The Spy Who Loved Me: Moore Starts Getting Bond Right

After the relative failure of The Man With The Golden Gun and the extraction of thorny co-producer Harry Saltzman from Cubby Broccoli's side, it was time to go back to the last boffo Bond for inspiration. With Ian Fleming only allowing the use of The Spy Who Loved Me's title (and not the story, which you should definitely read), Broccoli simply hired director Lewis Gilbert to virtually remake his previous Bond film, You Only Live Twice, but with Blofeld's name changed to Stromberg, and underwater instead of in space.

Despite all the shameless ripping off of himself, Gilbert delivers a Bond film which, for the most part, exceeds all expectations. It's Bond by numbers, but it's packed to the sprockets with spectacle and cracking action, and by this point we're so used to Bondian ludicrosity that we accept a villain with an underwater base and an indestructible idiot henchman with metal teeth named after a recent hit movie as if we pass them on the way to the shops every weekend.

The plot is, of course, ridiculous and convoluted (Bond must make contact with Sheikh Hosein in order to make contact with Aziz Fekkesh in order to make contact with Max Kalba in order to secure the MacGuffin) and the film's attempts to address the series' by-now-embarrassing misogyny are admirable but doomed to failure when Bond's female Russian "equal", Anya, is played by a plank of wood with tits and is required to completely reverse her stance on passion-driven revenge when Rodge raises one of those magnificent eyebrows.

Still, there is one thing that nobody expected to be as good as it was in The Spy Who Loved Me, and which is still overlooked today, and that's the occasionally surprisingly excellent performance of Roger George Moore. Don't get me wrong, he's still the worst James Bond, but once or twice a ray of brilliance shines through the clouds of crapulousness, and it's those that I'd like to celebrate here.

Where it took Sean Connery three films to find his sweet spot, Moore was comfortable in Bond's horsebit moccasins from the moment he unzipped that Italian chick's dress with his magnetic watch in Live And Let Die. It wasn't until The Spy Who Loved Me, though, that the combination of experience and a few choice nuggets of scripting gave him the chance to show that he was more than just two majestic arches of hair above a pair of twinkling, lecherous eyes. Take his fight with Oddjob-a-like Sandor on a Cairo rooftop: as Sandor holds onto Bond's tie for dear life, you can see Moore calculating how much tie is left before the teetering henchman falls, and the urgency of his questioning and callous dismissal of the bad guy with a brief hand movement are pure Fleming.

Probably Moore's single best moment as Bond comes as Anya reminds him - and us, for the first time since OHMSS - of his dead wife. Bond has clearly locked away all emotion for Tracy somewhere where it can fester in the pit of his soul, and Anya's mention of her causes a chilling reaction. Moore sits back slightly, backing away from a painful memory, then deploys a devastating eyebrow before fixing her with an ice cold stare and cutting her off mid-sentence. He touchingly admits sensitivity about the subject of his widowerhood and then, in an instant, defaults to jovial mode having buried his feelings even further down than before. The exchange lasts just ten seconds but within it Moore gives Bond more depth than in his previous four and a half hours in the role.

The scene also works to signpost a later one, in which Anya and Bond simultaneously realise that it was he who killed her lover in the pre-credits sequence. It's one of the best-written scenes in Bond history, and Moore again rises to the occasion. Bond knows what it's like to lose a loved one, and the weight of his loss and his empathy with Anya is visible even as he turns his back on her. His confession is unapologetic without being insensitive, and when she calmly informs him that she'll be killing him as soon as their mission is over, he gives a barely perceptible resigned nod, as if to say, "yes, I expect you will, and frankly I don't blame you". It's a shame Barbara Bach is so useless because with a better actress to trade off, this could have been one of the series' greatest moments.

Of course Rodge goes on to bugger it up several times during The Spy Who Loved Me, which is all the more frustrating when we know how good he can be, but for a few brief scenes he shows the world that anything Connery's nostrils can do, his eyebrows can do almost as well. But not quite.

The ski jump

Having just pulled off the greatest Bond stunt yet with a car that spins 360 degrees while jumping a river in The Man With The Golden Gun, Cubby Broccoli thinks nothing of immediately topping it with this outrageous piece of amazing nonsense. Directed by second unit chief John Glen, who would later direct five of his own Bond films, the stunt is the equivalent of the franchise pulling its trousers down and waving the world's most enormous cock and balls (with a Union Flag tattooed on the scrotum, natch) in the face of the moviegoing public, who gobbled it up. The parachute gag may be spectacularly dumb, offering any remaining villains a nice, bright target to aim at, but it was exactly what was required of Her Majesty's loyal terrier in Silver Jubilee year.

The music

With the Inland Revenue finding a few unpaid tax bills down the back of John Barry's sofa, it was left to Marvin Hamlisch to drag Bond strutting and pointing into the disco era with some astonishing funksplosions incongruously teamed up with a bit of Bach and Mozart, not to mention Maurice Jarre's Lawrence Of Arabia theme. And when I say "not to mention", I mean "let's not mention it". The score works though, Hamlisch's Cairo club music especially effective, and Carly Simon's title song is a thing of effortless beauty that revels in Bond's genital-waving superiority: baby, he's the best.

Ken Adam's sets

Having had a six-year break from Bond, the man who BUILT A FUCKING VOLCANO is back with his second-greatest ever set: the inside of a mind-bogglingly massive supertanker. You might think that you had a big idea once, but until a major film studio builds the world's largest stage in which to house it and gets Stanley Kubrick in to light it, your idea measures less than one ångström from end to end compared to this one. Go away and don't come back until you're Ken Adam.

Derek Meddings' models

If there's any indication of the breadth of skill involved in the making of The Spy Who Loved Me, it's the juxtaposition of Ken Adam's colossal sets with the models created by Derek Meddings. Meddings, having earned his stripes working on various Gerry Anderson TV series, created scale models of the Liparus (a 60-foot long 'miniature') and the submarines it swallowed, which blended seamlessly with Adam's monstrosities. He even mastered the art of realistic miniature water, which was still frustratingly tricky to get right in ye olde seventies. Combine all that genius (look at the wash behind the Liparus) with an expert knowledge of which lenses to shoot his models with for the most realistic result, and you begin to understand why Derek Meddings was given the Special Achievement Award for special effects at the 1979 Oscars.


And finally: Only a knob gag this terrible could make it into Alan Partridge's greatest ever Bond moment:

While entertaining 'Log Cabin Girl' with his penis, Bond receives an urgent message from M via his Dymotape-spurting watch. Bond dresses and makes to leave.

LOG CABIN GIRL
What happened? Where are you going?

BOND
Sorry darling, something came up.

I'll leave Alan's best friend Michael to sum this one up:

BlogalongaBond will return with Moonraker, God help us

What the hell is BlogalongaBond? I'll tell you.

Further BlogalongaBondareading here

Oh, James... I Cannot Find The Words

Via Last Exit To Nowhere.

Saturday Playlist #5: James Bond In The '70s

If Bond music in the '60s was all about the sleaze, in the '70s it was all about the cheese. From John Barry's Vegas of Diamonds Are Forever, through George Martin's funkalicious blaxploitation-esque wah-wah of Live And Let Die, to Marvin Hamlisch's whatever-the-hell-you-describe-it-as version of the Bond theme for The Spy Who Loved Me, well-past-its-sell-by cheddar runs through these scores like massively-collared safari suits run through Roger Moore's wardrobe.

So get out the cream crackers, raise a solitary eyebrow to the heavens and suck your cheeks in as you kiss a series of ladies in a horrifically unwatchable fashion, because it's time to...

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO

SATURDAY PLAYLIST #5:

JAMES BOND IN THE '70s

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Tom Mankiewicz 1942 - 2010

Tom Mankiewicz wrote or co-wrote some of the most average James Bond films. That might seem like a perfectly good reason to politely ignore his passing, but it meant that his Bonds (Diamonds Are Forever, Live And Let Die, The Man With The Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me) reached massive - and massively varied - audiences, ensuring the survival of the brand for years to come. His place in the history of 007 should be neither underestimated nor overlooked.

Mankiewicz was also responsible for reshaping a humungous and flabby Superman script into two classic films, thereby creating the template for superhero movies that can be found at the core of every blockbuster with the suffix -Man since. Except maybe Rain Man.

Combine all that with uncredited work on Gremlins, The Goonies and Batman and it's easy to see how Tom Mankiewicz has almost certainly touched the lives of every single person reading this blog.

And for that, The Incredible Suit salutes him.

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Claudia Winkleman's Competition

Seeing as how the BBC has a Political Editor, a Business Editor, an Economics Editor, an Arts Editor, a World Affairs Editor, a Europe Editor, a Middle East Editor, a North America Editor, a Home Affairs Editor, a Sports Editor and probably a Volcanic Ash Cloud Editor by now, isn't it about time they got a James Bond Editor?

Then we wouldn't have to put up with complete interest-vacuums like the one Alison Harper delivered from last weekend's FanFest event at the London Film Museum, in which she wittered with former comedy Bond villain and tragic actor clinging desperately to a single part he played in two films over thirty years ago Richard Kiel, forever known to an uncaring world as Jaws.

You can watch the report on the BBC's website here, although I don't advise that you do because your brains will trickle out of your nostrils at the sheer lack of any enlightening content. Here's a handy transcript of Ms Harper's opening pitch, in which she makes a curious statement:

Now, what exactly does she mean by that? That Jaws is one of her favourite, favourite James Bond films? Because it's not, strictly speaking, actually a Bond film is it? It's a film about a shark that doesn't feature James Bond, even in a cameo role.

Or does she mean that the James Bond film with Jaws in it was one of her favourite favourites? If it is, you'd think she'd be aware that he was in two Bond films, no? She later refers to Moonraker, firmly placing her in a certain subset of Bond "fans", so one can assume she hasn't seen The Spy Who Loved Me.

To be fair to Ms Harper she did have to put up with Kiel looming over her and creepily asking "Shall I bite you on the neck?" and referring to one of the rustiest nails in Roger Moore's Bond coffin by mentioning how, in Moonraker, he "had a girlfriend about your size". Sadly Alison responded to this last abysmal chat-up line by wiggling a lot and squealing "Oooh! That'd be wicked!"

And just watch her face drop as Richard starts banging on about some failure-destined cack he's about to start filming that not even she gives a toss about because he's only ever going to be Jaws and she's feeling slightly violated.

Anyway I don't wish to be mean and I wish Alison Harper all the best in her career, although it would be nice if she'd watch a few more Bond films, preferably some of the good ones.

As for Richard Kiel, good luck with your future career too. Here's the kind of quality you need to aim for to relive those golden years:



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The Back To The Future Birthday Bonanzagasm

I recently celebrated the anniversary of the day I emerged into this world, screaming and yelling because I’d just missed the release of The Man With The Golden Gun and would have to wait another three years for The Spy Who Loved Me, by having a Back To The Futurethon at my favourite cinema, the Joeyplex.

By crikey I love Back To The Future. It’s a perfect film in every way. Each time I watch it I find something I hadn’t noticed before. Today I realised how sad it was that George McFly’s lifelong bullying at the hands of Biff Tannen had completely stifled his creative urges. At 17 years old he wrote science fiction stories that he was too shy to show anyone because he couldn’t stand to be rejected, and by 47 he was wedged in some crappy job doing Biff’s work for him. Marty’s fannying about with the space-time continuum may have given George all the material rewards a 1980s family could hope for, but it’s the fact that he’s a published author, living his dream, that brings a lump to my throat. I’m just not sure why it took 30 years for his first book to be released.

Part II is slightly less lovable because Biff, in his various incarnations, crosses the line from great movie villain to completely unsympathetic idiot hole, and also because everyone shouts all the way through it. However I’ve never seen a sequel before or since that goes back into the original and turns it inside out like Seth Brundle’s telepod does to his baboon in The Fly.

Since I first saw Part II I’ve been perplexed by the backwards ‘99’ that appears at the end when the DeLorean is struck by lightning, but it was so enigmatic I just thought it was too brilliant to question. Received wisdom on the interwebs suggests it’s the flame trails, created by the time machine disappearing, spinning off into the distance. I suppose that could be true but I think it’s better left unexplained, like Marty’s failure to notice that his girlfriend and Dad have been replaced by lesser actors. Although I did have a big thing* for Elisabeth Shue at the time, due to a combination of unruly teenage hormones and Adventures In Babysitting.

Part III rediscover’s the trilogy’s heart and perfectly balances the race to get back to the future with a beautiful love story for Doc Brown. And the new time machine appearing at the end is such a “Yess!!” moment – which makes it even more brilliant that it’s topped when it takes to the skies and continues the adventure in a whole other story we’ll never see.

So here’s to the Back To The Future trilogy - a magnificent way to spend a birthday - and to its unsung hero Alan Silvestri, who composed a perfect theme for it that he never bettered. Great Scott!



*You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking what you’re thinking.

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