“One of the few times I was allowed to act”: the forgotten movie Roger Moore called his “best film”
Every actor who signs on to play James Bond knows that, regardless of whatever else they’ve achieved or accomplished before or after they make their debut as 007, it’ll always be the role they’re remembered for the most. Roger Moore was arguably the biggest star to be cast as the iconic secret agent, but he was still defined by gadgetry, girls, and saving the world.
Unlike everyone else who’s been handed a licence to kill on the big screen, Moore had several high-profile gigs under his belt before his first outing in Live and Let Die. That’s not to say nobody knew who Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig were, but they didn’t have the same levels of visibility as the second big-screen Bond, with George Lazenby the obvious exception.
He’d already turned down the part before due to his commitments to The Saint, with the roguish Simon Templar setting an early template for his tenure as MI6’s finest. He’d also gained attention in America in the hit series Maverick, with his performance opposite Tony Curtis in The Persuaders! keeping him in the spotlight.
However, once he’d embraced Bond, that was it. For the rest of his career, Moore couldn’t go anywhere without being pressed on his tenure as 007, despite notching dozens of credits across film and television. In a lot of those cases, his involvement was based on him carrying that baggage into whatever character he was playing, which didn’t give him much of an opportunity to flex his acting muscles.
He had charisma, charm, and screen presence, but he was never seen as a serious dramatist. Fittingly, when he went against type in an unsung British psychological thriller, Basil Dearden’s forgotten 1970 gem, The Man Who Haunted Himself, became Moore’s favourite of his own films, and it stayed that way for the rest of his days.
“When asked about the movie nowadays, I always reflect that it was one of the few times I was allowed to act,” he wrote in his memoir, My Word is My Bond. “It’s a terrible admission from someone who has made a living from walking in front of the cameras. Though, in my defence, I’d previously been cast in roles that were relatively straightforward in what was required of me, thank goodness. I’d never been ‘dramatically stretched’, as they say.”
In the movie, Moore’s Harold Pelham gets himself into a car crash that results in him being pronounced clinically dead during life-saving surgery. When he recovers, he begins to suspect that there’s a doppelganger out there trying to ruin his life, forcing him to find out if there really is an identical man tearing him down from the inside, or if it’s all in his head.
It wasn’t a critical darling or commercial success, but Moore didn’t seem to mind. He embraced a rare chance to sink his teeth into a fully-realised character, which is why he described The Man Who Haunted Himself as “what I have always believed is my best film.”
