The problematic heart of James Bond film ‘Live and Let Die’
The 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die was the first to feature Roger Moore as 007, making him the third actor to play the iconic British double agent. Guy Hamilton directed the movie from a Tom Mankiewicz screenplay following Sean Connery’s departure from the James Bond character after 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever.
Live and Let Die is based on Ian Fleming’s 1954 novel of the same name and tells of a drug baron by the name of Mr. Big who plans to monopolise the drug trade by taking out two of his heroin-dealing rivals. Eventually, we find that Mr. Big is, in fact, Dr. Kanaga, a compromised dictator from a Caribbean island where opium poppies grow. From there, Bond investigates.
While the film was a box-office hit and earned critical acclaim along the way, there’s a real problem at the core of Live and Let Die, and it primarily comes from the way the film’s producers treated actor Yaphet Kotto, who played Dr. Kanaga. Villain death scenes are often something to marvel at in a Bond movie, but it’s fair to say that Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman got it all so wrong in 1973.
Dr. Kanaga meets his fate at the film’s conclusion when he is forced by Bond to swallow a compressed gas bullet, the like of which is often found in underwater firearms. Kanaga’s body and face suddenly begin to bloat and inflate until he flies up out of the shark tank he’d been in, and he rises up into the air.
All the while, Kanaga’s body inflates until it can take no more, and then, pop, he explodes in mid-air and dies. Kanaga’s death scene is admittedly amusing, somewhat iconic and rather hilarious. However, there’s a genuine problem at its centre when it comes to Yaphet Kotto.
Kotto was a member of the Actors Studio in New York in his youth, had performed on Broadway, and later starred alongside Robert De Niro in Midnight Run. To find his character at the centre of such a ridiculous scene was not the kind of respect that the actor felt he deserved, given his prior experience.
“The way Kananga dies was a joke,” Kotto once said. True, but that was not the only problem. Kotto also felt that Tom Mankiewicz’s script reinforced black stereotypes, from which Kotto had to do his utmost best to try and find something genuine. “The entire experience was not as rewarding as I wanted it to be,” he said. “There were so many problems with that script.”
Kotto continued: “I had to dig deep in my soul and brain and come up with a level of reality that would offset the sea of stereotype crap that Tom Mankiewicz wrote that had nothing to do with the black experience or culture”.
Live and Let Die, released at the height of the blaxploitation film era, features several black stereotypes and cliches, such as black people being pimps and gangsters and drug dealers.
Dr. Kanaga was the first black Bond villain, and Kotto thought he might be able to bring something new and positive to the table. Sadly that was not to be the case. He concluded: “I wanted to be original… but there was nothing I could draw on from Tom’s script. It was a trap. If I had played it the way it was written, every black organisation in the world would have been on my case.”
