Love it or hate it, the Roger Moore era is all over the place. A mess of low budget thrillers, blaxploitation and kung-fu action fllicks, massive budget space epics and Cold War espionage movies, with a dash of Carry On. The tone seems to change with every film. What's more there are clear tensions running throughout this period. Should the films be small scale dramas or big screen blockbusters? Funny or cold? How violent should they be? How sexist should they be? How fantastic? How realistic?
Different directors tackle these issues in their own way. Guy Hamilton doesn't have any money to play with and tries to follow DAF with plenty of jokes. Lewis Gilbert is given loads of money and turns in two massive, escapist films that, perhaps, don't actually make a lot of sense. Finally John Glen gets his hands on the series, tries to go back to basics, recants and goes for humour and then ends up with a sort of a blend of everything. And throughout, Roger Moore keeps doing his thing, steady and reliable, a single eyebrow raised against all affrontery.
Here are the numbers.
| Bond | 007 Kills (Av) | Deaths (Av) | Shags (Av) | Helicopters (Av) |
| Connery | 57 (9.5) | 384 (64) | 13 (2.16) | 8 (1.33) |
| Lazenby | 5 (5) | 28 (28) | 3 (3) | 0 (0) |
| Moore | 183 (26.14) | 404 (57.71) | 19 (2.74) | 3 (0.43) |
| TOTAL | 245 (17.5) | 816 (58.29) | 35 (2.5) | 11 (0.79) |
They don't tell the whole truth though which is, again, that the Moore era is very erratic. For example, Bond kills just one person in TMWTGG, but in the very next film, TSWLM, offs over one hundred. Although Bond is killing more people during this time, less is made of it. Moore's Bond tends to dispatch baddies from a distance and very often their demise consists purely of an A-Team-style stunt jump in front of an explosion. And unlike Connery, Moore doesn't kill anyone with his bare hands - he's oddly distanced from even his most cold-blooded murders: both Fekkesh and Locque fall to their deaths, and in both cases Bond doesn't touch them, insulated from the crime by, respectively, his tie and a car door. When he shoots Stromberg, there's a twelve feet long dining table to act as intercessor.
The fractured nature of this period makes it hard to identify themes and track developments - especially in comparison to the Connery era which is very cohesive and has a strong narrative connection from film to film. Instead, the films of the Seventies and early Eighties are more individual adventures than they are episodes in a saga, and the franchise is easily distracted by passing fashions. But there is a slight storyline that progresses through these movies and it is revealing.
It's not there immediately. LALD and TMWTGG represent a false start for Moore's Bond as Guy Hamilton tries to find a contemporary niche for 007 to occupy. Both films explore western anxieties but it's all very domesticated: problems of drugs, race and energy are social ones, hardly within the remit of a governmental assassin. But starting with TSWLM the Moore movies reintroduce characters and plots that, at least, entertain the idea that the Cold War is an ongoing concern for audiences.
What's interesting is how the threat from the Soviet Union is downplayed and how right-wing foreign policy is gently affirmed. Over the course of these films the USSR is entirely co-opted, to the point where General Gogol will sip tea with M in Whitehall and even (in TLD) offer 007 the Order of Lenin.
It happens gradually. In TSWLM, the KGB is a credible and competent agency and Major Amasova repeatedly outwits Bond for our amusement. But the very idea of Anglo-Soviet co-operation, although novel at the time, begins the process of de-fanging the Russians. Their (and our) hideous nuclear weapons represent a threat to both sides, wielded explicitly, as they are, by a neutral third party. The idea that East and West must work together to prevent a nuclear disaster is hardly the subtlest of sub-texts, but we're already a long way from YOLT, where Britain is the voice of sanity whilst US and USSR get the wool pulled over their eyes by SPECTRE.
Moonraker avoids mentioning Russians altogether, but what's interesting is how it presents a much frostier than usual UK/US relationship. If we take Drax's poison plot as a metaphor for nuclear armageddon then Moonraker is almost a re-run of TSWLM, but with the CIA replacing the KGB. The rather extraordinary implication would appear to be that Britain isn't picking sides in the Cold War!
FYEO returns us to the nitty-gritty of a Cold War being fought on the ground, and presents the Russians as distinctly unfriendly once more. But they aren't the villains. The antagonists are gangsters from across Europe (Spanish, Belgian, East German, Greek) seeking to profit by selling British secrets to the USSR. Whilst it's not impossible that this is an attack on closer European cooperation, it's more likely that it is an unconscious attempt to show that Britain is in a league above these pettier nations - a major power that fashions a victory once Bond gets to deal directly with his Soviet opposite number.
As East/West tensions climb dramatically in the early Eighties, the Bond franchise finally gives us 'bad' Russians. General Orlov from Octopussy is the sort of villain one might have expected to come along sooner: an angry Soviet uniform, itching to let his tanks roll across Europe. But again, look at how the USSR is presented. Orlov is clearly a solitary maniac, frustrated by the reasonableness of the Politburo and watched over by 'good' Russians like Gogol, head of the KGB, who finally has the rogue General shot. He doesn't quite turn to Bond and say "Orlov's views and opinions are his own and are not representative of the USSR," but this is certainly supposed to be self-evident. Furthermore, it is Orlov's tanks that we are told to be afraid of, not his nuclear arsenal. Yes, his plan is to detonate a nuke on a USAF base, but his intention is to trick the West into nuclear disarmament so that a conventional war can be waged. The lesson we are supposed to draw from this is that 'our' nukes are good because they protect us, that unilateral disarmament would be a terrible mistake and that we must 'stay the course'.
These were, of course, the prevailing government policies of the day, both in London and in Washington, and perhaps it should come as no surprise that Bond's world should align so closely with them. But I do find it interesting that the nuclear threat is consistently ignored, underplayed or given a neutral context. Despite featuring in nearly all of these films, the Russians are, we are told in no uncertain terms, nothing to worry about.
In AVTAK they are almost entirely toothless, included it seems exclusively for their comedy value. In the PCS, Bond eludes their guards with all the blissed-out nonchalance of a Californian surfer dude. Although nurtured by the USSR, Max Zorin had escaped their doddery clutches in order to fly solo. Gogol and Ivonova get tricked very easily by 007 swapping their cassette. And KGB heavy Dolph Lundgren (yes, it is him) gets picked up and twirled about by Grace flippin' Jones.
This isn't the last we'll see of them - the KGB have one last hurrah to come in The Living Daylights (next) and a flashback flourish in GoldenEye - but throughout these films they and the wider Soviet threat have been thoroughly diminished on screen, as well as in the minds of the audience. It's pretty blatant propaganda, and overlaps only slightly with the realities of the Cold War in the Seventies and Eighties, but with every Martini, every quip, every raised eyebrow, Roger Moore's James Bond has gently pulled another claw from the paws of the Russian bear.
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