Live and Let Die (film)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Badass Decay: Bond is supposed to be a very good spy and secret agent. Yet on this movie it is quite jarring how EVERYBODY seems to know what he is, what's he's up to, and what he's doing. Not only that, but they're following and tailing him at almost EVERY SINGLE INSTANT in the whole film, to the point he gets betrayed twice AND trapped three times.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: That Paul McCartney title theme. Whoa.
    • So much so that Guns 'n Roses did a cover of it.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: The line in the title theme by Paul McCartney that goes: "But if this ever-changing world in which we live in...". On the other hand, it could also be "...in which we're living...".
  • Genius Bonus: At the close of the pre-credits sequence, to ratchet up the tension of the agent's death, the musical score quotes the Huge Chord from The Beatles' "A Day In The Life". The film's composer was George Martin.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Bond hears Felix communicating to his car through a cigarette lighter, noting "A genuine Felix Leiter/Lighter. Illuminating.". In Licence to Kill, Felix (again played by David Hedison) gives Bond a cigarette lighter as a gift for being his wedding's best man which he uses to kill Franz Sanchez as vengeance for Felix.
  • Narm:
    • Inflatable Yaphet Kotto, for a start.
    • "Take that honky out and waste him!"
    • "Get me a make on a white Pimpmobile!"
  • The Scrappy: Sheriff J. W. Pepper, to a certain extent, although this really set in for him after he reappeared in The Man with the Golden Gun.
  • Special Effect Failure: the Big Bad's death scene.
    • There were limits on how realistic they could have possibly made that sequence without outraging the censors at the time. Still, it just goes to show what a poor idea that method of dispatch really was.
    • It's quite obvious that the actor playing Tee-Hee is wearing a prop claw (you can see his wrist bending the sleeves, even though it's supposed to be solid steel).
    • Averted, surprisingly, on Bond's escape after being left to be eaten by crocodiles in a very small island. Instead of using fake props, those were actually real crocodiles. That ain't Moore or even a proper stunt double running on top of them. That's the owner of the ranch, Kananga himself.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Rescuing the white Damsel in Distress from the Scary Black Men. And that's just the movie; let's not talk about the book.
    • Also in the movie: how about the fact that all but two black people in the world (Agent Strutter and Quarrel Jr) are evil and in league with Kananga? Including not only everyone who lives in San Monique, but apparently also the entire population of Harlem.
    • Well, the people tracking Bond's car, except for the cab driver, were all CIA, so they are at least okay.
    • Alas, poor Strutter.
  • What Could Have Been: Perhaps to stave off the aforementioned Unfortunate Implications, the production crew originally wanted Solitaire to be black and the CIA contact/traitor to be white.
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