The Infuriating Smirk of Roger Moore

Do you think there's an ideal age to see a film? That a movie will play better to a specific age group or demographic because the ideas in it are more relevant to those people?

If so, I think I was introduced to the James Bond films at the exact right time. I was around 11 or so, and the heady mix of girls, guns, and car chases went straight into my blood, like an adrenaline shot to the heart. I suspect the same is true for many young men. Our fondness for Bond is rooted in late night viewings of underwater spear gun battles and beautiful blondes in need of rescue. They're viewed in dens and basements with uncles and grandpas. They are simultaneously the fairy tales and the porn of our tween years.

I've written briefly about how Bond films are childhood fantasies writ large, but I find that they're almost all (with a very few interesting exceptions) actually a very particular fantasy we have as boys: the fantasy of growing up. Bond was the culmination of what I thought I'd become: the suave lady-killer, the dangerous rogue, the renowned expert on every subject under the sun. In a word: invulnerable.

Which is why the Roger Moore Bond films are, for the most part, unbearable.

Moore's approach to playing Bond was to smile his way through the metal-toothed and midget henchmen, knowingly grin at the Agent XXXs and Holly Goodheads, and double-take at the massive space stations and blimps of his enemies. He was having fun, and he wanted you to join in on the childish adventure. I suspect those that like Mr. Moore's portrayal were those who saw them as young boys, not as interested in vodka martinis as they were in space laser gun battles.

To those of us who were more intrigued by baccarat and Faberge eggs, though, that ever-present smile looked more like a smirk, refusing to play it straight. We could never connect to the fantasy while the ostensible narrator was grinning at us, mocking our desire to indulge in the ridiculous daydreams of childhood. To borrow a British phrase, he took the piss out of the whole thing.

This is, however, a generalization. Bond films all tell the same basic story, so we tend to combine them all into an actor's "version" of the Bond character (hence the often-repeated criticism of Timothy Dalton's Bond as "too dark and serious", although only one of Dalton's films is "serious" in any sense of the word). The truth is that each film has a distinct Bond, which plays distinctive notes about the character. To illustrate this, let's look at Moore's second effort, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN.


THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN is a fascinating failure, a film that has so many great scenes and moments to add to the Bond mythos, but one that is ultimately done in by it's inability to play it straight. Oddly enough, almost none of this is Moore's fault. His Bond is the most grounded character in the whole mess, and for the most part, he plays it dead serious. The scene between him and Andrea Anders, Scaramanga's mistress, is of particular note. In the scene, Bond trails her and breaks into her hotel room, confronts her, then viciously slaps her and nearly breaks her arm. It's one of the darkest scenes in any Bond film. There's a sense in this scene of a brutal realism, of a lethality in Moore, that earnestly portrays the assassin that Bond is. It's a scene that never plays up Bond's sexual prowess to resolve the situation, and never winks at the audience. In as much that it comments on Bond's chauvinism and violent tendencies, it's a much more mature look at those childhood fantasies about the invulnerable male.

But for every scene like this one, which disturbs and pushes the viewer, there is an overlong scene with J.W. Pepper hurling racial epithets and generally embarrassing the franchise, or a gangster apologizing to a cardboard cutout of Al Capone for shooting it, or a midget butler bringing, of all things, Tabasco sauce to his master. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN is scared to commit to the story, like a child who knows he's too old to order off the kid's menu, but just wants a hot dog really bad.

It is the only Bond film to ever really comment on Bond's "licence to kill" (other than, of course, LICENCE TO KILL), and the moral ambiguities inherent to such a thing. Christopher Lee's Scaramanga is a shadow of Bond, a fact Lee is only too fond to play with. There is a great dinner scene where the differences between the two men are laid out, and one feels like Bond is protesting just a tad too much. Like many of these great scenes in the film, though, it is immediately proceeded by a silly, winking scene that makes fun of it all. Lee is immediately saddled with a lengthy monologue about "solex agitators" and channeling the power of the sun in order to explode Bond's plane with a blast of solar energy. It's not enough that Scaramanga wants to kill Bond - now he's got a world domination scheme! It's ludicrous, and Lee looks like he's trying to get through it all as quickly as he can so he can get back to the duel between the two men.

But even the basic idea of the duel gets undermined by Scaramanga's ridiculous LaserQuest-y maze that the duel takes place in, replete with funhouse mirrors, a giant grizzly bear statue, and a life-size mannequin of James Bond. It's like Laser Quest with the lights on; no fun for anyone.

By the time we get to A VIEW TO A KILL, Moore's seventh and final outing as Bond, no one's even trying anymore.


Iceberg submarine with a British crest on it? Check. The title sequence now has neon in it. Ooh. Microchips are important. Hooray. Moore is so old at this point (58) that his most exciting stunts are performed by a horse. The Bond fantasy is about growing up, not growing old. There's nothing cool or exciting about 007 in this film - even the one relatively new trick in Bond's repertoire, snowboarding, is undercut by the use of The Beach Boys' "California Girls" (sadly, not a middle-finger-flipping gummie bear to be seen).

In fact, the most interesting characters in the film are the villains. Christopher Walken's Max Zorin and Grace Jones' May Day are the two most memorable antagonists in the Moore era. Walken's character is a gem, a steroid-bred lab baby, brilliant but psychotic, a KGB agent gone rogue. It plays perfectly to his unique delivery, and he seems to have great fun letting loose, killing both adversaries and allies with gleeful abandon. But it's Grace Jones who steals the show, with her lithe steroid-fuelled assassin. Her arc is a little cliché (her line after Zorin betrays her: "I thought that creep loved me!"), but her commanding presence breathes some life into an otherwise dull movie.

As good as these villains are, it all seems so paint-by-numbers at this point. The Bond character isn't really about anything in this movie. He just moves where the script tells him to go and does the things he's expected to do. Moore tries to coast by with that damn smirk, and it becomes obvious that the toothy grin is only getting toothier by the day.

But maybe when I'm 58, it'll play better to me.