Moore the Merrier

When Roger Moore learned of the April 15 passing of character actor Clifton James - best known as the blustering, bigoted Southern sheriff, J.W. Pepper, in the 007 movies "Live and Let Die" and "The Man with the Golden Gun" - he tweeted, "Terribly sad to hear Clifton James has left us. As J.W. Pepper he gave my first two Bonds a great, fun character." Not more than six weeks later, Roger Moore himself succumbed to cancer, age 89.

James Bond and mystical tarot reader Solitaire (Jane Seymour)
are a sip away from peril in "Live and Let Die."

Cast as James Bond in 1973's "Live and Let Die" at age 45, Roger Moore remains the oldest actor to portray the spy with the license to kill, disregarding 57-year-old David Niven's role as a retired James Bond in the unlicensed 1967 spoof "Casino Royale." In a period of 12 years, Moore portrayed 007 in seven films, more than any other actor. Fans of Sean Connery like to point out that he, as well, played Bond seven times, but the seventh outing, 1983's "Never Say Never Again," like the above-mentioned "Casino Royale," was a maverick project made without the sanction of Eon Productions, the company that virtually owns the James Bond franchise.

"Sean was Bond," Roger Moore said. "He created Bond.
He was a bloody good 007."

For Eon, six actors, to date, have played 007 - Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig - which inevitably leads to an ongoing debate over who is the best Bond. In a 2005 interview, Moore commented, "People ask me who the best Bond is." Slipping into a dead-on impression of Connery, he continued, "Sean, of course it's Sean...cuz he told me to say it."A few years later, in his 2012 book Bond on Bond, he noted, "I'm often asked, 'Who is the best Bond?' 'Apart from myself?' I modestly enquire. 'It has be Sean.'"

Sketched by the author himself, this is how
Ian Fleming envisioned James Bond.

According to some accounts, Ian Fleming's first choice to play James Bond in the first 007 picture, 1962's "Dr. No," was David Niven (Fleming also asked celebrated playwright-composer-director Noel Coward to portray Dr. No).

Five years after "Dr. No," David Niven starred as Sir James Bond,
trapped here in a typical pop-art setting with Miss Moneypenny's
daughter (Barbara Bouchet), in the mod parody "Casino Royale."

Depending on whom to believe, there were also stories that Christopher Lee, a step cousin of Ian Fleming's, was the writer's first choice for the role of Bond. Lee himself claimed that Fleming offered him the role of the villain in "Dr. No."

In 1974, Christopher Lee finally got the chance to play spy games
in James Bond territory as super-assassin Scaramanga
in "The Man with the Golden Gun."

Patrick McGoohan, who was then starring in the popular British spy series "Danger Man" (known in the U.S. as "Secret Agent"), allegedly turned down the role of James Bond in "Dr. No" because it conflicted with his Catholic morals. Actually, the popularity of the Bond films revived interest in "Danger Man," and after a two-year hiatus, the series came back for a four-year run before evolving more or less, into the surrealistic hybrid of spy fiction and science fiction titled "The Prisoner."

"The Prisoner" aired only 17 episodes from the fall of 1967 to the
spring of 1968, but it soon gained a loyal cult following.

Every 007 trivia buff knows that the first actor to play James Bond, predating Sean Connery by eight years, was American actor Barry Sullivan in the 1954 broadcast of a live adaptation of Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale, which was published the year before. That's right, the guy who played the unimpressionable manager of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" portrayed Bond...as an American agent...called "Jimmy."

Whether it was a testament to Stanley Kubrick's intentional direction or just a display of Nelson's non-presence as an actor, but his characterization of the monotoned, bunny rabbit-handed Ullman was the epitome of dry-toast blandness.

The 1954 "Casino Royale" aired on the TV anthology series "Climax!" as a pilot for a possible James Bond series. Venerable screen menace Peter Lorre's casting as 007 nemesis Le Chiffre was the reason Nelson took the role. In 2004, Nelson recalled, "At that time, no one had ever heard of James Bond...I was scratching my head wondering how to play it. I hadn't read the book...because it wasn't well-known." James Bond did not become a familiar figure in the U.S. until President Kennedy listed From Russia with Love as one of his ten favorite books in a March 1961 issue of Life magazine.

Incidentally, a number of Hollywood studios initially shunned the notion of making James Bond movies because the novels were "too blatantly sexual," according to the book The Essential Bond, and "too British."

Compared to Sean Connery's interpretation of James Bond as an urbane but bullying brute, Roger Moore, in the words of the Los Angeles Times' Steve Chawkins, "brought a likable, comedic dimension to the unflappable secret agent." Moore himself admitted, "I look like a comedic lover," while admitting that Connery, and more recently, Daniel Craig, "look like killers." He said, "I'm not the cold-blooded killer type, which is why I play it mostly for laughs."

Roger Moore said that Sean Connery "really was sort of not that
enamored of being confused with James Bond all the time...
I personally don't give a damn. I just want to be remembered
as somebody who paid his debts."

A.O. Scott, film critic for The New York Times, observed, "Mr. Connery brought a rough sexual swagger to Ian Fleming's fantasy of British masculine competence. Later, Daniel Craig would bring pouty, wounded prettiness." Scott noted that Roger Moore singularly "knew exactly how silly these endeavors were, but he was committed to them all the same." Scott wrote, "Mr. Moore's blithe efficiency has always struck me as a truer expression of the Bond ideal. He was, by his own admission, an actor of modest gifts, which made him perfect for the role."

Roger Moore liked to joke, "I only had three expressions as Bond. Right eyebrow raised, left eyebrow raised, and eyebrows crossed when grabbed by Jaws."

"My James Bond," A.O. Scott declared, "is a cartoon hero in evening wear, a man whose mission is to embody and, therefore, to transcend - a secondhand, second-rate age, to be cool and clever in a world determined to be as lame and dumb as possible. Nobody did that better than Roger Moore."

By the mid-1980s, Moore figured the time was nigh to hang up his shoulder holster and turn in his license to kill. "I'm a realist," he said. According to the actor, after his sixth Bond picture, "Octopussy," "I resigned myself to thoughts of retirement. There are only so many stunts an aging actor can tackle, and only so many young girls he can kiss without looking like a perverted grandfather." In a 2005 interview, he admitted it was also "a question of finding villains old enough to look as if they could be knocked down by me."

In 1981's "For Your Eyes Only," James Bond has to fight off the
advances of a gushing skating prodigy named Bibi Dahl, played
by 23-year-old skater-turned-actress Lynn-Holly Johnson,
who was 31 years younger than Roger Moore.

When he starred in his last 007 adventure, 1985's "A View to a Kill" (pictured below), Roger Moore was 58, while "Bond Girl" Tanya Roberts (best known as a "Charlie's Angel" for all of 16 episodes) was 30. For those without a calculator, that's a difference of 28 years.

On the other hand, even after he closeted his 007 toupee, Roger Moore's predecessor, Sean Connery, continued pursuing ephemeral "love in the afternoon" onscreen: in 1992's "Medicine Man" (Connery 62, Lorraine Bracco, 38 = 24 years difference); in 1995's "First Knight" (Connery, 65, Julia Ormond, 30 = 35 years difference); in 1999's "Entrapment" (Connery, 69, Catherine Zeta-Jones, 30 = 39 years difference). When the salt-and-pepper-chest-haired Connery threw on a rug for the unofficial 1983 reboot of "Thunderball" titled "Never Say Never Again," fetching costar Kim Basinger was 23 years his junior.

Offscreen, Roger Moore apparently exhibited markedly non-Bond qualities. He loathed firearms and was afraid of heights. As for the martinis - shaken, not stirred - when he could drink (diabetes brought an end to his imbibing), he preferred Tanqueray gin over the fictional 007's vodka martinis.

Between 1979's "Moonraker" and 1981's "For Your Eyes Only," Roger Moore good-naturedly parodied his Bond persona in a pair of motion pictures. "I always saw the part as inherently comical," he remarked in one of his last interviews. "How could I possibly be a spy when everybody knew who I was, even down to my drink of choice?"


"...Acting like he was some goy movie star named Roger Moore" - Mrs. Goldfarb

In 1981's "The Cannonball Run," Roger Moore played Seymour Goldfarb Jr., a Jewish heir to a girdle manufacturing fortune who's convinced he is really James Bond star Roger Moore. The all-star comedy was based on the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an unsanctioned cross-country car race from New York City to Redondo Beach, California, that took place five times in the 1970s. The race was conceived by auto racer Brock Yates and Car and Driver magazine editor Steve Smith as a protest to the strict enforcement of the post-oil crisis speed limit of 55 mph.

Brock Yates poses with racers in the first Cannonball Run.

The illegal race had already inspired a pair of motion pictures in 1976: "Cannonball," directed by Paul Bartel (best known for writing, directing, and starring in the dark comedy "Eating Raoul"), and featuring David Carradine, with cameos by filmmakers Roger Corman, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, and Sylvester Stallone as a Mafioso; and "The Gumball Rally," directed by former stuntman Chuck Bail and starring Michael Sarrazin and Raúl Juliá.

For one of the cross-country races, Brock Yates and stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham souped up an ambulance to hold 90 gallons of gas and top 145 mph, only to have the transmission blow out in Palm Springs, California. Needham kept the ambulance in storage until he dusted it off for "The Cannonball Run," which he directed based on a screenplay by Brock Yates.

This was pretty much Hal Needham's approach to directing films,
from "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Smokey and the Bandit II" to
"Hooper" and "Stroker Ace" to "The Cannonball Run" and
"Cannonball Run II." Needham received an Honorary Academy
Award, citing him as "an innovator, mentor and master technician
who elevated his craft to an art and made the impossible look easy,"
ten months before his death from cancer in October of 2013, age 82.

Needham, a cofounder of Stunts Unlimited (an elite, by-invitation-only cadre of second unit directors, stunt coordinators, and stunt performers), struck gold when he hooked up with Burt Reynolds for his directing debut, 1977's "Smokey and the Bandit." Budgeted at $4.3 million, the picture's worldwide gross was estimated at over $300 million. It was the sixth highest grossing film of 1981.

The ambulance Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise
drive in the movie is the same one Hal Needham and
Brock Yates raced in the real Cannonball Run.

After starring in "Hooper" and "Smokey and the Bandit II" for director Needham, Burt Reynolds, in the words of critic Roger Ebert, "sleepwalks his way through a role he's played several times before but never so indifferently" in "The Cannonball Run." Show business bible Variety commented that the film was "populated by what could be called Burt and Hal's Rat Pack," including Dom DeLuise, Farrah Fawcett, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Jack Elam, Adrienne Barbeau, Terry Bradshaw, Jackie Chan, Bert Convy, Jamie Farr, Peter Fonda, Mel Tillis, and Valerie Perrine. "Just look at the cast," Ebert was prompted to remark, "it's like Hollywood Squares on Wheels."

Roger Moore had a field day spoofing his James Bond persona. He even drove a 1964 Aston Martin DB5, the same model driven by Sean Connery's 007 in "Goldfinger," which reappeared, albeit somewhat worse for the wear, in "Thunderball." (Moore's Bond never drove the Aston Martin onscreen.)

"Roger Moore" - er, Seymour Goldfarb threatens his mother, played
by the marvelous veteran Yiddish actress Molly Picon. "I warned
you not to interfere in my affairs...I'm terribly sorry, Mother, but you
know too much...Zei gezunt, Mama!"

The movie had fun with spy gadgets on the car which always seemed to malfunction in one way or another. Every time the film cut to Moore, he was accompanied in the front seat by a different "Bond Girl," all of them dubbed by June Foray, the extraordinary voice artist known for Jay Ward's Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Natasha Fatale, as well as Warner Bros.' Granny (in the Tweety and Sylvester cartoon) and Witch Hazel. (Legendary animation director Chuck Jones once said of Foray, who turns 100 this September, "June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc, Mel Blanc was the male June Foray.")


"I like cats, and I don't like people who don't." - Rufus Excalibur ffolkes

Moore's title character in 1980's "ffolkes," Rufus Excalibur ffolkes ("ffolkes" is the name of a line of baronets in Great Britain and is intentionally spelled with two lowercase "f's"), is a freelance underwater counter-terrorism consultant and the antithesis of James Bond. Moore's Bond was a clean-shaven, suave, wisecracking womanizer, while his ffolkes is a scraggly-bearded, humorless, curmudgeonly misogynist. When an associate incredulously says, "You really don't like women, do you?" ffolkes drily intones, "Both my parents died tragically in childbirth," adding that he and his five older sisters were raised by a maiden aunt. "Until the age of ten, I was forced to wear my sisters' hand-me-downs. And then when I married, I discovered to my horror that my wife had five sisters, all unmarried and all expecting my support."

Years before Michael Parks (pictured above, with Anthony
Perkins) became a familiar face in the cinema of Quentin
Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (most notably as the re-
curring character Earl McGraw), he worked with Andrew
V. McLaglen on three feature films and two made-for-TV
movies. Parks passed away in early May 2017, age 77.

When coldly efficient villain Anthony Perkins and gay partner Michael Parks, along with a band of terrorists, hijack a supply ship named Esther, headed to the North Sea oil production platform known as Jennifer, plant explosives on the drilling rig dubbed Ruth, and demand a ransom of 25 million British pounds (roughly over 44 million U.S. dollars), the British government and Lloyd's of London call on ffolkes and his elite team of precision commandos.

ffolkes: "Just on the off-chance...I've made a will.
I've left everything to my cats."

The venerable James Mason, David Hedison (best known as the costar of the 1960s series "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" who went on to play 007's CIA ally Felix Leiter in "Live and Let Die" and "Licence to Kill," opposite Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton, respectively), and singer-turned-actor Jeremy Clyde (half of the British Invasion duo Chad & Jeremy, whose biggest American hit was 1964's "A Summer Song") all provide proficient support in a crackerjack suspense picture that was released in the United Kingdom with the soporific title "North Sea Hijack" but was alternately titled "Assault Force" and " Esther, Ruth and Jennifer." Roger Moore quipped, "The film's had so many title changes I've lost count. But everyone seems to like the character I play."

Whatever the title, the film certainly did not deserve the ill-conceived Bondian comparison depicted in promotional posters, as pictured here.

Roger Moore once said he preferred "ffolkes"
over his James Bond films.

The Scottish fortress of solitude for the eccentric, reclusive ffolkes was actually the 16th-century Dunguaire Castle in County Galway, Ireland. County Galway held a special corner in the heart of the director of "ffolkes," Andrew V. McLaglen, since the county was where he cut his teeth in show business as a second assistant director on filmmaker John Ford's beloved screen classic "The Quiet Man," starring John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, and Andrew's pop, Victor McLaglen. Andrew later recalled, "I was the working-est goddamn assistant director."


"Without something, there is no nothing." - The Chief, "Spice World"

Roger Moore had one more card up his sleeve to play in the good-humored game of spoofing the James Bond character. At the age of 70, he portrayed an eccentric music executive whose label the Spice Girls record for in the 1997 film "Spice World." For a brief span of time in the late 1990s, the English pop quintet proved to be a global phenomenon, becoming the biggest-selling female group of all time and the biggest British pop sensation since the frenzy of Beatlemania.

 It's no secret that the filmmakers wanted "Spice World" to be a "girl power" version of The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night," depicting the frenetic activities and misadventures leading up to the fivesome's major concert at London's Albert Hall. Some posters for "Spice World" even ripped off the tagline: "You say you want a revolution?"

Director Bob Spiers ("Fawlty Towers," "Absolutely Fabulous") was fortunate enough to work with an impressive ensemble cast that included Richard E. Grant (Dr. Zander Rice in "Logan"), Australian comedian Barry Humphries (best known as Dame Edna Everage), Richard O'Brien (the creator of "The Rocky Horror Show" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"), Tony Award-winning Alan Cumming, George Wendt of "Cheers," Mark McKinney from "The Kids in the Hall," and Meat Loaf, with cameos by Elton John, Bob Geldof, Elvis Costello, and Bob Hoskins as themselves.

Nevertheless, Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson included "Spice World" as one of the 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made, and the 1999 Razzie Award for Worst Actress was shared by all five Spice Girls: Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Mel C, Geri Halliwell, and Victoria Beckham. Including the movie on his "Most Hated" list, Roger Ebert noted that the girls are "so detached they can't even successfully lip-synch their own songs."

Roger Moore was nominated for a Razzie as Worst Supporting Actor for his role as "The Chief," a recluse modeled after - of all characters - the cinematic portrayal of 007's archenemy, supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, most recognizable as a cryptic, faceless figure in a mandarin-collared jacket, stroking a purring white Persian cat. The script for "Spice World" alternately gave The Chief such lap pets as a cat, a lop-eared bunny, and a piglet.

"When the rabbit of chaos is pursued by the ferret of disorder through
the fields of anarchy, it is time to hang up your pants on the hook of
darkness. Whether they're clean or not."

Roger Moore never shared a single scene with any of the Spice Girls, nor had he even heard of them before the production. He filmed all his scenes in one day. Richard E. Grant was gracious enough to show up and feed his lines to Moore in person for their telephone conversations, during which The Chief would serve up such puzzling platitudes as, "The headless chicken can only know where he has been, he can not see where he is going." The screenwriters even dished out a reheated Bond gag when Moore was rattling a martini in a stainless steel shake as he prattled on the phone, "There's no reason for any stirring."

In the end, Roger Moore considered himself the fourth best Bond, after Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, and George Lazenby (whose single outing as 007, 1969's "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," is considered by many fans to be the best James Bond picture).

"I spent my life playing heroes because I looked like one," Moore once observed. "Practically everything I've been offered didn't require much beyond looking like me. I would have loved to have played a real baddie."


Epilogue (Spoiler Alert!)

The 1980 film "ffolkes" ends with a ceremony at the surly antihero's castle. When Madame Prime Minister says, "I've heard you don't approve of medals and other awards," he snarls, "Lot of nonsense." To his surprise - and, for the first time in the story, his pleasure - he is presented with three white kittens, dubbed Esther, Jennifer, and Ruth (after the names of the supply ship, drill rig, and oil drill).

With genuine warmth and humility, ffolkes smiles and quiety admits, "Very thoughtful. Much appreciated." Our sentiments exactly, Mr. Moore. Much appreciated.