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Geoffrey Holder and Jane Seymour in Live and Let Die. The film is littered with pimp mobiles, outrageous dress in the blaxploitation tradition and background music that could have been written by Curtis Mayfield, the music writer for Super Fly. His remarks are also a bit hard to swallow considering the films blatant appropriation of blaxploitation tropes.

Saltzman makes the case that Live and Let Die has nothing to do with blaxploitation but at the same time implies that it is a humorous version of the blaxploitation formula. We are doing it more tongue-in-cheek, with more humor.

We are not making a picture about blacks per se. With the new Bond we are lightening the entire thing. This was almost two years before the rash of black pictures started.We began active pre-production seventeen months ago.If I had known two years ago that there were going to be all these black pictures, we would have done Man With the Golden Gun instead of Live and Let Die, because I don't want to be tarred and feathered by that racist syndrome. Live and Let Die, we decided, would be our next picture after Diamonds Are Forever. John Bryson quoted Harry Saltzman, the producer of the Bond films, as saying the similarities were not premeditated. The question arises, 'Was Live and Let Die produced in response to blaxploitation?' This question cannot be simply answered. However, while Super Fly glorified the drug pusher, Live and Let Die has painted that same figure as evil. Live and Let Die has most of its action centered in the urban domain of blaxploitation, Harlem and New Orleans. Bond sleeps with the black CIA agent, Rosie, who turns out to be working for Kananga, therefore equating a presumably good black character with villainy. Blaxploitation often had its black characters sleep with white women. Live and Let Die contains many elements of blaxploitation which have been reversed to accommodate its white protagonist. Articles written in popular periodicals around the release of Live and Let Die have such titles as, 'The New Bond: Shaft in Reverse' and 'In Live and Let Die, The Bad Guys Are Black.' Live and Let Die was released during the height of the blaxploitation boom and the influence of those films is quite evident. This is an obvious reversal of the black/white dichotomy of blaxploitation. The film is drawn along racial lines that place blackness as the primary agent of evil and whiteness as responsible for putting things back in order. The film departs from most Bond plots by placing its emphasis on drugs (a blaxploitation staple), and not a plan to disrupt world power structures.

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After a series of chases, Bond kills Kananga and ends his plans to consolidate all heroin distribution in the United States. Bond travels to San Monique, then to New Orleans, where he uncovers Kananga's heroin operation. Big, a Harlem drug lord who turns out to be Kananga in disguise. Kananga (Yaphet Kotto 4), the prime minister of the mythical Caribbean island of San Monique.Д«ond is quickly targeted by black thugs who are tipped off by his arrival from Solitaire, Kananga's white tarot card reading slave played by Jane Seymour. The film finds Bond traveling to the United States to investigate missing agents who were involved in the surveyance of Dr. L ive and Let Die (1973) was the eighth James Bond film and the first to star Roger Moore in the title role.

Live and Let Die: Bring on the Black Guys