{"id":1931,"date":"2017-05-23T18:57:13","date_gmt":"2017-05-23T18:57:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=1931"},"modified":"2017-05-23T19:31:28","modified_gmt":"2017-05-23T19:31:28","slug":"roger-moore-1927-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=1931","title":{"rendered":"Roger Moore 1927-2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roger Moore \u2013 sorry, Sir<\/em> Roger Moore \u2013 seemed to the end of his life to have been bemused at best by his happy, successful life. That Moore seemed to never take himself too seriously may in part account for why so many people believe him to have been the very best of the actors who played James Bond on-screen. I withhold such superlatives, but I understand where they come from: generations who never felt the frisson of seeing Sean Connery embody so impeccably the compound of cruelty, composure and wry sang-froid we who\u2019d read the Ian Fleming novels had imagined 007 to be.<\/p>\n

Moore also wore the tuxedo-and-Walther-PPK longer than any of the others who occupied the persona. (Seven movies in all.) So he was the Bond that more people grew up with and, because he was altogether so companionable and charming, grew to adore. Still, Connery remains the preference of Fleming purists and card-carrying boomers (like me).<\/p>\n

But though I\u2019m not willing to call Moore the best Bond, I believe he may be the most underrated, which is a far more competitive field when you consider such worthy possibilities as the perpetually-underrated-in-everything-he-does Pierce Brosnan and even George Lazenby, whose single post-Connery shot in 1969\u2019s On Her Majesty\u2019s Secret Service,<\/em> doesn\u2019t look nearly as bad now as many insisted on believing at the time. Even Lazenby\u2019s co-star Diana Rigg, whose attitude towards Lazenby during filming was, let\u2019s say, less than collegial, now says stuff like \u201cPoor George\u201d when looking back on the experience.<\/p>\n

As always, I digress from my main point here \u2013 which is that history has already begun to consider Moore\u2019s approach to Bond\u2019s character \u2013 thicker on the wry, lighter on the hot stuff \u2013 as serving its own array of subtle graces. While he never took himself (or Bond) all that seriously, he brought just enough conviction to draw his audiences into buying even the most outlandish conceits of 1977\u2019s The Spy Who Loved Me<\/em>, 1981\u2019s For Your Eyes Only<\/em>, 1983\u2019s Octopussy<\/em> and all the others.<\/p>\n

He was also intelligent enough to recognize early in the game just how absurd it was to sell the idea of someone as altogether conspicuous as James Bond to be a spy. It was almost as though Moore\u2019s Bond resented throughout his tenure how the eponymous villain of Doctor No<\/em> described Connery\u2019s Bond as being little more than a \u201cstupid policeman.\u201d I may be a bloody policeman<\/em>, Moore\u2019s 007 seemed to say in all his turns at bat. But I\u2019m not bloody stupid!<\/em> And he wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what\u2019s odd, though: Sir Roger, though certainly not carrying Richard Burton\u2019s gravitas or Michael Caine\u2019s range in his quiver, had the stuff in him to be even spikier in the Bond role than he was. One example will do: Ffolkes<\/em>, a 1979 action thriller in which Moore, sporting a \u201cschweppervescent\u201d beard and a chesty, blustery countenance, played a free-lance anti-terrorism expert recruited to dislodge a North Sea oil rig and its inhabitants from the clutches of mercenary kidnappers led by Anthony Perkins and (the also-recently-deceased) Michael Parks. Moore nailed down this cat-fancying grouch with no love for women or any other human being with such confidence that one wonders why he had few other opportunities to show his quirky side, unless you want to count the faultlessly suave self-parodying turn in 1984\u2019s Cannonball Run II<\/em> where he plays a deluded billionaire named (yeah I know) Seymour, who undergoes plastic surgery to make himself look like Roger Moore.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also wondered whether Moore\u2019s Bond gig, whatever its assets to both him and the franchise, robbed the world of a great romantic comedy star (Cary Grant on pot, Hugh Grant on codeine). But all that would assume that the romantic comedy genre during Moore\u2019s peak years as Bond would have been worthy of his time and energy. And anyway, it\u2019s not as though the Bonds didn\u2019t give Moore a chance to show some Cary Grant chops; a friend reminded me today of the scene in 1974\u2019s The Man With the Golden Gun<\/em> when he\u2019s trying to keep Maud Adams from discovering Britt Eckland in the closet. His years in the TV vineyards as Simon Templar and \u201cCousin Beau\u201d Maverick also left him with a faultless knack for the risqu\u00e9 one-liner. (From For Your Eyes Only<\/em>: \u201cYou get your clothes on and I\u2019ll buy you an ice cream,\u201d he informs someone too young to be in his bed.)<\/p>\n

Now not even the action thrillers bother trying to be as witty as romantic comedies used to be. And romantic comedies are even less like what they<\/em> used to be. It\u2019s all about Getting Even and Getting Over — and you really need to wonder how things got to be the way they are now? If you weren\u2019t bummed by Roger Moore\u2019s passing before, think of where he\u2019d fit in movies now. And keep on thinking until your head starts to hurt — along with your heart.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Roger<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Moore \u2013 sorry, Sir Roger Moore \u2013 seemed to the end of his life to have been bemused at best by his happy, successful life. That Moore seemed to never take himself too seriously may in part account for why so many people believe him to have been the very best of the actors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[890,891,887,701,702,889,888,885,886],"class_list":["post-1931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-britt-eckland","tag-cary-grant","tag-george-lazenby","tag-ian-fleming","tag-james-bond","tag-maud-adams","tag-pierce-brosnan","tag-roger-moore","tag-sean-connery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1931"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1940,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931\/revisions\/1940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}