History Film / LiveAndLetDie

* AmusingInjuries: Bond pops a compressed air pellet into [[spoiler:Kananga]]'s mouth with alarming and jarring effects: he literally ''swells up like a balloon'' and hovers up into the air, where he continues to expand until he explodes ''with no gore whatsoever''. Such a sudden, cartoonish moment in a movie that has so far been at least vaguely grounded in the laws of physics was a bit hard to stomach for most. It's no surprise that this was Roger Moore's first Bond movie, signifying the beginning of a sillier, more outlandish Bond than before.

** The last we see of TeeHee is Bond throwing him out the window of a train and his artificial arm being rippped off. We don't know if he's injured/killed by the fall or escapes.

** Bond and ''Film/{{Coffy}}'' {{Expy}} Rose Carver pretend to be husband and wife on vacation. [[spoiler:Turns out she's TheMole]].

* CoolGuns: Bond uses a Smith and Wesson Model 29 as part of rescuing Solitaire and his confrontation with Baron Samedi.

* NewhartPhoneCall: Felix Leiter with Mr. Bleeker after James wrecks his airplane and terrorizes his student.

'''Mr. Big:''' Names is for tombstones, baby! Y'all take this honky outside and waste him now!

* ConspicuouslyPublicAssassination: It would seem that every black person in UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, [[TheBigEasy New Orleans]], and the fictional San Monique works for the BigBad, or knows him enough not to be surprised when Bond's table at a restaurant is suddenly lowered into the villain's lair as the singer taunts him. Kananga is the dictator of his island, while the Fillet of Soul restaurants in New York, New Orleans and other places are a [[TotallyNotACriminalFront cover for Mr. Big's operation]], so presumably everyone there works for him or knows to keep their mouth shut. However this doesn't explain the murder of two surveillance agents (one of the [=MI6=] agents in the prologue, and later Strutter) which both take place on the street in broad daylight with a large number of witnesses -- not all of whom are in the funeral procession.

* ConspicuouslyPublicAssassination: It would seem that every black person in UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, [[TheBigEasy New Orleans]], and the fictional San Monique works for the BigBad, or knows him enough not to be surprised when Bond's table at a restaurant is suddenly lowered into the villain's lair as the singer taunts him. Kananga is the dictator of his island, while the Fillet of Soul restaurants in New York, New Orleans and other places are a [[LegitimateBusinessmensSocialClub cover for Mr. Big's operation]], so presumably everyone there works for him or knows to keep their mouth shut. However this doesn't explain the murder of the surveillance agents which both take place on the street in broad daylight, with a large number of witnesses not all of whom are in the funeral procession.

** Bond's reaction when the San Monique concierge tells him "Mrs. Bond" has already checked in would suggest that [[Film/OnHerMajestysSecretService certain events]] still strike a nerve.

** Also, as always, [=MI6=]. You just can't ever tell when your agents might find a use for a wristwatch that's also a buzzsaw ''and'' a high-powered magnet.

* DeadpanSnarker: Strutter gets a gem on Bond after observing him escape Mr. Big's clutches on his first encounter: Strutter was able to follow Bond into Harlem despite Bond's 'clever disguise' being a 'white face in Harlem'.

** Solitaire wants so to know how they're going to get out of Kananga's underground base. Bond indicates a nearby monorail. "We take the train of course." Cut to Bond and Solitaire getting on a full-sized train.
* DeusExMachina: Quite unusually, Bond's magnet watch also turns out to have a serrated edge that can cut ropes when the face is spun, which comes out of nowhere in the climax.

* DrinkBasedCharacterization: In order to establish Moore's Bond as different from Connery's, he drinks bourbon and water with no ice as opposed to vodka martini. Felix orders a couple of Sazeracs and jibes Bond for it. "Where's your sense of adventure? This is New Orleans. Relax!"

* EnigmaticMinion: Baron Samedi is perhaps the most enigmatic villain/henchman the cinematic Bond has ever faced. The character is an ambiguous one, and the audience [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane cannot tell]] if he really is the Voodoo god Baron Samedi himself, or simply a mortal who has assumed Samedi's identity and can keep up a convincing enough act to make people think he is said Voodoo god. Contributing to the mystery is the fact that Samedi seems to operate as an aide to Dr. Kananga, but is not entirely under his control.

* EvilPlan: Mr. Big wants to corner the heroin market by flooding the United States with free heroin, driving TheMafia out of the drug business and doubling the number of addicts, whom he will then sell to once the free heroin runs out.

** Earlier Quarrel Jr says they'll be back any minute as he saw Bond's wetsuit was missing, only to cut to a scene where Kananga says he knew Bond was there because his men found the wetsuit.
** While waiting for Bond to return to Quarrel jr.'s boat, Leiter comments "He must have gotten tied up somewhere", followed by a cut to Bond and Solitaire tied to a death trap.

** Inverted when Bond sleeps with inept CIA agent Rosie Carver....then pulls a gun on her, revealing he knows she's actually TheMole for BigBad Kananga. He threatens to kill her if she doesn't spill what she knows; when she says he wouldn't do that, they've just made love, he replies:

* HollywoodPoliceDrivingAcademy: Arguably turned up to eleven as several police cars are wrecked during a ''boat'' chase. Not that Mr. Big's mooks do any better--when chasing Bond who's driving a Cessna airplane around on the ground, they somehow manage to wreck their cars even though they should be able to maneuver them better than Bond's plane.

James Bond is assigned to a case involving a drug lord who leads a huge African-American crime network spanning several cities and a Caribbean island where HollywoodVoodoo is practiced. After rescuing the drug lord's tarot fortune teller from her virginity, it becomes a plot of everybody trying to kill them. It is the first film where Bond deals with both organized crime and the supernatural, and the first film since ''Film/{{Goldfinger}}'' to not involve [=SPECTRE=], as well as the first one not to have music by Music/JohnBarry. It is noteworthy in that amongst the things it did to try and distance it from the later Creator/SeanConnery films, it didn't include a scene with Q (he's mentioned though). Also includes a boat chase in Louisiana, which resulted in at least a dozen speedboats being written off when they filmed it.

** Bond and ''Film/{{Coffy}}'' {{Expy}} Rose Carver pretend to be husband and wife on vacation. [[spoiler: Turns out she's TheMole]].

* AllBalloonsHaveHelium: Bond kills Mr. Big by blowing him up with compressed air so that he floats up to the ceiling before exploding.
-->He always did have an inflated opinion of himself.
* AmusingInjuries: Bond pops a compressed air pellet into Kananga's mouth with alarming and jarring effects: he literally ''swells up like a balloon'' and hovers up into the air, where he continues to expand until he explodes ''with no gore whatsoever''. Such a sudden, cartoonish moment in a movie that has so far been at least vaguely grounded in the laws of physics was a bit hard to stomach for most. It's no surprise that this was Roger Moore's first Bond movie, signifying the beginning of a sillier, more outlandish Bond than before.

* ArtisticLicencePhysics: In the finale, Bond [[spoiler: shoves a pressured carbon dioxide capsule down Kananga's throat, leading to Kananga inflating rapidly and rising above water and to the ceiling before exploding]]. CO[[subscript:2]] is heavier than air, [[spoiler: Kananga's body should have stopped going up when it reached water surface.]]

* AwkwardSilenceEntrance: When James Bond walks into the Fillet of Soul restaurant in New York the entire crowd slowly goes completely silent. It might be because the Fillet of Soul is in Harlem and everyone in the crowd is black, while Bond is white. Or it might be because all of them [[spoiler: work for Kananga/Mr. Big and the situation is a trap]].

* BondOneLiner

* DeadpanSnarker: Strutter gets a gem on Bond after observing him escape Mr. Big’s clutches on his first encounter: Strutter was able to follow Bond into Harlem despite Bond’s ‘clever disguise’ being a ‘white face in Harlem’.

* DescriptionCut

** In the novel, Mr. Big is eaten by various forms of marine-life after his yacht explodes. In the film, he swells up and explodes after ingesting a compressed air bullet.

* FollowThatCar: {{Subverted}} when Bond gets a taxi driver to follow Mr. Big and his entourage into Harlem. As they drive along however, various people on their route warn him via radio that he's being followed. When they finally arrive and Bond enters the building, ''the taxi driver'' then uses his radio to tip off Mr. Big that Bond has arrived.

* AHandfulForAnEye

* HighHeelFaceTurn

--->'''Bond''': [[{{Jerkass}} I certainly wouldn't have killed you before.]]

* InflatingBodyGag: Kananga dies from getting inflated by the gas in the shark pellets.

* ItsAlwaysMardiGrasInNewOrleans: {{Averted}}. It's actually not Mardi Gras when Bond visits TheBigEasy. The parades of people dancing on Bourbon Street are [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_funeral funeral processions]].

* LargeHam

* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane

* MusicalNod: If you listen carefully, you’ll realize that the song being played during the funeral procession in the opening sequence is “[[Film/OnHerMajestysSecretService We Have All The Time In The World]]”

* NeverSmileAtACrocodile: Bond is trapped on a small island in the middle of a pond at a crocodile farm. [[spoiler: He manages to escape by jumping on the backs of the reptiles.]] Tee Hee points out one in particular that tore off his arm before the events of the movie.

** Tee Hee, when Bond [[spoiler: cuts the cables to his prosthetic arm, locking him in place on a window handle.]]

* PopGoesTheHuman: Bond force feeds Dr. Kananga an oxygen bullet, which causes to inflate like a balloon. He rises up like a helium balloon and pops, with nothing but clothing shreds left.

-->'''Agent''': Whose funeral is it?
-->'''Assassin''': Yours! ''(stabs agent)''

* RealityIsUnrealistic: One of the most unbelievable and cartoonish stunts, [[spoiler: Bond jumping on some crocodiles to safety after being left to die on a small island]] was actually an authentic feat by the owner of the crocodile ranch. [[spoiler: Yes, those were real crocodiles (though their feet were tied down).]]

* RuleOfDrama: Yaphet Kotto's "Mr. Big" is Blofeld in all but name, something the actor is clearly enjoying. There’s no real reason for Mr. Big to have a top-secret underground cave-system headquarters, but most Bond villains do, so why not? There’s no obligation for him to keep a shark tank in his headquarters, either. In fact, it was this movie which inspired the “Unnecessarily Slow Dipping Mechanism™!” from the first ''Film/AustinPowers'' movie.
* ScaryBlackMan:

* SexSignalsDeath: [[spoiler: Rosie Carver, who's quickly killed by a gun hidden in a scarecrow after Bond outs her as a spy. Averted with Solitaire, who survives the film]].

-->'''Kananga (calm)''': If he finds it, kill him.
-->'''Kananga (concerned)''': At any cost - ''any'' - Bond must die.

** Dr. Kananga was named after the guy who owned the crocodile farm seen in the film. [[spoiler: The feet you see running on top of the crocodiles when Bond escapes said farm? Those were Kananga's, and those were real crocodiles.]]

* TuxedoAndMartini: ''{{Downplayed}}'' as much as the producers feasibly could. As a conscious effort of distinguishing him from Creator/SeanConnery's Bond, Creator/RogerMoore's Bond goes tuxedo-free for the entire movie (the second and last instance, after ''Film/YouOnlyLiveTwice''), [[CigarChomper favours cigars]] over cigarettes, and by the third act replaces the classic Walther with a gigantic [[RevolversAreJustBetter S&W Model 29]]. The direction and set elements follow suit, with much heavier emphasis on down-and-dirty location photography (Harlem, New Orleans, etc.) than the glossy SceneryPorn and over-the-top lairs of movies past.

* WhyDontYouJustShootHim

** Likewise the "put him in an easily-escapable deathtrap and then just walk away and assume it worked" meme is exemplified when Bond is marooned on a rock in a lake full of hungry crocodiles without even a single {{mook}} left behind to watch him, though to be fair, nobody could have predicted him running across their backs to shore.

[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/live_and_let_die_poster_02.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:300:''[[Music/PaulMcCartney ♫ Why does it matter to ya\\

* WithinArmsReach: In the last scene, [[DragonTheirFeet Tee Hee attacks Bond in his train room]] and is about to kill him with his hook arm when Bond reaches into his suitcase and pulls out some tweezers, which he uses to snip the wires controlling his arm, leaving his hook stuck on a window handle, with Bond throwing him out.

* ScoobyDooHoax: As in the novel, Mr. Big uses Voodoo, as his mistress/servant Solitaire, who has "the power of the Obeah" (which supposedly lets her see the future), to maintain an iron grip over his island nation and drug empire. He even has someone pretending to be Baron Samedi on his side, plus a host of traps and tricks. Subverted in that Solitaire seems like she really does have the power to see the future, and the ending has Samedi (who was apparently killed by snakebite earlier) riding the front of a train, laughing, implying he was RealAfterAll. Most of the other stuff really is just an elaborate hoax, like scarecrows promising death to anyone who trespasses on the poppy fields (and hidden cameras and guns in case you don't take the hint).

** In her introductory scene, Solitaire reads of James Bond's arrival in the cards.

* CurseCutShort: When Adam radios the other henchmen to pursue Bond, he screams, "Now ''move'', you mother--".

* MouthingTheProfanity: When Bond's boat jumps over him, Sheriff J.W. Pepper says "What the" and mouths the word "fuck".

* AdaptationalLocationChange: In the book, Mr. Big's lair is in Jamaica. In the film, he resides on the fictional island of San Monique, which was portrayed by - Jamaica. Also, the film doesn't go to Florida, unlike the book.

* BookcasePassage: When Bond enters the Filet of Soul restaurant, he sits at a table while casing the joint, only for the wall behind him to spin around and send him right to Mr. Big's office. It's subverted later on when 007 enters another Filet of Soul location and, clearly remembering what happened last time, takes a seat as far away from the back wall as possible… only for a trap door to open beneath him.

* EnemyEatsYourLunch: In the Filet of Soul, after Bond is sent to Kananga's secret office via BookcasePassage, the waiter steals Bond's bourbon.

* InnocentFanserviceGirl: Miss Caruso in the post-credits opening. Solitaire herself.

* JustBetweenYouAndMe: Zigzagged; first Mr. Big has no interest in talking to Bond, ordering his men to take him outside and shoot him. Then when Mr. Big unmasks himself as Kananga it's played straight, with him casually revealing his plan to flood the country with free heroin. Then at the climax of the movie Kananga casually shows off his underground base to Bond, filling him in on the technical details of how he intends to smuggle the heroin into the United States.

* MilkmanConspiracy: The Fillet of Soul Jazz Bars all seem to have secret lairs behind the booths or underground. They are part of a massive heroin ring run by drug baron Mr. Big for Caribbean dictator Dr. Kananga (who are actually the same person), through which is employed nearly every black person everywhere.

* ParanormalEpisode: Even Bond had a run of this here, where he faces off with a henchmen claimed to be Baron Samedi. He's seemingly killed, but shown alive at the end of the film, hinting he [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane may have been]] the genuine article.

** Solitaire looks at Bond's future and sees Death. [[spoiler:Kananga isn't happy when Rosie Carver dies instead, so Solitaire claims it must have been her death she foresaw.]]

** Bond is smoking a cigar while he's shaving, when a villain lets a venomous snake into the bathroom. Bond notices it, and ever resourceful, kills it by using the cigarette and an aerosol can of aftershave to fashion a makeshift flamethrower and spraying it at the reptile.

* GilliganCut: While waiting for Bond to return to Quarrel jr.'s boat, Leiter comments "He must have gotten tied up somewhere", followed by a cut to Bond and Solitaire tied to a death trap. Earlier Quarrel Jr says they'll be back any minute as he saw Bond's wetsuit was missing, only to cut to a scene where Kananga says he knew Bond was there because his men found the wetsuit.

* HookHand: Tee-Hee has a hook hand, but for the [[ArtificialLimbs larger part of his lower arm]]. He says he lost it to a crocodile at Kananga's croc farm (the croc is still alive, so clearly it was NothingPersonal).