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When three secret agents are killed on the same day, James Bond is extracted by "M" and Miss Moneypenny from the arms of his latest conquest and packed off on the trail of Mr. Big, black master criminal of the New York underworld. Finding his way to the "Fillet of Soul", a Harlem nightclub, Bond has an unpleasant encounter with Mr. Big and a more intriguing one with Solitaire, the beautiful fortune-teller whose readings of the Tarot cards determine the organisation's course of action. Discouraged from further research by two thugs ordered to kill him, Bond transfers his investigation to the Caribbean island of San Monique, where the local CIA agent Rosie Carver shows her eagerness to co-operate. She arranges to show Bond the way to the castle of Dr. Kananga, known to be linked with Mr. Big; but when Bond realises that she is a double agent luring him into a trap, she is immediately shot down. Bond makes his own way to Kananga's lair and finds Solitaire in residence; stacking the Tarot cards against her, he ruins her powers of prescience, and next morning the pair make their escape from the island by double-decker bus. They are eventually recaptured in New Orleans by Mr. Big, who removes his face to reveal the features of Kananga. Furious at the loss of Solitaire's powers, he sentences her to be sacrificed at a voodoo snake ceremony in San Monique and Bond to be fed to the crocodiles by his henchman Tee Hee. Left conveniently unattended, Bond escapes by power-boat (hotly pursued through the waterways by Tee Hee's men and by the local Sheriff, Pepper) to San Monique, arriving in time to cut Solitaire loose from the voodoo ceremony but also to fall once again into Kananga's hands. As the criminal prepares to dump them both into his private shark pool, Bond contrives to blow Kananga to pieces and, together with Solitaire, he leaves to catch a train. Before they can settle down for the night, however, Tee Hee creates an unwelcome disturbance and has to be defenestrated. . .

Whenever jungle drums begin to pound and witch doctors menace white girls at the stake, the days of the old Saturday matinee serials come to mind. The eighth Bond film, despite its costing nearly £3 million, is packed with cheap melodramatic perils of the kind that were being evaded by Pearl White and Helen Holmes (with far less concern and complication) over fifty years ago: snakes in the bathroom, voodoo scarecrows in the bushes, poisoned darts, the crocodile compound and, that old favourite, the shark pool. In this atmosphere, the mechanical miracles which we have come to expect from 007 (a less enterprising collection than usual) seem largely irrelevant — and mostly trivial in their application. The emphasis is far more upon the equally time-honoured attraction of the chase, here given a whole series of variations which serve to ginger up what would otherwise be a tediously inactive narrative: the double-decker bus and the low bridge; the airport pursuit in which cars and planes are tangled into expensive ruin; the headlong power-boat chase through the Louisiana bayous in which Bond speeds his machine not just across water but through gardens and over cars as well. Though crisply filmed and edited, these sequences have a certain flavour of French Connection pot-boiling about them; and when it comes to the verbal exchanges, Bond has very clearly lost the spontaneous combustion of his early cinema years. The opening exchanges with Bernard Lee are embarrassingly ponderous, and the expectedly cynical laugh-lines so predictable that one winces as Roger Moore, with much nudging and winking, puts them across. Sean Connery could undoubtedly have made more of a meal out of "we'll soon lick you into shape", addressed to an apparently reluctant bedfellow (Roger Moore's delivery suggests schoolboy ignorance rather than proven ability); but even Connery would have had trouble with the final punch-line. Moore makes a very British 007, somewhere between Patrick MacNee and Fleming's original concept, but the style only works occasionally, as with his "Same time tomorrow, Mrs. Bell?" to the speechless flying pupil in the private plane he has just reduced to matchwood. Otherwise he develops his role charmlessly, from a clownish fall-guy in the first half to a caddish automaton in the second, as insipid and unmemorable as his female sparring-partners (a poorly upholstered collection by comparison with earlier Bond conquests). Somewhere at the back of the script is an ingenious idea about fates and furies, the Tarot cards being intended to guide Bond's actions more closely than he'd care to admit; while the curious encounters with Baron Samedi suggest a chunk of plot that nobody finally cared to face up to. But while we don't expect the 007 formula to be particularly complex or realistic, it's sad to find that the flavour has been so expensively diluted. Like the musical score for the film (honourably excepting the McCartney contribution), the same old notes are still being struck, but new hands seem to have mangled the life out of them.

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