Action heroes aren’t prized for suavity much these days, or for knowing how to carry off a double-breasted pinstripe Savile Row suit, or how to raise a single eyebrow, or how to pose with a Walther PPK – under the chin in repose, or drawn dramatically, as if about to shoot the photographer, with a facial expression of satirically calm disapproval. Even the Action Movie 101 skill of finishing a deafeningly loud and chaotic scene with a single droll wisecrack is not executed with much of the élan of old. But Roger Moore’s James Bond was a master of all this; over seven Bond movies from 1973 to 1985, he brought some serious aplomb. No-one delivered the aplomb like Roger Moore. He was the secret agent with the twinkle of humour in his eye, and who put wit into his elegant, educated tones, which deepened and decelerated into a sensual purr as his tenure went on.For his final Bond, A View to a Kill in 1985, he was 58, and was humorously aware that he was a mature 007. So the emphasis had to be a little more on comedy and absurdity, and he was doing the job when 007 was a little out of style and it was considered appropriate to send him up a tiny bit.
Roger Moore got huge laughs on chat shows for decades after he stepped down, with his wry bemusement at all the silly things he was asked to do. In the Bangkok boat chase scene in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), he heartlessly pushes a child trinket-seller off his boat – a child who had just helped him get away from the bad guys. As Moore loved to say: as the Unicef goodwill ambassador, and an activist for stopping children getting exploited in developing countries – a job to which he was genuinely committed, and was much respected – this was hardly an appropriate thing for him to be seen doing.
He was loved by journalists for his easygoing openness, often corresponding generously with profile-writers. During the launch of his first 007 movie Live and Let Die, he published a cheerfully indiscreet account of the filming, entitled Roger Moore’s James Bond Diary, regaling the reader with all his boyish escapades, and gossip about the big-spending, big-lunching producer Cubby Broccoli. Later he published his autobiography, My Word Is My Bond, in which his self-deprecating charm shone through.
As for Roger Moore’s acting skills, he was never more charming than when he modestly said that these were nothing to write home about. And his milieu was not the National Theatre or the Old Vic: more Langan’s restaurant in London’s West End, dining with pals like Sean Connery and Michael Caine, wreathed in politically incorrect cigar smoke.
But his performance in what I think is his best film, Basil Dearden’s terrific 1970 doppelganger thriller The Man Who Haunted Himself, showed the world that he was actually a skilful and effective actor with an instinctive feel for how to play to the camera and how to undersell a line. This is a brilliant Jekyll and Hyde nightmare, and Moore cleverly conveys the creeping terror of a respectable professional man who is astonished to find that he has an exact double who is going to destroy his life.
Moore started his career on television, starring first in Ivanhoe, a high-minded children’s TV adaptation of the Walter Scott novel; and then, improbably enough, in a couple of US western series in the era when the Old West ruled television dramas. He was in The Alaskans and then Maverick, opposite James Garner. But it was in The Saint that Moore really established himself: as Simon Templar, the stylish man-about-town Brit, a Raffles gentleman thief and adorable rascal who only fleeced the bad guys, although in the first series his character tended to affect an American accent, apparently to help the show play in the US.
The programme’s running motif, in which the halo would appear above Simon Templar’s head and Moore gave an outrageous butter-wouldn’t-melt smirk, established his knack for posing and pouting in a cheeky way, a mannerism learned from his teenage days, earning an occasional crust as a model.
Moore was always being rumoured for the role of Bond, but he appeared to have lost the moment when he was cast in the 70s buddy action-comedy TV series The Persuaders with Tony Curtis. (Persuading? Who were they persuading? Nobody knew or cared.) It was at this moment that nation fell in love with Roger Moore – certainly I did, as a wide-eyed kid – because of the outrageous, yet brilliant split-screen opening title sequence that always began the show, with John Barry’s great music, showing the parallel lives of Moore’s character Lord Brett Sinclair (the placing of the title presumably making him specifically the son of an earl or duke) going through Harrow, Oxford and the Guards, while Tony Curtis’s Danny Wilde came up the hard way in the mean streets of New York, making his cash in oil. The sequence ended by demonstrating their outrageous sexism, ogling a young woman in a bikini who walked between them – tacky and obnoxious behaviour, of course, yet hardly to be taken seriously.
So by the time Moore took on the mantle of Bond his persona already appeared to have been pre-satirised with two quasi-Bond characters. Furthermore, he had the awful job of following Connery in the role, and knew that the only way to play it was to go the other way, to bring out the humour, not to try to be the straight-faced tough guy, and certainly not the borderline psychopath that Ian Fleming’s books seemed occasionally to be hinting at.
But Moore stayed the course, and his 007 movies did perfectly respectably at the box office; and in commercial terms, his Bond tenure was just as much of a golden age as that which had gone before. And when the 90s came, and Mike Myers’s comedy international spy Austin Powers became a smash hit, his style of Bond became increasingly adored: raffish, deadpan, devil-may-care. The Connery Bond was feared and admired, and the same went for the Brosnan Bond or the Craig Bond. But the Roger Moore Bond was loved. And Sir Roger Moore was loved too. It is desperately sad to see him go.
