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Hall of Fame

MOORE, Roger

mooreWe’ll pause for thirty seconds here to get the words ‘eyebrow’ and ‘creaky’ out of the way. Say what you like about his acting style (and at his worst it is strongly reminiscent of someone hazily trying to construct an alibi for themselves from badly-mimed hints given by someone at the far end of the room), but it’s hardly hindered the career of the superannuated towel thief. And he’s a tad sharper in the ‘laughing at himself’ stakes than Old Sean, too.

FINEST HOUR: Is it The Man Who Haunted Himself? We couldn’t possibly comment…

15 Comments

15 Comments

  1. Richard16378

    July 31, 2011 at 11:15 pm

    That scene in The Wild Geese where he makes a drug dealer sample his own wares is very far from his 007 persona.

  2. George White

    April 24, 2014 at 9:57 am

    Oh yes, Alan Ladd’s kid David, where he has to chow down on piles and piles of snowy white coke, to the sound of bad disco. Ah, when British action films genuinely were good, and Danny Dyer was still pissing in nappies…

  3. Adrian

    April 24, 2014 at 2:56 pm

    Also single handedly responsible for the 70s fashion for safari suits..

  4. Glenn A

    March 9, 2015 at 8:53 pm

    Or North Sea Hijack, an action film where he plays some kind of retired soldier who has a private army and likes cats and drinking whisky from the bottle. Not up there with Sean’s best efforts, but between Bonds, Roger made some reasonable fikms

  5. Glenn Aylett

    January 22, 2022 at 3:44 pm

    Crossplot is another pre Bond Roger film that is worth a look, even if it’s fallen off the radar. It’s rather like an extended episode of The Saint, where Rog investigates a shadowy organisation trying to blow up The Trooping Of The Colour, gets stoned with a group of hippies, disrupts a wedding and has a car chase in a Mini Cooper.

  6. THX 1139

    January 22, 2022 at 4:04 pm

    Don’t forget Shout at the Devil, where behind the scenes his co-star Lee Marvin was obsessed with getting into a drunken brawl with him. Until Sir Roger obliged, and Mr Marvin was knocked into next week, much to his surprise.

  7. Glenn Aylett

    January 22, 2022 at 7:12 pm

    @ THX 1139, another Rog African based adventure, Gold, based around dodgy dealings in the gold mining industry and mostly filmed in South Africa. A good film that seems to have fallen off the radar and released shortly after Live and Let Die. Shout At The Devil is good, too, being about deteriorating relations between British and German colonists in Africa just before the First World War that turns into armed conflict. Again this was done between Bonds, like The Wild Geese and Gold, and showed Roger was quite talented.

  8. Sidney Balmoral James

    January 22, 2022 at 9:39 pm

    Roger unfortunately didn’t really make films of quality outside of the Bonds – That Lucky Touch, Sunday Lovers, The Naked Face, Escape to Athena, Street People and so on and so forth, all a bit crappy to put it mildly – and there were some tantalising near misses – Day of the Jackal, A Bridge Too Far etc.

  9. THX 1139

    January 22, 2022 at 11:58 pm

    The Naked Face may be the most boring thriller ever made, and putting the word “naked” in the title wouldn’t fool anyone (I hope).

    Sir Roger’s most misbegotten, strictly for the money enterprise must be 1990’s Fire, Ice and Dynamite, which is so stuffed with product placement you hardly register that between the skiing stunts, the stars include Isaac Hayes, Niki Lauda, Marjoe Gortner, singer Jennifer Rush, Sidney Poitier(‘s daughter), and Buzz Goddamn Aldrin. Huge in Germany, apparently.

    • THX 1139

      January 23, 2022 at 12:01 am

      My mistake – Harry Belafonte(‘s daughter).

      • Sidney Balmoral James

        January 23, 2022 at 7:50 pm

        I suspect Rog did that one as a favour to Willy Bogner who did the skiing stunts in the later Bonds.

  10. Richardpd

    January 23, 2022 at 12:29 pm

    A few of Roger’s later films were very much retirement fund projects like Spice World: The Movie & Boat Trip, with him being happy to play along with his persona, just like he did with The Cannonball Run.

  11. Glenn Aylett

    January 23, 2022 at 1:05 pm

    Escape To Athena was a war film with a flimsy plot and loads of big stars that was meh. It was one of Lew Grade’s laudable attempts to save the British film industry like Raise The Titanic, but what he didn’t realise was a heap of guest stars and a large budget can’t save a poor script.
    However, Rog’s finest non Bond role has to be The Man Who Haunted Himself. The scenes on the M4 and the chase at the end are up there with anything he did in a Bond film, and the plot was unusual.

    • Sidney Balmoral James

      January 23, 2022 at 8:04 pm

      Escape to Athena isn’t very good, but the actions scenes are well directed by George Pan Cosmatos – there’s a very good opening shot from a helicopter, not dissimilar to the opening shot of The Cassandra Crossing. Oddly, Cosmatos, director of Rambo movies, was a connoisseur of antiquarian books! It’s a classic example of a cast past their prime, apart from Rog, and Telly Savalas (whose enormous success as Kojak didn’t translate into leads in A pictures): Sonny Bono, Elliot Gould, Stephanie Powers, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Roundtree. Oh, and David Niven, whose son was producer. Niven’s career is awesomely long (this film was made forty years after The Dawn Patrol!) but his increasingly dessicated appearance is distressing in his later films.

  12. Richardpd

    January 23, 2022 at 10:28 pm

    David Niven had problems speaking in his later years, & like Jack Hawkins & John Comer had be dubbed in his later appearances.

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