Roger Moore had the best, and definitely the most iconic Bond cars, says Kushan Mitra
When it comes to discussing James Bond, it always comes down to the “Bond Babes.” After all Ursula Andress’ iconic “emerging from the water” scene in Dr No set the template for all alpha-male spy thrillers. But Roger Moore was different. Yes, he had hotties in his movies too — Barbara Bach as Agent X in The Spy who loved Me — but when you think of that movie you really just remember the lotus Esprit. Roger Moore had the best, and definitely the most iconic Bond cars, and as a young kid growing up, Roger Moore’s 007 movies instilled a love of cars that has continued ever since.
It was that lotus Esprit, the underwater submersible car loaded with underwater firing anti-aircraft missiles, which set off a love of cars. like many other children in England those days (my father was still a student in England) three-year old me got a little Matchbox lotus Esprit dinky car. Matchbox was the leading UK manufacturer of small model cars, the Hot Wheels of England if you must, although now the brand is actually owned by Mattel, the makers of Hot Wheels. It was one of the must-have dinky car for little boys, because Bond, y’know.
Roger Moore was the James Bond of my parents’ generation but the first I saw. On special television screenings of movies like Moonraker and Octopussy. In retrospect, as you grow up you realise that save the first Moore Bond flick, live and let Die which is almost like a Blaxplotation movie, the rest of them were what one would describe as “campy.” That is, the movies were perversely exaggerated, over the top and delightfully silly. And living as we did in the early 1980s under the constant risk of nuclear armageddon over Europe, you needed campy spy thrillers with crazy villains like the triple-nippled Francisco Scaramanga.
But even in the Christopher lee starrer, Man with the Golden Gun, it is not the “triple-nipple” you talk about but the utterly insane stunt that the Bond team pulls off. The AMC Hornet, driven by stunt driver “Bumps” Willard, pulled off an amazing 360-degree aerial twist in that movie, and on the very first take at that. No computer graphics, although this was one of the first “computer” planned stunts because a computer was used to calculate just how fast the car had to be driven to be able to pull off a full twist. And despite that (spoiler alert on a 35-year old movie) Bond can not chase down Scaramanga because the international assassin has a flying car. Well, much like the submarine lotus, this was just a model, but only in a Bond movie could you see something like this.
Much like the AMC Hornet that Moore makes off with from a showroom in Bangkok, the Moore 007 car that I lusted after the most is the the Alfa Romeo GTV6 that Bond steals in Germany. As a young kid who had little idea of the heritage of the Italian marque at the time, this Alfa Romeo made one fall in love with the brand. And you also remember the silly Citroen 2CVs from For Your Eyes Only and the chopped-in half Renault 11 in A View to a Kill.
While the brand associated with Bond remains Aston Martin, after all, in Ian Fleming’s book the suave British agent drove a DB3. The car that remains associated with Bond is the classic DB5 — made famous in Sean Connery’s Goldfinger with the ejector seat, and that image was reinforced in Skyfall when Daniel Craig drives from london to the Scottish Highlands in a DB5. Yet, the passing of Roger Moore makes you remember that James Bond was always more than just Aston Martin’s. It makes you remember that lotus Esprit all over again. Godspeed, Sir Moore and thanks for the memories.