From Roger Moore with Love

CinemaSerfDec 2024

3.5

...or maybe from Roger with Moore love? If you saw the recent "Mad About the Boy" documentary on Sir Noël Coward, you'll recall the use of a voice actor to impersonate the subject of the story as he narrates it. Well that's the technique used here as the late Sir Roger takes us on a whistle stop tour of his own ninety year life. This film benefits from him being of a generation where the archive is a little more readily available as he rises to stardom, marries a few times, makes his name in the "Saint" (after a bit of tonsil hockey with Lana Turner in 1956) before he takes over from Connery as "007" and the rest, as they say. It appears he was himself an avid film maker so there are plenty of home movies as he entertained the great and good at his Swiss home, and with contributions from his children and a few closer to him than the usual panoply of talking-head movie journalists, this is quite an interesting look at a man who made a career from being a bit of a chauvinist, but who actually comes across as really anything but. Aside from one Golden Globe in 1980, more in the heartthrob category, his industry never really recognised that glint in his eye nor that eyebrow above it with a mind of it's own, so it's nice to reflect on a star who oozed charisma on screen small and large, was under no illusions about his own foibles and certainly didn't take him self seriously at all.