Headscratchers / Live and Let Die

Film

• Who sent the inverted "Queen of Cups" tarot card to James Bond to warn him that Rosie Carver was a traitor? It could only have been Quarrel Jr. or Solitaire, as they were Bond's only possible allies on the island.
  • There's no indication at all that Quarrel Jr. did it.
    • No direct indication, however there's at least some subtext going on there. When getting changed, Rosie accidentally exposes Quarrel's (powerful) communications equipment - he's definitely capable of getting in direct (and clandestine) touch with Felix Leiter when he needs to. Bear in mind that the only person who claims Rosie works for Felix is Rosie herself. Bond appears to take her at her word, but the very first thing he does the following day is take Rosie on Quarrel's boat to scout Kananga's headquarters, and it's clear that Bond and Quarrel are discussing Rosie ("As I was saying, Quarrel, a lousy agent...") when she's down below - one interpretation would be that Bond was playing along with Rosie while at the same time trying to find out via Quarrel if she was legit.
    • Another piece of subtext is that it's very important not to underestimate Quarrel. His cover is that of a lazy tourist boat operator, but the CIA (or MI6) don't hand out the kind of hardware contained in his boat to just anyone. He's very knowledgeable about the island and its people (presumably including the Obeah beliefs), and on top of that he's very observant - when Rosie pulls her gun on him, he immediately notices that she's left the safety catch on and is therefore not an immediate threat. The implication is that he's not just an agent, he's a very good one.
    • If Bond's secondary purpose in taking Quarrel's boat was indeed to check Rosie's credentials with Felix Leiter, Quarrel would have to find a way to notify Bond that Rosie was working for Kananga without arousing Rosie's (or Kananga's) suspicion. Using the tarot card in such a specific way was a pretty perfect way of doing it.
    • At this early point in the story, Solitaire is still very much caught in the middle - she may have doubts about Kananga, but she doesn't trust Bond yet either.
  • Did Solitaire do it?
    • It was a Tarot card that was sent to him and she uses Tarot cards to see the future.
    • Her discussion with Kananga after Carver's death shows that she knew that Carver was going to be killed, not Bond, and deliberately misled him into thinking that Bond would die. This indicates that she was already planning to betray him to help Bond.
    • She appears to be the most likely choice, but the movie never actually says that she did it. At no point in Bond and Solitaire's dialogue is there any mention or hint that Solitaire helped him out.
    • Solitaire is certainly the most likely to be the one who sent it. She'd know the significance of sending the "Queen of Cups" card upside down to Bond, which she knew that Bond would then take to the town's tarot shop to get the meaning. So, she and the shop owner are the only two that would know the significance of the card's meaning when it was inverted.
  • Nobody suspects that Baron Samedi did? After Solitaire, Samedi is the most associated with the tarot cards in the film (seen during the scene in which Mr. Big interrogates Bond and Solitaire). Not to mention the ambiguity surrounding his alignment- he seems to be out of Mr. Big's control and likes to screw with him (for example, burning the tarot card). It's quite possible that Samedi sent Bond the card in order to get things moving.
    • Except, there's only one time we see him touch any tarot cards, and that was after Kananga finds out that Solitaire's power was lost. Since the card came before she lost her powers, Solitaire is more than likely the one who sent it.
    • The meaning of that particular card has nothing to do with her powers- regardless of whether she or Samedi or whoever sent it, the person only had to know that an upside-down Queen of Cups indicates that you are dealing with a liar and a cheat, and if a Tarot Card shopkeeper knows then Solitaire, Samedi, Kananga himself and any number of people with a decent enough knowledge of Tarot cards probably knows too. It's likely that it was indeed Solitaire, but Samedi is still possible, especially since the final scene is meant to hint that he really was THE Baron Samedi and not just some impostor.

• How the hell does the casket in New Orleans pick up the damn body?
  • It's a trick coffin. The bottom acts like a door: opening and allowing the body inside, then closing and holding the body inside.
  • From a practical effects standpoint, it's not hard to imagine that the assassinated actor grabs part of the inside of the casket and when the casket is picked up, he goes with it. In fact, if you look carefully, there appears to be some internal pendulum action when the casket is lifted, indicating the actor hanging on inside and the likelihood that this was done in one shot, rather than using a camera cut.
  • One possibility is a canvas bottom with a rolling pin that gets under the victim. It would be enough to pick him up effectively, and additional conveyor scrolling of the canvas would be enough to contain the body fully, but it would probably cause more external movement than was shown in the film.

• What was Tee Hee trying to do when he boarded the train? Why still try to kill Bond, when the guy considered his mission complete?
  • Why not revenge? Bond did kill pretty much his entire organization...

• Why didn't Solitaire tell Bond herself that Mr. Big and Dr. Kananga are one and the same?
  • a) Didn't occur to her at the time (given all the emotional turmoil and danger she was in etc.), b) Still too scared of Kananga to give away all of his secrets, c) She honestly didn't know until Bond himself found out (or maybe Katanga only told her shortly before). Also, bare in mind that Bond isn't taking her because he thinks she knows anything important- she makes it clear she's just a glorified slave girl and has little freedom, nor any knowledge of his larger plans ("I simply read the cards for him!")- but rather to try and provoke a reaction from the villains, so he might honestly never have asked her about the relationship between the two men since he thought she wouldn't know anything about that either.

• Why didn't Agent Harry Strutter get assassinated outside the Fillet of Soul in New Orleans? The staff knew Strutter's name to lure him away from the table while they captured Bond, so it's safe to assume they knew who he was.
  • It's ambiguous as to whether Strutter was assassinated or not - we don't explicitly see him getting stabbed, but we do see the assassin sidle up to him and the music changing as it did before once the hit was complete. We don't see Strutter at any later point in the story.
  • The hit was probably called off with a signal from the assassin once the gang was aware Bond would shortly be on site, in order to lure him inside.

• Why did Bond go to the trouble of assembling an all-Lovers Tarot deck? There are less laborious — and less detectable — ways of forcing a card, and Bond (whose bookverse incarnation is trained as a cardsharp) could be expected to know them.^note There's a perfectly good Doylist explanation: It's efficient storytelling, since the deception can be made clear with a single camera shot. But that doesn't mean it makes in-universe sense.

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