“Ever heard of EVEL Knievel?”: James Bond meets the Rural sheriff

<jats:p>James Bond emerged as an international film hero because he represented an aspirational cosmopolitan ideal offering viewers an opportunity to escape to an exciting international arena of adventure during the Cold War. Sheriff J. W. Pepper’s appearance in Guy Hamilton’s Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) disrupts such cosmopolitan aspirations by calling attention to a cosmopolitan-rural divide that lurks in the shadows of these films. As a provincial throwback, Pepper presents a starker contrast to Bond than any of the most brutal villains he encounters, thus requiring Bond filmmakers to neutralize the conceptual threat that Pepper’s localism poses to Bond’s trans-global battle against evil on movie screens around the world.</jats:p>