Which one is this? The Hong Kong action movie.
Who’s who in this one? Moore (Bond); Lee (M); Llewelyn (Q); Maxwell (Moneypenny).
Where did you first encounter this one? On TV when I was twelve or so.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Christopher fucking Lee as Fransisco Scaramanga, the titular Man with the Golden Gun, the highest-paid hit-man / millionaire playboy assassin in the world. Ultimately, he just wants a fair fight against a true equal: 007.
Who are the Bond girls? Britt Ekland reuniting with her Wicker Man co-star Lee, as Agent Goodnight, the Bond girl with the single greatest ability to get herself into trouble. Also, Maud Adams as the death-bait, Andrea Anders. (Adams would later return to the series as Octopussy.)
Opening number? Lulu (“To Sir With Love”) belting out the rock n’ roll title track like a church bell with a loose screw. Maurice Binder’s title sequence presents an Asian water lily theme, where the ladies are the lilies.
What’s memorable about this one? The midget. The three-part golden gun. The flying car. The Orient. The barrel roll car stunt.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 9. For most of my life I have been calling this my favourite James Bond movie.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? Still a 9, though no longer my favourite.
I’ve jumped from director John Glen’s best effort to director Guy Hamilton’s best – and yes, that means I am putting 1974’s The Man With The Golden Gunabove Hamilton’s Goldfinger. I love this movie – love it, love it, love it – and while I would never be silly enough to call it the best Bond flick, it’s what I’ve commonly called my favourite since I was twelve or so. This is the Bond I’d slap on the telly when I was home with the flu; this is the Bond I recreated with my G.I. Joe toys, making a makeshift flying wing for my toy Jeep – and then throwing it, repeatedly, out the bedroom window.
The Man With The Golden Gun is such a twelve-year-old boy movie. It has the slightly seedy allure of a used Playboy magazine found in the park. There is an omnipresent veneer of titillation – featuring visibly naked women in the opening, breasts and buttocks and even pubic hair, barely glimpsed under the undulating water. Later, there’s a similar gag with a girl named Chew Mee, who is skinny-dipping in broad daylight at Mr. Fat’s compound when Bond pays a visit. When Bond saunters into Andrea’s hotel room, he leans against the door frame and watches her shower through the mullioned glass door with a pubescent smirk on his face – is it any wonder this was my favourite when I, too, was starting to get funny feelings “down there?” Roger Moore is a twelve-year-old in this movie, and besides, the movie’s got great toys.
Christopher Lee is terrific as Scaramanga, 007’s dark twin, and his pen/lighter/cigarette case combo, which quickly snaps together to form the Golden Gun, is probably the series-defining gadget. Scaramanga’s funhouse, introduced in the teaser, is a weird strip of ‘70s psychedlia, which is given an added dollop of creep by Nick Nack’s tendency to watch the proceedings within via a series of peepshow slats. The Westworld-inspired animatronic practice targets in the funhouse – cowboys and gangsters and James Bond himself – are certainly dated, but Scaramanga’s trappings are nicely commuted by the fact that Lee (and Hervé Villechaize, as Nick Nack) are so splendid in their villainous roles. We learn that Scaramanga only has sex immediately before conducting an assassination, but the far creepier beat comes after one of Scaramanga’s missions in the movie, where he returns to his Chinese Junk in the Hong Kong harbour and… rubs his gun on Andrea’s face.
Roger Moore, still early in his secret agent career, gives a credible performance throughout. He’s smug and debonair, certainly, but treats the Scaramanga matter gravely enough to convince us that his stake in the case is personal. The M scene this time out is a corker – M exclaiming that any number of “jealous husbands, outraged chefs and humiliated tailors” might want to take out a contract on Bond’s life, before agreeing to sign Bond’s resignation before Bond has even mentioned trying to tender it. The brief tussle in the belly dancer’s dressing room which follows is quite good too; Hamilton leans the camera with the punches, tightening the visual geography and increasing the apparent savagery of the beating, and Moore (not his stunt double) is present throughout. Similarly, a later sequence where Bond finds himself sentenced to death by… karate school? … plays nicely for the same reason. Moore is always in the space, even when (to my delight) two Chinese schoolgirls show up to fight forhim.
The film is a caravan of well-staged delights for me. The wreck of the Queen Elizabeth in the middle of Hong Kong harbour, which conceals a secret British headquarters, all the walls slanted. Scaramanga’s junk, bedecked with all the trimmings of a master spy. And of course, the flying car, which climaxes an overland chase (featuring the return of Sheriff G.W. Pepper from Live and Let Die, this time bringing his wife) which has incorporated what remains an extraordinary stunt, when Bond barrel-rolls his AMC Matador Coupe across a river.
Ekland’s Agent Goodnight, meanwhile, must simply be the stupidest Bond girl in the long line of them, although I guess she’s not as irksome (or flamboyantly plastic) as Denise Richards. Goodnight is the Bond girl as total goofball, too silly even for James to want or take seriously. He fucks Andrea right on top of her to stay on-mission (well, actually, Goodnight is in the closet), and later reacts with understandable irritation when Goodnight’s single greatest act of initiative results in the stupidest misfire in Bond history: when Goodnight, carrying the much-sought Solex Agitator and under explicit instructions to stay where she is, instead follows the midget out into the Bangkok streets, gets abducted, and taken to Scaramanga’s private island.
Scaramanga’s island, in the Andaman Sea, lends The Man With The Golden Gun its exuberant visual splendour. It’s a tremendous location, expertly exploited and photographed by Hamilton, and complemented by interior sets for Scaramanga’s lair which are lush, opulent, and vivid. The third act of the film, with Bond and Scaramanga hunting one another through the compound, unloads like a machine gun of thrills, and if Roger seems uncommonly smug as he repeatedly tries to bed Goodnight in the denouement, well, he may well have earned it.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, The Man With The Golden Gun is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on December 1 and 26. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.