The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Moore and Lee Keep It Alive
Aside from the superb title song and the espresso maker gag (punchline delivered with exquisite understatement by Bernard Lee), Live and Let Die was largely a waste of celluloid. Man With the Golden Gun, on the other hand, gave me hope for the franchise. Christopher Lee as a Bond villain was an absolutely perfect casting choice, and it's rather a puzzle to me that it wasn't made much earlier in the series. And Roger Moore, for his part, was bringing the role of Bond into his comfort zone enough so that he could even pull off Bond's ruthless side - which, frankly, was seldom seen to such good effect during the rest of Moore's tenure. Herve Villechaize's Nick Nack struck me as an obvious inversion of Oddjob - but with the intriguing wrinkle of being as much of an adversary to his employer, Bond's nemesis Scaramanga, as to Bond himself, and was certainly unforgettable. These three, as actors and characters, seemed to have a rappore that was very natural and fluid, giving the film a level of easy energy that compensated for some fairly mediocre material.

Some things were cringe inducing, such as the return of the redneck sheriff from the previous film, the swallowing of the golden bullet that killed 002, and the sound effect during the signature car stunt. And there were disappointments such as the underwritten Lt. Hip, which made less than full use of Soon-Tek Oh, Maud Adam's inability to convey any of the depth of her character's motivating conflict, and Britt Ekland's airhead version of Mary Goodnight. And let's face it, staging the car chases using AMC vehicles of the period was not the best way to deliver the visual thrill these scenes deserved.

Even so, this film had some unique touches. For once the main villain confessed to perpetrating his fiendish plot using facilities and technology he didn't really understand, and kept his operation admirably bare bones in terms of personnel. Maud Adams did play her final scenes well - and I'm not begin facetious, the effect she produced was downright eerie. As for Mary Goodnight, it was refreshing that Bond's leading lady was someone he already knew from work, and that as such, instead of being shunted aside and/or killed during the proceedings, actually stayed in the game and landed the big lug. Perhaps the character's ditziness was overcompensation for the previous outing's dour Solitaire, but give credit where credit is due; no Bond girl before or since has ever shown herself so adept at opening locked car trunks.

Thrilling, exotic, fun, sexy...
Bond is sent after the Solex Agitator - a device which can harness the power of the sun. He teams up with agent Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland) against Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) - The Man with the Golden Gun. The action culminates in a duel between the two men.
The issue of energy was of big concern at the time of the energy crisis of 1973-1974, when this movie was filmed, caused by Arab manipulation of oil supply and prices, in the wake of the Arab agression of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.


This is everything a James bond thriller is meant to be, lots of riveting action, and humour, sexy girls galore, and exotic locations.
The gadgets were quite ingenious for the early 70s, Britt Ekland was extremely cute and sexy as Mary Goodnight, one of the hottest Bond girls
The others being Solitaire (Jane Seymour) in Live and Let Die, Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) in The Spy Who Loved Me, Honey Rider (Ursula Andress) in Dr No, Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama) in You Only Live Twice, Bibi Dahl ( Lynn-Holly Johnson) in For Your Eyes Only, Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) in A View to a Kill, Kara Milovy (Maryam d'Abo) in The Living Daylights, Pam Bouvier (CArey Lowell) in Licence to Kill, and Jinx (Haile Berrie) in Die Another Day.

My favourite parts were when Bond stole the golden bullet charm from belly-dancing Lebanese temptress Saida (Carmen du Sautoy) in Beirut, and she cries 'I've lost my charm'. Bond quips 'Not from where I'm standing you haven't'.
The other scene where were Lieutenant Hip's (Soon-Tek Oh) nieces show their karate experise after they beat up Hai Fat's (Richard Loo) gang of goons.
Christopher Lee was one of the best villains in the series artfully portraying the psychopathic assassin Francisco Scaramanga, and his creepy midget henchman Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) combined the perfect combination of comedy and sinister wiles.
The action and intrigue takes Bond from Beirut to Macao, Hong Kong and Thailand.
All in all a classic action adventure of the series and one of the best.
Still as thrilling for audiences today as it was in 1974.

Perhaps the most undervalued Bond of them all
The Man With the Golden Gun was producer Harry Saltzman's last hurrah before selling out his share in the Bond series to United Artists to ensure the maximum inconvenience to his detested partner Cubby Broccoli. It's certainly not premium Bond: at times it threatens to turn into an episode of The Avengers, what with Scaramanga's funhouse, his midget servant Nick Nack, its human statues or the off-kilter angles of MI6's Hong Kong HQ located in the rusting wreck of the Queen Elizabeth, not to mention Roger Moore's more Steed-like Bond. Although there are hints of the lows to come in Moore's tenure - Bond being saved by a pair of schoolgirls or defeating a villain by pretending to be a tailor's dummy - this is still recognisable an old-school Bond film, with thankfully few gadgets, although it's disappointing that the producers provide Scaramanga with an island lair and super-weapon to give Bond something to blow up at the end (a rather half-hearted effort to be sure: instead of a private army, Scaramanga simply has Herve Villachaize and a maintenance man). Britt Ekland's irritating `typical silly woman' comic relief was a bit hard to take in 1974 and gets worse with each passing year, but Christopher Lee's Scaramanga is one of the more interesting Bond villains, not least because of his imagined empathy with his prey - he regards himself as Bond's moral and professional equal, the kind of pathological snobbery Fleming's books were full of but the films increasingly abandoned.

If you only want the film rather than the extras, the remasterd single-disc is a fair bet, including the new Roger Moore audio commentary from the two-disc Ultimate Edition which reveals Moore's friendship with George Lazenby and admiration for OHMSS and the reason his first scene had to be somewhat obviously dubbed later (a noisy bout of stomach ache!).