Guy Hamilton, “The Man with the Golden Gun” (1974)
Mainly memorable for the scene in which the stunt people managed to get a red coupe sports car perform a gymnastic full layout twist flying through the air from one end of a bridge to the other end – because the middle part was missing, and yes, I know cars can’t do piked or tucked twists – “… Gun” has a few things in its favour (and quite a few bad things against it) that make it easy on the eye and good for leisurely television watching in an age of COVID-19 corona virus lock-down when one needs light-hearted reassurance. The stunning scenes of island mountains hiding sun-kissed beaches (and evil villains’ multi-million-dollar hide-outs!) in Thailand’s Gulf region; a decent villain in the form of Christopher Lee playing assassin-for-hire Francisco Scaramanga; a plot that refers to the global energy crisis of the period (mid-1970s) and ingeniously matches Scaramanga and the cynical Bond (Roger Moore) as mirror twins of one another – what is not to like here? On the other hand, the film features minor cast members who drag out the plot and film-time much longer than they should have done, and Bond is paired with a ditzy agent, Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland), who should have been thrown over by the script-writers and substituted with Scaramanga’s girlfriend Andrea Anders (Maud Adams, who was to return in a later Bond film) as a serious love interest.
The only elements in the film brought over from the eponymous Ian Fleming novel are the names of the main characters. The action is transferred from Jamaica to Beirut, Macau, Hong Kong and Thailand, and includes hefty doses of kung fu and kick boxing, sports which were becoming popular in Western pop culture in the 1970s. The plot divides into two main strands: Bond is being hunted by Scaramanga; and Bond needs to retrieve a solex generator device that harnesses the sun’s energy before it falls into Scaramanga’s hands and he tries to sell it to the highest bidder, which may be one of the West’s ideological enemies in the Soviet Union or China at the time, or an international crime syndicate like SPECTRE. Bond decides to hunt Scarmanga instead and this decision leads him to Beirut to collect a used golden bullet, and then to Hong Kong and Macau to find the manufacturer, where he also comes across Andrea Anders. From then on, Bond has to work to find the solex generator, which he does, but not before having to outwit an entire academy of martial arts students ordered to kill him, being chased in a sampan in crowded canals and failing to save Anders from Scaramanga’s wrath when the assassin finds his mistress has betrayed him. Bond passes the solex generator to a Chinese aide who then passes it to Mary Goodnight but Goodnight foolishly has ideas of her own and ends up being whisked away by Scaramanga and his assistant Nick Nack (Herve Villechaize) in a car that converts to a mini-plane to the Scaramanga hide-out.
The plot can seem confusing and overly drawn out with sampan and car chases, and an irritating American tourist (Clifton James, playing Sheriff J W Pepper), but it cleverly poses Scaramanga and Bond together as brothers of a kind: professional assassins in the loneliest profession in the world, yet both well-known among intelligence agencies and the global criminal underworld alike. One kills for money and a good life, yet seems alienated from the rest of humanity with just his assistant, a girlfriend and one maintenance engineer on his remote island for company; the other kills in service to his country, yet always has to be at MI6’s beck and call to perform dangerous work for which the benefits can be many but are very temporary. The downside of such work is always having to put one’s personal life a distant second priority, and attracting people like Scaramanga on your tail. A bit of pruning here and there in the film to get rid of Pepper, less grovelling to popular Western cultural trends of the period, and perhaps a bit more to say about how the lives of people who put themselves on the frontline to save society and of those criminals they chase, and how they often end up having much in common, and the plot would have been better and darker.
The acting varies from good (on the villains’ side) to woeful (on the heroes’ side) and Moore had yet to settle into his preferred Bond persona (bored playboy type), playing the character as still a tough and sardonic spy with rare flashes of wit. His acting is sometimes wooden but he manages to scrape through adequately enough. Lee combines menace and friendly pleasantry in a split second and is easily the best actor in the film. Shame that Scaramanga comes to a seemingly ignominious end with no bangs or flashy explosions but it seems appropriate that he is brought down by an ordinary proletarian bullet, the cheapest on the MI6 budget. The richest assassin in the world brought down low in a common shotgun killing.
The film might not make compelling viewing and it has not dated very well, but in its own way it is a document of the period in which it was filmed.