The Man with the Golden Gun

There's an old adage with the Bond films, that the film is only as strong as its primary antagonist. Take Goldfinger, Goldeneye, or Skyfall as prime examples. However, with The Man with the Golden Gun, we have one of the best villains of the series, who is stuck in a quagmire of a plot, drowning in non-sequitur after non-sequitur that are nonsensical even by Bond's standards.

What starts off as a promising plot, having the titular villain of the piece, Francisco Scaramanga (played with regal menace by the ever reliable villain Christopher Lee), seemingly putting a hit on the world's best secret agent, soon devolves into kung-fu hi-jinks and the chase for the most bland McGuffin of the series (the Solex Agitator - picked as a comment on the 1973 energy crisis).

Let's start with the best and work down? Lee is fantastic in the role of Scaramanga, playing him off as a dark inversion of Bond himself. Erudite, cultured, with an appetite for violence and women, you can imagine a much more psychologically interesting tussle between him and Bond occurring in a parallel world. The highlight of the film is probably the classic villain manoeuvre of wining and dining Bond, before an attempt on his life. Except here, it makes perfect sense - Scaramanga has nothing but respect for Bond, and his rivalry is purely professional and full of admiration. Bond, the good old sport, naturally doesn't take kindly to Scaramanga's comparison that he and Bond are alike, down to the pleasure in taking a life.

Lee's physicality is also played to maximum effect, especially his razor sharp glare in an early scene, where his burning eyes glower over his golden gun, peering from the shadows before disposing of a hit. The tension is nicely strung out in this scene, which sees Lee having taking up a vantage point above neon lit shops in Hong Kong, where it is first unclear as to whether Scaramanga intends to shoot Bond or has another target in mind.

Scaramanga's dark edge is also felt in two other scenes involving his captured mistress, Andrea Anders (played by Maud Adams, who would return in Octopussy in a different role). The first scene of note between them is watching Scaramanga return to Anders in bed after a kill. Whilst the outrageous title song by Lulu alludes to the mingling of sex and death of the Bond films, it is just the tip of the iceberg for what happens in this scene. Here Scaramanga returns to Anders and strokes the tip of his golden gun (not a euphemism, I swear) across the mouth of Anders, letting the film suddenly gets very dark and psychosexual in a way that the series won't revisit until Famke Jansen's Xenia Onatopp gets very physical in Goldeneye. Later, Bond meets with Anders during a sumo match, only to discover that Scarmanga has clocked on to her deceit and lodged a bullet between her eyes. Scaramanga then joins Bond, quietly threatening him, and regaling about his first kill as a teen marksman in a circus. His threat to Bond to simply leave him alone, makes him unique amongst the pantheon of Bond villains in that he has no real initial compulsion to kill Bond (with the hit out on Bond turning out to be a ploy by Anders to get a knight in shining armour to rescue her).

Well that's the good stuff detailed, lets dive into the mire of madness. In some ways, the darkness the exudes off Scaramanga makes the supposed comedic elements around him only stick out worse. Perhaps the greatest offender of this is Brit Ekland's agent, Mary Goodnight. Ekland seems like a committed actor, well she would have to be to suffer through the many indignities that she has to act through, including allowing her bikini-ed bottom to set off some high-tech machinery which nearly kills Bond, to disposing of one henchman in a way that causes the villain's lair to start to self-destruct. It was clear the writing team were actively trying to write the most stupid character they could.

Worse still, she is completely doe-eyed and smitten with Bond, despite the fact that he takes every opportunity to insult or belittle her. The nadir of this is when Goodnight apparently turns down Bond's advances, only for him to return to his room to see that, why of course, she has given in and gotten into bed. However, Scaramanga's mistress turns up and so Bond, ever the smart gentleman, does not smuggle out Goodnight out of his room, but into the wardrobe. This then allows Goodnight to hear Bond and Anders getting it on all night (Bond is only doing it for information, queen, and country of course), only for Bond to let her out when Anders is gone and imply that her time will come. What a gent.

Hand in hand with cosmically stupid characters is the whole middle action set piece of the film, where the secondary antagonist, Hai Fat, who has employed Scaramanga to do hits on his behalf, has Bond knocked out. Now, he doesn't want the death to happen on his property so naturally he sends Bond to his ninja-training school...Bond shows little care for the rules of engagement, swiftly kicking the lead ninja in the privates and making his escape. In doing so, he is briefly assisted by Hip, his contact in Hong Kong, and his two daughters, kitted out in school girl attire, who of course turn out to be ass-kicking ninja themselves. Oh and then they drive off and leave Bond.

You see? It was just an action scene of the sake of an action scene, clearly invented to capitalise on the craze for kung-fu movies at the time. This then segues into a boat chase that is almost identical to the one that took place in the previous film, right down to the unnecessary reintroduction to racist sheriff Pepper (count how many times he calls people "pointy heads"). He also unexplicably shows up in a truly fantastic stun, when Bond manages to corkscrew a car over a broken bridge. Amazing stunt, totally undermined by a kazoo sound and Pepper's screeching as the car lands (skip to 5:12 in the video below for the stunt).

As is expected, Roger Moore is ever reliable for quips and puns, and he continues to be completely at ease in the role. However, when the script requires him to show some of the edge that would have come naturally to Connery, it feels jarring. The best example of this is when he first meets (pervs) on Anders by breaking into her hotel room and watching her shower. After she leaves the shower, puts on a towel, the two briefly scuffle over a gun, leading to Bond slapping her, and twisting her arm behind her back. Of course, the physical violence towards her is unacceptable, but the mindset of Bond, that the greatest assassin in the world has a hit on him, and that he needs information, gives his anger a sense of purpose, no matter how misguided. Despite this, this sort of action by Moore's Bond feels totally unnatural, and is tonally at odds with a film where the villain has a dwarf manservant, Nick Nack played by Herve Villechaize, who gets bundled into a suitcase and tied to the crows nest of a ship by the end (the relationship between Nick Nack and Scaramanga is one of the more interesting of the series, with Nick Nack actively hiring would be assassins to kill Scaramanga as a way of keeping him sharp, but also potentially just so Nick Nack can have him killed).

Both critics and audiences alike didn't take kindly to the film upon release, with box office returns coming in significantly lower than those for Live and Let Die, and combining this with the critical reception, it put the future of the Bond series in jeopardy. It was time to go big or go home, and my, my did they go big for the next one.