Man With the Golden Gun

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Received wisdom says that Roger Moore was the worst 007, the one who turned James Bond into a caricature. Rubbish, of course. How do you turn a character with no hinterland, no interests beyond bedding women and killing villains – and sometimes killing women – into a caricature? He already is a caricature. Bond is empty: Moore’s treatment of him as a bored playboy, for whom the sex and violence are beads of sensation in a mundane world, is the only filmic reading of the character as written in the screenplays that makes any sense.

Like albums by the Fall, the first Bond film you see is the one that leaves its residue upon you. This was mine: an unimaginably thrilling experience at the time, though less so from a distance of more than 35 years. In truth, The Man with the Golden Gun is rather flat: the jokes are forced and laboured (transplanting Clifton James’s halfwit Louisiana sheriff JW Pepper from Live and Let Die to Thailand for comic effect was particularly lazy); there’s no great gadget from Q; the set pieces are few (though in the corkscrewing car jump, there was one genuine classic); and, for a Bond film, it’s particularly talky, without ever being well-written.

But there’s something in The Man with the Golden Gun that points the way to the darker Bond of Timothy Dalton or Daniel Craig. It’s there in his jousting with Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) – the three-nippled villain of the piece, an assassin who works for $1m a hit and has Bond on his list – who reminds 007 that the pair of them are cut from the same cloth. Indeed, in Tom Mankiewicz’s first draft of the screenplay he posited Scaramanga as Bond’s alter ego, “a super-villain of the stature of Bond himself”.

The darkness is there, too, in the hall of mirrors on Scaramanga’s island, through which the assassin hunts his prey at the start and the end of the film: this is the one place in the film where uncertainty and fear and deception ring true. And it is there in Bond’s unusually certain attitude towards his adversary, a man he admits he wouldn’t mind killing in cold blood. It’s even there in the gleeful cruelty of Scaramanga’s dwarf sidekick, Nick Nack (an effortless assemblage of offensive notions in one sketchy character), who hires killers to take out his boss, with the boss’s full approval. It’s all useful practice, you see.

Like its predecessor, The Man with the Golden Gun borrowed from the cinematic trends of the time. Live and Let Die borrowed from blaxploitation; The Man with the Golden Gun took a couple of kicks at kung fu, though in a distinctly half-hearted fashion. Its most memorable piece of violence, in fact, is never seen: when Bond takes his seat beside Scaramanga’s girlfriend – who is to hand him a “solex agitator”, the McGuffin of the film – it takes him a few moments to realise she’s already been shot dead in her seat.
The sad thing about The Man with the Golden Gun is how great it might have been. South-east Asia in the mid-70s? You’d think even the most inept scriptwriter might have conjured something out of events there – I believe there was some sort of war going on nearby – rather than an implausible assassin with a luxury hideout on a secret island. Instead, the setting is just a background, as if the film were just a Duran Duran video with extra guns and safari suits.

Perhaps, when real people were dying real deaths in a real war just around the corner from the setting, the cartoon anti-Communism of the 60s Bonds didn’t seem entirely appropriate. American audiences might just have been furious at a Bond who sorted out the region’s problems with an unzipped fly, a Walther pistol and some Savile Row tailoring, while their sons were dying thousands of miles from home.

If this doesn’t sound much like an appreciation of a favourite film, I have saved one point till last. Those of us who actually have third nipples are rarely represented on screen. In Scaramanga we got our hero.

Favourite line: (Delivered by Scaramanga) “You see, Mr Bond, I always thought I loved animals. Then I discovered that I enjoyed killing people even more.”

Favourite gadget: The wreck of the liner RMS Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong harbour, which turns out to be MI6’s regional HQ.