Movie Notes: The Man With The Golden Gun
= 3 stars
Starring Roger Moore, Christopher Lee
Directed by Guy Hamilton
Roger Moore (James Bond)
Britt Ekland (Mary Goodnight)
Maud Adams (Andrea Anders)
The Man With The Golden Gun, starring Roger Moore as Bond, starts off lame (possibly the worst Bond theme I’ve ever heard), but gets better as it goes along.
We meet Scaramanga (Christopher Lee), an assassin with three nipples (I’m not kidding) that charges a million dollars per hit. His weapon of choice is a small golden gun, pieced together from common objects (cigarette lighter and case, cuff link, and pen) that he can carry on his person without detection. He has a personal goal to use it on Bond. Freud would have had a field day.
It’s fun to see Count Dooku / Saruman playing a more low-key villain. His diminutive assistant Nick Nack is Herve Villechaize, better known as Tatoo from Fantasy Island.
At times, the film reminded me of You Only Live Twice, as much of the action takes place in exotic locations like Hong Kong and Thailand. Bond encounters martial artists and watches a kick-boxing match (paralleling the ninjas and sumo wrestlers). His escapades include a boat-chase and a run-in with the red-faced southern sheriff from Live and Let Die, leading up to a tense final encounter at Scaramanga’s island hideout.
Meanwhile, the Bond babes didn’t leave much of an impression on me, namely Andrea Anders (Maud Adams) who is a bit too wooden, and Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland) who is a bit too stupid. They make nice eye-candy but nothing else.
To sum up, The Man With The Golden Gun is an average affair. It’s Moore’s second go at playing Bond, and it seems he was still finding his footing. The best Moore-as-Bond was still to come.
IMDB: The Man With The Golden Gun
Wikipedia: The Man With The Golden Gun
Rotten Tomatoes: The Man With The Golden Gun 67%
Next Bond Movie: The Spy Who Loved Me
Previous Bond Movie: Live And Let Die
The Man with the Golden Gun was one of my favorite Roger Moore’s because it was filmed in Thailand and I’ve been to Thailand. I also liked Christopher Lee being the bond villian. The third nipple, that was stupid. The movie was great, the scenery was great, the plot was a bit off at some points.
True, the Thailand scenery is very appealing. I think http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/mangolden.html
?the island with Scaramanga’s hide out is now a tourist attraction?
I can understand why having been to the location makes you like a film better. I found A View To A Kill more interesting because it partly takes place in San Francisco, where I work. And then a lot of people think that is one of the worst Bond films ever.
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Oh dear. This really is where everything went undeniably pear-shaped for the Bond movie franchise. Ham-fisted direction (that cutesy pennywhistle soundtrack for the bridge jump, for instance), two oddly unappealing Bond Girls, and a badly miscast villain (Christopher Lee just wanders around on ‘looming menace’ autopilot, phoning it in all the way. He plays his makeout clinch/grope-scenes like a bored physician conducting an examination). Moreover, the entire production boasted a cast with a conspicuous lack of chemistry, and the over-familiar ‘mad scientist with secret hideout and super weapon’ plot was strictly 1966 bond parody. Scaramanga’s ‘psychedelic shooting range’ was pure Batman, and Herve Villechaize (behold, a strange, mysterious dwarf! Lazy casting shorthand since whenever for an automatically ‘exotic, weird, slightly sinister’ henchman) with his annoyingly affected ‘wind-up toy’ walk was a whacky swingin’ Sixties trope too far (wasn’t there a guy like that in Patrick McGoohan’s 1967 TV show ‘The Prisoner’?). The Eastern locale is squandered by a stupidly racist script (oh yeah, big, white Bond can beat up any and all trained martial arts types), and the Southern baccy-chawin’ Good ‘Ol Boy light relief was similarly overplayed and odious. In short, this was actually a mid-1960s Bond parody movie made half a decade too late. By the release of The Man With The Golden Gun, James Bond had gone from inspiring Derek Flint to becoming him.
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