Bond #19 - The Man with the Golden Gun

Today's entry is the 9th Bond film, a misguided flop called...

. . .AS IAN FLEMING'S JAMES BOND 007: Roger Moore

SETUP: Master assassin Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) sends MI6 a golden bullet inscribed with James Bond's number 007, a clear sign that Bond is on the killer's hit list. M relieves Bond from active duty so that he may find a nice, quiet place to die. That is, unless he finds and kills Scaramanga first.

BUT IN REALITY: Scaramanga didn’t send the bullet. Scaramanga, in fact, isn’t even thinking about Bond, despite the Bond wax statue he uses for target practice. Instead, the killer's kept lover, Andrea Anders (Maud Adams), hoped the bullet would bring Bond to rescue her while Scaramanga hunts the Solex, a device that converts solar power to electricity. Scaramanga plans to sell the device to the world's highest bidder, a sensitive issue in 1974. Bond meets the assassin in a duel, tracking Scaramanga across his private island, into his funhouse, and finally killing him with a well-placed shot.

VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Scaramanga is a former circus trick-shooter who got his first kill by avenging his murdered pet elephant. That has nothing to do with anything, but it's very cool. His actual disfigurement is a “superfluous mammary gland,” or third nipple, a symbol of advanced virility, which he channels into his craft by only making love just before he kills. He must be doing something right. His titular Golden Gun only fires a single gold bullet, and he never misses.

THE MUSCLE: The producers decided against backing the physically imposing Christopher Lee with a beefy bodyguard, and instead gave Scaramanga a dwarf manservant named Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize). This guy is not employee of the month. He routinely hires Mafia thugs to kill his boss, which Scaramanga enjoys as a means of keeping his skills sharp. In the film's final moments, Bond fights Nick Nack on Scaramanga's private junk, eventually closing the butler up in a suitcase.

BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: The femme fatale is Andrea Anders, a woman who gets in way out of her depth by hooking up with Scaramanga, and then uses her wits and her body to convince Bond to save her. Scaramanga rewards her betrayal with a golden bullet of her own.

The Bond Girl is Mary Goodnight, a recurring character from the novels brought to life by 70s sex symbol Britt Ekland. Ekland is fine in the role, but Goodnight is one of the most poorly written heroines in the Bond series. She's eager and annoying, plus clumsy enough to get kidnapped by Scaramanga, trigger a meltdown in his energy reactor, and nearly kill Bond by fumbling with the Solex's control panel. Even Bond barely tolerates her. She exists mainly because Bond has to have sex with someone in the film's last scene, and the only other person left alive is Nick Nack.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Q is in the movie, but his only gadget contribution is a fake nipple Bond uses to disguise himself as Scaramanga. I guarantee this wasn't what Q envisioned when he signed up for the service.

MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: The guy's name is Nick Nack.


Actually, wait, that's not even the worst of it. Let's talk about JW Pepper. Clifton James appears in this movie, reprising the role he debuted in Live and Let Die. JW Pepper is a racist, half-witted, ornery stereotype of a southern sheriff that I would suspect was ripped off from Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit if that film hadn't arrived four years later. In LALD, his character actually scores a couple of laughs in spite of himself. In this film, he miraculously appears in Thailand so that he can join up with Bond, spit a few racial slurs, and leave. Thankfully, this was his last appearance in a Bond movie.


BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: Bond's sharp response to Scaramanga's offer of partnership: “There's a useful four letter word, and you're full of it.”

WORTH MENTIONING: Christopher Lee is Ian Fleming’s cousin. . . Maud Adams would return a few films later as the title character in Octopussy, making her, I think, the only actress to nail Bond twice as different characters. . . This film was made at the peak of the kung fu movie craze. The scenes of Bond fighting at the dojo were included to take advantage.

OVERALL: The Man with the Golden Gun is not a very good movie, and it usually ranks near the bottom on any Bond list, obviously including mine. Still, I have a weakness for the movie. The film has been bullied and discarded since its release, but I choose to focus on its scrappy charms. The settings are spectacular and the action is tightly paced, including a truly excellent chase scene (best viewed on mute to avoid the 'comedy' of JW Pepper) and a tense, well-designed finale in Scaramanga's funhouse.

I'm a realist, though, and my affection for the film can't disguise its deep structural problems. The movie is a bait and switch, where we're led to believe Bond is on the run from a hired killer, but is instead wrapped up in a murky plot about solar energy. Why is a wealthy assassin bothering with global energy policy? Because it was relevant to 1974 audiences, period. Plot reversals like this can work, but here the real story is much less interesting than the setup, and the film suffers for it.

It gets worse. The kung fu sequence is cutesy and drags the film to a halt, the lead heroine is a bikini that speaks, and the abundant comic relief... isn't. In short, the film is a mess. The Man with the Golden Gun has a lot of ideas, but nothing to hold them together besides a charismatic villain and some great locations. This time, it wasn't enough.

The James Bond Project

18. ???

19. The Man with the Golden Gun

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker

Bond #20 - Diamonds are Forever

The countdown marches on to the 7th Bond film, and one of the all-time stinkers. . .


. . .AS IAN FLEMING'S JAMES BOND 007: Sean Connery


SETUP: James Bond rips through SPECTRE henchmen in a successful mission to find and finally kill Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Charles Gray). With the Blofeld business over, M sends Bond into the international diamond trade. A smuggling ring is stockpiling diamonds, putting the global market at risk. Bond's mission is to uncover the smuggling ring and, if possible, destroy it.

BUT IN REALITY: Bond tracks the diamonds to Las Vegas billionaire Willard Whyte (sausage king Jimmy Dean) but soon discovers that Whyte has been replaced by the not-dead Blofeld, who doesn't care at all about diamond markets or global trade. The diamonds are for a light-refracting satellite capable of destroying the world's nuclear arsenal from outer space. Bond sabotages Blofeld's plans, wrecks his oil rig headquarters, and uses a crane to snatch the supervillain's escape pod right out of the water.


VILLAINOUS DISFIGUREMENT: Whenever Blofeld appears in the series, he has a different physical gimmick. This time he's created an army of duplicates via extreme plastic surgery, each with vocal matching and their own personal pet cat. This explains the film's opening. Bond thought he killed Blofeld, but it was just one of the villains many decoys.

THE MUSCLE: Blofeld hires Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, world-class assassins, to wipe out the evidence of his smuggling ring, which they do, brutally. They use scorpions, drownings, bombs, and more to dispatch the chain of smugglers, and even get a really good shot in at James Bond. Wint and Kidd knock Bond out with an urn, then lock him in a casket and send him into a crematorium to be burned alive. Bond only survives because some idiot villains drag him out to ask him a question. I feel like I can't hold that against Wint and Kidd. At worst it's a wash.


BOND GIRL AND FEMME FATALE: Tiffany Case (Jill St. John) works for the smuggling ring and holds absolutely no loyalty to Bond, Blofeld, or anyone else, interested only in her personal cut of the profits. She repeatedly plays Bond while trying to nab the diamonds until a casino tart named Plenty O'Toole (oof) ends up dead in Case's pool. Case realizes that she's been marked for death and happily joins Bond's team. As for the femme fatale, Case fills that role nicely, but honorable mention go to Bambi and Thumper, two bikini-clad acrobat assassins charged with guarding Blofeld's prisoner, Willard Whyte.

“PAY ATTENTION, 007”: Q provides Bond with prosthetic fingerprints and a voice simulator to aid in infiltrating the ring. When he has nothing better to do in Vegas, Q bolts for the nearest casino and promptly uses a gadget to cheat at slots. Why? Meh. Why the hell not?


MOST EMBARRASSING CULTURAL MOMENT: Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd are memorable assassins, but they're also depicted as flamboyantly gay with a sensitivity only found in 1971. They hold hands while committing murder, lather on perfume (causing them to smell, Bond suggests, like a “tart's handkerchief,”) and, worst of all, get sexually aroused when they grapple with Bond in the film's final moments.

BOND'S BEST ONE-LINER: Maybe not the best, but certainly the most bizarre. When CIA agent Felix Leiter asks Bond how he smuggled diamonds into America aboard a corpse, Bond replies “Alimentary, Dr. Leiter,” presumably referring to the deceased's, um, digestive system. In Bond's defense, it was a very long plane ride, and he had plenty of time of think of the perfect response. Too much time, probably.

WORTH MENTIONING: The reclusive Willard Whyte is obviously based on Howard Hughes, a friend of Bond producer Albert Broccoli. Hughes was peeing in jars at the time, but allowed the producers access to his casinos in exchange for just one print of the finished film. . . This was the last official movie to feature Blofeld and SPECTRE by name, as the rights for these elements were tied up in legal matters. . . It's never stated in the film, but Bond's pre-credits rampage is clearly a reference to the tragic ending of the previous film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

OVERALL: The most important fact to know about Diamonds are Forever is that this was Sean Connery's comeback film. Connery walked after You Only Live Twice, and when George Lazenby failed (financially) as his replacement, producer Albert R. Broccoli offered Connery a substantial fortune to rock the tuxedo one more time.

Broccoli was desperate. Everyone was desperate. In fact, the whole damn movie is desperate for attention, goodwill, laughs and, most of all, American acceptance. A vocal minority had declared Bond dead and irrelevant as the 60s ended. They believed American audiences would no longer support a British hero and, in fact, Burt Reynolds was in consideration to take the part and make it fully American before Connery made himself available. His return was a plea for forgiveness. “See? Bond's back and he's just like you remember him. No, wait! He's better! He's in America!”

The flaw is that this isn't Connery's Bond anymore. The shameless audience pandering in Diamonds are Forever leads to too many gags and too little excitement. For the first time, a series that always teetered on the edge of camp decided to jump right in without water wings. The gay assassins. The acrobatic pool bunnies. Master criminal Blofeld in drag. A fake moon landing on an underground set. Plenty O'Toole. The non-climax on the oil rig. Diamonds are Forever was the first film to embrace the slapstick that Roger Moore would make his Bond trademark. The result is an awkward, uncomfortable farewell for the man who originated the role and made Bond an icon.


As I prepared for this project, I re-watched each Bond movie in the original release order. My girlfriend, somewhat of a Bond newbie, hitched along for the ride, enjoying each and every Bond film that made it to the DVD player. . . until this one. Her review says it all. “Baby, it's just bad."

The James Bond Project

19. ???

20. Diamonds are Forever

21. A View to a Kill

22. Moonraker