The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) - film review

When James Bond receives a golden bullet imprinted with his agent code 007, his boss M takes him off his current assignment and requests his immediate resignation.  The bullet was apparently sent by Francisco Scaramanga, the world’s most notorious assassin, who kills his targets with bullets fired from a golden gun.  No one has ever seen Scaramanga or knows of his current whereabouts, so Bond decides to run him to ground so that he can be reinstated.  Having traced the assassin to Hong Kong, Bond witnesses the killing of a solar energy expert.  Aboard a converted shipwreck, M informs Bond that he is not Scaramanga’s target.  In fact, the assassin is after a vital component for a revolutionary solar energy system, a system which could solve the world’s energy crisis and make whoever possesses it the wealthiest and most powerful person in the world.  Unfortunately, it looks as if Scaramanga already has what he was after...

It is not hard to see why The Man with the Golden Gun is widely considered the nadir of the James Bond film series.  With comic book storylines, paper-thin characterisation and innuendo-based humour that would be substandard even for a Carry On or Confessions film, the Bond films of the 1970s were unlikely to stand the test of time, and you do wonder how the films ever managed to turn a decent profit.  By the middle of the decade, the screenwriters and production team had lost the plot and what audiences were fed was a pretty unsavoury diet of self-parody, racial stereotyping and chauvinism that is nowadays pretty hard to stomach.  

The Man with the Golden Gun has all these failings in abundance but what really sinks it is the lack of a half-decent plot.  Basically, the film is about a good guy and a bad guy fighting over a small piece of electronic hardware.  This was never going to be the most inspiring of actions thrillers, no matter how many exotic locations, car chases and bikini clad females were roped in to pep it up.

The film’s one saving grace is the inspired casting of Christopher Lee as the deliciously evil bad guy Scaramanga.  The man who famously put the bite into Hammer’s Dracula films in the 50s and 60s and went on to make a career playing a wide assortment of demonic nasties, Lee is such an obvious choice for a Bond villain that you wonder why he hadn’t already appeared in the series.  (In fact, Lee’s step-cousin Ian Fleming had suggested him for the part of the principal baddie in the first Bond film, Dr No).  

It is Christopher Lee’s straight-down-the-line portrayal in The Man with the Golden Gun that renders his character frighteningly believable and prevents the film from collapsing under the weight of its own shameless self-parody.  By tacitly resisting the temptation to send up his part (which could not have been easy given the way it was written), Lee emerges as one of the best and most chilling in a long line of Bond villains.

If only Roger Moore had followed the example of his co-star, this might have been a respectable entry in the series.  Unfortunately, Moore plays his character more or less as it has been scripted, as a camp cartoon-like secret agent whose every utterance must contain at least one inane sexual innuendo and not one drop of something which might be mistaken for real emotion.  The supporting cast aren’t much better.  Britt Ekland’s dumb blonde routine becomes tiresome after about ten minutes and whoever suggested bringing back Clifton James as the hillbilly sheriff (last seen in Live and Let Die) deserves to be dropped into a vat of liquid helium.

The Man with the Golden Gun was the last of four Bond films to be directed by Guy Hamilton, a sad note to end on given that Hamilton was the man who had previously helmed the Bond classic Goldfinger (1964), one of the best entries in the series.  It was also the last of the Bond films to be co-produced by Harry Saltzman, who was forced to sell his stake in EON for financial reasons.  The ensuing wrangling over the ownership of the Bond franchise would delay production on the next film, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), but that was no bad thing.  The series definitely needed a rest at this point.

© Chris Alderton 2010

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