Screen Vistas: BONDATHON: THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN

Live and Let Die wasn’t the best Bond but for better or worse it established Roger Moore as the newer, more ironic face of the franchise and secured it’s future. So successful was Live at the box office that producers decided to make The Man With The Golden Gun immediately so that it would be ready the following year. This rapid production style suited the franchise well in the beginning when all screenwriter Richard Maibaum had to do was make minor alterations to the books to turn them into scripts. But by this point in the franchise, screen stories where being largely constructed from scratch ignoring most everything but the books titles. This approach can work, especially with some of the sub-par books, but this time it results in a film that feels like a frustrating first draft with just enough good things in it to make its total failure all the more infuriating.

Here’s the stuff that could have been good – Bond (Roger Moore) being marked for death by the world's greatest assassin, Scaramanga (Christopher Lee). There is little doubt that Scaramanga will succeed unless Bond finds him first. The idea of giving Bond a Moriarty type nemesis is a smart one, and Lee, with his mad eyes and controlled demeanor is the perfect choice for the part. Why, he's able to sell even the silliest aspects of the character, such as his insistence on golden bullets and his Lady From Shanghai death maze.

Less promising is every other single element in this film. There's an atrocious title track by Lulu with laughable lyrics like: "His eye may be on you or me. Who will he bang? We shall see. Oh yeah!" Oh yeah indeed. Even Scaramanga’s uniqueness as a villain is brought down by an out of place subplot where he takes over a solar power company (tying into the ’73 energy crisis) so he can have a more conventional superlaser factory for Bond to blow up during the climax. Bond isn’t particularly good either. The film treats him blandly, even denying him a thrilling entrance, he just walks through a door and says 'howdy.' Watching him maneuver through Hong Kong is dull at best, irritating at worst. Director Guy Hamilton tries desperately to inject personality by bringing back J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), the hillbilly cop from Live and Let Die as Bonds sidekick, in one of the most forced introductions in cinema history. Pepper's presence is grating, he's the Jar Jar Binks of the Bond films. But the final sign that the series has fully descended into broad camp doesn’t come from Pepper, but the slide whistle that Hamilton uses to underscore the films most climactic and dangerous stunt.

Perhaps even more annoying is Bond girl Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland). Goodnight is the dumbest, most incompetent Bond girl in what has sadly become a long line of dumb, incompetent Bond girls. When I started this series I pointed to Hitchcock's North by Northwest as a model for the Bond films. But after watching 9 of these things, I'm starting to understand how ahead of its time Northwest was. Oh, how great it would be to see a woman in a Bond film like the Eva Marie Saint character, but I’ll settle for someone who’s anything more than a sexually subservient plot contrivance. In one scene Bond gives Goodnight the McGuffin and all she has to do is walk out the building with it. Instead she hangs around Scaramanga’s car and gets herself pushed into the trunk, meaning that the whole third act of the film is predicated on her being a moron.

This was Guy Hamilton's final Bond film. His first was Goldfinger, a film that remains a high benchmark of the series. It's a shame that his last Bond is little more than a wasted villain, a terrible title song and a particularly thin example of the formula Hamilton helped establish. I doubt any Bond film will be worse. Skip this one, and while you’re at it, skip the book that Fleming may or may not have completed before his death, its even more tedious than the film, and that’s saying something.

Grade: D

The Man With The Golden Gun is currently streaming on Netflix Instant.

Previous Bondathon entries:

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball / Never Say Never Again