There’s a famous line by Charles Dickens which opens A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. Never has there been a quote that applies to a James Bond film more, in my opinion, than that. The Man With the Golden Gun has some of my favourite elements in a Bond film. It has the best villain, a pretty decent henchman and a very exotic locale. Unfortunately, the other elements of the film are distinctly lacking.

Some of the film’s deficiencies can be blamed on timing. After Live ad Let Die was a hit and audiences accepted Roger Moore as the new 007, the series’ producers decided to strike while the iron was hot. They reassembled the writing team, the production crew and the series usual stars, including Moore, and rushed to make a new film. Perhaps, had the producers taken their time, the resulting film might have turned out a little better. It is worth noting that this is the last of the Eon-produced films where partners Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli would work together. After this film came out, Sallzman sold his share of Eon to the United Artists studio and didn’t work on the Bond series after that.

The film opens in a beautiful south-east asian island where we are introduced to the assassin Francisco Scaramanga. He lives on a beautiful estate with a gorgeous girlfriend and a diminutive assistant named Nick Nack. A gangster dressed in black shows up and is briefed by Nick Nack as to where he can find and kill Scaramanga. When Scaramanga enters his study, he finds the gangster, Rodney, waiting for him.

A quick note about Rodney. He is played by actor Mark Lawrence, who also played a gangster in Diamonds Are Forever. His character in that film is dressed pretty much the same as the mobster in this film. Eon has not confirmed whether or not Rodney is the same character as in the earlier film, but it’s quite likely.

Scaramanga escapes into a funhouse portion of his home and Rodney follows. Scaramanga attempts to find his chosen weapon, the titular Golden Gun, while Rodney tries to get ahead of him. In the end, Scaramanga makes it to his weapon and shoots Rodney in the head. We find that this deadly gane is part of a friendly rivalry, with Nick Nack hiring assassins to come after Scaramanga to keep the hitman’s skills sharp. James Bond himself does not really appear in this sequence, though we see that Scaramanga has a life-sized wax dummy of Bond in the centre of his funhouse. So while Bond’s not in this sequence, Roger Moore himself is.

After the credits sequence, featuring a song by British pop singer Lulu, Bond is summoned to M’s office and taken off the case he was working on. He’d been tracking down a missing solar energy expert. He’s informed that MI6 has received a golden bullet with “007” imprinted on it. This has led the agency to believe that the notorious Scaramanga has targeted Bond for assassination. The spy is placed on leave but he has no intentions of just sitting at home. After speaking to Moneypenny about Fairbanks, an agent who became one of Scaramanga’s victims, our hero travels to Beirut. There, he retrieves the bullet that killed Fairbanks from a local belly dancer after getting into a fight with some goons.

Bond takes the golden bullet to Q, and the irritable armourer and a ballistics expert examine it. They come to the conclusion that the bullet was manufactured by a gunsmith named Lazar in Macau. Our hero travels there and meets with the gunsmith in a very nice little scene. The gunsmith comes off as confident and knowlegeable. Bond questions him about Scaramanga and forces him, at gunpoint, to reveal that he makes the golden bullets the assassin uses and that he is about to send off a new shipment of the expensive ammunition.

Bond witnesses Scaramanga’s girlfriend, Andrea Anders, pick up the bullets and take them to Hong Kong. While following her, Bond runs into (almost literally) a beautiful blonde he knows named Mary Goodnight. It’s implied that the two knew each other at some point in the past before she was assigned to MI6’s South-Asian office.

So he sneaks into Anders’ hotel room as she’s taking a shower. She pulls a gun on him but he quickly disarms her and forces her, by roughing her up, to reveal that Scaramanga is going to a local club that night. This scene is very problematic and one that doesn’t play well. I mentioned earlier that this Bond film was very quickly made after the previous one, and it’s an example of the screenplay not taking into account the actor playing the character. 007 being so rough with a woman he’s interrogating is something that might have worked had Sean Connery still been playing the character. But for the more affable Roger Moore, the scene seems very out of character. This isn’t to say that Moore’s Bond couldn’t be threatening and dangerous. In the earlier scene with Lazar, he did a great job of turning the screws to the man when it was necessary. But in this subsequent scene, he just seems out of his element.

Bond goes  to the club that night and we can see Scaramanga peering out a nearby window and taking aim with his pistol. But it’s not 007 who ends up getting shot, but a man coming out of the club as Bond approaches. The spy, having pulled out his pistol, is quickly arrested by Hong Kong Police Lieutenant Hip, who might be one of the worst Bond contacts in the history of the series. Yes, I know I complained about Rosie Carver in my last review, but she was useless. Hip, on the other hand, comes off as competent but often makes baffling decisions where, if you didn’t know better, you’d think he was trying to hamper or maybe even kill Bond. For example, after he whisks Bond away from the murder scene, he drives him to the docks where he gets on a boat with two other Hong Kong police officers. Before getting there, Hip could have identified himself as working for MI6, but he didn’t.

Unaware of Hip’s affiliation, Bond jumps out of the boat as it approaches the capsized RMS Queen Elizabeth ocean liner in Hong Kong harbour. What he was hoping to accomplish once he was on the boat is unclear, but it turns out the ocean liner’s wreck is being used as a base by MI6. It is only here that Hip joins Bond and identifies himself as a British operative, so pretty much every moment of this film after the murder in front of the club is kind of a waste of time. Except maybe that we saw Nick Nack take a small device off the murdered man’s body, said device becoming important to the plot going forward.

Anyway, Bond finds M and Q inside the vessel and we learn that the murder victim was Gibson, the missing solar energy expert that Bond had been tracking at the beginning of the movie. The scientist was supposed to meet with Hip to discuss giving him the Solex Agitator, the piece of tech that Nick Nack absconded with.

Bond and Hip travel to Bangkok to investigate Hai Fat, an industrialist who they suspect might have arranged the murder in Hong Kong. Since no one knows what Scaramanga looks like beyond his having a third nipple as an identifying feature, 007 passes himself off as the assassin when he sneaks into Fat’s estate and takes off his shirt, revealing a fake 3rd nipple on his chest. Fat seems to accept the ersatz assassin’s presence at his home and asks him to come back later that night for dinner. Unfortunately for Bond, the entire exchange is witnessed by the real Scaramanga who, it turns out, is Hai Fat’s junior partner in some sort of enterprise.

When Hip drives Bond back to Fat’s estate, we meet Hip’s two nieces, who he has to drive somewhere after he drops off the agent. So, even though he’s a Hong Kong police lieutenant, he has relatives in Thailand that he immediately has to chauffeur around. I guess the film seems to think that everyone in Asia is related. I find that a little culturally insensitive, but, it’s par for the course with what’s coming up next.

When Bond walks through Fat’s garden of statues, two of them, sumo wrestlers, turn out to be real and attack him. This is another example of cultural anatopism, since Bond is in Thailand and sumo wrestlers are a Japanese thing. (If I’m wrong about this and sumo wrestling is actually very popular in Thailand, feel free to correct me in the comments) Once Bond has fought off the two wrestlers, he’s knocked out by Nick Nack, of all people. Just before he can stick a trident into the spy, the little guy is called off by Hai Fat, who does not want bloodshed in his home.

Bond wakes up in a martial arts school where he witnesses two students duel with swords until one kills the other. Then the spy is forced to take on a student in a hand-to-hand fight which he wins by kicking the man in the head before the fight starts. However, Bond then has to fight what appears to be the school’s premier student, Chula. (At least, I think that’s his name. It’s what the other students are chanting when he faces off with Bond. So it’s either his name or it means “whoop whitey’s ass” in Malay.) Our hero takes him on, but the fight doesn’t go his way so he escapes by jumping through a flimsy window. Outside, he runs into Hip and his nieces again and the girls prove to be martial arts prodigies by dispatching the students pursuing 007. It’s not a bad fight scene, but it really does seem unnecessary since Bond himself just watches the girls do all the heavy lifting in the fighting. It’s another case where the film producers looked at what was popular at the time, in this case, Kung Fu movies, and just jumped on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, this won’t be the last time this happens in the series during this decade.

After dispatching the first group of students chasing our hero, Hip and his nieces retreat to his car. But before Bond can get in, they drive away. This is incredibly confusing because why would Hip abandon his ally like that? Even if he thought Bond was in the back seat, wouldn’t the girls have pointed out that they were leaving the spy behind? Anyway, Bond is forced to jump into a thin riverboat and use it to escape. Chula and some other students hop aboard another boat and pursue him. Unfortunately, this boat chase is nowhere near as exciting as the one in Live and Let Die. But it does feature the return of Sheriff J.W. Pepper from the film, who is on vacation in Thailand for some strange reason. I don’t really object to him being here as he does add some amusing comic relief, but does it really make sense that this guy is vacationing in Bangkok, of all places?

Bond quickly sinks his pursuers’ boat and the scene shifts back to Fat’s home, where Scaramanga shoots him. He then declares himself the new head of Fat’s company. I wasn’t aware that you can take over a business by murdering the chairman of the board, but then again, my knowledge of corporate politics is very limited.

Back at his hotel, Bond shares a romantic dinner with Goodnight, who made the trip from Hong Kong, thus continuing tge film’s stance that Macau, Hong Kong and Bangkok are all essentially the same place. He tries to charm her, but she decides she doesn’t want to be one of his passing fancies, and leaves the table. Goodnight’s recalcitrance doesn’t last long as when 007 returns to his hotel room, he finds her waiting for him in a short nightgown. But before they can start having sex, he has to stash her under the bed when Andrea Anders shows up. Bond quickly transfers Goodnight to his wardrobe and then seduces Anders. She explains that it was her who sent the golden bullet to MI6 in the hopes that Bond would kill Scaramanga, who she fears and no longer wants to be involved with. Then she makes love to Bond, all while Mary Goodnight is in the wardrobe.

The next morning, he lets Goodnight out of her hiding place while Anders steals the Solex Agitator from Scaramanga’s safe. The spy goes to a Muay Thai kickboxing contest (one of the few culturally correct events shown in the film), but finds that Anders has been shot dead in her seat and somehow has remained upright with her eyes open. As Bond searches her handbag for the Solex Agitator, Scaramanga sits next to him and explains that he had to kill Anders because a mistress cannot have two masters. He explains to Bond that he has no ill will towards him and that, now that his business in Thailand is concluded, he doesn’t think their paths will ever cross again.

What the assassin doesn’t know is that Bond has picked up the Solex Agitator from where it fell on the ground and passed it off to Hip, who is disguised as a peanut vendor. Hip passes the device onto Goodnight who manages to get herself trapped in the trunk of Scaramanga’s car. As she has a walkie-talky in her purse, she is able to tell Bond where she is so 007 and Hip go to Hip’s car to pursue only to find out that Goodnight has the keys to the car on her. So Hip tries to hail a cab, unsuccessfully, while Bond picks up another dubiously useful companion as he jumps into a car dealership’s floor model AMC Hornet only to find Sheriff Pepper in the passenger seat. Bond uses the car to pursue Scaramanga and, I hate to sound like a snob here, but this could be the most disappointing Bond vehicle I’ve encountered in the series thus far. Nothing against the AMC Hornet, but I just don’t think of it as a classy enough vehicle for James Bond. The car chase that follows isn’t particularly exciting either. It’s a little better than the Vegas car chase from Diamonds Are Forever, but not by much.

This brings me to another instance where the film reaches incredible heights while crashing unbearably low at the exact same time. After taking a wrong turn, Bond finds that Scaramanga is on the other side of a river with no usable bridges anywhere nearby. So he’s forced to jump the car over a ruined bridge, with the cars spinning in midair, making the stunt a corkscrew jump. It’s an amazingly impressive stunt, totally ruined by the addition of a slide whistle sound effect as we see the car twist in midair. Thus far in these reviews, I’ve been most complementary as to the work of film composer John Barry. However, he has admitted that it was his idea to insert the slide whistle into this sequence. I guess nobody bats 1.000 when working on an entire film series. You’re bound to have a few bad moments, and this was definitely John Barry’s worst.

Despite Bond’s impressive stunt, Scaramanga still has enough time to drive his car into a barn where he attaches a pair of wings and a jet engine to it and then flies away with Nick Nack at his side. I gotta ask about something here. I know James Bond films are known for their gadgets and it’s perfectly acceptable for the villains to be the ones with the fancy tech. Scaramanga already has a gun that he can collapse into a pen, a cigarette lighter, a cufflink and a cigarette case (all gold of course). But the pair of wings and the jet engine? Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to buy a separate plane?

Bond and Sheriff Pepper are arrested by the Thai police that have been chasing them as they all watch Scaramanga fly away. Incidentally, Sheriff Pepper is never seen again in this film series,so it’s possible he still rotting away in a Thai detension facility somewhere. I’m not 100% sure that 007 would remember to get the guy released from his incarceration, as he has been kind of a jerk in this film. It’s at this point that Goodnight finally manages to open the trunk’s lock only to find herself nearly sucked out of the airborne vehicle.

The scene cuts to Bond, M, Q and Hip discussing how the car was found abandoned with Goodnight no longer in it. However, it turns out that her dress contained a tracking device, so they now know where she is. This scene is the last time we will see Hip in the film. It’s kind of surprising that he wasn’t sacrificed to become one of Scaramanga’s victims since so many of Bond’s contacts in other films are killed off to raise the stakes in the movie they appear in. But anyway, Hip survives to go on and probably make inexplicable decisions on another assignment that we’ll never see.

Bond flies a seaplane over to Scaramanga’s island where he is warmly greeted by the assassin. He shows off his high tech base, and it is at this point that the villains characterization kind of goes downhill. I find Scaramanga works best as a hired assassin and to have him suddenly be the master of this technological Wonderland doesn’t really suit him. He himself admits that he doesn’t understand most of how the place works. He also is the proud owner of an immense laser emitter that he uses to blow up bonds plain. I should point out that when he does so, you might expect a large laser beam, possibly gold in colour, to come out of the weapon. But actually, he just points it at the plane and it blows up. No beam is visible. Kind of seems like a special effect that they forgot to add in post-production.

Like every good Bond villain, he invites the spy to have lunch with him and it is at this point that Goodnight re enters the proceedings wearing a very flattering bikini. The scene features Scaramanga comparing himself to Bond and verbally sparring with him as 007 can barely hide his disgust at the man. It’s a good scene an I really like the dialogue, but it’s missing something. Bond speaks of the pleasure he would feel in killing Scaramanga, but he never mentions either 002 (Fairbanks) or Andrea Anders. I think the scene would have been improved somewhat if Bond showed some outrage at some of Scaramanga’s victims, especially poor Andrea. I’ll speak a little more about her later on when I talk about some of the films elements that just didn’t work for me.

Scaramanga proposes that he and Bond engage in a duel to prove which one is the better assassin. Our hero accepts the challenge and the two begin the duel on a beach as they walk ten paces away from each other. When Bond turns around, his nemesis isn’t there anymore and thus begins a cat and mouse game not unlike the one we saw Scaramanga engage in in the pre-credits sequence. Unlike the ill-fated Rodney, Bond manages to get behind the funhouse walls and sneak around, but he loses his pistol in the process. Meanwhile, Goodnight takes out the base’s lone goon who falls into a liquid nitrogen cooling device. It doesn’t affect Bond’s dual, but it will prove to be a problem in a few minutes.

Scaramanga sneaks around his funhouse looking for Bond but it is the super-spy who gets the drop on him. Somehow, he managed to make his way to the centre of the funhouse where the wax dummy of him was. He managed to put on its clothes and grab its functional gun so when Scaramanga passes by, he thinks Bond is his statue and the mistake costs him his life. When Bond exits the funhouse, Goodnight informs him that she took out the goon and 007 realises that the entire base power grid is going to blow up in a few minutes. Before they can escape, Bond must endanger his life to retrieve the Solex Agitator while Goodnight is of absolutely no help and almost gets him killed when her butt accidentally turns on a laser beam.

With the device being retrieved, the two agents escape the base as it begins to fall apart and get on Scaramanga’s junk, a remarkable vessel that apparently doesn’t need anyone to pilot it. They sail away and are about to make love when Nick Nack appears to try and kill Bond. It’s never made clear if he’s upset because 007 killed Scaramanga or if it’s because he blew up the island that Nick Nack would otherwise have inherited. But either way, he makes himself a nuisance by using his small size to keep away from Bond without really harming him all that much. In the end, the spy traps him in a large suitcase before making his way back to Goodnight for their long-delayed tryst.

Like I said at the beginning of this article, Scaramanga is an amazing villain, my favourite of the series, as a matter of fact. Christopher Lee is an amazing actor and he does great work here. He’s always a pleasure to watch when he’s on screen and even at the end, when his character gets involved which with a bunch of high-tech nonsense that really doesn’t suit him, he’s still compelling. This series has already trotted out characters who are supposed to be “shadow-Bonds”, dark reflections of our hero. None of the ones before or since really stand up to Scaramanga, who is the best use of this trope.

(Fun Fact: Christopher Lee is the cousin of Bond creator Ian Fleming. When Eon Productions was casting the role of the super-spy for 1962’s Dr. No, Fleming suggested Lee but his suggestion was ignored because the actor was deemed too unknown at the time.)

Nick Nack is a good henchman, and I appreciate the fact that the film, for the most part, never makes his diminutive size a reason to think less of the character. He’s very efficient at most tasks that he’s given and it’s only at the very end of the film when he attacks Bond that I feel they’re doing the character a disservice.

But when it comes to characters who are not handled well, I really have to bring up the women in this movie. Mary Goodnight could have been interesting, especially her scene where she tells bond that she won’t sleep with him because she knows she’s just going to be a passing distraction. Unfortunately, this is completely undone less than a minute later when she shows up in his hotel room having decided to sleep with him at after all. I don’t blame actress Britt ekland for this. She played the character as was written on the page, and unfortunately, that writing was very poor.

{Second fun fact, Britt Ekland was already tangentially involved with a James Bond film prior to this one. When Peter Sellers was filming 1967’s Casino Royale, he would often take extended leaves from the production to go check on his wife, and that was Britt Ekland. Sellers was convinced that she would cheat on him if he stayed away too long, and considering they divorced the following year, he might have been on to something. Or maybe she just got fed up of his jealousy. We’ll never know.)

But as bad as I feel the character of Mary Goodnight is treated, she’s Joan of Arc compared to poor Andrea Anders. This is a woman who, on paper, could have been a very interesting character. She’s a kept woman who wants to escape the terrible situation she finds herself in. But Bond never treats her seriously and Scaramanga, in one scene, rubs her mouth with his gun and uses it to pull down the sheets she’s covering herself with. If we ever needed to be told that the gun is a sexual metaphor, then the film really gives up any subtlety on that issue. After she’s killed off, the film forgets about her completely. As I mentioned above, I would have liked Bond to mention her when he’s having lunch with Scaramunga and expressing his distaste for the man. Bringing her up in this scene would have given the character some modicum of respect. But the writers just couldn’t afford her even that. The only good news here is that Maud Adams, the actress who played Andrea, would return to the series the following decade and play a much more interesting character.

But had Bond brought up Anders, I’d almost say it would have been out of character for him, by this point in the film. Because for most of the scenes leading up to it, he’s been a real jackass. He treats goodnight like crap, the whole scene of him trying to stash her somewhere while Andrea Anders is in his hotel room just comes across like bad comedy. His roughing up of Anders in the earlier scene, I’ve already mentioned just looks terrible. He’s even a jerk to a kid who tries to sell him a wooden elephant and gets his boat moving again during the riverboat chase. This is certainly not Moore’s finest performance as Bond. I don’t really blame him, as he’s just doing the crappy stuff that the script is telling him to do. But it is very disappointing and the main problem with the movie.

Oh, and Hai Fat is a nothing character. He’s so forgettable that I had to proofread this article three times before I rermembered to mention how lame he is.

What this film really comes down to is that it has some good elements but they get lost in what appears to be a quickly cobbled together movie where the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts. I like the location, but really feel the producers didn’t take the care to show it off properly. As far as the action scenes go, there’s not much here. The duel at the end is more of a suspense sequence then an action one. The car chase is not particularly bad, but it’s not particularly impressive either, save for the corkscrew jump which I’ve already talked about and, I repeat, is absolutely ruined by that slide whistle sound effect. The rest of the fight sequences aren’t anything particularly memorable. And I really do think it’s inexcusable to have a huge fight sequence where hip and his two nieces do all the fighting while Bond stands around.

overall, the critical and audience reception of this film were not great. Coupled with the departure of producer Harry saltzman from the series, there were some who questioned whether Bond films could still work. Luckily, the next entry in this series would show that they definitely could.

One final thing to mention about this film: Thanks to Blu-Ray releases and YouTube commentators, I learned that there’s a couple of scenes, cut from the film, that feature an interesting tidbit about Scaramanga. During the early stages of his duel with Bond, 007 forces him to reveal that his Golden Gun, which he claimed only has one bullet in it, actually has two! So he’s built his entire reputation on being so deadly that he only needs one bullet when, in fact, he’s been lying about it the whole time. I guess villains gotta be villains.