The Man With The Golden Gun
WHO IS JAMES BOND? I wouldn’t say that Bond is an “old” man, exactly — but he’s got this wrinkly neck skin that scrunches up every time he goes to kiss a woman and it makes my flesh crawl. There is a marked change in his sexuality — once upon a time, sex with Bond was presented as a generous gift. Now, it’s presented as a threat. If you’re a beautiful woman, it is expected that you will put out for this leering, randy man-boy. He says “My name is Bond, James Bond” and then he possessively puts his hand on your neck as you recoil in horror. The smirk is back, as is the racism and brutalization of women. He is tetchy, snide and impatient, brittle, pinched and smutty — an altogether unattractive package.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? The bad guy is Scaramanga, a high-priced hit man. He has a scheme to corner the world’s energy market, in spite of the fact that, by his own admission, he knows nothing about energy technology. Well, if Dick Cheney figured out a way to do it, why not. Scaramanga, in fact, has gotten control of an energy-technology firm pretty much the same way that Dick Cheney got control of Halliburton — he killed everyone who got in his way of doing so. This energy-technology firm has developed (or stolen, anyway) a high-tech whatsit that will change the future of energy distribution. Scaramanga’s brilliant scheme is to convince the gigantic Chinese technology firm to build an enormous power-plant on his private island, become full partners with the CEO, kill the CEO, inherit his stock, take control of the company, and rule the world’s energy distribution forever. The energy technology he’s gotten his hands on also comes with a heat-ray gun, so he also plans to be a lethal threat to anyone who ever happens to be standing in front of his heat-ray gun. Oh, and he wants to kill James Bond.
Come on, make up your mind, dude. One of the cardinal rules of bad-guy plot-writing is: two motives are weaker than one — three motives are out of the question.
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? Bond gets into this adventure out of sheer self-preservation. Scaramanga, it seems, has directly threatened Bond’s life. He travels to Hong Kong to track down Scaramanga, which leads him to discover that Scaramanga is not actually planning to kill him, but instead is plotting to take over this Chinese energy-technology firm, as explained above. Once Bond tails Scaramanga to his private island, Scaramanga, in the manner of Bond Villains, takes Bond on a gracioustour of the premises. The tour concludes with, oh yeah, and there’s this heat-ray guy. That’s bad news for anyone who happens to be standing on my private beach — watch out, trespassers!
Then, oh yeah, it turns out Scaramanga does actually want to kill Bond after all, and has wanted to do so for a long, long time. So they fight. And Bond wins (oops, sorry — spoiler alert!). Then he grabs the whatsit and blows shit up.
WOMEN? Best not to bring them up in the context of this movie. Every encounter with them is horrifying. First Bond slobbers over the abdomen of a belly dancer, then he sneers and smirks at his partner, then he slaps around the femme fatale. God it’s depressing.
HELPFUL ANIMALS: M and Q have greatly expanded roles this time around — market research must have indicated that audiences felt they weren’t getting enough M and Q action. Or perhaps, since Bond is aging so rapidly, the producers thought it important to surround Bond with as many doddering old men as possible, just so the audience would say “Well, okay, he’s not that old…”
Sheriff J.W. Pepper, from Live and Let Die, is also back, but this time in a different role. Before, he was a comic foil who was in the movie to show just how not-racist Bond was. Here, he fulfills essentially the same function as Don Imus’s producer used to — he’s the one who says all the racist things the star cannot, but would like to.
Bond also explores the mismatched-buddy theme with Mary Goodnight, who is a fellow intelligence operative, in spite of being a blithering idiot. Goodnight exists to show skin, resist Bond’s advances, then give in to him, then not get him once she wants him, then get abused by him, then show more skin, then be a blithering idiot some more, then finally get screwed by Bond. Comedy gold!
Then there is Lieutenant Hip, a Hong Kong, um, police detective, I think, and his two giggling teenage daughters. It’s one thing to feel uncomfortable when Bond puts his oily paws on grown women, but when he leers at the two teenagers in the back seat of Hip’s car, one feels the need to get a restraining order.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Oh, barely cool at all. He has a gun! It’s made out a cigarette lighter and a pen! Oooo! And he’s got a henchman — watch out, he’s a midget! (As it says in my notes, “Nick Nack is no Tee Hee.”) He’s got a terrifying deformity — a third nipple! (wait — does that qualify Mark Wahlberg to be a Bond Villain?) He’s got a flying car! For some reason. He’s got a half-hearted imitation-Ken-Adam HQ inside a house that looks like it was built yesterday in a movie studio. And a fun-house basement that, honestly, looks less like Bond Villain and more like Batman Villain. He wanders around the movie, blithely implementing his nefarious scheme, not thinking about the consequences of anything he does because he knows “hey, I’m a Bond Villain, there must be people taking care of this stuff for me.”
And then there are his motives, which seem haphazard at best and woefully disorganized at worst. I want to rule the energy markets of the world! Or, maybe I’ll just sell the technology to the Arabs, who will bury it. Either way, I’m happy. Oh, and I’ve got that heat-ray gun! Cause, I guess, the energy-monopoly thing isn’t exciting enough, I don’t know. Oh! Wait! I just remembered, I want to kill James Bond, it’s a life-long obsession! How are we supposed to fear and respect a villain who can’t even decide what his endgame is?
FAVORITE MOMENT: To give you an idea of how threadbare this movie is, there is a fight scene at the end where Nick Nack attacks Bond aboard Scaramanga’s luxury junk (Luxury Junk would be a better title for this movie). They tussle around the room, and Nick Nick climbs up on a counter and starts hurling bottles of expensive vintage wine at Bond. The bottles, of course, are props, and shatter on impact, revealing themselves to be, um, empty bottles of expensive vintage wine. So it seems Scaramanga stores empty wine bottles in his collection, just as Goldfinger and Blofeld routinely store large stacks of empty cardboard boxes in their warehouses.
NOTES: Here is where Bond enters the “Elvis movie” phase of his career. A steep dive in sophistication, The Man With The Golden Gun is a cheap, dispiriting movie — slapped-together, uninvolving, without thrill or suspense. Motivations are contrived, contridictory and nonsensical. Action beats are uninspired, and dialogue scenes are presented with less dynamism and panache than a Rex Morgan, MD strip.
Late in the movie, after the bad guy has run out of interesting things to say, he challenges Bond to a duel. He mentions that he is a multi-millionaire hit man while poor-slob James Bond is a poorly-paid government worker. Oh, that’s right — that’s why we’ve always liked Bond — he’s a populist, one of us, a friend of the working stiff. Riiiggghhht.
Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz reportedly gave up before finishing the script, complaining that it felt like he was “writing the same scene over and over again.” That would explain how Scaramanga uses almost the exact same excuse for not not knowing anything about his master plan as Blofeld does in Diamonds Are Forever — “science was never my strong point.”
There is one cool set — the British Secret Service Hong Kong HQ are located inside a sunken ocean liner. But that is hardly enough to save this movie. The special effects are on the level of a late Godzilla picture and the photography and lighting are on the level of a typical Quinn-Martin production.
I am told that Christopher Lee, who plays Scaramanga, was a cousin of Ian Fleming’s. Too bad his familial connections couldn’t get him a better part than this.