Christopher Lee’s Scaramanga is the most elegant killer the series has produced, and the film around him is a tired one, padded with slide whistles and a sheriff on holiday. Worth it for the villain; not enough else to recommend an evening.
The Man with the Golden Gun is Roger Moore’s second outing as James Bond, and its premise is simple: one professional killer is hired to shoot another. Tom Mankiewicz and Richard Maibaum take the name and the gun from Ian Fleming’s novel and little else, and bolt on a solar-energy device called the Solex Agitator that everyone wants because it is 1974 and petrol is short. Guy Hamilton, who directed Goldfinger, is back for his fourth Bond. It runs 125 minutes, and a good half hour of that is the film looking for something to do.
Christopher Lee is the reason it is remembered. His Scaramanga is tall, courteous and unhurried, a man who charges a million dollars a shot and regards this as reasonable. The film introduces him in the pre-title sequence, letting a hired thug (Marc Lawrence) loose in a private funhouse and stalking him through mirrors, wax gangsters and a swinging saloon door while Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) commentates. Peter Murton’s funhouse set is cheaply built and deliberately wrong, all slanted floors and dead-eyed mannequins, and we were unnerved by it for longer than a PG has any right to manage. Lee never raises his voice.
Moore is less well served. The film cannot decide what kind of Bond he is, so it asks him to be two: the light comedian who is particular about his drinks, and a thug who twists a woman’s arm in a Hong Kong hotel room and threatens to break it. He plays the rough scenes as if someone off camera had told him to, and Maud Adams is the one who comes out of them with dignity. Her Andrea Anders is the only person in the film who seems to have thought about what living with Scaramanga would be like, and she is not on screen nearly enough.
The locations are well used, and Oswald Morris and Ted Moore shoot them without fuss. Hong Kong harbour at dusk is done in long lenses that make the junks look like moths, and Murton’s best idea is MI6’s local headquarters inside the half-sunk hull of the liner Queen Elizabeth, every desk and filing cabinet propped level on a floor that tilts. Bernard Lee’s M sits in there looking as though the angle offends him personally. The film gives it about four minutes.
Then there is the bridge. During a chase through Bangkok, Bond’s car takes off from one half of a broken bridge over a canal, turns a full corkscrew in the air and lands on the other half, and it is plainly done in one piece by a real car and a real driver. We sat forward and stopped breathing for a second, which is what a stunt is for. Then John Barry’s soundtrack puts a slide whistle over it. Whoever made that decision turned the best moment in the film into a cartoon.
The rest of the comedy is worse. Clifton James’s Sheriff J.W. Pepper, the bellowing lawman from Live and Let Die, is on holiday in Thailand and ends up in the passenger seat for the chase, shouting. He gets more screen time than the villain’s mistress. Britt Ekland’s Mary Goodnight is a Secret Service officer written as a fool, and Ekland does what she can, which is to look pretty and bewildered on cue. Barry’s score is thinner than usual, and Lulu’s title song spends three minutes finding rhymes for ‘gun’. Raymond Poulton and John Shirley cut it all at a pace that keeps stopping for a joke.
Hamilton knew, on Goldfinger, that a Bond film is a run of rooms that each have a purpose. Here the Solex drops out of the story for long stretches, a karate school appears because somebody had seen Enter the Dragon, and Bond and Scaramanga, who are meant to be circling one another, share too few scenes. When they do meet the film comes alive, and the second half takes them somewhere we will not describe.
Most critics sit where we do, admiring Lee and not much else, and we see no reason to argue with them. If you want to watch one of the great screen villains do a job of work, this is a good evening. If you want a good Bond film, there are better ones on either side of it.
