Zzzzz...

Zzzzz...

Zzz- huh?  Oh, sorry.  My fault.  I must have dozed off there.  So, okay.  I don't think The Man with the Golden Gun can compare to Live and Let Die, or even Diamonds are Forever, when it comes to being terrible (though it's definitely not good).  But when it comes to being boring and stupid, The Man with the Golden Gun is the equal of any Bond film I've seen so far, if not worse.  What's more, it seems to crib from virtually every film that came before it in one way or another.

The film opens on the island of Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee), an assassin who apparently likes to test himself against other hired guns.  His assistant Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) has brought in some American mob type to do the job, which for some completely unknown reason involves pursuing Scaramanga through a bizarre funhouse full of gun-toting mannequins.  Scaramanga eventually kills the man, then shoots the fingers off a mannequin that happens to look exactly like James Bond.  (From Russia with Love: opening scene in which we're introduced to the main assassin via an unrelated test of his skills, during which it is also revealed that he already has an interest in Bond.)  This opening scene lasts eight minutes and really provides us with no useful information unless you consider the introduction of Scaramanga's superfluous third nipple (looking TOTALLY realistic), which I don't since Bond describes it to us in the next scene anyway.

"After I kill a man, I like to rub my gun all over my mistress."  Subtle.

After a pretty weak title song by Lulu, it's off to M's office.  M asks Bond what he knows about Scaramanga.  Bond runs off an incredibly detailed list of information, including that Scaramanga has a superfluous third nipple, and I can't help but wonder how someone compiled all this information when we're told that no one knows what Scaramanga looks like.  MI-6 has received a golden bullet with Bond's number on it, which M assumes means that Scaramanga has made Bond his next target.  (And of course, everyone knows what Bond looks like.)  Bond is thus taken off his current assignment - involving locating one Gibson and his "solar cell data" - allowing him to unofficially pursue Scaramanga.  He heads to Beirut, where a previous MI-6 agent was killed by Scaramanga; a dancer who was with the agent at the time has made the bullet into a lucky charm, which Bond swipes.  After examination by Q, the bullet is traced to a gunsmith in Macau, Lazar, who when Bond shows up tells him that "your reputation precedes you."  Seriously, why do we even call this guy a secret agent?

The actual wreck of the RMS Elizabeth in Hong Kong harbor.  One of the cooler shots in the whole film.

Bond threatens Lazar until he reveals that the bullets are delivered anonymously through the casino.  Scaramanga's mistress, Andrea Anders (Maud Adams), who we saw in the opening scene, takes them and jumps on the hydrofoil to Hong Kong.  Bond follows and makes rendezvous with Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland), who is introduced like we're just supposed to know who she is or something.  I guess she's a more important character in the books, Bond's personal assistant, but you'd think by 1974 there would have been a little less assumption that the bulk of the audience was intimately familiar with the novels, the last of which was published in 1965.  The Man with the Golden Gun was actually the last Bond novel published (after Fleming's death), and its plot is significantly more interesting than the plot of this one.  Whatever.  Bond gets into Anders' room and gets some information out of her, most notably that Scaramanga has a date at the "Bottoms Up Club," which is exactly as classy as you'd expect from a joint in Hong Kong with a name like that.

Bond turns out not to be the target; Scaramanga shoots Gibson, the missing solar power scientist, as he exits the club.  Bond is forced onto a boat by one Lieutenant Hip and taken to the RMS Elizabeth wreck, which oddly turns out to be used by MI-6 as some sort of local office.  (The delivery of Bond to a friend by an Asian agent whose loyalties are not immediately made apparent recalls You Only Live Twice.)  We're treated to a boring (and by now laughably outdated) conversation about the energy crisis, and then Bond and Hip are sent to Bangkok on the trail of Hai Fat, a businessman who seems to have had Gibson in his employ.  Bond forms a plan to approach Hai Fat by pretending to be Scaramanga, since he surmises that Hai Fat likely would have hired Scaramanga without meeting him.

The producers built an entire slanted set at Pinewood to stand in for the interior of the RMS Elizabeth, and spent maybe five total minutes inside it.  Worth it?

This turns out to be totally incorrect.  After sneaking into Fat's compound, Bond introduces himself as Scaramanga (thanks to a fake third nipple that looks no more or less realistic than the "real" one on Scaramanga), then suggests that Fat hire him to kill Bond.  Fat says he'll think about it and asks "Scaramanga" to return for dinner that evening.  After Bond leaves, we see that the real Scaramanga was there the whole time, apparently working for Hai Fat in some capacity.  When Bond returns that evening, he is knocked out, but rather than simply killing him, Fat orders him to be taken to "school."  (Not unlike Kananga ordering Bond to "the farm" in Live and Let Die.)

It's at this point that things should be ramping up.  Instead, they go off the rails completely.  First, there's a completely pointless sequence with Bond at the martial arts school (the students of which are expected to kill him, I guess).  When he and Hip escape, Hip unaccountably drives off without Bond, forcing him to jump into a boat and take off through Bangkok's canals.  Hey, a canal chase!  What a novel idea for an action oh wait it's exactly like Live and Let Die again.  And just in case you weren't reminded of Live and Let Die sufficiently, guess who freaking shows up.

Hurrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I cannot think of a single reason why you'd bring back J.W. Pepper, the vaguely racist idiot from Live and Let Die and the guy who put the "fat" in "fat Southern sheriffs."  Did they mistakenly sign Clifton James to a two-movie deal in 1973?  Were the producers angry with the Thai locals and needed a character who could berate them as "little brown pointy-heads" without associating the entire film with that racist mindset?  Did Guy Hamilton really think that action sequences would be improved by having an obnoxious imbecile dropped into the middle of them?  Or, God help us all, was this character actually popular with the audience?  I knew he was going to reappear at some point, but I thought it was going to be a minor cameo - when Pepper gets splashed by Bond's wake as the chase passes his boat, and yells to "Just try that in my bayou, boy," okay, I guess that's a fun little callback since Bond did try that in Pepper's bayou.  Mind you, it's only fun if you didn't hate Live and Let Die and everything about the Pepper character... but at least it's notionally fun.  After that, the chase continues, and we never have to see Pepper again.

Just kidding!  He's on screen almost constantly for the next five minutes, because God hates me.  Then it's back to the actual plot.  After a brief jump back to Hai Fat's compound where Scaramanga kills Fat and takes control of his company, we find Bond at dinner with Mary Goodnight.  He comes on strong but she turns him down, only to show up in his room almost immediately afterward.  "James, I thought this would never happen," she says.  Listen, WE DON'T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.  Why did she change her mind, Bond wants to know - it was because, as she puts it, "I'm weak."  Um, okay.  Women in the Bond movies, everyone!  They're about to get down to it when Andrea shows up, asking Bond to protect her from Scaramanga in exchange for the solar power device and revealing that she's the one who sent the bullet to Bond as a way of asking for his help.  Bond makes Mary get in the closet and has sex with Andrea instead (telling her "it was an inspiration, sending that bullet" which sounds exactly like the line Bond uses on the girls at Blofeld's clinic while posing as Sir Hilary Bray in On Her Majesty's Secret Service).  You're all class, James.

Bond meets Andrea at a kickboxing match to retrieve the device, but Scaramanga has figured out her plan and killed her in her seat.  He tells Bond he's got nothing against him personally but that it would be trouble if their paths crossed again.  Bond spots the device on the floor and manages to slip it to Hip, posing as a peanut vendor, while Scaramanga yammers on about how he discovered he liked killing people, like anyone cares.  Hip hands it off to Mary, but she gets caught by Scaramanga trying to put a homing device in his car after spotting Nick Nack (reminiscent of Tiffany Case falling into Blofeld's clutches in Diamonds are Forever, and it results in a similar sartorial fate in the final reel).  Bond chases Scaramanga's car by hopping into a showroom model when he can't find a taxi, and sitting in that showroom model is... oh, damn it.

You know what would improve this car chase?  Anything else.

"I know you!" Pepper says with a smile when he notices Bond is driving the AMC Matador.  "Oh, no," Bond replies, to which I can only say, MY SENTIMENTS EXACTLY.  Like it's not bad enough that two of the key "action scenes" of this film are slow-paced gun battles in a ridiculous funhouse setting, they had to go and have this idiot yell over large parts of the two main chase sequences.  Why would you do that?  I get that he's supposed to be comic relief, but I'm sorry, nothing about Pepper is funny.  And it's not like the ruining of these things stops at Pepper - the producers took the trouble to use computer modeling to calculate a spiral jump for a stunt, and then they play a slide whistle as the car does the jump just to make it look completely stupid.  Unbelievable.  Scaramanga gets away by attaching his car to an airplane and flying off.  Pepper may or may not be arrested by the Thai authorities, but at any rate this is finally (after utterly ruining nearly 15 minutes of total film time) the last we see of him.

Mary's homing device is traced, giving Bond the location of Scaramanga's island.  He heads there to find that Scaramanga is pretty much your typical villain in one of these films - he's used his millions to finance a crazy evil hideout.  Scaramanga tells Bond his entire plan, because of course he does.  It involves using solar power for various things - he might sell the technology to the highest government bidder, or allow the oil companies to pay him even more to keep the efficient solar power off the market.  He also channels the sun into a weapon that he uses to blow up Bond's seaplane.  Over lunch, Scaramanga explains that he would like to duel Bond as the ultimate test of his skills.  Bond is clearly annoyed as Scaramanga attempts to compare the two of them, stating that he doesn't enjoy killing for its own sake the way Scaramanga does, but he accepts the duel.  After they take twenty paces, Bond turns and fires, but Scaramanga has vanished into the funhouse.  Not exactly honorable.  After a rather boring but mercifully short scene, Bond poses as his own mannequin and kills Scaramanga.  (Bond dropped his own gun before this, meaning that Scaramanga apparently kept a loaded gun on the mannequin which Bond was able to use against him.  You deserve to die for that kind of stupidity.)

"Okay, Mary - you're a woman and it's the last reel.  Time to do something incredibly stupid!"

Lacking any real drama for the end, the film is forced to invent a bunch of contrived garbage, most of which involves having Mary blunder from one situation to the next (again, much like Tiffany's uselessness in the final part of Diamonds are Forever).  She knocks Scaramanga's henchman into a liquid helium tank, starting a reaction that eventually destroys the island, and nearly kills Bond as he attempts to retrieve the solar power device by sitting on the button that turns on the powerful heat energy beam.  And all this is stupid anyway - Scaramanga having been killed, do you really think I'm going to be worried that Bond will be burned up by a heat beam with three minutes left in the film?  The lair and island blow up, much like the conclusions of Dr. No and You Only Live Twice.  Bond and Mary escape to Scaramanga's junk, and are about to consummate their relationship when Nick Nack shows up, ready to kill Bond for destroying his inheritance.  Bond eventually traps Nick Nack in a suitcase and hangs him from the mast in a cage.  M calls a phone on board the junk - how did he get the number? - and asks to speak to Mary.  "She's just coming," Bond says.  Insert enormous groan here.

No, it's not as ridiculously awful as Live and Let Die.  But The Man with the Golden Gun might actually have less plot.  The main villain doesn't actually have a quarrel with Bond until the final 30 minutes or so - before that, the whole thing is almost more of a series of coincidences.  In the book, Bond gets amnesia following the volcano eruption at the end of You Only Live Twice and is eventually brainwashed by the KGB into trying to kill M, and after being deprogrammed is sent after Scaramanga as a way of proving his loyalty to MI-6, with the implication that MI-6 aren't sure he'll survive and figure that's as good a way to get rid of him as any.  Bond - not a freaking worldwide celebrity in the novels - is able to go undercover in Scaramanga's outfit and eventually struggles with the decision to kill him in cold blood.  Because the novel relied so heavily on previous books, the film had to rewrite pretty much the entire plot - and this is what they came up with, a jumbled mess of retreads and callbacks to fill out a slim narrative featuring one of the series' least menacing villains to date.  Don't get me wrong - Christopher Lee himself brings a great air of icy menace to the role, as he tends to.  But the character is not scary.  His credentials as the world's deadliest assassin are laid out, but because he and Bond barely interact until the final showdown, there's a detached nature to his supposed reign of terror.  He's certainly not so threatening that action scenes needed to be broken up with ludicrous comic relief.  His evil plan... well, it isn't even all that evil, is it?  Considering we're only just now getting viable mass-produced electric cars, oil companies trying to spike alternative energy sources isn't so unrealistic as to be a Bond-villain-worthy scheme.  The solar weapon, maybe, but there's really not much hint that Scaramanga can or would use it on a larger scale.

Actual exchange during this scene:
Alma: "James Bond and J.W. Pepper will return!"
Robert: "In The Spy Who Annoyed Me."

It's no wonder this was one of the lowest-grossing Bond movies.  Does anyone really go to a Bond movie to see this kind of thing?  Okay, he gets down with a couple hot women and there are various one-liners (though they seem to have been curbed a bit on this film, perhaps in part because Bond only kills one guy in the whole movie), but there are only three legit action sequences - two are ruined by a noisy redneck, and the third is a kung fu sequence that simply belongs in a different movie.  (Grabbing from whatever was popular at the time seems to have been a hallmark of Bond films in the 70s, such as when they bumped up Moonraker to try to capitalize on the desire for films involving outer space.)  There just isn't that much going on and yet things drag out for two hours, all to culminate with a final showdown during which the two main characters are almost never on screen together and which is over in less than ten minutes.  The producers seemed to realize that Scaramanga wouldn't be a good enough villain unless they gave him a classic lair, but there's little to suggest that the character would actually want or need a lair like that.  And so on and so forth.  The '70s weren't very good years for music, fashion, or Bond movies, apparently.  There are still two more '70s Bonds to go, but based on Moonraker's reputation, it looks like it's up to The Spy Who Loved Me to salvage the decade.

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