The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) has some redeeming qualities. For example, the film never subjects us to a shootout where Bond survives unscathed despite being absurdly outnumbered by men with automatic weapons (see, off the top of my head, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Living Daylights, No Time To Die* - all of which I think are super in spite of this glaring break in "realism" - as well as all the Brosnans, which, um, exist). Instead, the climax features Britt Ekland in a bikini. Brilliant trade 10/10.
*Look, it's not an automatic weapon that gets him, so it counts, shut up.
It stars Roger Moore as James Bond, except the script seems to be a recycled Connery in terms of his characterization (not the last time one of an actor's weakest Bond films looks like it was written for his predecessor - looking at you, Skyfall). It also stars Christopher Lee as the badhat and Maud Adams as the Other Girl - she'll be back in Octolowerlips, and he'll be in two turn-of-the-millennium trilogies where he's a former good wizard turned evil secondary villain who's quickly killed off at the start of the third film. Which is weird that that happened twice. The villain's name is some variant on Francis, which is weird because that happens again, twice (Licence to Kill and Spectre, in case you tried to forget).
It's set in Thailand-pretending-to-be-Hong-Kong, wherein a Chinese billionaire employs a pair of Japanese Sumo wrestlers for indeterminate reasons. One wonders how the Chinese feel about this cultural chop suey. (Looks at calendar, sees it's the 26th month of "two weeks to flatten the curve.") No, wait, I don't care what the Chinese think about this or anything else. They're welcome to it.
Quick observation, though: both here and in You Only Live Twice, the ChiComs are pretty blatantly set up as the villain's geopolitical sponsor. Just what they get out of having Dr. Evil start WWIII is a bit of a mystery, and I'm a bit perplexed at how Fleming, who kept banging on about the Russians, sold his hero to filmmakers (let's be generous with that description; this is The Man With the Golden Gun we're talking about) more afraid of Red China.
With the benefit of hindsight, sure, but at the time, they're just GETTING BOND WRONG THIS WILL NOT DO NO NOT AT ALL. Then again, this is Roger Moore's Bond, and Roger Moore's Bond is absolutely a Russian agent, as will become more obvious once General Gogol shows up in the subsequent offerings.
So the plots, once they're all unfolded and stretched out like a sunbathing Ms. Anders, are these: Britain is experiencing an energy crisis because it's run out of gas (shouldn't of ended the previous one on a fart joke, then). The Solex Agitator can fix this by being an efficient solar cell. Scaramanga, the baddie, wants it so he can sell it to the highest bidder - mate, you work for the ChiComs, copyright ain't exactly their thing. Scaramanga also happens to be the world's best assassin (since he's the criminal mastermind and the top henchman, this film has a relative paucity of villains especially compared to its immediate predecessor - starting to think the budget went to Christopher Lee's salary, cuz God knows where else it could have gone - Britt Ekland's dietician? Roger Moore's tailor?) who doesn't actually have a hit out on Bond, but his kept woman, Andrea Anders, makes Bond think he does so Bond will rescue her. Except Bond's having a bit of an identity crisis in this one and thinks he's Sean Connery, and while Roger Moore plays this sort of thing for laughs in The Cannonball Run - which, trivia fans, you'll have to watch if you want to see Moore drive an Aston - it's all a tad unsettling here.
But then bizarre decisions abound, from Anders not telling Bond that she sent him the golden bullet that got him involved in this whole mess in the first place, to Scaramanga using a private yacht with sealed empty wine bottles and a telephone number that M has (what?), to the curious decision to use real actors to portray Scaramanga's funhouse mannequins (that's Roger Moore's body double, whom we'll see again in the opening of Octofunpocket deliberately and probably in every other film inadvertently, as the cowboy). Why does Scaramanga have a funhouse full of mannequins? The obvious answer is "so Bond can switch places as one and catch him unawares, tee hee," to which my response is that I wasn't a hook-handed villain in the previous one. Although the presence of the waxwork does appear to confirm that in the universe of The Man With The Golden Gun at least, James Bond does look identical to Roger Moore, which would raise all sorts of Tracy-related continuity problems but for the fact that this film never gets referenced by any of the others except maybe Die Another Day.
Baffle-tastic. Almost as though they ran out of cogent ideas halfway through. Which, given this film's production schedule, they probably did. If you were born after, say, 1960, you've never experienced new Bond Films in back-to-back years unless you were watching this when you should have been watching Doctor Who (a television show that just happens to have got its most iconic and longest-serving lead actor the same year this film came out).
But if Live and Let Die is a clever reheating of Dr. No, The Man With the Golden Gun is the recycled bathwater of From Russia With Love. Bond and his commie-trained assassin dark-side-of-Bond chase each other around a plot about a woman and a bit of tech whose relevance is quickly forgotten, except this time around Christopher Lee uses it to make a laserbeam out of sunlight. Makes sense; he is Dracula after all, probably wants everyone else as scared of the big sky fire ball as he is.
Ah, yes, the Flemingesque notion that the badhat has to have some sort of physical deformity rears its head again here, and at least we do something a tad more interesting than will be done with Stromberg's webbed fingers - get it, he lives underwater, do you get it? Do you get it? This does at least let Q participate without giving us something truly ridiculous, like a watch that's a magnet but also a buzz-saw. Q now has an assistant who lasts all of one film (something that repeats itself a few times with various MI6 staff throughout the Moorera) and it does actually work, though probably for the best that he didn't become a regular, he'd run out of things to do faster than Moneypenny did (is she in this? She must be. Ah yes, at the beginning when they're talking about how 002 died).
This is the last Bond Film made in Made-For-TV-Movie Widescreen instead of Cinematic Widescreen, and the last to rely on the talents of director Guy Hamilton (and, officially, writer Tom Mankiewicz, although he probably did do a first draft of the next one). Doesn't feel like the end of an era, because Roger's only barely got started - he does finally get to wear a tuxedo in this one, going an entire film and a quarter without, making him take the third-longest of all the Bonds to wear one (Casino Royale being approximately three years long, and GoldenEye having a nine-year gap - encompassing within the entire Dalton Era - between the cold open and the rest of the film). Another "end of an era" here is that it's the last consecutive one (Moonraker will also do this) to style the credits as "[Actor] as James Bond 007 in Ian Fleming's [Title]" instead of "[Actor] as Ian Fleming's James Bond 007 in [Title]," since they're running out of books. Is this truly Ian Fleming's The Man With the Golden Gun? Dunno; never read it ('sokay; Fleming never finished it). Suspect not, given what little I know of the plot involves a post-You Only Live Twice amnesiac Bond getting brainwashed by the Russians, programmed to kill M, fails, and has to redeem himself by taking down Scaramanga, which is about as far away from the setup of this film as you can get.
Oh very well, let's talk about the cast. Christopher Lee gets less interesting the more he speaks, but that's the script's fault, and he very nearly makes it work anyway. Maud Adams was good enough to get an encore in Octosnatch, and Britt Ekland does look positively smashing in a bikini, which is her only job here, so well done. Hrm. It says something about [REDACTED - POLITICS] that Live and Let Die gets pigeonholed as "the super-offensive one" when its treatment of its Black characters looks positively progressive compared to The Man With the Golden Gun's treatment of women. Maybe "it's Bond, and therefore expected," but I don't recall even the most useless Connery girl pressing the wrong button with her bottom for a cheap gag. Yes, Diamonds Are Forever is positively ghastly on the treatment of women and the use of bikinis thereto, but Diamonds is also the worse film; this one has some redeeming qualities.
Examples: genuine tension as Bond/the audience think Scaramanga's out to kill him (the shower perv/arm twisting notwithstanding, the first Bond/Andrea encounter is a highlight) and later again outside the Bottoms Up, a villain (Hi Fat (yes, really) out-thinking Bond at speed chess), and the kung fu bit is quintessential Roger Moore Bond Film Fare, although one wonders why they saw fit to inflict another boat chase on us so soon after the previous one. Which brings us to the elephant ("Elephant? We're Democrats, Maybelle") in the room: Sheriff Pepper's back! Of all the decisions, recasting Felix Leiter every film but giving this caricature not one but two films to flatulate at us, how very dare they. But knowing more about the behind-the-scenes workings than is healthy, this does not surprise. There was quite a long stretch of time post-Goldfinger where The Powers That Were kept thinking what a good idea it would be to bring back Gert Frobe as Goldfinger's brother, because apparently that was The Key To All The Moolah We Done Made. For every questionable decision that was averted, we should allow them one that slipped through.
Speaking of slipped through, a word on the censorship, or rather the lack of it. The skinny-dipping ("Chu Mi," yeah, sure) is obvious, but consider: Scaramanga makes love before he shoots his load, and blatantly treats the Golden Gun as a stand-in for his Little Francis during his love scene with Andrea (he practically puts it in her mouth, for God's sake*), only my word that's a small caliber (.165), which would only work if he knows exactly where to aim and never misses, which is his forte - size doesn't matter, if you will. And - yes, I know this joke has been done - two schoolgirls beat off a load of men in pajamas. Not sure what we're to make of this, and a subsequent line about a "screwoff" doesn't help matters.
*There's a weird early-Moore fixation with oral sex, actually. That and Chu Mi, the "lick you into shape" joke in Live and Let Die, the shark that takes a moment before eating a girl (er) to shove its head in her crotch in The Spy Who Loved Me, and "Holly Goodhead" in Moonraker. Yikes. What's doubly concerning is that they switched writers in the midst of all this, so it isn't just one perv. Thank Christ they cut this out when the Bond-Girl age gap started getting into cradle-robbing territory. Ew.
Is it a bad film? Yes, yes it is, but not in the same sense that Skyfall or Spectre are bad films, or even, to labor a point, Die Another Day, the other entry featuring a talking bikini and a solar-powered death ray. ('ang about. Britt Ekland providing the fanservice in a 70s film where Christopher Lee wants to burn things and kill an English lawman? Sumer is icumen in.) This one is neither part of an ongoing story nor a celebration of All That Has Come Before. It exists, infuriatingly. Even more infuriatingly, it exhibits occasional flashes of genuine quality. The bits where Scaramanga puts his gun together as an oblivious Hi Fat (what) or Bond prattles on, those are good. Repurposing the wreck of that ocean liner as an MI6 base is clever, though it does call to mind the wacky canted angles of that one section of Casino Royale 1967 (there, I mentioned it. Let us never speak of it again). Any time Maud Adams is onscreen things perk up a bit (fnar). Once she's done, the film's lost for purpose. Probably why they brought her back for Octosquishbox, but that's another story (note that that review is hella old before you assume that it reflects my current view on the film). Other than that it's a fun hate-watch, and even then, the Pepper scenes are absolute cringe.
Here's one: Bond spends the first bit of the film tracking down the bullet that killed 002, so Q can examine it and send Bond to find the guy who made it. Except hang on, Bond's been sent one of Scaramanga's bullets. So this scene where Bond very clumsily tries to steal the bullet from a dancer's belly button (what) is completely superfluous to the plot.
Who was it made for? Bond Fans, that nebulous entity that tolerates a franchise that encompasses Moonraker and Quantum of Solace, and I already did that bit in the No Time To Die one. Why was this film made? Well, because they were almost out of books, it was either this or Moonraker, and nobody knew how to do a decent adaptation of Moonraker since it's that rare literary Bond that never ventures outside Britain (for a more complete answer on how to adapt Moonraker, see Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Yes, really). Why was it made this way? Well, the last one did "rather good," made more money than the Connery swan song, so let's have a repeat. I confess to actually enjoying the totally deranged title song - whatever you want to call it, it's the logical extension of having Macca blather on about this ever changing world in which we live in. And as for the lyrics - yes, the Golden Gun he'll "shoot anyone" with, "who will he bang?" yes it's blatantly a stand-in for that "something" that "came up" at the end of this film (and the beginning of the next, cheeky recyclers) - but they're no less juvenile than those of "Diamonds are Forever."
Where'd it all go so wrong? Moore and Lee and Adams are good at their craft on the basis of their performances here and elsewhere, Ekland is, if nothing else, good to look at in a bikini, which is, let's not mince words, her sole function for the last act (having bemoaned the Mankiewicz treatment of women earlier I now have license to partake, that's how this works). The plot, as indicated, is a gentle ripoff of From Russia, one of the franchise's standout entries. The elements are there. As is, personified in the waxwork dummy, a clear indication of how it's all going to go (here I'm not referring to the obvious "he's going to switch places with the dummy" "plot twist," but rather the appearance of Roger's terrible facelift in A View to a Kill). Actually, weirdly, the film does a "pose as a dummy" trick twice; did Bond learn it from Nick Nack?
One (me) suspects, but cannot prove, that the friction between Messrs. Broccoli and Saltzman had reached its breaking point; this was Harry the Salt's last Bond Film. Did that permeate the making of? Am not knowing; am, frankly, not caring. I've put about as much thought and care into this review as the makers did into the subject matter thereof. Ta-ta.
No comments:
Post a Comment