Prole Hole vs James Bond

MarkInTexas Oh yea, Photobucket can go fuck themselves. I mentioned this over on my R.E.M. thread but they want four hundred bucks for what amounts to copy-pasting a link. Fuck. That. I have grudgingly moved to Imgur, and will update the posters at some point in the near future. Ahem....

Live And Let Die (1973)



Connery’s gone! Yes, again! So rather than a hard-nosed Scot or a slightly effete Australian, step forward instead the debonair, smooth and decidedly English Roger Moore, who takes over the role for the first time. But can his first outing hit the highs of Connery’s tenure? Or will he get lost in the slush like Lazenby?

Pre-Existing Prejudices: Well it’s the Blaxploitation one, isn’t it? James Bond coming up against the then-popular genre certainly isn’t an obvious combination, and there’s no denying the Bond series has generally struggled when it comes to displaying other cultures. I haven’t seen this in a very long time, so whether the racial or cultural politics stand the test of time I don’t know, but I do at least remember a few decent performances. And one which very, very much isn’t (can you guess who that might be?)

The Actual Movie:
Gun barrel! Theme! And there he is, the first, ahem, shot of Roger! Then a shot of the New York skyline to the UN, and some parping brass! We pan across a lot of diplomats (Honduras is looking rather natty), to the UK delegate. Then a… thing is attached to his ear peace and he dies somewhat comically. Before we get a chance to consider this, we’re off to New Orleans for a funeral procession, outside the pun-tastic Fillet Of Soul. And a man smoking on the corner, who makes the, frankly stupid, mistake of asking whose funeral it is. Yours! Then the jazz kicks in. It’s a bit silly but its fairly well handled. Then we’re off San Monique and some voodoo because… well, anyway. A random white guy is tied to a poll as the rhythm increases and gets bitten by a snake… and we’re off to the titles, and a new, upcoming musician named Paul McCartney. He’s no Shirley Bassey, that’s for sure.

So when we return we open on Bond, with a “fabulously hi-tech” digital watch, and a lady speaking Italian draped over him. It is, we assume, Bond’s pad. This Bond has a line in yellow dressing-gowns that’s deeply unfortunate, though no worse than some of the things Connery had to wear. “In… somnia?” Bond asks after an inopportune early-in-the-morning visit from M. “In… structions” he's told.  Heh. Three agents have been killed, M tells us, since he’s turned up to deliver the exposition. They make a big fuss about the coffee, then Moneypenny turns up as the allegedly Italian lady hides in the wardrobe. There’s a bit of faffing about with a magnetic watch – wonder if that will come in useful later? – then off M and Moneypenny toddle. It gives us the rough outline of the story, and at least it’s not another scene in M’s office, I guess.

Bond’s off to New York, so we get another damned airport – JFK this time – and Bond’s picked up by a driver. That means, of course, another Felix Leiter (substantially better than the last one – it’s David Hedison off of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea), on the end of a carphone at this point. They’re on the trail of Kananga, but the chauffeur is taken out by a passing large African American gentleman (who remains anonymous at this point) in a phenomenal pimpmobile that shoots darts out of its wing-mirrors. There’s a bit of car action on FDR once the driver passes out, and it eventually scrapes to a halt sort-of safely. Moore calling Felix for help is certainly not how Connery would have played it, but it’s good. Bond goes to the registered address for the car that attacked him the “Oh Cult Voodoo shop” (now that’s a bad pun). Fatty from the car turns up and Bond follows out the back to the white pimpmobile. Back to Kananga, and a lift hidden behind a wardrobe, which makes its way to the underground lot Bond is. Bond follows it out to the street and jumps in a New York taxi following a different – and somehow even more pimpy pimpmobile – and we get the Bond theme as they head up to Harlem. It seems like every black person in NYC has a radio, and all know each other, and that Bond is to be stopped (“right on, brother!” say the impressively-sideburned taxi driver – OK, we get it), which is deeply unfortunate since it has the effect of making every black person on screen so far a bad guy. So in Bond walks, the only white person in Fillet Of Soul’s Harlem branch (it’s a chain, apparently). He gets stuck in a rotating booth (A Thing, it seems) and gets to meet Solitaire for the first time. The cards claim she and Bond will be lovers, but you don’t exactly need to see the future to know that’s going to happen. Moore gets his first “Bond… James Bond” line, which he delivers well. We get a demonstration of Tee Hee (though not named as such in that scene) and his Claw Of Strength. Solatare’s introduction isn’t terrific though, she’s terribly low-key, and Jane Seymour makes next to zero impression. Mr Big puts in a brief appearance – “Take him out and waste the honkey!” We get a bit of back-alley action then a CIA cop sort-of rescues Bond. We get a bit of explanation, then…

Off to San Moniquie we go, and Geoffrey Holder turns up as Baron Samedi to do that thing he does (camp it up on stage, at this point), and Bond checks in to his hotel. “Mrs Bond” is waiting apparently… There’s a slightly crap attempt at assassination with a snake as Bond takes a bath, and the champagne is delivered by our portly gentleman with the pimpmobile from earlier. Bond lights a cigar (!), as the snake approaches and it gets promptly torched by some rather fiery aftershave. Then the next feeble agent turns up, Rosie, and she’s relatively sassy until she sees a hat with some bloody feathers, at which point she becomes a shrieking stereotype who needs to be comforted through the night. Along with breakfast, Bond gets a tarot card. Moore’s sky-blue jeans and jacket is quite, quite awful. They hire a boat (well not hire, as it turns out it’s another agent running it). Rosie does her best Pam Grier impression – it’s not fantastic, to be honest – and we see Kananga’s house from the sea. Solitaire does a bit of tarot card reading (“is it death?” Kananga demands of her and she lies and says yes). They get to the island and drive inshore – Bond works out Rosie’s lying because she misidentifies a location, which is stupid, and after a quickie, she sees another voodoo doll, panics, makes a break for it and gets shot. So that’s it for Rosie. Pathetic. Off to Kananga again, and a bit of stuff of little consequence, then we cut to Bond smoking a cigar from a hand-glider (being kept in the air by the boat) then on cue he glides onto the island, while also kicking a guy off a cliff. Um. Bond sits in Solitaire’s seat while Jane Seymour struggles to look angry, or indeed anything at all. The “007” motif on the back of the playing cards is deeply unfortunate. Bond finally gets her in to bed with a whole deck of tarot cards which are all “the lovers” (does he just carry that around in case he needs to seduce someone of the voodoo faith?), and it’s made quite clear Solitaire is a virgin and by taking that from her, Bond has removed her “power”. She’s deeply upset by this. Bond tries to get information from her, but that’s a dead end – like Seymour’s acting – then Solitaire’s suddenly not upset any more and wants another go-round with Bond. It’s appalling characterization and gender politics.

The next day they follow some scarecrows to a church, and Kananga is informed by another stereotype character that Bond and Solitaire are on their way. They’re followed across the island (and briefly threatened by a helicopter) then head off in a knackered old double decker bus. Like you do. They’re followed by a few cops on bikes who aren’t so much defeated as all do comedy stunt falls so Bond can escape. Then a couple of cop cars get in on the action… and we get the famous “low bridge” stunt with the top of the bus getting ripped off, which honestly looks quite good. They make it to the boat, and leg it. Oh. I thought they were going to Kananga? See that’s what happens when you don’t bother to explain things clearly. Solitaire is upset again, the suddenly is not. What’s wrong with this woman? Anyway we’re off to New Orleans again, because there’s “a connection” we’re told. They get in a cab at the airport (yes, another airport) and it’s being driven by the impressively-sideburned cabbie from Harlem, who’s taking them to see Mr Big.  Except not, because instead the go to a rural airport (that's three in one movie now).  Bond’s being threatened with being thrown out of a plane so makes a not-great break for it and tries to escape in a little Cessna driven by a comedy old lady. There’s a bit of car-chasing-plane action on the ground and they trash some hardware, which looks fun but, well, not exactly essential. Finally we get Bond and Felix together – Bond has a horrible beige shirt on – and the Fillet Of Soul is being staked out again while a familiar looking funeral procession comes along… but this time we finally make it inside and Bond and Felix investigate (“had a nasty turn in a booth”) and we get a stage singer doing this movie’s Bond theme, for some reason. Bond this time vanishes into the floor (“Thanks for dropping in”), which is all kinds of hilarious, and Bond gets to meet Mr Big and his elaborate arm-holding chair. Solitaire is there, and Mr Big reveals himself to be… Kananga all along. Two tonnes of heroin is revealed to be his angle, he wants to use it to get people hooked, then raise the price. Kananga tests to see if Solitaire still (still!) has her powers reading the serial number of Bond’s watch, with a wrong answer threatening Bond’s pinkie. Solitaire gets it right, and Bond gets his watch back, but he’s knocked out and taken “to the farm”. Kananga slaps Solitaire for her betrayal…

Then we’re at a crocodile farm. Where the heroin is being produced. In, I would like to stress, a crocodile farm. Tee Hee dramatically opens a can with his claw thing, and feeds the crocodiles, which swarm. It’s not exactly an implied threat, is it? Bond being stranded on a small island is actually rather well done, as he’s left standing there while the bridge slowly retracts (it’s the fact that it’s slow that makes it work, because the reveal is subtle). Then there’s a bit of misdirection – Bond uses his magnet watch to try and pull a boat to him, only for it to be tied off, then he gets to run across the back of some crocs to make it to land. It’s in keeping with some parts of the film, silly but not quite silly enough to be too hard to believe. The crocs are let loose in the farm, lured in by some chicken, then Bond torches the place. He steals a speedboat and heads for the bayou, so that means we’re getting a speedboat chase. There’s some well-shot action here and there’s a nice little ramp jump thingy. But, just in case we were in danger of quality being sustained, here comes Sheriff J.W. Pepper to fuck it up. Hearing Pepper calling a black man “boy” is very uncomfortable (especially since the black man in question doesn’t even bristle at it, as if that’s how black people should always be referred to), but we get an even bigger jump from the speedboat which looks genuinely impressive, and the sheriff gets a speedboat in his car (though sadly not his head). The sheriff shoots Bond’s engine by mistake, there’s a bit of shenanigans with him getting a replacement boat and losing one tail… but then the chase is back on. Oh, and Pepper’s following as well. The local po-lice have set up a “road-block” on the river but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them the faster boats could just drive through the small flimsy ones. This is all going on far too long, and that’s long before we find out Pepper’s cousin is called “Billy-Bob”. Because of course he is. Comedy wedding gets ruined. Don’t care. Some comedy oyster farmer driving slow. Don’t care. Some more boats-go-over-land stuff that we’ve already seen. Don’t care. Cars crash. Don’t care. Finally the boat chase comes to an end with a fireball or something, but honestly I wandered off to get a glass of wine at that point. Anyway Felix meets Bond at the quayside (beside a very unfunny “3mph speed limit” sign), and then we’re off to (and I’m quoting here) “voodoo land” again.

Felix drops Bond on the island, there’s some “native dancing” as Bond looks on, then Solitaire is dragged out and swung about the place. She’s going to be sacrificed (presumably to the gods of poor casting decisions). Oh here comes a coffin full of snakes, one of which is held up and danced about the place a bit. Solitaire is threatened with it, Bond is about to take a pot-shot at it, then… a top hat is brought out. What? It’s placed in front of a grave, then Baron Samedi gets to rise out of the grave (vertically), and there’s a pause. His eyes snap open, the chanting resumes, and Bond loses patience and opens fire. Bond shoots Samedi, whose head cracks open like pottery, then his body shatters. It’s very strange. Bond frees Solitaire, sadly, then another Samedi rises from a different grave. Now obviously this isn’t explained, so was the first one just a special effect, or is voodoo real, or… anyway Samedi inevitably ends up in the coffin full of snakes for an especially hammy death, while Bond and Solitaire make their escape by the grave-lift-thing. They make their way into some tunnels, and of course Kananga is hanging about the place through a steel door with some champagne. We have a shark gun full of compressed air bullets explained at us, while the fat guy from earlier gets knocked off his sofa (I should point out that in the credits he’s called Whisper, because he, um, whispers, but I don’t recall the name actually being used on-screen). Underground monorail! Bond and Solitaire are tied to a metal frame, and Kananga cuts Bond so the blood will attract… sharks! It’s another “just kill him already!” moment, even more than the one we already had at the crocodile farm. Bond does the magnet thing with his watch to get a compressed air bullet (lucky nothing else metal flies towards him and give the game away), and… release the sharks! But just in the nick of time it turns out Bond’s watch can also spin round really fast and cut rope, a previously un-alluded-to function. There’s a brief, rather rubbish, fight between Kananga and Bond before they both fall into the water, Bond pushes the compressed air capsule into Kananga's mouth and inflates him like a balloon so he flies up into the ceiling and explodes, for one of the all-time stupidest deaths in cinema history. Bond and Solitaire head off on the train, playing cards, and we get the usual end-of-movie seduction scene… ah but, in case you thought this nonsense was over, Tee Hee is in a mailbag! He shorts out the train’s electrics, and Seymour has to deliver the line “for the first time in my life…I feel like a complete woman” which, to be fair, nobody could deliver well, and as she witters on, Tee Hee breaks in and just shuts her in the overhead bed. Quite right too. There then follows the only even slightly convincing fight of the movie, and one which Bond actually has to think his way out of, cutting the tendons on Tee Hee’s claw and hooking him (ha!) in place. He’s thrown out the window, and when Bond lets Solitaire out of the bed she’s too stupid to realize there was a fight going on… Moore gets one more pun (“just being disarming”), and… then Baron Samedi is sitting on the front of the train and laughing. It’s pleasingly unusual and makes fuck all sense, but that hardly seems inappropriate at this stage, does it?

In Conclusion:
Live And Let Die is an absolute complete and utter mess. Moments (not a lot of them, but still) of greatness co-exist with moments of forehead-slapping stupidity, with very little differentiation between them. And there’s very little sense of an actual story here, which for a series of movies that tend to lean heavily on narrative propulsion is a bit of a flaw. That lack of a cohesive story is at least in part covered up by the fact that, if nothing else, Live And Let Die is for the most part a snappily put together film that rarely lingers in one place long enough to get boring, and it avoids all of the bad production mistakes that dragged down the last two outings. That means no terrible day-for-night shooting, no awful rear-projection, and the camera here is often very mobile, giving a closeness to a lot of the scenes. That’s especially useful when Bond veers (somewhat unexpectedly) into Harlem, lending a certain grittiness to the proceedings that help make it seem like a convincing location. It’s strange to see a dapper gentleman like Moore in a back-alley that looks like it belongs in Super-Fly, and it’s certainly uncharted territory for the franchise and it’s a credit to all involved (but especially to Moore) that he somehow doesn’t look out of place in the collapsing rubble and urban desolation of the back streets, but instead uses his fists and smarts to try and get out of a sticky situation. Guy Hamilton, back at the helm again, proves to be a good match for the material here, and whether the camera’s wandering through San Monique’s jungle or proceeding down a New Orelans boulevard, this time out he does a fine job of keeping things going – it’s hard to imagine this is the same person that directed the hollow, weightless proceedings of Diamonds Are Forever, but whatever other flaws Live And Let Die has, its direction is certainly not one of them. A genre collision between Bond and Blaxploitation is in no way an obvious thing to do, so respect to Hamilton for managing to make this look like it almost, just about, seem to make sense.

But no director in the world could manage to compensate for the script, which is straight-up lousy. Actually describing the plot is relatively straightforward – Bond is sent to investigate the deaths of three agents on loan to the Americans, and gets caught up in a drug cartel operation run by Dr Kananga of San Monique, who’s posing as Mr Big in the U.S. to control operations there, so Bond stops him. Sounds simple, right? But the film demonstrates little to no interest in actually pursuing this plot. Oh we get references to it from time to time, but really the movie just wants to shift from one set piece to another and uses everything else as an excuse to do that. It should be a huge, dramatic reveal when we discover that Mr Big is in fact Kananga in disguise, but mostly it just elicits a shrug of a reaction and idle wondering about how long it took him to get into that rubber mask. Or why he bothered and didn’t just employ someone. The problem is we’ve barely even seen Mr Big by the time Kananga’s revealed to be the self-same person, so there’s no impact when the reveal happens. That’s not a unique factor here – the same is true when Rosie turns out to have been a double agent. She’s hardly been on screen for five minutes, so when she gets the inevitable, “they’ll kill me if I tell you!” line we haven’t spent enough time with her to really care whether she lives or dies in the first place. And then she does die, and we’re off to the Wonderful World Of Bad Acting, as Jane Seymour does her best to make an impression, and fails miserably. Remember when, back in Thunderball, we had Domino, a character who was noticeably similar to Solitare – an obviously-abused woman kept in a gilded cage by a man she’s clearly terrified of and unable to escape – who eventually gains agency and takes out her abuser? Well, don’t go looking for any of that here. Thunderball wasn’t a good movie, but at least Domino acted as a bit of a corrective to all that tedious underwater stuff. Solitare, on the other hand, is like bit of damp tissue paper by comparison – feeble, wet and almost entirely useless. To pull off a character like Solitaire you need an actor of incredible skill, someone who can find the depths of this woman’s psyche and suggest the internal war that wages between the beliefs of her past and the temptations of the future. Instead we get Jane Seymour, who’s making a very credible stab at being one of the worst actors the series has yet given us. That she has no rapport with Moore is unfortunate, though hardly surprising, but she has no rapport with anyone. She doesn’t look scared with Kananga (well, not convincingly), she often barely seems to be in the same room as Moore when they’re together, has very little interaction with any of the other characters, and she’s just flatly incapable of delivering on this role. Her inclusion here is a huge miscalculation.

One has to feel desperately sorry for Moore in all of this. Live And Let Die gives him precious little time to really establish his Bond, and as a result he gets a bit lost in the shuffle, despite acres of screen-time. It’s not really his fault – this happened to Connery at times as well – but the problem is that Bond gets very few actual character moments, so oftentimes this could be almost anyone going through the motions. There’s nothing about this script that demands that it’s Bond in the middle of it at all, rather than Simon Templar, or John Drake, or Steed and Mrs Peel, or… well, anyone really. What Moore needed for his first outing was something a bit more… well, I’m loathe to say traditional, but Connery got Dr No as his first outing.  It’s a fairly standard piece of spy caper action, and it shares a similar Caribbean location, but it’s one in which Connery and Bond have a chance to grow and breathe, to define themselves without having to struggle round an over-burdensome plot. Moore rarely gets that chance here, which is frustrating, because there are a couple of moments when his interpretation of the character really gets to shine through. It’s clear that the production have decided to move in a different direction with Moore’s Bond and are consciously taking a lighter approach to the material – rather than trying to cast someone in a similar mould to Connery’s hard-man routine they instead go for someone who’s a contrast. That feels like the right approach, and Moore’s lightness of touch does get a couple of moments when it really works – his nonchalant smoking of a cigar while hanging beneath a hand-glider, or the run-across-the-backs-of-the-crocodiles moment in the farm are somewhat preposterous, but crucially they’re the right kind of preposterous to make this more light-hearted approach work. It’s daft, but just about believable. Kananga can still be a threat, but a lighter Bond, hiding the steel rather than brashly showing it off, is an interesting approach to the character. Right before Bond and Kananga plunge into the shark pool at the end of the movie, there’s a moment where Moore’s Bond is all but beckoning Kananga to attack him, and Moore looks both furious and like he’s really going to enjoy killing this thug. It’s just a few seconds long, but it’s a terrific moment, the light charade dropped to show the real agent within. That’s what this film needs more of, those moments that give Moore the scope to define the character as the same, yet necessarily different, from his predecessor. What he gets instead is instantly-dated-on-arrival movie tropes, a rote script that just barely makes sense and hardly seems to care one way or another where it does, an appalling co-star, and a lot of “we should be afraid of black people chanting on an island” clichés. Moore struggles with the seduction scenes – there’s no moment that he will ever make a convincing Lothario, unlike Connery – but scaling back on that, while giving the character other areas to work in would have been a much more successful approach. Yet almost in spite of the often-dreadful material he has to work with, it’s impossible not to warm to Moore’s Bond here. The man himself radiates screen presence even when absolutely nothing around him does. The way he’s able to look natural and like he fits in, whether in a concrete jungle or an actual jungle, is a real testament to the skill Moore brings to the role, and in this at least the film find some kind of reason to exist. Yes, the love scenes are bad, but then again there’s no way Connery could have pulled off the Harlem setting even slightly, so at least there we get a good demonstration of what Moore can bring to the role that his predecessor couldn’t. He works well in the few scenes he gets with Yaphet Kotto as well – in fact Kotto’s terrific as Kananga, so it’s a great shame he doesn’t get more screen time with Moore, or simply a better film to appear in, because this load of old rubbish seems well beneath him.

Of course, the race relations here are simply horrible. Not just in a “looking back on the past” sort of way, but it must have been possible for someone in 1973 to realize that basically every single black character in this film is bad, and not a single white character is.  Sheriff Pepper - symptomatic of absolutely everything wrong with this movie, and an absolute categorical disaster - still manages to be basically on the "right" side, even though his actions get in Bond's way, and he's the "worst" white character we get! And not one black character manages to be redeemable.  Even nearly-sympathetic characters like Rosie turn out to be double agents – there is an inter-racical love scene between her and Bond, which is something I suppose and basically a first for the series (You Only Live Twice gets a near miss for its opening few minutes), but that’s not much in the way of a mitigating factor given what else is going on. And of course crucially Rosie isn’t even the “main” Bond girl – we won’t get a black principal female in the series until Halle Berry turns up in the 2002 (!), and Kananga remains the only black principal antagonist even now. So just to count them off – every single African American character in New York is out to get Bond, our principal villain is black, his two principal henchpeople are black, the double-agent is black, and as for the voodoo island of San Monique… I mean, where to begin? It’s every woo-woo native caricature imaginable – even the name of the island implies a colonial past, with Great White Saviour Bond sweeping into rescue the poor white woman from the clutches of the evil black people who rule. Oh and of course Kananga is deeply superstitious, believes in “the cards” and the island is littered with “dolls” and “scarecrows”, some of which have camera eyes and handy built-in traitor-dispatching guns. This is all openly racist, in other words, in a way that no Bond has even been until now, not even with Connery in slanty-eye make-up. Fear the black man, this film tells us, because you can be sure he’s up to no good, no matter where in the world he is. It’s hard to imagine that Bond looking uncomfortable in a Harlem soul food joint would be one of the least racist elements in the whole movie, but here we are. At least the pimpmobiles in Harlem look cool – the stuff on San Monique is just every lazy racial cliché of voodoo you could think of. It’s awful.

So yes, Live And Let Die is bad. Often very bad, and occasionally as bad as the Bond series will ever get. In it’s tone-deaf, clumsy handling of race and gender the film is an absolute categorical failure. It’s well shot, for the most part uses it’s locations well, and occasionally even manages to be compelling which helps cover at least some of the deficiencies on show here, but it’s all in the service of absolutely nothing. As a launch vehicle for Moore’s lighter, more easy-going interpretation of Bond it’s an outright disaster, giving the man himself too few moments to show why we should care now that he’s in the driving seat, and rarely letting us witness how this new Bond is going to work. None of that is remotely Moore’s fault, and his avuncular, charming version of the character is the sole redeeming feature of a film that is 100% dependent on the charisma of its leading man not to sink without trace. Moore deserved better. The audience deserved better. Everyone deserved better.

Live And Let Die is absolutely dreadful.

What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut?
Not as easy to decide as you might imagine. I mean, obviously there’s Sheriff Pepper, that goes without saying, and about half of the speedboat chase, which starts impressively then just goes on for way too long to sustain interest (despite a few impressive-looking stunts). The problem with cutting this film is a lot of the scenes and locations are quick in-and-out ones – even Harlem, certainly a distinctive place for the Bond series to go to, is only on-screen for about fifteen minutes. And since we’re in Harlem, the bluff of Mr Big can go too – it contributes next to nothing, and is far too low in the mix to care about. Of course it would be great to cut all the terrible racism and sexism, but then you’d only have a title sequence. I mean, Paul McCartney knocks out a good Bond theme and all, but you need a bit more than that. The stuff with Whisper is completely dispensable, but the fact he’s a vast gentleman who’s very quietly spoken is... well, not crucial, but distinctive at least. Let’s go for 10% - Pepper can go, the pointless Mr Big sub-plot can go, and then we’re stuck with the rest.

Quip Level:
Well it could have been a lot higher, all things considered. Moore’s Bond is a different thing from Connery’s, and his puns and one-liners are delivered in a much more arch fashion, as one would expect from an actor like that. There’s a charm to the way Moore delivers them, though, so even when they’re fairly bad or contrived (that final “disarming” one) the man delivering them is enough of a smooth gentleman to be able to pull it off without it being too cringe-inducing. Though the number of them does increase as the film wears on, Moore never loses his ability to deliver them, and the majority are fairly low-key at this point in his run. I think we’re relatively safe with a Medium this time out, but watch this space…

2017 Cringe Factor:
If this film were an absolute paragon of race relations, gender politics, and a sensitive portrayal of a fragile and abused woman coming to terms with her place in the world, this would still earn a Trumpshake. And it will come as absolutely no surprise to discover the reason for that is Sheriff J.W. Pepper, one of the very worst characters ever to grace the silver screen. From the first moment his crushingly unfunny, agonizingly awful stereotype wobbles his way on screen until his final, impotent, angry-stomping on the quayside, there is not a single occasion where this character has a redeeming moment, nor one where he even manages to justify his place within the film itself. If it had been a necessary character, but badly acted (see: Seymour, Jane) that would be one thing, but his inclusion is the very definition of pointless, and contributes nothing. He is, to put it mildly, fucking terrible. Of course on top of that you also have the gender politics, which even by Bond standards are poor, with Solitare flipping from distressed, to horny, to rebellious, and back again, sometimes within the same scene but almost never with a sense of reason or purpose. She’s just a prop, and the film makes no bones about treating her that way. And there’s one bizarre scene she has by the plane, where she briefly appears to be on Kananga’s side, then isn’t. Oh and of course the way the film deals with race which is, at it’s least awful moments comes across as “fine, it was the 70’s” (some, but not all, of the Harlem-set material) to, at it’s worst, phenomenally patronizing portrayals of voodoo culture, island life, the remainder of the Harlem scenes and… well you get the point. Is there something even more cringey than a Trumpshake I can award this?

I'm so glad these are back, but I can't bring myself to watch this one. Even as a 12-year-old I could tell this one was dire.

- Dear Lord Jane Seymour is beautiful.
- Whatever market research firm told Broccoli that the thing audiences wanted more of from Bond was comedy needs to be retroactively shot.
- Still thinking about Jane Seymour.
- What might be the saddest thing about LaLD is that I think everyone involved thought they were doing a Good Thing by broadening the scope of the franchise to include Black characters. The road to "Trumpshake" is paved with good intentions. 

Oh I meant to add pairesta

Nope, not a sound-stage. That's really what it looked like.  Prole Him was 11 when this movie was shot and he grew up in NYC and confirms that's what large tracts of the Bronx and Harelm actually looked like in the early 70's.   Super-Fly, shot a year earlier than LALD, shows exactly the same kind of urban desolation.  It looks like mid-80's Beirut, and it's genuinely shocking.

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)



So Roger survived longer than Lazenby at any rate. That’s something! After the hideously misconceived Live And Let Die the question for the Bond series is this – can it successfully find a way forward after Connery’s departure? Lazenby was the path not taken, and indeed so not taken was the path Connery had to return for one more go-around. And sadly the last movie answered this question with a resounding “no”, despite the best efforts of the leading man. So let’s see if this manages to do any better and find a successful template for 70’s Bond.

Pre-Existing Prejudices: Three nipples. Christopher Lee, Lulu doing the main theme for some reason. But beyond that, almost nothing. I have a vague sense that among Bond aficionados this isn’t up to much, but it can’t possibly be worse than Live And Let Die. Can it?

The Actual Movie:
So straight up we have the Bond theme and the gun barrel, only to open on… well, it’s not a studio set but it looks like it should be. But water laps the beach, a man and a woman exchange a towel… and the man is Christopher Lee! They are not being shy about the third nipple. We also have a dwarf (with, lets assume, a French accent) and a mansion built into a tropical island. A visitor arrivies and is informed he will be joined in a minute, so he goes into a fairly standard Bond villain set. Really, the clues are all there… The visitor pulls a gun on our third-nippled friend, and… there’s a shot! Deep red lighting. Then a slightly surreal sequence with a wobbly screen, an endlessly-echoing Scaramanga, some fairground antics, and this movie’s theme played on a honkey-tonk piano (never a good sign, it seems). Out potential assassin wanders through a fairground ride…. While Scaramangea stalks him. Our little friend – Nick Nack – appears to be teasing them both, which is a bit odd. Scaramanga shoots the assassin, and there’s a waxwork Bond there, for… reasons… which Scaramanga shoots the fingers off of…then a funky guitar riff and Lulu’s off to explain the back-story in a far-too-over-literal theme song.

So after Lulu’s finished taking all the fun out of innuendo (to be fair, that’s John Barry’s fault, not Lulu’s) Bond walks in to M’s office. He explains an entire backstory in… oh, two minutes? The whole “golden gun” thing is laid out for us, including the fact that Scaramanga has a third nipple, likes sex before his kill, and has golden bullets of which one has 007 engraved on it. Bond has been targeted, it seems, and he’s in a horrible suit that makes the audience rather side with the would-be killer. M relieves Bond of duty – his current “energy crisis” mission to find a scientist named Gibson is suspended – until the matter is resolved, but M looks rather… well, pleased at the idea Bond might be taken out by Scaramanga. Of course Bond asks if it would change matters if he got to the killer first, which of course it would, then there’s some standard Moneypenny stuff and we’re off to a belly-dancing club in Beirut. Obviously. It’s kind of seedy, Bond (again smoking a cigar) looks a bit… out of place (this is a long way from the belly-dancing in From Russia With Love). He goes backstage to meet one of the dancers (and deliver the name line). We find out that this dancer has one of the golden bullets and is now worn in her belly button, which is a totally normal thing to do with a spent bullet, honest. This is followed by the usual sort of thing – “you really do have a magnificent abdomen” says Bond (and Moore somehow manages to make that line sound not as awful as it clearly is), before being attacked and accidentally swallowing the bullet. There’s a fist fight (done rather well), though it hardly a great blow for feminism that the dancer just stands there and shrieks. After the fight Bond exits the scene with her her saying, “I’ve lost my charm” followed his retort, “Not from where I’m standing”. How far we’ve come…

Q’s back! And he’s rather camp this time out. We get the calibre of the golden bullets and are told that it’s an impossible manufacture. There’s a bit of fluff, then we’re off to Macau, and Bond’s swapped his terrible suit for a white-linen colonial monstrosity. Turns out we’re at the manufacturer of the impossible-to-manufacture bullet, and Bond is getting threatening. Moore is unexpectedly ruthless here, and he’s great at it while he eventually gets the bullets from the armourer. Off to a casino… then an aquaplaning boat passes a wrecked hulk (the RMS Queen Elizabeth) as Hong Kong harbour is approached. Bond gets a green Rolls followed to a hotel, and Britt Eckland pretends to be annoyed at something. He sneaks into a hotel room, finds Anders, and after a bit of to-and-fro Bond gets the information he needs. Bond is again ruthless here, and its disconcerting to see Moore play Bond quite like this, up to and including slapping Anders around to get the information here wants. But it’s disconcerting in all the right ways. Moore is uncompromising when he needs to get information, but still charming when he opens the champagne. This is a properly fantastic scene, full of deception and game-playing, and also a million miles better than anything in Live And Let Die. Well, until the last line when we get the “bottoms up” line, and we cut to a strip club. Still, points for trying.

Moore hangs around outside, still smoking that cigar, while we cut to Lee seducing a rather-too-young-looking Anders (I say “seducing”. I mean bedding, since we’ve been told this is his preferred pre-kill routine). We cut to a late night street, Nick Nack wanders past Bond as he crosses the road, Sacaramana is seen in shadow pointing the gun, there’s a shot… someone else dies! Bond is arrested by the local police, naturally, and taken… to a harbour, by the marvellously-named Lieutenant Hip. He’s invited onto a boat, which speeds out of Hong Kong harbour, only to cut to Scaramanga, using the “golden gun” as the most obvious penis substitute in cinema history. Bond is taken to the wreck of the RMS Queen Elizabeth, which turns out to be a new base for the navy. It’s a bit of a shame, because so far this has been a fairly grounded so far, but this is a bit silly, and not the most effective kind. Still, fantastic set design with everything being on an angle. M and Q are there, it will surprise nobody to discover, and it turns out it was the solar energy expert, Gibson, of Bond’s original mission that was killed. This is all very topical for 1974, with talk of solar energy and solving the world energy crisis, and it works pretty decently, to be honest (a slight surprise there). Bond is told to retrieve the solex agitator, the key part of a solar power plant, which seems reasonable, and to take Goodnight with him, which doesn’t. That means we’re stuck to with Britt Eckland.

So we’re off to Bangkok now, along with Lieutenant Hip, who sadly does not come with an old-timey moustache and a vinyl collection. There’s some fairly standard “exotic Oriental” establishing shots, then we cut to Hip standing on Bond’s shoulders while Bond puffs away on a cigar. Hope the smoke doesn’t give away their position or anything…. Bond hops over a wall and meets Hai Fat, slipping off his shirt to reveal a false third nipple so he can impersonate Scaramanga. They have a guarded conversation about Bond being a threat, then Bond leaves (“he must have found me quite titillating” he quips, throwing away his false nipple), only for it to be revealed that Scaramanga is already there and Fat is completely aware that Bond is faking it. Later the evening, we get Bond ditching Goodnight at the hotel and getting a lift with Hip and his nieces, in a short (and not funny) scene that appears to exist so Eckland can look unconvincingly annoyed. Bond turns up at Hai Fat’s and says “the name’s Scaramanga” the same way he normally says “the name’s Bond” which is a nice touch. He wanders through a garden, naturally confronts a couple of sum,o with whom he has a bit of a slap-fight, and Bond wins by… giving the sumo a wedgie? Bit strange. Anyway it’s for no benefit as Nick Nack knocks his noggin so he’s knocked out. Before Nick Nack can kill him off though, Hai intervenes – “ this is my home!” and is told to take Bond to school. Surprise! It’s a dojo, and lots (and lots) of pupils line up while two teenage boys fight each other with blades. The fight is short and brutal (one boy dies) and the choreography here is excellent. Bond is given some tea (because not enough clichés have been included, apparently) while a refugee from “Kung Fu Fighting” goes through a few moves, then Bond is “invited” to a fight. One kick from Bond ends the fight, but anther muscular boy in black comes out to replace him. Another fight – pretty decent again, and Moore is doing some great work here so his defeat of this muscle-boy looks weirdly convincing, especially when he cuts to the chase and just starts punching. Making a break for it, Bond jumps outside, where Hip and his nieces are waiting. Bond gets a “stand back girls” moment… then the nieces kick the living shit out of a whole karate school, which is a strangely feminist slant for the film to take. Then… somehow Hip drives off without realizing Bond isn’t in his car, so Bond is forced to make a run for it and steals a boat. A boat… now, how did that work out in the last movie, hmmm?

A crassly awful stereotypical young boy selling a wooden elephant falls off a tourist boat and climbs into Bond’s while Bond has engine troubles (Bond thoughtfully pushes him overboard after the boy actually manages to help him), and… oh fuck JW Pepper is on the fucking tourist boat! He’s there with his wife, indulges in a little light (well, heavy) racism, and he’s just fucking awful. Again. He even gets to use “cotton-pickin’” as an elephant sticks his trunk in his pocket, then knocks him into the water – sadly, though, I must report he doesn’t drown.

Then we’re back to Scaramanga judging Fat for his school’s failure to kill Bond. Fat claims to be employing Scaramanga, while he reveals a few secrets as Scaramanga slowly assembles his golden gun, shoots Fat, then quietly disassembles it. Lee is rather wonderful in this scene, ending it with the line “he always did like that mausalieum. Put him in it,” which isn’t something every actor could deliver well. Back at the hotel, Bond and Goodnight share a drink, we get a bit more casual racism – the wine is called Phuyuck, much to Bond’s consternation, though there’s a sly joke as the waiter sarcastically tells him it’s a “74”, the year of the movie’s release – and Moore does his best seduction routine, but it’s still the weakest part of his performance. There’s zero chemistry between him and Eckland, though at least she knocks him back. But just off-shore there’s a junk with Nick Nack on board, spying on them. Exciting. Bond heads back to his hotel room, where… Oh Goodnight is waiting for him in a teddy after all. I’m sure she looks stunning, or something, but how stupid does she sound when she says, “Oh James, I though this would never happen!” Yup, never heard of Bond bedding a leading lady before… There’s a small amount of tension as someone else slips into Bond’s room… it’s Anders. Goodnight hides under the sheets, “the old three-pillow trick”. Turns out Anders was the one that sent M the bullet with 007 engraved on it. Anders confesses she wants Scaramanga dead and offers any price – including herself. But Bond, that old romantic, wants a solex agitatior instead, which isn’t, in fact, a super-impressive dildo (well, it may also be, but in this case we’re talking about the solar power thing). Pity. Goodnight gets stuffed in the wardrobe – it’s about as wooden as she is, and it’s the only stuffing she’s getting this evening – then Anders slips into a bathrobe, lowers the lights, Moore gets to fail at seducing again, and Goodnight looks bored in a wardrobe. Sorry, is this meant to be funny or something?

Afterwards, Anders is off back to Scaramanga’s boat (oh yes, he’s on it as well as Nick Nack). She puts her jewellery away and we see the agitator in the safe. Cut back to Goodnight getting out of the wardrobe – not great acting going on here – then we’re off to a boxing match. Goodnight and Hip are there (he’s posing as a peanut seller while yet more muscle boys fight away in the background), and Bond meets up with Anders. She’s quite dead – there’s a small but precise bullet hole in her breast. Handily after being shot she’s stayed upright and eyes open, and she didn’t bleed all over that fetching white dress she’s wearing. Scaramanga slips in beside him and explains his backstory (the circus, which is something different) while Nick Nack keeps a gun on Bond. Bond sees the agitator on the ground, slips it to Hip, who then passes it on to Goodnight. Scaramanga sees himself out, Nick Nack gets into a car, Goodnight tries to bug it but instead – like the stupid, stupid character she is – gets shoved into the boot of the car. She cheerfully announces her presence trapped in the boot over a walkie-talkie in the same way someone might react after discovering a previously lost ornament. She also tells them she has the car keys to Hip’s car so loudly Scaramanga and Nick Nack must be deaf not to hear her. To chase after them, Bond gets into a car ready for a test drive, only to find himself sitting next to… fucking Pepper again. They zoom out of the showroom, do a bit of stunt driving while Pepper hams it up (as if he could do anything else), and Scaramanga and Nick Nack realize they’re being followed. Moore looks ashamed to be in the same scenes as Pepper, and it’s definitely Moore, not Bond. It’s impossible to blame him. Of course after all that stunt driving (some of which is pretty good) the police naturally give chase. Comedy car crash, etc You know the drill. Then we’re onto countryside roads. When Pepper says “where the hell they got to?” Moore shoots him a look of utter contempt, which is hilarious, because it’s so obviously a genuine reaction, not someone acting. Anyway Scaramanga and Nick Nack are on a parallel country road, separated by a canal. This is followed by one of the most genuinely impressive car stunts in the history of movies, as Bond drives off the end of a broken bridge, the car spirals through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and lands perfectly on the other side. It’s an absolutely beautiful thing to watch, and it’s completely and utterly ruined by the decision to have Moore do a bad Southern accent before it, and a swanee whistle (slide whistle, for not-British-readers) over the actual stunt itself. For. Fuck’s. Sake. The stunt itself though? Incredible. The chase is back on. Scaramanga pulls into a barn, there’s some instrumentation, a few bits of metal… then the police turn up. While Pepper – somehow – hits a new low, there’s a roar from inside the building and Scaramanga’s car… is now a plane. As it takes to the air, Goodnight – “I think we’ve finally stopped!” – finally levers open to boot to discover she’s hundred of feet off the ground. She really didn’t notice take off? Really?

Cut back to the slanted office – M looking, quite rightly, boggle-eyes at the whole affair. When he describes this as a “half-witted operation” he’s not wrong, though hearing him twice say, “oh shut up Q” is rather like watching someone kick a puppy. But finally someone picks up Goodnight’s homing signal, and we’re off to a small chain of islands near “Red China”. Bond flies in on a little sea plane cutting close to forests and islands – some decent stunt flying there – but he’s spotted. Scaramanga’s told of Bond’s approach but his lackeys are instructed to “do nothing” as his visitor “wont’ be leaving”. There’s some nice establishing shots before the plane makes its water landing but it’s not exactly fast paced. Bond lands the plane on a beach next to Scaramanga’s gaff, and Nick Nack emerges with some champagne. Scaramanga shoots the cork off it, and describes what he and Bond do as “the loneliest profession”, which would be rather poignant if he didn’t have a big grin spread across his face as he says it. Lee is acting like a bit of a loon here, and clearly relishing it. It’s made pretty clear that the Chinese have built this for him in return for “an occasional favour” and there’s something very 70’s about the way Scaramanga claims to have, “every electrical labour-saving device”. He boasts they have an “amble supply of electricity” and then takes Bond to show off his Solar Energy station, with fancypants liquid helium vats, where he explains his plan – selling it to the highest bidder, though Bond suggests the oil sheiks will pay him just to keep it off the market. Moore is doing some “looking around” acting here that at least makes it look like Bond is only half engaged in the conversation while searching for another angle. Scaramanga shows off his solar collector while Moore fails to look impressed by a cheap model emerging from a cheap model island. Lee is playing Scaramanga a bit like a CEO who doesn’t quite understand the product his company makes but is happy to take the credit and money anyway. It’s quite an effective approach for a Bond villain. Oh his power plant also comes with a big-ass laser gun as a “bonus”, so we see Bond’s plane blown up. And after that – lunch.

Oh, and Goodnight in a bikini, showing off everything Britt Eckland was hired for, while she and Bond have a stilted conversation and Scaramanga carefully and deliberately places a few golden boxes on the table while mocking Bond for getting nothing more than a “well done” from the Queen and a pittance of a pension. Bond justifies himself. Rather curiously, Lee is given then line, “but then of course the English don’t consider it sporting to kill in cold blood, do they?” while speaking in a cut-glass, upper-crust accent that makes Moore sound like a bit of rough by comparison. He couldn’t sound more English if he’d been draped in the St George’s Cross while delivering it. Bond goes for his gun, but… Scaramanga has somehow assembled his without anyone noticing, and tells Bond that the death of 007 will be his great work of art. A duel, suggests Scaramanga, and now we see Lee bringing a real hardness to his performance. Bond accepts, and we cut to he and Scaramanga standing back to back on the beach. Nick Nack counts out twenty paces – while Scaramanga’s security guy pervs over Eckland – Bond spins and shoots, but Scaramanga has vanished. Exploring a bit, Nick Nack emerges from behind a rock and informs Bond that if he kills Scaramanga all the island will belong to him. Then we’re back in Scaramanga’s funhouse for a moment, and Bond informs Nick Nack he’s never killed a midget before but there can always be a first time. Nick Nack is either a total pervert or just a sadist but either way he’s enjoying this way more than he ought to. Bond gets the cut-to-red lighting effect and we’re in funhall mirrors, fake Western towns, and wax Bond’s again while Nick Nack watches with glee. Bond gets out by climbing down some scaffolding – sexy! – but drops his gun doing so. Careless. There’s a lot of mood lighting and swathes of purple going on that are a bit Star Trek (the soundtrack is not helping on that front), but this is mostly well shot and tense. There’s some nice musical intercutting here as well, so when Bond is on screen we get the Bond theme and when it’s Scaramanga we get “The Man With The Golden Gun” minus the vocal. Scaramanga steps out in front of his Bond waxwork… and it’s the real thing, who shoots him dead with a single shot. Scaramanga never ever cries out, just collapses face-first. It’s almost perfunctory, but that also makes it work because it’s a great way of puncturing Scaramanga’s pretentions.

Goodyear, meanwhile, is still following around the security guard. She finds a wrench and is able to whack him with it, but he falls into one of the vats of liquid helium, over which hangs a sign reading, “Absolute zero must be maintained to prevent prompt criticality”. I mean, I understand what they’re trying to say but that sounds like a Health and Safety sign put together by Google Translate…. Goodnight and Bond meet up to try and to find the solex, and she gets a Bond-esque pun, unusually (“I laid him out cold!”). Some alerts and whatnot are being sounded so it’s bad, which Bond explains to us. He finds the solex but cant get it free from its housing, while Goodnight’s arse accidentally presses the “master override” and nearly fries Bond as the whole system is set off. She’s too stupid to read half a dozen signs right in front of her, and when Bond shouts “just push every damned button!” he sounds quite rightly pissed off with just how idiotic she’s being. Thankfully – and it’s not often I get to type this – a cloud saves the day! Hooray! It blocks the suns’ rays and temporarily shuts down the system. There’s some minor tension as Bond works over the system while the cloud passes in front of the sun, but that brave little cloud hang on long enough and he just gets it free in time. Thanks, cloud! Goodnight and Bond make a run through some collapsing set – it’s pretty well done, and the base being destroyed looks impressive. They head for Scaramanga’s junk – help yourselves – while a model island is detonated (though again looks pretty great). Then we end with the normal seduction scene, and Goodnight gets the incredibly crap line, “I always wanted to take a slow boat from China” while her and Bond snog away… ah but we pan up and guess who’s hiding in the roof? Why it’s that pervy ‘lil midget Nick Nack! He lifts a roof panel and grabs a knife, ready to pounce. But just in time Goodnight opens her eyes (emerging from the dream of having any fucking purpose in this movie), and Nick Nack drops down, but too slow as they roll out of his way. Moore hisses, “youuuuu” at Nick Nack as if they have some kind of personal vendetta – which they don’t – and we are then gifted with a truly terrible fight whereby Roger Moore tries to kill a comedy midget while an equally comedy string section tries to convince us this is funny. Nick Nack jumps on the bar and flings bottles at Bond. His solution? Grab a suitcase, stuff Nick Nack in it, then we get the implication that the little man has been thrown overboard. After this apparently rather casual murder, Bond returns to the waiting arms of Goodnight but just as they are about to get down to it a phone and radio emerge from the side of the bed. It’s M, with some congratulations and coitus interruptus, lest we end the film in a not-bad way. Moore is given the line, “She’s just coming sir,” (ha ha, that sounds just like cumming!), a final “goodnight, sir!” and we see that in fact Nick Nack has instead been stuck in a small wicker cage and hoisted up a mast. And then Lulu has to try and sing the, frankly fucking awful, lines, “goodnight goodnight sleep well my dear / no need to fear James Bond is here!” Poor love. This isn’t the best Bond theme ever but she deserved better than that.

(Actually. After those few, awful lines, we get a slightly slower version of the theme song, and Lulu is really belting it out, but it’s more than just volume, it’s a noticeably superior performance to the one used for the opening credits. It’s far more convincing than the “proper” version, her vocal is much better executed, and the slower pace makes the whole song sound much, much less desperate to convince us that the whole thing is capital-E exciting. It’s an object lesson in how a very small change can make a very big difference).


In Conclusion:
The Man With The Golden Gun is very much a movie divided against itself. There are some bits of it which work incredibly well – one of which is Christopher Lee, it will come as no surprise to discover. Other bits work incredibly badly - that would be Britt Ekland, though "work" scarcely describes what she's turned up to do. It's also an abnormally serious performance from Roger Moore, which gives this film an odd tonal disconnect. He's taking things way more seriously than he did in Live And Let Die, but he's doing it in a film that’s fairly straightforward, so it can’t quite support that performance. Since Moore was one of the few redeeming aspects of that shambolic mess of a movie it's a bit strange seeing him turn in above par work in a film that has little use for the serious. Still, all things considered it's maybe as well that he does, since he's faced with two co-stars, Ekland and Adams, who perform their roles like they've never actually acted before. Maybe appearing alongside a legend like Lee pushed Moore into doing something a bit more straight, a bit less frivolous - certainly their scenes together would look odd next to the effortless cold of Lee's Scaramanga were Moore still aiming for a liger overall tone, but a more serious version of his Bond works well with Lee. The problem is they don't share al that much screen time together, so the film feels unbalanced.

Still, lets be completely clear about one thing - despite its fairly dreadful reputation, this is in nearly every respect a better movie than Live And Let Die, and the bits that aren't better are of the same level, rather than being actively worse. So we have Sheriff Pepper, inexplicably back for a second time, and he's just as ghastly as he was the first time round, but at least his screen-time is cut into two separate blocks, so we don't have to suffer through one huge chunk of him. Ekland is every bit as bad as Seymour was last time out – some achievement, that – but we have Anders to cut to when Goodnight becomes too insufferable. Not than Anders is great - she's not - but at least it's a change of scenery, and that helps to break things up a bit too. In fact, series regulars and Lee aside there's very little of the guest cast that makes much of an impression at all. Characters like Lieutenant Hip or Hai Fat are competent but unremarkable and exist mostly to fulfill plot functions and little more. Mind you, at least Fat gets to be shot by the Golden Gun - Hip doesn't even get that dignity, written out without so much as a final line. How undignified. We have Nick Nack to shore up the credibility – if that’s the right word – of the baddies, but aside from Lee he’s the only non-regular to make any impression at all. And, let’s be honest, a lot of that is his stature. If he were a regularly sized man performing the role it would be pretty unremarkable “the butler and the master” routine. Hervé Villechaize does well with what he’s given though, so credit where credit’s due, and Nick Nack pervy little performance certainly remains one of the movie’s most striking aspects.

The strange thing is that for a fairly generic runaround - which is definitely what The Man With The Golden Gun is – there’s attention being paid to a lot of the details. The canted sets for the RMS Queen Elizabeth look absolutely fantastic, impressionistic almost, and appear to have been constructed for a much more ambitious movie than the one we're left watching. Similarly it's clear that the whole "solar energy" backdrop to the movie had been properly thought through, so it starts off as a bit of background colour – it’s almost a throwaway details when first mentioned by M – then eventually grows until it becomes the whole point of the movie. Often these attempts at topicality can lead to a movie instantly dating, but the careful layering over such concerns through the script works remarkably well, and the fact that energy production is still an issue today means it retains a frisson of topicality. Indeed the fact that the movie is really about the solex agitator ends up being really quite funny, as we see Scaramanga repeatedly trying to insert himself into this solar powered narrative - up to and including assassinating his alleged boss - only for everyone else to be far more worried about a bit of technology the size of a fag packet. He’s happy to parade Bond round his solar plant because it’s so impressive yes, but cheerfully admits he knows little about how it works – for him it’s just another rather gauche way of showing off. In this, his almost perfunctory death at the hands of Bond feels entirely appropriate - he might think himself as important, and the grand artist of death, but in the end he's not much more than a sketch artist, and a fancypants golden pistol can't change that. Indeed, Scaramanga's pretensions are very well drawn in the movie because they're obvious, yet understated, so they don’t make a big song and dance about him noting down the wine Bond recommends, but its clear that he doesn't have the taste to know the right vintage himself. Moments like that are very well handled indeed. Yet, for all that attention to detail there’s plenty of frustrations, because there are other lapses in logic that just defy sense. I mean, obviously there’s the car-turning-into-a-plane, which is just a dumb way of ending a chase scene with… well I don’t want to say the minimum of fuss, but it gets it done. But other questions immediately present themselves. Why, for example, is Pepper taking a car for a test drive when he’s on holiday? Obviously so he can be contrived into the chase sense, but it doesn’t make a lick of sense. There’s a whole mess of “just kill him already!” moments. Scaramanga makes a huge deal about the bonus-feature laser that his base has, he blows up Bond’s sea plane, then…. Nothing. What was the point? There’s a whole lot of those moments – I won’t list them all out – but given how carefully other aspects of the movie have been crafted it’s a shame to see such attention to detail elsewhere being dragged down by easily-avoidable mistakes.

The last time we visited the Orient, in the flawed You Only Live Twice, there were some early successes in using the setting respectfully, before things eventually deteriorated until we were “treated” to pig women and Connery in slanty-eye make up. Things here are a little bit better, if not always by a lot, so a lot of Eastern stereotype boxes get ticked but they're... well look they are obviously clumsy, but they're not especially presented as fetishistic, and that helps a lot. The dojo fight is maybe just as obvious as the ninjas were, but at least some attempts are made to undercut the most obvious clichés. Criticize the nieces beating up the dojo students if you will, but at least this film bothers to give couple of females (and, significantly, Asian females) some agency - this isn't Bond as the Great White Saviour but instead is quite the reverse, he's dependent on others to rescue him this time out. Lieutenant Hip, very much this movie’s Far East Felix Leiter, also contributes (just) enough to the plot to have there be a mix of good and bad characters from Asia, thus dodging one of Live And Let Die’s biggest problems (namely that all the non-white characters were either outright bad or at best duplicitous). That helps a fair bit too.

But in the end The Man With The Golden Gun can’t quite be fully redeemed. It’s a lot stronger than it’s reputation, but the word “generic” dogs the movie again and again. It rarely rises above “competent”, though the moments when it does – such as when Moore and Lee are together – give an indication of what a good, straight Moore Bond movie might look like. Moore again remains the most compelling part of his second movie, which is appropriate, and having Lee as the bad guy goes a long way towards making up for the movie’s obvious deficiencies elsewhere. Production and direction are perfectly fine for the second time in a row, and really the biggest flaws the movie gives us are two utterly uninteresting female leads, who practically redefine the word “irrelevant” in front of our very eyes. They’re a huge hole in the middle of the movie, and Britt Ekland and Maud Adams, as Goodnight and Anders, drag the movie to a stop every time they’re on screen and mean that Moore has nothing worthwhile to work with for great chucks of the movie. They look the part, but that’s part of the problem – they’ve clearly been cast for their appearance rather than because they can actually act or have something worthwhile to contribute. Not that a Tracy or a Domino could have completely saved this, but Moore’s stuck trying to act opposite two planks of wood and there’s not a lot he can do to try and make that work. His sterner performance in the role could work very well against a more robust female lead, but instead he’s got two simpering nothings and most of their scenes just evaporate. Still, in the end I don’t want to be too hard on The Man With The Golden Gun. For all it’s flaws, it’s substantially less racist than its immediate predecessor, it’s plotting is more consistent, and the production and direction make this an enjoyable enough romp, despite obvious shortcomings. The Man With The Golden Gun certainly isn’t the knock-out that Moore still needs, but it does suggest that a lot of the bugs have been worked out of the system, and that, indeed, a way forward has been found, even if there are still a lot of rough edges. Now, onwards and upwards!


What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut?
Not much this time out. We’re back to a fairly standard, just-under-two-hours run time, and things skip a long at a fair old rate. Most of what’s on-screen is actually relevant to the plot, and the pre-credit sequence – featuring Scaramanga taking out an opponent, but not featuring Bond at all – feels like it’s acting as a proper prologue to the film, setting the mood and tone for what’s to come. I guess you could drop Ekland without missing anything, but the character has too much screen-time to go altogether, and of course it goes without saying Pepper needs to go. So let’s keep it low and just ditch Pepper – I reckon that’s no more than, say, 5%, which isn’t too bad really.

Quip Level:
About average for Moore, but high next to Connery, The Man With The Golden Gun doesn’t overdose on quips, but the ones we do get are of a surprisingly poor standard. Bond’s “he must have found me quite titillating,” while throwing away his fake rubber nipple is crap, though it’s again a tribute to Moore than he almost makes it work (the key to that one working is the way Moore delivers the line, then looks angry before swinging himself into the car, so the flippancy is undercut). Elsewhere it’s just the usual procession of one-liners, few of which land. Oh let’s be kind and just go for a Medium.

2017 Cringe Factor:
Pepper’s in it. Trumpshake. But putting aside the actively racist, punishingly unfunny fuckwit, there’s only a few “we’re in the East, here comes the casual racism” moments, and given the vastly racist Live And Let Die that’s a huge step in the right direction. The name of the wine which – hahaha!! – sounds a bit like something in English is an outright awful moment (Bond muses on the word in the next scene as well, which makes it worse), but for the most part we get Asian settings and a lot of the trappings that come with it. The sumo wrestler defeated by a wedgie is idiotic and patronising – because their thongs looks just like underwear, ha fuckity ha! – but the dojo school works well, in part because the fighting that happens there looks genuinely impressive. And that’s not just the Asian fighters either, Moore’s couple of attempts at combat show him being surprisingly terrific at delivering on the physical side of Bond. Elsewhere there’s just a bit too much open sexism to get a decent rating – cutting from the name of a strip club called the Bottoms Up to a shot of – can you guess? – a ladies posterior is clumsy, but it’s not really unforgivable in a Bond context. Having two beyond-useless female leads is, however, and Goodnight’s stupidity reduces her to nothing more than a walking bikini model. Her perky personality starts annoying and winds upwards from there, but by the time she’s accidentally pushing buttons with her bum, and then ends up being too stupid to read one of only about six labels on a panel directly in front of her, she’s tipped over from “thick” to pathetic caricature, and it’s tremendously damaging to the film. And for someone who allegedly works for the secret service, her frequent reaction to any crisis is an uninspired “eek!”. Just rubbish. Without Pepper, I’d give this an Oh Dear… But it’s not without Pepper, so. You know.

Third nipples do not work that way! It’s not

.  .   .

it’s

.     .
.

!

Anyway this is the only Roger Moore one I’ve seen, and my mother loathes Moore so I never got the steady diet of Moore-Bonds-on-TBS that a lot of my friends did as a kid. But I did see this one with her, a couple years ago when she visited me in Amsterdam—after a day of walking she wanted to just wanted to turn on the TV and rest her feet, and the only thing on was this and I stayed and watched (I was taking her out for dinner later anyway). I thought we’d end up riffing through it, but my mother watched it intently, absorbing it in and then talking mocking it afterwards, over dinner. Pepper baffled us, as did the fact that every can was an AMC (the US’s late, milquetoast, and altogether forlorn fourth automaker). But the thing that got us was the pacing for most of it—Christopher Lee’s there but his interaction with Moore in particular lacks any sense of tension. When Bond entered Scaramanga’s lair he might as well have been entering an art gallery. Maybe we Americans were distracted by their accents, but there’s something almost too genteel about Moore, at least here.

Anyway I think I’ll give The Spy Who Loved Me a spin anyway—heard it is the best of the “Moore Bonds” (as in it does the campier, gadgety, disco-era ambience the best).

I don't even remember that. Just a certain avian double-take at one point.

Oh really?  I have no memory of that at all, though I did remember the jump-and-slide-whistle here.  Damn, talk about not being able to learn from your mistakes, because the stunt here really is an amazing thing to watch.

pairesta - Yes the beating scene is... awkward at best.  That's the sort of thing that Connery could, occasionally, just about, get away because he always played a bastard, but but it's not at all the association we have with Moore.  I'm doing my best to put those kind of memories aside and just come at each film fresh and in sequence, but it's impossible to eliminate all prejudices in advance, and seeing charming, avuncular Roger Moore behave like that is very disconcerting.  It's not that Moore plays it badly - he absolutely plays it well - but that in a way makes it part of the problem, he's almost too convincing in that scene.  

Jean-Luc Lemur - Happy to have you a long for The Spy Who Loved Me!  It'll be a couple of weeks before it gets posted due to not having this weekend free, but fear not it's coming.  This is an easy film to mock in places,so I don't at all blame you or your mum for taking the piss out of it, but... I dunno, I couldn't hate it, and I was fully expecting to write another full-on takedown of it.  It's formulaic, and a more than a bit silly in places, but I couldn't bring myself to hate it as a lot of Bond fans apparently did.  I read a couple of reviews for both LALD and this after I had written my own ones (on Den Of Geek, who did a Bond retrospective a couple of years back), and that writer's attitude was the reverse of mine - Live And Let Die was the classic (the racism was dismissed with  "I just enjoy it I'm not here to write an academic essay", which seems staggering to me - how can you avoid the racism in Live And Let Die?), whereas this film was apparently so bad it make the writer angry.  This isn't a great film by any standards, but... yeah I just don't get that.

That poster is awesome. If they used that for the next Craig film, even though I'm done with Craig Bond movies, I'd see it in theaters.

Kangaroosevelt-Ecks - I do believe the production have since expressed regret at the slide whistle, which given they've seriously slagged off for having it there in the first place is fair enough. Unfortunately for them I'm reviewing what we have, not what they should have done so... Best way to watch that stunt, actually, is the youtube clip you linked to but just leaving the sound on your computer off. Amazing, and done on a first take too.

Fuck that Jack White/Alicia Keys collaboration. And fuck Sam Smith's effort. And fff..ffff nope I can't do it. I can't actually bring myself to say fuck the Madonna song, because bad though it is I do reckon it's better than either of those two efforts. Or maybe it just fits the film its a part of better. Ahh, but that's a discussion for the future...

Having girded up my loins and forced myself to rewatch the Venice scene, thereby cutting at least a day off of my life, there doesn't seem to be a slide whistle in there, so I don't know what part I was remembering since I definitely haven't watched Golden Gun in years. In my defense the whole damn scene is essentially a long slide whistle of hammy reaction shots, all of which make me want to kill the people who thought they were a good idea.

For me it was #23 AVTAK and #24 DAD... The former was absolutely dreadful but the latter is some straight-up made-for-SpikeTV blasphemy. All I can remember about Diamonds is that I was about as bored as Connery was.