With Live and Let Die proving a great success with audiences, work quickly commenced on Bond’s next outing, The Man with The Golden Gun, adapted from the posthumously published Fleming novel of the same name. Could Moore maintain the momentum he’d created in the role with his debut outing, or would he risk being overshadowed by the legendary Christopher Lee in the role of the titular villain? Greg D Smith resumes his journey through the franchise to find out.

Though I fondly recall Moore in the part of Bond as previously discussed, I don’t have the clearest memories of all his movies and this one in particular I am fairly certain I had never watched ‘properly’ before. The presence of Christopher Lee, one of the more iconic actors of his time, promises much, but much like the movie before it, this one can’t help but feel like it’s having a little bit of an identity crisis as it goes on, lurching from serious, almost psychoanalytical examination of our hero to levels of silliness which seem over the top even by the standards of the franchise as a whole.

The fairly lengthy pre-credits sequence introduces us to Lee’s Scaramanga by way of one of those more outlandish sequences, the assassin trading shots with a mobster apparently chasing a bounty provided by Scaramanga’s own butler, the diminutive Nick Nack. This, we learn, is some sort of arrangement between the two, whereby Nick Nack procures the hardiest killers to come and test his master’s skills, the agreement apparently being that should one ever succeed, the butler will inherit his master’s wealth and property. This in and of itself would be odd enough, but the fact of the fight taking place in a sort of ‘funhouse’ environment, with various waxwork dummies, ramps, secret doors and the like just elevates it to the truly bizarre. It’s almost easy to forget that you’re even watching a Bond movie, right up until the final moments as one of the many waxwork dummies is revealed to be a perfect replica of Moore himself as Bond, striking a classic pose. If you’re coming to this brand new but as a fan of the franchise, you might be forgiven for wondering just exactly what is going on.

Then, following Lulu’s belting out of the classic title song, the film dramatically downshifts in tone. Suddenly MI6 are concerned because they’ve received a golden bullet – the signature of mysterious and faceless assassin Scaramanga – with 007 etched onto it. This – apparently – is serious enough to prompt MI6 to relieve Bond of his current assignment in case he gets killed. It’s certainly a bold move, telling your highly trained, licensed to kill agent who has confronted deadly enemies and situations routinely as part of his job, that he might want to sit things out indefinitely because you think an internationally renowned assassin might have it in for him (surely an occupational hazard in his line of work?) but that’s where the movie chooses to go. In hindsight, one can argue that the movie is attempting to assert the sheer threat represented by Scaramanga, though it fairly successfully undermines that attempt in my view by choosing to have the villain unknown by face or features save one – that he has a third nipple.

And that’s the main issue that the movie has from start to finish. On one level, it wants us to buy into Scaramanga as a kind of ‘Dark Mirror’ of Bond – a man who kills just as often and just as violently, but who does so for money and, more importantly for the sheer pleasure of measuring himself against other killers and emerging victorious. Bond, on the other hand, does all this out of a sense of duty and honour, so the movie would have us believe. Except Moore’s maiden outing in the role made it painstakingly obvious that he was really an incorrigible overgrown boy who liked shagging around and living the high life and viewed his job as a sort of necessary encumbrance to get to all that other stuff. Moore’s trademark insouciance, that knowing wink and raised eyebrow that isn’t quite to camera but may as well be, mitigates against any attempt the script has to portray him as some serious, driven man of honour and ethics squaring off against the vicious dilletante Scaramanga.

This actually bleeds into the whole subplot of Anders, Scaramanga’s…mistress, for want of a better word. It’s never really entirely clear how Anders and the assassin met, but essentially she is kept around by him as a sex object – literally he must apparently sleep with her before every kill. This is fed to us as a titbit of what an awful man our antagonist is, but that sort of falls down in the context – Bond literally physically torturing the woman for information – as well as in terms of a supposed ‘contrast’ to Bond who…quite often randomly sleeps with women for the sake of it before going off to kill people.

But then, Anders as a character on the whole doesn’t make sense. Eventually, she reveals to Bond that she had actually sent the golden bullet with 007 inscribed on it to MI6 herself, hoping that Bond would kill Scaramanga and rid her of her misery. This of course doesn’t tie in at all with her first encounter with Bond, where he extorts details of how to find Scaramanga from her by twisting her arm and slapping her about the place – why not tell him of this great plan of hers at that point? That she then goes on to co-operate with Bond before winding up dead at the hands of Scaramanga himself is all just…well, about as messy as the rest of the thing as a whole.

Having tracked his quarry to the Bottoms Up club (har har), Bond is just in time to witness the energy scientist he had been tracking before being relieved of duty get murdered in the street by Scaramanga, who then steals the energy device the scientist has that everyone wanted. Whereupon due to a ‘hilarious’ mixup, Bond finds himself arrested by the Hong Kong police for the understandable reason of being found stood over a recently shot man holding a gun. Except it’s not the police but a secret agent who takes him to a shipwreck in the harbour that’s actually a secret MI6 base where M and Q are waiting for him and proceed to assign him the mission of… retrieving the energy device with secret agent Hip. You know, the same mission he was taken off by them a little while ago because… oh, who really cares at this point?

As the film wears on, we get another extended water-based chase, only this time in sampans to make it that little bit more excruciating, we meet up with Sheriff J.W. Pepper again because someone thought that was a good idea, and we see our villain take off in a carplane back to his island so that Bond can follow him there for The Big Finale Showdown. Amidst all this, we get an ill-conceived attempt by Bond to infiltrate the organisation which paid Scaramanga for the energy scientist hit by strapping on a third nipple and pretending to be is nemesis, and a token gesture in the direction of  feminism (I guess) when Bond finds his bacon saved by agent Hip’s karate-fighting nieces.

And I haven’t even started on Agent Mary Goodnight. Look, Bond Girls are a thing – we all know this. Their main ‘job’ is to look pretty, sleep with our hero at some point and usually get kidnapped and rescued by him so that they can sleep with him again as the credits roll. It’s not the most demanding of roles for an aspiring young actress, and there have been some truly bad examples, including Rosie Carver in this film’s predecessor. But has anyone to this point truly been as vacant as Britt Ekland’s Goodnight? Ridiculous name aside (courtesy of Fleming), this is perhaps the tropiest example of the Bond Girl trope. Wears a bikini? Check. Is hopelessly attracted to Bond? Check. Get’s kidnapped? Check. Ekland has a good go with what little the script gives her – an implication that she and Bond have crossed paths before and that whereas she may have fallen for his charms then, she’s a little more worldly now – but then it just constantly undermines her by having her be a ditz.

And so to that final showdown, wherein we have the traditional ‘Bond dines with his mortal enemy like they’re gentlemen’ bit, and the villain reveals his diabolical plan which – unaccountably – is somehow now about grabbing that energy device himself and selling a giant laser powered by it to the highest bidder. Given that the movie has spent most of its run time trying to convince us that Scaramanga’s most powerful driving impulse is to measure himself against Bond, who he considers to be the greatest killer out there, this feels somewhat out of left field. But the show must go on so we get an extended final duel through the manor and fun house seen in the opening, with Bond inevitably taking the place of his waxwork to deliver the killing shot to his quarry. Meanwhile, Goodnight is ditzing her way along trying to help stop the laser, and ultimately the Evil Lair™ goes boom as the pair sail off into the sunset to romance one another after bundling the hapless Nick Nack into a suitcase.

At its heart, the fundamental issue is that the film misuses its star. Moore’s debut wasn’t perfect, but his uncanny knack for knowing exactly when and how much to ham things up for the benefit of the audience, letting them all know he was in on the joke, is almost entirely absent here. Instead we get a Bond trying to be more serious and ‘gritty’ in certain parts, which means when we get to the standard Bond stuff like schmoozing a lady, it comes off more as creepy.

The other major issue is the tone, which bounces wildly and inconsistently throughout the run time. The heart of the plot – the tension of Bond vs someone he’d like to think is entirely different to him, but may actually be more similar than he’d like to admit – is only ever passingly flirted with, the movie shying away from ever getting too close to it, almost as if the studio realised that saying this quiet part out loud about their central character might devalue his status with audiences as a ‘hero’. Like other Bond movies which would follow it then, it starts with the kernel of a decent idea that could make an interesting movie, but then it bottles it and just ends up going with the standard stuff. Whoever thought that a character like J.W. Pepper needed to be in a movie like this, or that the Sampan chase was a good idea, or the karate sequence, needed to give their head a little wobble.

Add that to the convoluted and often completely nonsensical plotting and it all just ends up feeling like a waste. Having started with an imperfect but energetic outing, Moore gets a gloopy, poorly written, often nonsensical follow up, and you have to feel he must have been questioning his life choices, especially as it cruised to the (current) number five spot in the lowest grossing entries in the Bond franchise (and lowest for any Moore entry).

Ultimately, it feels less like The Man With The Golden Gun and more The Studio Intent On Slaughtering The Golden Goose. I can only hope things improve with the next one…