1974 - The Man With The Golden Gun
Alternate Title - The Man That Owned A Midget
PG - 125 minutes
Director - Guy Hamilton
Stars - Roger Moore, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland
The first introduction to the villain, Scaramanga is a close-up of his three nipples. A minute into this movie and I’m already hard. It then turns into Scaramanga and a hit-man trying to kill each other while a midget watches and laughs at his boss, Scaramanga. The scene basically turns into a carnival fun-house with flashing lights and scary skeletons popping out at the hit-man as he wanders through in the dark. Scaramanga and his midget appear to be into a very kinky game of lethal foreplay. He kills the hit-man with his golden gun and shoots the fingers off of a mannequin version of Bond that clearly isn’t Roger Moore standing there, shaking and pretending to be a mannequin. Clearly.
Bond is led to believe that Scaramanga has a hit out on him. The exact way that Bond tracks him down is that all of his bullets are made of gold. It’s fairly easy to track once he finds out who makes them for Scaramanga. It seems to me that if he used regular untraceable bullets that it would be almost impossible for Bond or anyone else to track him down. That’s pretty much the first rule if you want to be a career criminal; avoid doing anything that raises suspicion.
While tracking down the bullet, Bond assaults a woman by twisting her arm up to her head and threatening to break it if she doesn’t give up Scaramanga. Eventually this leads to a sunken ship where for some fucking reason M is using as a headquarters. Despite having an entire sect to run, M and Q are ALWAYS within twenty minutes of Bond. It’s as if they don’t have other agents to keep track of. Or paperwork. Or bosses to report to. They seriously just appear to follow Bond around on the off-chance he might need a good talking-to.
Bond winds up at a kung-fu school and beats the shit out of all of the students. He then is on a boat while a child tries to sell him a wooden elephant. The kid is like the most high-pressure car salesman ever. But a salesman that is horrible as he keeps lowering the price. Apparently Bond hates him so he shoves him overboard.
If you thought we were done with Sheriff Pepper you were wrong. For absolutely no reason other than (failed) comic relief, he shows up in Asia where Bond happens to be causing a ruckus. Pepper shouts out horribly racist shit at the locals and declares that he is a democrat to his wife. I bet. I bet the angry, racist southern sheriff is a democrat. Seems logical.
Later in the movie Bond is about to nail his partner, Goodnight when Scaramanga’s right-hand woman, Andrea walks into the room. Instead of just telling her that Goodnight is there he decides to do the old sitcom rouse of hiding her awkwardly while Andrea isn’t looking. They both sit on the fucking bed while Goodnight is under the blankets as if she wouldn’t notice the giant human-sized lump in the sheets. When he hides Goodnight in the closet he proceeds to bang the living shit out of Andrea while Goodnight is forced to listen to the entire fuck-fest. After Andrea leaves he lets Goodnight out of the closet and for some unknown reason Goodnight storms out. I can’t imagine why. It should be noted that Goodnight is super hot and Andrea is by all accounts a cougar at best. However, from Roger Moore’s perspective it must be because they are basically the same age. When Connery was Bond they surrounded him with 20-30 year old girls that seemed natural. But when Moore took over they needed to surround him with cougars in an apparent effort to make him look younger.
I’ll say one thing about Bond entering the 1970’s, it meant that car chases were mandatory about every twenty minutes or so. In this one he gets into a chase with Sheriff Pepper in the car and it turns into a fucking Dukes Of Hazard episode. They are in the car and must ramp over a small river using a loop-to-loop from a childhood car track. The ramp is made of wood and it flips the car over 360 degrees while a literal slide whistle gives it soundtrack. It’s fucking stupid. Especially in the middle of this mostly serious movie. Then Scaramanga hooks his car up to a set of plane wings and flies the fuck out of the scene while Pepper chews tobacco and yells racist shit (pointy-heads) at the local police.
When he eventually tracks down Scaramanga, he shows Bond his new toy which is a solar-powered laser gun used to blow up things for fun, apparently. Later Bond and Scaramanga are repeating the opening scene where the hit-man died. Bond threatens to kill the midget like a fucking man does. Quickly it turns into the fun-house again and Bond repeats everything that the hit-man did. However, Bond isn’t your ordinary duck so he climbs below the set and sneaks away. Bond disguises himself as the previously mentioned mannequin Bond and shoots Scaramanga. Seriously, all of his downfall is predicated on the fact that his methods are dangerously stupid.
Goodnight pushes a man into a vat and this causes everything on the island to overheat and explode. Bond and Goodnight sail to safety. Or did they? Because the midget is hiding on the boat. Bond gets the best of the midget and kills him….er….no, he just hangs him on top of the sailboat mast. Leaves him to die I guess.
Overall, this is one of the best Bond movies out there. It would have been a lot better if they didn’t bring back racist Sheriff Pepper. Scaramanga is a pretty good villain despite doing almost nothing that was evil. He seriously just talked slowly and killed hit-men. He wasn’t even the one that sent the threat to Bond at the beginning. It was Andrea. Scaramanga was just a dude with a laser at the point when Bond killed him. Sure, he might have done something evil with the laser later but we didn’t get to see it. At any rate, he’s fucking dead. Just like all villains end up, oh wait, unless they’re midgets. That’s the only way to survive a Bond movie if you’re evil. Midgets just end up on top of a boat while they roast in the sun and die of dehydration. Maybe it would have been more humane to just shoot the prick.