- I'll admit that my affection for The Man With the Golden Gun stems primarily from the fact that it features Christopher Lee as Scaramanga, the world's most expensive and skilled assassin. As movie pitches go, that one is pretty great. The movie itself is unfortunately much more of a mixed bag. In the plus column, we get some truly gorgeous Pacific rim scenery and a tremendously impressive stunt in which a car executes a barrel roll in midair over a canal. The film's acting is generally palatable, too, with Maud Adams and Britt Ekland as better-than-average Bond girls, Lee as his usual wonderfully creepy self, and Hervé Villechaize as the memorably comic henchman, Nick Nack. Even Marc Lawrence, an actor I'm always glad to see after his terrific performance in The Asphalt Jungle, makes an early cameo as one of Scaramanga's potential assassins.
- And then there's the rest of the film. Scaramanga's flying car and sideshow antics are both pretty absurd, although perhaps only slightly beyond the pale by Bond standards. Lieutenant Hip (Soon-Tek Oh) is decent enough, but his kung-fu fighting nieces are just too much. Still, it's much easier to believe that they could hold their own in a fight than could Roger Moore, whose performance wilts at the first sign of physical exertion. And then there's the subject of Scaramanga's extra nipple (or "superfluous papilla") about which the less said, the better. The film's cardinal sin, however, is the reintroduction of Clifton James as the intolerable Louisiana Sheriff, J. W. Pepper. Reprising his role from Live and Let Die, another colossally uneven entry in the Bond pantheon, Pepper almost manages to derail this film with his hammy Southern aphorisms and general obnoxiousness. While Bond films regularly require suspension of belief to a high degree, I simply cannot accept either that Pepper was randomly vacationing in Bangkok, or that the writers or director thought it would be a good idea to bring him back. If only he had gotten ejected from the car during its flip, this film would have gotten significantly higher marks from me.
- For the record, this was the second Bond film to feature a golden gun.
- Is Marc Lawrence the same character from Diamonds are Forever? Even the internet doesn't seem to know.
