Just Awful: The Man with the Golden Gun

Sometimes, your foggy memory of youth should be taken to the bathroom and drowned in the tub. That is precisely the rose colored glasses I viewed the 1970s vintage Bond flicks with.

When I get “spot bonuses” at work, a fairly regular occurrence, I’ve been using them to fill in gaps in my media collection.

I have been slowly adding things that I remember from watching while I was growing up, and one part of growing up in the turbulent 1970’s is the Roger Moore era James Bond flicks.

Until recently, I had only “Live and Let Die”, and “For Your Eyes only” from that era, so I rectified that by adding three more, “Octopussy”, “A View to a Kill” (a Christopher Walken guest vehicle), and the above mentioned, “The Man with the Golden Gun”.

I remember watching it in the 1970’s as a young lad, likely on the small screen (we did have HBO) and I loved the chase scenes. Set in south-east Asia, in Thailand and Hong Kong, it tells the tale of a high end “boutique” assassin, Scaramanga, who kills for the princely sum of $1M per contract, who has fixated on James Bond.

While the bad guy was ably played by Christopher Lee, the whole movie is just trash.

How trash? Well, if you remember the loudmouthed Louisiana sheriff from Live and Let Die? What are the odds that he would be on vacation and run into Bond in Thailand?

That is just one of the ridiculous premises.

There is the disassembling fire arm, the cast gold bullets that are the trademark of Scaramanga, the midget from Fantasy Island (Herve Villachaise), a trick funhouse mirror room that Scaramanga uses twice once in the opening scenes, and once when he is hunting Bond.

Of course, there were decent chases, in water-ways with open engined canoes(?) and one scene with the Sheriff, an AMC muscle car¹, and a ramp that may be one of the best stunts filmed, a corkscrew jump…

Seriously, that one scene is the best part of the movie.

Yet, the 10 year old me who watched this when it was first out, this was the Bond that captured my imagination. I hadn’t watched any of the earlier Connery vintage Bond, but I knew that James Bond was a bad-ass.

Oh, and as I type this, I am watching “Octopussy”, that was something I watched much later, and it is equally as awful.

Ten year old me thought this was a solid 8 out of ten.

Fifty nine year old me barely gives this a 2. And that is me feeling generous on Independence day.

1. That almost feels like sacrilege to type…

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