Only a year removed from his Bond debut in Live and Let Die, Roger Moore finds himself again in the famed role in The Man with the Golden Gun. If nothing else, this film teaches us that director Guy Hamilton, who was behind the camera for four Bond films is versatile in his directorial choices in that the tone and style of each is markedly different. Goldfinger, while the most fetishized of the franchise, is kind of hokey, inundated with puns / innuendo, and a departure for Bond from his first two films. Diamonds are Forever is a bit more politically savvy than the Hamilton bunch, but, more importantly, tries to recapture the audience turned off by On her Majesty’s Secret Service by using longer takes on Connery and convincing him to speed up the action and take a few stage fighting classes. Live and Let Die is carried by its soundtrack and tries desperately to fit in with seventies tropes. While it succeeds, it’s mostly forgettable aside from some Paul McCartney vocals.
However, The Man with the Golden Gun begins amidst deception and borrows a page from Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game, the tale of a man who invites a stranded stranger into his home only to set him on course through which his host relishes in hunting him.
This time, the black-donned, fedora-wearing man is not stranded, but tricked into landing on Scaramanga’s (Christopher Lee) island, where he pays a handsome price to the diminutive Nick Nack (Herve villechaize), in order to kill the assassin that floats unseen all over the world. The tension is palpable, but this scene and Scaramanga’s victory with his golden gun merely just hint at his meticulous nefariousness. Bond is his target all along, as we are informed by the wax figure of Bond that exists in Scaramanga’s fun house of death.
And, Bond’s belief that he is Scaramanga’s next target sets him on a collision course with the rather gregarious, disconcertingly polite villain.
The film runs the way we are accustomed to with prosaic monologues, some deception here and there, a twist and turn in the story, and a bit of bed romping, but what’s doubly interesting about this film is that, at its core, is an issue that is all to prevalent today: energy depletion.
This clever assassin also has in his hands the Solex, a tiny gizmo that harnesses the energy of the sun, a power that could overshadow a thousand neutron bombs and generate enough energy to keep lights in New York City and Los Angeles burning ceaselessly.
But the apparent observations about the need to find another source of energy outside of petroleum, seem to be rhetoric all too common to all too many generations. Ironically enough, the notion of using solar energy to replace depleting petroleum is often bunked, thrown into a common cliche of “only good in the right hands.” In a way, The Man with the Golden Gun, whose title also bespeaks a wickedness to the harnessing of solar energy, casts a shadow of doubt on whether the sun would be used for the purposes of good.
In the 1970’s the fear of nuclear annihilation was still all to familiar, given that the Cuban Missile Crisis was only a tad over a decade old, so it’s possible that the prospect of a natural energy being used to create something similar was coursing through cultural politics as this film was being made.
