Watched The Man With The Golden Gun last night, really great premise and opening sequence in Scaramanga’s lair, then the film just goes off the rails into goofy shit.
Bond looks like a lumbering arthritic giant, hardly physical at all.
The goofy third nipple thing.
The sequence in Thailand has goofy car stunts, ditzy blonde Goodnight, ninja teen girls, fat southern sheriff guy providing comic relief.:smack:
And what could have been a very interesting situation, the difference or maybe similarity between Bond and Scaramanga is hardly examined.
I never thought it was one of the better ones, myself. By “early”, I thought you were going to comment on Sean Connery’s films, not Roger Moore’s second one.
Yeah, early Bond films: Sean Connery films…which are very much not goofy. Moore output is, with some exceptions, For Your Eyes Only for instance or the Spy who Loved Me.
It is actually part of the book so blame Ian Fleming for that.
As a plot bunny, it is supposedly how Scaramanga got identified. There supposedly wasn’t an available photograph of him, but it was known that he had that third nipple.
Fleming’s villains all have physical abnormalities (and are of mixed race parentage.) The movies (wisely) tend to ignore most of those. I suppose he was trying to reflect their mental aberrations in their physical appearances.
The 70s Bond flicks are pretty curious artifacts of the filmmaking trends of their era. You’ve got the blaxploitation Bond in “Live and Let Die,” the undersea adventure Bond in “The Spy Who Loved Me,” and the “shameless attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars” Bond in “Moonraker.”
The early Bond films like “Dr. No” and “From Russia With Love” were actually pretty straightforward spy movies, with a few flamboyant touches.
It was just hard to buy Roger Moore as a tough, determined spy and killer. He looked like he should be standing in a store window with a stick up his ass. Took the franchise in a whole wrong direction.
Dr. No and From Russia With Love played it relatively straight, and the latter is among the best. Goldfinger started going crazy with gimmicks and was the biggest hit of the three, so the producers figured that people wanted the spy gimmicks and outlandish plots. By the Roger Moore era, it was all silliness.
That you can even think of a Roger Moore film as “early Bond” shows the profound difference between us.
The “early Bond” films – the 1960s Sean Connery films – were arguably the bet. Richard Maibaum wrote or co-wrote most of them. The ones he didn’t – like You Only Live Twice, which Fleming friends Roald Dahl* wrote the original screenplay for – were the worst.
Moore’s were pretty awful until *For Your Eyes Only. Two of the Moore screenplays were by Tom Mankiewicz and Christopher Wood, and they were eaily the most puerile and “Goofy” Bobds – these were the ones with “Jaws”. Christopher Wood went on to write the screenplay for the equally awful Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Mankiewicz also co-wrote The Man with the Golden Gun. They brought in Maibaum to try to save it, but the body died on the operating table. They filmed it anyway.
The first four Bond movies were fun spy flicks and set the standard for action movies and the rest of the series. They started getting goofy with Diamonds Are Forever, with bond chasing a diamond smuggling ring in Las Vegas, getting his ass kicked by a couple lesbian bodyguards, driving a moon buggy through area 51, (and launching the moon-hoax industry), and… I gotta stop; It was too silly to take it seriously. It was 1970, people took a lot of drugs then.
The Roger Moore films went further in that direction. They were pretty horrible. I’ve always thought that Man With The Golden Gun was one of the worst Bond films made. Best to stick with Connery and Craig, with Lazenby’s single entry into the genre and Brosnan’s first, GoldenEye, as well.
Are you kidding? That movie rocked. Unlike the Bond films, the silliness worked.
I consider the moon buggy chase to be the moment the Bond movies truly jumped the shark. Although there is a massive plot hole just before that, how the hell did Plenty wind up floating in Tiffany’s pool?