James Bond’s Tastes: The Man With The Golden Gun

The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) was Ian Fleming’s twelfth and last Bond novel (published posthumously), and it was fairly limp (and poorly reviewed) by comparison to its antecedent, You Only Live Twice, in whose ending the British spy was recovering in Japan from amnesia and needed to go to Russia to jog his memory. The Man with Golden Gun slides over whatever happened there, opening with the news that MI6 presumed 007 dead for more than a year, only to find him return so brainwashed by the Russians that he tries to assassinate his boss M with a cyanide pistol.

After being “de-brainwashed” Bond is back on the job, sent to Jamaica (a frequent Fleming location) to kill Francisco “Pistols” Scaramanga, who is himself a paid assassin of several British agents. He is known as “The Man with the Golden Gun” because his preferred weapon a gold-plated Colt .45 revolver with solid-gold bullets.

Bond is said to be still drinking too much, but there are few references to his appetites in the book; he still favor bourbon over Scotch and Champagne over all. M, over lunch at his club Blades, orders an Algerian wine called Infuriator, which Bond loathes. Scaramanga prefers Jamaican Red Stripe beer.

Bond masquerades as Scaramanga’s personal assistant at his bordello in the Thunderbird Hotel, where 007 is welcomed with a meal of eggs Benedict and a bottle of Walker’s Deluxe bourbon. Bond learns that Scaramanga is involved with a syndicate of American gangsters and KGB agents. Not much of a world-shattering threat here: Scaramanga and his investors want to increase the value of the Cuban sugar crop, run drugs and prostitutes into the U.S.

Over lunch with Scaramanga, Bond orders Beefeater’s pink gin with “plenty of bitters” to go with shrimp cocktail, steak and French fries.

Bond meets up with his CIA friend Felix Leiter, pretending to be an electrical engineer in Scaramanga’s meeting room, where Leiter learns that Scaramanga plans to kill Bond. At dinner in the hotel dining room, the meal consists of “desiccated smoked salmon with a thimbleful of small-grained black caviar, filets of some unnamed native fish (possibly silk fish) in a cream sauce. a ‛poulet suprême’ . . . and the bombe surprise.”

After a KGB agent exposes them, Leiter and 007 manage to kill many of the bad guys and hop aboard Scaramanga’s train, where Bond, even during a gunfight, fantasizes about a meal of cold lobster salad, cold cut meats, pineapple and local fruit, roasted in stuffed suckling pig with rice and peas, and champagne, rum punch and Tom Collins cocktails. Both Bond and Scaramanga are wounded, and Scaramanga limps off into the swamps. When Bond finds him, he is eating a boa constrictor and drinking its blood, offering some to Bond, who replies, “No thanks. I prefer my snake grilled with hot butter sauce.”

The villain offers Bond money—he refuses—and asks Bond not to kill him in cold blood and to allow him a moment to pray—“I’m a Catholic!” he declares—but then pulls out a golden derringer with a snake venom bullet and shoots Bond, who returns fire, kills his foe, then collapses in pain.

It takes weeks for Bond to recover fully, and then M offers him a knighthood, which 007 mulls over, saying it makes him shudder at the thought of being called Sir James Bond.

The 1974 film made from The Man with the Golden Gun) was the ninth, and Roger Moore’s second appearance as the British agent. The plot had nothing to do with the book’s, as became the standard practice in subsequent Bond films. There is little reference to food and drink, though right at the movie’s beginning Scaramanga’s midget assistant/henchman Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) brings a tray of Moët Champagne and a bottle of Guinness Stout with oysters to Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) and his moll, Andrea Anders (Maud Adams).

Bond is sent to find Scaramanga (who is known to have a third nipple) after MI6 receives a golden bullet etched with “007” on it. Bond retrieves another golden bullet from a belly dancer’s navel. (She, too, is partial to Moët; Bond orders Dom Pérignon at his hotel; both are Moët brands, which tells you something about product placement). The bullet is traced to a gun maker in Macau.

Accompanied by Andrea, Bond goes to Hong Kong and checks into the Peninsular Hotel, then goes to the Bottoms Up Club, where Nick Nack steals a high energy device called the Solex Agitator. Bond is arrested for pulling his own gun outside the club, but the Hong Kong police, led by Lieutenant Hip, bring him to meet M and Q onboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth, which, after a fire in 1972 capsized and was left rotting in the Kowloon harbor.

There he is ordered to retrieve a super electric energy gadget called the Solex Agitator. Posing as Scaramanga (complete with fake nipple) Bond flies to Bangkok to meet entrepreneur Hai Fat, who had the scientist who created the Solex killed. Bond’s plan fails when Scaramanga himself is found to be operating at Fat’s estate at Dragon Garden, Castle Peak Road, Castle Peak.

Bond is then captured and sent to a martial arts academy at Muang Boran, where students are instructed to kill him. Bond fights two of them and is then rescued by Hip and two teenage girls trained in martial arts. Fat’s men follow Bond, who escapes on a motorized sampan on Bangkok’s canal system. He reunites with his assistant Mary Goodnight, with whom he has a dinner at the Oriental Hotel, where the waiter offers them a bottle of Phuyuck ’74 (the same year as the movie) wine.

Scaramanga kills Fat and obtains the Solex. Anders begs Bond to kill Scaramanga, and promises to get the Solex, but she is murdered at a Muay Thai boxing event at the Lumpini Stadium the next day. Bond does obtain the Solex with the help of Goodnight, who is kidnapped by Nick Nack, with Bond in pursuit, not, however, in his usual Aston Martin but instead in a borrowed AMC Hornet. Bond takes a seaplane to Scaramanga’s private island at Phang Nga Bay, where Nick Nack receives him with a bottle of Dom Pérignon ‘64 (Bond says he prefers the ’62) .

Scaramanga destroys Bond’s plane with his Solex laser, then, over a lunch of mushrooms and other delicacies, Bond comments on his host’s choice of wine, “Hmm, slightly reminiscent of the ’34 Mouton.” Scaramanga says “I must get some for my cellar.”

He then proposes a duel on the beach. After pacing off, 007 finds Scaramanga has vanished. Nick Nack leads Bond back to Scaramanga’s house, which has a funhouse of mirrors and diversions. Bond manages to kill Scaramanga and retrieve the Solex, blowing up the island and taking his foe’s Chinese junk to escape with Goodnight for an eight-hour sail to Hong Kong.