James Bond: Who'd want to put a contract on me?
M: Humiliated chefs! Outraged tailors! Jealous husbands! The list is endless!
Intro:
In the ninth official film, released in 1974, the hunter becomes the prey when Bond is targeted for assassination. The movie is based Ian Fleming's novel with the same title, and features the second appearance of Roger Moore as James Bond, the third Bond after Sean Connery and George Lazenby.
Plot:
The title villain, the man with the golden gun, Francisco Scaramanga, was played by Christopher Lee, who incidentally is a cousin of Ian Fleming. Scaramanga is, unlike most other Bond villains, not trying to take over the world (or at least part of it), but the very best assassin in the world (charging $1 million per hit), who "just" wants to test his skill against James Bond, the only man alive able to beat him. When a golden bullet with the number 007 engraved arrives at British Intelligence, everybody assumes Bond will be the next target. So he sets out to get Scaramanga, before Scaramanga gets him, in the usual Bond way: Follow the trail of bullets...
Trivia:
Bond girls are Britt Ekland as the aptly named Goodnight and Maud Adams as Andrea. By the way, Maud Adams will appear again in Octopussy as the title character.
Equipment provided by "Q" (the late Desmond Llewelyn) includes a Nikon camera which caused subject to explode when aimed and a Homing device and detector, almost a token gadget in later Bonds.
The southern sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James) returns for comic relief: ("Hey! You're that english secret agent! From England!"), after his first appearance in Live and Let Die was received successfully by the audience.
This is one of the few Bond movies where Bond does not make a personal appearance in the pre-credit teaser sequence. Instead, it serves to introduce Scaramanga as the villain, who hires other hitmen to try and kill him.
Suggested by RalphyK: The corkscrew jump was calculated precisely with computers, and they got it right on the first try. The producers actually took out a patent on the stunt, so nobody was allowed to do it for two years, although nobody has tried since.
Incidentally, even though Scaramanga does not manage to kill Bond (I hope nobody will consider that information to be a spoiler), he does kill Agent 002 (Bill Fairbanks) in Beirut, once again proving that the Double-0 when not Bond is the equivalent to a Red Shirt in Star Trek.
To finish up and complete the writeup, here is a nice link to all things Bond:
Previous Bond: Live and Let Die, James Bond will return in: The Spy Who Loved Me