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Lots of dramatic imagery on the Wikipedia article about the Universal Carrier.

#wwii #armored personnel carrier #british military #action shot #car jump #tracked vehicle #caterpillar treads

Poster Signed by Roger Moore from The Man With the Golden Gun, 1974

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) is, by any rational measure, an absolutely preposterous film, and I say that with the deepest possible affection. Consider what it asks you to accept: Christopher Lee, possibly the most aristocratically sinister man ever to appear on a cinema screen, plays a world-class assassin whose defining characteristic, whose very calling card to the intelligence community, is a third nipple. Not a scar, not a tattoo, not some distinctive birthmark that could plausibly identify a person. A nipple. The screenplay apparently looked at the entire canon of human peculiarity and decided that a supernumerary teat was the detail most likely to strike terror into the hearts of audiences in 1974. And then, as if to make absolutely certain you understood what you were watching, the film opens by having two separate characters discuss it at length with the earnest gravity normally reserved for nuclear launch codes. There is also a dwarf butler called Nick Nack who lives on a private island in Thailand and whose primary job function appears to be arranging elaborate death traps for his employer’s amusement. This is presented without comment, as though it were a perfectly ordinary domestic arrangement.

What makes the film genuinely lovable, though, is that it has absolutely no idea it is being funny. Roger Moore, in only his second outing as Bond, raises an eyebrow and delivers every line with the serene confidence of a man who has just remembered where he parked his car. Britt Ekland is on hand as Mary Goodnight, an MI6 agent whose contribution to British intelligence includes accidentally triggering a solar energy superweapon with her bottom. The car chase through Bangkok features a policeman named Sheriff J.W. Pepper, imported wholesale from the previous film on no discernible logical basis, apparently because someone in the production office thought he was simply too good to leave in Louisiana. There is a corkscrew jump over a collapsed bridge that is, to this day, one of the most technically accomplished stunts ever filmed, accompanied on the soundtrack by a slide whistle. A slide whistle. Someone, presumably a grown adult employed in a professional capacity, heard that stunt, looked at the assembled might of British filmmaking, and said: what this really needs is a comedy sound effect. And somehow, inexplicably, magnificently, they were right.