The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) - 31 mistakes

Visible crew/equipment: When Bond tries to get the golden bullet from the belly dancer named Saheeda, some angry gangsters enter her dressing room. As they start destroying the place, you can see the crew in the mirror on the dressing table very clearly after one of the bad guys is knocked into it, nudging it out of position.

Revealing: At the start of the film when the gangster lands on Scaramanga's island, and enters Scaramanga's fun house, he encounters a scene where some dummies of Al Capone and some other gangsters come out of an area guns blazing... With the first burst of machine gun fire, the dummy "blinks"...

Audio problem: At the beginning of the film the gangster screws a silencer on his gun, but when he fires the sound effect is for an unsilenced gun.

Continuity: When Bond is flying over China and landing on the sea by the Scaramanga's island you can see that his plane has two floats - one on either wing. But in the shot where he is heading for the beach it is clearly seen that the left float has gone!

Factual error: The film’s car chase takes place in Thailand, where vehicles are right-hand-drive (RHD) and travel on the left side of the road (as in England and Australia). Yet the American Motors (AMC) cars in the chase (the red Hornet X, gold Matador coupe and several Matador sedan police cars, all 1974-models) are all left-hand-drive cars. Scaramanga’s car can be excused as something he specifically imported for himself, but the Hornet is ‘borrowed’ from a fictitious AMC dealership (none existed outside the USA) and the small amount of AMC vehicles sold outside the USA were shipped disassembled to various companies that reassembled them and sold them under their own company names (AMI in Australia, Karmann in Germany, etc). Companies such as these, in RHD nations, had to modify the cars to RHD themselves in order to be allowed to sell them ‘locally’. So the Hornet would have been at a non-AMC dealership, and would have been RHD, as would the fleet of police cars. Naturally, this ‘error’ was created by AMC’s promotional deal with the filmmakers to use AMC cars in order to improve US sales to the US filmgoers.

Continuity: When we first meet Francisco Scaramanga we see that he has a third nipple which is just above his left. The next time we see him he is lying on a beach chair showing the left of him. If you look carefully you will notice that there is no third nipple.

Visible crew/equipment: In the scene where Bond walks in on Scaramanga's girl in the shower, you can easily see a crewman in a mirror as the camera pans.

Continuity: The AMC Matador stops as the AMC Hornet X races by on the cross-street. As the Matador halts, we see it has a proper door mirror. In a close-up of Scaramanga driving, we can just see the hole in the door where the now-missing mirror was mounted (on the VHS full-frame, we can see the remote cable hanging from the hole and the base of the mirror swinging as the mirror hangs out of view).

Visible crew/equipment: James Bond is backing up the red AMC Hornet X, preparing to jump the wooden bridge. Sheriff J.W. Pepper says, "What the hell you doing now, boy?" and then you can see a studio light and a crewmember in the reflection of the right rear passenger window.

Visible crew/equipment: As Bond slides himself past the curtain in the hotel room, just before placing the champagne on a table, in the lower right corner of the picture you can see three points of reflection of light on a glass or chrome object on the board (an ashtray?). The left one of these suddenly turns dark, indicating some movement behind the camera. Bond cannot have caused that as there is no light behind him, all light comes from the right and from behind.

Continuity: When the AMC Matador arrives in the hangar and begins attaching the jet plane equipment, we see a bracket welded to the lower rear quarter panel, just behind the door. The wing supports swing down to attach at this point on both sides of the car, yet these brackets were not on the car in any prior shot.

Visible crew/equipment: During the car chase scene where Bond is driving the red AMC Hornet X, Sheriff J.W. Pepper says, "The nearest bridge is two miles back." Look at the rear window and you'll see the elbow of a crewmember on the roof of the car appear into view.

Factual error: James Bond comes out of the "Bottoms Up" topless bar and down to the waterfront. He jumps on a boat and tells the boatman to take him to "Kowloon side". In fact, Bottoms Up is on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong harbour, so he's already there. If he wanted to cross the harbour, he should have asked for "Hong Kong side".

Revealing: Scaramanga's jet-car fires up its roof-mounted jet engine and begins to roll forward in the hangar. Despite the fact that we hear the turbine whining loudly at increasing RPMs, the flimsy tan sheeting hanging in front of the jet intake is not sucked in, or even disturbed at all by the air flow.

Continuity: When Nick-nack realizes that he and Scaramanga are being followed, there is no round, white decal at the lower corner of the windshield of their AMC Matador, yet in all other shots, the decal is there.

Plot hole: When Bond and Scaramanga are dueling, Bond has no tie or jacket on. After Bond drops his gun and gives his hiding place away, he somehow has the time to not only crawl back onto the staging, but to move the wax replica of himself, and also to put on the dummy's jacket and necktie.

Audio problem: The voice of Lt. Hip, Bond's assistant in Asia (played by Soon Taik-Oh) changes during the film, usually depending on whether it's an inside or outside scene. In all the outside scenes, his voice is much higher and shriller, so it was probably dubbed by a different actor.

Revealing: In the shot where Bond rams the long tail boat of the karate experts, you can see that the boat is split in two pieces and the bow is already sinking before the collision.

Continuity: The red AMC Hornet X that Bond steals from the car dealership alternately does, and does not, have an interior rear-view mirror mounted on the windshield.

Factual error: The liner Queen Elizabeth sank in the Hong Kong harbor in 1972, not 1971.

Audio problem: In the teaser we see the hitman load his gun when he gets ready to kill Scaramanga. When Scaramanga walks into the room, the hitman aims for him. The gun makes a loading sound. A loaded gun does not make a sound when you aim it - and why would he have unloaded the gun while waiting for his victim? When you load the gun, the hammer is back and the gun is ready to fire. No further actions are necessary. And a professional hitman does not wait to turn off the safety on his gun until his victim has arrived.

Factual error: Q says the golden bullets are caliber 4.2mm. But when we see them they are much larger - more like 9-10mm. 4.2mm is like a hail in an air pistol.

Continuity: As Scaramanga turns the laser gun towards the plane you can see that the gun never points at the plane, while he turns it and when he shoots. The perspective shows that the gun never points closer to the plan than some 30 - 40 m behind it.

Continuity: At the start, when the gangster is preparing for the showdown with Scaramanga, there is a rope hanging with a knot in it, however, when Scaramanga comes in the knot in the rope has been tied.

Continuity: A significantly modified '74 AMC Hornet was used for the famous cork-screw jump sequence, taking the place of the relatively stock Hornet X used in all other shots. It is best viewed just after the jump as the car slows to turn left - the car has a much lower stance and the wheel wells are far larger.

Visible crew/equipment: In the beginning of the movie when the "gangster guy" is taking on Scaramanga, Scaramanga slides down a ramp to get his golden gun. If you look closely, he has roller skates on.

Visible crew/equipment: As Bond hides behind the door between the two living rooms you can see a gold-colored (metal?) object suddenly entering the mirror in its lower left corner, then it moves a bit as the camera doesn't pan anymore. It has to be something moved or held by a crewmember.

Continuity: When Scaramanga is talking about the laser gun to Bond, the water is next to his airplane but when he shoots on it, the level is lower. There's only little waves so it's impossible to change that fast.

Revealing: Scaramanga's woman is taking a shower. When Bond gives her a towel you can see she's not naked but wearing a skin-colored top. The top is also visible when looking at the reflection on the mirror to the right of them.

Continuity: During the chase scene with the police, Bond swerves past a driver in a dark green 1956 Plymouth Savoy. As the police cars pass the Plymouth, the scene cuts to an inside shot of the car with the driver yelling, then the driver loses control of the car and rolls it over. The car that crashes is a green 1955 Chevrolet 210 series, not the 1956 Plymouth.

Continuity: When Bond is picked up by the Sumo wrestler in the garden Bond is upright hitting the wrestler. When they cut to the wrestler front (Bonds backside) Bond is already down over the wrestler's shoulder doing something to the wrestlers backside. They cut back to Bond front side and he is still up and reacting in pain and then bends over the wrestler's shoulder.