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described Largo as a ‘ruthless Neapolitan black marketeer and fence who moved to riskier and more profitable ventures on the international crime scene’, and his black eye patch gave him a certain evil
je ne sais quoi
. Adolfo also had quite a strong accent and his voice was dubbed by Robert Reitty.
    Blaxploitation movies were fast becoming popular in 1970s cinema, and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz thought it would be very daring to use black villains in
Live And Let Die
, especially with the Black Panthers and other racial movements being very active. The ‘swinging sixties’ had romanticized the use of soft drugs, but in the early 1970s it was taken a step further by drug barons and counterculture. This all combined for an exciting plot in which Jimmy Bond tackled the drug barons head on, or at least Harlem drug lord Mr Big, whose plan was to distribute the world’s largest cache of heroin, free of charge, on the open market. It would drive other drug cartels out of business, increase the number of addicts, and give Mr Big and his alter ego, poppy-farming Dr Kananga, a monopoly.
    As director Guy Hamilton was a jazz fan, he suggested filming in New Orleans and decided to use an opulent New Orleans jazz funeral as the starting point in the film, and as a cover to enable the villainous Mr Big to make a few agents disappear. Then, while searching for Kananga’s island retreat (in Jamaica), the crew discovered a crocodile farm owned by a certain Dr. Kananga (after passing a sign warning that ‘trespassers will be eaten’). The farm was incorporated into the script and that inspired Mankiewicz to name Mr Big’s alter ego after the owner.
    Maybe a spoonful of sugar would have persuaded Mr Big (Yaphet Kotto) to swallow this deadly pill?
    Yaphet Kotto was cast as Kananga/Mr Big, the first (and to date only) African American villain in a 007 adventure.
GOLDEN MOMENTS
    For my second outing, my old pal – and Ian Fleming’s cousin, as it happened – Christopher Lee was cast as my opponent, Francisco Scaramanga, aka
The Man With The Golden Gun
. Christopher and I had worked together on a film called
Trottie True
right back in 1949 when I was starting out, and then again in an episode of the TV series
Ivanhoe
in the 1950s.
    Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) was the diminutive hired help of Scaramanga, and as this photo indicates, he was quite a ladies’ man.
     
    In
The Man With The Golden Gun
I faced up to my old friend Christopher Lee.
    On
The Man With The Golden Gun
I used to tease Christopher mercilessly about his role as Dracula and, just before the director called ‘Action’, I would lean over and say, ‘Go on, Chris, make your eyes go red!’
    A rather provocative poster image for the film, featuring Christopher Lee’s hand.
     
    Remember the bullet with 007 on that arrived in M’s office? Well, it was a custom-made, 4.2-millimetre, golden (23-carat gold with traces of nickel) dum-dum bullet.
    Then there was the time we first entered the mouth of the cave on James Bond Island, which was replicated back at Pinewood as Scaramanga’s HQ. A mass of bats flew out towards us. Without flinching, Christopher held up his hand and said, ‘Not now, Stanislav!’
    He looked sheepishly at me and said, ‘You’re going to use that against me, aren’t you?’
    Me? As if!
    Karl Stromberg (as played by Curt Jurgens) in
The Spy Who Loved Me
, one of my more charismatic adversaries. Note the vice-like grip in which he holds both me and Barbara Bach-to-Front.
    Scaramanga is assisted by the diminutive Nick Nack, as played by Hervé Villechaize. Dear Hervé was a fun character – and sex mad! I asked him how many girls he’d had while we were shooting in Hong Kong.
    ‘Forty-five,’ he replied in his squeaky French voice.
    ‘Ah!’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t count if you paid them.’
    ‘Even when I offer to pay sometimes they refuse me,’ he added sadly.
    He trotted up to Maud Adams in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel in Hong