There's a bit in The Man With The Golden Gun where Bond - having just seen Gibson shot in the head and lost the Solex - is told by M to take Goodnight to Thailand with him. "After tonight's debacle," says M, "an efficient liaison officer wouldn't go amiss."
In 2017, this is a line that elicits guffaws. Mary Goodnight: efficient? This is the girl who nearly fries 007 with her out of control buttocks, yes?
And they're right: Goodnight is a mess, a terrible wimp of a character. But stop and rewind. At that point in the film, what has she done? She's picked up Bond at the ferry terminal. She's proved her local knowledge by telling him about the green Rolls-Royce limos. She's flirted with him, then peevishly noted that he's probably going to shag someone else instead. She has, in short, been an efficient liaison officer.
Oh, she goes downhill fast. Like Tiffany in Diamonds Are Forever, she makes a great first impression, then slips into bimbo mode. Tiffany, however, declines over the course of the film, and still shows smarts at the end. Mary makes a shift change.
Look a bit closer at the film and you can actually pinpoint the moment when efficient Goodnight turns into inefficient Goodnight. When Bond dines with Mary and she rejects his advances, she's cool and capable and funny. When she turns up in his bedroom in the very next scene, she's needy and desperate and the kind of girl who doesn't mind sitting in a cupboard while her intended beau diddles someone else. Her change of mind has always annoyed me, but I think I've finally worked out what happened. Those two scenes were written by two different writers.
Rewind back to the early seventies, and it looks like the as yet unreleased Live and Let Die is going to be great. Broccoli and Saltzman reassemble the winning team, including screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz has a concept for Golden Gun, based on Shane: the two greatest guns in the world finally square off. Bond vs Scaramanga. It would be a grittier film than its predecessor - no gadgets, more down to earth.
Something happens though during the process - some have said that Mankiewicz was burned out from the effort of writing his third Bond in as many years, some say there was a falling out with Guy Hamilton. Mankiewicz leaves (with no hard feelings - he returns with ideas for the next two Bonds) and veteran Richard Maibaum is brought in. Maibaum adds the entire Solex subplot to add a MacGuffin 007 and the villain can both pursue. The two storylines mesh badly, clunking from one side to the other and never really satisfying - it's never adequately explained why Scaramanga would be interested in the Solex.
Maibaum also reintroduces humour to the "gritty" script, amping it up for Roger Moore's style. And this is where Goodnight was broken, for me. Until the Phuyuck scene, Goodnight has been - well, not witty, as such, but she's got in a few zingers, and her rejection of 007 comes from a place of strength. In the next scene, she gets locked in a cupboard. Then she gets locked in the boot of a car. Then she activates a laser with her arse.
It occurred to me that all this stupidity only happened in scenes that mentioned the Solex. Andrea and Bond are bargaining over it while Goodnight's in the cupboard. She has it in her handbag when she's locked in the boot. On Scaramanga's island, she's actually funny and doing her best at the dinner table, but when Bond is trying to dig the Solex out she can't even find an off switch on the console. In short, she's only a bimbo when Maibaum writes her.
Now I'm not saying Mankiewicz's Goodnight would've been one of the greatest Bond Girls, up there with Tracy and Vesper. His previous female characters were not great - Tiffany, as mentioned, de-evolves to the point where she falls off an oil rig; Plenty is a hooker who's thrown in a pool topless; Rosie is naive to the point of stupidity and is killed; Solitaire is a drippy virgin. But Andrea, in the same film, is great; she's sophisticated and exotic and haunted.
Part of Andrea's success is of course down to Maud Adams, so a word about Britt Ekland. She's very pretty, and... that's it. Tiffany is a far better Bond Girl than Goodnight, despite the same downward slide, because she was being played by Jill St John, a gifted comic actress. Britt Ekland is not funny, and it harms Goodnight as a character. Britt is adequate in the early scenes, but when she's being chucked about she's just there. Maibaum's vision of a woman who can't control her own buttocks may have worked with someone else: imagine what Goldie Hawn would've done with it! As it is - not so much.
Watch the film again and switch it off after Phuyuck and you'd think that Mary Goodnight was a competent agent in Her Majesty's secret service with a flirtatious side and the power to say no to 007. I'm sure that was how Goodnight would've been throughout the film, if there hadn't been these last minute rewrites. (I'm also sure that the dinner scene was a Mankiewicz creation - the dialogue is sharp and barbed, and Mary's role is similar to Tiffany's on the oil rig). She's not that exciting, which is why I can see Maibaum would introduce easy gags as a way to give her a bit more colour and personality. They were working on a deadline so, yeah, stick the blonde in the boot of a car and let's move on.
Of course, this is all theory. I don't have access to the original scripts to compare and contrast (if you want to send them to me, feel free). But I'm glad to finally have an explanation for Goodnight's change of heart in Thailand. It's so sudden, so out of character, and so wrong, it's irritated me for years. I'm happy to have my own headcanon to explain it away.
