The 1974 movie scene that almost blew up a ‘Bond girl’: “It was a burning hell”
For the most part, James Bond does most of the dirty work himself. After all, what’s the point in being the most iconic secret agent in cinema history if you can’t save the world single-handedly?
In the early years of 007’s big-screen existence, the ‘Bond girls’ were hardly renowned for being in the thick of the action. Usually, they’d be damsels in distress in need of rescue or notches left behind on some far-flung bedposts, but when one of them had to run through fire, it was almost the death of them.
The longer the series has worn on, the bigger and bolder the stunts have gotten. That’s the way it is for almost every sequel, and it’s especially integral to Bond: with each new adventure, MI6’s finest has to get involved in some sort of escapade the likes of which audiences have never seen before, whether it’s a car chase, shootout, brawl, skydive, bungee jump, or whatever the writers have come up with.
‘Go big or go home’ has been the mantra since the early 1960s, and while the advent of CGI has made things less perilous for the modern-day incarnation of the never-ending spy saga, throwing a couple of actors in the midst of a string of rigged explosions always carries the chance of going disastrously wrong.
In the script for The Man with the Golden Gun, it seemed simple. Roger Moore’s Bond and Britt Ekland’s Mary Goodnight had to escape from the lair of Christopher Lee’s scheming Scaramanga, all while things are blowing up all around them. However, in execution, the ‘Bond girl’ almost bit the dust.
Reflecting on her memories of sharing the screen with Moore, the first thing that came to Ekland’s mind was the most important. “He literally saved my life,” she said. “We were shooting the scene where we were escaping from Scaramanga’s island with a series of controlled explosions and pyrotechnics. It was a burning hell.”
During rehearsals, their movements were to echo the way “each explosion was timed precisely,” but the actor didn’t account for her wardrobe. “I was in a bikini, of course, and wearing wedge heels, which made it tough to run,” Ekland elaborated. “When the cameras started rolling, I was too slow, and one explosion went off right under my bottom and singed my bikini.”
Understandably, since her arse was on fire, she panicked, and her first instinct was to cover her face, hit the ground, and roll to put out any lingering flames. The obvious downside was that there were more explosions still to go off, and in a case of art imitating life, Moore became a real-life 007.
Ekland remembered how he “grabbed my hand and pulled me up to safety and carried me along to finish the scene unscathed,” which was a damn sight better than lying face-down and being subject to even more explosions, which could have left her with much more than a smoking bikini.
