51 Years Ago, One of the Most Unbelievable James Bond Subplots Happened (And It Was in the Books Too)

From the very beginning, the James Bond franchise has had hallmarks that not only set it apart from any other action series, but which nothing else can really replicate. It’s not just the globe-hopping locales throughout each movie, or the larger-than-life gadgets, or the chasimatic villains, or the state-of-the-art sports cars, or the femme fatales with suggestive double entendre names, it’s all of those things that make a James Bond movie. Not only do most of the movies have all of these, but sometimes they have even further surprises that can stop an audience member dead in the tracks, like what happened on this day many moons ago.

51 years ago today, the ninth James Bond movie and second film starring Roger Moore, The Man with the Golden Gun, was released into movie theaters in the United States. The film, like so many others in the series, would quickly become a success story, bringing in over $21 million at the domestic box office, equivalent to over $130 million in 2025. Like many other movies in the series, this one had an ace up its sleeve in the form of a cinematic icon, but Christopher Lee’s Francisco Scaramanga also delivered one of the most unbelievable subplots in franchise history.

Read Next

7 Best James Bond Villains, Ranked by Actor Performance

The Man With the Golden Gun Identifies Its Villain With a Surprise

The opening of The Man with the Golden Gun immediately bucks a franchise trend, starting not with the reveal of Bond in a big action scene that sets the stage for the movie at large, but the introduction of the villain. We not only meet Lee’s Scaramanga on a beach but his assistant, Hervé Villechaize as Nick Nack, and an assassin who has taken on Scaramanga’s own bounty to try and kill him. In a trippy, funhouse mirror sequence Scaramanga finally confronts his hunter and kills him, revealing not only an obsession with James Bond (he has a wax figure of Moore inside the funhouse) but a personal detail that immediately surprises anyone: he has three nipples.

Bond’s first scene even addresses this curiosity with M asking 007 what he nows about “Scaramanga.” Though Bond naturally knows all the pertinent information about the would-be assassin and his mythical golden gun, he also knows his “distinguishing feature,” calling it by the scientific name of “a superfluous papilla.” One would think that this identifying trait would end up being very important in just spotting Scaramanga in the wild, but it gets even weirder than that.

As the plot of The Man with the Golden Gun carries on, with Scaramanga being hired to kill an energy scientist, Bond has the clever revelation that the mystery of Scaramanga and his third nipple being a key identifier are because no one has ever actually met the man in person. This prompts Bond to come up with an idea that he writes down on a piece of paper and hands to Q, who responds, “Really, 007!” Bond answers, “I admit it’s a little kinky.”

The next scene reveals Bond’s plan; he wears a fake third nipple on his body to try and trick a Bangkok gangster into believing that HE is Scaramanga. It appears to work at first as Hai Fat invites him to dinner (“He must have found me quite titillating.”) There are two problems with Bond’s idea: he has the fake nipple on the wrong side of his body, and Scaramanga is already present at the gangster’s compound. The trap he thought he was setting was actually one for him.

One minor line in the movie seems to imply why this entire element was included in the story at all, when a character reveals that “Some cults consider it a sign of invulnerability and great sexual prowess.” As we know, it may indicate the latter, but the former is far from true by the end of the film. In the end, after Bond’s real identity is confirmed, the third nipple subplot is dropped completely.

Did it have any place in the movie at all? Did it actually advance the hunt for Scaramanga in a meaningful way? Considering they manage to arrive at the same locations more than once, even without the knowledge of the extra mammary gland, it seems like it could have easily been taken out. The wildest thing about the third nipple? This comes directly from the pages of the novel by Ian Fleming, his final one before his death.