“The Man with the Golden Gun” (1974): From Denmark with Love

● EONs ninth James Bond film, "The Man with the Golden Gun" from 1974, features the first ever on-camera appearance of a Danish person. However, Janni Pia Christensen is not mentioned in the credits, nor has she any lines. The 20-year old Janni from Copenhagen can be glimpsed in a single shot as she is passing James Bond (Roger Moore) on the stairs of the The Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.
Time code (Blu-ray): 27.37

Janni Pia Christensen in "The Man with the Golden Gun" (1974) - framegrab

According to the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet, Janni also did an evening scene with Roger Moore and Britt Ekland at a restaurant in Bangkok. This sequence appears to have ended up on the cutting-room floor - unless it was staged for the benefit of the Danish press?

Janni Pia Christensen' got her walk-on in the Bond movie after winning the beauty contest "Årets pige" [Girl of the Year] arranged by Ekstra Bladet in 1973. On December 29, 1973 the tabloid printed a photo of Roger Moore apparently choosing Janni from a picture of the fifteen finalists aged 15 to 21. Moore was photographed in South Africa where he was shooting "Gold" for director Peter Hunt.

Janni Pia Christensen with Roger Moore, Britt Ekland and Maud Adams | publicity photo, 1974

Janni met up with the Bond film crew in Thailand in May 1974, but after her return she told the monthly youth magazine Vi Unge as well as the weekly glossy Billed Bladet that her experience as the first Danish Bond babe had been a dispapointing one, and that Roger Moore with his "hollow knees" wasn't exactly her type. Later the same year she married and changed her last name to Nicolaisen and quietly disappeared from the limelight.

● For years it had been rumoured that the sultry saxophone solo in the sequence where James Bond romances the belly dancer Saita (Carmen du Sautoy), was of Danish origin. In 1998 the composer and arranger Ib Glindemann told local Danish daily Fyens Stiftstidende that his musician friend Jesper Thilo had come across a showing of "The Man with the Golden Gun" on Danish TV and recognized their composition "Saxophone A" on the film's soundtrack. The sax solo also appears on the soundtrack album track "Getting the Bullet".

Glindemann believed that he composed the cue as a piece of library music for the music publisher Warner/Chappell in 1973/74. Film music expert Jesper Hansen who was a personal friend of the now deceased Glindemann trawled through every single Glindemann/Thilo cue titled "Saxophone A" in 2020 but failed to find an exact match to the solo heard in the film. Hansen believes that the Danish cue might have been used as temp score during the editing of the film. Another explanation could be that the Bond composer John Barry - who was greatly pressed for time due to the film's compressed post-production phase - simply chose to copy an existing piece without crediting the original authors.
Time code (Blu-ray): 17.19

● Read the whole story: "The case of the Danish saxophone solo"

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