Number One Gun

So, we come to our the third and last trailer in our brief Lindsay Shonteff season of random movie trailers.  Well, I say trailer, but this - the only footage related to Number One Gun that I could find anywhere online - looks more like a promo reel of the sort you'd show potential distributors.  Indeed, I know that Shonteff had real problems getting any distributors, anywhere, to buy this movie.  He took a big financial hit as a result.  As far as I know, it was never distributed in the UK or US, which would explain the lack of an English-language trailer. 

Anyway, this is the third and final film to feature the UK's 'Number One' secret agent, Charles Bind, played by yet another different actor.  Whilst Number One's previous incarnations, Nicky Henson and Gareth Hunt, had both enjoyed relatively high-profile roles on TV (and in Henson's case, film as well), Michael Howe, who took over the role for this outing, was a relative unknown, reflecting, no doubt, a drastically reduced budget, (which, bearing in mind the shoestring budgets of the previous two films, is really saying something).  Best known for having played the lead in a children's TV drama in the early 1970s, Number One Gun didn't make Howe into a film star, although he continues to make guest appearances on TV, appears in the occasional film and has enjoyed a successful stage career (I believe he's currently appearing in the West End in the Lloyd-Webber musical Scandal).

Another sign of the reduced budget is the fact that Number One is now toting only a single magnum revolver, rather than the pair sported by both Henson and Hunt in their outings.  Indeed, the footage in this trailer generally looks far less slick than in the previous films, with the appearance of a TV episode rather than a feature film.  Most interestingly, whilst the first two films were clearly parodying the then contemporary Roger Moore Bond movies, this one seems to parodying those first two films, with every scene apparently played for laughs.  Of course, by the time Number One Gun appeared, Timothy Dalton was 007 and the Bond series had taken a more serious turn. 

So, there you have it, three trailers representing the career of a low-budget film maker who managed to a carve a reasonably successful career at a time when the, according to populat wisdom, the British film industry was all but dead and buried.  Yet Shonteff continued to find funding and continued to make films - most of which actually made money.