Car Spot: Man with The Golden Gun 74 AMC Hornet

The most famous hatchback built in 1974

Not having the same mega budgets that General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler left scrappy little American Motors scrambling for attention. In 1974, they scrapped together 5 Million bucks for one of the biggest PR coops in automotive history by getting its car placed in the newest Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun. One of those cars is the subject of this week’s spot I found recently at the Kenosha History Museum.

When it comes to Bond cars, 007’s iconic 1963 Aston Martin DB5 and amphibious 1976 Lotus Espirit get all the attention yet it was an AMC Hornet Hatchback that joined that select list. While it was the Hornet that Roger Moore drove, his co-star villain Scaramanga, Christopher Lee who drives, and flies, an AMC Matador Coupe. I so want to build an RC model of that since they made it fly that way in the movie. Matador sedans are driven by policemen in Thailand.

Back to the Hornet. This was AMC’s bread and butter when introduced in 1969 and became the company’s top seller during its production run as well as the platform for AMC’s subcompact Gremlin, luxury compact Concord, liftback and sedan Spirit, and the all-wheel drive Eagle. It was a “game changer” for AMC as the compact-size Hornet platform became the base for new market segments. With its MSRP of $1,994 for the base model, the Hornet was a low-priced economical small family car. There was even a high-performance model in 1971, the SC/360 model powered by AMC’s 360 V8 making it a compact-sized muscle car. Right now these are the rarest of the Hornets, besides this one.

In the early 1970s American Motors Corporation was still looking to expand into foreign markets and the Hornet was assembled under license across the globe so this film was perfect. In case you’re not a Bond fan he commandeers an AMC Hornet X Hatchback from a car showroom in Bangkok, Thailand along with a surprised Sheriff Pepper. 007 drives the Hornet through the showroom window and sees the AMC Matador driven by the villain Scaramanga. The Hornet’s big moment comes as the two AMCs exit the city and Bond jumps the car 40 feet over a Thai river, the car performing a barrel turn in mid-air, twisting through 360 degrees, before landing on a bridge on the opposite bank. No second take, no CGI, just one slightly modified AMC Hornet doing a crazy stunt.

This was nothing new for AMC. With the help of a college study utilizing 18th-century mathematician Leonhard Euler’s equations for the motions of a rigid body in three-dimensional space. In other words, AMC’s Astro Spiral Jump show utilizing Javelins and first performed at the Houston AstroDome. Some have called it the greatest auto stunt of all time.

The Hornet that made the jump, like the Javelins, was specially modified with the driver sitting in the center but outside of that, the same 360 V8 and Cragar wheels that the car Bond drove. The Guinness World Records 2010 book describes the jump as the “first Astro spiral used in a movie” and lists it as third among the top ten James Bond film stunts.

There were several Hornets taken to Thailand for the filming and they eventually ended up in a collection. The one that did the jump was at one time sold from a private collector for $110,000 in 2017 and is now part of a Bond vehicle exhibit at the National Motor Museum in the U.K. This one is owned by Kevin Rutkowski who lives in Kenosha.

The Hornet was phased out after the 1977 model year and transformed into a new “luxury compact” line of automobiles, the Concord. It outlasted the compact platforms that included the Chevrolet Nova, Ford Maverick, and Plymouth Valiant.

Thanks for stopping by and checking out this week’s spot. I have tons of others so be sure to discover those and come back next week for another one of my spots along with some of its history. Have a great weekend.