EmailThe death of gentle-giant movie actor Richard Kiel – who famously portrayed the metal-toothed bad guy Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979) – closes a poignant chapter in the history of that curious action movie tradition: the henchman. But Kiel’s Jaws is an unusual figure. He was the henchman who went over to the side of goodness, redeemed by love, and challenged the moral universe of the Bond films.
The henchman is the man, and occasionally woman, who with unexplained submissive obedience does the main villain’s bidding in Bond movies, unhesitatingly ready to face near-fatal and in fact fatal danger in facing up to 007. He is Igor to the villain’s Frankenstein, an Untermensch underling with his own grotesque personality based on a certain unattractive appearance. (The word henchman comes from the Old English “hengest” or male horse – that is, the “horse-man” or groom, the clan chief’s servant.) Mike Myers mocked the henchman convention in his Austin Powers movies: what happens to the henchman’s family when the inevitable happens? Is there sick pay? Benefits? Shane Black’s screenplay for Iron Man 3 showed the henchman suddenly realising that he has no loyalty to his obviously obnoxious employer.
But Richard Kiel’s Jaws was part of a Bond tradition – faintly offensive by implication – that these henchmen are exotic foreigners, nasty pieces of work. The most famous is Oddjob (could any henchman have had a more demeaningly low-status handle than that?) whizzing his deadly hat at Bond in Goldfinger (1964) and smirking. But the henchman is without the main villain’s larger, strategic sense of evil and is hardly better than an animal: the gators or spiders or snakes that might menace Bond. Jaws was like this – a shark.
Jaws was not the first henchperson to switch sides to join the good guys: Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore came over to the British team in Goldfinger, inspired by her attraction to Bond himself. And Jaws is not the first minor character to get a repeat appearance. Clifton James’s beefy police chief Pepper in Live and Let Die (1973) was popular enough to come back in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974).
But Jaws emerged as a well-regarded and even well-loved repeat 007 character, endlessly in demand at fan conventions for the rest of his life. After Bond drops him into a shark tank in The Spy Who Loved Me, he escapes by sinking his steel fangs into the shark and swimming away. And even here we see not just persistence and survival but, perhaps, a premonition of his ethical about-face: he repudiates the shark. In Moonraker, he attempts to kill 007 by biting the through the steel wire keeping up his cable car, but finally falls in love with a female character called Dolly, and Bond persuades him to join him by showing Jaws that the villain Drax intends to introduce a sinister master race and that Jaws would not measure up; thus making explicit the horrible racial-eugenicist basis of henchman-ism. Jaws strikes back.
And Richard Kiel’s Jaws has an afterlife in the movies - in my view, he has a spiritual descendant: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. In ethical terms, he was Jaws 2.0, the metallic destroyer who changed sides and came over to the forces of light in his second movie. As Sarah Connor says: “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.” Richard Kiel’s Jaws was the minion who redeemed himself, who jettisoned the “hench” and found his humanity.
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