Dick Van Dyke James Garner and Elke Sommer, "Some Kind of a Nut", "Never a Dull Moment" with Edward G. Robinson, and "Divorce American Style" with Debbie Reynolds and Jean Simmons. But he also starred as Caractacus Pott (with his native accent, at his own insistence, despite the English setting) in the successful musical version of Ian Fleming's "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (1968), which co-starred Sally Ann Howes and featured the same songwriters (The Sherman Brothers) and choreographers (Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood) as "Mary Poppins". In 1969, Van Dyke appeared in the comedy-drama "The Comic", written and directed by Carl Reiner.
The Man with the Golden Gun (novel) that "perhaps Ian Fleming was very tired when he wrote it. Perhaps ... he left it unrevised. The fact remains that this posthumous Bond is a sadly sub-standard job." His praise for the novel was muted, admitting "it isn't of course by any means totally unreadable but it's depressingly far from the best Bond." Writing in "The Observer"s sister paper, "The Guardian", Christopher Wordsworth noted that "since "Goldfinger" 007 has been toiling hopelessly in the wake of the "Zeitgeist"." Prior to this novel, Wordsworth writes, "the distance between "Live and let Die", Ian Fleming's second and best, and "You Only