The death of gentle-giant actor Richard Kiel, who famously portrayed the metal-toothed bad guy Jaws in James Bond films 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.

Exotic foreigners

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 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 alligators 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.

Endlessly in demand

But Jaws emerged as a well-regarded and even well-loved repeat 007 character, with Kiel 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 henchmanism. Jaws strikes back.

And Richard Kiel’s Jaws has an afterlife in the movies – he has a spiritual descendant in 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. Richard Kiel's Jaws was the minion who redeemed himself, who jettisoned the "hench'' and found his humanity. – (Guardian service)