Heavy Bondage: Goldfinger

This film has everything required for instant and prolonged success. It cannot fail to hit the jackpot.
- Kinematograph Weekly (December 1964)

Goldfinger
Film: 1964
Book: 1959 (7th in chronology)

Irreverent Synopsis: Auric Goldfinger is smuggling gold, and lots of it. Bond is assigned to figure out how, and instead gets in Goldfinger's face. Two dead Mastersons later, Bond is about to get lasered in half until Goldfinger decides to keep him alive so he can brag about his spiffy plan to nuke all the gold in Fort Knox and render it unfit for market. He promises Bond a front-row seat. Unfortunately for him, his henchwoman Pussy Galore seems to like Bond a little more than she should, and because she is Honor Blackman, ass is kicked and Goldfinger eventually goes skydiving without a parachute. Oh, yes, and nobody is really gassed to death. Except the mobsters, of course.

Major Observations: It's surprising how little I have to say about the Bond film that for many, many people is the iconic one. Perhaps the best testament I can give to it is that, unlike some of the other great Bond imagery, the striking images in this film are still striking: Oddjob, Goldfinger himself, the improbable Pussy Galore, and especially the death of Jill Masterson which continues to startle even to this day.

Unfortunately, the startling images are a bit front-loaded, which means that once we've seen Jill's death and seen Oddjob take the statue's head off, the movie inevitably seems to slow down, at least to latter-day eyes.

This is one of the first views we get of Bond as troublemaker. As M points out, there is no reason for him to get in Goldfinger's face about the card-cheating at the beginning, and he may well have made life more difficult for himself later by doing so (in the book, even more so than in the film, it's evident by the time of the golf game that Goldfinger knows perfectly well who spoiled his card scam). He does it because of his natural instinct to stir up chaos.

This film doesn't score heavily on either the Blunt Instrument or the Gentleman Spy scale. It is what it is. At least Bond's role is more active than the preceding film, although he does spend a lot of its middle third in a cell.

Despite its pacing, this is the rare Bond film that holds together better than its corresponding book. The book has several bad plot holes which the film corrects - most notably Goldfinger's basic scheme. In the book, he does indeed attempt to steal the gold - all the gold in Fort Knox. The comment Bond makes in the film, about how this would be logistically impossible, was apparently taken to heart by the screenwriters - in a rare fit of rationality - and they came up with the idea to irradiate it instead. Which is, as Bond notes, pretty brilliant.

The film also lets us get into the vault (in the book, Operation Grand Slam dies ignobly before they ever get there). It shows us Jill Masterson's death (in the book Bond is told about it, far after the fact) and gets rid of Tilly much earlier (in the book Tilly goes to Kentucky with Bond). On the down side, the film substitutes "Red Chinese" for SMERSH as Goldfinger's bosses, and its handling of the various mob bosses makes considerably less sense ... and though Goldfinger's reasons for keeping Bond alive may be more believable in the film, they have the side effect of all that jail time for Bond mentioned above.

The film's handling of Pussy Galore, though still somewhat ridiculous, is at least more believable than the book. In the book Pussy very clearly is interested in Tilly, not Bond, and her lesbianism is stated in so few words. This means that her last-minute switch to back Bond (in the plane, eight pages before the end of the book) is not just a rather deus-ex-machina surprise, but somewhat offensive (in that we are expected to believe that Bond's magnetism could actually get Pussy to go against her sexual orientation). In the movie, Pussy is rather more of the "open to suggestions" bent than outright lesbian, and her ambiguity toward Bond is made obvious much earlier.

Minor Observations: The unofficial military liaison to this film, Charles Russhon, could finagle permission for Piper Cubs to actually buzz Fort Knox at 500 feet, far under the minimum flyover restriction. He could obtain the use of actual soldiers for the gas scenes (the soldiers were each paid $20 and a beer for their trouble, and were cued by director Guy Hamilton blowing a whistle from a helicopter). But he couldn't get them into Fort Knox itself. There are limits. So the inside is entirely from production designer Ken Adam's imagination - and in defiance of reality; bullion is actually never stacked more than two feet high.

Sharp eyes will see the film's shout-out to Russhon on a banner in the Fort Knox gas sequence.

Ken Adam, by the by, had also designed Dr. No, but had to skip From Russia With Love because he was busy designing a little film called Dr. Strangelove. He also did You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever (as well as several post-Connery Bond films). If you ever wonder why some of the mad-scientist sets from this era look so similar ....

UA was understandably nervous about the name of the female lead character (it is still the most ridiculously overt name in the Bond canon, and that's saying something). They considered renaming her to "Kitty" for a while, something the producers were apparently against (they had their publicist leak the name so it couldn't easily be changed), and I still don't understand why. Anything would have been better than Fleming's original, which is simply a big inappropriate joke.

German actor Gert Frobe's English was nowhere near as good as the producers had been led to believe, and he was eventually dubbed by Michael Collins. Harold Sakata (Oddjob) was a former Olympic weightlifter and professional wrestler. His wrestling stage name, "Tosh Togo," appears in the end credits.

The laser scene is a buzzsaw in the book. Forgive the bad sci-fi look of the laser; no one had ever shown one on film before and they were making it up as they went. They attempted to film an actual industrial laser first, and it wasn't very impressive. The "flame" you see on the table is the result of an oxyacetylene torch being used beneath the table by a technician and the beam is an optical effect. Connery's convincing agitation in this scene is because he was actually on the table, and it was getting hot!

As originally written, Q's briefing on the Aston Martin did not mention the ejector seat. Producer Albert Broccoli and director Guy Hamilton disagreed on this - Hamilton wanted it to be a surprise, and Broccoli felt that if the audience weren't warned, they would feel cheated. Hamilton later conceded that Broccoli had been "absolutely right." Later Bond films occasionally ignored this rule, to their disadvantage.

The bomb is supposed to be stopped with three seconds left, but the producers went for the cheap joke and filmed an insert that shows it stopping at 007, making hash of Bond's "three more ticks ..." remark.

Ian Fleming visited the set during the filming of the gin game sequence. It would be his last visit to a Bond picture; his heart was failing, and he died, at age 56, on 12 August 1964.

Next page: Thunderball