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Goldfinger: Going for the gold.
Starring Sean Connery, Gert Frobe, Shirley Eaton
Directed by Guy Hamilton
= 5 stars
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Sean Connery (James Bond)
Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore)
Shirley Eaton (Jill Masterson)
You know Goldfinger is awesome even before loading it in the DVD player - it’s a pop culture landmark and a high point for the James Bond franchise. Even the title speaks “Bond” - much more so than a meandering one like The World Is Not Enough. There’s a professional (almost dare I say - golden) sheen to the whole affair, from Sean Connery’s comfort as the British spy to the heavy-set, slightly warped villans. Add as additional layers a brassy score, some cute ladies, and some inventive yet confident direction - and this film oozes class.
The evil mastermind of this entry is Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe), a man obsessed with the shiny, valuable metal. He wants to sink the value of the world’s stockpile so his personal amassed wealth will rise. To do this, he comes up with an audacious scheme to render ineffective the American Federal gold store at Fort Knox with a radioactive bomb.
James Bond (Sean Connery) is set on a mission to put a stop to this nonsense, during which he runs into Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), a Goldfinger aide who sadly gets the gold shoulder, her sister Tilly Masterson (Tania Mallet) an drop-dead gorgeous lass who is felled much too quickly by Odd Job’s (Harold Sakata) iron-brimmed hat. Lastly, there’s the inimitablely named Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), Goldfinger’s tough-as-spikes “wenchman” who practices judo but is eventually thrown for a loop by Bond’s aggressive charm.
Yes, Goldfinger sports a standard, predictable Bond plot, but many of the Bond standbys are the best of breed. Bond gadgets: a tricked-out Aston Martin. Baddies: Odd Job, Pussy Galore, and Goldfinger. Theme song: The exemplar Shirley Bassey tune. Evil plot: totally daffy with no chance of success, but it’s great fun watching it play out - especially when Bond is tied to a gold table and fired at with an industrial laser inching towards his family jewels (the inspiration for Goldmember, perhaps).
One unintentionally hilarious scene occurs where Goldfinger presents his wacky scheme to the mafia. Behind a huge control panel on which he spins dials to darken the room, he calls forth a huge wall map and a gigantic architectural model rises out of the room’s floor, along the way emphasizing the Fort Knox gold store as worh 50 million dollars (at that time a princely sum). The humor lies in Goldfinger’s insistence on this crazy display presentation - when a simple slide show would have sufficed. This is of course, in the days before PowerPoint.
I only had two minor disappointments with Goldfinger: the location of Florida is not as exotic as some of the foriegn locales Bond usually travels to, there’s no Blofeld, and as in Diamonds Are Forever, the prettiest Bond lady of the movie is dispatched before her due.
But all in all, Goldfinger is a perfect James Bond film, the best of the breed - I can’t recommend it enough if you enjoy the James Bond series or movies of that ilk.
IMDB: Goldfinger
Wikipedia: Goldfinger
Rotten Tomatoes: Goldfinger 92%
Categories: 5 Star Movies, General, James Bond, Movies :: Tags: ::
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This was the first really big Bond blockbuster, but success was a two-edged sword. It’s a bit like enjoying a really good local band’s early albums, then they get signed, the budget goes up, the edge comes off, and while it’s great that they’re so popular, one wishes they were lean and hungry and passionate again. “Goldfinger” has a classically slinky title song and some truly iconic moments, but as a satisfactory movie experience it didn’t gel as well as its two predecessors. This one was more about situations than character interaction, so while there are famous setpieces like the laser episode, there was nothing as tense or compelling as say, Rosa Klebb’s instruction/seduction of Tatiana in “FRWL”. Moreover, a burgeoning wave of campiness was just breaking shore, evidenced by Oddjob’s silly lethal hat, Pussy Galore’s squadron of Jayne Mansfield-breasted pilots, the Oriental soldiers’ fluorescent white puttees (all the better to accentuate their high-stepping ‘hopping’ gait) and so on. Connery seems a little distant this time around, too, and while the introduction of the (in)famous Bond Gadgets was admirably low-key (and that cool Aston Martin car was an inspired addition, hidden weapons notwithstanding), it removed the character slightly from a previous crucial vulnerability. While the previous two Bond movies were set in a near-believable world, utilising the immediacy of the ‘space race’ and the overarching Cold War climate, “Goldfinger” was a small, but in retrospect significant step in the direction of campy fantasy. The collection of ‘Mafia Dons’ all use comic-book speak (we’re a long way from “Goodfellas” here), everyone’s just a little too eager to fall over when the Flying Circus gasses Fort Knox and so on. On the plus side, the villain was memorable, the girls were exemplary (agreed; the assassin-sister of the Golden Girl was the Hottie Of The Film and her exit was actually quite shocking), and the action scenes were fine. The director was Guy Hamilton, who later gave us similarly patchy efforts like “Diamonds Are Forever” and “The Man With The Golden Gun” in the 1970s. ‘Nuff said.