9 / 10
Official trailer
The Template
Goldfinger is the film that turned James Bond from a successful spy series into a worldwide phenomenon. Dr. No and From Russia with Love had been hits, but Goldfinger was something else: a cultural event, with queues around the block, record-breaking box office and a flood of merchandise, toys, parodies and imitators. It’s the moment the Bond formula was born.
Guy Hamilton directed it, taking over from Terence Young, and it came out in September 1964, a month after Ian Fleming died. Sean Connery was at the peak of his confidence in the role. I give it a 9. It’s not the best spy story in the series. That’s From Russia with Love. It’s the film that defined what a Bond film is, and it’s still pure entertainment.
Goldfinger makes me grin from the fake seagull to the last seconds on the Fort Knox clock. From Russia with Love is the better spy story, and this is still the one I’d choose first, because it knows exactly what kind of fun it’s selling and delivers every bit of it.
Almost everything people associate with Bond starts here or reaches its classic form here. Every film since has either followed its template or deliberately broken it. Casino Royale, forty years later, defined itself largely by what it took away from Goldfinger’s formula. That says a great deal about how dominant this film became.
The Opening
The pre-title sequence is a model of Bond style. Bond emerges from the water in a wetsuit, with a fake seagull on his head, sets explosives in a drug baron’s plant, and then peels off the wetsuit to reveal an immaculate white dinner jacket underneath, dry and pressed. He walks into a bar as the bomb goes off, and calmly lights a cigarette.
Then he kills an assassin by throwing an electric heater into his bath, delivers a dry one-liner and walks away. In a few minutes, the film establishes Bond’s style, his cool, his humor and his ruthlessness, and it tells the audience exactly what kind of fun they’re in for. Then Shirley Bassey starts singing.
The whole sequence has nothing to do with the main plot. That’s why it works. It’s a small, self-contained Bond adventure that shows the audience the character’s style before the story begins, and nearly every Bond film since has opened with a sequence built on the same idea.
For Writers
When you write the opening of a long-running series or a new character, a self-contained scene that shows who they’re is worth more than any explanation.
Write a short opening scene that has nothing to do with your main plot but shows your character at their most typical. Let it end with a single line that sums them up.
The Song
John Barry’s score, and the title song he wrote with Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, set the sound of Bond for decades. Shirley Bassey belts the song with a power that made it a standard, all brassy menace and wild drama, and it became a hit around the world.
Barry’s score, with its blaring brass and jazzy tension, became the template for every Bond soundtrack that followed. Robert Brownjohn designed the title sequence, with scenes from the film projected onto the gold-painted body of a model, and it remains a series landmark.
Producer Harry Saltzman reportedly disliked the song and thought it too strange and brassy, and Bassey’s performance of the final note was so long and powerful that she said she nearly passed out recording it. It was a transatlantic hit and set a standard that later Bond themes have been measured against ever since.
Auric Goldfinger
Gert Fröbe plays Auric Goldfinger, a German-born gold dealer and smuggler obsessed with gold, and he’s one of the great Bond villains: fat, smug, childish and utterly ruthless. Fröbe barely spoke English, and the actor Michael Collins dubbed his voice, but his physical performance, the greedy smile and the flash of temper, is perfect.
Bond first meets him cheating at cards by a hotel pool in Miami, and then beats him at golf, cheating back, in a long, tense and very funny match at a country club in England. The golf game is among the best scenes in the series. A battle of wits and bad manners plays out over eighteen holes, and it establishes the rivalry between the two men without a single punch.
Goldfinger also has a real personality beyond his greed. He’s vain, touchy and childishly delighted with his own cleverness, and he enjoys explaining his plans to the one man who might appreciate them. That vanity is his weakness, and Bond exploits it throughout the film.
The golf match is my favorite stretch of the film. Two grown men cheat at a gentleman’s game, each one delighted with himself, and Bond wins by being the slightly better crook. I’d happily sit through another eighteen holes of Connery and Fröbe going at each other.
For Writers
The golf game is a battle between hero and villain with no violence at all, only cheating and counter-cheating over eighteen holes. It establishes their rivalry completely.
Put your hero and antagonist in a harmless competition early in the story. Let them both try to win unfairly, and let the way each cheats reveal who they are. There’s more on this in my article on why villain motivations fall apart.
For a first confrontation between hero and villain, a contest of wits in an ordinary setting can say more about both characters than a fight.
The Golden Girl
Goldfinger’s assistant in Miami, Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton, sleeps with Bond and helps him expose Goldfinger’s card cheating. Bond wakes to find her dead on the bed, her whole body painted gold, killed on Goldfinger’s orders for betraying him. It’s the moment the film turns from a playful game between two men into something with real stakes.
It’s the most famous image in the series, and it’s known far beyond it. The film says the paint suffocated her skin. That’s a myth, and the image of her lying on the bed, gleaming and still, is unforgettable. It made Eaton instantly famous and appeared on the cover of Life magazine.
Oddjob
Goldfinger’s bodyguard is Oddjob, a silent, immensely strong Korean manservant played by the Olympic weightlifter Harold Sakata. His weapon is a bowler hat with a steel rim, thrown with deadly accuracy. He decapitates a statue with it and kills Jill’s sister Tilly as she tries to avenge her.
He’s the template for every Bond henchman who followed: a physically unstoppable figure with a gimmick and no dialogue. His final fight with Bond in the vault at Fort Knox, with the clock ticking down on a nuclear bomb, ranks with the best fights in the series, and his death, electrocuted as he tries to retrieve his hat from between the bars, is perfectly judged.
Sakata was a silver medallist in weightlifting at the 1948 Olympics, and he was reportedly a gentle, friendly man off set. He was burned during the filming of his death scene, and he held on until the director called cut. He played versions of Oddjob in commercials and appearances for the rest of his life.
The Aston Martin
Q equips Bond with an Aston Martin DB5, and it’s the most famous car in cinema. It has revolving number plates, machine guns behind the indicators, a bulletproof shield, tyre-shredding spikes in the wheel hubs, an oil slick, a smokescreen and, famously, an ejector seat, operated by a red button hidden in the gear stick.
Q’s scene introducing it, dry and exasperated, established the Q branch routine that the series would repeat for decades. The car’s chase through Goldfinger’s factory in Switzerland is a gadget showcase, and the ejector seat is used on one of Goldfinger’s men to great effect. After the film, the DB5 became a best-selling toy around the world, and it has returned in several Bond films since.
It’s also the moment the series discovered one of its great pleasures: showing the audience the gadgets first, so they could spend the rest of the film waiting for each one to be used. Every Q scene since has followed the same pattern, and every one of them owes something to this car.
The Laser
Goldfinger captures Bond and straps him to a table beneath an industrial laser.
The beam slowly cuts through the gold plate toward his crotch. Bond asks whether Goldfinger expects him to talk. Goldfinger replies that no, he expects him to die. The exchange is quoted endlessly, and Fröbe’s calm, amused delivery, dubbed or not, makes it work.
The scene became a signature of the series. It was an update from the book, where Bond was threatened with a circular saw, and the laser, then a new and exotic technology, gave the scene a modern, sinister edge. Bond talks his way out by bluffing about what he knows of Goldfinger’s plan, and the tension of the scene holds up completely.
The laser scene makes my palms sweat. Goldfinger’s reply that he expects Bond to die is the best line a Bond villain ever got, and Fröbe delivers it like a man ordering lunch.
Operation Grand Slam
Goldfinger’s plan is one of the cleverest in the series. He’s going to break into the United States gold reserve at Fort Knox, not to steal the gold, since it would be impossible to move, but to detonate a small nuclear device inside it, making the gold radioactive and useless for decades.
The value of his own gold would soar, and the Western economy would be thrown into chaos, to the benefit of Red China. It has supplied the bomb.
Bond works it out, pointing out that stealing the gold would take weeks and an army of trucks. That’s a rare moment when a Bond film lets its hero be clever.
The scene plays like a detective story’s reveal, and it gives the audience the pleasure of understanding the scheme at the same moment Bond does. The plan also gives the film its climax: a gas attack on Fort Knox, an army of Goldfinger’s gangsters, a vault full of gold and a bomb with the clock running down.
For Writers
Bond works out that Goldfinger doesn’t want to steal the gold, only to irradiate it. The series rarely lets its hero win with his brain, and this is one of those times.
In a villain’s scheme, a plan that seems impossible until the hero understands it gives the reader a satisfying moment of discovery. Design your villain’s plan so it looks like one thing and turns out to be another. Let your hero, and the reader, work out the real goal from clues you’ve planted. Writing Heroes and Villains is worth a look on this.
Pussy Galore
Honor Blackman plays Pussy Galore, Goldfinger’s personal pilot and the leader of an all-female team of stunt pilots, the Flying Circus, who are to spray nerve gas over Fort Knox. She’s tough, cool and unimpressed by Bond, and Blackman, who had played the judo-expert Cathy Gale in The Avengers on television, was a match for Connery physically and in wit.
The character’s name was a notorious joke, and her conversion, after a scuffle in a barn, from Goldfinger’s ally to Bond’s is the film’s most dated element: the implication is that Bond changes her allegiance by forcing himself on her. It’s uncomfortable to watch now. Blackman’s performance, strong and dry, survives the scene better than the scene deserves.
What Goldfinger Gets Right
Because it’s the definitive Bond film, the one that established nearly everything the series would become, and because it’s still enormous fun. Connery is superb, relaxed and dangerous, Goldfinger and Oddjob are iconic, the gadgets are wonderful, the golf game and the laser scene are classics, and the Fort Knox plan is clever.
It isn’t quite a 10 because it’s lighter and less tense than From Russia with Love, and because some of its attitudes, especially toward Pussy Galore, have aged badly. It’s still the first Bond film I’d show anyone who wants to understand why the series became what it did. It’s the one most likely to turn a sceptic into a fan.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Goldfinger works because every element serves one clear idea: a man obsessed with gold. His name, his color, his henchman’s hat, the dead girl, the golf balls and the Fort Knox plan all grow from a single obsession.
With a villain, a single obsession gives the reader a key to understand everything they do, and it makes them memorable. Give your antagonist one central obsession, and let it shape their home, their habits, their allies and their plan. Make every detail of them point back to it.
The Verdict on Goldfinger
Yes. It’s a 9 and the essential Bond film, the one I’d hand to anyone who wants to know what a Bond film is supposed to feel like. Connery at his peak, the Aston Martin, Oddjob, the golf game, the laser and the Fort Knox plan all still work. The missing point goes to a story that’s lighter on tension than From Russia with Love and to the Pussy Galore barn scene, which belongs firmly to 1964 and which I’d cut without a second thought.
