DIR: Guy Hamilton
ST: Sean Connery, Gert Frobe, Honor Blackman


It doesn't matter which side you take in the eternal Sean vs Rodge debate, everyone can agree that this is where the template was struck for the Bond franchise. Reissued this month on a new print, it's the first Bond movie to feature a pop star singing the title song (Shirley Bassey) and the first to fire up the Aston Martin DB4, with its recherche optional extras of ejector seats, revolving number plates and machine guns hidden behind the front indicators. It's also the first time on screen that Bond asks for his Martini "shaken, not stirred." This, surely, is Jeremy Clarkson's idea of Hog Heaven.

Goldfinger finds Bond sent to investigate rotund megalomaniac Auric Goldfinger, who plans to contaminate the Fort Knox gold reserve to increase the value of his own private stock. Although running to a brisk 110 minutes, director Guy Hamilton still manages to squeeze in some of the most memorable images from the entire series, from Sixties' It Girl Shirley Eaton covered in gold paint to Ken Adams' cavernous Fort Knox fantasy and Bond's eye-watering encounter with a laser beam. The script, from Richard Maibaum and Paul Diehn, has a deft lightness of touch and includes >i< the >i< definitive Bond dialogue exchange: "Do you expect me to talk?", "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die."

With all this working to its credit, it's no surprise Goldfinger recouped its $3.5m budget in three weeks, becoming the first Bond movie to achieve blockbuster status. But there's more at work here than just natty cars, wetsuits that reverse into tuxedos and a little chap with a steel-rimmed bowler hat. The Cold War movie cycle, begun in the late 1940s, adopted a more ironic and cynical tone during the Sixties - and Goldfinger, sandwiched between political satires like 1963's The Manchurian Candidate and Dr Strangelove (1964), chimes with the times.

The plot for The Manchurian Candidate - Communists brainwash a solider to act as an assassin - is no less fundamentally unbelievable than the average Bond movie storyline, while the War Room set in Strangelove, also designed by Ken Adams, is a riff on the lair of a Bond baddie. In fact Strangelove, a wheelchair-bound, glove-wearing Nazi, is almost a parody of the classic Bond villain. Meanwhile Bond's Aston Martin became as integral to Swinging London movie chic as the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud David Hemmings' drives in Antonioni's Blow-Up, or Keith Richards' Bentley and the Rollers owned by Lennon and Keith Moon.

MICHAEL BONNER


Pic credit: Kobal

SAVE A THIRD!
WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE TO UNCUT!