After Dr No, and From Russia With Love, Goldfinger is the third movie in the James Bond saga. It stars Sean Connery, as did the two movies prior – he performs outstandingly as usual. And according to mainstream review sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, Goldfinger is the best Bond movie of all time, although I wouldn’t read too much into that as they both also rate a couple of Daniel Craig’s movies as being superior to anything by Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton which of course is absolute nonsense.
Goldfinger is an interesting one though. It takes Q branch to another level, with the return of Desmond Llewelyn playing Q – we met him in the previous movie, From Russia With Love, and he reprises his role in almost every Bond movie until his death in 1999. He gets some good screen time this time round, in Goldfinger, as he introduces us to a well kitted-out Bond car, with dynamic weaponary, a bulletproof rear shield and a passenger ejector seat. The knightrider/batmobile style Bond car is a nice concept that returns regularly in subsequent movies.
Goldfinger also introduces us to one of the most iconic tough-guy villains in the whole saga, called Oddjob, played excellently by Harold Sakata (real name Toshiyuki Sakata, wrestling alias Tosh Togo). He could be the second most memorable baddie after Jaws.
To its credit, this movie is packed with iconic James Bond movie scenes, from the card game with help through an earpiece from a lady with a telescope in the distance, to the golf game with switching balls, to the car tailing scene where James spies on Goldfinger from a high vantage point, while a woman with a gun spies on and shoots at James from an even higher vantage point. That’s all within the first 40 minutes, so it’s off to a more efficient start than From Russia With Love which had a bit of a messy first hour before the really good scenes came back to back in the second hour.
Further concepts coined by this movie within the first hour include Bond dressing up in all black, to stealthily infiltrate and observe Goldfinger’s base – a concept well copied by Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon, 9 years later. As well as the very iconic scene of Bond being strapped to a table with a lazer beam pointing down, cutting through the metal table and slowly moving towards him – a classic concept that gets replicated by further Bond movies.
This movie also takes naughty female names to a new level, and introduces us to the concept of secret compartments within shoes – similar to the secret popout poison knife hidden with the shoe of the enemy in From Russia With Love, except this time it’s just a compartment for slotting things in to keep them hidden.
This movie also introduces us to electronically moving floors and tables, for elaborate displays.
This movie has a goods bit of humour too, such as the way Bond escapes from Goldfinger’s prison by tricking the guard into thinking he’s disappeared.
There’s also a couple of good examples of dropping tracking beacons, including in Goldfinger’s car, and in a random guy’s jacket pocket with a note.
We also get new music in this movie – instead of using the classic theme tune from Dr No, that was also remixed for use throughout From Russia With Love – this time we get a bunch of remixes of Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger theme tune and it works quite well.
The main antagonist in this movie, Goldfinger, is played quite well by Gert Fröbe.
The main female roles are taken by Shirley Eaton (as Jill Masterson, who gets killed off in the first hour) and Honor Blackman (as P**** Galore, one of Goldfinger’s main assistants alongside Oddjob). They both do a fair job in their respective roles, although promoting Honor Blackman as a very attractive woman is a bit of a stretch.
The fight scene at the end between Bond and Oddjob is a bit weak – Oddjob seems to be able to take all kinds of punishment but when it’s his turn he mostly just does useless WWE style throws to make Bond stumble for a few steps while staying completely unhurt. I guess this is due to his ‘professional wrestling’ background – prior to that he was an Olympic weightlifter.
All in all, I rate this movie as Upper-OK. It may be slightly better than Dr No and From Russia With Love, but not by a significant enough margin to rate it on a much higher level, in my opinion, considering the current rating system we’re using here. When I think of the very best Bond movies of all time, I have to say this is not on that level, in terms of entertainment value for my taste – it’s still a bit old fashioned even if it’s got plenty of new cool features compared to the last two movies.
Subsequent Bond Movies
Next in the series of Bond movies, after Goldfinger (1964), is Thunderball (1965) which was promoted in the closing credits of Goldfinger just like Goldfinger was promoted in the closing credits of From Russia With Love. Then after Thunderball, Connery did You Only Live Twice (1967) although a few months prior to the release of that movie, there was Casino Royale (1967) starring David Niven, produced by a company other than Eon Productions (only two Bond movies were ever made outside of Eon Productions, of which this was one, so don’t expect it to be up to the same standard). Then we had On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) starring George Lazenby, but he was far from able to fill Connery’s shoes – he’d never done any acting before – he was also disinterested in starring in another Bond movie, so they got Connery back for Diamonds Are Forever (1971) before the Roger Moore era began. Connery eventually did one further Bond movie, a decade later, outside of Eon Productions, called Never Say Never Again (1983), but Roger Moore was still going strong and Timothy Dalton was great after him, and that took us through to the 90s by which time Connery was now an old man, looking like a grandpa – something that was already starting to show in Diamonds Are Forever, 12 years earlier – not very fitting for a hotshot active agent doing a lot of physical work while trying to look cool – something Connery was able to pull off much easier in his earlier movies from the 60s. So Connery eventually packed it in and focused on other movies of which he made many classics like First Knight alongside Richard Gere and Entrapment alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones.