“Ejector seat? You're joking!”
The third James Bond movie in the Eon Productions official franchise, Goldfinger — directed by Guy Hamilton and based on the novel by Ian Fleming — is widely considered to have set the tone for the series in general, if not to have kickstarted the action film genre as we know it. The first film, Dr. No (1962), aimed to be a straightforward thriller at first even if it couldn’t help but be campy sometimes. The second film, From Russia With Love (1963), continued with a more serious tone, perhaps with some inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s style. Released in 1964, Goldfinger went the opposite direction and leaned into the silliness with the gratuitous puns, and the ridiculous gadgets, and the women falling all over Bond even as he treats them with open contempt. Two things can be true at once: Goldfinger is considered one of the best Bond films for good reason, and you kinda have to turn off your brain to really appreciate this movie.
(But wait — not if you’re a total nerd for midcentury architecture! I loved the Miami Beach scenes in particular, I didn’t realize the tall white condos were that old. Goldfinger’s lair is awesome. And then there’s the early 1960s commercial roadside sign designs — at one point they drive by a certain chicken restaurant chain, noted to be Colonel Sanders’ recipe.)
The iconic theme song performed by Shirley Bassey is nominally about the titular villain (“He loves only gold!”) but in many ways about Bond himself (“Pretty girl, beware of his heart of gold, this heart is cold!”) It’s one manifestation of the shadow archetype in fiction — the traits that the hero and the villain have in common. The women Bond gets involved with often end up dead for their association with him, and he doesn’t seem all that bothered by it for long. Although, it’s not always callousness on his part — he has to keep moving through the danger of his missions, without stopping to show emotion.
In-story, nobody pretends James Bond’s (Sean Connery) behavior is normal and professional. His boss “M” (Bernard Lee) and colleagues and allies just kind of roll their eyes at his distracted womanizing, but Agent 007 is otherwise good at his job so they let it slide. He is a man of simple desires…
…and so is the criminal overlord, Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe). For much of the movie, you don’t actually know what he is up to — it’s James Bond’s job to find out. Bond sabotages Goldfinger’s attempt to cheat at cards when he meets and immediately seduces his henchwoman Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), only to find her dead and painted with gold. The lighting and the daylight horror of this scene — it feels like a proto slasher film, with a sick and twisted and presumably complex villainous mind.
Back in the United Kingdom, M scolds Bond for his indiscretion with Jill and, in sending him to continue investigating Goldfinger, advises him: “This isn’t a personal vendetta, 007. It’s an assignment like any other, and if you can’t treat it as such, coldly and objectively, 008 can replace you.”
With a first act like this, you’d think you’re getting a bog standard revenge plot, with the “woman in the refrigerator” trope motivating the high-minded hero to take down the bloated incel who did this and whatever complicated manifesto he’s got, that he would have a pretty lady murdered in such a ridiculous way. It’s obvious from early on that Goldfinger is sadistic in general, and also has a troubling fascination with Nazi gold that you’d think might point to some ideology. If this was an Alfred Hitchcock film, you’d probably get the villain’s psychologically twisted backstory complete with mommy issues. But Auric Goldfinger is not that complex, and James Bond is not that high-minded…
Spoilers below
…even if Tilly Masterson (Tania Mallet) is. The second major “bond girl” of the movie, she is driven and determined to avenge her sister’s death. An action contender in her own right, she meets 007 in a couple of car chases that now make me curious if they inspired a similar scene in Mission Impossible II. But her motivation for family and honor is not a replacement for professional training, nor a match for the heavy bowler hat that the top henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata) tosses like a frisbee. Goldfinger himself is physically unintimidating and pretends to be an affable host; meanwhile Oddjob is the deadly silent fighter who does the dirty work.
Something that is easy to forget about this movie, with all its action, is how James Bond actually spends much of it being kidnapped and just reacting to things (often ineffectively), rather than being a traditional Hero’s Journey protagonist who moves the plot forward. The famous laser scene used to be the TV Tropes image for the male damsel-in-distress equivalent.
In that laser scene, Goldfinger explains his motives: “This is gold, Mr. Bond. All my life I’ve been in love with its color, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I welcome any enterprise that will increase my stock.” That’s it. No totalitarian vision for society, no Freudian resentments, no ideological fanaticism… just straight-up greed. He wants to get richer — or at least make the rest of the world poorer — and he doesn’t care if the process involves authoritarian foreign governments being empowered and society being destabilized and who knows how many innocent people dying.
Bond only convinces Goldfinger to spare him by pretending he knows more about “Operation Grand Slam,” which involves irradiating Fort Knox and ruining the United States gold supply to increase the value of his own wealth. He got the time to convince Goldfinger of this because Goldfinger wanted to be sadistic and run him through with the ridiculous laser death trap. His plot would have succeeded if he’d only had some impulse control and taken the advice of Scott Evil from Austin Powers: “Why don’t you just shoot him now?”
Instead, Bond wakes up on a plane in front of a female pilot and main Bond girl (Honor Blackman) who introduces herself as “Pussy Galore.” He smirks and remarks “I must be dreaming!” Apparently, Eon Productions had to do some publicity maneuvering to get her name past the censors, and I think by 1964 the Hays Code was on its last legs anyway. In spite of the name, Galore is actually one of the more serious Bond girls — very much in the same archetype as Diana the virgin huntress, or a prototype of the “Final Girl” who survives to the end of the slasher movie. She is a rare female character who doesn’t fall for James Bond on the spot, and she also makes it clear that she is focused on her actual job and is not Goldfinger’s arm candy. In the novel (which I have not read) she is a lesbian, with the badly aged idea that she had not met the right man yet.
Captive at Goldfinger’s horse ranch, Bond manages to cleverly escape his cell and eavesdrop more about Operation Grand Slam, then cleverly attempts to smuggle a message through a tracking device planted onto someone leaving the ranch… only for that plan to fail. What finally works, in the movie, was Bond forcefully kissing and then seducing Galore, whose subsequent change of heart makes all the difference for sabotaging Goldfinger’s plan. (Apparently, Galore had more character development in the book but this was skipped over in the movie.) So, simple lust defeats simple greed.
As if to underscore this whole simplicity point, there’s the scene toward the end where Bond has to defuse the nuclear bomb to John Barry’s suspenseful score. With seconds to go, he is overwhelmed by the complex machine… until some other guy walks over and saves the day by just pressing the off switch.
And just as we think we’ve seen Goldfinger for the last time, he re-appears… and has that famous villain death scene that really does remind me of Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit’s door!
I guess the way I’m describing this movie makes it sound like a goofy comedy. But what helps Goldfinger work as more than that, is the suspense and high stakes and fights scenes and high production value ahead of its time — even as, in-story, the characters themselves are often aware of how ridiculous things are and just handle it with a smirk.