Goldfinger

"'Do you expect me to talk?'
'No Mr Bond. I expect you to die.'"

Above all else Goldfinger is iconic, and this surely is the reason that it is regularly cited as people's favourite James Bond film. It has all the elements that people immediately associate with 007; the 007, the Bond car, the title song and a gold-painted girl to boot. It has a great henchman and some superb lines. It has Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore and just the right balance of action and humour and the the film makers showed restraint in the pre-titles sequence. Unrelated to the rest of the film, the pre-titles are short and to the point, with an explosion, a girl, a fight and ends with a slick one liner from Connery.

However, for all the plus points Goldfinger has a major drawback. Although not a fault of the film itself, but rather the mentality of EON, it marks the beginning of the end of the short reign of films closely based on Fleming's novels and a rapid slide towards Bond relying upon gadgets rather than his own cunning. This latter path was followed in Thunderball and culminated in You Only Live Twice, a film that has almost nothing to do with the novel. Although Fleming was revisited in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, it marked a step backward from the fresh new style of cinema pioneered by Dr No to what has become a rather tired formula.

The beginning of the end it may be, but Goldfinger truly is one of the best Bond films.

Sean Connery	James Bond
Honor Blackman	Pussy Galore
Gert Fröbe	Auric Goldfinger
Shirley Eaton	Jill Masterson
Tania Mallet	Tilly Masterson
Harold Sakata	Oddjob
Cec Linder	Felix Leiter
Bernard Lee	M
Lois Maxwell	Miss Moneypenny
Desmond Llewelyn	Q
Director	Guy Hamilton
Screenplay	Richard Maibaum

 

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