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I have to admit to being something of a heretic regarding the James Bond films. Conventional wisdom states that Goldfinger is the best of the Bonds. I personally prefer From Russia With Love. Mind you, I like Goldfinger--I like it a lot, in fact--but Goldfinger is a double-edged sword. It is a huge entertainment, sure, but it codifies the Bond films into the formula that strangles many (most?) later Bond films. As the archetypal Bond film, it is an instant dead end for the series. I mean, Goldfinger was only the third film in the series. There are nineteen Bond films now. Only three or four of them exist outside the shadow of Goldfinger, and two of those are the ones that precede Goldfinger. This is unfortunate, since, on the whole, Bond films are enormously well mounted and stand as the bright shiny "gold standard" (if you will pardon the pun) of the action-adventure movie. If the standard is moribund, what does that say for the rest of the genre?

Even so, Goldfinger IS one of the most entertaining films you will ever see.

James Bond runs across one Auric Goldfinger at a Florida resort. Goldfinger cheats at cards and Bond finds him out, after seducing Goldfinger's bikini-clad accomplice. Goldfinger takes this poorly and paints the girl gold--suffocating her skin and thereby killing her--and leaves her on a bed for Bond to find. Bond returns to England, only to be assigned Goldfinger in earnest. Goldfinger, it seems, is plotting something. He is plotting with both the Red Chinese and SPECTRE. Bond must find out what Goldfinger is planning and stop it at all cost. What Goldfinger is planning is one of the most baroque schemes the Bond movies ever came up with: Goldfinger plans to detonate a nuclear device in Fort Knox. By doing so, he gives the Chinese and SPECTRE what they want: economic chaos in the west; and Goldfinger gets what HE wants: the value of his gold increases many times. Bond seduces Goldfinger's sexy pilot, Pussy Galore, and foils the plot, but not before a final confrontation with Goldfinger's bodyguard, Odd Job, who is impervious to pain and has a lethal bowler with which he decapitates his boss's enemies. They battle as the bomb counts down. After Bond defeats Odd Job, he must defuse the bomb. It is stopped as the clock reads 007.

All of the elements of the Bond movie are in place here: The insane supervillain, the lethal henchman, the gorgeous henchwoman, the bizarre plot, and the best of the Bonds, Sean Connery. Additionally, this features the best of the Bond movie's "Talking Killer" sequences, the only one that seems to be believable. Bond is strapped to a table and an industrial laser is inching towards his crotch. "Do you expect me to talk?" Bond asks. "No, Mr. Bond," Goldfinger replies, " I expect you to die." Of course, Bond talks himself out of the predicament. Afterwards, all but a handful of the Bond movies include these elements in varying degrees of competence. But Goldfinger dazzles the audience with it lustre.

Somewhere along the way, Bond films became a ritual for me. I have seen all of them since The Spy Who Loved Me in the theater without fail, usually on their first night of release. The lion's share of these later Bonds have been pretty bad (with A View To a Kill and Octopussy being the worst of them). They ape Goldfinger at the expense of offering the audience something new under the sun. Only two of them break away from this: License to Kill, the second of the Timothy Dalton films, and For Your Eyes Only. License to Kill breaks away so radically that it hardly resembles a Bond film and it isn't very good, but For Your Eyes Only...well, it is probably the best Bond to be seen since Goldfinger itself. Interestingly, it hearkens back to a more minimalist Bond, a Bond that didn't need so many gadgets. A pre-Goldfinger Bond, if you will, not unlike the Bond you would find in From Russia With Love...

Other James Bond Films Reviewed on this site include:

Never Say Never Again

The World is Not Enough