Here We Go Again ...

It's My Birthday Week and I'll Write About James Bond If I Want To

1964 Touchdown in Gotham for Goldfinger

What is it that is so especially sad about the passing of James Bond personnel, time passing for us all the short answer as two more joined the necrology since last year, Tania Mallet from Goldfinger (Tilly Masterson), then Claudine Auger, Domino of Thunderball in December ’19. I thought of these upon revisiting Goldfinger this week, of Shirley Eaton covered with gold paint, then recovered to join us forty-four years later (2008) at Winston-Salem’s Western Film Fair, sat behind a signing table in a drab conference room that was cosmos away from '64 London premieres (royalty present at one), and her LIFE magazine covered-in-gold cover. Next to Ms. Eaton was Caroline Munro, vet of a Roger Moore Bond, both not an hour from the house I live in. What varied planets these two have known, fame from long ago an annuity to buy them plane fare to farest-flung places where 007 fans dwell (which, of course, is everywhere).

Goldfinger today salts streaming mines with all of other Bonds, no more special than the rest, and far from the overpowering spectacle it once was. Maybe “spectacle” is inapt, because Goldfinger got made for a price (three million, it is said), then forged on to profit-bearing history. It’s been told and re-told that the Bond craze began here, a first two successful (Dr. No, Russia), but not remarkably so. I’ve written, perhaps too much, of impact(s) each made, yet Goldfinger startles still for so many pop cultural touchstones it introduced. For starts, the tying-in of toys, knick-knacks, stocking stuffing, that came of Goldfinger and run-up to Thunderball, presaged all of doo-dads to sell alongside Star Wars a decade later. Look, however, at what Goldfinger had to offer: a bathtub electrocution (this was where I learned not to plug anything in when/where immersed), the Gold Girl, sprawled and presumed naked on a bed she has lately warmed with Bond, a heart-stop in March ’65 when Goldfinger finally dragged ways to the Liberty following a December ’64 open elsewhere, Oddjob and his hat, amusing on the one hand, deadly on another, and yes, we threw hats as result of seeing him, though brims were too soft and fewer men wore lids at all thanks to Kennedy, it was said, shunning them. Then was the table to which 007 was strapped, and a laser beam aimed for his nether regions, a hazard even youngest viewers felt acutely. Sears offered the devise as toy for shoppers in 1965, for hadn’t Aurora given us a working Guillotine around the same time, with its detachable victim’s head that could be affixed, then cleaved, then back again?

I could go dizzy recalling all of stimuli … from which the Aston-Martin, with its ejector seat, stood well out. It was no time before Jethro Bodine tried a same gag on passengers as a “double-naught spy,” which reminds me too of many and tiresome spoofs that tried, but could not, dissipate powerful narcotic that was Bond, nor would ersatz agents we knew from posters, if not content of films, to be unworthy. Goldfinger was pygmied by ABC for September 1972 broadcast, a first Bond so shrunk and the network’s season premiere for Sunday Night Movies. I refused to watch as expression of grief that such a thing was allowed to happen, another theatrical totem toppled down to level of the living room box. Blu-Ray redeems all this, Goldfinger very much with theatre punch (albeit minus an audience) where home screens are large enough. There is much to enjoy anew from a favorite you’ve had for over half-a-century. Sentiment, memory, fresh aspects not noted before … whatever ails of modern life suspended for those 110 minutes, disc extras offering hours more. Here’s what one of those taught me: Albert R. Broccoli from the beginning proposed James Bond as family entertainment, which for me at age ten it seemed anything but. In fact, we went to Goldfinger upon assurance that it was the dirtiest picture ever to play the Liberty, and certainly the rawest to come our childish way. You had to assume all stops were out when they called the female lead “Pussy Galore.”

The teaser had Bond putting squelch to “heroin-flavored bananas,” this for obvious benefit of those arriving to 3:00 shows a little late from school-out but not missing essential narrative that follows. “Miami Beach” is a fascinating mosaic of that exotic place, plus indoor environ at Pinewood where most of “exteriors” were done, a happy economy I’d not trade for bloat that would accrue in a next, and future, Bonds. Shortcuts become old friends, “flaws” if you like, though I don’t see them so. It humanizes Bond to be humbled both at M’s office and even at table he shares with the boss and a high-up gov’t man (“Smithers is giving the lecture, 007”). Such quiet moments would become a lost thing as Bonds got Bigger, then Biggest. Time passes faster for me here than any of the series, Goldfinger a model of forward-movement, all muscle, no fat. The golf game reflects confidence in a situation played nearly mute (little dialogue, sans scoring), suspense taut upon whether Goldfinger, let alone Oddjob, would notice 007 having switched a golf ball. Where it is necessary to defend the concept of James Bond, this sequence will do.

Outdoors Miami Beach Staged Indoors at Pinewood

What films would you call wholly satisfactory? Narrowed down further, what Bonds are so? Many are fine in parts if not whole, but I’d call Goldfinger the one closest to a total win throughout. Noted, not for a first time, was fightin’ words Bond utters (certainly so in 1964), offhand, as in something to effect that no one should listen to the Beatles without earmuffs. So whose poison pill was that? Writer Richard Maibaum (b. 1909), co-scribe Paul Dehn (b. 1912)? I wonder if the line elicited boos anywhere. The Liverpool pack were at a peak of popularity, A Hard Day’s Night lately out, and clicking, though not on a level Goldfinger would. Here’s the thing I noticed from seeing Goldfinger first-run … virtually no one else at school had, and what’s more, they didn't much care. Classmates seemed not so taken with movies, at least not near extent I was, an admitted extreme not to be wished on anybody, but what did occupy them? I’ve looked back for answers, asked contemporaries ... there was the YMCA, kid sports, though less of that before at least seventh grade. What of the popular culture engaged them? Television surely … everyone had their favorite shows, but … I'd say it was music, records, AM radio, the more so as we moved up grades toward high school, enthusiasm a-plenty directed toward the Beatles. Were there polls in the 60’s asking teens which they preferred --- rock and roll, or movies? 

Brief as it was, had there been such a high-sped chase as Goldfinger’s with the Aston-Martin? There is one shot where the thing races round a corner and toward the camera that feels like a missile ready to jump off the screen. Pursuits before this were staid by compare, boxy sedans that seemed still even as drivers looked to be in seat-flight. Revenooers would never have run Lucas Doolin off a mountain road had he been driving an Aston-Martin (just checked --- they introduced the sleek DB4 in 1958, the year Thunder Road came out). Grace Kelly quick-drove a sporty vehicle to Cary Grant’s discomfort in To Catch A Thief, but we didn’t feel it for Hitchcock falling back on process screens. Even Bond did a sort of same in Dr. No, before car chases became ends in themselves. British wheel men Stanley Baker and crew rode trucks hard in Hell Drivers (1957), but that, at least for me, was more scary than thrilling, not meant to be “fun” chasing. So … I’m asking, what did we have for road action, in a modern sense, before Goldfinger and the Aston-Martin? I know I’m forgetting several, maybe some I’ve never seen or am not familiar with. And note: They kept making, and selling, 007’s Aston-Martin model for years after Goldfinger. Chances are, they still do.

Couple of random thoughts re Goldfinger: Dubbed voices, as in Gert Frobe, plus others throughout the Bond series whose faces we see, but with voices we don’t hear. You could almost call 007 a lot of dubbed foreign movies. And think of worldwide fame that came to so many journeyman Brit players when Bond went nuclear. Jobbers from way back, like to the 40’s … Honor Blackman, Bernard Lee, then Connery and Shirley Eaton almost anonymous in whatever work could be had during the 50’s. These folks must have stood often together to shake heads in astonishment. From Jacks to Kings, across the boards, so long as Bond would last, and of course, he’s still lasting. Here’s the other thing, and maybe I mentioned it somewhere before, but Brick Davis and I tallied percentage of UK films we saw at the Liberty during the mid-60’s, agreeing it was close to half. Consider the Bonds, Hammers, Beatle features, Tom Jones, Darling, Georgy Girl, offshoot chillers from Amicus and elsewhere, like Lipperts from over there, even Carry On entries that washed up on our shore. I was fully adjusted to British idiom and pace by age eleven. One last thing to close: Felix Leiter and assist are scoping Goldfinger’s stud farm where 007 is an apparent prisoner. At one point, they are parked in front of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. A keenest memory I have of that March ’65 day was sitting and wondering why our town did not yet have a KFC. It bothered me near as much as not having an extra dime for two Baby Ruths rather than one. For the record: Colonel Sanders finally built for us in 1967, the site now a Thai place.