With two Bond films having been delivered to global acclaim, the juggernaut was starting to move, but a court case surrounding what would eventually become the fourth Bond movie left Saltzman and Broccoli to develop the 1959 novel Goldfinger as the superspy’s third cinematic outing. With a budget equal to the two preceding films combined, and a new director in the form of Guy Hamilton, who had previously turned down the opportunity to direct Dr. No, the pieces were all in place, but, asks Greg D. Smith, would this third entry shine as brightly as the previous two?

I don’t often like to ‘cross the streams’ as it were, with these things, but bear with me as it is relevant, I promise. In 1997’s The Jackal (a remake of the classic 1973 The Day of the Jackal) there’s a scene where Bruce Willis’ bad guy fatally wounds the female lead and then taunts her, telling her to pass on a message to the movie’s hero: ‘Tell Declan he can’t protect his women’ (a reference to the fact that the same villain had apparently killed the hero’s girlfriend years before). As I watched Goldfinger unfold before me, in all its Swinging Sixties misogyny, I kept hearing that line play over and over in my head, with the big difference being that it was less that James couldn’t protect his women, and more that he just wasn’t minded to.

Excluding Moneypenny, there are three female characters of note in Goldfinger. Two of them are sisters. Both end up dead, thanks to Bond’s casual indifference to the fact of the danger his actions place them in. The third is called Pussy Galore, and disregarding the name that must even back then have sounded parodic, her ‘plot’ through the film is by turns horrifying, mystifying and completely nonsensical.

So far so Bond then. Women as objects to be pursued or more often simply set dressing. But did anything about Goldfinger stand out from its predecessors? Well, yes, rather a lot.

For starters this is the movie which starts the Bond tradition of the title song actually being played, with lyrics, over the opening credits. Shirley Bassey’s first Bond song is bold, brassy and easy to hum or sing along to – staples that would feature in almost every Bond theme which followed.

Prior to that theme song we have a pre-credits action sequence which, unlike in the previous movie, does not relate to the main plot in any way at all. In From Russia With Love, we had the scene involving a Bond double being hunted and killed by the movie’s nemesis. Here we have Bond fulfilling a mission to blow up a drug lab – something which has nothing to do with anything that happens in the main body of the movie whatsoever. This would of course go on to be a staple of the movies going forward.

It also begins perhaps the most infamous tradition of the franchise as a whole, with the introduction of the fully gadget-laden car, the Aston Martin DB5, supplied by Q. This really represents a step up from the gadgets we’d been shown in the previous two films, giving us something truly outlandish and fantastical compared to the rather modest and believable devices we’d seen up to now.

And that last point really ties in with the biggest difference overall. I’ve said already that the previous two movies felt a little split down the middle, involving some fairly grounded, believable spycraft and ideas but also fights against shadowy global cabals and larger than life nemeses. Here, the grounded and believable parts are thrown out of the window altogether, and we settle on a tone that feels more like modern Bond to someone like me.

It starts with our villain. Auric Goldfinger, played by German actor Gert Frobe, as dubbed by Michael Collins with a German accent. Though clearly foreign, the character is referred to in passing by Felix Leiter as ‘British, but he doesn’t sound like it.’ This is the only reference the script makes to the odd disparity between accent and apparent nationality (though perhaps with Scotsman Connery in the lead role, they felt that wasn’t a thread at which to tug). Goldfinger is a cartoonish villain in every sense of the word. Despite being fabulously wealthy, he cheats at a friendly (though expensive) game of cards with an elaborate scheme involving an earpiece and an accomplice with binoculars looking at his opponent’s cards. He is obsessed with gold. He has a personal pilot who also happens to be in charge of her own, all-female ‘flying circus’. He has a mute sidekick who is enormous, freakishly strong, and has a bowler hat for a weapon. And he has a ridiculously complex evil scheme.

To its credit, the film does at least give a reasonably interesting spin to the bog standard ‘let’s break into Fort Knox’ scheme of the time (before Die Hard with a Vengeance went and spoiled it all by telling us where most of the gold is really hidden). Goldfinger’s elaborate plan to explode a nuclear device inside the vaults and thereby render the gold in there unusable for years and increase the value of his own hoard exponentially certainly carries more interest than just stealing it, though it would rather seem to run counter to his avowed obsession with the substance. It also makes sense of his bullion smuggling operation – if you’re about to limit the amount of gold available, then it’s smart to acquire as much of the remainder as you can first. But it’s not the end goal itself so much as the over-the-top manner in which it is planned to transpire that shifts the plot from serious to more than slightly bonkers.

Of course, if that’s crackers, Goldfinger’s need to grandstand to people he’s clearly about to betray – and indeed his keeping Bond alive at all – is just plain daft. We all remember the famous scene, Bond strapped to a giant laser about to bisect him, his barked ‘Do you expect me to talk?’, Goldfinger’s ‘No Mr Bond, I expect you to die!’ response, sampled and impersonated so many times over the intervening decades as to transcend being a mere piece of dialogue and becoming a cultural artefact all its own. But the truth is that Bond’s half-arsed ploy blurting out a word he’d overheard and bluffing he knows more than he’s letting on really shouldn’t save him. Bond should be bisected by that laser there and then, and at the very least, once he’s clearly revealed he knew nothing and couldn’t have warned anyone when he’s found spying on Goldfinger’s elaborate briefing to his mob allies, he should be dealt with then. That he isn’t proves that however much of a fiendish genius the plot wants us to think Goldfinger is, in actuality he is afflicted with the exact level of situational dumbness that has become a hallmark in every parody of a Bond Villain ever done, Dr Evil included.

And yet, it isn’t even that which ends up being the spanner in Goldfinger’s works. No, this villain’s true Achilles heel is the women with whom he surrounds himself. Jill Masterson is a woman he pays to help him cheat at cards and ‘to be seen with him. Just seen’. She is also instantly susceptible to Bond and his *ahem* rogueish charms, so Goldfinger has her killed (which seems to bother Bond a little bit for all of a few seconds). This leads to Tilly Masterson having it in for Goldfinger, a woman whose car Bond wrecks before he ends up getting her killed too as she goes on her own mission to try to kill the man who murdered her sister (another woman whose death Bond barely seems to register). But most importantly of all, there’s Pussy Galore.

Played by the late Honor Blackman, Pussy is introduced as Goldfinger’s personal pilot but is also the head of Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, central to Goldfinger’s plans. Although Connery and Blackman had evident chemistry on the screen (and Blackman reportedly delighted in embarrassing interviewers on the press tour by repeatedly saying her character’s name with great relish), the circumstances by which they end up on – shall we say ‘friendlier’ terms – are problematic to say the very least, Bond essentially forcing himself on her until she ‘gives in’ (a pattern even I recognise from fairly recent entries in the franchise) and then… well then she apparently decides to switch sides, but we never really get given a reason as to why. The film seems to imply that Bond reveals the truth of Goldfinger’s plans to her, including the many innocent lives that will be lost, but because we never see this happen, and indeed never see any evidence of the change happening. Then it gets really weird, as having foiled the plan and saved the day, Bond finds himself kidnapped by Goldfinger on a plane flown by….Pussy Galore. Why Goldfinger still trusts her, or even if he does, is not apparent, neither why she has agreed to go along with this plan.

And that’s the main issue with the movie for me (its treatment of female characters aside). Though it’s stylishly shot, and you can undeniably see that bigger budget and the chops of the new director on the screen, and though it has some interesting ideas, there’s an artificiality to proceedings which is lurking under the surface for the first two acts and then fully breaks loose and runs riot for the climactic third. It stops being a story and becomes instead a vehicle for James Bond to be all the things we know as archetypes of the character. The action hero, the ladies man, the guy who will always have one more quip for any situation. Events as they unfold in that third act don’t do so through any narrative or logical reasoning, but rather so that Connery can smoulder to the camera as he delivers another pithy line or knockout punch (or both). Even the final line of dialogue as the credits roll is a ‘zinger’, delivered as he rolls under a parachute with Galore for another bit of canoodling while Felix Leiter searches for him.

Iconic as it is, it’s a film from a different era, with all the caveats and limitations that might imply. It may have one of the most enduring theme songs and some of the most memorable lines, but as a movie, its value is in its status as a cultural artefact, rather than as a story in and of itself.