Beginner’s Bond: Goldfinger
These “Beginner’s Bond” posts are about closing what is probably the largest gap in my knowledge of cinema. So I am watching all of the James Bond movies in order for the very first time, and sharing my reactions and thoughts with you, faithful readers! A quick recap—Dr. No was a pleasant blast from the past, while From Russia With Love was silly and fun despite an underdeveloped script. What does 1964’s Goldfinger have in store for me?
I found the previous two films to be surprisingly grounded, but Goldfinger proved to be significantly less interested in realism. James Bond goes to Miami to basically harass the rather literally-named shady bullion dealer Auric Goldfinger. The powers that be think Goldfinger’s up to “something,” so they send 007 to poke around in the man’s business until he gets pissed off. His mission doesn’t really have any other parameters, and he’s very good at getting under his target’s skin. Bond figures out the villain’s diabolical plan by hiding under the diorama Goldfinger uses to give his class presentation on how to break into Fort Knox. Once again, the bad guy’s right hand woman is persuaded to turn on him after a literal roll in the hay with 007. After saving the day during the siege of Fort Knox, James is invited to lunch at the White House with a grateful Unnamed President.
Goldfinger is the first functional prototype of what the Bond movies were to become: big, explosive action movies full of sexy people making playful banter as they shoot at each other. All of the elements are there. He introduces himself as “Bond, James Bond.” He orders the dry vodka martini shaken over ice. Not a single woman in the film can resist his charm, except probably the old lady guarding the evil lair’s front gate with a machine gun. In my head-canon, that’s definitely Goldfinger’s grandma sitting out there in a shack waiting to waste any interlopers that wanna try her. It would make a lot of sense. We also meet Pussy Galore, the first of a long line of Bond girls with ridiculously suggestive names.
Although Q provides fewer gadgets than in From Russia With Love, he makes up for it by rolling out the iconic Aston Martin for the first time. Fully loaded with smoke screens, oil slicks, tire-shredding spikes… there’s even an ejector seat! Classic spy stuff. At one point Mr. Bond is strapped to a gold table and nearly bifurcated by a slow-moving laser, the franchise’s first instance of the needlessly complex death trap. We also get to meet the hat-throwing mute man-mangler Oddjob, the first superhuman henchman to give James a solid trouncing or two before inevitably being outsmarted. Goldfinger ended with a massive action set piece, a shootout between two armies, which I assume became the standard conclusion for future films.
And then there is the titular villain himself. Auric Goldfinger is a fat, balding, orange-skinned billionaire with no class who cheats at golf and decorates everything he owns with a tacky amount of gold, which made him surprisingly relevant to a watcher in 2025. His plan to murder thousands of innocent people in order to make himself slightly more obscenely wealthy is also distressingly familiar. And when his master plan starts to collapse around him, he kills his own men to create a distraction that will allow his escape, which feels eerily prescient. In the end, Goldfinger gets sucked out a plane window at 30,000 feet, and we can only hope that is foreshadowing. There’s no question he set the bar rather high for future villains to clear. It’s hard to imagine an antagonist that’s easier to hate than Auric Goldfinger.
Goldfinger basically established the blueprint for a blockbuster action movie. I’m interested to see if Thunderball will follow it, but my only wish is that things continue to get more and more ridiculous.
