007 fans remember Sean Connery as the quintessential James Bond. Goldfinger was the movie this actor really defined the gentleman spy of pop culture.
The James Bond franchise was successful from the very beginning, with Dr. No earning a boatload against its relatively low budget and Sean Connery nailing the role of 007 from his first take, but it didn’t make blockbuster numbers until the third movie, Goldfinger, which established the formula that would carry the franchise into the next century.
Connery is remembered by many fans as the best Bond actor, perfecting a role that actors would continue to take on for decades to come, and a lot of the franchise’s most beloved entries star Connery’s incarnation of the gentleman spy. But Goldfinger is arguably the best movie of Connery’s stint.
Terence Young laid the essential groundwork that the 50-year history of the Bond franchise has been built on with Connery’s first two outings, Dr. No and From Russia with Love, which are both great movies, but the series didn’t really find its feet until Guy Hamilton came along and helmed Goldfinger.
In addition to being the first Bond movie to make blockbuster money at the box office, Goldfinger defined what a quintessential Bond movie is.
One of Goldfinger’s many franchise firsts is that it was the first Bond movie to have a theme song performed by a contemporary pop artist. After the success of Shirley Bassey’s iconic Goldfinger theme, the 007 producers decided to repeat the strategy with (almost) every movie going forward.
Bassey’s trendsetting Goldfinger theme is still — pardon the pun — the gold standard for Bond themes. Every subsequent Bond theme has paled in comparison; Bond themes are measured on a scale of one to “Goldfinger.”
The opening action set piece of Goldfinger sees Bond using an array of gadgets and spy trickery to break into a Latin American drug lab and blow it to kingdom come. Then, he’s attacked by an assassin, whom he thwarts in the nick of time after catching the guy’s reflection in his traitorous lover’s eye.
Before the opening credits have rolled, Goldfinger sets a high bar for its action. But throughout the movie, the action scenes keep getting bigger, from shootouts to car chases to a climactic showdown at Fort Knox.
Under the direction of Terence Young, Sean Connery developed a take on 007 that was sort of a classy brute. He killed without remorse, but he looked cool smoking a cigarette and he could wear the heck out of a tuxedo.
In Goldfinger, without the guidance of Young (who modeled Bond after himself in the first two movies), Connery’s Bond came into his own.
When it comes to discussions of the best Bond villains, after the obligatory mention of Blofeld is out of the way, Auric Goldfinger is undoubtedly one of the first names that’ll come up. Gert Fröbe’s performance is delightfully eccentric while also being suitably ominous.
He checks off all the boxes of a great Bond villain: a quirk (an infatuation with gold), a megalomaniacal plan (own all the world’s gold), an army of henchmen, and one last trick up his sleeve.
One of the most iconic moments in Bond movie history is the scene in Goldfinger in which the eponymous villain has 007 strapped to a slab of gold and demonstrates a laser beam that can cut right through it. This image is now synonymous with the spy movie genre.
As the laser beam slowly moves up between Bond’s legs, he manages to talk Goldfinger into letting him go by convincing him that MI6 is aware of Operation Grand Slam.
In many of the 007 movies’ hand-to-hand combat scenes, Bond effortlessly dispatches legions of henchmen without breaking a sweat. So, it’s refreshing to see him face a formidable physical threat in Goldfinger in the form of the title character’s right-hand man, Oddjob.
Oddjob is an unforgettable side villain. In the third-act showdown, Bond gets the tar beaten out of him by Oddjob, who isn’t fazed by any of his punches and lands plenty of his own, throwing 007 around Fort Knox like a rag doll.
Thanks to impeccable production design by the great Ken Adam, the Fort Knox set seen in the climactic set piece of Goldfinger is virtually indistinguishable from the real Fort Knox.
Of course, good set design is worthless if what the crew shoots on those sets isn’t compelling. From Goldfinger’s escape to Bond’s fight with Oddjob to the large-scale gun battle, Guy Hamilton staged a spectacular finale on Adam’s sets.
After the big finale at Fort Knox, Guy Hamilton tricks the audience into thinking the movie’s action is over. He throws in a requisite wrap-up scene in a hangar before Bond boards a private plane to have lunch at the White House.
Then, Goldfinger emerges, gun in hand. The showdown on the plane, complete with Goldfinger getting sucked out of a broken window and Bond having sex under his parachute after narrowly escaping a crash, gives the movie a final stinger — as if the Fort Knox sequence wasn’t thrilling enough.
Everything that is now expected from a Bond movie — an opening action scene, a theme song by a pop artist, an eccentric megalomaniac, etc. — originated in Goldfinger. Dr. No and From Russia with Love followed their source material pretty closely, but Goldfinger used its source novel to create a template for a Bond film.
This formula is still followed to a T, especially in recent years as the producers have run out of Ian Fleming stories to adapt, and many poor attempts to replicate it have proven that Goldfinger perfected that formula right out of the gate.
