My favourite Bond film: Goldfinger

Goldfinger has the most sinister villain and best soundtrack but it's the inept fumbling of 007 that truly sets this Bond film apart

Anne Billson
Tue 2 October 2012

The first time I laid eyes on James Bond, he had just emerged from the ocean with a fake seagull on his head. He then blew up a drug lord's laboratory, peeled off his wetsuit to reveal an immaculate white DJ, snogged an exotic dancer, clocked in her eyeballs the reflection of a bad guy sneaking up behind them, tipped said bad guy into the bathtub, threw an electric heater in after him, and quipped: "Shocking, positively shocking!" All this, and the credits hadn't even started. My 12-year-old self thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

Many years later, Goldfinger (1964) remains not just my favourite Bond movie, but the standard by which all other Bond movies must be judged. It has Sean Connery, of course, and the best theme song, incorporating Shirley Bassey and lashings of John Barry brass.

And it has the best villain; Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) is a petty-minded plutocrat who cheats at cards and golf, and has the best ever evil dialogue. His masterplan is to profit from the economic chaos that will ensue after he has detonated an atomic bomb in Fort Knox, making America's gold reserves radioactive for 58 years. "He's quite mad, you know," Bond says to Pussy Galore, just in case any of us might have thought this was a viable get-rich-quick scheme.

Ah yes: "Poosy", as Connery calls her – the implicitly (explicitly in Ian Fleming's novel) lesbian pilot with the ultimate absurd Bond girl name. And yet Honor Blackman, who plays her, never looks less than Totally In Control, even when required for plot purposes to yield to Bond's manliness. Mindful of Blackman's ass-kicking role as Cathy Gale in TV series The Avengers, the film-makers allow her to fell Bond with a judo throw, but that's as far as they go with this feminist nonsense. Bond promptly upends her in the hay, and overcomes that implicit lesbianism with just one kiss.

Goldfinger has the best henchman – Japanese-born Harold Sakata as Oddjob, the thickset Korean with the deadly steel-rimmed bowler. And the best car – the Aston Martin DB5 with smokescreen, oil slick, front-wing machine guns and passenger ejector seat, all of which Bond employs against carfuls of henchmen in pursuit … to no avail, because he ends up totalling it and getting captured anyway.

Which brings me to what I like most about Goldfinger: it makes me laugh. I never tire of the back projection used to make it look as if Connery is in Miami rather than Pinewood, the disposable comedy gangsters, the montage of troops pretending to be gassed and collapsing unconvincingly, or of Pussy Galore's crack team of girly stunt pilots.

Best of all is Bond's uselessness. He manages to get both Masterton sisters killed (one of them covered in gold paint, the best ever death of a Bond girl) and spends most of the film quaffing Dom Perignon, a "rather disappointing brandy", martini or mint julep, you name it. He gets strapped to a table with a new-fangled laser beam pointed at his private parts: the best Bond-in-peril scene and one that is not easily escapable – our man's family jewels remain intact only thanks to the villain's inexplicable reluctance to deliver the coup de grace.

For the last hour of the film, Bond is Goldfinger's prisoner while the action occurs elsewhere, and it's Poosy who saves the day (though of course 007's studliness might have something to do with changing her mind). But even at the climax, he's reduced to bashing cack-handedly at the atomic bomb casing with a gold brick, trying in vain to stop the countdown, only for a CIA man to step in at the last minute and calmly flick the "off" switch.

Despite its hero's ineptitude, Goldfinger is full of quintessential Bond moments, all of which have since been recycled or spoofed so many times you forget this is where they began – Bond tricking the jailer into opening his cell door, a minor bad guy's car reduced to a scrunched-up cube in a scrapyard compactor, the villain shooting his own henchmen. Best Bond movie, no question.

Favourite line: Goldfinger, preparing to dissect 007's groin with his laser beam: "Choose your next witticism carefully, Mr Bond, it may be your last."

Best gadget: "Revolving number plates, naturally"; making the Aston Martin valid for Britain, France and Switzerland.

THE GUARDIAN