by Sean Egan
The most stern-browed Bond publication was Il Caso Bond, an Italian collection of seven essays, co-edited by Oreste Del Buono and a young Umberto Eco. Eco’s own contribution to the collection was an essay titled ‘The Narrative Structures in Fleming’, in which he compared Fleming’s novels to matches played by the Harlem Globetrotters exhibition basketball team: ‘We know with absolute confidence that the Globetrotters will win: the pleasure lies in watching the trained virtuosity with which they defer the final moment, with what ingenious deviations they reconfirm the foregone conclusion, with what trickeries they make rings round their opponents.’
That constricted but definite pleasure was now gone for ever.
WORLD DOMINATION
Due to a dispute about money, Terence Young was replaced on Goldfinger by Guy Hamilton.
The film’s screenplay was credited to Paul Dehn and Richard Maibaum. Maibaum told Pat McGilligan, ‘On Goldfinger, I did a first draft. Saltzman didn’t like it, and he brought in Paul Dehn, a good writer, to revise. Then Sean Connery didn’t like the revisions, and I came back to do the final screenplay.’ An uncredited contribution is reported to have been made by Wolf Mankowitz. This sort of screenwriter merry-go-round and shadow assistance is common in Movieland, and certainly common in the history of the Bond franchise. Not every example will be listed herein in the interests of skirting tedium.
When writing the Goldfinger novel, Fleming clearly conducted a considerable amount of research: the book features a visual aid in the form of a map of Fort Knox and its surrounds. It was all for naught. Several critics observed that stealing the gold from Fort Knox posed practical problems that weren’t all related to the heavy security. Or, as Maibaum and/or Dehn had Bond note to Goldfinger, ‘Sixty men would take twelve days to load it onto two hundred trucks.’ Accordingly, Goldfinger’s plan was changed by the writer(s) to one that involved irradiating the Fort Knox gold where it sat, thus increasing by tenfold the value of the villain’s existing stocks while the government of China – who supplied him the necessary atomic device – would secure their objective of economic chaos in the West. (Unlike their disinclination to condemn the USSR, Eon had no qualms about criticism of what was then still called ‘Red China’, possibly because Chairman Mao’s horrific policies had made him a successor to the previous Red bogeyman, Joseph Stalin.) The finale thus becomes a desperate race by Bond to overcome Goldfinger’s henchmen and disarm the device.
This is indicative. While largely adhering to its structure, the screenplay of Goldfinger over and over again improves on the parent novel. Examples of changes for the better include the fact that Bond first encounters Goldfinger by design, not chance; a horrified Bond comes upon the gold-painted corpse of Jill Masterson (as she is named here) rather than the murder being verbally relayed to him; Bond’s genitals are threatened by an industrial laser rather than a circular saw; we actually get to go inside Fort Knox instead of stopping in the grounds; the specs of the Aston Martin are profoundly sexier. An added bonus is the merciful absence of the suffocatingly ubiquitous SPECTRE, the only example of such in Connery’s seven-picture tenure.
Which is not to say that the picture is without flaws. The most notable of several is when Goldfinger tells an assembly of hoods the full details of Operation Grand Slam. As Goldfinger kills them all with deadly gas immediately afterwards, it’s clear that the only point of the peroration is to enable the temporarily escaped Bond to bear witness to it. An illogicality that can’t be explained even by the need for exposition is Oddjob crushing plan-refusenik Mr Solo in his car without first extracting from the boot his boss’s gold.
Goldfinger contains the first proper Bond pre-title sequence in the sense of one that feels like a miniature movie: in a brisk four minutes, Bond penetrates and blows up an enemy installation, keeps a rendezvous with a beautiful woman and then – just when we think the action is over – has to electrocute to death a would-be assassin (‘Shocking’). This would be an exhilaratingly stylised start on its own, but we are then swept up into John Barry, Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse’s sumptuous title theme, rendered lustily by Shirley Bassey. It was the first Bond theme as we know the term today: glossy, anthemic and slightly preposterous (‘Such a cold finger!’).
Another, more bizarre Bond tradition is begun with the fact that Jack Lord does not reprise his role as Felix Leiter. The CIA man is instead played by Cec Linder. Although there may have been legitimate reasons for not getting back Lord – he is reputed to have made disproportionate demands regarding billing and money – it is rather silly that, in his nine appearances in official films, Bond’s CIA pal has been played by seven different actors, with David Hedison and Jeffrey Wright the only returnees.
A more agreeable tradition is inaugurated with the first proper Q scene. First, Bond walks through the testing section of Q’s department, a furious and comical hive of activity where Q’s minions calmly withstand explosions and gunfire in the certainty of the protection afforded by their device prototypes. Then comes an exchange between Q and Bond that emphasises that Bond is no hero to the gadgets man, who is harrumphingly resentful of having to demonstrate to 007 equipment he knows the agent will only go and destroy. Q’s main gadget in this picture is the Aston Martin DB5, which comes with a rear bullet shield, a revolving licence plate, an oil dispenser, retractable wheel-spikes, machine guns and a passenger-side ejector seat. In the book, the car’s add-ons were restricted to hidden compartments, changeable lights and reinforced bumpers, and Bond used none of them.
That the movie’s budget constituted those of the first two Bonds combined is evident in Scene 1’s luxurious, seamless panning shot. It sweeps across the exterior of Goldfinger’s grand Miami hotel to its swimming pool, telescopes in on a man diving from a high board, follows him under the water, shifts to Felix Leiter observing the swimmer through an observation panel and then follows Leiter as he goes in search of Bond.
The budget is also evident in Ken Adam’s designs, which exceed even his usual flights of fancy. At Broccoli’s prompting, Adam spurned the prosaic nature of what is known about Fort Knox’s interior to create a cathedral of gold protected by huge steel, cone-design doors. Similarly, the bomb is the size of a chest freezer, chockfull of mysterious wires, buttons, dials and blinking lights.
Some scenery, of course, needs no budget. Connery looks the veritable million dollars, especially when wearing Savile Row suits. This despite the fact that Goldfinger was the first film where Connery’s hair – which had been thinning since he was a very young man – was artificially augmented. (Paint was applied in From Russia with Love.) It’s curious how much of an open secret this was. In his private life and in some contemporaneous film roles, Connery didn’t bother with toupees, but there was little commentary by the media on his follicle depletion.
Much of the frisson surrounding the film resulted from the name of the character played by Honor Blackman. Christening someone Pussy Galore in print is one thing, but the transference to film and the fact that the character is far more prominent than in the book meant that the name was now being enunciated on peak-time television and radio broadcasts. In 1964, it was a how-do-they-get-away-with-it? scenario.
Although Blackman’s casting meant a change of nationality for Pussy, it can’t be denied that the actress is as beautiful as she had been as action-girl Cathy Gale in television show The Avengers – only in full colour. She’s also the first Bond girl of any description not to be re-voiced, Nikki van der Zyl having stood in for Andress, Eunice Gay – twice – and this film’s Shirley Eaton. The last of these is arguably even more transcendently easy on the eye than Blackman: her hair of spun gold and eyes of cobalt blue would have made her brief appearance memorable even without her character Jill Masterson’s iconic gold paint job.
Goldfinger is played by German actor Gert Fröbe. Rotund and red-headed, he is visually perfect. However, sonically he fell down and had to be re-voiced. Recalls Wanstall, ‘It was a huge shock. Apparently, he came over
here giving the impression he could speak English, but all he did was to learn his lines parrot-fashion so that he would be ready for shooting. I remember they tested a lot of actors. They all attempted to do a few lines. I synchronised them all up and then we ran them one after the other.’ Michael Collins was the man chosen to put words into Goldfinger’s mouth. ‘I think it was a masterclass,’ says Wanstall of his work. ‘You will never, ever, ever, ever witness a better re-voicing example than that. You cannot tell. He captured not only the sync, but the weight of the man, the cynicism of the man and the danger of the man. And the accent. Everything is perfect. I wish I’d been responsible for it. I was on sound effects. The dialogue man did that.’
Wanstall, however, has plenty he can claim credit for in Goldfinger, not least the power of the laser-beam scene. Accordingly, come 5 April 1965, Wanstall became the first Bond crew member to be presented with an Academy Award.
Goldfinger is a hugely stylish and swaggering film, from that glib-and-proud-of-it pre-title sequence, to the way Bond works his way into Goldfinger’s hotel room by deftly manipulating a chambermaid, to Bond humiliating his boss by displaying superior expertise about brandy, to the stylish way Bond slides across the floor of Fort Knox to electrocute Oddjob with a severed electricity cable as the villain is reaching for his metal-lined hat, to the fact that the atomic bomb is disabled when its three-digit countdown display is on ‘007’, to the way proceedings conclude with Bond pulling a parachute over himself and Pussy to evade a rescue so they can enjoy another tryst, the bawdy horn line of the theme music blasting out once more as he does …
Despite the film’s vaunting tone, it’s in no way devoid of humanity, even nobility. Bond is shaken by the murder of Jill and grimly aware of his culpability in it. Moreover, in Fort Knox, Bond doesn’t even think about taking the opportunity he has to run and instead selflessly toils to defuse the bomb in the face of lack of resources, knowhow and time.
That Goldfinger was destined to be a phenomenon seemed to be assumed from the get-go. John Barry’s soundtrack album charted before the film was released. At the film’s world premiere in Leicester Square, London, on 17 September 1964, the print was delivered in golden canisters by four gold-clad ‘dolly-birds’. The film broke the UK box-office records set by From Russia with Love. Over in the States, it was accorded the privilege of being UA’s major Christmas release. UA put over a thousand prints of the movie into circulation across the globe, enabling the maximum number of cinema screenings and a critical mass of publicity. Goldfinger made it to what was then called The Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-grossing movie in history.
Dr. No was rereleased at the same time and also did well. Such rereleases would, over the following decade, be an important part of the Bond revenue stream in the absence of television royalties.
During his second scene with Jill Masterson, Bond quips that drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above a temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit is ‘as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs’. The putdown might have accurately reflected the prejudices of a man of Bond’s breeding, but it’s rather ironic in the cultural context of the time. The mania surrounding Bond from this point on tied into a feeling of which Beatlemania was the other major element. It’s an arrestingly appropriate fact that the first Bond movie and the first Beatles record – ‘Love Me Do’ – were released on the same day.
Despite their North American producers and funding, and despite their UK crew being chiefly determined by the Eady Plan – the tax-deduction scheme by which the British government encouraged filmmaking in its country – the Bond films were quintessentially British. The other quintessentially British phenomenon of the era was the ‘Fab Four’. Just as their irreverence, proletarianism and provincialism made the Beatles seem harbingers of a new classless age, the strutting, sexed-up values of James Bond seemed to epitomise the taste in the air for libertarianism, while his gadgets chimed with the impression of a gleaming, trailblazing era. A grey, class-ridden, war-weakened, empire-deprived country was suddenly beginning to believe that it had more to its credit than an illustrious history. Out of the blue, the world considered British culture ahead of the curve, a feeling culminating in April 1966 with Time magazine anointing England’s capital ‘swinging’.
In short, over the course of the next few years, it was primarily the Beatles and James Bond who made people once more proud to be British.
The decision to pitch the James Bond films at a younger demographic than had Fleming his Bond novels was one of the most commercially astute moves Eon ever made. That they had no greater a rating restriction than ‘A’ in the UK and – once classification started there in 1968 – ‘PG’ in the US meant that Bond films were consumed by children as much as they were by adults. This in turn paved the way for merchandise, the bulk of which is usually aimed at kids.
The ‘Bond Market’ began in a modest way. The merchandise accompanying the film Dr. No extended no further than the comic adaptation, the belatedly issued soundtrack album, the John Barry single of ‘The James Bond Theme’ that wasn’t even an official version and a reprint of the original novel with stills from the film on the cover, which Fleming complained to Pan Books was using ‘my books for advertising … films’. A similarly scanty merchandising story pertained to From Russia with Love.
The explanation for this would seem to be that there was almost nothing in it for Danjaq. In a letter dated April 1962, Fleming stipulated to Danjaq that, although they were free to make licensing deals, they could receive no money for them. Moreover, such deals were to be limited to five products within one year of Dr. No’s release and must not include toiletries. Meanwhile, according to Broccoli, UA chief executive Arthur Krim had insisted from the get-go that the studio own all Bond-movie music rights. Merchandise, then, was useful only to draw attention to the Bond films.
The aftermath of the release of Goldfinger was very different. It saw shop shelves groaning with Bond jigsaws, board games, action figures, guns, walkie-talkies, bubblegum cards, attaché cases and clothing, even if much of this product did not appear until several months after the movie had been put on release. Although shortly before Fleming died Glidrose had signed an agreement with Eon to share the Bond marketing rights, one suspects that, following Fleming’s death, a more hard-headed attitude was adopted by the owners of the literary Bond. Booker McConnell were in the business of making money and were not motivated by the sentimentality that would have partly informed the decisions of Glidrose when run only by the Fleming family.
From this juncture on, synchronisation became standard. No Eon Bond film would ever again reach the cinemas without the simultaneous presence on shelves of tie-in consumer goods of every description and utility. Replica guns, miniature cars and secret-agent paraphernalia in general were expected because logical, but Eon had learned the same lesson as owners of merchandising rights to other cultural phenomena such as Tarzan and the Beatles: a brand name or likeness could be plastered on any conceivable artefact and, whether germane or not, result in a mutually beneficial outcome for licensor and licensee. Thus it was that James Bond’s name, the 007 logo and the likeness of the current Bond actor have ended up on everything from toy racetracks to pencil cases to magic sets to deodorant to underwear.
Hand in hand with the tidal wave of merchandise came a sharper sense of promotion. Bond films were heralded by official television documentaries, publicity jaunts and a blizzard of publicity stills. The publicists eventually honed this process to such a state of ubiquity that, whenever Bond was in the theatres, his face and name routinely appeared as much on cereal packets, crisp bags and lottery tickets as they did magazine covers.
The ultimate Bond merchandising sensation was the miniature Aston Martin DB5, manufactured by UK toy company Playcraft in their Corgi range. Although prompted by the car’s appearance in Goldfinger, this die-cast model didn’t actually appear until October 1965, only a couple of months before the release of the next Bond movie, Thunderball (alt
hough it did, handily, also feature in that). Although no bigger than a human palm (1:46 scale), it had several features of the vehicle seen in the film, including machine guns, bumper rams, bullet shield and – most gratifyingly – ejector seat with resident villain. These features were activated by ingenious methods, such as pressing the exhaust pipe. The car was not the silver of the film but gold, a decision made because the silver paint originally tested made the toy look as though it had in fact been denied a paint job. The kids didn’t care. ‘James Bond’s Aston Martin D.B. 5’ – Corgi model 261 – was, despite its hefty price tag (9s 11d in the UK), the retail sensation of Christmas 1965.
By February 1968, the toy had sold nearly 4 million models, during which time it had been slightly increased in size to 1:43 scale. Corgi continued the upgrades, exchanging the 261 for the 270, the paintwork of which was authentic silver birch. The gadgets were now augmented by revolving number plates and pullout tyre slashers and the product came in a ‘blister pack’ – as opposed to the previous rectangular box with a painted image – that enabled the prospective purchaser to instantly see what he was getting.