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The trailer for the latest James Bond movie debuted last week, and while it was exciting to see footage from Bond’s 23rd big screen outing (well, 25 if you include the slapstick Casino Royale parody and the 1983 Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again), something felt a little off. Much like how 2006’s Casino Royale attempted to refashion Bond for a Bourne Identity-reared audience, Skyfall appears to be giving the series a Christopher Nolan-influenced reboot.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with reinventing a character that has been kicking around for 50 years, but with someone as important to the history of action movies as James Bond, it is sad to see the established formula fade away. No other character or franchise has survived as long as the ongoing adventures of the gentle misogynist and alcoholic superspy, with a love of double entendres. There’s something special about the ludicrous tone of the original flicks that no self-consciously dark facelift can recapture. Bond might still be a major player at the multiplex, but the finest films of the series will always be the classics. There’s a reason why a film like Goldfinger holds up well today, while other 60s action romps offer little more than camp appeal. The folks behind this franchise stumbled onto the perfect formula for an action blockbuster decades before the genre was a linchpin of Hollywood production. Give a young Sean Connery a gun, a girl, and a martini (you know how he likes it), and even the most ADD-addled viewer will be giddy with entertainment.
Goldfinger wasn’t the first outing for James Bond, coming after Dr. No and From Russia With Love. However, the film was the first outing in the franchise to gross over a $100-million (no small feat in 1964) and firmly established the James Bond formula that audiences now slide comfortably into like a warm blanket. Gone were the Cold War villains of previous outings as the series settled into a comic book reality. The villain is Auric Goldfinger, an impossibly dapper, wealthy, and mysteriously accented gentleman who hatches a ludicrous plot to let off a nuclear device inside Fort Knox to melt/radiate the U.S.’ entire supply of gold to make his personal collection more valuable. It was the first supervillain of this type to grace the Bond universe, and in many ways remains the best. As with any proper villain, he’s also got some equally memorably henchmen in Oddjob (an assistant/bodyguard with a razor-sharp bowler hat he throws around with reckless abandon) and a beautiful band of women skydiving by robbers led by the astoundingly named Pussy Galore (as far as I can tell, she did not earn the name from adopting a record number of cats).
This entire article could be dedicated to ticking off the franchise staples founded and perfected in Goldfinger. This was the first time Q appeared to give the man with a license to kill his collection of gadgets. The Austin Martin DB5 remains the greatest Bond car, a gorgeously-designed vehicle packed with an oil slick dispenser, machine guns, and best of all a passenger-side ejector seat (the car was turned into a toy and was one of the first pieces of absurdly successful movie tie-in merchandising, giving Goldfinger yet another milestone). Let’s not forget Shirley Bassey’s vital and instantly iconic theme song. Then, of course, there’s a requisite death-trap that the villain inevitably puts Bond into while spelling out his plan, in this case, Goldfinger straps Bond to a table with a laser slowly burning its way up between Bond’s legs towards his favorite dangling appendage. It’s a collection of sequences fans came to expect from every outing for the superspy and they were repeated so often because of how exquisitely they worked here in a sardonic, explosion-filled entertainment factory.
Guy Hamilton was the man calling the shots from the director’s chair in his first of four entries in the series. The producers kept bringing him back because the guy instinctually knew exactly what the series required. He shot the gorgeous globe-trotting locales like the world’s most expensive and action-packed travel brochure. The tone Hamilton fosters is light enough to contain countless one-liners and camp sequences (like say Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus or Oddjob’s decapitating hat), yet grounded enough to pull off legitimate suspense and genuinely thrilling action scenes. That balance may sound simple and certainly seems to be executed effortlessly here, but looking at some of the failed entries in the franchise will show just how difficult it is to pull off. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the film features Sean Connery as Bond; he’s considered the finest for a reason. The guy can spit out a one-liner with the detached ease of Roger Moore, while still providing the dramatic weight and macho ass-kickery of Daniel Craig. Simply put, he was born to play the role, and none of the imitators have been able to capture more than a single aspect his performance.
Another key factor in Goldfinger’s status as the finest Bond romp was completely unintentional. The movie is a relic of the early 60s and as a time capsule, it gets away with absurd flights of fancy, cornball special effects, cheesy dialogue, and exaggerated performances. Viewed today, these elements all add an extra level of laughs and nostalgia that you can’t capture deliberately. The reason James Bond needs to be completely reinvented now is because audiences would never buy the series’ most lovable excesses (and decades of parodies certainly didn’t help).
These days, Bond needs to be a gritty, vulnerable hero with a psychological profile that creator Ian Fleming never even considered. Fair enough, times and tastes have changed. Yet, that kind of characterization just isn’t what made James Bond a worldwide phenomenon. Sure, the character and series are absolutely ridiculous and dated. However, that’s not necessarily bad thing, with the franchise serving up idiotic and joyous entertainment at it’s finest. Without Bond, there would be no summer blockbusters, and superheroes would still be the stuff of the funny pages. Though it will never be as critically revered as, say, Citizen Kane, there’s an argument to made that Goldfinger is one of the most important and influential movies ever made. The film didn’t just establish the formula of the Bond series, but cemented the brand of popcorn blockbuster filmmaking that takes over the multiplexes every summer. Sure, it may just be fluff, but that fluff is now the bedrock of Hollywood. Whether or not the dumb entertainment revolution is a good thing is a topic worth discussing another time. For now, let’s just agree that it happened and we’ve got one man to thank: Bond, James Bond.
Goldfinger will screen at the Scotiabank Theatre, Colossus Vaughan Cinemas and Coliseum Mississauga Cinemas on Tuesday May 28 at 7 p.m.
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Phil Brown writes about classic films for Toronto Standard‘s Essential Cinema column.
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