For Conservative Movie Lovers: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and 'Goldfinger' Part 1

It’s the kind of movie “best” lists were made for, and over the years it’s been on plenty of them: Best Movie Quote, Best Song, Best Villain, Most Thrills. It boasts both the most famous car in movie history and what novelist Anthony Horowitz once called “perhaps the most bizarre murder in literature.” It spawned both 1964’s best-selling toy among tots and that year’s “sexiest man alive” among adults. It remains the most beloved entry in the single most profitable cinematic series of all time — adjusted for inflation, the movie cost only twenty-four-million dollars to make, yet brought in an epochal 853 million at the box office.

It’s Goldfinger (1964), and a half-century on the thrills, chills, eroticism, adventure, and luster invoked by that name all remain undimmed. According to one estimate, over a quarter of the world’s population has seen a James Bond film. That marks Goldfinger as not only a blockbuster, but as the harbinger of a profound cultural phenomenon.

Secret agent James Bond was introduced to the British public in 1953 via the novel Casino Royale, published in an initial print run of less than five-thousand copies. Author Ian Fleming quietly cranked out a novel a year for nearly a decade, with each languishing on the mystery-novel midlist alongside dozens of other now-forgotten titles from other writers. Sales were reasonable, but hardly spectacular.

Then on March 17, 1961, an article appeared in Life magazine called “The President’s Voracious Reading Habits.” Included on a list of “Ten Kennedy Favorites” was the 1957 Bond novel From Russia, With Love (over thirty years later, some choice praise from President Bill Clinton would deliver a similar jump-start to the career of African-American mystery writer Walter Mosley). The Kennedy Bond-boost, combined with the appearance of the first film (1962’s Dr. No), served to increase Fleming’s sales exponentially. By 1964 he had some forty million books in print. But the movie version of Goldfinger changed everything. In just the first year after it rocketed into theaters, an astonishing twenty-seven million more Bond books flew off the shelves.

Published in 1959, Goldfinger was chronologically the seventh novel in the series, yet only the third film. In every way it far exceeded its two predecessors, Dr. No (1962) and From Russia, With Love (1963) — its budget was larger than both of the previous two combined. Riding the crest of the same British invasion that introduced The Beatles to the States (Bond even playfully disparages the Fab Four at one point), it was the first installment to have large parts of the plot staged in America. It was also the first to have a pop star sing the theme song, and the first to use a famous actress as a Bond girl (Honor Blackman was already well-known to TV audiences from The Avengers). Although Goldfinger was the second film to feature actor Desmond Llewelyn as Bond’s equipment officer, it was the first to call him by his now-immortal name: Q. It was even the first film in movie history to use a laser, which at that time was a fresh, newfangled invention (the novel has a tied-down Bond threatened with a buzzsaw).

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In a series chock-full of memorable characters, gadgets, action scenes, and set pieces, Goldfinger reigns atop the list as the most innovative, inventive, and satisfying. From the wondrous set designs of Ken Adam (Fort Knox, Goldfinger’s sanctum) to Robert Brownjohn’s now-classic golden-girl title sequence and marketing imagery, to John Barry’s brassy, lush score, everyone seemed to be firing on all cylinders.

For this third chapter the series also had a new director, as Terrence Young (the man widely credited with having taught Sean Connery the ins and outs of Bondian cool) was replaced by Guy Hamilton. It was Hamilton who introduced the humorous relationship and banter between Q and Bond, who strove to tone down 007’s super-heroics in favor of a more realistic action palette, and who worked on making Auric Goldfinger and Oddjob far more compelling and formidable villains than any that came before.

Underwhelmed by the version of Bond’s car found in the script (as written, it only sported a smokescreen defense), and thinking about some traffic tickets he had recently acquired, Hamilton came up with the idea of adding revolving license plates to the Aston Martin DB5. He also encouraged the crew to come up with their own improvements, and soon the vehicle was chock-full of gadgets and weapons destined to thrill audiences worldwide. Clearly, Hamilton punched way above his weight in this film. Although he would ultimately direct three more Bond pictures — Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), plus other Hollywood action fare like Force 10 From Navarone (1979) and Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985), he would never again come close to equaling the potent cinematic alchemy of Goldfinger.

And yet even a movie with the esteem and cultural impact of Goldfinger has its enemies and party poopers. Anyone who’s made a cursory study of the Bond phenomenon is familiar with many of the early critical bashings. The most infamous came from the (then young and liberal, now old and conservative) historian Paul Johnson, who in 1958 wrote a New Statesman review of the novel Dr. No titled “Sex, snobbery and sadism,” in which he wildly attacked Fleming’s achievement: “I have just finished what is without a doubt the nastiest book I have ever read. . . Fleming deliberately and systematically excites, and then satisfies the very worst instincts of his readers. This seems to me far more dangerous than straight pornography.”

You might assume that Johnson’s half-century-old opinions were superseded long ago by more modern tastes. Not so — mainstream critics and bloggers continue to lament the perpetual popularity of the Bond franchise. Over at BBC News Finlo Rohrer asks “Is James Bond loathsome?” Techland’s Matt Selman accuses Fleming’s stories (and, to the degree they adhere to them, the films) of being “packed with outdated, but probably deeply-felt, sexism, racism, and, yes, even homophobia. . . a recent re-read of Goldfinger revealed the hate-speech was hilariously explicit.” He also condemns Bond’s successful seduction of Goldfinger’s lesbian pilot, the aptly named Pussy Galore, as “every idiot male moron’s fantasy.” Even Fleming fans grant, as Bond expert Bob Chapman does in the above-mentioned BBC article, that the stories are “sexist, heterosexist, xenophobic, everything that is not politically correct.”

My opinion is that Bond continues to be one of the most profitable franchises in history for good reasons — ones that have little to do with theaters and bookstores being filled with “idiot male morons” indulging in their penchant for “deeply-felt, sexism, racism, and, yes, even homophobia.” We live in an era where ostensibly sane people are busy trying to protect us from horrors like soda pop and table salt. In such a loony world, it’s no surprise that we now get a non-smoking Bond who takes his marching orders from a hectoring Hillary Clinton/Madeleine Albright-style “M” (remember Judi Dench’s quiet tirade in Goldeneye (1995) about Bond being a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur”?) In such a hostile cultural/political environment, it’s heartening that Fleming’s writings haven’t been widely banned as hate-speech, and that Goldfinger still ranks in most polls as the best Bond adventure, better even than the slicker, bigger-budgeted, more politically correct ones of recent times.

The public’s continuing regard for Goldfinger begs a question: what do modern-day movie lovers take away from this early incarnation of James Bond as envisioned by Ian Fleming, and brought to life on celluloid by Sean Connery? What do we glean from that misogynist dinosaur world of sex, snobbery and sadism?

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we begin to answer that question by delving into the life of the creator of James Bond: Ian Fleming.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING