Connery ever so slightly pantomimes moral outrage for the camera, having electrocuted a man in a bath, while recovering his gun from the girl who has double-crossed him. "Shocking. Positively shocking." And the screen goes to black and a bloody great gold hand slides up it as the orchestra crashes in.
'Goldfinger' is the epitome of performed cool but the coolest part of it is that no imitator quite matches the timing or the intonation of Connery as he suaves his way through this caper. It's a hilariously commanding confection that doesn't bother with explanation in places and, yes, there are plot holes as 007 wings and hop skips his way from uncovering a gold-smuggling scam to being in on a dirty Communist bomb in the vault of Fort Knox. The casual escalation of violence and scope of criminal plan is what makes the movie so impossibly infectious. There may be holes in the achievement - why was Gert Frobe so obviously dubbed at points? Why do the supposed naughty Cold War 'Red' Chinese speak Cantonese and in such reduced phrases endlessly repeated? But these things really don't detract and the screen glows and tingles with the same magical brassy style of the score, with its constant percussion and trumpets.
The script is clever and allows Connery to have a ball and get closer to annexing Cary Grant's territory than the first two films in the series had dared. It also toys with the unperformable lesbianism of the novel's chauvinistically-named Pussy Galore, huskily and mischievously embodied by Honor Blackman. Frobe's physical acting is magnificent and he lets himself become a grotesque balloon of a body to match the physically repelling imagery of Fleming's writing. His character, clad in an outlandishly brown-and-gold version of the hero's black-tie, really does have Connery on the skids in the iconic laser-threatens-crotch scene. It really looks as though the hero isn't that sure that he's going to make it out of this situation.
Nice touches give Connery opportunity for cute reaction shots: you can admire his performance throughout, but check out his disbelief when in a Hitchcockian twist the little old Fraulein who curtseys as she lifts the gate at Goldfinger's Swiss lab subsequently produces a machine gun and blasts the hell out of his windscreen when he tries to escape.
Can we have more of these old early Bonds scrubbed and cleaned for the screen? It might give Daniel Craig something more to think about before his next act in the 007 shoes. Although never quite so bloodied, Connery also fights dirty; his preferred MO is to kick a man in the face. Nasty, brutal, thrilling, implausible, winning stuff. No wonder that by this time the screen and the audiences loved the spy in the DJ who always told everybody his name.
'Goldfinger' is the epitome of performed cool but the coolest part of it is that no imitator quite matches the timing or the intonation of Connery as he suaves his way through this caper. It's a hilariously commanding confection that doesn't bother with explanation in places and, yes, there are plot holes as 007 wings and hop skips his way from uncovering a gold-smuggling scam to being in on a dirty Communist bomb in the vault of Fort Knox. The casual escalation of violence and scope of criminal plan is what makes the movie so impossibly infectious. There may be holes in the achievement - why was Gert Frobe so obviously dubbed at points? Why do the supposed naughty Cold War 'Red' Chinese speak Cantonese and in such reduced phrases endlessly repeated? But these things really don't detract and the screen glows and tingles with the same magical brassy style of the score, with its constant percussion and trumpets.
The script is clever and allows Connery to have a ball and get closer to annexing Cary Grant's territory than the first two films in the series had dared. It also toys with the unperformable lesbianism of the novel's chauvinistically-named Pussy Galore, huskily and mischievously embodied by Honor Blackman. Frobe's physical acting is magnificent and he lets himself become a grotesque balloon of a body to match the physically repelling imagery of Fleming's writing. His character, clad in an outlandishly brown-and-gold version of the hero's black-tie, really does have Connery on the skids in the iconic laser-threatens-crotch scene. It really looks as though the hero isn't that sure that he's going to make it out of this situation.
Nice touches give Connery opportunity for cute reaction shots: you can admire his performance throughout, but check out his disbelief when in a Hitchcockian twist the little old Fraulein who curtseys as she lifts the gate at Goldfinger's Swiss lab subsequently produces a machine gun and blasts the hell out of his windscreen when he tries to escape.
Can we have more of these old early Bonds scrubbed and cleaned for the screen? It might give Daniel Craig something more to think about before his next act in the 007 shoes. Although never quite so bloodied, Connery also fights dirty; his preferred MO is to kick a man in the face. Nasty, brutal, thrilling, implausible, winning stuff. No wonder that by this time the screen and the audiences loved the spy in the DJ who always told everybody his name.