Is
Goldfinger the best Bondkino? Because I am a gay nerd I ran the numbers and it's pretty much a three-way (snicker) contest between this one,
You Only Live Twice and
The Spy Who Loved Me, although
Live And Let Die,
The Living Daylights and
Tomorrow Never Dies are also personal favourites.
Let us consider how
Goldfinger is the best Bond: in the first place, it has the best villains. While many will argue that Blofeld is the definitive Bond enemy on the strength of his first three appearances, his batting average is let down by
On Her Majesty's Secret Service and
Diamonds Are Forever, in which he falls prey to bad writing and ends his run a tiresome buffoon. What's more, none of his henchmen were half as good as Oddjob*.
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| I think Oddjob is the only henchman to get his own musical theme, which is pretty based. |
One of the rare joys of
Goldfinger is that the beef between Bond and his archenemies is developed thoroughly over the film's runtime, with Bond and Goldfinger each gaining the upper hand at one time or another, rather like John McClane and Hans in
Die Hard, lending their eventual reckoning a certain pleasing weight. Compare and contrast the SPECTRE agent from
From Russia With Love who seems to have an entirely one-way hate-on for Bond in his talking-killer train scene. Hipsters love
From Russia With Love for the wrong reasons, but plebs and patricians alike love
Goldfinger for the right ones.
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| >tfw no solid gold gf |
Moreover Goldfinger is a fantastically eccentric villain who takes such special delight in his evildoing that you sort of want him to succeed at least a little bit. The mutant organ in my chest cavity can't help but inflate with approval at a villain who, at the first sight of US Army troops approaching him, immediately sheds his outer garments to reveal a military uniform and guns down the accomplice nearest to him, effectively switching sides just long enough to get behind the real troops and gun then down in turn.
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| Your villain may be evil, but is he stolen valour in the middle of a heist evil? |
It's such an ingeniously rotten contingency plan it makes me smile everytime. That this occurs just seconds after he locks his loyal manservant in a vault with Bond and a nuclear bomb just makes it even funnier. If Goldfinger had been in that Guns and Roses video where that guy dives through the wedding cake to get away from the rain, Goldfinger would have thrown him through it, hidden himself under a replica bridal veil, shot three bridesmaids and pissed in a homeless man's cap on the way out. A patrician bastard!
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| This will never not be funny to me. |
Dullards have taken to complaining about this filmographeme because Bond doesn't do anything after being captured, but this is precisely why it is great: his efforts to escape or get word out to Felix Leiter are consistently foiled up until he finally manages to flip Pussy Galore (snicker), which demonstrates the effectiveness of Goldfinger's containment methods. So ingenious is Goldfinger he even assigns Pussy (snicker) to watch over Bond because she is a lesbian (confirmed in the b**k and implied in the kino), little realising that there are no such things as lesbians where Bond's BBC (Big British Cocc) is concerned.
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| The name's Bond. Chad Bond. |
This raises (snicker) the other objection dullards have about the film, which is that Bond raeps Pussy (snicker), because how else can their play fighting in the barn be interpreted, except in any other way than that because that's fucking weird and nasty, what the fuck dullards? Have you never play fought with your partner prior to (or during) secks? If you raeped your partner, do you think that would have the effect of making them more likely to help you, or less? If you answered more, I think you are a danger to society.
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| ppl who call bond a raepist be liek ↑ |
Because I am not a creepy soyman, only one thing used to bug me about
Goldfinger: the plot holes, which are both abundant and egregious. One is that you don't die from body paint, which makes the offscreen scene in which Oddjob methodically paints Jill Masterson gold even more ridiculous than it would otherwise be. The other is that Bond only finds out about Goldfinger's masterplan by overhearing him briefing a room full of hoods who he then immediately kills, making a major plot point hinge on a completely pointless exercise.
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| I like to think he spent many an evening playing out Op Grand Slam with toy soldiers on this board. |
Both these objections, however, also crumble when exposed to not being a neckbeard for a few moments. In the first place, the skin suffocation is symbolic of the suffocating grasp of the possessive and vindictive Goldfinger, and the gold paint is an iconic calling card reflective of the superior art direction that has gold and goldish colour saturate the picture, right down to the uniform blondeness of Pussy's (snicker) squad of pilots, and Goldfinger's elaborate briefing is just another outlet for his prodigious ego. He wants his peers to appreciate his supreme artistry in the field of crime. You know, like he says he does.
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| The revolving plates covering her mouth are a nicely creepy touch. Of course she isn't saying anything - she's dead. |
Another nice touch is that the pre-title sequence has nothing whatsoever to do with the main plot of the film. While it's often mistakenly believed that this is a common thread in the James Bond films, nearly all of them tie into the main plot in some way, but not this one. It's like the cartoons they used to show before the main feature back in the days when people went to cinemas because they used to show good movies. It's very pleasing, daydream stuff.
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| I'd watch these movies just for the sets 2bh my fams. |
*
The Spy Who Loved Me has the opposite problem with a great henchman in Jaws but a relatively underwhelming mastermind in Stromberg, although fun fact: he was originally meant to be Blofeld before the McClory lolsuit put a stop to it.
