If only Connery`s hairpiece had made life less hairy for 007

If only... Goldfinger had made life less hairy for 007. John Patterson thinks a bolder Bond could've done wonders for male-pattern baldness - reports The Guardian.

I think we can all agree that among the Sean Connery Bond movies, Goldfinger represents some kind of pinnacle. After the slightly unsteady and uncertain first steps that were Dr No and From Russia With Love, by the third film in what was definitely now a franchise all the soon-to-be-familiar elements were firmly in place.

There is perhaps no greater or sillier Bond villain than Gert Fröbe's maniacal Midas of the international crime scene (his ridiculousness is perfectly enhanced if you keep his Germanic villain from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in mind at all times - although, mind you, Oddjob comes pretty close on the Ridicular Scale). And, for me there is no sexier Bond, uh, "babe" than the 40-year-old Honor Blackman, fresh off her stint as judo-champ Mrs Cathy Gale in The Avengers (and to think Steed's first partner had been the strenuously non-pneumatic Ian Hendry). It still amazes me, incidentally, that Goldfinger got released at all in the still staid United States of 1964, given it featured a lesbian character named Pussy Galore.

Throw in a great golf game, that laser-castration threat, the compacted Lincoln Continental, a skin-diving 007 with a fake duck on his head, and that odd line about "listening to the Beatles without earmuffs" (which to my ears is a reference to the screaming fans of the Beatlemania era, not a diss on the band - why would one half of the 1960s British cultural export drive start wailing on the other?), and you have the embodiment of a certain wonderfully optimistic moment in British pop culture.

But one element we tend to forget is that Connery was already sporting a hairpiece by this time. Wouldn't it have been nice if the most visible male sex symbol alive had saved the world from Goldfinger while sporting a gleaming chrome-dome? What a difference it might have made for baldies the world over.

I say this as someone whose hair flows freely and lavishly from his skull, but I do feel a charitable sympathy for those balding friends of mine who have bypassed the traditional Kinnockian combover remedy for concealing hair-loss (the Coen brothers, both very hirsute, once called that horrible, self-deluding hairstyle "the Alpine rope-toss"). But the world's legions of follically-challenged males badly needed a role-model long before Vic Mackey showed up on The Shield, before the idea of going entirely naked upstairs became common tonsorial currency, or the Dalai Lama became hip, and, to be honest, Sean Connery could easily have put himself up for the job a lot earlier than he did.

It's not even like anyone started puking into their cupped hands when he finally ripped off the gluestrips and horsehair to play bald for real. Hell, no. He was still being named Sexiest Man Alive within the last decade, and if he'd played bald in 1964, what a perfect and harmonious contrast he might have offered to his mop-topped equals in the chart world. And how heartened my hair-losing mates might have been.

Thanks to `Paul` for the alert.

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