The Times film critic rips Goldfinger apart, accuses Bond of incompetence

Hello, is that M? What do I do now? Nigel Kendall writes in The Times that 007 is the epitome of cool, but in Goldfinger he was more Mr Bean than Mr Bond.

For many people Goldfinger, which is rereleased [July 31st in select UK cinemas], is the quintessential Bond film, the one that established a formula that is still going strong 43 years later. The third of the Sean Connery Bond films, this was the first to feature a pretitle sequence irrelevant to the plot of the main film; the first to have a real theme song belted out over the opening credits; the first to feature Q by name, and the first with the gadget-packed Aston Martin DB5, still the most famous film car of them all.

With its snappy script, sight-gags and one-liners, Goldfinger was the first Bond to go blockbuster, and yet if you scratch the surface, you find it’s not a “typical” Bond film at all.

Made at a time when the producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman still didn’t really know if they had a lasting success on their hands, Goldfinger takes the notion of the infallible secret agent, established in Dr No and From Russia with Love, and plays it completely against type.

This is the dirty secret at the heart of Goldfinger: JAMES BOND IS COMPLETELY INCOMPETENT THROUGHOUT. Don’t believe me? Consider, if you will, the bare bones of the plot.

In Miami, Bond is ordered to observe the antics of Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe). Instead, he lets his indiscipline get the better of him and interferes, which costs a young woman, Jill Masterson, her life.

Hauled over the coals by M, whose intervention with the Miami Beach Police prevents Bond from being arrested and jailed, 007 then embarks on a short game of cat-and-mouse with Goldfinger. This ends when Bond gets Masterson’s sister killed by a maniac with a flying hat, and is easily captured and forced to beg for his life as a laser threatens to separate him from his manhood. “Do you expect me to talk?” he asks, hopefully. “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die,” comes the immortal reply.

So, by the halfway point of the film, Bond’s interfering, aimless ways have resulted in the premature death of two sisters and a humiliating capture by an overweight buffoon.

But what of the car, the great Aston Martin, fitted with oil-slicks, a bullet-proof screen, circular saws, machine guns and an ejector seat? What of it? After a brief chase in which Bond is prevented from making an escape by an arthritic pensioner with a machine-gun, Britain’s top secret agent is dazzled by oncoming headlights and crashes his world-beating gadget into a brick wall. How pathetic is that?

Worse is to come. Captured, beaten and humiliated, what does our hero do next? Perform a heroic escape? Alert the outside world to the dangers of Goldfinger’s evil plan? Not a bit of it. When he’s not sipping Mint Juleps on the balcony of Goldfinger’s Kentucky ranch, he’s slipping notes into the pocket of a gangster who – along with the note – then gets flattened in a car crusher. So comfortable does Bond appear in captivity that the CIA minders (it is by now obvious that our moronic hero cannot achieve anything alone) decide not to intervene and leave him to enjoy his cocktails.

And so it goes on. Bond never escapes, and the film’s climax finds him, still a prisoner, helplessly trying to disarm a nuclear device. It takes the intervention of a kindly CIA man to show him the off switch. In the course of the film, Bond’s only moment of efficiency comes from killing his nemesis, right at the end.

It’s a miracle that Britain’s bumbling saviour made it that far at all, since Oddjob, the smiling villain with the evil hat brim, has previously come close to making mincemeat of him. One can only ascribe Bond’s continued nonchalance to the fact that he’s permanently drunk, snorting back the brandies in London, hitting the Juleps in Kentucky and enjoying “liquor for three” on Goldfinger’s private jet. When Q shows him the Aston Martin’s tracking system, Bond is delighted: “Allow a man to stop off for a quick one en route,” he exclaims. What’s really astonishing about Goldfinger is Bond’s ability to hold a Walther PPK straight with two litres of spirits permanently coursing through his system.

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