Goldfinger

Pay attention, 007: Auric Goldfinger, the international bullion dealer, is one of the richest men in the world, and like many very rich men, he possesses an insatiable hunger for more: more gold, more wealth, more power. He's planning something called "Operation Grand Slam," and whatever it is—it seems to have something to do with the U.S. gold reserve at Fort Knox—you are to ensure that he does not succeed. Beware, James: to get to Goldfinger, you'll have to get past his assistants, including a mute Korean manservant who wears a sharp bowler hat and a young female pilot with a rather remarkable name. Weapons at your disposal include your Walther PPK, your Aston Martin (to which I believe you'll find that Q has added a few interesting and useful modifications), and your, er, facility for relating to the opposite sex. And, of course, your wits. The world is depending on you, 007. Nobody does it better.

2002 is the 40th anniversary of the James Bond film franchise, and with the release of Austin Powers in Goldmember this coming Friday and Die Another Day, the 20th "official" Bond Film, scheduled for release this November, I thought it might be fun to take a break from "serious" films and spend an evening with Britain's greatest superspy. Goldfinger may or may not be the best Bond film—everyone has their own favorite—but it's certainly the most famous and the most iconic, and in many ways is the most important.

The James Bond of Ian Fleming's novels is essentially a straight spy, albeit an archetype of idealized mid-century masculinity: he shoots bad guys, he makes love to beautiful women, he saves the world. The first two Bond pictures, 1962's Dr. No and 1963's From Russia With Love, basically hewed to Fleming's characterization, depicting 007 as a serious secret agent facing realistic foes with abilities that, though highly developed, were still recognizably human. With Goldfinger, though, producers Harry Saltzman and Albert "Cubby" Broccoli took the series in a different direction: the villains were more cartoonish, the gadgets more unbelievable, Bond's success with women more improbable. By dialing everything up past the point of credible realism, Saltzman and Broccoli turned an engrossing action thriller into a sly comedy, and established the formula that every James Bond movie since has followed.

If you've never seen a Bond picture before, Goldfinger is a good place to start. From the opening shot of 007 seen through the barrel of a gun to the closing credits that inform us that James Bond will be back in Thunderball, Goldfinger is a two-hour anthology of nearly all the clichés—let's be kind and call them "traditions"—in what has become the most rigidly formulaic picture series in filmdom. You've got your cool car, your beautiful babes, your nifty gadgets, your megalomaniacal villain who's gone to the trouble of installing a scale model of Fort Knox on a mechanized pedestal in his Lair of Evil... what more could you ask for? (I always wonder about those scale models that Bond villains commission to illustrate their diabolical plans. What do they tell the contractors? Are the revolving tabletops and mechanized pedestals really necessary? How do you price out a job like that? Doesn't it constitute a security risk to let carpenters into the Lair of Evil? And how could anyone build a giant Lair of Evil without attracting attention, anyway? Traffic around here gets crippled for days whenever they so much as dig up the sidewalk to install fiber optic cable. But I digress.)

Sean Connery, who is the only correct answer to the question "Who's the best Bond?", takes a relaxed, cheerful approach to the role, playing 007 as a man who is equally at home foiling Goldfinger's plans for world domination and romancing the ladies. In short, he makes it look easy. His antagonist Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) is not as well known as Bond's frequent early nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld—it was Blofeld, in the person of Donald Pleasence, who was the chief model for Austin Powers' Dr. Evil—but he was the man who owned the laser that threatened to permanently end Bond's career as a womanizer in one of the most frequently parodied scenes ever. His assistant Oddjob (Harold Sakata), who prefers action to talk, is near the top of just about any list of great movie henchmen. And then of course there's Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), the one Bond girl whose name everybody knows. Along for the ride are Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny, in love with Bond as always; Bernard Lee as the avuncular M, head of the British Secret Service; and Desmond Llewellyn as the irascible Q, who supplied Bond with his gadgets in every Bond picture save two from 1963 right up to 1999's The World is Not Enough. (Tragically, Llewellyn died that year in a car accident at the age of 85; John Cleese takes over as the head of Q branch in Die Another Day.)

Points to ponder:

• Drinking Dom Perignon above 38 degrees Fahrenheit, Bond says at one point, is "just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs." It's interesting how the culture changes; at the time, the remark was intended to portray Bond as a man of distinction, but today it just makes him sound like the biggest square of all time. If Paul McCartney felt slighted, he must have eventually gotten over it: he recorded the title track for the 1973 Bond film Live and Let Die.
• Felix Leiter, 007's American counterpart, appears in six "official" Bond movies and in 1983's unofficial Never Say Never Again, but is played by a different actor in all but two of them. Cecil Linder plays the character here.
• The Bond Film Informant features a comprehensive database of the official and unofficial James Bond films and lists the clichés present in each one, under headers like "gunbarrel, "gambling," and "using the title." It's a fun read.
• Shaken. Not stirred.