MAKICHUK: Some Goldfinger trivia on the 60th anniversary of its release
The film would propel Bond and Sean Connery into worldwide pop icons
“This is gold, Mr. Bond. All my life I’ve been in love with its colour… its brilliance, its divine heaviness.”
— Auric Goldfinger
It seems like just yesterday when I walked into a theatre in Windsor, Ont., to see Goldfinger, the third James Bond adventure to hit the screen.
Alas, it is now 60 years since 007 battled Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) in an epic film that still gives me a thrill to watch so many years on.
Goldfinger, which was published in 1959, was the seventh title in author Ian Fleming's series of novels about the gentleman-spy, and its premise sprang from a chance encounter three years earlier.
In 1956, Fleming was staying at Enton Hall, an English health spa, when he happened to strike up a conversation with a broker who specialized in gold. As he picked the man's brain about the gold trade for a while, the seed that would grow into Goldfinger was planted.
There are so many aspects of this film to enjoy, but here are a few special moments.
The opening credits — wow. As a nine-year-old boy, those golden images, shall we say were quite enlightening, to put it nicely.
That and the fabulous theme music composed by John Barry and sung by Shirley Bassey put one in the right mood to watch Bond in action.
It is interesting to note, that the first person to hear the theme, was Michael Caine, who was slumming at Barry’s house in London.
He happened to walk in the room where Barry was pounding a piano keyboard — asking Caine what he thought of it.
Oh, and as for Bassey, she had trouble hitting the high note in the song, so, hidden behind a screen, she ripped off her bra, tossed it in the air and bashed it out!
Then there is Oddjob (Harold Sakata), Goldfinger’s silent and deadly henchman.
During the scene where he gets killed in Fort Knox, Sakata actually suffered burns to his hands, and did the fall/stunt as if he had actually been killed!
On film, it is an absolutely extraordinary scene.
The elegant and witty Pussy Galore, (Honor Blackman) played equal to Sean Connery’s Bond, and was definitely easy on the eyes.
Forever known as the ultimate Bond girl, her proficiency in martial arts helped her land the role.
"I was already a James Bond fan but I asked to read Goldfinger before taking the part," she once revealed.
"By the time I had read it, I was convinced it was absolutely me."
Aged 39 when Goldfinger was filmed, Blackman was actually five years older than Sean Connery and, at the time, the oldest actress ever to play a Bond girl.
"Most of the Bond girls have been bimbos," she once said. "I have never been a bimbo."
As for Goldfinger, Hamilton was shocked to find out that Frobe didn’t know a word of English.
But rather than recast the villain, the decision was made to dub him with actor Michael Collins.
"He had a dialogue coach and he studied his scenes very hard. I made a point of not making them too long and had lots of cuts in them," Hamilton recalled.
"He learned his dialogue phonetically. The only thing I had to do was get him to speed up, because he was enunciating everything very slowly. The main thing is that the mouth is moving at the right tempo. Michael Collins did a tremendous job of imitating Gert."
Another epic scene involves Q (Desmond Llewellyn) introducing Bond to his new wheels — the now iconic Aston Martin DB5, with all its wonderful gadgets, most of which actually worked.
As a kid, I treasured my Corgi die-cast toy DB5, spending many hours ejecting the plastic man in the passenger seat.
Apparently Corgi has sold over 7 million DB5s in various editions since 1965.
“At the rehearsal stage, I was working at a desk and Bond comes in and I got up to meet him,” remembered Llewellyn. “And Guy said, ‘No, no, no, no. You don’t take any notice of this man. You don’t like him.’ And I thought, ‘But this is Bond, this is James Bond and I’m just an ordinary civil servant. I must admire him like everybody else does.’ Guy says, ‘No, no, no, no. Of course, you don’t. He doesn’t treat your gadgets with respect, any respect at all. I mean, the briefcase that you gave him in From Russia With Love — he just ignored it more or less although it saved his life. So, when you’re describing the things on the car, you know perfectly well he’s not going to treat them with the respect they should have.’ And, of course, the penny dropped and the whole thing came together.”
Special effects supervisor John Stears recounted cutting a hole in the roof for the famed ejector seat gag.
"I remember it now, putting the hole through this lovely Aston Martin, my pride and joy," Stears recalled.
Though it's one of the most memorable moments in the entire film, the car's legendary ejector seat was not actually a working model. To achieve the effect, Stears used a dummy and compressed air, and careful editing did the rest.
My brother Jim and I actually rented a beautiful grey BMW hatchback from Nice, and retraced Bond’s route through Switzerland. While we didn’t have the tracker and screen that Bond had, we did have a GPS screen and a voice directing us all the way.
Talk about bucket list!
It was director Guy Hamilton who came up with the idea of revolving number plates because, “I was getting a lot of parking tickets at the time and I thought it would be absolutely marvellous to collect a parking ticket and then juggle the number plate, drive off, not be worried and you’d look at the meter man’s face.”
The rewrite meant that Llewellyn had more technical jargon to learn but it also gifted him one great moment.
“And, of course, it gave me the chance of producing I suppose one of the most famous lines: ‘I never joke about my work, 007’.”
And if you’re looking to find the location for Goldfinger’s Kentucky ranch, look no further than Pinewood Studios in England, where it was all recreated.
Goldfinger’s huge ranch house is equipped with a rumpus room where a “hoods convention” assembles to hear the plan for Operation Grand Slam.
Designed by Ken Adam, the room is rigged with a number of electronic controls that can transform it into a high-tech war room, replete with huge maps and photographs and a model of Fort Knox that rises majestically from the floor.
And who can forget the scene where a beautiful black Lincoln is put into a crusher, along with a mobster inside.
In actuality, the Lincoln drive, the iron and metal crushing yard, the Kentucky Fried Chicken where Leiter (Cec Linder) and Simmons (Austin Willis) were waiting — were all shot in Miami.
And if you think those beads of sweat on Bond’s face during the laser torture scene are fake, think again.
The team managed to get their hands on an actual industrial laser, but according to optical effects designer Cliff Culley, by the time the set was fully lit, the cameras couldn't pick up the beam.
The workaround proved to be complicated. The sheet of metal Bond was lying on was pre-cut, then solder was used to fill in the hole, which was painted over to blend with the surrounding table.
To actually make the scene work, two effects technicians had to be under the table, one holding a light and the other using a cutting torch to produce the effect of a laser slicing through the table. It all looks very convincing once the laser beam is optically painted in, and it was all too real for Connery as it happened.
"You look at Sean and you're talking about sweat," Hamilton recalled. "That was real sweat, because he's thinking 'When is that son of a bitch going to say, cut?'
“Because he knows that the two technicians underneath, one with a torch to show the other guy with the blowtorch which way to go, they don't know where Sean's crotch is, they're just going along."
Goldfinger ends with a dramatic battle between Bond and Oddjob on a big set-piece involving a huge set designed by Ken Adam. While the exterior was a detailed recreation of Fort Knox on Black Park, the interior was pure invention.
“I thought if I can reproduce the exterior absolutely as a copy of the existing Fort Knox, then I can design whatever I like for the interior of it,” said Adam. “Since I felt gold was the important thing, I then stacked up gold 40 foot high behind a sort of prison like grille.”
For wide exteriors, Hamilton and a small crew used a nearby military base to simply zoom in on Fort Knox from afar, and used a single group of American soldiers over and over again to fall down at various locations to create the sequence in which Pussy Galore's pilots drop nerve gas on the fort. For the price of $10 and a beer, the soldiers were all too happy to participate.
Of all the fantastic visuals throughout Goldfinger, the most memorable is probably still the one that was used as a key piece of marketing for the film: A nude woman covered entirely in gold paint.
The woman was actress Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson, Goldfinger's kept woman who was killed after she dared run off with Bond.
To achieve the effect, Eaton really was covered completely in gold paint, and the production kept a doctor on set just in case "skin suffocation" really did pose a danger.
Sadly, author Fleming didn’t live to see the explosion of the film’s success.
He visited the Goldfinger set in the spring of 1964, as the crew was shooting Connery's part of the Miami hotel pool sequence at Pinewood Studios.
He died just a few months later, on August 13, 1964, at the age of 56. Goldfinger premiered in UK cinemas a little more than a month after Fleming's death.
The film would catapult Bond, and Connery, into a pop culture force, and there would be no going back.
— with files