And yet, in polls on this very board, Goldfinger usually ranks #1. I am never quite sure why.
My nitpick. In Dr No I’m Married, Bond it attacked by a tarantula. The most deadly spider in the world! Except, it isn’t deadly at all. Plus the “attack” was done with rear-projection. Connery wasn’t even anywhere near the spider.
It has an undeniable sense of style. The Bond movies started rather small; sabotaging rocket launches and stealing decoding machines. But each movie had to be bigger than the one before, and eventually we had invisible cars and every villain wanted to start World War III. Goldfinger was the sweet spot; big, but not so overblown as to be ridiculous. And I think Gert Fröbe’s performance is very good.
Not deadly, but (according to Wikipedia) tarantula bites can cause serious pain and muscle spasms. None of which may have been known back when that scene was written and filmed. And at least one shot shows Connery’s skin pressed down by a piece of glass between him and the tarantula; so he was near it, but still safe.
It’s been noted elsewhere that the GIs coming to Bond’s rescue in ***Goldfinger ***actually made sense, since they were on a military base. After that, we started getting things like frogmen parachuting in from nowhere, a rappeling ninja army, and a Mafia helicopter assault. Not only did this become formula, each iteration had to be more impressive than the last. The ultimate effect, which we now see today, is ludicrous.
I quit going to see Bond movies for good when the radio telescope in Puerto Rico became a secret weapon in Cuba, and was tired of the series long before that.
I wouldn’t say the frogmen or ninjas came out of nowhere. They were military units dispatched by governments with an interest in stopping the villain’s plan, after Bond had alerted them to where they were needed.
That does lead to one of my favorite movie errors ever. Bond and Natalya have foiled the villain’s plan and destroyed his installation, they think they’re all alone in a field, and Bond moves in for the clinch. Suddenly, a bunch of U.S. Marines pop up out of disguised holes in the ground and two helicopters descend from the sky. Yes, that’s right, the helicopters were hiding by being outside of the camera shot! Now that is coming from nowhere.
I get that, but they still smack of deus ex machina. I liked the three movies that followed Goldfinger (Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), but thay had already started to become tedious by the time Connery returned in Diamonds Are Forever—not because of Roger Moore in particular, but because they had become so formulaic.
Wasn’t that an invasion of a foreign country (albeit a not-so-friendly one)? :dubious:
Apparently the CIA can zoom into Cuba in Cessnas any time they want, too. Why did it *have *to be set there? And why the hell was all that rocket fuel (or whatever it was) stored in the underground control room? That made as much sense as putting a wheel labeled OVERLOAD on a nuclear reactor. 
:smack:
That bugged me. it has two errors.
First, Bond and Natalya basically ended up at that spot pretty much at random. They escaped, and that’s where they ended up. So of all of Cuba, they landed right on top of camouflaged soldiers?
And second, what the hell were these camouflaged soldiers waiting for? Bond could have used their help, but no, they’re fiddle-farting around in ghille suits while the real heroes are fighting the bad guys in a touch and go battle. Thanks, chumps, you were a big help.
I got the box set a few years back, got 'em all on DVD from Dr. No through, I think, Die another Day (which I recall liking). Binge-watched them which 1) vastly improved my appreciation of Austin Powers and, 2) burned out my brain badly enough that I was able to rather quickly forget them. That said, the first 007 movie my wife saw was Casino Royale. She found it campy. I looked at her, looked over at the box, and asked, “You think so?”
But oddly written stories aside, they do serve some value as time-capsules about what society thinks is scary, sexy, or shocking. A big part of why I watch them is to help me remember what life was like before we had the ubiquitous wisdom of the internet at our fingertips. When sharks were vicious, soulless, man-eating machines, when tarantulas were basically 8-legged sharks, when the technological challenges of a viable submersible Lotus were so trivial as to be feasible without altering the appearance of the car in any way, when 15 "no"s in 3 minutes meant, “fuck me now!”
I’m a bit more bothered by the small, private armies that the villains are able to command. In You Only Live Twice the ninjas attack Blofeld’s operation inside the disguised volcano. They’re met by armed force defending the volcano. Why, what are those guys fighting for. Blofeld is being paid to start a war between the U.S. and the USSR, and presumably he has crunched the numbers and will still turn a profit after deducting the rocket fuel and depreciation on the volcano. But what are his men fighting for; after he’s hidden out to save his own skin, how much money do these guys think he’ll pay them to get shot? Even worse is Moonraker. There are people making nerve gas satellites for Drax to deploy from orbit, and not all of them are going into space with him. Why would they help with a plan that must lead to their own death?
I just assumed that every field for miles around had camouflaged soldiers in it.
Which Casino Royale? In terms of campiness, it matters. A lot.
Yeah, there’s a certain weird zeitgeist about them. I remember checking once and all but two of the Bond movies had a helicopter in them, somewhere, but now I can’t remember which two.
Right? Yeah, I only subjected her to the 2006 one.
I like Goldfinger, and I am not sure why either.
I think it is partly because it is preposterous. But, you know, in a fun way. Like Dr. No, who can build a whole rocket launch site and nuclear reactor in a small Caribbean island, and nobody notices. But for some reason, I can suspend disbelief in a way that I can’t for the Roger Moore efforts, which were equally preposterous but not as much fun.
But I agree that changing Goldfinger’s motivation away from stealing the gold to making it radioactive was a brilliant plugging of a major plot hole and improved the movie very much. As well as re-targeting the laser away from Bond’s crotch to cutting down the door into Fort Know. In the book, they were using the nuclear warhead to blow the door open. I don’t know much about physics or warhead yields, but I can think of some problems associated with being in the same zip code as a nuclear explosion.
Regards,
Shodan
The helicopter gunship scene…Too much?
I love Casino Royale. Probably the best movie, IMO.
But you can’t make a propane bottle explode with a 9mm. A 9 mil won’t even dent a propane tank, it’ll at worst leave a grey streak on the surface. If you did manage to make a hole, the tank won’t explode, it’ll just leak. One of the few Mythbusters eps I enjoyed dealt with this one. Took incendiary ammo to get it to blow.
In View to a Kill, Zorin only kills the one businessman who disagrees with the plan.
He has Mayday escort him to a ‘waiting room’ which turns into a chute that drops him out a trapdoor; we then see that the meeting was in Zorin’s blimp a thousand feet up.
Ah, right…I was mistakenly conflating that with the scene in the mine where he machine-guns down all his workers.
Either way, not a happy bunny, was he?
Seemed pretty happy to me, in a sociopathic sort of way.
The Goldeneye satellite project was an former Soviet Union legacy program continued on by modern Russia. Presumably when the facility was built back in the 70’s/80’s they chose Cuba because it had both a military partnership with the Soviets as well as being in one of the last places the United States would look for a giant superweapon complex (in the film the only other complex was in an extremely remote part of the siberia near a military air base so obviously they wanted complete secrecy but still within easy reach)
Granted, it could be set somewhere else but Caribbean locations are also another series trademark.