In fairness, the books have him switch to the Walther (and a .38 S&W revolver) in Dr. No after his Beretta snags during a recent case. Maj. Boothroyd considers the Beretta to be “a ladies gun.”
Overall, the Beretta in .25 ACP wasn’t a bad balance between concealibility and effectiveness at short ranges. At least, at the time the novels were written.
In the movie, as well.
Probably everyone knows this already, but the fictional Major Boothroyd was based on a real firearms expert, Geoffrey Boothroyd, who wrote to Fleming and suggested that Bond should carry a Walther PPK rather than a Beretta, as well as other advice about Bond’s use of firearms. Fleming accepted Boothroyd’s advice and wrote him into Dr No.
The movies were already rushed. We readers knew how LotR ended. The audiences who didn’t weren’t bothered by it.
I agree. It might need enough padding that would turn it into one Hobbit movie. No thanks.
(And LotR really needed to be more than 3 movies. But now we’re veering way off-topic.)
Goldfinger. In the book the plan was to steal the gold from Fr. Knox. People pointed out how impractical this was in terms of transport, crew, time, etc. So in the movie the plan was switched to nuking the place from the inside.
(OTOH, whether this had any long term benefit to Goldfinger is another question. After all, the gold would still be there.)
The musical version of Tootsie takes the basic situation of the movie - a struggling actor wearing drag to get a part - and changes most everything else. The actor gets a part in a Broadway musical, not a soap opera, and the themes are adapted for current sensibilities. It fixes the problematic elements and is a strong version.
And there. And there. And some of it’s over there.
The obvious implication in the film was that the gold would be essentially worthless, since it would be highly radioactive for many years afterwards and would not be able to be contacted by humans.
The benefit to Goldfinger is the fact that, with the Fort Knox gold irradiated, all the rest of the gold in the world (including the vast amounts owned by Goldfinger) would immediately substantially increase in value due to its increased scarcity (“I conservatively estimate, fifty times.”).
I thought it was ten times.
I’ve said before that the plan is not consistent with Goldfinger’s character. He says, and the theme song confirms, that he loves gold. He doesn’t love the things he can buy with it, he loves gold, itself. He welcomes any enterprise that will increase his stock. Setting off an “atomic device” in Ft. Knox will not increase Goldfinger’s holdings. In fact, by driving up the price of gold it will become harder for Goldfinger to acquire any more.
Still a great movie. Blowing up Ft. Knox, rather than just sealing the gold, makes for a nice plot twist, and it’s a great scene when he reveals his plot to Bond.
It may have been ten; I was trying to remember that quote from memory and I might have confused the increase with the number of years the gold was supposed to be radioactive.
I can kinda see that the plot doesn’t fall into Goldfinger’s character; he’s the sort of guy who would probably weep at all that gold being irradiated. But, ultimately, they had to make a plot that would work. They already had a woman in the movie named Pussy Galore; there’s only so much that an audience can take, I tells ya!
Maybe his plan also took into account the atomic bombings of so much gold would cause the price of gold to rapidly fluctuate and he could buy more gold when it was on the downward swing. The entire point of the Chinese involvement was to cause chaos in the Western economies for instance.
And see, this is where we get different strokes for different folks. I think the movie Tootsie is close to a perfect film, while the stage musical is a clunky abomination. Part of it is that I’m tired of stage shows being “meta” about, well, being a stage show inside a stage show; part of it is the idea of a Broadway musical star somehow becoming a well-known beacon of feminist freedom across the country is laughable (it makes sense to me that a TV soap star in the 1980s could have had that affect on housewives, I can’t see somebody doing eight shows a week in New York reaching those same women in any way close to the reach of TV); and part of it is just the staging requirements of a live musical (wardrobe changes, etc) ruin the pacing of a show with the star switching between playing a man and a woman.
I did like the numbers by the friends (“What’s Gonna Happen” by Sandy and “Jeff Sums It Up”) but the Michael Dorsey in the touring version we saw wasn’t good enough to land the concept.
I question the premise that making gold radioactive would decrease its value. Who cares that no one can touch the gold? No one touches the gold anyway.
But, AFAICT, he does enjoy things he can buy; for example, we see him drinking a mint julep (instead of forgoing that small pleasure because, hey, this is money that could be spent on more gold, or on stuff that could later be sold for more gold — or risked, in a gamble on a golf course, in hopes of ending up with even more gold — or used to bankroll a big fine heist of yet more gold, like it first looks like he’s doing; or whatever). Because, well, near as I can tell, enjoying a mint julep is a satisfying end in itself for the guy.
the sonny/lucy story while not the best subplot does have a purpose as Lucy technically ends up owning a rather large chunk of Vegas for Don Corleone and sets her up for the “Virginia hill” moment when she testifies in front of the congressional committee
they also left out most of the Johnny Fontaine story cause of Sinatra who felt it was too on the nose
The movie has dated badly and needed an update. You also have to realize that Michael is a jerk. He fantasizes about being a feminist icon, but it’s all his ego. He doesn’t realize how badly flawed as a person until the end and it’s possibly too late.
The side characters also improve on the movie and overall, it has a funnier script. The only real misfire is when the agent starts fawning over Dorothy, since the show hasn’t opened and she would only have heard rumors. But it makes the scene funnier.
I can jump through endless mental hoops to make sense of Bond films:
What is ownership but possession? And what is possession other than determining where something is be kept? Goldfinger attempted to “own” the Ft. Knox gold like a more recent supervillain attempted to “own the libs”.
So a fraction of the gold is a bit radioactive? (I.e., the outer layer of the bricks on the outside of some of the stacks.) It’s still gold. The US isn’t trying to put the gold in Ft. Knox on the market.
But from the irrational gold bug market point of view “OMG, something happened! Jack up the gold prices.” It wouldn’t take too long for things to settle down. I can see Goldfinger profiting off both sides of the spike in the price. 50 times? Ridiculous.
The bomb that Goldfinger delivers to Ft. Knox may be “small, but particularly dirty”, but it’s still an atomic bomb. After it blows up real good, the gold isn’t going to still be sitting there in neat stacks. The heat and shockwave would not be doing it any favors. I don’t know how much of it, if any, could be recovered. Not only would it be radioactive, but it would be scattered in tiny little bits over a large area.
Goldfinger also says that the gold will be radioactive for fifty-eight years. Since the film came on in 1964, the gold would have been usable again some time last year.
An interesting recent story about owning metal in a warehouse. JP Morgan owned some nickel in a warehouse, and used that nickel in settling nickel futures. The nickel could be moved to another owner simply by swapping tags on the shelf. This worked great, for years, and then someone discovered it wasn’t nickel, just some rocks.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-21/jpmorgan-had-some-fake-nickel