He said he “should” have known, but that was after Grant had knocked him unconscious and was holding him at gunpoint.
Bond, for all that he’s thought of as an epicure, was wrong a lot. Pinot Noir and salmon go together beautifully.
He also stated with faux authority in “Goldfinger”:
His snark about The Beatles aside, you most certainly can drink champagne at a higher temperature, and I’d argue that you should (especially a vintage champagne from Dom). 38 is pretty cold, and will dampen some of the subtler flavors.
What’s interesting to me about FRWL is that in some ways it’s very atypical of a Bond film. Apart from all the things you mention, one thing that we think of as standard Bond is missing: there’s no world-conquering villain with a secret hideout, scores of disposable henchmen, and a ridiculously elaborate scheme. The fate of the world is never at stake. All that would happen if SPECTRE’s plan succeeds is that Bond would be dead, and the British government embarrassed. The stakes are refreshingly small-scale. Even the familiar Q-gives-Bond-a-new-gadget scene is low key. It’s a briefcase with a few hidden compartments.
This being only the second film, it represents an alternate path the series could have taken. They might have continued in this vein, with somewhat more down-to-earth plots and more nitty-gritty spying. Instead they went with the operatic villains, the spectacular stunts, the grand scale save the world storylines. That’s probably what let the series last so long, but it’s also what made a lot of the movies pretty silly at times.
The fight between Connery and Shaw in the train compartment is, for my money, the best fight scene in the series, and one of the best in movies in general.
Diamonds Are Forever* is the one where Bond trips up Mr. Wint (or is it Mr. Kidd?) by asking about a claret. The Bad Guy doesn’t know that claret is a red wine, tipping off Bond to his nefarious schemes. One BG gets set on fire, while the other gets a bomb tucked between his legs before being thrown overboard.
Indeed. So that’s one fewer memorable moment from From Russia With Love.
For Your Eyes Only is kind of similar, and I also don’t find it very memorable.
Grant wasn’t Russian; neither was he working for them. He was a Brit in the employ of SPECTRE, and he was merely uncouth. (I wouldn’t trust anyone who drinks red wine with fish either. Yeccch! 
)
Respectfully disagree. It’s probably the best of the Moore bonds, and one of the most “realistic.”
I tried, years ago, to do this, even started a Straight Dope thread about it. Thing is, I guess I’m just not James Bond movie material. I didn’t hate the first Bond movie, but I didn’t find the genre worth coming back to.
That’s a fair point. I’ve never been a huge Bond aficionado or anything. Just that each time I’ve seen a Bond film, I’ve enjoyed it to some degree, so I thought this would be an interesting way to re-visit the franchise.
There’s a chance I’ll burn out on these before I finish. If so, so be it. I’m not staking my reputation (such as it is) on this endeavor. 
There was a whole series of “James Bond Film Festival” review threads, before the Craig movies began. This link brings you to the last thread in the series, the first post of which contains links to all of the other threads.
I’m a Bond fan, and my favorite of the Bond actors is Pierce Brosnan, who I feel represents the ideal mix of what Connery and Moore brought to the character.
Actually, the scheme was just one move in a larger game plan. SPECTRE was being paid by China to stir up trouble between USSR and the West, eventually driving them to war, and allowing China to conquer what was left.
Is that from the novel, or revealed in a later film, or am I being whooshed?
I don’t recall any mention of China in FRWL.
Here’s the key scenein FRWL.
It is revealed later in YOLT that an Asian government was paying them to do it. Presumably China, but not explicitly named as such.
See also this Bond wiki.
Goldfinger (1964)
Wow, this was quite a treat. I’m pretty sure Goldfinger was the first Bond film I ever saw. IMDb says it was first shown on ABC in 1972 to a whopping 49% of the viewing public. I’m certain my family and I were among that percentage. Still, I was 9 years old, so most of what I retained were visuals, namely the murder-by-spray-paint victim, the decapitation of the statue by Oddjob’s hat, some of the aerial stunts, and Oddjob’s demise. Though the plot wasn’t too hard to follow, I surely didn’t quite grasp the subtleties of the global gold market, and definitely missed out on much of the adult-oriented dialogue and sexual double-entendres.
So now, 48 years later, I was able to appreciate this film from a whole new perspective. And I loved it! As much as I enjoyed From Russia With Love, Bond 3 took the franchise to the next level. It’s bigger, brighter, more colorful; overall the biggest spectacle of a Bond film yet.
After James blows up… some building or another, and electrocutes a guy in a bathtub, we’re treated to the first – and arguably the best – of the great James Bond opening theme songs. Shirley Bassey’s bold vocals and the audacity to rhyme “Midas” with “spider’s” are enough to make this a classic. Great Stuff.
Then we get to right into it. The big bad guy makes his appearance almost immediately: Auric Goldfinger, gin rummy cheater. In what I find to be a fairly brilliant choice by actor Gert Frobe, Goldfinger comes off as a bit of a schlub in this scene. We only catch on little by little how dangerous he really is.
James then heads back to MI6, where the previously-established team really starts clicking. Bernard Lee as M and Lois Maxwell as Moneypenney are on their third time around, and Desmond Llewelyn his second as Q. But they all (especially Llewelyn) seem to really inhabit the roles more thoroughly; or at least they’re growing into the qualities that have become so familiar over the years. The Felix Leiter revolving door is in motion, though. Cec Linder is fine, and Leiter has a fairly essential role in this one, but the character still isn’t terribly memorable.
So Bond almost immediately becomes Goldfinger’s prisoner, using his time in captivity to learn about his plans, and works his charms on Pussy Galore, who eventually turns on her boss by swapping out the poison gas in her team’s planes – which we don’t find out until after the fact. Frankly, it’s a pretty thin plan with a huge possibility of failure. But of course that doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the ride, and this one was about as fun as it gets. Gert Frobe and Honor Blackman both nailed their villainous roles. Harold Sakata as Oddjob made an entertaining, if somewhat cartoonish, henchman. The tricked-out Aston-Martin was awesome, the action fast and exciting, and Sean Connery continues to be as suave as can be while narrowly escaping death time after time.
Plus, we get one of the greatest lines in movie history:
“Do you expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”
(Side note: Curse you, Amazon! Since I watched From Russia With Love, they have removed the Bond library from their “included with Prime” package. Goldfinger cost me $3.99. Worth it, but irritating.)
Next up: Thunderball.
The movie Goldfinger has one of those rare moments where the adaptation surpasses the novel, in that the movie-plan is to detonate a nuke in Fort Knox to irradiate or destroy much of the U.S. gold supply, while the novel describes using a small nuke to breach the vault and actually steal the gold. The movie rightly points out that this is a stupid idea, though the novel does include a passing mention that Fort Knox is actually not the primary gold repository in the U.S. - that would be the Federal Reserve Bank in New York (which itself gets hit, without nukes, in the third Die Hard movie).
By the way, in 1997 I took a cross-continent road trip and stopped at Fort Knox. It is indeed a huge army base as described in the novel and there is a Bullion Boulevard where the depository’s front gate is. The building itself is set way back from the road and I was surprised that the gift shop on base had no gold-related postcards or merch. I ended up mailing my girlfriend a postcard with a picture of a tank on it.
I didn’t watch the whole of that video, so I don’t know if it mentions this issue, but over 15 years ago Dutch chess writer Tim Krabbe published a short article pointing out an interesting and important discrepancy between the real game Spassky-Bronstein and the fictional game Kronsteen-MacAdams: https://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess2/diary13txt.htm (scroll down to item 250).
I agree that it was a great performance by Frobe - more so when you find out that apparently he spoke no English, so all his lines were dubbed in later.
Goldfinger really has the perfect James Bond vibe; cool gadgets and an audacious villain, but neither were as outrageous as they would become in later films.
On watching it several times over the years, I did notice a couple problems. For one, James is not very good at his job. He gets Jill and Tilly both killed, crashes his Aston Martin, and he’s taken prisoner. He tries to get a message to the CIA, but that doesn’t work, either. Basically, all he does right is seduce Pussy Galore.
Also, while Goldfinger’s plan is very clever, I’m not sure it fits the character. He confesses to Bond that he loves gold, and he welcomes any enterprise that will increase his stock. Setting off a nuke in Fort Knox (sorry, spoiler alert) will do just the opposite. Goldfinger’s gold will become ten times more valuable, but it will also be ten times harder for him to get more.
I’ve read that Fröbe was primarily a comic actor in Germany. And the other English roles I’ve seen him, like Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, were also comedies.
And for a bit of trivia, what do those two movies and Goldfinger have in common?Fröbe’s character crosses the English Channel.
He’s a smuggler, which his how he was assigned to Bond in the first place. It was only by accident that 007 learned about Operation Grand Slam while surveilling him. I doubt he’d have any trouble acquiring more gold illicitly.
Bond regularly fouls up in the books, too. He starts sweating when the bad guys get suspicious, blows his cover, is captured and tortured, thinks the bad guys are dead when they’re not, and gets other people killed. He can’t ski worth a damn, either.
Actually the plan in the original book was to steal all of the gold. The movie fixes that plot hole which is, as Bond notes in the film, logistically impossible.