A View To A Kill is essentially a stealth remake of Goldfinger, and despite its many weaknesses (a clearly aging Roger Moore, one of the weaker ‘Bond girls’, the cold open featuring a musical interlude of what is actually a cover of the Beach Boys California Girls, the high camp of the Paris chase scene after the Eiffel Tower assassination, the horse racing subplot that drags the pace of the film down and goes nowhere), Christopher Walken plays a great psychopath and Grace Jones commands the screen whenever she’s on, and arguably has the best death of any henchman.
Trying to remake Goldfinger as-is is kind of a nonstarter; it is definitely a film of its time in not only the treatment of women (I mean, Bond literally rapes ‘Pussy Galore’ out of her lesbianism and into betraying Goldfinger) but in the basic plot elements. I think if there is one Connery-era film that could do with a modernized remake it would be You Only Live Twice, although a filmmaker absolutely needs to stay with Ken Adam-inspired set design and in camera practical effects for the volcanic lair; no CGI except for wire removal and to enhance things that can’t be done safely on-set with pyrotechnics and flame generators.
Gert, it’s a great opportunity. You’ll be playing the villain, trying to get to the gold! No, get to the gold, this Auric fellow wants to irradiate it with a stolen nuclear bomb. Ya, I don’t know either but he’s assisted by a sexy aviatrix whose name I can’t say until after Lent. No, I only flipped through a few pages, why? Throws lethal hats, really?!?
In the original story, Bond isn’t tied to a table with a cutting laser beam as a threat – it’s a buzz saw, as if Bond was a heroine in a Victorian melodrama and Goldfinger a moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash.
Some British TV show actually filmed the scene with the saw instead of the laser.
Eh, that would just make him more boring and generic. A gold obsession makes him stand out from the villainous crowd instead of just being Greedy Bad Guy #7564.
I realize the song says ‘he loves only gold,’ but doesn’t the movie show him wanting other things for their own sake? Like, at one point, we see him drinking a mint julep; he apparently used money that could’ve spent on gold — or on equipment with which to acquire more gold — to instead get a mint julep, which (a) maybe doesn’t work as a lyric but (b) is the choice he’s made: to have some gold, sure, but also to have some mint juleps, because he finds the latter to be satisfying.
I just saw the “brandy scene”. The Bank of England tells Bond that Goldfinger moves his gold around to take advantage or the arbitrage form gold prices in various countries.
You could write your way out of the boring part (you could have Goldfinger, for instance, have an ulterior motive for destroying the economy.) It makes the story more logical. That’s the only problem with the original film.
I’m worried the remake would screw it up in some other way, by trying to modernize Bond somehow. I don’t want him rape-converting a lesbian character, which is now sickening, but he still needs to be James Bond.
I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of overlap between the posters in this thread and the one I’m about to cite.
But as this topic spreads out past the fate of the nuked gold in Goldfinger, it’s starting to get pretty well overlapped with this other recent thread that is also spreading into a general discussion of Bond plots & actors.
I don’t say that to object to either thread or to ask they be combined; IMO that’d be a bad move. I’m just thinking most posters here might want to see / participate in that thread too if they have not already.
Note that he cheats at cards and golfing. The first for thousands of 1960s dollars and the second for a small time bet. The money doesn’t matter. It’s about winning using any method.
The amount of gold he has is just a way of keeping score.
At least in the book, the purpose of embedding gold in the car was to send it to India where due to government restrictions gold fetched a higher price. I.e., he intended to sell it. But then the money could then be turned into even more gold.
I keep thinking about the thread question. Out in the open, a small nuclear device, even a dirty one, wouldn’t do much to gold ingots stacked on pallets directly underneath it. While the Trinity test tower lost a lot of steel, most of that was quite thin compared to gold bars, esp. ones that are stacked. The rods holding the feet of the tower survived nicely.
So some of gold on the surface of the top outside bars would go away, it wouldn’t be a thick layer.
As to the radiation, again, it would only affect a thin layer of the outer ingots.
As to whether any of the above would apply to stacks of bars inside a concrete vault is a whole different question. The concrete might be solid enough to survive the blast, the heat would be much higher, the radioactivity would be unable to rise up with a mushroom cloud, etc.
It might take some significant numerical analysis and simulation to even give a ballpark answer to the OPs question.
Yes, the “over the top” aspect is key to the Bond genre. The villains are supervillains without costumes, just as spy agencies have an equipment list that belongs on Batman’s utility belt and Bond is the most unsubtle, un-secret secret agent imaginable.
Fun fact. That laser effect was filmed by having a guy underneath with one of those torch-style cigarette lighters. This burnt the thin foil and the laser effects were added.
