Sat 7 Sep 2024
A 1001 Midnights Review: IAN FLEMING – Goldfinger.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[9] Comments
by Marcia Muller
IAN FLEMING – Goldfinger. James Bond #7. Macmillan, hardcover, 1959. Signet #S1822, paperback, 1960. Reprinted many times. Film: United Artists, 1964 (with Sean Connery, Honor Blackman, Gert Fröbe).
This is perhaps Fleming’s wildest plot, involving a maniacal criminal with a lust for gold and a plan to rob Fort Knox. Bond’s association with Auric Goldfinger begins in Nassau when he encounters Junius Dupont, a rich American who feels he is being cheated while playing two-handed canasta with Goldfinger.
Bond agrees to watch their games and soon discovers that Goldfinger — whose desire is to sport a golden tan at all times — has a very effective method of cheating his opponent. An excellent card-player himself, Bond quickly extricates Dupont from the man’s clutches, and considers the matter closed. Weeks later, however, Goldfinger surf aces in the files of British Intelligence as a possible international threat, and Bond finds himself once more involved with the man, this time professionally.
There is the usual complement of beautiful girls, luxury clubs, and odd methods of torture and murder, but what this novel points up about the Bond series is that there is also a lot of low-key action: long, detailed card games, golf matches, and conversations. Those not interested in Fleming’s passions (cards, politics, golf, and business) may find some parts of these books tedious, but the author was skillful enough to hold the reader’s interest, at least minimally.
Goldfinger was made into an immensely successful film in 1964, with Sean Connery as Bond. Connery appeared as Bond in other films, notably Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1964 ), and Thunderball ( 1965). The character of James Bond has also been portrayed by Peter Sellers (Casino Royale, 1967), Roger Moore (Live and Let Die, 1973, among others), and George Lazenby (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969).
The novel on which this latter film is based is notable because here we see Bond at his most human — in love and planning to be married. Agent 007 also appears in two short-story collections, For Your Eyes Only: Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond (1960), and Octopussy, and the Living Daylights (1966). The Bond series was continued by John Gardner after Fleming’s death.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
September 7th, 2024 at 2:28 pm
Sixty years on, us geezers still remember the seismic impact that the movie version of GOLDFINGER had on pop culture. My Dad and I saw it during its first-run theatrical weekend in the U.S. Since Marcia Muller’s review, we can add Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan. and Daniel Craig as 007’s big-screen embodiments, and Raymond Benson, Anthony Horowitz, and several others as writers licensed by the Fleming rights-holders to “continue” the series. Oddly, Muller neglects to mention the very first (and best) of the pastiches, Kingsley Amis’ COLONEL SUN. And actually, in 1967’s CASINO ROYALE, David Niven was the “real” James Bond. Peter Sellers’ character was one of several other people recruited to impersonate Bond. The 1967 movie is an entertaining mess, only a little sillier than some of the “authentic” Broccoli-produced entries with Connery and Moore.
September 7th, 2024 at 8:25 pm
“Sixty years on, us geezers still remember the seismic impact that the movie version of GOLDFINGER had on pop culture…”
Absolutely. That’s a statement all of us old guys will agree with. Seismic is right.
September 7th, 2024 at 6:26 pm
Man, I loved this book when I read it in the sixth grade. I read it in the movie tie-in edition, although later I had a copy of that Signet edition with the purple cover and the golden girl. Fred’s right about the movie’s impact. I didn’t see it until the next summer at the drive-in, but it’s still my favorite of the film series. I don’t know if the book or the movie hold up, and I’m afraid to find out. But I suspect they might.
September 7th, 2024 at 8:30 pm
Both the book and the movie were knock-them-out-of-the-park artifacts of our generation, no doubt about it.
September 7th, 2024 at 11:43 pm
Myself, I’m not sure what to say about the read. Simply another reliable, robust, nimble example of the stalwart Fleming style. Certainly wish he’d had time to write more of the same quality.
Always relished when Fleming described U.S. locales like Kentucky, Florida, or Nevada. His outsider’s eye for American quirks, is my favorite after Nabokov.
The flick: I don’t consider it dusty, hoary, or hidebound. It still generates avid interest among new generations of fans.
The movie is even one of the more divisive topics among Bond-purists. Some say the Goldfinger script shows Connery “fumbling his way to victory” in this Bond romp; showing no mastery over circumstances at all. I don’t know whether I agree with or not.
Flawed or no, the movie has a lot of chic/swagger much absent from the Jason Bourne era of actioners.
I’d even wish that –as their modern strategy–EON had simply remade GF [and the other novels] as a loving series of ‘period pieces’; without any apology at all to anyone claiming, ‘datedness’.
The tiny traces of Fleming in the existing adaptation –little bits of gentlemanly-living and grand-manners –that’s never dated, I say.
September 8th, 2024 at 5:16 am
I was never any good at cards, politics, golf, and business, but Fleming’s descriptions of the games never bored me.
September 8th, 2024 at 9:09 pm
During the early days of WWII England had to consider they might well be invaded by the Germans and thus would have to evacuate their gold reserves. Though Canada was the obvious choice Canadian PM Mackenzie King’s relationship with the Motherland was tenuous at best and Governor-General John Buchan was still working to repair the relationship.
That left the United States and Fort Knox as the next obvious choice. At the time Ian Fleming was assistant director of Admiralty Intelligence under Admiral Sir John Godfrey (the model for M)and one of his jobs was to come up with schemes to outwit or trick the Germans (Operation Mincemeat the planting of a dead body with secret papers designed to be found by the Germans was one of his) so he was given the job of coming up with a plausible (if unlikely) plan the Germans might use to steal the British gold reserves being transported to Fort Knox so the Brits could guard against it (Clive Cussler also delved into this fictionally in the Dirk Pitt novel NIGHT PROBE).
GOLDFINGER was the result of that plan rather like the way FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE was based on the very real German Enigma machine and how it was stolen by the Poles from the Germans. As with FRWL Fleming was skating fairly close to the Official Secrets Act though in reality prosecuting him would have revealed more than his novels did.
Of course, that was little more than a framework for the novel. Buchan succeeded in mending fences with King and the gold went to Canada.
There was an actual Swiss businessman named Goldfinger, though obviously not a supervillain (At one point he considered suing Fleming, though after the film came out, he embraced the whole thing actually looking into a gold-plated Rolls-far too heavy to be practical-and persuading a stewardess on his private jet to change her legal name to Pussy Galore it is alleged).
Jill Masterson’s iconic death by gold paint was suggested by an article Fleming read about an exotic dancer who supposedly died of asphyxiation that way (an episode of MythBusters confirmed it was fairly unhealthy if not fatal)
Fleming was on a roll after FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE and each book seemed more fantastic and sold better than the last. He would rather miss a beat with THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, but both ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE and YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE were among his best. Unfortunately, he died before he could revise THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN.
Personally, I have a tie to GOLDFINGER and Fort Knox which is built on land originally owned by my mother’s family in Kentucky, so I have always enjoyed this one.
Don’t pay too much heed to so called “Bond Purists” about half of whom never bother to read the damn books. Bond is never masterful, he always fumbles his way to victory (rather like Hortaio Hornblower) not through mastery of his craft like Quiller, but because of his “Nelson Touch” the uncanny ability to snatch victory from the jaws of sheer disaster. Bond is always being captured, tortured, and only getting away because he seduces the right woman. He gets hit on the head more than any hero but Philip Marlowe. It was a pattern Fleming observed with many of the wartime agents he knew where whole operations would go dramatically wrong and yet work out in the end thanks to dumb luck and the ability to seize the moment.
Bond is tough, adaptable, and capable of seizing those moments, far more reliable characteristics for an agent than brilliance. He also does some fair detective work in GOLDFINGER, at least of the undercover kind, a side of the character shown in DOCTOR NO, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, and ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE to varying degrees where he buckles down, follows leads, and does the paperwork.
The impact of the Bond Craze following GOLDFINGER was international seen on big screens and small. The whole EuroSpy industry went into high gear, Bond imitators flooded the bookshelves (some quite good with long careers of their own), and even the Japanese, Turkish, and Indian film industry got on board. The Russians tried their hand at a James Bond style hero in a rather tired book (he rode a bicycle) and virtually every nation had their own Bond imitation.
But readers and film goers who find Bond too lucky or too “passive” should read some history of the field where sheer dumb luck and the fantastic have always gone hand in hand whether it was Baden-Powell painting enemy fortifications into portraits of butterflies or Sidney Reilly and Eddie Chapman winning the Iron Cross from the Germans while spying on them.
The reality was quite often far too outrageous for fiction.
September 9th, 2024 at 7:58 am
Ernő Goldfinger was a Hungarian-born British architect and furniture designer. “Si monumentum requiris”, go to quite a few places in London and look around. It’s said that Fleming had objected to Goldfinger’s knocking down houses to build his own house. Goldfinger threatened to sue Fleming for libel, but accepted some free copies of the book in compensation – depriving us of a case deserving the talents of Albert Haddock or Mr. Justice Cocklecarrot.
September 10th, 2024 at 12:06 am
H’umm. H’umm. Re: theory in msg #8 …I’m not sure.
I’d agree that (in both real-life & in fiction), there’s missions where “Murphy’s Law” conspires against an agent. Seen it time after time: their assignment collapses around them. Yep, it’s great when their skills (or-luck) saves-the-day.
But then there’s other adventures where the agent himself seems to blunder, and create his own mishaps. Those yarns are more frustrating.
And maybe there’s still other cases where the writers/filmmakers don’t notice weaknesses in their plot. Many’s the spy flick which “can’t-seem-to-make-up-its-mind-what-it-wants-to-be”.
Eh. Just woolgathering out loud …