Pre-existing prejudices: It’s Goldfinger. Also, for reasons best kept to myself, I’m aware that Fleming named the bad guy in the book after the Brutalist/modernist architect Erno Goldfinger because Fleming so despised his concrete buildings. And obviously, this contains a string of clichés even someone who has never seen a Bond movie would know – Pussy Galore, Odd-Job, “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!” and so forth. Whatever else you can say about this film, its place as part of the cultural lexicon is unshakeable, and that must mean something. Let’s find out what!
The Actual Movie:
As with From Russia With Love, we immediately start with the gun barrel opening still where it should be, and with the appropriate theme.
And as with the last film, we get a pre-credits sequence, though unlike the last film this one has absolutely no relevance to the movie whatsoever. Bond swims into a harbour with a duck on his head – not the perfect disguise, and more than a little dignity-stripping. Still, there’s no obfuscation here as there was with From Russia With Love, and the Bond theme has piped up before the two-minute mark (and again to delineate action, which is now its sole use). But we’re all action here as Bond breaks into the wherever-he-is and plans to blow it up. His bomb clock timer is rather sweet, an alarm clock with a big square battery, attached to Big Red Barrels of Nitro.
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