Celebrating Goldfinger’s 60th Anniversary

“This is gold, Mr. Bond. All my life I’ve been in love with its colour… its brilliance, its divine heaviness.”

Directed by Guy Hamilton, Bond (Sean Connery)’s third globe-trotting mission takes him from Latin America to Miami to Kent to Switzerland to Kentucky, this time thwarting gold-obsessed businessman Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) from controlling the world’s bullion reserves. 

To mark its sixtieth birthday, let’s celebrate how Goldfinger established the template for many of the adventures to follow…

The Title Sequence

The iconic title sequence for Goldfinger was created by advertising creative/graphic designer Robert Brownjohn. Building on his work in From Russia With Love, which projected slides of text onto the body of a dancer.

While the sequence ultimately featured images from all three 007 films, it delivered a tightly paced precis of Goldfinger’s key moments, from the chief villain Goldfinger to henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata) to the revolving number plates of the Aston Martin DB5. It became a striking collage, all played out to John Barry-Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse’s unforgettable song. “I think the mixture of his images and the song was just perfect,” recalled Barry.

The Song

Goldfinger marked the first time composer John Barry composed the music for both the film and the title song. Hamilton wanted the song to be “dirty and gritty” and played Barry a recording of Mack The Knife as a guide to the feel he wanted.

“I sat down and wrote this rather strange angular thing, which for me was right,” said Barry. “It couldn’t be a freewheeling open melody. It had to have angles.”

Barry sent the music for the song to lyricists Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, who were enjoying a huge West End hit with Stop The World I Want To Get Off. As neither had read Goldfinger’s book or screenplay, Barry explained it was a song for the main villain, using Mack The Knife as an example. After the lyric was written, Barry recorded a demo with a bass, banjo and Newley on vocals before moving into the studio to record with performer Shirley Bassey.

“There was a big screen in the studio and I had to sing over the titles and I’d never done that before,” said Bassey. “The titles were very sensual, I must say.”

“I said ‘Shirley, just sing it like you sing it, with all your conviction,” said Barry. “’Convince everybody that you know what it’s about. Belt it to the best of your ability’.”

The recording session went on all night, with the singer having to repeat the song over and over again.

“I had this restricting bustier on, so towards the end, I went to the bathroom to take it off and let it all hang out,” the singer remembered. “I felt much more comfortable and I was able to hit the last note better. I was holding it, and holding it, and I was looking at John and I was going blue in the face and he was going, ‘Hold it just one more second.’ And when it finished I nearly passed out.”

The song proved to be a huge hit, inspiring over 20 cover versions, the soundtrack album going to number one. Yet the combination of Barry’s writing and Bassey’s voice also gave the series its signature sound. 

“Shirley fit so well with that Bond style,” explained Barry. “It was the most natural thing.”

The Q Scene

While previous films had included scenes with M and Miss Moneypenny, Goldfinger became the first Bond film to take us into Q’s lab and showcase his workshop of gadgets. The scene not only sees Q (Desmond Llewellyn) replace 007’s Bentley 3 ½ litre with the now iconic Aston Martin DB5, equipped with an arsenal of extras that save Bond’s life, but also set the tone for the 007/Q relationship that would play out across the series. 

“At the rehearsal stage, I was working at a desk and Bond comes in and I got up to meet him,” remembered Llewellyn. “And Guy said, ‘No, no, no, no. You don’t take any notice of this man. You don’t like him.’ And I thought, ‘But this is Bond, this is James Bond and I’m just an ordinary civil servant. I must admire him like everybody else does.’ Guy says, ‘No, no, no, no. Of course, you don’t. He doesn’t treat your gadgets with respect, any respect at all. I mean, the briefcase that you gave him in From Russia With Love — he just ignored it more or less although it saved his life. So, when you’re describing the things on the car, you know perfectly well he’s not going to treat them with the respect they should have.’ And, of course, the penny dropped and the whole thing came together.”

Initially, the script skipped over Q’s explanation of the car’s capabilities but was rewritten at Cubby Broccoli’s insistence so the audience could enjoy the anticipation of Bond pressing buttons to escape. “I think Cubby was absolutely right”, recalled Hamilton.

The rewrite meant that Llewellyn had more technical jargon to learn but it also gifted him one of the series’ most memorable lines.

“Since they had the set there, it was quite easy to get me back on Monday and then they could choose whether it was used or not,” the actor recalled. “And, of course, it gave me the chance of producing I suppose one of the most famous lines: ‘I never joke about my work, 007’.”

The Car

Ian Fleming’s novel described Bond’s car as a gadget filled Aston Martin DB8 Mark III, an idea which had particular resonance with production designer Ken Adam.

“I had a Jaguar which was continuously being damaged by people parking badly,” he said. “Having guns at the back of the Aston Martin and the overriders becoming like boxing gloves and so on, became part of me releasing my frustrations.”

It was director Guy Hamilton who came up with the idea of revolving number plates because, “I was getting a lot of parking tickets at the time and I thought it would be absolutely marvellous to collect a parking ticket and then juggle the number plate, drive off, not be worried and you’d look at the meter man’s face.” 

Adam and Special Effects Supervisor John Stears visited Aston Martin Lagonda and fell in love with a red DB4 that was actually a prototype for the DB5. The car was so packed there was no space to add the mechanics to make the gadgets work so more practical means were sought. The rear lights that descended and oil slick were done for real with a big container of oil in the back of the boot – this meant removing the bullet proof shield to create more room.

The Aston Martin DB5 proved immensely popular. The following year, a Corgi die-cast model car was released just before Thunderball and has sold over 7 million DB5s in various editions since 1965.

The Huge Climactic Action Set-Piece

Pre-empting the likes of You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker, Goldfinger ends on a big set-piece involving a huge set designed by Ken Adam. While the exterior was a detailed recreation of Fort Knox on Black Park, the interior was pure invention.

“I thought if I can reproduce the exterior absolutely as a copy of the existing Fort Knox, then I can design whatever I like for the interior of it,” said Adam. “Since I felt gold was the important thing, I then stacked up gold 40 foot high behind a sort of prison like grille.” 

Filming in the vault began on June 12. On the first day of the shoot, Sean Connery was sent home with a swollen eye, testament to the physical nature of the action. As Goldfinger’s Korean army take on the US military, the sequence took ten days to complete, complicated by fight choreography and practical special effects. As Bond diffuses the bomb that is to irradiate the gold bullion, producer Harry Saltzman suggested a comedic beat that sums up a knowing lightness of touch that Goldfinger exemplifies.

“When you shoot an insert for the bomb and the thing is flying through, obviously you go down to zero,” observed Hamilton. “It was Harry Saltzman who said, ‘Stop it here. You should stop it at seven. 007’.”