Rereading 007 - Goldfinger
This is a bizarre story, bursting with coincidences and unwise decisions, as though Fleming just had loads of ideas fizzing around in his head and no patience to sit down and work them through properly.
It starts when Bond is travelling through America and his plane is delayed - the sudden intervention of chance which kick-starts a lot of thrillers. In this instance he is approached by rich Mr Du Pont, who unmemorably sat opposite him on the roulette table at the Casino Royale. Mr Du Pont, like everyone, seems to know that Bond is a secret agent - the way this fact is accepted and Bond rarely travels undercover is one of the biggest oddities of both the book and film series. Fleming knew how SIS and its fellow agencies worked - why obstinately perpetuate this weakness on Bond's part?
Anyway they go off and guzzle soft-shell crabs and Du Pont invites Bond to help him solve the problem of why he is losing at cards to a rich fellow-guest at his hotel. This is, of course, our introduction to Auric Goldfinger.
As so often with Bond, I find the written descriptions of the characters completely overlaid by the actors in the films. Fleming puts a lot of effort into describing the odd appearance of Goldfinger, but all I see is Gert Frobe - sorry, Fleming. It's also hard to believe that a careful businessman focused on a big project would waste time unnecessarily cheating his rivals at cards. It's reminiscent of the (superior) similar opening to Moonraker, but Hugo Drax has a better reason for cheating - his raving paranoia which means he can't bear to be beaten, whereas Goldfinger's somewhat feeble justification is that you should always act when the odds aren't right. And when they aren't right, you should make them right - a piece of logic which by rights should mean he NEVER STOPS.
James Bond is efficient in figuring out how Goldfinger is cheating, with the help of the millionaire's alluring secretary Jill Masterton, who is only too happy to betray her boss but foolishly reluctant to leave his employment. All of this of course is merely an amuse-bouche. Bond heads back to London, where M is worried about gold disappearing from the British reserves and is interested in who has got lots of it, including Goldfinger. This clunky coincidence leads to one of those lectures from experts that Fleming loves, this time the Bank of England chairman on gold. And Bond has a new mission, one of those in which his target has already been chosen for him and all he has to do is follow the scent, which leads to a golf game in Sussex.
Another set-piece, recreated in almost exact detail in the film and most enjoyable. Goldfinger attempts to cheat Bond at golf, fails for the second time against him and invites him to dinner. But in this next encounter, Bond over-reaches himself. He is left alone at the house and foolishly decides to search it, dismissing the possibilities of hidden cameras and other security devices that a wealthy post-WW2 villain might easily have, and is caught out. This is also where we meet Oddjob, the latest in the series of colourful henchmen.
Goldfinger is unwise in deciding not to take Bond's suspicious behaviour seriously but Bond is even more foolish in deciding to continue to pretend to bump into him by chance. Even the most inept of villains would not be fooled by this and it just makes them both look stupid when, having fallen in with Jill Masterton's revenge-bent sister Tilly following Goldfinger across France, Bond crashes in on the millionaire's French headquarters.
It beggars belief that, knowing that Bond is a secret agent, rather than having him shot, Goldfinger decides to put him to work. The film fixes this plot weakness - Goldfinger saves Bond from the deadly laser because Bond has mentioned Operation Grand Slam, Goldfinger's secret project, and he can't afford to take the risk that Bond and his colleagues don't know what it is.
In the book, instead, Bond and Tilly Masterton are turned into 'secretaries' for Goldfinger as he fine-tunes Operation Grand Slam. It's rather amusing to see decisive man of action 007 turned into a typist who takes notes and produces carbon copies of meeting minutes. It's a reminder that Fleming was an excellent administrative officer at Naval Intelligence during WW2 and would have been highly capable at this sort of thing.
Operation Grand Slam is a plan to take Fort Knox and to pull off this implausible plan, Goldfinger implausibly needs to rope in several troublesome gangsters who will be extra security risks. Cue an entertainingly ridiculous meeting in which we meet several cartoonish villains and Goldfinger explains his plan to them all in minute detail before asking them if they want to be involved. I rather like Jed Midnight, who is the good-living, easy-charming type that Bond is often friends with in other books. But Pussy Galore, sadly, is rather unconvincing in book form - thank goodness for Honor Blackman turning her into a stylish and charismatic figure in the film.
Again, the film version of Operation Grand Slam is in some ways more sensible than the book. Moving all that gold safely after you've stolen it would be simply impossible, something the book acknowledges but fails to solve. So Goldfinger simply plans to irradiate it instead, making his own gold far more valuable instantly.
Back in the book world, Op Grand Slam goes ahead. Bond manages to warn the authorities, who stage a ludicrously elaborate fake to make Goldfinger think he's getting away with it, presumably purely because Fleming could not resist seeing the plan put into action. The day is saved, in that the civilian residents of Fort Knox don't die, but Goldfinger gets away with the gold. He also, very implausibly, manages to shoot four dangerous, experienced gangland chiefs in the head without any of them suspecting it or combining to stop him, and equally oddly, spares Pussy Galore so that she can come along and pretend to be an air hostess on the private plane on which he is going to kidnap Bond.
By now, in both film and book, Pussy has inexplicably decided to ally herself with Bond. In the film, this is at least more or less explained as being because Goldfinger had lied to her and plotted to have all her gang-members die as part of his evil scheme. In the book, it's just because she's decided he's good-looking. Hmmmm. Anyway, Bond saves the day - not difficult in a small plane where you only have to start a fight to endanger the entire crew. Goldfinger is sucked out of the plane window, the rest of the crew die and James Bond and Pussy Galore ditch into the ocean and are rescued. Cue romance, but if Bond could not make it work with Solitaire or Tiffany Case, it feels tremendously unlikely that he is going to make a go of it with an experienced female gangster with a long criminal record.
In summary, Goldfinger is a bundle of entertaining scenes and ideas connected together by an improbably plotline. It suffers from a poorly-drawn heroine but Goldfinger is at least an intriguing villain due to his neat fastidiousness and economy. Not a raving paranoiac like Drax or a colourful genius of crime like Mr Big, he avoids bloodshed where possible and plans all his villainous schemes very precisely. If he had taken on something slightly less impossible than Fort Knox, he might well have succeeded. Incidentally, like Mr Big and other international villains, he implausibly turns out to have connections to SMERSH. Fleming kept doing this - as though fearful that his colourful villains aren't enough in their own right, or feeling that his books are pitched as Cold War thrillers and need to stick to this theme, he drags SMERSH in by the heels in every plot - until abruptly abandoning them for the more diversified (and thus more useful for fictional purposes) SPECTRE.
It starts when Bond is travelling through America and his plane is delayed - the sudden intervention of chance which kick-starts a lot of thrillers. In this instance he is approached by rich Mr Du Pont, who unmemorably sat opposite him on the roulette table at the Casino Royale. Mr Du Pont, like everyone, seems to know that Bond is a secret agent - the way this fact is accepted and Bond rarely travels undercover is one of the biggest oddities of both the book and film series. Fleming knew how SIS and its fellow agencies worked - why obstinately perpetuate this weakness on Bond's part?
Anyway they go off and guzzle soft-shell crabs and Du Pont invites Bond to help him solve the problem of why he is losing at cards to a rich fellow-guest at his hotel. This is, of course, our introduction to Auric Goldfinger.
As so often with Bond, I find the written descriptions of the characters completely overlaid by the actors in the films. Fleming puts a lot of effort into describing the odd appearance of Goldfinger, but all I see is Gert Frobe - sorry, Fleming. It's also hard to believe that a careful businessman focused on a big project would waste time unnecessarily cheating his rivals at cards. It's reminiscent of the (superior) similar opening to Moonraker, but Hugo Drax has a better reason for cheating - his raving paranoia which means he can't bear to be beaten, whereas Goldfinger's somewhat feeble justification is that you should always act when the odds aren't right. And when they aren't right, you should make them right - a piece of logic which by rights should mean he NEVER STOPS.
James Bond is efficient in figuring out how Goldfinger is cheating, with the help of the millionaire's alluring secretary Jill Masterton, who is only too happy to betray her boss but foolishly reluctant to leave his employment. All of this of course is merely an amuse-bouche. Bond heads back to London, where M is worried about gold disappearing from the British reserves and is interested in who has got lots of it, including Goldfinger. This clunky coincidence leads to one of those lectures from experts that Fleming loves, this time the Bank of England chairman on gold. And Bond has a new mission, one of those in which his target has already been chosen for him and all he has to do is follow the scent, which leads to a golf game in Sussex.
Another set-piece, recreated in almost exact detail in the film and most enjoyable. Goldfinger attempts to cheat Bond at golf, fails for the second time against him and invites him to dinner. But in this next encounter, Bond over-reaches himself. He is left alone at the house and foolishly decides to search it, dismissing the possibilities of hidden cameras and other security devices that a wealthy post-WW2 villain might easily have, and is caught out. This is also where we meet Oddjob, the latest in the series of colourful henchmen.
Goldfinger is unwise in deciding not to take Bond's suspicious behaviour seriously but Bond is even more foolish in deciding to continue to pretend to bump into him by chance. Even the most inept of villains would not be fooled by this and it just makes them both look stupid when, having fallen in with Jill Masterton's revenge-bent sister Tilly following Goldfinger across France, Bond crashes in on the millionaire's French headquarters.
It beggars belief that, knowing that Bond is a secret agent, rather than having him shot, Goldfinger decides to put him to work. The film fixes this plot weakness - Goldfinger saves Bond from the deadly laser because Bond has mentioned Operation Grand Slam, Goldfinger's secret project, and he can't afford to take the risk that Bond and his colleagues don't know what it is.
In the book, instead, Bond and Tilly Masterton are turned into 'secretaries' for Goldfinger as he fine-tunes Operation Grand Slam. It's rather amusing to see decisive man of action 007 turned into a typist who takes notes and produces carbon copies of meeting minutes. It's a reminder that Fleming was an excellent administrative officer at Naval Intelligence during WW2 and would have been highly capable at this sort of thing.
Operation Grand Slam is a plan to take Fort Knox and to pull off this implausible plan, Goldfinger implausibly needs to rope in several troublesome gangsters who will be extra security risks. Cue an entertainingly ridiculous meeting in which we meet several cartoonish villains and Goldfinger explains his plan to them all in minute detail before asking them if they want to be involved. I rather like Jed Midnight, who is the good-living, easy-charming type that Bond is often friends with in other books. But Pussy Galore, sadly, is rather unconvincing in book form - thank goodness for Honor Blackman turning her into a stylish and charismatic figure in the film.
Again, the film version of Operation Grand Slam is in some ways more sensible than the book. Moving all that gold safely after you've stolen it would be simply impossible, something the book acknowledges but fails to solve. So Goldfinger simply plans to irradiate it instead, making his own gold far more valuable instantly.
Back in the book world, Op Grand Slam goes ahead. Bond manages to warn the authorities, who stage a ludicrously elaborate fake to make Goldfinger think he's getting away with it, presumably purely because Fleming could not resist seeing the plan put into action. The day is saved, in that the civilian residents of Fort Knox don't die, but Goldfinger gets away with the gold. He also, very implausibly, manages to shoot four dangerous, experienced gangland chiefs in the head without any of them suspecting it or combining to stop him, and equally oddly, spares Pussy Galore so that she can come along and pretend to be an air hostess on the private plane on which he is going to kidnap Bond.
By now, in both film and book, Pussy has inexplicably decided to ally herself with Bond. In the film, this is at least more or less explained as being because Goldfinger had lied to her and plotted to have all her gang-members die as part of his evil scheme. In the book, it's just because she's decided he's good-looking. Hmmmm. Anyway, Bond saves the day - not difficult in a small plane where you only have to start a fight to endanger the entire crew. Goldfinger is sucked out of the plane window, the rest of the crew die and James Bond and Pussy Galore ditch into the ocean and are rescued. Cue romance, but if Bond could not make it work with Solitaire or Tiffany Case, it feels tremendously unlikely that he is going to make a go of it with an experienced female gangster with a long criminal record.
In summary, Goldfinger is a bundle of entertaining scenes and ideas connected together by an improbably plotline. It suffers from a poorly-drawn heroine but Goldfinger is at least an intriguing villain due to his neat fastidiousness and economy. Not a raving paranoiac like Drax or a colourful genius of crime like Mr Big, he avoids bloodshed where possible and plans all his villainous schemes very precisely. If he had taken on something slightly less impossible than Fort Knox, he might well have succeeded. Incidentally, like Mr Big and other international villains, he implausibly turns out to have connections to SMERSH. Fleming kept doing this - as though fearful that his colourful villains aren't enough in their own right, or feeling that his books are pitched as Cold War thrillers and need to stick to this theme, he drags SMERSH in by the heels in every plot - until abruptly abandoning them for the more diversified (and thus more useful for fictional purposes) SPECTRE.
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