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We watched Goldfinger at the weekend. Rich had never seen it before, but he made a very good point: Bond doesn’t actually do anything.

M and the Governor of the Bank of England put him on to Goldfinger, so he does nothing there. Felix points him out in Miami, so he doesn’t even have to stalk him. The Bank of England comes up trumps in getting him a game of golf with the man himself, where he manages to plant a bug in Goldfinger’s car.

He follows this over to Switzerland where he gets easily captured (his own stupidity: he crashed into a wall) and flown to Baltimore by Pussy Galore. There he’s held prisoner at Goldfinger’s ranch, until being handcuffed to a nuclear bomb and locked in Fort Knox. A battle rages outside the fort in which, for obvious reasons, Bond can’t take part, and then someone from the CIA bursts in and defuses the bomb. Apart from a little fight on a plane in which a window gets accidentally blown out and Goldfinger is sucked into outer space, that’s it.

So what was Bond’s contribution to the story, considering even his attempts to warn the CIA of Goldfinger’s plot were thwarted?

He seduced Pussy. That’s all. One literal tumble in the hay and a bit of quick kissing (or maybe more, but we’ll never know as this was the 60s and they didn’t show such things back then) and she was turned. She phoned the CIA (where did she get their number?) and double-crossed her employer. End of story.

Yet Goldfinger is held up by many as one of the best Bonds of all time. The third in the series, it was the one in which the team got into its stride. I still like it a lot, but it’s strange that it took a first-time watcher to point out something I’d never noticed before; this isn’t really a James Bond film at all. It’s the story of Pussy Galore.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 9:05 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.