Goldfinger
Bond contemplates necrophilia while Goldfinger says hello to his grandmother back home.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? One of the chief joys of Goldfinger is the bad-guy plot. Goldfinger’s scheme is logical, surprising and utterly horrifying and evil. Goldfinger trades in gold, but instead of robbing Fort Knox he plans to set off a “dirty bomb” inside it, killing tens of thousands of people, making America’s gold worthless and his own ten times more valuable. On his way to achieving this goal, he’s willing to kill just about anybody he feels like, even his own financiers and allies.
WOMEN? Four: a fiery Latina before the titles, good-sport “Dink”(!) in Miami, poor doomed Jill Masterson in the hotel, and then the more challenging Pussy Galore. In general, the sexual politics in Goldfinger are more complicated than in the previous two movies. Not all women simply jump into bed with Bond any more — some are femmes fatale, some are easy pickings, some aren’t interested in sex at all (and don’t get it), and some are classy, independent thinkers who must be, um, persuaded.
FRIENDLY ANIMAL Felix Leiter is back, but has been re-cast as older and frumpier (don’t tell me they couldn’t “get” Jack Lord). But it’s still the same Felix Leiter, Bond even refers to their Jamaica adventure. Maybe the past few years have been tough on the CIA, what with the Bay of Pigs and the assassination of Kennedy and all.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Goldfinger is a riveting and fascinating character, played with startling realism by Gert Frobe. He’s not a moustache-twirling bad guy, he’s a disgusting slob with a dyspeptic grimace, but an extremely wealthy and powerful one, which makes all the difference in the world. Speaking of Cold War villains, he reminds me of no less a personage than Col Tom Parker. Goldfinger is so evil, the Italian mobsters assembled at his home in Kentucky come off like a bunch of yahoos and cheeseheads (and this is back when the Italian mafia was a true force to be reckoned with). How cool is Goldfinger? He’s responsible for not one but two urban legends about ways to die: the “getting painted to death” legend and the “getting sucked out of an airplane window” legend, both of which, we now know, are total hogwash. How sick is Goldfinger? He has a prison cell in the basement of his Ken Adam-designed house and not one but two peepholes into the bathroom of his private jet. He gets -1 point for hustling gin games in Miami Beach, 1 point for ultra-cool henchman Oddjob, 1 point for living in a Ken Adam set, 1 point for killing a woman by painting her gold (you can’t tell me that’s Oddjob’s job) and 100 points for his brilliant, devious plan.
NOTES: This is the first Bond movie to offer the pre-title sequence. Let’s run through this one: Bond swims through the ocean to a dock with a fake gull taped to his head. He climbs over a wall to a field of oil tanks. He goes to a specific tank, throws a secret switch and goes inside. The inside of the oil tank is someone’s secret living quarters (designed by Ken Adam — he was everywhere in the 60s). This person’s secret living quarters are lush, spacious and well-appointed. In addition to the swank furnishings, there is a pile of red oil drums marked “NITRO.” Because hey, you never know when you need a pile of gigantic oil drums filled with nitro. Bond plants a bomb in the nitro, escapes from the secret living quarters, sheds his wetsuit to reveal a white dinner jacket, then goes to hang out in a local bar while the oil field explodes and the town’s economy evaporates. Later, he goes to visit a local exotic dancer, who, it turns out, doesn’t appreciate him bombing the hell out of her town, and before you know it he’s got to kill a guy. Just a day’s work for our pilot-raping super-spy.
Apart from the rape thing (and Bond’s stated abhorrence of the Beatles), this is by far the best script in the series up to this point. It’s like the filmmakers have finally found their voice or hit their stride or something. It’s a real detective story with plenty of twists and surprises, actual clue-sorting and legwork, and Bond interacts with the bad guy from the very beginning. Oddjob is still killer stuff 43 years later, brutal and implacable, although I can’t for the life of me figure out how his hat works. I get that it’s got some kind of razor-sharp blade in, but I can’t figure out how he could possibly throw it hard enough to cut a cable or behead a statue (or a lady sharpshooter).
I understand why Goldfinger needs a big laser, but I can’t understand why it needs a coiled blue neon light on it.
I note that the air squadron is called Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, and I wonder if perhaps, on some level, the name Monty Python is meant as a kind of reply to Pussy Galore.
I also note that Bond (or, rather, a Bond-rehabilitated Pussy) alerts the CIA to Goldfinger’s plot, and wonder if Fort Knox actually falls within the CIA’s jurisdiction. Would Kentucky not be the FBI’s territory? I also wonder what, exactly, the CIA would do with a warning from a woman named Pussy Galore, when they couldn’t bring themselves to respond to a memo titled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike Within US.”
Further thoughts on Attack of the Clones
Many pixels have been spilled in the pages of this journal regarding Attack of the Clones. Most of them revolve around the world of Kamino, particularly the mysterious and seductive scoopy chair.
But one has not seen a movie until one has watched it with a six-year-old boy, as I did with Attack of the Clones today. I think this probably works with any movie; watch it with a six-year-old boy and any narrative flaws will become immediately clear. I must remember to try it with L’Avventura sometime soon.
The love story, as everyone knows, is an embarrassing shambles. And its not that the actors’ performances are so bad (although they are), it’s that the script makes absolutely no sense at all. From the very top, it’s simply unbelievable that Padme would fall deeply in love with Anakin, who is, throughout, nothing more than a petulant, moody, griping, disturbingly awkward pest. The most romantic thing Anakin says to Padme while he pitches woo to her is when he talks about how one day the republic will bend to the will of an iron dictator. As for his attempts at poetic flattery, search the racks of every greeting-card store on the planet and you will not find a single verse that tells a woman she is not like sand.
The detective story, “Who is trying to kill Padme and why?” works very well, thank you and is the best reason for the narrative existing. Obi-Wan tracks down Padme’s would-be killer in a crackerjack chase scene, finds a clue that leads him to a remote planet, where he stumbles upon a vast mystery that will change the course of history — as all good clues do. Super. Although I will add that Obi-Wan is a miserable detective — he can’t find a planet just because a snippy librarian tells him it doesn’t exist, but, literally, a six-year-old boy can.
The rescue story (“I must find my mother”) comes out of left field half-way through the movie, is motivated by nothing and leads nowhere. It’s ugly, brutal and racist (between the flies buzzing around the somehow-even-more semitic Watto and the characterization of the Sand People as “animals”). The action story (“We’ve got to find Obi-Wan!” “Uh-oh! Gladitorial combat!”) works well, and would work even better if the rescue story wasn’t in there. And the war story is gloriously staged and truly spectacular.
In fact, one of the interesting things about Attack of the Clones is that the CGI characters consistently give better performances than the live actors. Case in point: compare the arena scene on Geonosis with the pod-race sequene in Phantom Menace. The human extras at the pod race give terrible performances and look ridiculous in their rubber masks and silly costumes. In contrast, the giant-bug Geonosians look utterly believable and in fact give more subtle, more believable performances. And when a human has to interact with a room of CGI creatures, the effect is always awkward, but fill the screen with monsters and robots and it looks absolutely splendid and believable.
Now then: I still have some notes.
It says in the title crawl that “thousands” of solar systems have fallen under the power of “the mysterious Count Dooku.” Are we to believe that thousands of systems, representing untold billions of individuals, have decided to throw in with a leader they know nothing about?
Palpatine’s desk — it’s too clean. In fact, everything in Attack of the Clones is too clean. Everything looks like it was just unpacked yesterday.
Jango Fett comes to Coruscant to kill Padme. He contacts a female bounty hunter and gives her the squiggly bugs to drop in her window (they are apparently homing squiggly bugs — otherwise this is a stupid plan). The female bounty hunter takes the canister of squiggly bugs and loads it into a little flying thing, which takes off for Padme’s window (good thing for the bounty hunter she didn’t decide to sleep on the living-room couch at the last moment). My question: why does Jango Fett need the goddamn female bounty hunter? Can’t he load the goddamn flying thing himself? He’s already got the canister of squiggly bugs, presumably he knows how it fits in the flying thing. What the hell is his problem?
Senator Padme travels back to Naboo and chats with the new Queen. She counsels action but the new Queen chooses caution and patience. Padme nods in acquiescence because she understands from her own experience that becoming Queen of Naboo turns you a fucking idiot.
Now those Kaminoans (you knew it would come back to this): I’m sorry, I just — now wait. Play this back for me. Ten years ago, a Jedi guy came to you and placed an order for a clone army. In the ensuing ten years, you’ve been diligently manufacturing that clone army. The Jedi guy never called back to check up, and in fact business has otherwise dropped to zero due to your planet being removed from the archives, but you have kept on making this clone army. It must cost untold billions of dollars, and is useless to you personally, but that is, apparently, the way you do business. Okay. I get that.
Here’s my question. Ten years later, another guy in a Jedi robe shows up. He obviously knows nothing about the clone army and in fact seems to be lost. Don’t you even ask him for his receipt? Is this how you operate in your business? The only order you’ve had in the past ten years, and you don’t even ask for a receipt? Suppose this Jedi guy you don’t know says “Hey, nice army, wrap ’em up, I’ll take ’em with me,” and then the next day your actual client stops by? What are you going to do then, Kaminoans?
(By the way, today I counted a total of six Kaminoans, not two as previously reported: the Greeter, the Prime Minister, Jeeby, and three others, wandering around the halls of Kamino. The lack of population probably explains why the Prime Minister doesn’t even own a desk, but just sits in his windowless glowing room doing nothing while waiting for visitors to drop by every ten years.)
Note to Obi-Wan: when you’re chasing Jango Fett through a deadly asteroid field, what prevents you from simply leaving the asteroid field? You’ve got a freaking tracking device on him, and he’s heading for a giant planet, and everyone knows that in Star Wars Land every planet only has one or maybe two places to land — where the hell do you think he’s going to go?
C-3PO falls into the robot-factory machinery, then, within 24 hours, ends up wandering out onto the arena field with the rest of the just-created battle-droids. Yet all the battle-droids with him are already beaten up, scuffed and dirty. My son Sam suggests that they’re actually made to look like that. Perhaps the Separatist army prefers their droids pre-distressed, like stone-washed jeans — it gives them character and let’s you stop worrying about keeping them pristine.