In May, the moviegoer’s fancy turns wistfully to the sustained adrenalin rush. It’s an appropriate time, then, to revisit the granddaddy of modern action/adventure movies:

Goldfinger (1964)

running time: 1 hr., 52 m. / original studio: United Artists

produced by: Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli

directed by Guy Hamilton; screenplay by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn, from novel by Ian Fleming; director of photography, Ted Moore; edited by Peter Hunt; music by John Barry

with: Sean Connery (James Bond), Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore), Gert Fröbe (Auric Goldfinger), Harold Sakata (Oddjob), Shirley Eaton (Jill Masterson)

Woman: My name is Pussy Galore.

Bond: I must be dreaming.

Visually dazzling, outlandishly funny, jazzy, sexy and unceasingly inventive, Goldfinger was the third film in the James Bond series and it remains the best. It isn’t a great movie in the Citizen Kane/Lawrence of Arabia/Godfather sense, but it is a classic guilty pleasure and a landmark film from a turbulent decade, bursting with a period style and panache that changed moviemaking and moviegoing in ways which are still with us, for better and for worse. For instance: there had been many blockbuster movies before, single films that somehow hit the right chords with the paying audience, but Goldfinger turned the Bond movies into the first blockbuster franchise, a studio chief’s wet dream, a brand name that was guaranteed to pack houses every time. (more…)