An Analysis
By Louis Lalire
Goldfinger is about to be 50 years old, but it’s a George Clooney 50, not a Mickey Rourke one. It has, along with many early Bond films, proven
to be extremely durable, playing just as well in 2013 as it did when it grossed
51 million in 1964. It’s a film that encourages, begs even, for repeat
viewings.
This is in large part
due to its understanding of pace. It may seem like it breezes by, and that you
have briefly left your surroundings and taken a short detour from life, which, in
the end, should be the main goal of all escapist cinema such as this.
Unfortunately, escapist cinema has become so that it is less focused on
creating a pace determined by a film’s narrative than one determined by
“one-upping” or outdoing the technical capability of what came before. The
stakes must be higher and the action must be louder. This tendency is not what
convinces an intellectual audience to dive into this detour of action/adventure
surrealism, and it has led to some atrociously boring films in recent times, in which the
firefights, explosions and car chases that once provided the thrills have now become
mindlessly redundant. This is admittedly a generalization, spawned from being frequently
disappointed this blockbuster season, but it has become so that even when the
action is visually impressive, it is more arduous than exhilarating. The bloated,
chaotic scenes of violence in Man of
Steel and The Lone Ranger, for example, seem scared to
stop, as if they fear they lack the substance to allow the audience to sit back
and breath, a fear that is compounded by the fact that these extended scenes of
violence almost always bring any sort of narrative momentum to a halt. Instead
of thinking of original ways to create action scenes, Hollywood is using the
same formula over and over again, just making it a little longer each time. What
Hollywood is essentially telling us is that it is decidedly more exciting and
satisfying to see Superman crash through eight Metropolis skyscrapers as
opposed to three.
Goldfinger is a
film from an era long ago, before the term “blockbuster season” existed. It
would be scary to think about how Goldfinger
would look if it were made today: perhaps two and a half hours long, with
the golf scene being replaced by something more boisterous and the final
conflict at Fort Knox being drawn out an extra 15 minutes. But Goldfinger as it stands, despite being an
old man and far more technically limited than any action film is today, remains
exciting and satisfying through its supreme understanding of pace. It’s
comparable in this sense to the original Star
Wars, another action film that has held up over the years despite the fact
that, by today’s high standards, is technically limited (Sorry for this
interjection, I had to get a Star Wars reference
in here).
The pace of Goldfinger,
written by Richard Maibaum and directed by Guy Hamilton, is one of the main
reasons that it has been used as a model for countless other Bonds, a series
that has not, it should be noted, been immune to the “one-upping” syndrome of
action movies. The film starts out with an action set piece, the first of what
would become known as the “pre-titles sequences” within the Bond canon, meaning
an action scene often unaffiliated with the main plot that precedes the opening
credits. In Goldfinger, and in many other Bond films for that matter, the pre-titles
sequence’s goal is to engage the audience from the moment the curtains open by,
as the expression goes, “starting with a bang.” The film historian in me wants
to say that the idea of blasting off with a large action set piece originated
with Goldfinger, but that may be
entirely false. What is true is that this strategy has been replicated in hundreds
of action films; think of the D-day opening in Saving Private Ryan or the Joker’s bank heist in The Dark Knight.
Goldfinger opens
with an infiltration that involves Bond planting some plastic explosives, before he unveils a tuxedo below his wet suit and steps into a bar for a moment, when the resulting detonation occurs and he returns to his hotel room, where he narrowly evades an assassination attempt, before deadpanning the now famous line "Shocking. Positively shocking," to his electrocuted victim and his sexy, double-crossing night partner. In short, it
is 6 minutes of fun at the beginning of the film that not only start things “off
with a bang” (shoot me if I use that again), but also introduces us, in this
case, re-introduces us, to our hero. Six minutes is all we need to remember how
much of a bad ass James Bond is.
One of the biggest concerns it seems, within the action
genre, is the avoidance of a lull after the opening action set piece. This
section of any film usually deals with more exposition than any other, and the
goal must be to disguise the exposition in a manner so that the audience takes
it all in without being completely conscious of it. It
is this section that most action film aficionados would agree is the dullest of most genre films,
and, yet, in Goldfinger, it is
perhaps the best sequence of the entire movie. The obstacles are as follows: we
must introduce Bond’s mission and explain it, we must introduce Auric Goldfinger
(Gert Frobe/Michael Collins) and give an impression of who he is, and we must
vaguely explain Goldfinger’s plan (or in this case explain what MI6 thinks his
plan is: smuggling gold across country borders in order to sell it at a much
higher market value). The reason that this sequence of Goldfinger excels is because it disguises much of this necessary
exposition well and always feels as if it’s building to something, despite the absence
of a large, follow-up action set piece. Bond and Goldfinger butt heads in both
cheeky and hostile ways. First Bond foils Goldfinger’s gin rummy scheme, which explicates
Goldfinger’s over-competitive nature as well as his penchant for blondes. Then,
Goldfinger suffocates and kills Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) by painting her
gold (fucking painting her gold! still gets me), which introduces us to his
deadly henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata) and also tells us a lot about Goldfinger
himself: how far he is willing to go, how little he cares for those close to
him, how little thought he gives before having someone killed, and, of course, how much he
loves “gooooooold”, while also reinforcing his over-competitive nature. The
final part of this exposition-laden section is filled by Bond’s meetings with M
and Q, both of which set up major payoffs later in the film. A foremost aspect
of the meaning behind “building towards something” is the idea of a set-up and a
payoff. The Q scene in Goldfinger in
which Q (Desmond Llewelyen) shows Bond his cool new toy, the Aston Martin DB5,
and all the tricks it has to offer is now famous. But no one would care about
the oil slick, the machine gun headlights or, most significantly, the ejector
seat that make this Q scene so well-remembered if we didn’t get the payoff later in the
film, in which all of these gadgets are put to perfect use.
That is the reason
why, to briefly discuss another Bond film for a moment, the exploding pen from Goldeneye is such a memorable gadget. Near
the end of the film, Bond uses the exploding to pen to escape. Even though Q
has lectured us about the exploding pen, by the time we get to the finale in which Bond is captured at Alec Trevelyan’s (Sean Beam's) underwater base, we
have all but completely forgotten about the pen. And we have no idea how Bond
is going to escape until we get that sudden moment of realization…“Oh shit!
Boris is clicking the exploding pen right now!”
A great payoff is dependent on two things, 1) that there is a
set-up and 2) that the set-up is so far out of our minds by the time the payoff
rolls around that we are completely unprepared for it, until that is, we are
hit with that “Oh shit!” moment. What you can essentially boil Goldfinger down to is a series of well-constructed
and well-executed set-ups and payoffs: Bond learning about Goldfinger’s
over-competitive nature sets up Bond using this against him to win a game of “strict
rules of golf,”; Goldfinger’s thoughtless double-crossing and murder of Jill
sets up his thoughtless double-crossing and murder of his mafia colleagues, as
well as his business partner Mr. Ling (Burt Kwouk); Goldfinger’s murder of Jill
sets up her sister’s, Tilly Masterson’s (Tania Mallet), assassination attempts
on Goldfinger; Goldfinger’s use of the
Delta 9 Nerve Gas to kill his mafia colleagues sets up what we think is the
mass murder of thousands using the Delta 9 Nerve Gas during the final action
set piece; Bond warning Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) about firing guns on
planes sets up Bond killing Goldfinger by doing just that; Oddjob using his
bowler hat to slice off the head of a stone statue sets up Oddjob using his hat
to kill Tilly Masterson (side note: poor, poor Masterson sisters. You could
practically have a Saving Private Ryan-esque
spinoff in which Bond is tasked by the government to track down the last of the
Masterson sisters and return her home, safely to her mother, after being pretty
much directly responsible for the death of both of her sisters, Tilly and Jill. Only thing is that she's being pursued by an evil mute named Oddjob! Who wouldn’t want to watch that movie!); a scene showing Goldfinger’s car being loaded onto
an airplane sets up a scene showing the car itself being melted down into gold
bars (which also serves as the payoff for how he is transporting gold across
country borders); a scene showing Bond overhearing the words “operation grand
slam” sets up a scene in which Bond avoids being split in two by a giant,
gold-powered laser, by convincing Goldfinger he knows what “operation grand slam”
is; that same introduction of the giant, gold-powered laser sets up its use in
breaking into Fort Knox in the action finale. The list could go on and
on with examples of set-ups and payoffs of varying degrees of importance and subtlety
that are littered throughout and that drive the film forward. The one payoff in Goldfinger that is not completely
satisfying and thus not satisfactorily set-up is Pussy Galore’s double-crossing
of Goldfinger. It is reliant on the idea that having sex with James
Bond is so life-changing that it causes women to rethink their morality. It is
the least logical facet in the film and a lazy set-up and payoff, something
that has, in today’s cinema, become a major, widespread problem within the action
genre.
It is my belief that most writers and directors have either
overlooked the importance or lost the touch for executing a compelling set up
and payoff. Writers, filmmakers and studio heads are often guilty for either one
of two things: 1) they are so worried about having a so-called “lull” in the
first half of the film that they skip the set-up altogether and bombard the
audience with payoff after payoff until they no longer deserve to be
described as such or 2) they are so worried about the audience’s lack of intelligence
and short attention span that they will have a set-up which will be paid off
minutes later. When payoffs become this obvious they are ineffective. Christopher Nolan has practically gained a religious following simply by being one of the few directors of action today who understands how to set-up a rewarding payoff.
The
mastery of set-ups and payoffs is what makes Goldfinger so entertaining, fun, and enduring. The execution or
lack of execution of these set-ups and payoffs, however major or minor they may
be within the narrative of the film, helps create the impression of having
things like “momentum” and “fast pace.” A fast pace distracts us. It can
effectively disguise loads of exposition. It makes it easier for the audience
to take the detour from reality and get lost in the surreal world of action and
adventure and sex that a great James Bond film can create, and that all
escapist and blockbuster cinema focuses on creating. The
problem is not that Hollywood has forgotten that cinema has the ability to liberate us from everyday life, to the contrary escapist cinema is more
prominent now than perhaps ever. The problem is that Hollywood has forgotten the keys to
getting the audience to take the detour.
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