GROSS/55 1964 - a (partial) Goldfinger alphabet

Thesis: Ian Fleming is mendacious, a snob and a terrible writer. Also: all the films of his work are witless, cruel and pointless.

GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

GOLDFINGER, director GUY HAMILTON, cast SEAN CONNERY, HONOR BLACKMAN, GERT FRÖBE, production EON/UNITED ARTISTS, 1964, 110 MINUTES.

I’ll just say it: I don’t like the Bond movies. I’d be happy never to see another one. In Have you Seen, David Thompson makes Goldfinger stand for all the others, which is a good idea and neatly acknowledges that this is essentially one dumb project, stretched across multiple dumb movies (do you disagree? Please leave a comment. Anyone can, not just subscribers). Anyway, in this (really almost complete) Goldfinger alphabet, A is for:

Agents. We retain a powerful attachment to the idea of the spy as a glamorous free agent. It’s a role that triangulates playboy, paid assassin and import-export agent - connecting noble and tawdry in one figure. And for almost the whole history of the profession this is what they were. Diplomats and spies were, until the 19th Century, always aristocrats, men of means, travelling at their own expense and retaining staffs that were like mobile mini-courts with retinues of hangers-on, secretaries and fixers. Hardly anyone was paid - not even junior staff - until after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when standard diplomatic job titles and functions were defined - a world bureaucracy emerged. In Britain, though, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for professionalisation. This is Imperial Britain, at its very peak, bestriding the world, remember. It was decades before the new bureaucratic model was adopted here - aristocrats clung to their ancient privileges in a way that probably shouldn’t surprise us. Perhaps this is why it’s in British pop culture that the idea of the playboy-spy lingers. Bond is the last of the breed: apparently almost entirely independent of the state, held in check only by a tolerant handler (M) whose main role seems to be to grumble indulgently each time Bond derails a crowded train or nukes a private island.

Blackman, Honor. Of course, we make an exception for Honor Blackman - we honour Honor, in fact. She’s the only person in the movie who seems to understand its mendacity, it’s nastiness. When Pussy Galore is with Bond and she turns away, swinging her pistol pointlessly, as if to slight him, it’s powerful. Somehow a statement about the whole stupid thing. Brilliant. And honestly too sad that she was stuck with this dog on her CV for her whole career.

Cocksman. We should assume - I think it’s safe to assume - that Bond’s priapic tendency, his apparent compulsion to shag anything, especially at the most stressful moments, when an ordinary human being would be hyper-ventilating or crying - is more than a medical condition (I mean we probably shouldn’t rule that out - it is absolutely off-the-scale inappropriate - get some help, man). But Bond’s batchelor energy is probably also connected with the history and status of the profession. You’re a libertine-aristocrat in the diplomatic service, a barely-supervised agent in the field - an exotic foreigner everywhere you go. You have an unlimited expense account, a pistol at your waist and a pad in the centre of the capital. Of course you’re off the leash.

Distractions. Fleming’s 1958 version of Goldfinger’s plot is a straightforward theft - a big one and cruel but a theft all the same. In the movie version it’s a more complicated affair, with a cold-war geopolitical element. Thinking about it, it’s very close in character to the heist from Die Hard. Goldfinger pretends he wants all the gold in Fort Knox and Gruber pretends he wants to overthrow capitalism. In both cases, these distractions conceal the bad guys’ real intent. Securing a monopoly in the shiny stuff and bagging $640M million dollars of untraceable bearer bonds respectively.

Definitely spies

Espionage. We know that the first intelligence operatives were diplomats. The earliest civilisations we know about were already sending envoys to trading partners and adversaries and they’ve been busily sending valuable intelligence home ever since (there’s a lot of this kind of to-and-fro in Cleopatra). This stuff will make your head spin: look up the Amarna letters, a cache of diplomatic communications sent back to Egyptian rulers from embassies in other kingdoms 3,500 years ago. You don’t need me to tell you that back then the current location of MI6 was a trackless marsh (and would be, in fact, for another 3,350 years). By the fifth century CE - I think this is my favourite - Byzantine rulers retained a huge and bureaucratic office in the Empire’s capital Constantinople called the Bureau of Barbarians to manage relations with foreign states - and to spy on them obviously. In the present day it’s just accepted that some diplomats are spies. Every embassy has some kind of intelligence function and semi-formal quotas allow for a proportion of embassy staff to be working in intelligence - civil servants with job titles like political officer, cultural attaché or defense attaché. In the ritual of the ‘diplomatic incident’ it’s always the intelligence staff who are sent home first.

Form. I don’t know what the charm of the Bond films is. I’m under-qualified to explain it. I suspect it’s rooted in their un-seriousness, in the way the brand continually undermines its own status - but not so much as to collapse into self-parody (or into Austin Powers). It would be dishonest not to recognise the preturnatural skill that has sustained the thing across the decades. Whose skill is it, though? This I don’t understand. There’s obviously some kind of voodoo involved in sustaining a tone and a aesthetic (and an ideology) across dozens of writers, crews, locations, studios, directors, designers… and almost 70 years (take that, auteur theory!) And don’t tell me it’s Fleming. He died right at the beginning of the project and wrote fewer than half of the books adapted. Is it hypnotism? Group hysteria? Does Bond offer us some kind of consolation as all the hegemonies fall and a new order emerges?

Gold (see also Nazi gold). You could argue that in Goldfinger’s moment - in the year of Harold Wilson’s first general election win - Britain’s final decline has already begun. Gold is finished, the pound as a reserve currency is finished, Bretton Woods is finished (nearly). Within two months of Goldfinger’s release Britain will borrow the largest sum in IMF history and. within three years Wilson will devalue the pound. In the film, Bond attends a complacent gathering at the Bank of England. It’s a kind of unwitting commentary: fine brandy and cigars are served, there’s a butler. Ancien régime niceties while Britain spirals. At the meeting a gold bar is proffered, apparently part of a cache recovered from a German WW2 wreck. It bears a Reichsbank stamp. It’s an odd detail - a MacGuffin - and soon forgotten entirely (and it’s another detail that’s not in Fleming’s book).

Heroin. In the pre-title sequence (a convention introduced in the second Bond movie and maintained for every one since) Bond is caught up in an implausible heroin bust in Mexico - this is the kind of thing that Bond gets up to before the credits. It’s soon forgotten and we’re left vaguely wondering why Britain’s top intelligence agent was involved at all, but there’s a fascinating follow-up that seems to condense a lot of the period’s concerns into a single line - a line with an almost counter-cultural hum to it Congratulated for putting the cartel out of business, Bond says: “at least he won’t be using heroin-flavoured bananas to finance revolutions.” Woah. Where are we going here, James? Don’t tell me you’ve got a Che poster in the den, alongside that photograph of Mansfield Cumming in his naval finery?

Industrial policy. There’s a nice vignette about innovation. In the movie, Bond is famously threatened with a radical, end-to-end dissection using a massive industrial laser (one of several emasculation gags we’re given in this movie - see crushed golf balls at about 33 minutes) but in the novel it’s just an old-fashioned circular saw. You’ll have guessed already what happened between the novel’s publication in 1958 and 1964: the laser was invented. And this is one of those American stories about the cold-war, the military-industrial complex and the vaulting ambition of a handful of scientist-entrepreneurs (read about the war over patents that lasted for thirty years).

Jews. There’s no need to rehearse Ian Fleming’s anti-semitism. It was public at the time and it’s been well-documented since, but the specifics as they relate to Goldfinger are worth being clear about. Many of the Bond books feature barely-concealed anti-Jewish storylines, characters and stereotypes. In this movie, Goldfinger is named after brilliant Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger. Fleming’s anti-semitism was the casual affectation of the British elite of his era. He gives his villan a Jewish name and a lust for gold because, well, that’s what you do when you’re an upper-class cultural arbiter in Britain. There’s a kind of mealy-mouthed gloss to the story of why Fleming chose the name Goldfinger too - that it was because the author hated the brutalism of the architect’s creations (and his radical politics) - but this is shallow bullshit. He hated Goldfinger because he was a brilliant, respected and successful architect who was also a Jew. Worse, Goldfinger was a legitimate, high-brow artist with the attached prestige while Fleming’s pulp output won him only fame, not respect. Fleming resented him and took pleasure in putting him down. Simple, really.

Kitsch or camp? I love a coincidence. It’s not a big one but it’s sweet. The year this movie came out was also the year Susan Sontag published her beautiful essay Notes on Camp, still in print and still a big seller (especially the little Penguin edition at £2.85). I’ve used Notes on Camp here before. It’s useful in reading any pop culture and perhaps especially the movies - because camp is structural to the form. Goldfinger without its freight of camp imagery, raised eyebrows and ironic violence would be an empty shell. In her essay Sontag doesn’t mention Bond (she could have done, other big movies of the period are there) and she uses the term ‘kitsch’ only twice. For her it’s beyond camp, she reserves its use only for the worst art. I think she’d have attached it to the Bond movies. It’s absolutely vital to Bond criticism to recognise that every single movie in the franchise has essentially the same level of camp and that no degree of introspection, gloom or absolutely ripped abs can dilute this.

Laughter. In the first scene, Bond (it’s Sean Connery, for the third time) enters in a wet suit, paddling in from a boat. He has a stuffed bird on his head and a dumb half-grin on his face. It’s ridiculous and comic (see also ‘kitsch or camp’ above). At the cinema there’d have been a ripple of laughter - the laughter of recognition - the dead bird does the vital work of setting our expectations as to the seriousness of this work of art - there will be gruesome deaths and grisly geopolitics but we can relax. It’s Bond.

Miami Beach. The choice of the Florida resort for Bond’s first encounter with Goldfinger is smart. At the time of Bond’s visit Miami Beach is America’s number 1 resort. It’s prestigious but also - crucially - there’s some decadence, with exactly the blend of high and low that the Bond brand requires. A New England resort would have been too fusty, Las Vegas too trashy. Miami Beach was a rat-pack hang-out. The Beatles stayed at the Deauville. JFK had blessed the place when he came for the Democratic National Convention in 1960 and, later, Nixon brought his ‘Winter White House’ to the coast.

Nazis. Actual Nazis. I don’t want to be too hard on the OG Nazis - it was a long time ago and everybody was doing it - but this film has at least one fully-accredited Nazi, right there in the cast. Gert Fröbe, playing Goldfinger himself, joined the Nazi Party in 1929, aged 17, in the small town in Saxony where he lived. When this became known, after the release of this film, he and the studio were in trouble but then a Jewish man came forward to say that Fröbe had sheltered him with his mother during the war and that this had probably saved their lives. But there’s also the awkward fact that it wasn’t just German actors who were given safe passage to the USA after the war. Under Operation Paperclip, ultimately 1,600 German scientists and engineers (including enthusiastic Nazis like Werner von Braun) were recruited to the American missile and space programmes. Under a similar British programme, German scientists were actually abducted to work on secret projects. The British and American intelligence services, including agents like Bond, would have been involved with these schemes. There are no clean hands in this story.

Old school. Conrad’s The Secret Agent begat many movie spies: Fritz Lang’s Mabuse, Hitchock’s various black-and-white anarchists and adventurers. The idea of the free agent, the unconstrained, the amoral actor, was born in the first quarter of the century of tragedy and grief and betrayal.

Property. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond and author of 12 Bond novels, died a month before Goldfinger’s premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square on 17 September 1964. He’d seen the release of only two of the 27 movies based on his work. And before he was in the ground Fleming had been translated into an enduring, brass-bound intellectual property, a commodified content asset protected and exploited to this day by his estate and the various studios and distributors who have come into its possession along the way - the most recent being Amazon Prime.

Reds. It’s 1964: for some reason the Bond machine has here settled on communist China as Goldfinger’s state collaborator. I say ‘for some reason’ because there are no Chinese in Fleming’s book. No communists of any kind, in fact. No international relations storyline either, for that matter. More to the point, why the Chinese? Why not the Soviet Union, the absolute number-one, default cold war villain? It’s intriguing. Could it possibly be because the CCP didn’t - yet - have a tested nuclear weapon? So the bomb in the movie can be more speculative? Less of a looming, real-world threat?

Smiley. You couldn’t consider Bond without also looking at Smiley. Le Carré’s modest, thoughtful operative was styled as a direct reaction to Fleming’s sleek and amoral one. Smiley is essentially a bourgeois, bureaucratic counter to Bond’s aristocratic free agent. And Smiley wasn’t the only anti-Bond. There was Deighton’s Harry Palmer - my favourite - an exact contempory of Bond but apparently from another - working-class - planet (Palmer, in his earliest appearances, was grittier still, lacking even a name). Bond, Smiley and Palmer, in fact, give us essentially the whole British class system in summary, from top to bottom. Since their day we’ve had dozens of movie spies, of course - mostly, it should be said, more violent, more comicbook/kinetic - sometimes psychotic or driven mad by their obligations.

Telephones. M strides across his huge office (presumably in the Minimax fire extinguisher building in Victoria) and picks up the green telephone on his desk. Allied intelligence used a scrambler phone called the A3 for secure communications during WW2. The phones were always green. Muriel Spark used one in her job at the Political Warfare Executive and described the sound of a scrambled call as “jangling caterwauls.” The A3 was used for the telephone line that linked Churchill and Roosevelt (it’s difficult to to know what they actually talked about since they were never allowed to say anything secret because it was assumed the system had been compromised - and it had). Ian Fleming probably used one too, in Naval intelligence. They weren’t secure and were eventually replaced by a more effective model. Still green, though, obviously.

Virtual. I learn that all the gold ever mined and refined would add up to a cube 22 metres on a side. There’s your problem, one might conclude. How could something so physical - so present in the world - possibly continue to dominate the imagination in a universe of intangible, simulated, virtual and synthetic second-order things like the contemporary financial markets? Things you could never grasp or even touch, let alone melt and pour into a mold?

Workplace politics. When M gets on the intercom and tells Bond and Moneypenny to drop their ‘customary bi-play’ it’s clear we’re in a different era. There will be no disciplinary for our hero’s regular abuse of expenses and for trashing all those cars, and Moneypenny may continue to flirt lethally with Bond in that airless outer office with only the lightest censure.

That’s 21 letters of the alphabet. I’m getting better at this…

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• I don’t know how to tell you this: the next film in the GROSS sequence is The Sound of Music.

• More about Ian Fleming’s corosive anti-semitism and about the many jews who contributed to making the franchise he left behind him such a phenomenon in this article from the Forward.

• Goldfinger (along with all the other official Bond movies) is on Amazon Prime.

• All these reviews, plus others from outside the sequence, are on Letterboxd.