Light Amplification

'Bond's Back In Action!' boasts the back cover of this 1965 20th edition of Ian Fleming's novel Goldfinger, echoing the tagline of the previous year's film poster.

The novel was first published in 1959 - the year of Nick's birth - and became the third Bond film in 1964. Nick considers it most remarkable that he clearly remembers seeing the film at the cinema on its first release.

He was only five years old at the time (recalling that his first cinema experience was but a year earlier - Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday) and is surprised not so much that he remembers the opening sequence, the scene of Jill Masterton painted head to toe in gold paint and the laser scene but that his introduction to Bond - and admission (with mother) to the cinema - was so young.

Shirley Bassey's Goldfinger (lyrics co-written by former Mr Joan Collins Anthony Newley, who originally recorded the song, and produced by The Beatles' George Martin) is probably the definitive Bond film theme song. The best Bond theme ever not recorded for a film is Moby's track from his album I Love To Score which, among various dodgy samples, includes the classic Goldfinger exchange:

Bond (to Auric Goldfinger): "Do you expect me to talk?"
Goldfinger (laughing): "No, Mr Bond - I expect you to die!"

At this stage in the film, Bond is strapped, legs spread, to a lead bench with an industrial laser inching upwards towards his greatest assets. In the novel, it is a somewhat less modern circular saw. It's said the laser wasn't chosen for the sake of modernity but that the saw was too melodramatic. More The Perils of Pauline than hi-tech 1964.

It's one of the more widely known bits of Bond trivia that Gert Frobe, the German actor who played the movie's eponymous villain, spoke little English and was dubbed by another actor. Frobe, incidentally, was concerned by Goldfinger having Fort Knox guards killed with nerve gas vecause of public sentiment about Nazi gas chambers - no wonder. As Wikipedia notes:

While Fröbe was a member of the Nazi Party before and during World War II, he aided German Jews by hiding them from the Gestapo before 1945. Owing to his connection to the Nazi Party, the film Goldfinger was banned in Israel until he was publicly thanked by a Jewish family.

Published by Pan, Nick's Goldfinger paperback is hardly worth more than a few dollars but it's worth it's weight in, well, gold, at least to him.

The novel recalls a Christmas gift of the original classic Corgi James Bond Aston Martin DB5 with pop-out front machine guns, pop-up rear bullet shield and working ejector seat which came with a spare passenger, holding a gun on Bond in the driver's seat. Good job - the first passenger disappeared under or behind the sofa, never to be seen again by 10am on Christmas morning.

The novel also lists on the frontispiece the other James Bond novels available in Pan Books and notes of Thunderball that 'Eon Films are now making the fourth James Bond film, starring Sea Connery as Bond, from this title'.

But Thunderball's a story for another time...

In the meantime click here to enjoy a TV performance of the great Shirley Bassey singing Goldfinger.