60 Facts Celebrating 60 Years of the Third James Bond Movie

Sixty-two years after the James Bond film series began, it’s still going strong, with 25 films under its belt and a 26th eventually going into development. Of them all, Goldfinger, currently celebrating its 60th anniversary, remains one of the most popular.

For many people, agent 007 has always been a part of pop culture in much the same way that The Beatles are, but there was indeed a time when both were exploding for the first time, the world swept up simultaneously in Bondmania and Beatlemania. And unless you were there, you simply have no idea how big it really was or how insane the fervor.

Released in 1964, Goldfinger was the third entry in the James Bond film series and — along with 1962’s Dr. No and 1963’s From Russia with Love — propelled actor Sean Connery into a superstardom that never faded, even when he left 007 behind after six films.

The plot of the film has James Bond going off to investigate what seems to be gold smuggling by magnate Auric Goldfinger, but what’s uncovered is a plan to radiate the gold in Fort Knox so that the value of his personal holdings will see tremendous growth. And while this sounds like a fairly grounded plot line, the film introduces a great many elements that would come to define the 007 film series for decades to come.

Goldfinger was the third James Bond movie, but it was the seventh 007 novel by Ian Fleming, published in 1959, five years before the film was released.

Author Ian Fleming took his inspiration for Goldfinger from a conversation he had with a broker specializing in gold while at an English health spa called Enton Hall. As they discussed the gold trade, the ideas for the adventure began to form.

Between the second Bond film, 1963’s From Russia with Love, and this one, actor Sean Conner filmed the thriller Woman of Straw, with Gina Lollobrigida and Ralph Richardson, as well as Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie.

While Terence Young had directed Dr. No (1962) and From Russia with Love (1963), Guy Hamilton made his 007 debut with Goldfinger. He would go on to direct Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).

Sean Connery was actually uptight about the Goldfinger script, feeling that its approach — with increased humor and a penchant for the ridiculous — was getting too far away from the seriousness they’d established in the previous two films, especially From Russia with Love.

British singer Shirley Bassey handled vocals on the title track, which reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and 21st on the UK charts, while the soundtrack album — composed by John Barry — reached the top of the Billboard 200 chart. Bassey would record the title tracks for Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and Moonraker (1979) as well as the unused “Mr. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” for Thunderball (1965).

To record the song, Shirley Bassey sang while the opening credits were playing so that her vocals would match what was happening on screen. However, she nearly passed out while holding that final note as the credits played out. Something similar nearly happened to Tom Jones on the next film when he sang the title track to Thunderball.

Sir Michael Caine (in the days before he was knighted) was the first non-Bond employee to hear John Barry’s score for Goldfinger as he was a house guest of the composer’s at the time.

Did you know that the song “Goldfinger” was rewritten as “Gold Label” for a series of cigarette commercials?

While it was well known that Sean Connery wore a toupee through much of his career, it was reportedly with Goldfinger where the need for it actually arose.

What’s in a name, you might ask? Ian Fleming got “Auric” from the adjective meaning “of gold,” and Goldfinger came from his disdain for Erno Goldfinger, a Hungarian modernist architect.

Whereas From Russia with Love was treated very much like an espionage film, Goldfinger made a significant change in the Bond character, as noted by film historian Steven Jay Rubin, author of The James Bond Films: “With Goldfinger, the writers created a new agent, an indestructible man who would survive any situation. It was no longer a question of whether Bond would survive, it merely became a case of which button he would push, or what he would say.”

Richard Maibaum, already a mainstay of the series as a writer, was joined on this film by poet turned screenwriter Paul Dehn, whose other script credits include Seven Days to Noon (1950), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) and three of the original Planet of the Apes films from 1970 to 1972.

Actor Orson Welles, whose vast credits, of course, include Citizen Kane, was considered for the role of villain Auric Goldfinger, but his salary demands were too high and producers passed him over. He would actually play the villain Le Chiffre in the 1967 007 spoof Casino Royale starring Peter Sellers.

Austrian actor and folk singer Theodore Bikel screen tested for the role of Goldfinger and apparently came quite close to securing the part. His prior credits included The African Queen (1951), The Kidnappers (1953), The Enemy Below (1957) and My Fair Lady (1964).

Ultimately chosen to play the title character was German actor Gert Frobe, who was certainly imposing as the villain, but gave the production the challenge that he could barely speak any English, his voice dubbed by British actor Michael Collins in the end.

After the credits, the first part of the film is set in Miami and involves a number of characters — including Bond — but none of the actors were there except for Cec Linder, who was playing CIA agent, and 007’s American buddy, Felix Leiter. Connery was elsewhere filming Marnie.

It seems that quite a bit of the film takes place in America, but in reality only five days were spent shooting in Miami and a bit of time in Kentucky, but most of the rest of production took place in England, although there was some shooting in Switzerland.

Goldfinger’s right hand woman was Pussy Galore, portrayed by actress Honor Blackman, who at the time was well known for playing Cathy Gale on the British spy series The Avengers. As she told the media, “I wasn’t really shaken by this character until I went on the promotion tour of the States with the picture and hardly any of the interviewers would call me by my character’s name. They said, ‘How do you feel about playing a character with this name? Don’t you find it rather distasteful?’ and all this. They really took it so seriously, you know? I set them up rotten, because they’d been given instructions from above that they mustn’t say ‘Pussy Galore.’”

One of cinema’s most iconic moments is when Sean Connery’s James Bond awakens from being knocked out, walks into a hotel’s bedroom and finds the lady he was with, Shirley Eaton’s Jill Masterson, sprawled out on the bed, naked, dead and painted head to toe in gold paint. It’s a truly stunning moment. “I only had two scenes with Sean Connery,” said Eaton, “who was attractive and studious. It was only a week’s worth, so I never imagined that the film and my role would have such a lifelong iconic” — there’s that word — “existence.”

Goldfinger was the first movie that 10-year-old Pierce Brosnan — a future James Bond himself — had ever seen. “Which,” he laughs, “for a young lad from Ireland, was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. There was this gold lady laid out in the bed, naked. So James Bond has been part of my cinematic heritage, as it were, as an actor.”

Playing Jill Masterson’s sister, Tilly, is Tania Mallet, whose character meets her end after seeking revenge for Jill’s death, but is instead killed by Odd Job. This was her only featured film role.

While James Bond creator Ian Fleming was able to visit the set of Goldfinger, he passed away before the film’s release. While he obviously witnessed some of Bond’s enormous popularity, he couldn’t imagine how big the character would become or that he’d still be around in 2024

The villain’s obsession with everything gold was even worse in the novel. While suntanning he preferred to wear gold-colored underwear, his library was filled with yellow-covered pornographic magazines, and when he engaged in sex, he preferred his partner be painted gold.

Goldfinger’s henchman was Odd Job, the man who throws a razor-rimmed derby with deadly accuracy and is a mountain of an adversary for Bond. He’s played by the Hawaiian-born Harold Sakata, an American Olympic weight lifter and professional wrestler. As can be seen in the commercial above, he was able to get a lot of mileage out of his association with 007.

Odd Job grunts in the film, but that’s about it. We’re never told why, although in the novel Ian Fleming provides an explanation: he has a cleft palette.

Given that this was the third time that Sean Connery was playing 007, and the films were growing more popular, he was unhappy with his salary and during filming a dispute between he and producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman broke out. When the actor was injured during a fight scene with Harold Sakata’s Odd Job in the Fort Knox set, they managed to work things out: Connery would receive 5% of the gross of each of his Bond films (including Goldfinger), which would mean a total of four more movies.

Bond’s fight with Odd Job ends with the latter being electrocuted as he grabs his hat stuck between two metal bars at the exact moment 007 applies a severed electric wire to to them. The effects used actually burned Harold Sakata’s hand, but he refused to let go of the hat until Guy Hamilton yelled, “Cut!”

One of the mainstays of the Bond films was actor Desmond Llewelyn as Q, the man who supplies Bond with his gadgets and who was in most of the films upto and including 1999’s The World is Not Enough. In Goldfinger, director Guy Hamilton helped establish the oftentimes adversarial relationship between Bond and Q, telling Llewelyn, “You hate the bugger. Think about it. He comes down here, pays no attention to what you take, takes your props away, uses them in completely different ways than you intended, never returns them. I mean, the man’s a menace as far as you’re concerned, and the sooner 009 turns up, the happier you’ll be.”

Another great scene in Goldfinger is when Goldfinger has Bond strapped to a table with a laser slowly inching its way towards 007’s crotch, literally threatening to split him in half. The sequences gives us the wonderful bit of dialogue where Bond asks, “Do you expect me to talk?” to which Goldfinger responds, “No, Mister Bond, I expect you to die.” And he comes pretty close to doing just that. In the novel, however, Fleming, clearly inspired by the old movie serial The Perils of Pauline, actually had a buzz saw threatening Bond’s manhood.

Although the above sequence looks very cool in the finished film, actually shooting it was anything but, including a pair of special effects guys, one beneath with a light and the other with a blowtorch to go over a spot in the sheet of metal that had been cut in half and welded back together. Connery was laying there and smoke was coming out of the spot and he was really beginning to sweat, because that flame was getting dangerously close to his crotch for real.

Actress Margaret Nolan plays the film’s first “Bond Girl” (people cringe when they hear that phrase now), Dink, who we see giving 007 a massage in Miami early in the film. Beyond that, she wore a gold bikini and was painted gold for the film’s title sequences (you can see them on the entry for the Shirley Bassey title song) as well as the soundtrack cover and advertisements for the movie. This would all lead to her appearing in the November 1965 “James Bond Girls” edition of Playboy magazine. Additionally, Nolan had a bit part in the 1964 Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night.

During production of From Russia with Love, the decision had been made for film number three to actually be On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but for a number of reasons, that was put on hold as there wasn’t enough time to prepare for location in Switzerland to meet the September 1964 release date. Goldfinger was chosen instead, though OHMSS (as it’s commonly known) did reach theaters in 1969 with George Lazenby as James Bond).

The credit sequence for the film was considered innovative for its time. It was created by graphic artist Robert Brownjohn, who projected film clips from the first three Bond films (Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger) on model Margaret Nolan’s body. The way he explained it, the inspiration came from seeing movie images projected on people as they stood up and walked out of theaters.

Burt Kwouk, who has a small role as Mr. Ling (who provides Goldfinger with the small atomic bomb with which he plans to irradiate the gold in Fort Knox) went on to appear in over 200 other films, including many entries of the Pink Panther films as the house servant of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau.

Look closely at the gangsters Goldfinger is explaining Operation Grand Slam to, and you’ll see among them is Garry Marshall, future producer of such classic TV shows as The Odd Couple, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy.

One of the key scenes in the film is James Bond engaging in a game of golf with the film’s villain, Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe). Connery had to learn the game for filming, but ended up genuinely falling in love with the sport, and it’s been a part of his life ever since. In an interview reported by PGA.com, he explained, “I began to see golf as a metaphor for living, for in golf you are basically on your own, competing against yourself and always trying to do better. If you cheat, you will be the loser, because you are cheating yourself.”

Another integral part of the Bond formula that made its debut in Goldfinger was the pre-credit action sequence that had little or nothing to do with the main plot; just Bond wrapping up his last adventure before engaging in a new one.

The gold motif is virtually everywhere in this film. Pussy Galore and her Flying Circus are all blondes, Goldfinger owns a yellow-plated Rolls Royce, he wears