Goldfinger Question
Ice Station 0
Posts: 44MI6 Agent
I just watched (and listened) to the Goldfinger audio commentary and have a question. I may have missed the explanation since I was listening to the commentary but why did Bond place the tracking device and his message in gangster Solo's pocket? Even if he hadn't been crushed, would Solo take a note to the authorities? Since the note was destroyed, how did Bond get the info to Felix about Goldfinger's plan?
Comments
Who it may have specifically been does not really matter, only that he was able to ID 007.
Are we discussing the book or the film? And if both I think the differences should be highlighted.
So it's the movie to which the questions are referring.
You can certainly argue the logic of Goldfinger's actions, i.e. "Why not simply kill them and be done with it?" Only defense is that it's a movie and we have to go along for the ride. We in the audience got to learn the basics of the caper just as Bond did. And if nothing else it just illustrates the point that there is no honor among thieves.
I'll admit it's over the top, but it's an enjoyable scene. Gert Frobe and Michael Collins chew up the scenery quite memorably. And it advanced the storyline of the movie very effeciently. Pure logic? Nah. But pure entertainment.
It does seem silly that Goldfinger would reveal his elaborate plot to the gansters if all he intended was to kill them. It does seem silly that Goldfinger would release Mr. Solo only to kill him, destroy a perfectly good vehicle, and have to go through the trouble of removing the gold after it was all done. Perhaps these actions were necessary to satisfy Goldfinger's massive ego.
Either way, I think we sometimes think too much about what we are watching when we should just sit back and enjoy. I don't know about you, but this little bit in GF does not ruin my enjoyment of the film.
-Roger Moore
"I am not an entrant in the Shakespeare Stakes." - Ian Fleming
"Screw 'em." - Daniel Craig, The Best James Bond EverTM
When Bond confronts Goldfinger after the latter gasses the mafia guys, he sayd something like "I enjoyed your little speech", to which Goldfinger responds, "So did I , Mr Bond" (or such like).
Basically Goldfigner is saying that he brought the crooks there with the intention of killing them, but the over-the-top demonstration of Grand Slam was purely for the benefit of his own ego. He got off by showcasing his own "perfect" plan to an audience.
And of course, the absurdity is compounded by paying off Mr. Solo early and sending him on his way to a separate, elaborate death when he planned on killing all the others 10 minutes later. But of course, there was a reason for that choice that may not be apparent in our modern world. I'm dating myself here, but the crushing of the car was a huge deal when I was a kid. Practically invisible-car territory for '64.
Thank You!
"Better make that two."
I don't know that the sequence is badly written so much as poorly conceived. If the idea, as you suggest, was to show Goldfinger's ego, that was easily done with the scene with Bond, as you've already noted. I suspect that was a secondary concern of the writer. Goldfinger's ego is a character point that might help explain his wanting to rob Ft. Knox, but it's not a plot point, which should move the story along. His ego doesn't really come into play after that. It's not as if a fit of ego leads to his undoing later in the picture. As I see it, the only purpose the death of the gangsters serves is to present Goldfinger's plan to the audience and kill Solo in a spectacular way. Seems to me both could have been presented in a more integrated way. But again, it doesn't bother me or spoil my enjoyment of the film.
I will say that the scene in GF is probably a bit more enjoyable than others. I do think that the exposition is justifiably grounded in Goldfinger's ego. He's very proud of his plan (even Bond calls it 'inspired') but poor Goldfinger just has to tell somebody. He can't take any credit once it happens since he'll be labeled Public Enemy #1. So in order to stroke his massive ego, who's he going to tell? Other bad guys, and in order for them to think he's not insane (which he is) he has the entire model setup. Telling the mobsters and then killing them of course had three benefits 1) Auric tells his plan and gets the only 'credit' he can possibly get for his ingenuity. 2) Killing them doesn't chance GF being 'ratted out' afterwards. and 3) Goldfinger doesn't have to pay back the million dollar debts he owes them.
Perhaps we're looking at it backwards. Goldfinger didn't call them there to tell them his plan. He called them there to kill them all in one shot. Why not squeeze a little fun out them by letting them marvel at his plan first.
On the other hand, the Solo thing NEVER made sense to me at all.
Well done, DH.
I can't remember the exact subject of some of our debates, Darenhat, (and I'm too lazy to look them up), but I've had a number of them with people about similar apparent non-sequiturs in CR. And I've made a similar point about people sometimes looking at movie events backwards (the "Why-does-LeChiffre-put-Vesper-in-the-middle-of-the-road-where-Bond-almost-runs-her-over" question, for instance, leaps to mind: the answer is, of course, that he doesn't know Bond will almost run her over. He just thinks he'll see her). Looks like I've done the same type of thing here.
This is just a long way of saying that I think you are entirely correct about the slaying of the mobsters. GF's primary motive for bringing them there was to kill them. The exposition of the Ft. Knox plan was incidental. I put the exposition first.
Which makes me wish all the more that Mr. Solo's death had been better set up. I'm sure it could have been done pretty easily, thereby keeping the car-crushing sequence.
AVTAK: You know Goldfinger... I was always better.
Alot of people have objected to this scene because it seems that Goldfinger went to so much trouble to kill Solo. However, I think it is a perfectly logical scene as it is another example of Goldfinger's ego impacting his work. Yes, he could have just shot Solo, but why would he? He's a master criminal; the best at what he does. Why would he do something so ordinary when he himself is anything but ordinary? He killed Solo that way because, like he was going to kill Bond with a laser, killing people in unoriginal and ordinary ways does not befit a man of his stature.
Sorry Dan, but the ego explanation doesn't really hold in this case. Not only does he kill Solo separately and have him crushed, he then has to separate the gold from the crushed car. It's waaaaay too much trouble for Goldfinger, who in addition to being an egomaniac, is an impatient, intelligent man. I'll buy the ego explanation in the first case because it doesn't cost GF anything to explain the caper to his victims, plus he gets to strut for a few minutes, if only in front of them. But killing Solo in that manner was too much of a pain the a**, and he gets no opportunity to strut, either. And you're right to compare the Solo slaying to the laser scene, but only because killing Bond with a laser rather than a bullet is also a bit hard to swallow. To make it more logical, GF should have wanted Bond to talk, and I think that could have been done without spoiling "the line" in this way:
GF: Who sent you?
JB: Do you expect me to talk?
GF: Not really, Mr. Bond. I hopeyou will talk, but I expect you to die.
But I don't mind that type of thing in a Bond film, if it's not played for laughs. Which is why I'm always puzzled by folks who castigate CR for a couple of flights of fancy. There seems to be a serious double-standard between CR and GF, which I think boils down to this: GF is a beloved classic, CR, while extremely popular, is disliked intensely in some quarters. Unlike CR, nobody walked into GF the first time expecting to be disappointed.
I don't really see that there's a double standard. GF had some over the top moments like a woman covered in gold, duck-headed scuba gear, an aston martin with everything but flying capabilities, and a woman named Pussy Galore. Everything about GF screams 'tongue-in-cheek' which means when you walk in the door, you check your hat, coat, and disbelief. CR wasn't that type of film, IMO.
It is true that GF is the film that nudged the series down the slippery slope toward self-parody, but it was only a nudge: GF still took itself seriously. It was not as aggressively tongue-in-cheek or over-the-top, IMO, as the later films, whose philosophy seemed to be that if a little whimsy went a long way, more whimsy will go even further. And CR, although more-down- to-earth than the last couple dozen outings, wasn't exactly an exercise in documentary filmmaking. Foiling terrorists with a card game, glove-compartment defillibrators and poison antidotes, one-man assaults on the embassies of small nations, injectable homing and medical diagnostic chips: those are pretty fantastic, too. So I think the films were not that far apart in terms of Bond paraphrenalia. I will grant you that a laser had a greater "gee wiz" factor in its day than a glove-box defillibrator does now, but that's more a function of the films' respective eras, even though the devices were/are real enough. We're used to gadgets now. We weren't in '64. I was serious in my earlier post that the car-crusher in GF was a real cause for amazement for '64 audiences. I doubt many younger people watching GF today for the first time would realize that.
The real difference in CR was that the film examined Bond's character rather than just showed a resourceful sophisticate using those amazing toys of his. This "gritty vs. silly" thing never was the either/or proposition it was made out to be by those who wanted to keep the Bond films just as they were. The idea behind CR was simply to inject a little more realism of situation and complexity of character into 007, not turn him into George Smiley.