Goldfinger (1964)

"Who else could play the part now?" - Anne Pacey, The Sun

"There was no difficulty in picking out the top release of 1964. Goldfinger stands out as the No.1" - Bill Altria, Kinematograph Weekly, 17 December 1964

"So Bond is off again; and, as with From Russia With Love, a pre-credits sequence of breathless speed and impudence tips a colossal wink at the audience. After these first five minutes of outrageous violence, callous fun and bland self-mockery, the tone is so firmly set that the film could get away with almost anything... But the real trick of the formula - not, incidentally Ian Fleming's formula at all, but the film's invention - is the way it uses humour. In all his adventures, sexual and lethal, Bond is a kind of joke superman, as preposterously resilient as one of those cartoon cats... Goldfinger really is a dazzling object lesson in the principle that nothing succeeds like excess." - Monthly Film Bulletin

"There is violence a-plenty but the fantasy is so well created that it doesn't sear the mind; it manages to become quite stimulatingly cathartic." - Derek Prowse, The Sunday Times

"When Bond can do anything he loses his point: the film becomes a costly tour de force, a gigantic firework, expensive purposelessness." - Ian Wright, The Guardian

"As the story advances we are amused and excited by the predictability of every situation, and await it like children at a birthday party... This was the first James Bond film I have seen and perhaps the last. There was for me something quite terrifying in the knowledge that an audience could be so easily predicted, that enjoyment involved not even the illusion of a single salutary or admirable sentiment, and that, deep down, as they say, we are all the same" - Mike Sarne, Films and Filming, November 1964 p.26

"Goldfinger is one vast, gigantic confidence trick to blind the masses to what is going on underneath" - The Daily Worker

"This film has everything required for instant and prolonged success. It cannot fail to hit the jackpot... It was not easy to go one better than From Russia With Love but it has been done. Bond's insouciant adventures are even larger than the largest life and death dealt out so liberally throughout is as deadly as can be. The incredible almost impossible plot is carried along from one smashing incident to another and the ability of the more astonishing incidents to provoke admiring laughter as well as chills is a tribute to screenwriting, direction and the stars" - Kinematograph Weekly

Last Updated: 9 November, 2009