What makes Goldfinger one of the best Bond movies ever? It wasn’t the first James Bond film. It wasn’t even the first James Bond film featuring Sean Connery. It wasn’t the first with a great villain or the first with great spy gadgets. But it was the first to have every each and every element of a Bond movie reach out and please its audience all the way through. We loved hating the villain. We found the henchman exotic and threatening. The car was a lovely thing. The women were beauties. Everything in the film looks great, from costume design to the giant ceiling-mounted laser, which has a more Buck Rogers flair than your normal industrial machine. All the elements you desired for a spy movie were delivered, wrapped up in a song that drove itself up the charts. While the music was fantastic, it can’t take all the credit for this fantastic Bond. The producers learned an important lesson from the theme song of Dr. No. That theme became the Bond movie theme. Great care went into selecting, composing, and writing the theme songs that would play well and set the tone for the following Bond movies. What makes this one of the best ever is that they got everything right. Drawing this strip was easy; all I had to do was list just a few things that went right in the movie, then punctuate it with a gag.
Why do I give Goldfinger only a nine? Because I didn’t get to see it in the theater. Why didn’t I get to see it in the theater? Because I was only two years old. Because my parents had the common sense and courtesy not to take a toddler to a movie filled with gunfire, explosions, and a plot that didn’t involve animated animals. Am I getting sidetracked onto the subject of people bringing in underage children to watch inappropriate movies? Yes I am. Just because the film has a tiger in it, you don’t take your six-year-old daughter to see Life of Pi. I personally don’t care what movies you watch with your kids at home. But a theater is a communal experience. And while it might take a village to raise your offspring, you don’t take them to see The Village while their still in nappies and cant follow the plot, get squirrely and then start a long wheezing cry that spoils everybody’s experience. I’m sorry, but if you’ve got enough mulla to bring your kid to the theater, you’ve got enough to cover a baby sitter. And that’s why Goldfinger only gets a nine.
