GOLDFINGER: Novel vs. Movie

The quintessential James Bond story.  Not the first, not the best, but the one that got the mixture right and set the stage for all that followed.

The seventh novel in the series, it marks a significant milestone in Ian Fleming’s growth as a writer, being the first time he ever gave real attention to Bond’s inner life and how he reacts to his career and missions.

Fleming was a good writer but not a great one.  He typically wrote a first draft of his novels in two months time, revising over another month before submitting them.

This is not a schedule conducive to tight plotting or attention to detail and it shows in Goldfinger.

Give the book credit for being a fun, fast paced adventure, it still could have been better.

While Goldfinger was Fleming’s longest book to date, his publisher still felt it ran too short and asked for another 5,000 words.

Fleming added a lengthy detailed dinner with a minor character and a lengthier detailed golf game (based on one he actually played once).

He should have spent more time on the logistics of Goldfinger’s scheme to rob Ft. Knox.  When the big plan is presented, there’s almost no description of the enormous effort it would take to get the men and vehicles to the gold depository to pull off the heist.  Fleming dismisses this with a bit of handwaveum by saying Bond, posing as a freelance crook, was coordinating the efforts via phone for Goldfinger!

On the other hand, the opening chapter, with Bond musing over the death of a Mexican drug cartel assassin sent to kill him, is expertly written and, as mentioned, gives us the first real glimpse into Bond’s psyche in the series.

One gets the feeling Fleming started Goldfinger with good intent but grew impatient towards the end and just wrapped it up as quickly as he could with slam-bang action to be done with it.

He did something similar with The Spy Who Loved Me, starting out writing what he intended to be a literary novel about a young woman’s coming of age told from a first person POV, either getting bored or writing himself into a corner 2/3 of the way through, saying to hell with it and dragging in some gangsters and James Bond to liven things up.  (Robert E. Howard did the same thing with his story, “A Witch Shall Be Born”; when he got bogged down he remembered he fortunately gave the hopelessly trapped queen an unnamed general who had been captured and crucified by the villain, so with a few strokes of the keyboard Conan tears himself off of the cross and comes back to town looking for revenge.)

Unfortunately, there’s also some really ugly bits throughout Goldfinger as well and it’s a toss up as to who Fleming smears worse:  Koreans or lesbians.  The Korean stuff is really horribly racist and as for the lesbian material, well, lesbians don’t work that way, Ian.

Bond also thinks too often in terms more suited for a Boy’s Own Adventure story, undercutting his previous melancholy.

Fleming could be a far better writer than he appeared on average, and his short stories show that probably was a better format for him than novels (but who can make a living writing short stories, right?).

Goldfinger isn’t his finest work, but it’s the must read entry of the series.

By contrast, Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn’s movie adaptation does an excellent job adapting Fleming’s book to the screen, although oddly adding plot holes of their own.

Book and movie overlap by 90%, a pretty good average for this kind of story.

Briefly, here are the holes Maibaum and Dehn filled:

• They eliminated a chance encounter with a minor character from Casino Royale, thus eliminating a huge coincidence that drags Bond into the plot of the novel.  Instead, Felix Leiter tips 007 to Goldfinger and sets him to work.

• The somewhat sad and melancholy opening of the novel is reworked as a James Bond mini-adventure with an exploding oil refinery and a naked flamingo dancer.  It’s a great precredits sequence, arguably the best of the series.

• Jill Masterson is killed by Oddjob and Bond is framed for it in the movie; in the book we only learn of her fate much later (Goldfinger supposedly killed her by painting her with gold body paint that sealed off her pores, causing her to suffocate, but to paraphrase Rocket J. Squirrel:  “Hokey smokes, Goldfinger!  That trick never works!”).  

• When Bond shows up at the golf course, Goldfinger is far more wary of him -- and why not?  This is a guy he tried to frame for capital murder and he doesn’t even bring it up.  Clearly Bond is much more than a freelance crook.

• Tilly Masterson’s death occurs sooner and more logically.  As I’ll note, it’s pretty farfetched for Goldfinger to let Bond live after catching him snooping around a third time, but it’s even more farfetched for him to keep both alive as he does in the novel.

• Unlike the book where he continues passing himself off as a freelance crook, Bond quickly acknowledges he’s working for the British secret service (and why deny it?  They just pulled him out of the wreckage of that fabulously tricked out Aston-Martin DB5).  That fact doesn’t keep him alive but when he reveals he knows “Operation Grand Slam” is the codename for Goldfinger’s big scheme, that convinces Goldfinger to keep him alive so M won’t send another 00 agent after him.

• Pussy Galore’s arrival is separate from the American gangsters, indicating she’s far closer to the heart of the plan than they are.  Using her as Bond’s guard enables the two to build a relationship, which makes her joining the good guys more plausible.  She also now leads a team of stunt pilots, an improvement over the book where they’re just a team of criminal acrobats (from Harlem, no less!).

• Goldfinger simply kills the gangsters once he gets from them what he needs, a brutally cold but wholly logical departure from the book.

• The biggest departure from the novel is that movie Goldfinger wants to blow up Ft. Knox with an atom bomb, destroying America’s gold reserves to the advantage of Communist China and bolstering his own gold holdings.  That’s one helluva better plan than recruiting rival American mobsters from around the country to help loot the place.  In the novel Goldfinger plans to use a black market nuke to gain entry to the vault, ignoring the intense heat / shockwave / radiation that would result (recovering stolen nuclear weapons would be the plot of Thunderball).

• Pussy Galore helps Bond convey a message to Felix Leiter instead of Bond taping a note to the underside of an airliner toilet in the hopes a cleaning crew will find it.

• Pussy Galore helps double cross Goldfinger in the movie, in the book she sticks by him.  

• Bond kills Oddjob inside the gold vault instead of shooting out an airplane window; it’s Goldfinger who dies the ignominious death of getting sucked out of the jet.

Maibaum and Dehn’s improvements tighten up the film, but they still leave a number of idiot plot points, such as letting Bond drive his own car after being captured despite knowing it’s tricked out with all sorts of spy gadgets and weapons or crushing a defecting gangster in his car but neglecting to first remove the bold bars he was carrying.

It’s also a fair question to ask why Oddjob just doesn’t kill Bond at the same time he kills Jill Masterson, but one could argue that while Goldfinger knew who Jill Masterson was and could kill her with impunity, he might have decided to err on the side of caution by leaving Bond alive – albeit with a gold painted corpse to account for.

Still, a marked improvement over the book, with the movie being only mildly implausible as opposed to the novel being wildly implausible.  It’s the best of the early Bond films (though From Russia With Love runs a tight second).

© Buzz Dixon