I have never seen ‘The Sound of Music’ (I refused to go and see it on principle, during the months when it incessantly occupied the biggest Cinema in Oxford, week after week after week) or ‘Mary Poppins’, and wouldn’t take the chance now if it was offered to me. I feel I have a more-than-sketchy idea of what goes on in both of them. I also managed to miss most of the early James Bond films, probably because my parents thought I was too young.

But I have always felt slightly at a loss through not having seen ‘Goldfinger’. I can recall a friend of my mother’s being embarrassed at being seen reading the book, with its unforgettable and disturbing cover of a skull with gold coins in the eye-sockets. She quickly put it away, to keep it out of my sight. Having since read it, I’m not surprised. That must have been about 1959 or 1960, and That skull , and the coins, was all I did remember. I see now I’ve looked it up that the skull had a rose clenched between its teeth, but I must have thought that a silly girlish detail, and erased it.

I can remember schoolfellows boasting about having been taken to see the 1964 film , going on and on about Aston Martin DB5s, ejector seats, revolving number plates and machine guns, and it contains some of those things that ‘everybody knows’ – people can die if you paint them all over with gold; if you shoot a hole in a pressurised plane, you’ll be sucked out through it; everything we think we know about Lasers, which we had in 1964 only just heard of, all the gold in the USA is in Fort Knox (this last is apparently very much disputed these days) . It must have the most memorable cinematic cliché of modern times - the hero about to be sliced in two by a Laser beam, as the smiling villain looks on. I never caught up with it on TV, Bond films are too boastful to fit on a TV screen, I suspect. Certainly, ‘From Russia With Love’ on screen was very disappointing.

So when one of my local art-houses screened it on a Sunday afternoon, I felt almost obliged to go. Gosh, it made me feel old. Thanks to the cultural revolution in humour and sexual attitudes, it was frequently unintentionally very funny. I wondered from time to time whether Sean Connery and Honor Blackman had somehow seen into the future as they filmed it, and realised that all the assumptions of their age would become ludicrous before they died.

Its ideas of luxury and style, almost pathetic, reminded me of a remark by Kingsley Amis, (in an essay collection called, I think ‘Whatever happened to Jane Austen?’, which I haven’t seen for years) of an era of gross rather crude luxury, seen through a ‘miasma of Drambuie and king-sized cigarettes’. Only a country recently relieved from rationing would have been much impressed by that sort of thing. It reminded me of the days when restaurants would bring the wine, reverently tipped up in a basket.

The ‘best hotel in Miami beach’ looks like a fairly basic Holiday Inn, the room-service meal looks, well, like a room-service meal, and the room telephones don’t even have their own dials, let alone push-buttons.

I’d have laughed if I’d been at home, especially at the fights and the scornfully-treated floozies, but could I laugh in an (uncrowded) cinema, or were some of these people taking it seriously? A woman called ‘Pussy Galore’ indeed. How did they get away with that in 1964? A modern version of the film couldn’t use the ludicrous name, but would certainly make a lot more of the fact that in the book on which the film is loosely based, Miss Galore is a confirmed lesbian, as are all her troupe of girls. I suppose this possibility is very faintly hinted at when she tells Bond she’s immune to his charm, but it really is a very soft whisper indeed.

But what struck me most of all was the the great Bond himself was so totally useless. Sent to spy on Auric Goldfinger, he immediately exposes himself and breaks his cover to rescue a foolish man from being tricked at cards. Why bother? Anyone who played cards ( and repeatedly lost) against a man with a huge earpiece stuck in the side of his head, who insisted on sitting in the same seat for every game, deserved to be cheated.

Having done so he also exposes a beautiful girl to danger, who is promptly killed. Bond cannot save her because, despite his MI6 supertraining and licence to kill, he does not notice when Goldfinger’s henchman, Oddjob, sneaks into his hotel room, or when Oddjob creeps up behind him and knocks him out, before painting the girl gold all over and killing her. Why Oddjob doesn’t kill Bond as well I cannot for the life of me work out, except that the film would have to be abandoned if he did.

Somehow, even after this, Bond continues to pretend he has not been unmasked, playing a futile game of golf with Goldfinger at an expensive course, during which both men pretend that they don’t know that one is a villain and the other a spy.

From that moment onwards. Bond does nothing either useful or intelligent. He gets in the way of the dead girl’s sister, who is trying pretty gamely to shoot Goldfinger, so saving the British taxpayer a great deal of money.

He then gets her killed too. His Aston Martin super car, ejector seat, revolving number-plates, machine-guns etc is as much as use as a bicycle against Goldfinger’s small army of trained (North?) Koreans. After driving around in it for a bit, shooting people, ejecting a Korean and crashing, Bond is captured and duly strapped to a gold table while a laser is aimed at his crotch. Goldfinger then lets Bond go, on the flimsiest pretext possible, after which he surely deserves to die.

Bond later escapes and manages to get captured *again* because he is not paying attention. His attempt to smuggle the details of the plot to the CIA fails completely. The world is in fact rescued by Pussy Galore, who turns out not to be immune to charm and changes sides.

The more I write this the more I am reminded of the late Anna Russell’s deadpan description of what happens in Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelungs’ (which you can read here, http://www.markelliswalker.net/music/albums/anna-russell-ring.html , or watch on YouTube, in which she also impersonates a giant pink blancmange) . I think she is the origin of the much-copied expression ‘ I am not making this up, you know’. I can’t begin to match its majestic mockery of opera, an art form whose supposed glories have always eluded me. But there is something about a straight recitation of this rubbish which brought it to mind).

It is just astonishing how useless Bond is. At the end of the film, he can’t even manage to defuse the atomic device whose lid he has taken about 20 minutes to get off. A technician has to do it for him. *And* Goldfinger almost gets away, only failing to escape through his own sudden and uncharacteristic stupidity. Was the whole thing meant to be a joke from start to finish? How and why did it become such a cult that they are still churning them out half a century later with no sign of an end.