The Man with the Golden Car: “Goldfinger” Turns 60

In the James Bond Cinematic Universe (JBCU), Goldfinger occupies an important place for two reasons: The villain is one of the more realistic ones, as he's a rich guy who just wants more gold, and he also likes to play golf. His motivations are more tangible and easily understood.

By comparison, the vast number of Bond villains who followed wore black or white suits and would mostly hiss in a British accent something about world domination, sometimes while stroking a cat, rendering them somewhat interchangeable and ultimately less relatable.

The film even spends a wild portion of its running time showing us a golf game being played by the main characters—something you wouldn't see in an action film today because Bond has to be doing parkour and other feats of acrobatics to compete with the Mission: Impossible and Jason Bourne schools of action filmmaking.

And before that, in the 1990s, he would smirk while sending a remotely driven BMW 7-Series into the street below, not caring if an old lady or a group of schoolchildren could be crushed by it.

Clearly, Goldfinger was filmed in a very different era for audience attention spans.

Other parts of the film have aged a bit as well. Back in 1964, Auric Goldfinger's enthusiasm for gold was portrayed as a strange obsession, one that was a little gross and perhaps unseemly—terms now unfamiliar to Instagram bling worshipers.

"This is gold, Mr. Bond. All my life, I've been in love with its color, its brilliance, its divine heaviness," Auric Goldfinger tells our permanently smirking hero.

At the very least this Bond villain was somewhat philosophical about the metal itself—something modern tech oligarchs can't really muster these days. And money in the imagination of 1960s audiences was still firmly tied to precious metals, stacks of greenbacks, and gemstones. The very opposite of crypto.

Where Goldfinger ultimately goes even more retro (spoilers below) was in the method of moving gold around. It involved plenty of old world charm, and was remarkably low-tech in its approach.

Goldfinger used a 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville with coachwork made from actual gold to smuggle the metal from England to Switzerland, where the body of the car is melted down and voila—he avoided some kind of banking-schmanking regulation. Once the body of the car was melted down, the original coachwork went back on and he'd return to England to repeat the operation.

These days this would be done via cryptocurrency, as you're probably yelling at your screen by now, which doesn't make for very impressive storytelling in film.

Goldfinger's greater plan is slightly more elaborate (and frankly a little cost-prohibitive), but gets plenty of points for the element of surprise. He wants to break into Fort Knox and set off a low-yield nuclear device to irradiate the gold in the depository, thus driving up the value of his own gold reserves. To his credit, Fort Knox security probably did not make plans for such a contingency, especially given the costs of fissile material in creating nuclear devices to begin with, which the film glosses over.

But that's not why we're here.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Goldfinger, the film that is credited with putting the James Bond franchise on the map. It was the third film in the JBCU, but it is often talked about in cinema circles as being the first one that secured the franchise's longer-term success, following the inaugural Dr. No (1962) and From Russia with Love (1963).

In the automotive world, James Bond is still firmly associated with Aston Martin, with a few detours to Bavaria. But Goldfinger also gave us a glimpse of some metal that was already retro by 1964.

The Phantom III itself, featuring a Barker body, was originally commissioned by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, the first Lord Fairhaven of Anglesey Abbey in England.

"Challenging the conventions of the time, it was painted almost entirely in black, including all lamp housings, bumpers, wheel discs and even the rear-view mirror surround," Rolls-Royce points out. "It included a white coachline, which highlighted the bonnet sides and top, and the chrome radiator shutters were sandblasted for a more subdued finish."

The car itself was modified for the film, with the yellow and black finish meant to complement Goldfinger's obsession with the metal.

Powered by a 7.3-liter V12—the first use of this configuration for the marque and the last car to be developed by Henry Rolls—the Phantom III produced 165 hp, which permitted it (at least in the fictional universe) to traverse the Furka Pass into Switzerland while loaded down by bullion.

As the automaker notes, Rolls-Royce models have appeared in a dozen Bond films by now. But few appearances were as memorable as that of the 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville in Goldfinger.

The very tangible plot of Goldfinger also stands in sharp contrast to the last 30 years of Bond films, thereby uncovering one aspect of the JBCU that has now become somewhat obscured by the passage of time and genre requirements.

And it is this: We are never going to get another Bond movie that features a villain with a 1937 Rolls involved in a very low-tech gold smuggling effort that involves parts of a car getting melted down. And we're never going to get another Bond film where the title is just some guy's surname, and the two of the film's leads spend a big chunk of the film's running time playing golf on a badly-mowed golf course.

And that's a shame.

Who should play James Bond in the next film? Let us know in the comments below.