Goldfinger

The eyeball gag that so beguiled Bresson sets up the famous credits, the modernist body as gilded screen for brutal projections. ("His lies can't disguise what you fear," thunders Shirley Bassey over a honeyed Dalí installation.) Guy Hamilton enjoys a swift spectacle, he moves to Miami with a luxurious helicopter shot that floats down to a trampoline diver and cuts on the plunge into the hotel pool, James Bond (Sean Connery) is there ready for his assignment. There have been "miracles in every field of human endeavor except crime," Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) is just the nefarious jeweler to remedy that—his plan is to make Fort Knox radioactive, Pussy Galore the bodacious barnstormer (Honor Blackman) is by his side with a tank full of Beckett's "superfine chaos." A cross-theme from Becker's Touchez pas au Grisbi (Nazi gold in gangland warfare) gets the villain's attention, the hero's Aston Martin DB5 zips through a Swiss forest but in Kentucky the uncooperative mafioso's Lincoln Continental is crushed into a junkyard cube, a thoroughly metallic world. "You'd be surprised at the wear and tear that goes on out there in the field." The Bond formula means to dazzle and does so, here is its zenith as an amalgam of fantasies streamlined into glittering nihilism. The flow of pop imagery is continuous: Bond's near-crash into a darkened mirror dissolves to his imminent laser castration ("le rayon de la mort" turns up in Alphaville), which dissolves to Pussy Galore's oneiric intro as a blonde Juno daring to be conquered. Oddjob (Harold Sakata) and his razor-tipped bowler are adjustments from Feuillade, Shirley Eaton in gold paint is an emblem of the series' Eros-Thanatos braid. "You like a close shave, don't you?" On Her Majesty's Secret Service uncloaks Bond's vulnerability, but for insouciance there's no beating this coruscating joyride. With Tania Mallet, Bernard Lee, Cec Linder, Martin Benson, Lois Maxwell, and Desmond Llewelyn.