Goldfinger (1964)

Goldfinger arrives in 1964 as a well-tailored artifact, and time has been unkind to its social arrangements in ways that are almost architectural. The film's signature image is a woman gilded into an ornament and left dead on a bed, a composition so striking that Life magazine put it on the cover. Elsewhere, women are named for double entendres, overpowered in barns, and converted. Pussy Galore's all-female flying circus carries a faint suggestion of Sapphic independence, but the narrative's only interest in it is Bond's successful correction of it. We are watching the pre-feminist screen treatment of women preserved in amber, and the amber is doing the work of a museum case.

Race fares no better. Oddjob is a wordless Korean manservant with a steel hat, and Ling is a Chinese nuclear physicist on the wrong side of the ledger. Neither is examined, only deployed, and the film's idea of foreignness is a threat to be neutralized by men in good suits. On economics, Goldfinger is a greedy tycoon, but the film's sympathies sit with MI6, the Bank of England, and the US Army defending Fort Knox. This is capitalism defended with an Aston Martin and a well-timed golf cheat.

What remains is a film that lectures no one. There is no climate parable in the dirty bomb, no historical revisionism in the Cold War fantasy, no body-positive framework anywhere near a story whose central prop is a corpse painted gold. The moral instruction extends to a single precept: do not interfere with British intelligence. As vintages go, this is a robust and confident bottle with nothing on the label about justice. We record the absence without complaint.