[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVg23yjKl1g]
It’s a bizarre fact that Goldfinger, by general consensus the best Bond movie ever, opens with an image of Sean Connery wearing a seagull on his head.
It’s a disguise, of course, allowing 007 to swim up to the docks of a shady Latin American oil depot to blow up a hidden heroin lab, which inexplicably is decked out like a ’60s bachelor pad. Luckily for Bond, it also inexplicably contains several bright red oil drums labeled NITRO. Once 007 has set his charges and made his escape, he strips off his wetsuit to reveal a perfectly pressed white dinner jacket. Party time.
The rest of this pre-credit sequence is absolutely vintage: on his way out of town Bond stops to take care of some “unfinished business” with a dancer from a local nightclub. He surprises her in the bath while, unbeknownst to him, a thug lurks behind the cupboard, waiting to clonk him on the head. But 007 spots his attacker reflected in the eyes of the woman he’s kissing, and spins her around just in time so that she gets the bludgeon instead. There are at least two things wrong with that sentence.
All, or some, is redeemed when 007 dispatches his assailant by throwing him into the tub, tossing an electric lamp in after him and, as the man sizzles and smokes, delivering the one-liner: “Shocking.”
For good measure, he says it again to the dazed, semi-naked woman on the floor: “Positively shocking.”
Still, I’m docking Goldfinger half a grade for the seagull.
GRADE: B