‘Goldfinger’ is often voted the most popular of all the Bond films, and this is a very assured outing from Sean Connery, the third in the series, with all the tropes around sadistic, narcissistic megalomaniacs who literally want to take over the world. In this manifestation, it is Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) whose penchant for gold leads him to commit a maverick plan to get inside Fort Knox and alter the balance of gold reserves in the world which he, and only he, will then control. This trope of the businessman with designs on world power has a particular resonance in the current day, and of course this is a familiar staple of the Bond universe.

This was the first Bond movie to give us Q (Desmond Llewellyn) and his assortment of gadgets which come in very handy for Bond when he is being pursued by Goldfinger’s henchmen and his personal assistant with the name of Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), and which so nearly resulted in the film being banned, despite the name being taken verbatim from Ian Fleming’s source novel. Geoffrey Shurlock was the chief censor at the Production Code of the Motion Picture Association of America and Cubby Broccoli had to persuade him against proscribing the film which had already received Royal approval in London (with headlines in the day going to town on how the Duke of Edinburgh had met Honor Blackman at the premiere – ‘The Prince meets Pussy’).

The film is though littered with chauvinistic moments, including Bond slapping his masseuse on the backside and beckoning her away because of the need for ‘man talk’. And of course the only time we see Bond seriously worried about death is when his genitalia is likely to be severed by a laser beam. For Bond, sexual performance and his success in the world of espionage go hand in hand, and we see the template here for all the other films in the series, including a glimpse into the lair of the megalomaniac villain who can never resist the urge to reveal all his secrets to Bond before planning to have him executed… but of course, as the Austin Powers films so humorously showed us, Bond is always able to outwit his nemesis.