Guy Hamilton
Agente 007 - Missione Goldfinger

LA RECENSIONE

James Bond (Sean Connery) follows Auric Goldfinger, an extremely wealthy financier skilled in gold smuggling. The agent, after having a bit of fun with Goldfinger's girlfriend, is captured by him but still manages to uncover his plan: to destroy the U.S. gold reserve at Fort Knox to wildly inflate the value of his own gold. While imprisoned, he seduces another of Goldfinger's girls, who reports everything to the secret services for him. The plan fails.

"Goldfinger" was the most successful 007 ever and the one that definitively sparked the "Bond mania". Years later, it can be said with certainty that it is the best film of the series: fresh, lively, original, and never repetitive or silly (despite the risk due to the dangerous screenplay); Sean Connery is in his most dazzling form, and Hamilton's direction is excellent.

What makes this film remarkable are especially the thousands of clever innovations (the modified car, the blade-hat, the girl covered in gold, the bomb timer stopping at "007" seconds) that run throughout the film; not to mention the wonderfully developed characters. Among them is Goldfinger's silent henchman, "Oddjob", one of the most successful and unsettling characters of the entire series, but it's also worth mentioning the three "Bond girls", two of whom, sisters, die. The third is the famous Pussy Galore.

It is not a five-star film because, despite being the best James Bond ever made, it is not the highest peak reached by a spy film. That honor belongs to Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece "North by Northwest" (to which the entire 007 series is enormously indebted). But that's another story.