Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Goldfinger
1964 · Guy Hamilton · Goldfinger on Sightlines
Start with the woman in gold. Shirley Eaton lies painted head to toe in gold, and Ted Moore lights and frames the body to shock. It is a horrible image and a beautiful one, and the film knows exactly what to do with it. It shows it, lets it burn in, and moves on. Bond has work to do.
That rhythm is the whole of Goldfinger: an unforgettable picture, then forward motion, then another picture. Most people remember this film as a gallery. There's the golf match, the laser table, Oddjob's lethal bowler hat, and Connery in a dinner jacket beside the Aston Martin. Guy Hamilton composed each of these tableaux to be memorable on its own. Gilles Deleuze, drawing on the philosopher Henri Bergson, offers a useful name for this. He separates two ways of breaking movement into moments. The older way, from sculpture and ballet, moves through privileged instants: the held pose, the climax, the frozen gesture that sums up a whole action. The newer way, which cinema itself was born from, records any instant whatever, the ordinary in-between frames of a movement as it happens. Cinema is a machine for any-instant-whatever. Goldfinger, oddly, keeps reaching back for privileged instants. It builds poster frames. That is why sixty years of advertising could lift its images straight off the screen. The film was half made of icons already.
The film still runs, though, and it runs on what Deleuze calls the action-image, specifically its large form. It's a simple engine. A situation presses on a character, the character acts, and the action changes the situation. Here the situation is about as large as situations get. Goldfinger plans to set off a nuclear device inside Fort Knox, irradiate America's gold reserve and multiply the value of his own holdings. The screenwriters changed Fleming's plan, a plain theft, into this smarter one. It makes the threat global and abstract: the world economy itself is the milieu calling Bond to act. Deleuze adds that the large form likes a duel, which he calls the binomial: force against force, hero against villain. The film's engine is a run of escalating confrontations between Bond and one vivid antagonist, and the golf match is that duel in miniature, played politely with cheating on both sides. Gert Fröbe's corpulent aesthete of gold, whose voice was dubbed by Michael Collins, works as a shape built for the duel. He needs to be big enough to push back.
The film's real invention, though, is a third party at the table, and that third party is us. Deleuze credits Hitchcock with a cinema of relations, where the viewer holds knowledge the characters don't and watches the threads tighten. Goldfinger descends from Hitchcock through The 39 Steps, with its wry, unflappable hero chasing a MacGuffin, and through North by Northwest, with its debonair man in peril against national landmarks. But it bends that inheritance into something more mechanical. Watch the Q Branch briefing. Desmond Llewelyn shows Bond the DB5's revolving number plates, machine guns, oil slick, bulletproof shield, tire-slashers and ejector seat. Deleuze calls an object like this a mark: something that comes with an expected chain. When you see X, expect Y. Every gadget in that workshop is a promise, and the film keeps its promises with near-perfect narrative economy. Half the pleasure of the later car chase is recognition. We were told. The weaponized attaché case in From Russia with Love was the first draft of this, and Goldfinger made it a system, a briefing that would come back in film after film.
Now the laser table. Bond is strapped down and a laser creeps toward his groin. This is the exact situation Deleuze's account of modern cinema turns on: a hero who can no longer act, who can only watch what's coming to him. In postwar European film, that paralysis cracks the action-image open and leaves characters who just see and endure. Goldfinger refuses the crack. Bond can't move his body, so he moves his mouth. Do you expect me to talk? No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die. The quip is his action. The circuit from situation to response stays closed, carried by wit when muscle runs out. Hamilton's lighter, more ironic touch, set against Terence Young's straighter thrillers, is just this: peril staged so we can enjoy it as a game.
Peter Hunt's editing does the same work at the level of the cut. His elliptical style trims action down to its most kinetic beats and lets rhythm carry the audience past logical gaps. In Deleuze, gaps and slack links between scenes often mean the action-image is coming apart. Hunt uses ellipsis the other way, as acceleration. The chain moves too fast for you to notice a missing link.
Then there's the color. Deleuze writes of color that stops decorating a scene and absorbs it, so that a hue becomes the feeling itself. Moore's warm golds and metallic sheens build toward Ken Adam's Fort Knox, a vault no outsider had ever seen. So Adam invented it: a vast, vertical, theatrical space stacked with bullion. It's a closed set, a frame packed with information, its geometry dwarfing the people inside it. Adam had sketched this vocabulary in the reactor room on Crab Key in Dr. No. In the same year, 1964, he built the raked War Room of Dr. Strangelove. Put the two side by side and you see one designer giving the decade's anxieties about money and the bomb a single architecture: cathedrals where human figures look like accessories.
What did Goldfinger do to film? It took the action-image at the very moment, by Deleuze's account, that serious cinema was losing faith in it, and turned it into a ritual. The pre-credits set-piece, the title song, the briefing, the megalomaniac, the henchman, the quip under threat: these became a liturgy the audience learned by heart, and they still govern the franchise. Hunt went on to direct On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Adam went on to later Bonds and to Kubrick. The template traveled.
Which leaves an open question worth taking back to the film. If we know the chain in advance, if every gadget announces its own future, are we still watching action, or are we watching a ceremony of action? Rewatch it with that in mind. Count the promises in Q's workshop and tick them off as they pay out. Notice when a shot stops to become a picture. And follow the gold from a painted woman's skin to the vault, where it fills the whole frame.
Concepts in play
- privileged-instants — Hamilton stages iconic tableaux composed to be memorable in isolation: the gilded body, the golf match, the laser table, Oddjob's bowler hat, Connery beside the DB5
- action-image-large-form — A global situation, Goldfinger's plan to irradiate the Fort Knox reserve and wreck the world economy, presses until Bond's decisive action transforms it
- binomial — The dramatic engine is a sequence of escalating confrontations between Bond and one vivid antagonist, miniaturized in the golf match
- mark — The Q Branch briefing introduces gadgets (DB5 ejector seat, oil slick, machine guns) that are deployed later with near-perfect narrative economy, so the audience expects each payoff
- affective colour — Ted Moore's recurring warm golds and metallic sheens, from Shirley Eaton's gilded body to the gold-hued vault
- the closed set (cadre) — Ken Adam's invented Fort Knox interior: bold geometry, gleaming surfaces and a scale that dwarfs the human figure, extending the Crab Key reactor room and paralleling Strangelove's War Room