A Great Adaptation

I read Goldfinger the other day, and I just wanted to note that while the James Bond movies often trashed their source material, the script of the Goldfinger movie may be one of the best novel-to-screen adaptations ever done. The writers, Bond regular Richard Maibaum and the prolific Paul Dehn, managed to keep nearly all the good stuff from the novel while eliminating all the stuff that wouldn't work on screen. The result is something that keeps the essence of the book but produces a story that actually makes more sense than the book's.

Just about the only good scene from the book that isn't in the movie in one form or another is Bond's dinner with Goldfinger (maybe they figured they'd already done the dinner-with-the-villain bit in Dr. No). They kept Goldfinger's method of cheating at cards and Bond's method of stopping him; Jill Masterson getting killed by gold paint; Goldfinger ordering Oddjob to demonstrate his hat and, later, Oddjob killing Tilly Masterson with the hat; Bond's golf game with Goldfinger; Goldfinger murdering the mob boss who won't participate in Operation Grand Slam; Goldfinger hooking Bond up to a device heading for his crotch (they just changed the device to a laser); the seemingly dead people springing to life outside Fort Knox, and much more. A lot of Bond movies have a frustrating habit of leaving out even the stuff that would work well on film. (Like the "he disagreed with something that ate him" scene from Live and Let Die, which was eventually used in License to Kill to make up for the idiocy of leaving it out of the LALD movie.) The writers of Goldfinger clearly made an effort to use most of the best set-pieces from the book, while re-writing Fleming's clunky dialogue and sometimes adding things to make the set-pieces more spectacular, like having Bond actually discover Jill's gold-painted corpse instead of just being told about it later.

And the other thing the script did was eliminate or change nearly all of the things in the novel that don't make sense. Most famously, they changed Goldfinger's plan from something that could never work in a million years (explode a nuke in Fort Knox, steal the gold, and load it onto a bunch of Russian ships that apparently nobody is supposed to notice) to something that is silly but not totally illogical (explode a nuke in Fort Knox and contaminate the gold). Another thing that makes more sense is how Bond meets Goldfinger. In the book, Bond is hired by an American millionaire to find out how Goldfinger is cheating at cards, and it only later turns out, by coincidence, that Goldfinger is also the target of Bond's latest spy mission. In the movie, Bond is assigned by M to keep an eye on Goldfinger in preparation for the mission, and while he's observing Goldfinger, he notices that he's cheating at cards. And the movie creates a more-or-less logical reason for Goldfinger not to kill Bond, whereas in the book, Goldfinger keeps Bond alive for no real reason, and doesn't even know he's a spy until near the end of the book (because it makes total sense that an international criminal mastermind would not do a background check on a guy who's been foiling his evil plans for half the story).

In the novel, Pussy Galore is a lesbian who suddenly falls for Bond near the end, and Tilly Masterson is also a lesbian whose crush on Pussy Galore helps get her killed. (Tilly's lesbianism is the excuse for Fleming/Bond's infamous rant about how lesbianism was caused by the terrible decision to give women the vote. Really.) In the movie, Tilly's death is moved to an earlier point, so she's not hanging around Bond doing nothing for a large portion of the story, and while Pussy Galore is implicitly a lesbian, her falling for Bond is also moved to an earlier part of the story. Bond basically raping Pussy Galore into heterosexuality is hilariously stupid and offensive -- but then, so is the whole Fleming universe -- but it makes more sense than what happens in the book, and it's also a better way for Bond to foil Goldfinger's plan than the message-in-a-bottle gambit from the book. Also, Pussy Galore's dialogue is no longer Fleming's unbelievably bad approximation of how "tough" Americans talk.

The movie is implausible, ridiculous, sexist fun just like the book, but the story makes sense on its own terms, which the novel didn't always. One reason Goldfinger is one of the best of the Bond movies is simply that it's the best of both worlds: it has the Fleming spirit and many of Fleming's scenes, while actually improving on Fleming.