I threw some shade at James Bond movies the other day, so I thought I ought to mention my favorite Bond movie, the first 007 mega-hit from 1964, Goldfinger.

It’s the only Bond film that remains roughly faithful to its Ian Fleming source novel, though it still takes plenty of liberties, including changing the villain’s motivation for his raid on Fort Knox.

If you try to analyze its plot, you’ll find that it really doesn’t make any sense, at least no more sense than any of the other 007 flicks, but you probably won’t notice most of the plot holes on first viewing, and on subsequent viewings you’ll most likely decide that they don’t matter, as the movie simply flies by with one high point following another, and everything tied together with one of John Barry’s best film scores.

Here’s one of my favorite scenes, where Bond (the great Sean Connery, and the best Bond) visits Q (the incomparable Desmond Llewelyn)  to receive the gadgets he’s going to need to fulfill his mission.

Here’s how Steven Jay Rubin describes the Aston Martin in his James Bond Movie Encyclopedia:

An Aston Martin was originally introduced in Ian Fleming’s 1960 Goldfinger novel, but it was a low-tech DB3 with just a few secret compartments and a homing device. But when it came time for 007 producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to adapt the novel, fresh from their success with the rigged briefcase in From Russia with Love, they were ready to introduce the ultimate gadget: a car with much more elaborate upgrades.

Buying three silver cars from the Aston Martin plant in England, production designer Ken Adam and special effects supervisor John Stears went to work, taking the cue from the checklist of modifications presented in the screenplay by Q (Desmond Llewelyn): 1) revolving license plates, valid in all countries; 2) bulletproof front, side, and rear windows; 3) audiovisual reception on the dashboard, tied to a magnetic homing device—with a range of 150 miles—placed in the car 007 is tailing (a device that predated modern car GPS capability by nearly forty years); 4) defense mechanism controls built into the car’s armrest, including left and right front-wing machine guns, smoke screen and oil slick ejectors, and a switch to raise the rear bulletproof screen; 5) electrically operated and retractable tire shredders, built into the wheel hubs; and 6) a passenger ejector seat activated by a red button hidden atop the gearshift.

The special effects department gave these modifications an assist. The machine guns were actually thin metal tubes activated by an electric motor connected to the car’s distributor. Acetylene gas (the kind used in a blowtorch) was discharged into the tubing to give the impression of the guns firing. Insert shots of actual machine guns were also used.

The tire shredder, or “chariot scythe” (named for the same device on Messala’s chariot in Ben Hur) was really an enormous screw knife welded to a spare knock-on wheel nut. The car had to be stopped to exchange the nut, but thanks to cinematographer Ted Moore’s photography and Peter Hunt’s editing, the finished film shows it emerging automatically from the hub center.

Bond’s 1960s-era GPS, which allows him to track Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), was another non-working feature that appears in the film via an insert shot, showing the lighted map, its dialing feature, and the moving blip that indicates the position of Goldfinger’s Rolls. The same device is deployed in Kentucky by CIA agent Felix Leiter (Cec Linder).

The ejector seat worked, but it was more a prop than part of the real Aston Martin. The actual seat came from a fighter plane. It was spacious and could be mounted only immediately before the actual shot, in which one of Goldfinger’s Chinese guards is thrown through the car’s roof. As in a plane, the seat was triggered by compressed air cylinders. For close-ups of the car’s interior, the air-powered device was replaced by a non-ejecting passenger seat.

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