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By Jimmy Don Ventura

Movie Critic, Stockton Telegram-Dispatch
Guest Reviewer — CMC Blog

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COLD OPEN: NO WARM-UP LAP REQUIRED

I don’t ease into Goldfinger. I never have. You don’t tiptoe up to a movie like this. You open the door hard, let the hinges complain, and see who flinches. February needed a film with some weight on it, something with chrome, consequences, and a body count that includes at least one innocent automobile. Goldfinger answers the bell like it’s been waiting sixty years for me to ask the question.

I was a boy the first time I saw it, watching on a color television that weighed as much as a washing machine and took just as long to warm up. By the time the opening credits rolled, I already knew this wasn’t going to be some polite English drawing-room mystery. This was a movie that understood spectacle. It understood menace. And most importantly, it understood cars as characters, not props. In Fort Stockton terms, that’s the difference between borrowing a truck and owning one long enough to know which door sticks when it’s cold.

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THE ASTON MARTIN REVEAL: WHEN A CAR BECOMES A CO-STAR

Let’s get the obvious out of the way, because if I don’t, someone at Grounds for Divorce will accuse me of burying the lede. The Aston Martin. The car that launched a thousand model kits, bedroom posters, and lifelong automotive fixations. The Aston Martin DB5, finished in Silver Birch, is not just the most famous Bond car. It may be the most famous movie car, full stop. When it rolls into Q’s lab and the tarp comes off, it’s staged like a religious reveal. Revolving number plates. Machine guns behind the front wings. Oil slick sprayer. Smoke screen. Tire slashers. Bullet-proof rear screen that slides up like a bank vault. You half expect a choir to start singing.

What makes the DB5 work isn’t the gadgetry, though. It’s the confidence. The thing looks expensive standing still. It doesn’t need to shout. It knows you see it. That long hood, the perfect roofline, the stance that says it’s equally comfortable at 30 miles an hour or 130. This was the moment Aston Martin stopped being an insider’s brand and became a cultural object. Ford would buy it years later, sell it years after that, and still never quite own what this movie gave it.

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ODDJOB AND OLD MONEY: THE ROLLS-ROYCE AS THREAT

Now, Bond being Bond, the car doesn’t stay clean for long. The Swiss Alps chase is still a master class in tension without hysteria. No shaky camera nonsense. No overwrought editing. Just speed, geography, and the sense that a mistake here would be permanent. Bond pursuing Oddjob in his rolling monument to wealth and bad intentions, the Rolls‑Royce Phantom III. Let’s talk about that car for a minute, because it doesn’t get enough credit.

The Phantom III isn’t flashy. It’s imposing. Tall, formal, almost funereal. It moves like it expects traffic to part out of respect. Goldfinger uses it the way old money always has, as a signal. He’s not just rich. He’s insulated. And then there’s the twist, because the Phantom is literally stuffed with gold, smuggled inside the body panels like some grotesque mechanical piñata. It’s a wonderful visual metaphor. Wealth carried by wealth, arrogance layered on top of arrogance. Oddjob driving it just adds another note of menace, like a bulldog chauffeuring a bank.

And yes, before anyone writes in, I know the Phantom wasn’t exactly nimble in the Alps. That’s part of the fun. The DB5 dances. The Rolls lumbers. You can feel the weight difference even through the screen.

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THE LINCOLN CONTINENTAL: A SACRIFICIAL SLAB

Then there’s the scene that still makes car people wince. Mr. Solo, having made the mistake of thinking he was smarter than Goldfinger, finds himself chauffeured in a Lincoln Continental. Nocturne Blue, slab-sided, dignified, and brand new. The kind of car that in 1964 meant you had arrived somewhere important and intended to stay awhile. It’s a perfect choice for a man who thinks he’s negotiating from a position of strength.

The crusher scene is pure cinema cruelty. Watching that Lincoln get fed into the jaws like a sacrificial offering is genuinely upsetting if you have even a trace of empathy for machinery, much less luxury Blue Oval. Now, let’s address the mechanical elephant in the room. The Lincoln that gets crushed is not the same car that drove into the yard. That honor went to a disguised 1963 model, de-contented and painted to match, presumably so the production didn’t have to explain to Ford why a brand-new flagship sedan was being turned into modern art. Even then, the physics are… generous. A five-thousand-pound Lincoln does not neatly cube up and get hauled away like last week’s refrigerator in the business endow a new Ford Ranchero. But movies aren’t documentaries, and Goldfinger earns the right to ask us to look the other way. Barely.

DETROIT’S HANDSHAKE WITH HOLLYWOOD

Ford’s presence in this film is impossible to ignore, and I’m convinced there was a check involved. The Ford Mustang Convertible driven by Tilly Masterson was brand new when the cameras rolled. Barely off the showroom floor. That chase, with the Mustang pursued by the DB5, feels like a deliberate handoff. Old-world European sophistication meets new American confidence. 

The Mustang is lively, a little reckless, and perfectly cast. It’s also worth noting that this wasn’t just any Mustang. This was a convertible, white, and shot in a way that made half the audience want to find a dealer the next morning.  Roger over at Frontier Ford admitted that the day after Goldfinger debited at the Bijou the list of buyers wanting a new Mustang as soon as they could get one was longer than one of Brother Bob’s sermons, the deposits stronger than the tithes that followed.

The FBI agents roll around in new Thunderbirds, further padding Ford’s résumé. Lincoln is represented repeatedly, even if one of them meets an unfortunate end. A Country Squire wagon ferries guests around Goldfinger’s Kentucky operation, all woodgrain dignity and American excess. If you’re keeping score, that’s Mustang, Thunderbird, Lincoln, and Country Squire all on screen, and all looking exactly like Dearborn would want them to.

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THE MERCEDES MOMENT: RESPECTABILITY ON FOUR WHEELS

There’s also the Mercedes‑Benz 190, which shows up doing what Mercedes sedans have always done best in movies, existing as a quiet symbol of European respectability and engineering sanity amid chaos. It doesn’t need a spotlight. It just needs to be there.

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THE PLOT: AUDACITY WITH A STRAIGHT FACE

Plot-wise, Goldfinger is the film where Bond grows teeth. The stakes are larger. The villain is more theatrical. The plan is audacious to the point of lunacy. Irradiate the gold at Fort Knox to increase the value of Goldfinger’s own holdings. It’s brilliant in its cruelty, and absurd in a way that only works because the movie commits fully. Sean Connery’s Bond is at peak confidence here. Not invincible, but unflappable. He gets captured. He gets threatened. He gets strapped to a table with a laser aimed squarely at his future prospects, and still finds time for sarcasm.

And yes, the cars matter to the plot. They’re not decorations. The DB5 saves Bond’s life. The Rolls moves the gold. The Lincoln becomes a warning. The Mustang becomes a moment of vulnerability. Each one does a job, like characters in a well-run small town. You don’t ask why they’re there. You know why they’re there.

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THE CORGI INTERLUDE: BIRTHDAYS AND BIAS

Somewhere around the midpoint of the film, I always go down my own rabbit hole, because that’s part of the ritual. I was gifted a Corgi scale model of the DB5 by an aunt who, for reasons never fully explained, favored me over my cousins. They all got Monkeemobiles for their birthdays. I got Bond. This caused friction at family gatherings that lasted years. I still have the DB5. The cousins all had their Monkeemobiles up on jack stands before the last of the cake was eaten. Draw your own conclusions.

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FINAL REEL: WHEN A MOVIE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT IT IS

Watching Goldfinger now, decades later, the thing that strikes me most is how assured it is. It knows exactly what kind of movie it’s making. It doesn’t apologize. It doesn’t hedge. It understands that glamour and menace can coexist, that humor doesn’t undercut danger, and that a car can tell you more about a character than a page of dialogue.

JIMMY DON’S VERDICT  🔫🔫🔫🔫🔫

By the time the credits roll, you realize you’ve been watching a template being written in real time. Every Bond film that followed is in conversation with this one, whether it admits it or not. Every movie car that aspired to greatness has had to measure itself against that Silver Birch DB5.

So here’s the verdict from Fort Stockton’s folding chair critic. Goldfinger gets five out of five Walther PPKs. Not because it’s perfect, but because it knows exactly what it is and never lets go of the wheel. The cars alone would earn it a high score. The fact that the rest of the movie keeps up is just proof that sometimes, when everything lines up just right, cinema can feel as solid and inevitable as a well-built machine idling at the curb, waiting for you to get in.

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