This was the movie that established James Bond as a global cultural icon. It included many new elements that became signature features of following Bond movies.
Goldfinger premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on 17 September 1964. It recouped its $3 million budget in two weeks and broke box office records in multiple countries around the world. The Guinness Book of World Records listed Goldfinger as the fastest grossing film of all time.
The United States premiere occurred on 21 December 1964, at the DeMille Theatre in New York. The film opened in 64 cinemas across 41 cities and eventually peaked at 485 screens. Demand for the film was so high that the DeMille cinema had to stay open twenty-four hours a day.
The American Film Institute has honoured the film four times: ranking it No. 90 for best movie quote (“A martini. Shaken, not stirred”), No. 53 for best song (“Goldfinger”), No. 49 for best villain (Auric Goldfinger), and No. 71 for most thrilling film.
Also meriting mention are the Aston Martin DB5, replete with gadgets to fend off pursuing villians, and Oddjob, Goldfinger’s henchman who fights with Bond in the vault of Fort Knox. This was seen by many as not just one of the best Bond fights, but also “must stand as one of the great cinematic combats”
Goldfinger has been described as “the most highly and consistently praised Bond picture of them all” and after Goldfinger, Bond “became a true phenomenon.” The success of the film led to the emergence of many other works in the espionage genre and parodies of James Bond, such as The Beatles film Help! in 1965 and a spoof of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1967. Indeed, it has been said that Goldfinger was the cause of the boom in espionage films in the 1960s, so much so that in “1966, moviegoers were offered no less than 22 examples of secret agent entertainment, including several blatant attempts to begin competing series, with James Coburn starring as Derek Flint in the film Our Man Flint and Dean Martin as Matt Helm”.
Goldfinger represents the peak of the series. It is the most perfectly realised of all the films with hardly a wrong step made throughout its length. It moves at a fast and furious pace, but the plot holds together logically enough (more logically than the book) and is a perfect blend of the real and the fantastic.
John Brosnan in James Bond in the Cinema
The success of the film led to Ian Fleming’s Bond novels seeing a boom in popularity, nearly 6 million copies were sold in the United Kingdom in 1964, including 964,000 copies of Goldfinger alone. Between 1962 and 1967 a total of 22,792,000 Bond novels were sold.