18 SEPTEMBER 1964, Page 20

Bond's Back

Goldfingcr. (Odeon, Lei- cester Square, 'A' certi- ficate).

EACH time, in Technicolor and often in close-up, with

a 11 t h e appropriate crunches and all possible immediacy and punch, a foot kicked into a face (this happened twice), a scream- ing man was electrocuted to death (twice again), or, best of all by the sound of it, a man penned inside a burning car was slowly roasted alive, the audience roared its approval, clapping, laughing, cheering its head off. Not just a hooligan patch of it, but more or less the whole cinema. Gold finger, the most overtly fascist of this insanitary series, is with us. Bully for Bond again and the Western way of life.

When anti-Bond heads are counted, they turn out to be precious few, yet I can't help suspecting a good deal of the cheering is hysterically induced and not even spontaneous. The pro-Bond argu- ment runs: it's all fantasy, so what does it matter? Bond's everyone's alter ego, infinitely resourceful, lucky, irresistible. It's a send-up of sophistication, violence, politics, sex, modern manners, a myth born of the particular present. Fascist, my eye: stop fussing.

Right, so I'll stop. My own private notion, anyway, is that it's all put out by cunning Krernlin (or maybe Peking) propagandists, since nothing could better convince the world of our basic nastiness, and get us cheering it on' Not that Moscow's the villain this time, though Gold- finger himself (Gert Frobe) looks like Mr. Khrushchev's twin. Peking's the arch-enemy and Goldfinger's minions are an army of blue- uniformed, yellow-sashed, slipper-shod orientals, led by Odd-job, a mountainous Korean who slices people to death with his hat-brim before you can say knife. (Imagine the uproar if Goldfinger's troops had all been Negroes.) It's Peking, too, that supplies the atomic device (`cobalt and iodine') to make all the gold in Fort Knox radio- active, with economic chaos resulting in the West and Goldfinger's bullion soaring in value.

Guy Hamilton, the director, relies on a well-

tried formula : immensely elaborate sets, spectacularly 'real'—Fort Knox, inside and out; Goldfinger's hide-outs,push-button marvels where walls and windows, maps, models and engines, all slide about; gadgets of death and destruction and communication to tickle the schoolboy scientist in us all—radio receivers and transmit- ters that fit inside a shoe-heel, cars fitted as com- plete armouries; situations seemingly hopeless, as ancient as Pearl White on the railway tracks, and suspense nicely calculated by ticking count- down machines (the atomic device is dismantled only three ticks away from zero, after running for—I think--over 500), or, more crudely, by our physical consciousness of what's coming—a `ray' of incredible power cutting through the metal Bond is strapped to, X-shaped, and creeping with titillating slowness towards his genitals; and the sickly sweet jokes that are part of the formula: pretty, smiling blondes spraying poison gas on to crowds that roll over unconscious (that it turns out to be non-poisonous soporific gas doesn't really rub out the feeling sprayed poison gas tends to arouse), pretty girls killed in various violently sensual ways (one sweats to death under thick gold paint, another gets sliced by Odd-job s hat). Sean Connery is Bond again and, what's oddest of all in the whole odd business, he s