MI6 looks back at the Goldfinger world premiere in 1964, and what the press had to say about Bond`s most popular adventure...

Goldfinger - The Premiere & Press
22nd September 2003

Goldfinger was unveiled to an eager public at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on Thursday 17th September 1964. The Kinematograph Weekly reported on September 24th that "5,000 fans fought the police outside the Odeon Theatre. In the near riots, the massive glass door of the theatre was shattered and police reinforcements had to be sent for."

Although Sean Connery did not attend (he was filming "The Hill" in Spain), Honor Blackman drew large crowds and was nearly swept off her feet by the over-enthusiastic fans and had to be rescued by the police.

Above: Honor Blackman reunited with the Aston Martin DB5 at the recent Bond, James Bond exhibition - photo AP.

Following the premiere, Honor Blackman embarked on a tour of Rank Premiere Showcase cinemas in and around London and similar scenes of Bondmania ensued here and across the country when the Goldfinger road show moved on tour the country, calling at Leicester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow throughout October 1964. Inevitably, Goldfinger shattered UK box office records, leading to United Artists re-issuing "Dr. No" - which raked in staggering figures at the box office. The success was repeated in the States when the film opened there on 21st December 1964, quickly becoming the fastest earning film made to that date. Bond fever was building, and it would be two short years before it hit astronomic proportions with "Thunderball".

What The Critics Said...

The Good

"There was no difficulty in picking out the top release of 1964. Goldfinger stands out as the No.1" - Bill Altria, Kinematograph Weekly

"So Bond is off again; and, as with From Russia With Love, a pre-credits sequence of breathless speed and impudence tips a colossal wink at the audience. After these first five minutes of outrageous violence, callous fun and bland self-mockery, the tone is so firmly set that the film could get away with almost anything... But the real trick of the formula - not, incidentally Ian Fleming's formula at all, but the film's invention - is the way it uses humour. In all his adventures, sexual and lethal, Bond is a kind of joke superman, as preposterously resilient as one of those cartoon cats... Goldfinger really is a dazzling object lesson in the principle that nothing succeeds like excess." - Monthly Film Bulletin

"There is violence a-plenty but the fantasy is so well created that it doesn't sear the mind; it manages to become quite stimulatingly cathartic." - Derek Prowse, The Sunday Times

"This film has everything required for instant and prolonged success. It cannot fail to hit the jackpot... It was not easy to go one better than From Russia With Love but it has been done. Bond's insouciant adventures are even larger than the largest life and death dealt out so liberally throughout is as deadly as can be. The incredible almost impossible plot is carried along from one smashing incident to another and the ability of the more astonishing incidents to provoke admiring laughter as well as chills is a tribute to screenwriting, direction and the stars" - Kinematograph Weekly

The Bad

"When Bond can do anything he loses his point: the film becomes a costly tour de force, a gigantic firework, expensive purposelessness." - Ian Wright, The Guardian

"As the story advances we are amused and excited by the predictability of every situation, and await it like children at a birthday party... This was the first James Bond film I have seen and perhaps the last. There was for me something quite terrifying in the knowledge that an audience could be so easily predicted, that enjoyment involved not even the illusion of a single salutary or admirable sentiment, and that, deep down, as they say, we are all the same" - Mike Sarne, Films and Filming

The Ugly

"Goldfinger is one vast, gigantic confidence trick to blind the masses to what is going on underneath" - The Daily Worker