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February 11, 2008
Hey, guess what I watched this weekend? That old chestnut James Bond movie “Goldfinger” which I first saw in 1965 (when I was 15) and which is a great movie if you are interested in cars from that era.
Of course, everyone is familiar with the silver Aston Martin DB5, armed to the teeth and the most famous of Bond cars. Equally famous is the yellow and black 1937 Rolls Royce Phantom III Sedance de Ville which Goldfinger has fabricated in gold and then driven to Switzerland to have melted down.
But how about the white 1965 Ford Mustang convertible which gets in a driving duel with Bond in his DB5 on alpine roads with hairpin turns? It was Mustang’s debut on the silver screen. Or the white 1964 Ford Thunderbird which CIA agent Felix Leiter and his partner drive around?
Watching the Bond movies now, as I have occasionally with my 14-year old stepson Pat, they seem more quaint than cutting edge, more comic book than real.
But to an adolescent then (and now), it was mesmerizing.
The success of the Bond movies, especially the first three – “Dr. No,” “From Russia With Love,” and “Goldfinger” were partly due to the inimitable Sean Connery who, as a Scot from the wrong side of the railroad tracks is the only Bond who seems to have been able to give and take a beating, and partly due to the exotic locales – Jamaica, Istanbul (where Bond has figs and yoghurt for breakfast, foods no one had heard of back in the 1960s), Venice, Miami Beach, Switzerland and Kentucky.
Other gorgeous vehicles in Goldfinger include a red 1964 Ford Country Squire station wagon and a 1964 Lincoln Continental convertible sedan.
Then there is the Lincoln Continental sedan that Oddjob uses to drive a mobster to “the airport.” Instead he shoots him and delivers the body and car to a scrap yard which proceeds to crush the car into a cube. The cube is then deposited onto the flatbed of a green 1964 Ford Ranchero – which in real life would have been crushed by the load!
And in the background all through the movie, all sorts of cars and trucks so remote from today they might as well be horse-drawn carriages.
- Peter C. T. Elsworth
Posted by Peter C. T. Elsworth 
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