Examining the Roots of Goldfinger
As Fleming settled into a new formula for his Bond novels after Diamonds Are Forever, he seemed to adhere to the familiar recipe for a lucky marriage from the Victorian Era: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.”
The Bond novels always had a reputation for being a fashionable shade of blue, although the timing was entirely understandable. Fleming's Casino Royale arrived in bookstores nine months ahead of the premier issue of Hugh Hefner's Playboy Magazine, at a moment when work was feverishly underway to develop a safe and effective oral contraceptive.
Where the Clubland heroes of Ian Fleming’s youth might have celebrated the successful conclusion of a case by guiding a very special young lady around a dance floor, Fleming’s hero ushered his lady of the moment toward the bedroom, even if the pair had met only recently, and the case wasn’t even quite over yet. Although when read today, Fleming’s measured descriptions of Bond’s romantic interludes can suggest a bodice-ripper romance written by an octogenarian dowager, the books were once considered fairly racy.
In From Russia, With Love, the imperiled princess and the dragon from the timeless fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” provided the dose of antiquity for his new formula, while other plot-points and characters hinted at another fairy tale altogether, one which, if not exactly brand-new, had been brought to the screen only a few years earlier by Walt Disney. Something that was unabashedly borrowed was a plot device from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, a 1946 film in which Cary Grant convinces Ingrid Bergman to climb into bed with enemy agent Claude Rains. Fleming acknowledged the debt to Hitchcock by embedding the word “notorious” three times in the text of From Russia, With Love, all within the introductory section where a plan to have an attractive young cipher clerk slip into James Bond's bed, is hatched and approved.
In his follow-up, Dr. No., Fleming builds his story on the bedrock of the classic tales of Theseus and the Labyrinth and the sacrifice of Andromeda, while simultaneously borrowing the outline of Disney’s recent live-action adventure, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The trace-evidence for the latter source is acknowledged by the author when he has Bond burst into song as he first spies Honey, and then battle a giant squid with a knife and a spear near the end. In addition, Fleming names his villain "Julius," (the English form of "Jules") and sneaks "Nautilus" into the narrative as the name of the magazine which Honey consults to learn which shells are most valuable.
Judged alongside its two immediate predecessors, Goldfinger can seem a different kettle of fish. Although the story may rest on the foundation of the classic fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin,” (Goldfinger is a wee red-haired man who grants golden wishes and revs up a particularly sinister spinning wheel), nothing stands out as having been borrowed from any recent motion picture. Nothing, that is, unless we consider the case for the horror film Night of the Demon, released in the UK a few months before Fleming set to work on his first draft of Goldfinger.
Night of the Demon (released in the US as Curse of the Demon) was directed by Jacques Tourneur from a script written by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett, based on a 1911 story called “Casting the Runes.”
I decided to take a closer look at the film after seeing a clip of Niall MacGinnis as the diabolical Dr. Karswell on YouTube, in which the Irish actor embodies the sort of supercilious self-proclaimed authority that would have made him a natural for the role of Auric Goldfinger, as written by Fleming - if only MacGinnis had been much, much shorter. On the other hand, as Walt Disney was currently demonstrating with his live-action production Darby O’Gill and the Little People, size was often simply a matter of perspective.
After finally getting a chance to see Night of the Demon in its entirety a few years ago I was struck by how much it has in common with Goldfinger, considering the fact that it has nothing at all to do with plundering the depository at Fort Knox, or even with gold per se.
The horror film does, however, delve deeply into the matter of coincidence. A psychic debunker from America, Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), is thrown together with the story’s love-interest Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins), through the happenstance of seating arrangements on a transatlantic flight. He next has a (supposedly) unplanned meeting with the villainous Karswell at the British Museum, where they discuss the very nature of “coincidence.”
Late in the film Holden secretly prowls around Karswell's ornate mansion (the handiwork of longtime Bond production designer Ken Adam) only to have his investigation interrupted by a spooky cat.
If little of this rings a bell with fans of the film version of Goldfinger, rest assured that it all connects neatly with events in Fleming’s novel, which gets underway with a chance encounter in an airport lounge and is famously divided into sections named “Happenstance,” “Coincidence," and "Enemy Action.” Fleming also includes an incident in which a pesky cat observes Bond’s stealthy reconnaissance at Goldfinger’s country house. Being Auric Goldfinger’s pet it is, of course, a ginger cat.
Happily, it is possible to watch the Tourneur film on YouTube for free (Try searching for it under the American title: Curse of the Demon) and note not only the bits that may have influenced Fleming’s novel, but a few scenes that seem to predict touches which were added to the movie version of Goldfinger.
The film opened in England a few months before Fleming began writing his latest thriller. Of course Fleming may not have seen the film, in which case any resemblence is merely a spooky coincidence.