Goldfinger, Auric

For gold the Spaniards eradicated the ancient civilization of the Peruvian Incas Pizarro disavowed any mission to convert the heathens to Christianity, saying coldly and simply 1 have come to take from them their gold. For love of gold, settlers in the nineteenth-century New World met dusty deaths in the American West. In Auric Goldfinger, James Bond faces a mixture of Midas and Polymnestor, alive and well and hungry for the vaults of Fort Knox. 

In the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger, the arch-villain Auric Goldfinger tries to detonate a nuclear weapon inside Fort Knox to make the U.S. gold supply radioactive in order to increase the value of his own gold horde. Apparently, novelist Ian Fleming knew there is only one stable isotope of gold. 

This is only unusual because there have been so many great Bond villains. Auric Goldfinger set the standard for most of what followed. He even got what may still be the most famous one-liner a villain has spouted in any Bond film, when he answered Bond s question, Do you expect me to talk with, No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die. But Goldfinger wasn t cool like Bond. A Jack Nicholson might take over a Batman movie, hut no one was going to distract us from Sean Connery. 

The point is that the category of the Bond villain has become more important than the actual villains. I would argue that there are only four Bond villains of note Dr. No, Auric Goldfinger, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and whoever you liked enough to make number four. (There have also been memorable henchmen besides the aforementioned Onatopp, one could add Oddjob and Jaws, along with one other I will discuss shortly.)... 

At this point, the Bond movies were following the plot of the novels with relative fidelity, and the idea of a Bond villain had yet to be clearly established. With the subsequent Goldfinger, new patterns were set in motion. Auric Goldfinger remains to this day the ultimate Bond villain he is present throughout the film, he has several key scenes with Bond, and he has a plan to take over the world. 

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