Glad-2

Universal-International studios. Two tough American buddies (Robert Ryan, Anthony Quinn). Sunken treasure off the Caribbean. Plots about scuttled ships and sunken gold. A thuggish sea-captain. Giant squids. A set-piece bar-room brawl. Even voodoo drums. Tacky colour. You can almost picture the lurid cover of the 10-cent paperback novel the film was based on. All that's lacking is a real femme fatale.

Bud Boetticher was a cult director in the Don Siegel/Sam Fuller vein, later acclaimed for the series of sparse but superb western quickies he made in the late 1950s with actor Randolph Scott (Ride Lonesome, The Tall T, Westbound, etc).

Irresistible and well made.

. But worth noting for its star Richard Johnson and director Seth Holt. A former Royal Shakespeare Company actor, Johnson was Bond director Terence Young's original choice to play 007 and might have proved much closer to author Ian Fleming's concept of him. Indeed, Johnson was briefly groomed by the Rank Organisation in the late Sixties as their answer to Sean Connery, hoping to ride the Bond slipstream (but the two films Deadlier Than the Male and Some Girls Do were too cynically packaged to work as either imitation or spoof).

Johnson's brand of worried suavity found a better vehicle here. A minor addition to the murkier side of the genre, it remains most notable for Holt. A former editor, Holt's deft cutting room skills had made two suspense films he directed for Hammer (Taste of Fear and The Nanny) unusually seamless and subtle.

Alas, in Danger Route, even his assured touch failed to enliven an intractable plot about Cross-Channel espionage. But an exceptionally strong support cast - Harry Andrews, Diana Dors and Gordon Jackson - and a certain casual ruthlessness, lift this film above the totally routine. And Carol Lynley and Barbara Bouchet are truly gorgeous.

Trite cynicisms and a trashy title-song date Danger Route unsympathetically. But Holt's admirers will discern enough in its minor virtues to compensate.

The Eon style at its deftest. Director Guy Hamilton tautly steers Sean Connery's inimitable 007 through some of his most memorable encounters: the gold-painted heroine, the Aston Martin car chase, the laser beam, the plot to irradiate Fort Knox. It has the best Bond villain in the eponymous Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) and the best henchman in Oddjob (Harold Sakata).

And the wittiest script. About to be dissected by a pencil-thin ray of scarlet laser-light, Connery demands: "Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr Bond," scoffs Froebe. "I expect you to die!" Like the scene in the mosque in From Russia With Love, this scene is brilliantly written, designed, storyboarded, lit, photographed, edited and scored. If Hitchcock had shot this it every frame would have been analysed.

And the best gadget. As described by Desmond Llewelyn's deadpan Q, the Aston Martin DB5 is of course an outrageous affront to audience credibility. But the subsequent chase through the Pinewood backlot is done with such verve and unabashed conviction that even the most absurd device, the passenger ejector seat, is persuasive.

And the best climax. The choreographed fight in the echoing and cavernous Fort Knox set has a ferociously cool sadism, perfectly offset by the shot in which Oddjob smilingly beckons the battered Connery to get back on his feet.

Goldfinger cleverly builds up character by minor touches. Froebe's furtive, covetous glance at the stacked goldbars inside the vault, his gold-plated Colt.45, his petty vanities in naming his alpine factory Auric Enterprises, his Kentucky stables Auricstud, even labelling the geiger-counter ‘Auricspectrometer'.

And there's minor touches of quirky humour. Oddjob's impassive smile, the matronly Swiss gate-keeper who drops Connery a small curtsy only to later machine-gun the Aston Martin as he makes his escape. And still the best joke in the entire series is in the pre-title sequence where Connery , after sabotaging a Caribbean ammunition dump, nonchalantly unzips his wetsuit to step out in immaculate evening dress, and affixes a carnation to his lapel.

Goldfinger is also composer John Barry's most successful integration with character and action, from the brassy exuberance of the title song to the almost imperceptible base that marks out Oddjob's robotic stride, and the menacing triangles that underscore Goldfinger's sinister Koreran retinue.

True, there are thin bits. The American gangsters, the Sindy Doll pilots. And Honour Blackman is miscast as Pussy Galore. But, there's no doubt, Bond peaked in 1964.