Posted on 07/07/2009 4:26:03 PM PDT by BGHater
The character Goldfinger may have been based on a German spymaster who plotted to blow up gold reserves at the Bank of England
THE inspiration for Goldfinger, the arch villain created by Ian Fleming to rival James Bond, could have been a German spymaster who plotted to blow up gold reserves at the Bank of England.
Andrew Cook, a historian who specialises in intelligence affairs, has found new evidence that suggests Auric Goldfinger’s fictional plans to destroy all the gold in Fort Knox may have been based on a conspiracy to bankrupt Britain on the eve of the first world war.
Cook believes Fleming based his villain on Gustav Steinhauer, “the Kaiser’s master spy” who was running a network of German agents in the UK before hostilities broke out in 1914.
Fleming is known to have drawn much of the inspiration for his Bond novels from his work with British naval intelligence.
He published Goldfinger in 1959 and five years later it was adapted as a blockbuster film starring Sean Connery as Bond and Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore, the villain’s personal pilot. Fleming visited the movie set, but died a month before its premiere.
In the film plot, which slightly differs from the novel, Goldfinger, an evil gold smuggler, plans to use a nuclear device supplied by China to increase the value of his own bullion tenfold by detonating it inside Fort Knox, thereby making the US gold supply radioactive for decades.
“The Bank of England plot has been a secret for nearly 100 years and it is only now that we are beginning to uncover the truth,” said Cook.
“If Britain’s Secret Service Bureau had not uncovered the plot and the Germans had succeeded, Britain would almost certainly have lost the first world war.”
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Exploding a dirty bomb in Ft. Knox was the movie version Fleming was already dead when that came out if IRC.
In the book, the plan was to steal the gold/
Good movie though.
Best Bond villain ever. Oddjob too. Connery sealed his ownership of the Bond franchise in this movie, and Honor Blackman was delish as Pussy Galore. The whole Bond motif just crystallized in this film better than in any other in the series.
Something fun to watch for when you catch it on late-night TV or DVD: When Oddjob leaves the body in the Lincoln and lets the big magnet pick it up for crushing, there’s a glimpse of the car’s undercarriage, and you can briefly see that all the mechanicals had been stripped out. I’d imagine that was to economize (why waste a perfectly good engine?) but it might also have been to make for a more satisfying crush.
I want that Lincoln for a coffee table!
best ever is right. the look on bond’s face right after odd job crushes the golf ball in his bare hand is classic.
Blow it up? They’ll sift the rubble and collect it all right back. Dumb idea.
If they can leech gold out of a mountain, they can leech it out of a pile of rubble.
The theme to that was (it seems to me) the best Bond movie theme ever.
This story though, looks to me to be on shaky ground.
Germany would have won the war if the United States hadn’t joined in. By the time the US got in, Russia was out of the war, Italy (talked into joining the allies) was kicked back off the frontier and pushed down deep into its own territory in defensive positions, Romania (similarly suckered in by the British and French) was occupied, the British and French forces were nearly wrecked and had Germany’s undivided attention, and the whole war on the western front was fought on French or Belgian soil.
‘This story though, looks to me to be on shaky ground.’
Lol. But, that wouldn’t sell a book.
That interpretation of WWII seems a bit skew-whiff to me....
Russia was Nazi Germany’s main focus throughout the entirety of the war following the start of Operation Barbarossa (taking up approximately 80% of it’s resources), Italy didn’t join the allies until 1943, Romania was not on the allied side until towards the end when they joined the Soviets, and the war on the ‘Western Front’ was not just fought on French and Belgian soil, it was also fought in Holland, Denmark, Norway and latterly, Germany as well (also Greece if you count the fact that the British fought there as it being part of the ‘Western Front’....)
I can see why that would be, since this topic is about something that happened in WWI.
Oops...
Even so, I dispute that. Germany was essentially starved and blockaded by Britain and France, and they had the limitless manpower reserves of their respective Empires to draw upon. Germany would have lost the war of attrition whether the US entered or not....
The problem for the Central Powers throughout WWI was that they were badly outnumbered; the growing probability of imminent war in the early 20th century led Germany to revise strategy and tactics. Knowing they’d be outnumbered perhaps four to one resulted in emphasis on sheer firepower. British and French armies were shredded by it, and the only reason they stayed in as long as they did was that they believed Germany and Austria were nearly out of manpower; this was in line with official propaganda, particularly in Britain, which insisted (even to this day) that German casualty and KIA rates were comparable, when they were not — until the US entered the war. The French actually figured out the problems with Allied tactics first, and the US (uncharacteristically of course) owes a great big thank you to France for helping train the AEF along the lines that would beat the Germans. Those French rifles they sold to us were POSes though. :’)
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