Where to watch Goldfinger (1964)

Trivia & production notes

• Director Terence Young, who helmed the first two Bond films, declined to return for Goldfinger due to a pay dispute in which he was denied a percentage of the film's profits, leading Guy Hamilton to take over the role.
• Goldfinger had a budget of $3 million, equal to the combined budgets of Dr. No and From Russia with Love, and became the first Bond film classified as a box-office blockbuster.
• Guy Hamilton and production designer Ken Adam knew each other from their shared work in Royal Navy intelligence during World War II.
• The film's script fixed a major plot hole from the novel where Goldfinger would physically steal Fort Knox's gold; in the film, he plans to irradiate it with a nuclear device instead.
• Paul Dehn, an uncredited writer brought in to revise the script, was a former Special Operations Executive political warfare officer during World War II.
• Sean Connery never traveled to Miami to film the opening sequences; he was shooting Marnie elsewhere in the United States, so his scenes were shot on a soundstage at Pinewood Studios.
• Ian Fleming visited the Goldfinger set in April 1964 and died just a few months later in August, shortly before the film's release.
• Ken Adam was only allowed to fly over Fort Knox once for reference and observed machine guns on the roof; denied access to the interior, he designed the vault set based on his imagination and knowledge of Bank of England vaults, creating a cathedral-like gold repository.
• The Fort Knox vault set was so convincing that Pinewood Studios stationed a 24-hour guard to prevent the gold bar props from being stolen, and members of the public sent angry letters questioning how a British film unit was allowed inside the actual facility.
• When filming Pussy Galore's Flying Circus gassing soldiers, pilots were instructed to fly above 3,000 feet but violated orders by flying at approximately 500 feet, prompting an angry military response.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Goldfinger (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.