It all started with a throwaway comment from my friend Olivier: “Did you know James Bond is basically useless in Goldfinger?”
I laughed. Goldfinger is widely hailed as one of the franchise’s high points — if not the best 007 film ever made. How could Bond possibly be useless? “No, really, I’m telling you!” (He kept insisting...)
Skeptical, I decided to check for myself. A quick dive into the Internet unearthed a handful of posts and essays reaching the exact same conclusion. Still, I resisted the diagnosis — me, a lifelong devotee of double-o-seven.
I opened Premiere and placed Goldfinger on the operating table…
Committing a theory to paper can be a seductive thing — but putting it to the test is another matter entirely. Faced with the images, one quickly runs into impossible cuts, lines of dialogue spoken by a character you were hoping to erase, or costumes that shatter continuity. I know this all too well: years ago, I condensed Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul into two two-hour films, and some ideas that seemed perfectly clear in the abstract fizzled out after just a few edits.
So I proceeded with care. One scene removed, then two… Then more. And before long, doubt began to take root. Scene after scene, a bittersweet truth emerged: Bond drifted through the film as little more than a luxury extra.
THE PRE-CREDITS: Like in so many Bond films, it’s completely unrelated to the main plot. Next.
MIAMI BEACH: Bond teases Goldfinger, sure, but the man will recover quickly from losing one card game out of a thousand he’s won. Bond’s interference, however, indirectly causes the death of Jill Masterson — who had done nothing to deserve it.
THE GOLF MATCH: A long, pointless duel. When Bond tries to sell Goldfinger his Nazi gold bars — a proposal Goldfinger initially considers — the villain changes his mind after losing, humiliatingly, on the 18th hole. Bond’s only concrete action? Slipping a tracking device into Goldfinger’s car. But it barely matters in the grand scheme — we’ll come back to that…
THE SWISS STOPOVER: Bond watches. It’s Tilly Masterson who initiates the action, attempting to avenge Jill’s death. She misses her shot at Goldfinger, who remains blissfully unaware as he eats an apple.
NIGHT AT THE FACTORY: Same pattern. Bond stands at a distance, watching Operation Grand Slam unfold. Meanwhile, Tilly tries again. Unfortunately for her, Bond is there to stop her — which only leads to them being spotted. The result: a brief, cult-status but ultimately pointless car chase, after which Tilly is killed.
THE BIG LASER: Bond is tied down. A spectator — literally.
GOLDFINGER’S PRIVATE JET: We meet Pussy Galore, leader of Goldfinger’s all-female flying squad. Bond? Just a passenger. He doesn’t spark anything, doesn’t alter anything. In short: our meeting with Pussy could have happened without him.
GOLDFINGER’S RANCH: This long sequence teases the idea that Bond might finally be useful. After being imprisoned, he escapes and hides under the giant Fort Knox model, notebook in hand, jotting notes as Goldfinger lays out his plan to investors. On paper, he’s acting: he slips a note and a tracker into Mr. Solo’s jacket to alert the CIA (via Felix Leiter). In practice, it’s a failure. Goldfinger has Solo killed and his car crushed into a cube — destroying the tracker. Bond is really just there for exposition: to reveal (to us) that the gas is lethal, not just a sleep agent, and that Goldfinger’s plan isn’t to steal the gold at Fort Knox, but to irradiate it so the value of his own gold skyrockets. In my cut, this info is gone — guilty as charged — but it’s still readable: we grasp Goldfinger’s intentions from Solo’s fate. As for the bomb, its only purpose is to be defused…
ROLLING IN THE HAY WITH PUSSY GALORE: A controversial sequence in which Bond forces himself on Pussy — supposedly to “appeal her maternal instincts” and push her to betray Goldfinger. An outdated, uncomfortable scene I was happy to cut. Pussy doesn’t need Bond to realize the obvious: moments earlier, a sleazy gesture from Goldfinger (a loaded caress) is enough to disgust her. That’s when her change of heart happens. And whether or not Bond’s involved, her decisive action — swapping the gas and tipping off the CIA — happens off-screen.
FORT KNOX: A climax full of disappointment, with Bond once again restrained — this time in handcuffs! Helpless, chained to a nuclear bomb! But here’s the wildest part: when Bond tries to defuse the bomb, he hesitates, fumbles, and… at seven seconds to detonation, it’s not even him who saves the day, but an random CIA agent!
EPILOGUE ON THE PLANE: Bond thinks he’s boarding an American flight, but Goldfinger has hijacked it. In the original cut, their scuffle leads to the Man with the Midas Touch being sucked out after shooting a window. In my version, it becomes almost a logical murder-suicide: cornered by his operation’s failure and Pussy’s betrayal — she’s the one piloting — Goldfinger chooses death, taking them both down.
After a quick early cut, this final thirty-minute deconstruction took me months to perfect. I wanted every transition, every piece of music, every sound effect and audio splice, every line moved or removed to serve the new intention. I couldn’t film new scenes — and I flat-out refused to use AI-generated images, not out of principle, but because I wanted to prove that pure editing could sustain Olivier’s theory.
Did I succeed? That’s for you to decide.
The result may feel absurd — and in places, it is on purpose (like in the altered opening credits or the fleeting shot of Sean Connery in a blue terry-cloth playsuit). But this short film was never meant as an ultimate parody. It’s not a YouTube Poop or a random Internet shitpost.
On the contrary, it’s a focused re-reading of the story, centered on Auric Goldfinger and those around him. A narrative where the real hero is Pussy Galore: a strong, independent woman who realizes she’s just a pawn and consciously chooses to act alone to foil a plan that could have made her unimaginably rich — even if it means never achieving her dream.
Without Bond, Goldfinger breathes differently. The story retains a surprising coherence, where supporting characters step into lead roles. Better yet, the actions make sense without male supervision — which, when not useless, was often problematic.
Without Bond, Jill Masterson survives and keeps helping Goldfinger cheat at cards.
Without Bond, Tilly Masterson stays alive because she has no one left to avenge.
Yet, I didn’t remove Bond to “fix” the film, but to show how certain narrative conflicts — often added just to artificially slow the plot — can reveal their own hollowness when they simply pad a tight short film into a flawed feature.
Le Type, August 2025
