Goldfinger: Film – Goofups- Revealing mistake: The reflection that Bond sees in the girl’s eye isn’t a mirror image like a true reflection would be.
- Revealing mistake: The car goes off the road at the curve with the oil slick by turning sharply the wrong way, rather by than continuing on a tangent as it should.
- Continuity: The 1964 Lincoln Continental that Oddjob takes to be crushed becomes an engineless 1963 Continental as it is being compacted.
- Continuity: Whenever we’re looking away from the bomb’s countdown timer, it fails to advance as fast as it should, even though from time to time we do hear ticking at the same rate that the counter changes. For example, we see it tick from 010 to 009 and then hear 4 more ticks before it is stopped, but it then displays 007 and not 005.
- Revealing mistake: During the fight with Oddjob in Fort Knox, Bond picks up a stick-like object off the floor as a weapon. The next shot, showing Bond wave the stick and begin to launch it at Oddjob, clearly uses a stunt double, his hair and physical build being different from that of Connery.
- Anachronism: The interior scenes in Pussy Galore’s JetStar are filmed in a sound stage far too large to be the interior this particular aircraft. The JetStar interior barely fits two small seats side-by-side with a tiny isle in between. Additionally, Bond would not be able to stand up-right in the cabin of a JetStar.
- Continuity: When Tilly falls after her fatal encounter with Oddjob’s hat, she lands on her back. When Bond comes over to kneel over her body, it is face down.
- Geographical error: When Leiter contacts M on the green scrambler, the south portico of the White House is shown through a window behind him. There are no structures directly south of the White House to the Tidal Basin except for the Washington Monument.
- Continuity: Goldfinger’s crew uses a giant truck-mounted laser to burn their way through the Fort Knox entrance. Several shots of the truck show the laser beam being moved across the entrance extremely rapidly; however, when these shots are intercut with views of the entrance itself, the beam inches across the entrance door very, very slowly.
- Factual error: The plane’s air pressure gauge drops too far and too fast.
- Revealing mistake: After the Lincoln is crushed, it is gently lowered onto the bed of Oddjob’s Ford Ranchero pickup, which would have crushed it. A ’64 Lincoln weighs close to 5000 lbs, not counting the the extra weight of the gold that was supposed to be in it (or the body… ), and that year Ranchero had a max load weight of approximately 1000 lbs. A mid-sixties Ranchero was built on the Falcon chassis.
- Miscellaneous: When the crushed Lincoln is being lowered into the bed of the ’64 Falcon Ranchero, a protective mat is visible.
- Continuity: In the opening scene, when the attacker is in the bathtub, he pulls 007’s pistol from the shoulder holster hanging on the wall. He is aiming it at 007 when the heater is thrown into the tub. After the subject is electrocuted, 007 is seen walking over to recover his holster. The pistol is still in it.
- Revealing mistake: After being knocked out in his hotel suite kitchen in the Fountainbleu hotel in Miami, Florida, Bond returns to the bedroom where he will discover Jill Masterson painted gold. The room is dark; he must turn on the light to see. But since he’s on a British sound stage, and not really in Florida, and since Sean Connery is British (very Scottish, in fact), he does what comes naturally: flicks the wall switch down to turn the light on (since most wall switches in the UK work that way).
- Factual error: In the Fort Knox vault, the gold is stacked too high to be practical. Given the weight and softness of gold, the lower bars of the stacks would be flattened by the sheer weight of the bars above them.
- Audio/visual unsynchronised: When Auric Goldfinger is talking to Mr Ling about the process of melting down the gold from the car, his lips never move.
- Factual error: At Fort Knox, the sergeant’s stripes on Kisch’s uniform are the type used by the United States Air Force, not the Army.
- Factual error: The U.S. Army Brigadier General is addressed as “Brigadier”; U.S. Army, Air Force and Marine Corps officers of this rank are addressed as “General”, since in the U.S. military it is a General officer’s rank. “Brigadier” is strictly a British or Commonwealth form of address.
- Factual error: The helicopter that delivers Pussy Galore, Goldfinger and the “nuclear device” to the depository has the registration N-ASAZ. Aircraft registrations in the USA haven’t used the “N-and four letters” system (as used in the UK, for instance, with G in place of N) since 1927.
- Continuity: After the soldiers are all knocked out by nerve gas, the procession to the gold depository is led by an army jeep. The jeep shown keeps switching back and forth from a WW2 era jeep to a much later 1950s-style jeep. The trucks also change between shots.
- Continuity: Position of Smithers’s hand/cigar jumps between shots
- Continuity: When James Bond foils Goldfinger’s scheme to cheat at gin rummy, Jill Masterson changes positions between shots. When we see her from behind, she is lying face down. But when we see her from the front, she is lying on her side/back.
- Continuity: When Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus lands at Blue Grass Field, the blonde girl we see getting out of the first Piper is not among the group of pilots who report to Pussy in the next shot. When the girls are dismissed, there are no planes in the background.
- Revealing mistake: During the golf game, Bond is standing to the left and slightly behind Goldfinger. Yet the bar of gold 007 drops lands to Goldfinger’s right. When we see Bond in the next shot, he’s still in his original position.
- Crew or equipment visible: As Bond regains consciousness after being struck by Oddjob, the shadow of the camera and boom moving is visible on the bottom of the cupboards.
- Continuity: When Oddjob uses his hat to severe the statue’s head, the hat is seen to continue flying away from the statue. In the next shot the hat is seen on the ground beside the statue’s head.
- Continuity: Bond walks into Goldfinger’s suite to find Jill Masterson laying on her stomach, talking on the short-wave radio. In the reverse shot, she is on her back.
- Continuity: When the cabin de-pressurizes, one of Goldfinger’s soldiers can be seen on the floor. This suggests that at least a portion of this scene was edited out.
- Continuity: When Felix Leiter and the other agent follow Oddjob and the soon to killed Mobster to the airport, the Ford Thunderbird they are driving has no “fender skirts”, or coverings for the rear wheel openings on some luxury cars. After they loose the signal in Bond’s transponder, they return to Goldfinger’s ranch, and as they pull up by the fence, the T-bird suddenly has fender skirts.
- Revealing mistake: When we see Pussy Galore’s private jetliner in the long shots, the strings that are suspending the model plane are visible
- Continuity: At the Miami resort, when Goldfinger walks towards the card table, on the far left you can see Bond and Leiter standing watching Goldfinger in the background. In a close up shot of Bond and Leiter we see Bond reaching for a towel and putting it on his shoulder, but then in the wide shots there is no towel over his shoulder and he never moves.
- Continuity: When Bond is tracking Goldfinger’s car in Switzerland, the map on his dashboard show’s Goldfinger’s blip moving north from Geneva along a lakeside road, yet the shots of the cars indicate a high mountain pass.
- Continuity: Bond drops a bottle of wine onto the floor after being hit by Oddjob and he falls and lands almost on top of the bottle, but in the next shot it’s a few feet away to his left side.
- Continuity: Before Goldfinger joins his opponent at the card table in Miami, the cards are blue, but when Goldfinger sits down and they begin the game, the cards are red. (There is another deck of cards on the table, also red, but they remain untouched throughout the scene.)
- Continuity: When Bond is listening beneath the model of Fort Knox, just after he is caught by Pussy Galore, his vest has one button undone. But is the next shot, still standing in the same place, the button is done up.
- Geographical error: When Felix and his partner are following Odd Job to the airport, thinking they are tracking Bond, they are supposed to be in Kentucky but palm trees are visible in the background en-route.
- Miscellaneous: In the opening credits, Harold Sakata (Oddjob) is very discreetly projected in Margaret Nolan’s golden body when the credit for “Gert Frobe as Goldfinger” appears.
- Continuity: In the intro scene, while Bond deposits the explosive along the drums labeled ‘Nitro’ you can see that his hands are all grimy. After he climbs back over the wall shortly after and takes off the overalls his hands are clean.
- Continuity: The bomb is disarmed with 007 seconds left on the placed timer with big white numbers. Then, Bond says “Three more ticks and Mr Goldfinger would’ve hit the jackpot.” Originally, the timer would’ve stopped at 003, and the line would make sense, but later it was decided to stop it at 007 instead for a good old Bond joke, and apparently never forgot to delete that line in editing.
- Continuity: When the industrial laser is moving into position while Bond is on the table, the blue lights on it dim and brighten in the close-up while turning completely on and off in the wide shot.
- Revealing mistake: When the “Flying Circus” planes land and taxi to a stop, one can clearly see that the pilot of the nearest plane, who is looking at the camera making sure not to hit it with the wing, is a burly man wearing a blonde wig. It is basically a yellow hat with pigtails.
- Audio/visual unsynchronised: When Goldfinger is at the airport, we see a jet taxiing in the background but hear a piston-engined aircraft.
- Revealing mistake: The wires used to direct the plane Bond is travelling on to meet the US President are visible several times.
- Continuity: In the car chase between Bond and Tilly Masterson, Bond opens the control console hidden beneath the arm rest, you can see that the entire sleeve is black but in the earlier and the following scene Bond’s wearing a brown jacket and a white shirt.
- Continuity: Goldfinger’s Lockheed Jetstar has “Auric Enterprises” written on the nose in the airport shots, but it’s not on the model in the flight shots. (Lockheed had the company names put on the Jetstars during production to remind the workers of the importance of their clients.)
- Continuity: At the Florida hotel Bond is giving Goldfinger orders over the radio system. We see two close-ups of Goldfiger holding the cards and a gold ring is clearly visible on his little finger, left hand. The next two shots of Goldfinger are face on and the ring has moved to the fourth finger, left hand.
- Factual error: The Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami is a crescent shaped building; the guest room hallways are therefore curved, not straight as seen when Bond first approaches Goldfinger’s room.
- Revealing mistake: As the Lincoln Continental supposedly containing Martin Solo’s body is being crushed, we can clearly see that the back seat (where Solo was sitting when he was shot) is empty.
- Revealing mistake: In the last scene with Bond kissing Pussy Galore on the parachute you can see the tan line from Sean Connery’s wedding ring.
- Continuity: When Bond enters Goldfinger’s hotel room in Miami we see that the transmitter is on the table next to Jill. Bond turns it off but when Jill turns around and says, “Who are you?” we see that Bond is too far away from the table to have just turned off the transmitter.
- Continuity: When Bond is knocked out by Oddjob at the hotel, the contents of the fridge are totally different when he regains consciousness.
- Plot hole: After the nerve gas attack on Fort Knox and the surrounding area, Goldfinger’s Grand Slam task force is seen driving past numerous bodies of soldiers apparently dead on the ground. In the storyline, the soldiers are only pretending to be dead in order to lure Goldfinger’s task force to the Depository. While soldiers pretending to be dead might fool Goldfinger’s people, presumably they would notice that stray dogs, birds, squirrels and other wildlife would still be very much alive, indicating that the nerve gas attack had been ineffective.
- Revealing mistake: Right at the end of the car chase between Bond and Tilly Masterson they have descended to the valley but there is a shot inside Tilly’s car which still has snow outside the window.
- Geographical error: When Bond drops Tilly off at the service station she says “Fraulein”. The location however, is in Suisse Romande which is French speaking.
- Factual error: In the opening scene, Bond throws a lamp into a bathtub full of water and kills an enemy inside. Shortly after the man is electrocuted, you hear the electrification of the water stop. However, the power in the building did not short out, which would be required for the lamp in the water to cease electrifying it. If the power to the lights in the room are still on (which they were), so should the power in the broken lamp, continuing to electrify the water.
- Continuity: After the golf duel Goldfinger takes a seat in his car to write a check. After this, Oddjob is crushing a golf ball with his bare hands and then drives away. When the passenger seat is shown, Goldfinger is not in the car.
- Revealing mistake: When Bond first sees golden Jill on the bed she is lying diagonally across the bed with her right foot on the bed and pointed like a ballerina on points. As Bond approaches the bed her right foot is pointing towards the camera. The last shot of Jill’s legs show both her feet hanging over the end of the bed meaning that she has changed position and is now lying straight along the bed.
- Continuity: In the cantina in the pre-credits sequence, Bonita can be seen reflected in the mirror, and a man is lighting a cigarette for her. In the next shot, she storms out of the cantina with no cigarette, and the man has suddenly disappeared.
- Factual error: After the game of golf, Bond attaches a magnetic tracking device to the trunk of Goldfinger’s car, but the bodywork is made of gold (Goldfinger smuggles gold this way) and gold is non-magnetic, so Bond would not have been able to do this.
- Factual error: The jet plane’s window is much too small and narrow for a very large man like Goldfinger to be pulled through.
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- Entry created: December 25, 2006; 15:49; Last modified: August 13, 2009; 21:26
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