For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond

Music is a core component of any James Bond film. In addition to providing a vital tool for synergic marketing and cross-promotion, the soundtrack highlights and extends the various strands of the Bond narrative “formula”—those elements of plot and packaging that remain pleasurably familiar throughout the series, but also offer enough scope for variation to keep new films feeling fresh. Music not only forms a core part of the Bond “brand,” but is also used within the narrative to articulate and exaggerate the series’ exotic locations, romance, suspense, and action, and the traits of both new and recurring characters (Mera 7-8; Smith, “Unheard” 100-2). These strong links between the sound of the series and its characterization, style, and story mean that music is also implicated in the Bond films’ problematic identity politics (Haworth 117-9). Bond stories tend to employ difference as a reductive tool for characterization; a tendency to which the sexually, ethnically, racially, and/or ability-coded deviance of villains, and the feminine charms of the passive, disposable “Bond Girl” bear frequent witness.

My focus here is on the interplay of music with the representation of women in Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton 1964), the first film in which the combined elements of the Bond formula appear in their definitive form. As well as the girls, guns, and gadgets we expect from the typical Bond storyline, the film also includes the first fully-realized example of the series’ title sequences, where the credits appear after Maurice Binder’s gun barrel sequence and an action-heavy teaser segment, and are accompanied by spectacular visuals and a tailor-made title song sung by a well-known and suitably glamorous artist. Goldfinger’s title sequence is significant: its musical and visual motifs spill over into the film’s narrative proper and have the potential to create spaces within which female desire and agency might be articulated. The extent to which these musically-marked spaces disrupt the prevailing order becomes clear when considering the overall scoring of the franchise: a sound representative of, and belonging to, Bond himself.

THE MEN WITH THE MIDAS TOUCH: SCORING BOND

Bond soundtracks typically sit at the intersection of two cinematic traditions, combining the extensive orchestral scoring established during the studio era with original popular music that keeps pace with changing tastes. Behind this signature sound was British composer John Barry, who assisted Monty Norman in scoring Dr. No (Terence Young 1962) and went on to provide incidental music and title songs for a further 11 Bond films. Barry’s Bond scores combine jazz-inflected big band brass and sweeping, romantic string lines with classic song writing skills that continue to provide a template for contemporary musicians working on the series.

The Bond sound is dominated by music that centers on the title character. Jeff Smith describes Barry’s musical Bond formula as comprising of four discrete (though musically linked) and flexible elements: the famous “James Bond Theme” (henceforth “Theme”); “007,” a march often heard during action sequences; a title song that also provides the basis for cues within the orchestral score; and a recurring motif associated with Bond’s primary adversary (101-2). Barry’s musical universe is designed primarily to reinforce Bond’s own supremacy. Cues most commonly act as a means of highlighting Bond’s presence, his positioning within exotic locations or tense situations, or his own perspective on events or characters, which work to align the experiences of the audience with the hero. This includes aspects of the soundtrack associated with female characters, which, regardless of their thematic basis, most commonly align themselves with Bond’s view of women as potential conquests or adversaries. An obvious example can be found in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter Hunt 1969), where Bond is disguised as the chaste, bookish Sir Hilary Bray, but a florid and seductive saxophone cue reveals his underlying interest in a bevy of Blofeld’s beautiful “Angels of Death.” Music like this is typically part of the film’s—or Bond’s—discourse about these women, and therefore acts to curtail, rather than create, female agency.

Within this overarching musical formula, the “Theme” acts as both a stylistic anchor and a basis for musical development. Its tightly constructed set of memorable “hooks” provide the stimulus behind many other motifs, as well as material that features explicitly in several title songs. It is also a highly effective and quickly established aural signifier of the Bond persona—an “ownership” of musical material that is immediately established in Bond’s first scene in Dr. No, where his “Bond. James Bond.” introduction is synchronized with the “Theme’s” appearance on the soundtrack. The “Theme’s” particular combination of catchy musical features and contextual associations mean it can function both as a distinctive, flexible marketing tool, and as an easily referenced element within the narrative fabric and standardized “packaging” of the Bond film: it represents the sound of Bond himself, and is a crucial tool in promoting his particular brand of masculinity.

Goldfinger is no exception to this franchise-wide use of the “Theme,” or indeed to a reading of Barry’s scores that emphasizes their primary correlation with the eyes and ears of Bond. The film’s pre-credits sequence is typical in this regard. Bond swims ashore in an unnamed coastal location, destroys a heroin processing plant, canoodles with a double-crossing dancer, and fights off the thug who ambushes him in her dressing room. As Bond leaves, the slam of the door ushers in the start of Goldfinger’s title sequence. Music is used to emphasize Bond’s position at the heart of this compressed dramatic arc. The sequence is dominated by material from the “Theme,” appearing in a variety of guises to accompany and create tension (its chromatic bass line cycles throughout suspenseful sections), mimic action (brass stabs play during fights, the pace increases as Bond starts to run), reinforce location (an “exotic” guitar variation plays inside the bar), and underline humor (high, sustained strings highlight the reveal of Bond’s under-wetsuit dinner jacket). Bond’s experience is stressed throughout this sequence, reassuring the viewer that the film offers more of the same hero who featured in Dr. No and From Russia with Love (Terence Young 1963). It would therefore seem to set the scene for a title sequence that continues this brand reinforcement—but while Goldfinger’s titles do conform partially with this model of masculinized Bond-centricity, they also start to disturb it, setting up a complex series of interrelated audiovisual signifiers that have far-reaching implications.

“BEWARE OF THIS HEART OF GOLD”: FEMALE VOCALITY IN THE TITLE SEQUENCE

Robert Brownjohn’s celebrated title sequence for Goldfinger projects scenes from Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger across the human canvas of a bikini-clad, gold-painted woman. Like many Bond titles, Goldfinger reinforces the idea of women as conquerable and fetishized signifiers of difference, giving its golden girl anonymity via her painted body and expressionless face that turns her into a literal trophy. However, this analysis of the titles is heavily biased towards the visual, ignoring not only the music and lyrics of “Goldfinger,” but also the powerful, distinctive sound of the woman who gives voice to them—an audio-visual reading of the sequence that mirrors elements within its creation, where Barry and Brownjohn viewed each other’s partially-completed work during production (Fiegal 136-7).

The foregrounding of music and sound within a reading of Goldfinger’s titles undermines a straightforward understanding of the sequence as reductively misogynist: it draws out significant similarities between the film’s construction of both Bond and the villain; it has the potential to give voice to the silent, passive woman of the visual track; and it introduces the star persona of Shirley Bassey. Whenever “Goldfinger” material is heard in Barry’s orchestral score it articulates a complex series of connections between Bond and Auric Goldfinger, and also conjures the specter of the woman who sings about them. This overtly polysemic aspect of Barry’s “Goldfinger” theme is relatively atypical of classical film scoring models, as Smith notes (115-7). Explaining this lack of musical integration and “unity,” via a discussion of the blockbuster structures of Bond films and their position as part of a self-referential franchise, Smith also draws attention to the ways in which these overlap in the signification and “ownership” of material from the title song that complicate the film’s approach to characterization and identity.

The first of these “complications”—the similarities between Bond and his primary adversary—is one that applies to many of the films, and a majority of Fleming’s source novels. A tense, suspenseful Bond story requires a villain (almost always male) who is a convincing match to the hero’s own prowess, and the narrative becomes a battle for supremacy waged not only along the axis of “good” and “evil,” but also along the lines of sex, violence, intelligence, class, money, and power. Both Bond and Goldfinger are dangerous, persuasive, greedy, and egocentric. Bond’s Queen-and-country motivation is therefore key in distinguishing his violent masculinity from that of Goldfinger; a pragmatic justification of attitude and behavior that is further reinforced through the construction of the protagonist’s (hetero)sexuality.

Both Bond and Goldfinger “consume” women in a way that serves to highlight their characterization as strong, powerful, and selfish men. But while Bond’s voracious sexual appetite is used (not unproblematically) to valorize his masculinity as a virile and irresistibly attractive “ladies man,” Goldfinger’s attitude towards women is seen as a perverse extension of his warped personality, thematizing his gold-lust and desire for wealth. Thus he “likes to be seen with” the beautiful Jill Masterson but has no sexual interest in her, until he avenges her dalliance with Bond by painting her with gold, skin-suffocating paint and displaying her corpse as both a trophy and warning. Fleming’s novel is even clearer about Goldfinger’s deviant consumption of women, as Jill’s sister Tilly describes to Bond: “He has a woman once a month […] He hypnotizes them…he paints them gold […] Jill told me he’s mad about gold. I suppose he sort of thinks he’s—that he’s sort of possessing gold. You know—marrying it” (230).¹

Goldfinger’s title sequence takes its inspiration from the striking image of Jill’s golden corpse, reinforcing the idea of a woman being a submissive and spectacular trophy. In opening with projections of Goldfinger and then Bond’s face over the girl’s body, it also reinforces the connections between these two men, and especially their relationships with women. It thereby highlights Bond’s own attitude towards the seduction of women as often aggressive, emotionally detached, and with little thought for anyone but himself; a point of comparison between Bond and Goldfinger also highlighted in Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse’s lyrics, which warn any “golden girl” to beware the “cold” heart and “web of sin” of the “man with the Midas touch.”

In addition to these visual and lyrical comparisons, “Goldfinger” also heavily references music associated specifically with Bond, both in the construction of its melodic motifs and through direct quotations from the “Theme.” Its opening four-note chromatic bass line loop acts as “Goldfinger’s” section bridge and plays throughout the lengthy and dramatic outro, where high trumpets also quote the melody from the big band-style swing break section of the “Theme”—Bond’s music is also at least partially Goldfinger’s, and vice versa. This provides Goldfinger’s score with an element of structural unity and “Bond-ness,” and means that the title song can be used flexibly in scenes featuring Bond and/or Goldfinger to highlight their positioning as closely matched adversaries. But complicating matters here is the sound and implied presence of the vocalist: not just a physically absent singer who balances out the mute figure of the visual track, but a strong, identifiable woman who gives voice to Newley and Bricusse’s words of warning.

The aural presence of this singing body both intensifies and challenges the visual and lyrical elements of the “Goldfinger” sequence. The singing voice represents a physicality and self-produced “excess” that transcends the tightly policed (if spectacular) visual boundaries in place, where the woman’s body is rendered mute and static by her gold paint, fragmented by the tight camerawork, and overlaid with Brownjohn’s projections. As demonstrated by the film musical, song has affective potential, powerful emotional resonance, and strong links with the persona of the onscreen singer (Laing 7). “Goldfinger” implicates no single character as the source of its lyrics, therefore this emotional resonance is instead transferred to the film’s women more broadly. This intensifies the meaning of the words, casting the storyteller-vocalist in the additional roles of victim and survivor (of Goldfinger and, by implication, Bond). Although she sings of suffering and of the power of men, the vocalist retains the agency of the survivor: she is a woman who desires to tell her story and vocalize her experience, which suggests a possibility of reading the imagery of the sequence against the grain.

However, it is also possible to argue that the female voice of “Goldfinger” becomes just another vehicle for misogynist fetishization. Scholars like Kaja Silverman have argued that commercial cinema has a tendency to confine significant, authorial episodes of female vocality to closely defined and guarded “textual space” (56-7) where its effects can be easily exploited but also contained; a maxim that would seem to apply in a textbook-fashion to the closed-off audio-visual spectacle of a Bond title sequence. But the containment of vocality is only partially present here, given the way in which Goldfinger’s titles are used to introduce the primary themes (in both a general and specifically musical sense) throughout the film’s narrative proper: the “Goldfinger” sequence is the narrative and characterization of much of the film itself, and the echoes of its female voice reverberate throughout. While the woman’s warning cannot prevent the deaths of Jill or Tilly Masterson—which of course, are pre-ordained by the demands of the Bond narrative for sacrificial victims, additional motivation for the hero, and multiple conquests—it does lend those deaths additional poignancy and resonance, with “Goldfinger” acting not just to articulate the presence of the men who cause them, but also the female subjectivity of their victims.

Further intensifying the signification and disruptive potential of the female voice in “Goldfinger” is the performance of Shirley Bassey, the vocalist most closely associated with the franchise. “Goldfinger” was the first of several Bond songs recorded by Bassey, who also provided vocals for “Diamonds are Forever,” “Moonraker,” and a version of “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (originally intended as the theme for Thunderball [Terence Young 1965]). As became common practice, Bassey brought a distinctive star presence to the Bond soundtrack that provided additional marketing potential, as well as fitting Barry’s own musical vision: “Shirley was great casting for ‘Goldfinger.’ Nobody could have sung it like her. She had that great dramatic sense” (Barry qtd. in Fiegal 136). Bassey’s exacting enunciation and clipped consonants, carefully controlled but ever-present and expressive vibrato, and dramatic performance style ensures her voice is instantly recognizable, challenging the gold-painted anonymity of her visual counterpart in Goldfinger’s titles. Her thoroughly-trained voice and technically precise singing is emotionally communicative and highly personal, but is also atypical of the broad stylistic conventions of lighter “pop” recording, bringing a sense of the operatic, or at least the theatrical, into much of her work. This not only makes her an appropriate choice for the full orchestral sound and dramatic musical styling of “Goldfinger” (Fiegal 143), but also enables her to fit vocally as well as socially into the cultural space occupied by the prima donna, and more particularly into the exaggeratedly dramatic and fiery stereotype of the diva (Cowgill and Poriss xxxiv-xxxv).

As Ros Jennings notes, Bassey’s life and career have followed a well-trodden path to divahood (37-8). Celebrated now as a powerfully voiced, occasionally tempestuous, and always fabulously glamorous establishment figure, Bassey’s emergence into 1950s British cultural life was a rags to riches story that pitted burgeoning talent and tenacity against the hardships of life as a mixed-race teenage mother from Cardiff’s docklands. She was a regular feature in the UK charts and gossip columns by the early 1960s, and her Bond performances bring into play the diva’s complex, feminized (and sexualized) mix of despair, tragedy, celebration, and survival (Koestenbaum 133). Bassey’s star persona therefore extends and reinforces the complex series of gendered relationships already present in the title sequence, her celebrated difference and resistant divahood making her powerful vocal contribution to “Goldfinger” one that resists any conventional understanding of the boundaries between soundtrack and story (an overlapping of texts and identities that can also be seen in Bassey’s adoption of elements of the “Bond Girl” archetype within her own star image).

Bassey adds more than a “voice” to “Goldfinger’s” anonymous golden girl; she brings her own identifiable stardom to bear on the sequence and thereby adds weight and emphasis to the title song’s tale of female experience, solidarity, and warning. This striking female voice undermines any reading of Goldfinger as a score purely about Bond, or even Bond and Goldfinger. Goldfinger also offers numerous moments of resistance to the all-encompassing dominance of the hero and villain; moments where textual spaces for female agency are opened up and exploited by the soundtrack.

“YOU’RE A WOMAN OF MANY PARTS, PUSSY”: MUSIC AND FEMALE CHARACTERIZATION

The rest of Goldfinger’s soundtrack also conforms to and challenges the expectations of a typical Bond film. Three women occupy significant roles in the plot: Jill Masterson (Goldfinger’s secretary, and the gold-painted victim discussed above), her sister, Tilly (killed by Oddjob whilst trying to avenge Jill’s death), and Pussy Galore (a talented pilot, who plays a key role in Operation Grand Slam—first in Goldfinger’s employ, and then as a double agent who switches loyalties to Bond). “Goldfinger’s” frame of reference encompasses both the male leads and the three primary women of the story, and aside from a motif specifically associated with Oddjob and some geographically-flavored linking pieces, almost every cue in the score is built around material from the title song (whether used alone, or in conjunction with elements from the “Theme” and “007”).

“Goldfinger’s” use as a love theme, or at least a signifier of some kind of sexual desire, is therefore highly appropriate, if not always unproblematic. In lush string or jazz-inflected lounge-style arrangements, this music accompanies Bond’s early dalliance with an enthusiastic Jill Masterson; his quickening pulse as her sister, Tilly, drives past in her convertible; and his eventual romantic clinches with Pussy Galore. These instances, which can be considered representative of many other moments of “Goldfinger”-accompanied romance or desire, demonstrate the varying ways in which Bond retains the agency of soundtrack ownership in his interaction with women.

Although Jill Masterson’s engaging confidence and obvious attraction to Bond allows her to share ownership of the sultry “Goldfinger” material that accompanies their canoodling, Bond’s musical dominance is asserted in the snippet of the “Theme” that accompanies his trademark introduction. The aftermath of the scene makes clear the devastating punishment for Jill’s transgressively guiltless and positive sexuality, as Bond’s discovery of her corpse is accompanied by the metallic dissonance of Oddjob’s motif. Jill’s attempt to step outside her role as objectified possession is, predictably, doomed to failure; instead, all that occurs here is effectively a temporary transfer of ownership, underlined by the soundtrack, which bookends her joint ownership of music with the themes of her male aggressors.

Tilly Masterson is distinguished from her sister through a notable absence of thematic material on the soundtrack in the majority of her scenes with Bond. This absence of music only occurs after Bond meets Tilly face to face: prior to this we see his interest piqued as she zips past him in her convertible, with the “Theme” section of a jazzed-up “Goldfinger” instrumental used to highlight Bond’s sudden excitement. But Tilly’s clipped manner and lack of interest in Bond (Fleming’s novel is clear about Tilly’s homosexuality) forbids any further musical support or expansion of their relationship, and even Bond’s trademark introduction line is left unscored. Although there is some dramatic underscoring in scenes featuring Tilly, especially those leading up to her death, there is no hint of anything more personal and certainly nothing that can be identified as either “Goldfinger” or “Theme”-based romance. This might seem a minor point—after all, Tilly is a secondary character—but it demonstrates her refusal to conform to stereotype and act as a mirror for Bond’s own narcissism. Bond’s masculinity is symbolized musically by his control of the soundtrack and the presence of “his” music, and that masculinity is at least partially dependent on the validation provided by female approval; therefore, Tilly’s disinterested musical silence presents a significant challenge to Bond’s agency.

Tilly, like Jill, steps outside the boundaries of acceptable female behavior and is punished for it. Whilst Jill’s “Goldfinger”-accompanied celebratory sexuality is tamed through death and the (re)imposition of music that is not “hers,” Tilly’s disinterest in Bond is signified through silence—a withholding of musical accompaniment that, while providing little in the way of “support” to her character, also articulates the challenge that her closeted lesbianism presents to Bond’s self-assured masculinity.