Some of you might remember the Austin Powers trilogy of movies.  If not, all you really need to know is that they were made to spoof the spy films made famous by the James Bond series.  The title character (Mike Myers) is radically different from James Bond (Sean Connery), though they do share some characteristics.  The easiest to recognize trait they have in common is that they are British.  Austin takes this heritage to the extreme, whereas it is more unspoken, but no less felt by James.  They are womanizers, too, and this is something that I will discuss more when I get to the specifically Catholic portion of this review.  For this introduction, I will leave you with one last intersection: the third and last of the Austin Powers series is Goldmember (2002), which is an obvious rip off of today’s film, Goldfinger (1964).

Unlike its two predecessors in the nascent franchise, Goldfinger immediately shows you what 007 of military intelligence, section six (MI6), is all about: covert operations, snazzy tuxedos, and having his way with the ladies.  In order, he blows up a factory producing drugs, quickly doffs his scuba outfit for black tie duds, and ends the night in the arms of a stunningly attractive woman.  Not long after his nocturnal activities are interrupted by a cartel thug, he is directed by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Felix Leiter (Cec Linder) to Miami.  Once there, he is to observe Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), a trader in gold bullion.  He is of interest to MI6, and these orders have come from the organization’s head, M (Bernard Lee).  At first, Auric appears to be a common card cheat, albeit an extraordinarily rich one.  James figures out how Auric gets away with it by wooing Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), Auric’s fetching assignment.  Auric does not take kindly to this betrayal, sending Oddjob (Harold Sakata), Auric’s hulking bodyguard, to knock out James and murder Jill.  The method chosen for dispatching Jill is to suffocate the woman by dipping her in gold paint.  Back in England, James makes his gloomy report to M.  With a word of caution about making things personal, James is sent back into the field with some new gadgets to get closer acquainted with Auric’s operations.  After playing a round of golf with the rare metals aficionado, James plants a tracking device on Auric’s car and follows it all the way to Switzerland.  While keeping tabs on Auric, James has an encounter with Tilly Masterson (Tania Mallet), who is there to assassinate Auric for the death of her sister.  She becomes an unwitting ally of James as he is trying to break into one of Auric’s factories, though she also dies at the hands of Oddjob, this time with his deadly, steel-rimmed hat.  So, yeah, that is a thing. . . .  James is about to meet his end, too, when he tells Auric that he knows about his so-called Operation Grand Slam.  In truth, he has only heard the name and has no further information about the project, hence the reason for his attempted infiltration.  In any case, it is enough for Auric to keep James around until he can ascertain the extent of MI6’s insights into his workings.  Thus, James is forced to fly back to the United States, and this is how he is introduced to the unfortunately named Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman).  She is Auric’s personal pilot, and they are headed to her base of operations near Fort Knox, Kentucky.  Once there, Auric brings in a group of organized crime bosses to whom he owes money, telling them he has a plan for getting them ten times what he owes them.  To do so, he intends to rob a bank, and the financial institution in question are the vaults of gold bullion held at the military installation.  When the majority of them voice their skepticism, Auric gasses them.  His real intention is to plant a dirty bomb provided by the Chinese and irradiate the gold, thus making his own supply more valuable.  This fresh plot is overheard by James, but his first attempt at getting word to the CIA ends when his involuntary message carrier is smashed in a car compactor by Oddjob.  Instead, he does what James Bond seems to do best: seduce a woman.  In this case, it is, er, Pussy.  Remember that gas I mentioned a moment ago?  Auric attaches cannisters of the stuff to the bottom of the planes of Pussy’s planes, which (miraculously) fly over Fort Knox and disable the entirety of the base’s personnel.  This seems a bit farfetched to me, but I supposed I have seen worse.  With rows of American soldiers put to sleep, Auric and his henchmen, with James in tow, make their way to the vaults.  He is locked in with the gold, handcuffed to the bomb, while Auric’s men wait outside.  This is when the American troops awaken from their feigned slumber and attack, having been forewarned by James’ new ally, um . . . Pussy.  In the resulting chaos, Auric changes into an American army uniform and slips into a plane, with, uh . . . Pussy at the controls.  This is the same one that James is put on to go meet the president, but he must now fend off Auric, who unexpectedly emerges mid-flight.  The villain is sucked out of the plane’s window when he discharges his pistol, which creates a hole and loss of pressure.  James and, well . . . Pussy manage to bail out of the aircraft before it crashes.  We close with them embracing while a search helicopter looks for them overhead.

Goldfinger is everything you would expect from one of these early Bond movies, if not a little more hokey.  For example, in the first scene when James emerges from the water, he does so with a seagull decoy attached to his head.  It looks fakes, and I am not sure why it is necessary, so I chuckled.  There were a few other moments like this one.  What is less chucklesome is James’ treatment of women.  If you know your Bond movies, this might not be as much of a surprise.  Indeed, in the first two films, he treats the females he encounters as basically a means to his missions’ ends.  It is no different here, but the physical way in which he interacts with them hit me the most this time.  This is not a topic that the Catholic Church has specifically defined, at least Catechistically speaking, but there are those in the broader Catholic culture that talk about the proper way for a gentleman to behave.  Put differently, the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not use the term Catholic gentleman, but there are websites that you can go to that will help you get the idea.  The Catechism and such outlets agree that you should not push a woman’s face away when she is lightheartedly interrupting a phone conversation, or make assumptions about the prospects of going to bed with a member of the opposite sex.  The burden of chastity falls a great deal on the man’s side, and it is something that James could do better to occasionally practice instead of chalking every dalliance up as an occupational hazard.  At the same time, these films are degrading to women by assuming that every one of them wants to climb into bed with 007.  To return to a familiar refrain, sex is something given to us by God for a higher purpose, which is divinely ordained, not politically motivated.

While watching Goldfinger, I kept expecting some reference to the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion (SPECTRE).  It never came, despite the previous two movies having the shadowy organization lurking in the background.  Does this make this movie an outlier?  Who knows?  I am not sure it is worth watching in order to ascertain an answer.