ABSTRACT
One of the most famous James Bond sequences is without a doubt the laser scene from Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton, 1964). In this scene, Sean Connery as 007 is firmly tied to a plate of gold that Gert Fröbe, as the titular villain, sluggishly saws through with a high-powered laser beam. Slowly but surely, the beam crawls up to Bond’s crotch … “Do you expect me to talk?” Bond recklessly asks in an unruffled voice. “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” Auric Goldfinger replies in his heavy foreign accent. This typical articulation affords the German-born actor Gert Fröbe a fair amount of ‘authenticity’ on screen. It is, however, not Fröbe’s own voice we hear in the post-synchronized soundtrack of this famous James Bond film; instead, it is the English (voice) actor Michael Collins, who did his very best to foreignize his ventriloquist representation of Auric Goldfinger. Meanwhile, John Barry’s musical underscore is rooted in just one stretched chord (Fmadd2) complemented with the three-note Goldfinger figure, moving towards a repeated eight-note riff in the strings, succesfully supplementing the suspense as the laser beam proceeds.
