Fool's Gold

People with wealth sometimes will stop at nothing to accumulate even more wealth. Goldfinger is one of those people. Even though he has enough gold to make millions of bottles of Kim Kardashian's perfume (that stuff is melted-down gold, right?), he wants more.

It's his greed that gets Goldfinger caught. Bond first tempts Goldfinger with a gold bar given to him by the Bank of England. Here is the head of the Bank describing it:

SMITHERS: This is the only one we have from the Nazi hoard from the bottom of Lake Toplitz in the Salzkammergut. […] Mr. Bond can make whatever use of it he sees fit. Provided he returns it, of course. It's worth five thousand pounds.

That doesn't sound like a lot, but adjusted for inflation, that shiny hunk of metal would be worth around 80,000 pounds today.

In a shocking plot twist, however, gold turns out to be a 24-karat red herring in this movie. Goldfinger wants to destroy gold so that he can make the gold he already owns even more valuable. He may even be a poet about gold, as we see here:

GOLDFINGER: This is gold, Mr. Bond. All my life, I've been in love with its color, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I welcome any enterprise that will increase my stock, which is considerable.

But Goldfinger's romanticism is misplaced. It isn't gold itself that he is in love with—it's the wealth it brings him. He isn't in love with gold—he's in love with dollar signs. Or pound signs. Or whatever made-up version of currency is applicable for the country he's in. But gold is empty—you just keep wanting more and more of it. There's no end.