In
the history of big-screen product placement, this car, the Aston Martin DB5
from the 1964 film Goldfinger,
is perhaps the most successful. The combination of beautiful Italian design,
British engineering and clever gadgets from special effects expert John Stears
set the tone for Bond films and the publicity almost certainly saved Aston
Martin from one of its perennial financial crises.
“An
ejector seat? You’ve got to be joking,” says Sean Connery as Bond when the
Aston is introduced by Desmond Llewelyn as Q.
“I
never joke about my work 007,” he coldly replies.
With
the Second World War only 19 years previous, you could see where Stears derived
inspiration for the Aston Martin’s armament; twin Browning .303 machine guns
just like those that spat rounds from the leading edge of a Spitfire’s wings,
the bullet-proof rear screen, too, echoed that fighter’s pilot protection.
And
the vicious-looking tyre slashers? As Llewelyn wrote in the introduction to
Dave Worrall’s book The Most
Famous Car in the World: “They’re just a variation of the chariot wheel
scythes of Ben Hur, and gangsters in the Prohibition era resorted to oil slicks
when driving their getaway cars.”
However,
it was that ejector seat that captured the imaginations of generations of small
children. The Corgi model of the Bond Aston was the company’s most successful
ever and is still in production. Yet how many sofa backs would yield up the
tiny blue plastic spy lost after a successful ejection through the roof of the
silver birch Aston?
As
Llewelyn wryly observed: “It was the gadgets which were actually famous – not
the car.”
There’s
also a mystery surrounding the Goldfinger Aston Martins, almost worthy of the
plot of a Bond film itself. At the beginning there was one, the special effects
or gadgets car, based on a prototype DB4 but virtually identical to a DB5 and
ingeniously fitted out by Stears and his team of craftsmen at Pinewood Studios.
Then,
after producer Harry Saltzman expressed disquiet at “this $45,000 little bag of
tricks” being thrown around public roads in the high‑speed sequences, Aston
Martin lent Eon Productions a second, standard production DB5 registered FMP 7B
for the high-speed work.
That
is this car, which went under the hammer at RM Auctions’ sale in Battersea Park
So
how did FMP 7B come to be fitted with all the Stears gadgets? Here the story
gets complicated. As a high-speed film car, FMP 7B proved useless. Its German
ZF gearbox failed during filming in Switzerland, which meant it was actually
the precious gadgets car, driven with considerable verve by stunt driver Bill
Baskerville, that we see chasing Tilly Masterson’s Ford Mustang through the
Alps.
After
filming was completed, the gadgets car was sent on a two-year, around-the-world
publicity tour. With Eon Productions starting filming the next Bondathon film, Thunderball, Aston Martin
decided to retro-fit FMP
7B with replica Stears gadgets with a few changes to make them more reliable.
So, in 1965, in the opening credits of Thunderball, when Sean Connery uses his
Aston’s water cannons to scatter his assailants, it is this car that is
attached to the fire hoses of the French pompiers.
Weirder
and weirder, the original car was eventually stripped of its Stears gadgets by
Aston Martin and sold to Kentish businessman Gavin Keyzar. He had facsimile
gadgets refitted and sold the car on to Richard Loose in Utah in 1971. In 1985,
it was sold by Sotheby’s New York to Anthony Pugliese, who used the car for
promotional work. It was stolen from an aircraft hanger in Boca Raton airport
in Florida in 1997 and the insurance settlement was rumoured to be about 80 per
cent of the car’s agreed value of $4.2 million.
To
cope with the demands of the promotional circuit after the success ofGoldfinger and Thunderball,
Aston Martin built two replicas, which became known as the press cars. These,
too, were sold on, initially to Anthony Bamford, who swapped one of them for a
Ferrari GTO, arguably the best piece of trading he ever did. One of those cars
now resides in the Dutch Louwman museum in The Hague, the other was sold in
2006 for $2.09million by RM Auctions in Arizona to a private buyer.
So,
FMP 7B might not be the first Bond DB5, and it proved pretty useless as a
high-speed film car, but its provenance makes it the closest thing to the
original Stears gadget car. It was driven by Sean Connery, it appeared in two
Bond films and, in the absence of the original, it is the nearest thing to what
Q issued to an insouciant Bond all those years ago.
Quite
what you do with it is a different matter. It’s not a desperately good Aston
Martin and its value makes it difficult to use much. Astons are nosebleed
expensive to keep on the road and the gadgets make this car even more so.
Stears’s special effects are undoubtedly impressive, but we need to remember
that none ever worked in the true meaning of the word. The machine guns never
fired, the bullet-proof screen was anything but and that ejector seat was an
expertly filmed mock-up.
James
Bond is the fantastical Peter Pan of spies. If he was 30 in 1964 he’d be 79 now, hardly an age to be leaping about foiling Auric Goldfinger or Smersh. In what appears to be the end of the James Bond and his DB5 partnership, in the last Bond film 'Skyfall' the Aston Martin is mercilessly destroyed by the evil Raoul Silva for faithfully defending its master till its very end. My heart cried out during the rather emotional action sequence and I secretly whispered to myself 'Get the bastard for that James'.
Film
appearances by Aston Martin DB5
Goldfinger 1964
Thunderball 1965
Carry
On Doctor 1967
The
Cannonball Run 1981
Goldeneye 1995
Tomorrow
Never Dies 1997
The
World Is Not Enough 1999
(scene cut)
Catch
Me If You Can 2002
Charlie's
Angels – Full Throttle 2003
Double
Zero 2004
The
Life And Death Of Peter Sellers 2004
Casino
Royale 2006
Skyfall 2012
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