Although the James Bond series began in 1962 with Dr No, it wasn’t until the huge success of Goldfinger (1964) that the rest of the cinema world recognized there was a Fort Knox fortune for the taking in the spy genre.
Of course, part of the Bond films success is they looked expensive, because they were expensive; all that glamour and technology doesn’t come cheap. The trick B-movie directors had to pull was in making a film that looked expensive, but wasn’t, and in taking a Bond film down to its barest elements (guns, girls and gadgets), the rest would somehow look after itself; with the right parts in place, as long as a suave-talking spy fought up an evil crime organization, the audience would be happy with a counterfeit product.
Of course, those film-makers were wrong, but some were happy just to make fun of the spy genre, like our first film…
