From "Margaret Nolan obituary/Glamour model and actress who starred in Goldfinger and the Carry On films and epitomised ‘everything cool in the Sixties’" (London Times).
Nolan played the character who was painted gold and who appears in the opening credits with "the face of Sean Connery’s 007 and the typography of the film’s titles... projected on to her gilded and nearly naked silhouette."
She was also the woman standing over Paul's grandfather in the casino scene in "A Hard Day's Night":
Here's a photograph of her at her Wikipedia page, showing her in her natural mature beauty in front of one of her photo montages, showing herself in her cinematic glamour:
Is the montage "a feminist critique of the commodification of women"? I think it's easier to argue that the woman painted gold in "Goldfinger" and used as a place to project the images of others is a feminist critique of the commodification of women. But no one wanted to argue that at the time. It wasn't the intent of the filmmakers, and feminist critique was the intent of the montage-maker.
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Shirley Bassey's rendition of the title song has not stood up very well. I had to hit the mute button.
Damn. I was going to go as a a feminist critique of the commodification of women for Halloween.
I assume she cashed the check.
I am Laslo.
She monetized the commodification and good for her, not everybody manages that, but I do get a little sick of this stuff, like Linda Ronstadt complaining recently about how much she hated the music she made that made her rich. She could have been a starving artist making ‘art’ recordings like those screeches Yoko did and kept her integrity. Or both of them could have learned plumbing or auto repair or whatever, like the guys who paid money to listen to them or look at them did. Cut out the middleman.
She was a model. The scene was not even soft pornography. That said, the commoditization of women progressed with normalization of not the first, second, third, or fourth choice, but the Pro-Choice quasi-religion, specifically selective-child or wicked solution, in order to keep women barefoot, available, and taxable, associated with the sexual revolution, friends with "benefits", and social progress that reduced both women and men to incapable actors with selfie motives.
Oh god. Some woman are such drips.
Men are wired to look at women. They're projecting anything in looking unless they're very inexperienced.
"'Part of me was living behind this screen of men’s expectations'"
So is part of many heterosexual men living behind the screen of women's expectations.
Hello? She was a movie actress in a James Bond film. Her job was to be young and beautiful, and look good while naked and painted in Gold. It wasn't Jane Eyre. Imagine Arnold S. complaining he was just getting paid to look like a muscle bound hulk and toss off a witty one-line in The Terminator. Or how he subverted the whole thing by blah de blah.
Its just entertainment folks. Movie acting, as Brando said, isn't an art. 90% of it, is being well-cast and showing up.
The Shirleys, Eaton and Bassey, are both still around at 83.
What Ms. Nolan, and all entertainers, have to consider is that they always have the option of a day job.
Many actors are egomaniacs and don't realize how good they have it. If they're supporting they want to be stars. If they're musical stars, they want to do Hamlet. If they do serious actors who do Hamlet, they want to sing or do Comedy. Always they look back and complain about their careers and how they were forced to do this, or they were typecast, and REALLY could've set the world on fire if only they'd been given a chance.
The vast majority of them, especially the TV stars, were simply lucky to have a part that fit them to a T and become famous. Two of the luckiest people in the world were William Shatner and Lenard Nimoy. Both good solid B+ actors who got rich and famous as Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Both of them were smart enough to understand they'd hit the lottery and kept a modest outlook. Too bad more actors couldn't emulate them.
The point of Goldfinger painting a woman gold was that you had to leave some of the skin exposed (I seem to recall it being the spine) or she would not be able to sweat and would therefore suffocate. Fleming, like all British public schoolboys, was fixated on such exotic fictional S&M.
Therefore, the feminist critique today would be that all woman have the right to be suffocated erotically using gold paint, and you're an anti-sex cis-sexual kill-joy if you don't run through the streets celebrating it.
Oldfinger, he's the man
The man with the Biden touch
A China touch
Such a cold finger
Beckons you to vote Kamala in
Don't let him win!
The problem with these feminist critiques is that women WANT to be looked at. The sex drive is powerful. Calling it patriarchy doesn't make it go away.
I remember watching that scene as a young boy of 8 or 9 and being completely traumatized by it. Recovered though, I'm fine now.
Show me a man who can pay his rent by swallowing his pride and showing his butt.
He would starve.
Female Privilege.
BTW, James Bond was a saint for putting up with all of that sexual harassment from Moneypenny without filing a grievance. Come on you Bonds, tell us now how you had to just grin and bear it and think of England when subjected to it, but all of the time you were making subtle gestures to undermine the whole charade.
Somebody told a story about Brando once, that he was in a movie and there was a scene with several other actors, and the director said to one “You are an orphan who just heard from her long lost sister” and to another “You just lost your job and you have to go home and tell your wife that there will be no Christmas this year,” and to another he said “You have been working for twenty years under a hardass boss for this break, and you aren’t going to let it slip away” and then he settles into his chair and Brando asks him, “What about me? Do you have a backstory for me?” and the director says “You. Just say your lines."
I wonder how Sean Connery feels about being “commodified”?
Pretty damn good, I should think.
Horseshoe crabs have actually evolved a third eye growing out of the top of its head whose only purpose seems to be to scope out the ladies. It could be that human male brains are even now evolving so that the cells responsible for us enjoying girl watching so much are trying to grow their own eye on a swivel stalk, like the crabs, for their exclusive use.
The John Barry/Shirley Bassey theme song was camp -- so over the top and hard to take seriously that it was enjoyable, at least for me.
Everything James Bond is camp -- or would be if it was actually enjoyable. After a while the movies are just so bad that they are bad.
And in keeping with the "camp" theme -- things so bad they are good -- every egregious example of racism or sexism is also a parody and critique of itself, at least to 21st century eyes.
I think I forgot to get turned on by her "nearly naked" (ie., bikini) gold self in the Goldfinger intro. Did my "men’s expectations" fail me, or what? I'm not sure which of us had the actual expectations problem.
Does any woman not know "what's going on"? At least she never lost her appetite for drama.
I wish I could buy a remote farmhouse in Spain with the proceeds of charging women to look at me.
It's remarkable how many feminist critiques have involved women taking their clothes off. David Thompson has a flock of them collected at his site.
Men are wired to look at women.
"Women say they have sexual thoughts too. They have no idea. It's the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it. If they knew what we were really thinking, they'd never stop slapping us."
Anybody that knows anything about women, at least good looking women, knows they dress for other women, not men. My wife, when she was younger, said "a woman looks at a party like a man looks at a battlefield."
---"that deconstructed the notion of glamour in a feminist critique of the commodification of women."
That bit struck me, because it sounds so much like what I used to read in books from the '30s and '40s dealing with the prevailing mores and attitudes of the long-gone Victorian era. In other words, a commonplace from a time in the past that is dead to us today and only of interest as a peculiar curiosity. Another world, and one that seems stranger and stranger. Did they really think like that? And talk like that?!
I live in Andalusia Spain so I am wondering where her remote farmhouse is located. Everything here was once remote but now it’s all connected.
Yes, the World would certainly be a better place if men didn't make such a fuss over women. I can see why women find that annoying. Believe me, we're trying to stop.
Who? And why?
Odd how someone considered beautiful enough to be a model and 'hot stuff' in movies didn't age well at all. The best I can say is it looks like she didn't have egregious work done a la Pelosi.
In the B&W photo she is 70. I know 70-year-olds that are still smoking hot. She isn't one of them.
If you search her name and select 'images' you get hundreds of shots of her, mostly wearing lingerie or bikinis. She got work because she was a 'type' that played well in that era...a blonde with big tits.
She wasn't Olivier and wasn't even smart enough to know that.
Michael K - Agree. Did not realize that my first 40 years on the planet, but after marrying a fancy lady, I fully understand. My wife loves fashion.
MIchael K at 6:47 "Anyone who knows anything about women, at least good looking women, knows they dress for other women, not for men."
Nobody would ever call me an expert on good looking women, but that was well said, and true, as far as I can tell.
That being said, I do happen to know something about women who are generally considered just ok looking, rather than good looking (well , trust me on this , ok looking women are almost always very good looking from my point of view) and, well ..... I would add the word "sometimes" in between "knows they" and "dress for other women", if anyone asked me to modify your statement to describe women who are generally considered just ok looking.
What do they want, I wonder. Oh, wait -- don't bother answering. I'm not listening anyway.
In the clip from the Richard Lester film, the former actress looks more like she does today than like she looked like in the contemporaneous Bond films. Very uncanny, if you ask me.
By the way, they say people have the face they deserve at 50 ( I doubt it, but people say it ) and the former actress, in the recent picture, looks like a thoroughly good hearted person.
At my back I always hear....The onrushing chariot is starting to make a loud clatter, much louder than the bee loud glade that used to surround her and everyone near her. Now she's gone. So is Tom Seaver. When your contemporaries, the ones who exemplified what it was to be young and at the peak of physical grace, start croaking, it's a different kind of intimation of mortality than when some elder statesman dies. When Henry Kissinger finally dies, I'll bearly hear the angelus bell, and it won't ring for me.. .....I wonder if Tom Seaver ever worried that people objectified him for his strong right arm. He must have felt that he was so much more to him than just a strong right arm. Well he had dementia towards the end so it probably didn't bother him all that much.
I remember watching that scene as a young boy of 8 or 9 and being completely traumatized by it.
MeToo. It was the first thing I thought of. We were so unjaded then, despite years of TV westerns.
She should have gotten the sweet fraulein gatekeeper part. The one who has the mean look and a machine gun when Bond is trying to escape.
My 8:13 comment was a little misguided. I missed the part where she had passed away, before commenting - well like a lot of us, I react to pictures and ignore the words, frequently. Well God bless her.
What I meant to say in my 8:13 comment was that the woman in the Richard Lester film (1965 or so)looked more like the woman in the recent photograph (2019 or so) than like the woman in the James Bond film (1965 or so). It is one of the most extraordinary set of pictures I have ever seen on the internet (meaning, the 25 years old, or thereabouts, woman in the Richard Lester film, standing behind the rock singer's grandfather, looked more like herself in her 70s than she looked like herself at 25 or so in the other film she was famous for in her 20s. I have rarely seen anything like that in the entire kingdom of humans and animals.)
I know almost nobody cares, but I saw what I saw.
She's had "work" on her face now hasn't she?
They have no idea.
Oh, some do.
"Everything here was once remote but now it’s all connected."
Its true isn't it? There are good roads everywhere.
She wasn't the actress in the movie painted gold; she was only gold in the credits.
In the movie she was the girl, Dink, in the blue bikini when Leiter found Bond at the Fontainebleau. "Say goodbye, Dink" (slap on fanny).
Wonder what Gina Nolin is up to.
"'Part of me was living behind this screen of men’s expectations,' she explained. 'That’s why I made some of them quite grotesque — the idea that I was this passive woman, being looked at. But behind my eyes, I knew what was going on.'"
Really? Or is that just what she tells herself now?
A truly subversive collage would have turned Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) into a sex symbol.
The problem with these feminist critiques is that women WANT to be looked at. The sex drive is powerful. Calling it patriarchy doesn't make it go away.
Not just women. It's a boy chases girl chases boy world. Most boys and girls get it, then they reconcile, they self-moderate, and their baser hopes and dreams do not progress.
So, individual dignity, intrinsic value, inordinate worth, and natural imperatives. Men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature. Exercise your better judgment. Make the right choice.
I live in Andalusia Spain so I am wondering where her remote farmhouse is located. Everything here was once remote but now it’s all connected.
In 1986 she went to live, with her children Luke and Oscar, in Órgiva, province of Granada. From 1990 to 1995 she lived in the cortijo (small farmhouse) Vera in Los Cigarrones, which started as an alternative community in the 70s. Los Cigarrones is located to the southeast of Órgiva, east of the village of Los Tablones, in the hills, and I think you can call it remote, and primitive.
https://www.granadahoy.com/ocio/chica-Bond-Alpujarra_0_402259827.html
https://pasos.coop/Hablamos%20de%20%C3%93rgiva-PASOS_R.pdf
I would like to be so oppressed that I could be comfortably set for the remainder of my life.
I think it is (or should be) a "critique of the feminist commodification of women."
Women have been commodities (as have men) since forever.
Looking over her website and her entry in IMDB, I find it sad that she worked hard to make it in the acting world buy could not get beyond being blonde-boobie-babe.
She did well enough to raise two sons and have a house in Spain. A good life.
“I bet you’re a great swimmer,” said Paul’s grandfather.
montages from her early publicity shots that deconstructed the notion of glamour in a feminist critique of the commodification of women
That reminded me of - "Man Who Agrees With The Media, Universities, Corporations, And Hollywood Thinks He's Part Of The Resistance"
Thanks Kassaar, the Alpujarra region is much more remote than where I live. I was started to see so many people there that looked like 70’s era hippies. At the time I didn’t know about the alternative community.
Goldfinger: Best Bond theme song ever.
In other words: I disagree with Big Mike :)
I, for one, appreciate the low, low bulk prices of commodity goods. Buy wholesale, I say, in large amounts. Use what you need, and sell the rest, at retail if possible. That's just good business, right?
As to commodified women, I have seen some on corners in large cities, but I've been told they are to be respected for their self-empowered commercial utilization of their own bodies, and not disdained for being commodified sex objects. So what's this complaint about commodified objectification? Let's get these feminist definitions less confoundedly mixed up, that is, decide if being a whore is a good or bad thing, then we can each own that decision whichever side we land upon.
Goldfinger was a nasty character, and deserved to be destroyed by Bond's appeal to the maternal instincts of Pussy Galore, a much more interesting character than the Golden Girl.
Who did not deserve to die, of course, and should have had a much larger speaking role in the movie, in her bikini or out.
Blogger rcocean said...
Oh god. Some woman are such drips.10/13/20, 5:12 PM
Could be - but she's marketing a product right? So if she came out as a pro - wife - would the "woke crowd" like the feminists' buy her product. The average Joe or Jane is not her go to market. It's the city dweller liberal feminists who scream "you go girl". Pure commercial marketing B.S.
Beauty will always attract attention whether man, woman, horse or this morning's moon.
My wife loves fashion.
Yes, an incontrovertibly feminine quality, humans have our lovely ladies. Just one, because ladies, and gentlemen, from conception to death do us part, are not, in fact, a commodity. Hmm, interesting, social progress.
Nolan played the character who was painted gold and who appears in the opening credits with "the face of Sean Connery’s 007 and the typography of the film’s titles... projected on to her gilded and nearly naked silhouette."
Not sure this is quite right. Nolan played Dink, who was giving Bond a poolside massage, and was sent on her way by a most un PC smack on the behind, when Bond wanted to talk to Felix. She was also the nearly naked gold creature in the opening credits.
But the entirely naked (but for a strategically placed cushion) character who was painted gold, even unto death, was Jill Masterson, Goldfinger's girfriend, played by Shirley Eaton.
But better looking than both was Tilly Masterson, Jill's avenging sister, played by Tania Mallet, who keeps her clothes firmly on throughout, before getting herself Oddjobbed. She only appeared in one film - Goldfinger - because she found it cost her too much money. She was making way more as a model.
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