No, not that kind of “Johnson” … but a Samuel Johnson whose first name is Paul.

I’d never heard of him till today … Paul Johnson, I mean.

Karl Marx

Samuel Johnson was an exotic figure out of 18th Century England who, aside from being afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome, was also afflicted with literary genius.

James Boswell was his devoted biographer.

My Johnson is decidedly a Brit genius out of the 20th Century and, if you can believe it, afflicted, as I have been, with the Jesuits!

Studied in his teen years, as I had, with The Black Robes!!

He is also, not like I, a brilliant historian!

If you don’t believe me, Paul Johnson received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.

One of the few smart moves that President ever made.

Why am I so entranced by Paul Johnson?

I just read his unerring exposure of intellectuals, The Heartless Lovers of Humankind.

If my “Boswell Days” with this Johnson only last the length of my admiration for one particular essay by this esteemed historian, I will still have shared my moment with one of my favorite “Ordinary Miracles” of life.

No one, and I mean no human being in the past, present or even the future, will serve up to “intellectuals” a more piercing examination, diagnosis and autopsy of them than this contemporary Dr. Johnson.

Accurately and with no need of any exaggeration, Paul Johnson dates the symbolic birth of the intellectual as having occurred at the outset of the French “Enlightenment” and the rising sun of Voltaire, whose own intellectuality had him explode with the piercing description of his peers as “enlightened despots”!

The intellectual has, according to this Dr. Johnson, “filled the position left by the decline of the cleric, and is proving more arrogant, permanent and above all more dangerous than his clerical version.”

That’s just openers!

He picks Percy Bysshe Shelley as his first target … and … well … how many years did poor Shelley have to grow up in?

He died one month away from his thirtieth birthday.

I never matured until my sixties!

Paglia

If he doesn’t like young romantics, the good Doctor should read Camille Paglia on Romantics in general. Her assault upon them in Sexual Personae makes Dr. Johnson’s invasion of intellectuals look almost medicinal.

Romanticism for Ms. Paglia is one of the very few pastimes she would acknowledge as a perversion.

Fascinating woman, Camille Paglia!

Where was I?

Oh, yes, skipping Shelley out of my simple respect for the Romantic Dead … and, as Paglia points out,  Shelley, like Keats, was more of a Romantic than an intellectual … we move on to my favorite example of intellectual perversion, Karl Marx.

“Karl Marx (1818-1884) was another example of a man who became convinced that it was his duty to put ideas before people.

The lucidity with which the Doctor captures this ultimately homicidal set of priorities … and, indeed, that’s the primary ingredient within Marx’s soul … or lack of one … “ideas!”

Then the second sentence of this exhumation:

“Hence his relentless and often unthinking cruelty to those around him became a kind of distant adumbration of the mass cruelty his ideas would promote when they finally became the blueprint of Soviet state policy.

From Marx’s perennially sophomoric self-obsession to the deadly fruits of that ideological narcissism, Paul Johnson captures it all in one sentence.

Then he reveals the essentials of Marx’s parents.

His father, who was afraid of him, detected the fatal flaw: “In your heart,” he wrote his son, “egoism is predominant.”

Meanwhile Marx’s mother remarked:

What a pity it was that he (Karl) did not try to acquire capital instead of writing about it.

In the next paragraph, Paul Johnson lists the hypocritically petty bourgeois obsessions forcing Marx to “keep up appearances.”

Then, how this “man of ideas” treated people:

He seduced his wife’s servant, begot a son by her, then forced Friedrich Engels to assume paternity. Marx’s daughter Eleanor once let out a cri de Coeur in a letter: ‘Is it not wonderful, when you come to look things squarely in the face, how rarely we seem to practice all the fine things we preach – to others?’ She later committed suicide.

Then from a larger point of view there’s this:

Marx’s whole life was an exercise in emotional or financial exploitation – of his wife, of his daughters, of his friends. Studying Marx’s life leads one to think that the roots of human unhappiness, and especially the misery caused by exploitation, do not lie in the exploitation by categories or classes – but in one-to-one exploitation by selfish individuals.

Finally the author sums up Marx in the context of his only interest: ideas.

Nor is this indifference to others a mere human failing in a great public man. It is central to Marx’s work. He was not actually interested in real human beings, how they felt or what they wanted. He never met a member of the proletariat, except across the platform at a public meeting. He never made a visit to an actual factory, rejecting Engel’s offers to arrange one. He never sought to meet or interrogate a capitalist, with the solitary exception of an uncle in Holland. From first to last his source of information was books, especially government bluebooks.

Following this, Dr. Johnson’s x rays of Vladimir Lenin must be prefaced by the novelist, Vladimir Nabokov’s estimate of Lenin:

A glass of the milk of human kindness, at the bottom of which is a dead rat.

The historian, however, begins with this:

It is no accident, I think, that Lenin (1870-1924) never set foot in a factory until he became the Soviet dictator, and never, so far as we know, had any real contact with the workers whose lives he claimed the right to transform.

Then moving on to the third of this Unholy Trinity:

Nor did Stalin ever seek out the working man or the peasant to discover what he actually wanted; he was also a great devourer of statistical columns. What masses of facts these monsters ingested before they went on to devour human flesh! One might say that the road to the gulag is paved with unwritten PH.D. theses.

Hmmm … and an eventually Nobel Prize Winning Marxist cum law degree from Harvard in 1988, when Dr. Johnson’s essay was written, had reached his third year as a Communis … uh … I mean Community Organizer.

It is no coincidence I have linked Dr. Paul Johnson with Samuel Johnson. Dr. Paul actually quotes his literary predecessor admiringly:

I incline to the contrary belief of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) when he observed, “Sir, a man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is getting money”

Nor so brilliantly revealed as when he is getting to the heart of Marxism and the soul of enlightened despotism.

It’s Goldfinger (1964), and a half-century on the thrills, chills, eroticism, adventure, and luster invoked by that name all remain undimmed. According to one estimate, over a quarter of the world’s population has seen a James Bond film. That marks Goldfinger as not only a blockbuster, but as the harbinger of a profound cultural phenomenon.

Secret agent James Bond was introduced to the British public in 1953 via the novel Casino Royale, published in an initial print run of less than five-thousand copies. Author Ian Fleming quietly cranked out a novel a year for nearly a decade, with each languishing on the mystery-novel midlist alongside dozens of other now-forgotten titles from other writers. Sales were reasonable, but hardly spectacular.

Then on March 17, 1961, an article appeared in Life magazine called “The President’s Voracious Reading Habits.” Included on a list of “Ten Kennedy Favorites” was the 1957 Bond novel From Russia, With Love (over thirty years later, some choice praise from President Bill Clinton would deliver a similar jump-start to the career of African-American mystery writer Walter Mosley). The Kennedy Bond-boost, combined with the appearance of the first film (1962’s Dr. No), served to increase Fleming’s sales exponentially. By 1964 he had some forty million books in print. But the movie version of Goldfinger changed everything. In just the first year after it rocketed into theaters, an astonishing twenty-seven million more Bond books flew off the shelves.

Published in 1959, Goldfinger was chronologically the seventh novel in the series, yet only the third film. In every way it far exceeded its two predecessors, Dr. No (1962) and From Russia, With Love (1963) — its budget was larger than both of the previous two combined. Riding the crest of the same British invasion that introduced The Beatles to the States (Bond even playfully disparages the Fab Four at one point), it was the first installment to have large parts of the plot staged in America. It was also the first to have a pop star sing the theme song, and the first to use a famous actress as a Bond girl (Honor Blackman was already well-known to TV audiences from The Avengers). Although Goldfinger was the second film to feature actor Desmond Llewelyn as Bond’s equipment officer, it was the first to call him by his now-immortal name: Q. It was even the first film in movie history to use a laser, which at that time was a fresh, newfangled invention (the novel has a tied-down Bond threatened with a buzzsaw).

In a series chock-full of memorable characters, gadgets, action scenes, and set pieces, Goldfinger reigns atop the list as the most innovative, inventive, and satisfying. From the wondrous set designs of Ken Adam (Fort Knox, Goldfinger’s sanctum) to Robert Brownjohn’s now-classic golden-girl title sequence and marketing imagery, to John Barry’s brassy, lush score, everyone seemed to be firing on all cylinders.

For this third chapter the series also had a new director, as Terrence Young (the man widely credited with having taught Sean Connery the ins and outs of Bondian cool) was replaced by Guy Hamilton. It was Hamilton who introduced the humorous relationship and banter between Q and Bond, who strove to tone down 007’s super-heroics in favor of a more realistic action palette, and who worked on making Auric Goldfinger and Oddjob far more compelling and formidable villains than any that came before.

Underwhelmed by the version of Bond’s car found in the script (as written, it only sported a smokescreen defense), and thinking about some traffic tickets he had recently acquired, Hamilton came up with the idea of adding revolving license plates to the Aston Martin DB5. He also encouraged the crew to come up with their own improvements, and soon the vehicle was chock-full of gadgets and weapons destined to thrill audiences worldwide. Clearly, Hamilton punched way above his weight in this film. Although he would ultimately direct three more Bond pictures — Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), plus other Hollywood action fare like Force 10 From Navarone (1979) and Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985), he would never again come close to equaling the potent cinematic alchemy of Goldfinger.

And yet even a movie with the esteem and cultural impact of Goldfinger has its enemies and party poopers. Anyone who’s made a cursory study of the Bond phenomenon is familiar with many of the early critical bashings. The most infamous came from the (then young and liberal, now old and conservative) historian Paul Johnson, who in 1958 wrote a New Statesman review of the novel Dr. No titled “Sex, snobbery and sadism,” in which he wildly attacked Fleming’s achievement: “I have just finished what is without a doubt the nastiest book I have ever read. . . Fleming deliberately and systematically excites, and then satisfies the very worst instincts of his readers. This seems to me far more dangerous than straight pornography.”

You might assume that Johnson’s half-century-old opinions were superseded long ago by more modern tastes. Not so — mainstream critics and bloggers continue to lament the perpetual popularity of the Bond franchise. Over at BBC News Finlo Rohrer asks “Is James Bond loathsome?” Techland’s Matt Selman accuses Fleming’s stories (and, to the degree they adhere to them, the films) of being “packed with outdated, but probably deeply-felt, sexism, racism, and, yes, even homophobia. . . a recent re-read of Goldfinger revealed the hate-speech was hilariously explicit.” He also condemns Bond’s successful seduction of Goldfinger’s lesbian pilot, the aptly named Pussy Galore, as “every idiot male moron’s fantasy.” Even Fleming fans grant, as Bond expert Bob Chapman does in the above-mentioned BBC article, that the stories are “sexist, heterosexist, xenophobic, everything that is not politically correct.”

My opinion is that Bond continues to be one of the most profitable franchises in history for good reasons — ones that have little to do with theaters and bookstores being filled with “idiot male morons” indulging in their penchant for “deeply-felt, sexism, racism, and, yes, even homophobia.” We live in an era where ostensibly sane people are busy trying to protect us from horrors like soda pop and table salt. In such a loony world, it’s no surprise that we now get a non-smoking Bond who takes his marching orders from a hectoring Hillary Clinton/Madeleine Albright-style “M” (remember Judi Dench’s quiet tirade in Goldeneye (1995) about Bond being a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur”?) In such a hostile cultural/political environment, it’s heartening that Fleming’s writings haven’t been widely banned as hate-speech, and that Goldfinger still ranks in most polls as the best Bond adventure, better even than the slicker, bigger-budgeted, more politically correct ones of recent times.

The public’s continuing regard for Goldfinger begs a question: what do modern-day movie lovers take away from this early incarnation of James Bond as envisioned by Ian Fleming, and brought to life on celluloid by Sean Connery? What do we glean from that misogynist dinosaur world of sex, snobbery and sadism?

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we begin to answer that question by delving into the life of the creator of James Bond: Ian Fleming.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

“Another ’60s Anniversary: The Ur-Action Blockbuster Goldfinger” by William Bradley. This Huffington Post article does a good job of amassing information and anecdotes about Goldfinger, covering the production of the 1964 film and its cultural impact.

James Bond — Part 1: The Connery Years. A good homemade video, which gives a younger fan’s rundown of the first five Connery Bond movies:

“Gooooldfingah!” Performed by Shirley Bassey. This rendition appeared on The Muppet Show, of all places (the cultural reach of Fleming’s creation truly knows no bounds). Come on, you know you want to give it a listen before heading out for the weekend. (scroll to 5:45 if you want to skip directly to the song):