The greatest James Bond villain of all time wasn’t even in a ‘Bond’ movie
As we patiently wait, with decreasing enthusiasm, for the announcement of the next James Bond actor, let’s take some time to consider the real stars of the franchise: the villains.
With all due respect to the various 007s, they rarely manage to upstage the drama queens that try to destroy them. Think of Gert Fröbe as the titular baddie in Goldfinger, with his convoluted plot to nuke America’s gold reserves with the help of an industrial laser, or Donald Pleasance as Blofeld, whose white cat and campiness became the model for Dr Evil in Austin Powers.
The Bond villains have always been the best roles, and, Rami Malek aside, they have almost always been given to character actors who can meet and exceed the absurdity of the characters on the page, but there was one enormous omission from the franchise that was so obvious and blundering that an independent production company catering to unsophisticated teenage audiences swooped in and made it right. Vincent Price, the actor who set the template for camp villainy in the 1950s and ‘60s and had such a recognisably velvety purr that there is an entire website dedicated to his voice, somehow never appeared in a single Bond film.
This is a travesty that still haunts those of us who like their 007 nemeses as camp and hammy as they come. Price epitomised the smooth, moustache-twirling stereotype that we know today in early horror movies like The House on Haunted Hill, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Masque of the Red Death, plus, he was born in Missouri but insisted on rolling his ‘r’s as if he were a BBC newsreader circa 1947, and he was tall, slim, and looked more natural in silk capes and smoking jackets than blazers; in short, he was born to be a Bond villain.
How the Eon producers dropped the ball with him is a mystery, for he was a celebrity in the 1960s when the franchise began, and he was even more of a celebrity by the time he died in 1993. There were no fewer than 16 opportunities to cast him as the main bad guy during this period, but it never happened, and instead, actors such as Christopher Lee and Christopher Walken did the honours, suggesting that the casting directors knew what they were doing and should definitely not have missed out on Price.
As early as 1965, American International Pictures spotted the obvious and cast the actor in a Bond knockoff called Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, a spoof of Goldfinger, with Price playing the titular scientist who has built a machine that creates gold bikini-clad androids who seduce wealthy men to extract their fortunes. As with most AIP pictures, it was geared towards teenagers and blended the beach party genre with the emerging espionage genre, standing as a mess of slapstick, bad acting, and polyester, but whenever Price was on screen, none of that mattered.
Wearing a gold brocade jacket and twirling a foot-long yellow writing quill, he trills his lines, slaps his incompetent servant Igor, and giggles malevolently, with at one point, telling a minion, “Get your hands off the merchandiiiiiise” in a singsong warble that should have become a catchphrase. He is a magnetic screen presence, and it’s deeply frustrating that he never got to aim that devilish charisma at a real 007.
Despite the absurdity of the film, it was originally meant to be much weirder, as the script had been written as a musical, with Dr Goldfoot occasionally bursting into song to explain the plot (if such a thing were even possible). Price had signed up for this version, loving the idea, but when the producers saw his musical performance as Goldfoot, they worried that it was, in actor Susan Hart’s phrasing, “too fey”. In other words, Price’s character looked like he might not be straight, which, spoiler alert, he absolutely is not, with or without musical interludes. Price was almost certainly a queer icon at that point already, so the producers were just shooting themselves in the foot by dampening the appeal of the film for a key portion of the audience.
Sadly, we will never know what Price might have done with the slightly higher standards of a Bond script, or with the much higher standards of a Bond spoof musical, but at least Dr Goldfoot gives us a hint at what might have been. It’s not the sort of movie that you could, in good faith, recommend to anyone, but for Vincent Price fans, it’s a must-watch, if only for the scene in which he provides a breezy tour of his torture dungeon. All I will say is that he’s dressed as the Grim Reaper and is trying to get a youthful business mogul to sign a legal document, which is pure gold (no pun intended).
