James Bond hit U.S. shores in 1964 with an impact that fitted the description Bond’s armorer, “Q,” gave of his .32-caliber Walther PPK: “Like a brick through a plate-glass window.” Goldfinger was number two in the U.S. box office in 1964, and From Russia With Love was number five, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The one film that outgrossed Goldfinger that year, Mary Poppins, was released much earlier in the year, while Goldfinger, establishing the trend of the big holiday adventure release, opened on December 22. Business at New York City theaters was round the clock.

How popular was Goldfinger? The website boxofficemojo.com estimates that the average movie ticket in 1964 cost approximately one-seventh of an average ticket today. By that yardstick, Goldfinger at today’s prices would have grossed nearly $360 million, dwarfing such supposed megahits as the Mission Impossible movies and surpassing even the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

Let’s put 1964 in context. It was an era dominated by British films and British stars. Of the top 10 grossing films for the year, six starred Britons. The top box-office stars of the time were Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, Peter Sellers, Audrey Hepburn, and Cary Grant. Sean Connery was, by the end of 1964, without reservation the biggest box-office star in the world.

Did Connery make Bond or did Bond make Connery? Probably both. A 1954 television production of Ian Fleming’s first Bond book, Casino Royale, starring Barry Nelson—an American James Bond?—made no stir at all. Probably, Connery was a star waiting to happen, and Bond is what made him happen.

Oddly, it has become a commonplace idea that the Bond books and films gained popularity largely because of the Cold War. But, in only one Bond movie and in just a few of the books were Soviets the targets of Bond’s aggression. Sensing even before Hollywood did that the Cold War was losing some of its frost, Fleming invented an international criminal organization, SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) made up from equal parts of the murder arm of Soviet intelligence, the Gestapo, the Mafia, and Fleming’s imagination.

The true villains in most of Fleming’s books and nearly all the movies were modern robber barons, high-tech pirate predators—Doctor No, Auric Goldfinger, Emilio Largo in Thunderball, Ernst Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE—ruthlessly trying to carve personal empires by setting East against West. Bond was neither English (he was Swiss on his mother’s side and Scottish, like Connery, on his father’s) nor a spy, as the English novelist Kingsley Amis, a close student of Bond, correctly pointed out. He was a counteragent and professional killer, sent out to hunt and destroy these predators—in effect, a pre-Miranda international cop. The Bond stories reflected not the Western World’s obsession with the drudgery of the Cold War but its