Whereas removed from my favourite installment within the franchise, there’s little doubt that essentially the most iconic James Bond movie is 1964’s “Goldfinger.” The third movie within the collection noticed Sean Connery’s Bond going after villain Auric Goldfinger, a gold magnate that wishes to infiltrate Fort Knox. It’s well-known for introducing Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, however even cooler is Goldfinger’s 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville, which impressed a brand new one-off Phantom VIII that was commissioned by a buyer in celebration of the film’s sixtieth anniversary.
Rolls-Royce says this particular new Phantom took three years of steady improvement to finish, and it has “a few of the most extensively engineered Bespoke options” ever put right into a Rolls-Royce. All of it begins with the “long-side” two-tone paint job that’s a brand new format for Rolls. The corporate exactly matched the yellow of the unique film automobile, which uninterruptedly wraps across the black physique with a delicate pinstripe surrounding it. Superior polished 21-inch disc wheels have black facilities that make them seem to drift, an identical look to the previous automobile’s hubcaps and white wall tires.
The Spirit of Ecstasy hood decoration has been provided in numerous totally different finishes for years now, from stable gold or rose gold to illuminated crystal and carbon fiber, however this Goldfinger Phantom has a end that’s by no means been carried out earlier than. Impressed by how Goldfinger used his automobile to smuggle gold within the movie, the brand new automobile’s Spirit of Ecstasy is made out of stable silver with hand-plated 18-carat gold sections which are revealed relying on the sunshine and the way you view the decoration. It seems really spectacular.
Practically each little bit of the inside is roofed in Navy leather-based, which is properly offset by Royal Walnut veneers. The leather-based has gold stitching, gold double-R headrest monograms and gold-colored steel “bullets” that cap the ends of the seat piping. All the air vents, organ stops and speaker grilles have a “lustrous” gold end, with the audio system engraved with the film title within the right font. The gold-plated three-dimensional treadplates are supposed to appear to be gold bars and are additionally embossed with the movie title, and the VIN plaque is gold-plated. Rolls made certain the automobile’s VIN ends with 007, after all.
A hidden vault within the middle console homes a stable 18-carat gold bar that has been formed right into a speedform of the Phantom, designer communicate for a small scale mannequin that’s a stylized model of the automobile’s form used to find out how totally different paint colours and light-weight circumstances look on the design. The vault is illuminated to point out off the speedform, and the insides of the middle consoles and glovebox are lined with a gold end. The glovebox is debossed with a quote from early on within the film, when Goldfinger tells Bond, “That is Gold, Mr. Bond. All my life, I l have been in love with its color, its brilliance, its divine heaviness.”
One of many coolest options of the Phantom VIII is the Gallery that runs the width of the higher dashboard, during which prospects can fee all types of various artistic endeavors. On this Goldfinger tribute, it has a hand-drawn three-dimensional isoline map of the Furka Cross within the Swiss Alps, the place Bond tails Goldfinger to his gold smelting plant. This art work is made out of stainless-steel that was darkened by bodily vapour deposition, and the terrain and elevation strains are engraved into the darkish substrate to disclose the brighter steel beneath. The Furka Cross highway is lower out from the metal, exposing a gilded gold floor. To create the piece, Rolls-Royce developed ten prototypes over years of “painstaking” improvement. The clock encompass within the Gallery is designed after the gun barrel intro that has been utilized in each single Bond film.
Every Royal Walnut picnic desk within the rear has a 22-carat gold inlay that’s a tenth of a millimeter thick, displaying a fictional map of Fort Knox from the movie. These took six months and required three prototypes to develop, they usually spotlight totally different places from the film’s plot. The starlight headliner depicts the night time sky because it regarded above the Furka Cross on the final day of filming on July 11, 1964, fabricated from 719 stars that glow a delicate gold and are accompanied by eight capturing stars.
The Phantom has some particular equipment, too. The traditional Rolls-Royce umbrellas that slot into the doorways are the identical colours as Goldfinger’s umbrella within the film — blue, inexperienced, pink and yellow. Bond locations a monitoring machine on Goldfinger’s Phantom within the movie, so Rolls’ Bespoke division created a tool that initiatives the 007 brand onto the carpet at any time when the trunk is opened. Additionally mounted within the trunk is a gold-platted putter golf membership, a recreation of the one utilized by Goldfinger and guarded by his henchman Oddjob, which has an “AG” engraving just like the one on Goldfinger’s signet ring. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be Rolls made a killer hat just like the one worn by Oddjob.
For one final particular contact, Rolls-Royce acquired the AU 1 license plate — a nod to the chemical image for gold — that was utilized by the Phantom III within the film. The brand new Phantom is now registered with that plate, having been delivered to a “important” shopper and collector in England. As for the worth? Effectively, if it’s a must to ask… I hope the customer paid for this factor in gold bars, a minimum of.
