Aston Martin was initially reluctant to part with two of their cars for the production. The producers had to pay for the Aston Martin, but after the success of the movie, both at the box office and for the company, they never had to spend money on a car again.

The movie was the fastest grossing movie in movie history when it was released, and was entered into the Guiness Book of World Records.

When Dame Shirley Bassey recorded the theme song, she was singing as the opening credits were running on a screen in front of her, so that she could match the vocals. When she hit her final high note, the titles kept running and she was forced to hold the note until she almost passed out. (This echoes the experience of Sir Tom Jones when recording the Thunderball (1965) theme.) She has told the story that she only managed to hold the note after removing a restricting bustier she was wearing.

Though he had been considered for, but never appeared in a Bond movie, Sir Michael Caine was the first person to hear the completed score for this movie. After he and roommate Terence Stamp were ejected from their apartment, Caine asked friend John Barry if he could use the spare bedroom at Barry's London residence. As they were good friends, Barry agreed and so for several months, Caine crashed with Barry and was there the sleepless night he completed his iconic score. At breakfast the following morning, Barry played his composition for Caine, the first time he'd performed it for anybody.

Sir Sean Connery never travelled to the United States to film this movie. Every scene in which he appears to be in the U.S. was filmed at Pinewood Studios outside London. This explains why Bond flips a light switch down to discover the golden corpse of Jill, as British light switches are generally turned on by flicking them down instead of up. According to director Guy Hamilton, Cec Linder (Felix) was the only main actor in the Miami sequence who was actually there. Connery, Gert Fr?be, Shirley Eaton, Margaret Nolan, and Austin Wallis, who played Goldfinger's card victim, all filmed their parts when filming started in Britain, with rear projections used, and in the case of Fr?be and Wallis, stand-ins used for the long shots.

Continuity

When Bond is getting a rubdown from Dink, his back is perfectly shaved. When he wakes up the next morning with Jill, he has apparently grown a good deal of back hair.

After Bond ejects Goldfinger's henchman at the factory, subsequent shots of the Aston Martin show the roof sections intact.

When the Lincoln is being lifted into the crusher, the car tilts, and it is obvious that there is nothing i.e. nobody in the back seat.

Goldfinger's crew uses a giant truck-mounted laser to burn their way through the Fort Knox entrance. Several shots of the truck show the laser beam being moved across the entrance extremely rapidly; however, when these shots are intercut with views of the entrance itself, the beam inches across the entrance door very, very slowly.

After the soldiers are all knocked out by nerve gas, the procession to the gold depository is led by an army jeep. The jeep shown keeps switching back and forth from a WW2 era jeep to a much later 1950s-style jeep. The trucks also change between shots.



Factual errors

There is nothing about decompression that changes the aerodynamics of aircraft. Wings still produce lift and the control surfaces still function. Remember Aloha 243 landed safely with a third of its upper fuselage missing.

In addition to what has been pointed out by others about the small Ford Falcon-based Ranchero truck never being able to carry the crushed Lincoln Continental (weight doesn't change because something is compacted to a smaller physical size), the Continental's large-block cast iron engine (which is fairly non-compressible)is almost as large as the depicted "cube" by itself let alone all the rest of the car's parts. Even today, there is no way a vehicle of that size can be turned into a compacted cube of the small size that was depicted, let alone with crushing equipment from 50 years ago.

The idea that all-over gold paint would suffocate someone is something Ian Fleming made up.

In the Fort Knox vault, the gold is stacked too high to be practical. Given the weight and softness of gold, the lower bars of the stacks would be flattened by the sheer weight of the bars above them.

At the last hole of their golf match, Bond says he needs to make his last putt to win. He misses and Goldfinger claims victory. However, if his last putt was for the win it meant they were tied at that point and his miss would've forced another hole or cancel the bet altogether, but not a Goldfinger win.



Incorrectly regarded as goofs

While Bond is giving Tilly a lift to the garage, he looks in his rear view mirror at the initials on her case. He sees "T.M." His view should be ".M.T" This is because we don't see a camera shot of the mirror. The camera shows the case in the back, so the initials are not mirrored.

As they watch him meet up with "his pigeon", Felix tells Bond: "That Goldfinger's a fabulous card player." It takes Bond less than a minute to deduce Goldfinger is "a fabulous card player" because he cheats, yet Felix, who has had Goldfinger under surveillance for a week, didn't figure that out. This is why Bond is considered to be the best secret agent in the world.

When infiltrating Fort Knox, Goldfinger wears a U.S. Army general officer's uniform (wide band on sleeve, two stripes on trousers) yet sports the silver eagle of a colonel on his shoulder boards. Goldfinger is not a real general so he is not wearing an authentic uniform with all of the proper regalia; it is a prop uniform and just like a movie prop uniform, it may not be completely accurate.

When Goldfinger is getting ready to slice Bond in half with his laser Bond claims he knows all about Operation Grand Slam. All Goldfinger would have had to do was tell Bond to tell him what Operation Grand Slam was and Bond would have been dead meat because he obviously couldn't have done that. And all Bond would have to do is remain coy about what he actually knows, enough to sow doubt in Goldfinger's mind as to what the extent of his knowledge is, hence the comment "Can you afford to take that chance?"

During the "laser" scene, Goldfinger reveals that Bond has been outed by "one of your opposite numbers, who is also licensed to kill". MI6 has not been compromised; an "opposite number" is a person's counterpart within an opposing force, so Goldfinger is referring to a spy from another country.



Revealing mistakes

The reflection that Bond sees in the girl's eye isn't a mirror image like a true reflection would be.

When the crusher picks up the 1964 Lincoln Continental, as it lifts the car, the weight of the engine causes the car to tilt forward, however, with so much gold in the trunk, you would expect the car to stay level or tilt backward.

The common misconception of junkyard operations is that a car is taken "raw", squeezed, and simply compacted into a two-foot cube as depicted. In reality, the glass, rubber, metal, plastic, vinyl and other materials are all run through a chopper, which breaks down everything into small parts which are then separated according to the material type. The metal (steel and iron engine parts, chrome bumpers, etc.) is magnetically separated from the scrap, and Goldfinger's gold, being non-magnetic, would not have stuck to the magnet and would been mingled along with all the other virtually worthless scraps.

When the "Flying Circus" planes land and taxi to a stop, one can clearly see that the pilot of the nearest plane, who is looking at the camera making sure not to hit it with the wing, is a burly man wearing a blonde wig. It is basically a yellow hat with pigtails.

A standard gold bar used by banks and bullion dealers weighs 400 troy-ounces, or 27.5 pounds each. Goldfinger's henchmen are transferring the gold bars to the truck as if they weighed almost nothing.



Anachronisms

Audio/visual unsynchronized

When Auric Goldfinger is talking to Mr. Ling about the process of melting down the gold from the car, his lips never move.

After Goldfinger's been beaten at Gin Rummy and snaps a pencil in anger, we hear this while we're seeing through Jill's binoculars. We wouldn't be able to hear something like that from Jill's vantage point, several floors up from the pool area.

In the first dialogue of the pre-credits sequence, when Bond chats to Sierra just after the explosion, the actor playing Sierra has clearly been dubbed.



Crew or equipment visible

After Goldfinger writes a check in his car, he closes the door. You can clearly see the film crew in the reflection of said door.

As Bond regains consciousness after being struck by Oddjob, the shadow of the camera and boom moving is visible on the bottom of the cupboards.

When Bond drives his Aston Martin between the buildings of Goldfinger's facility, the studio roof is visible instead of a clear night sky.

The stage lighting is visible in the vault door, even as it opens.



Errors in geography

When Felix and his partner are following Oddjob to the airport, thinking they are tracking Bond, palm trees are visible in "Kentucky".

When Bond is tracking Goldfinger's car in Switzerland, the map on his dashboard show's Goldfinger's blip moving north from Geneva along a lakeside road, yet the shots of the cars indicate a high mountain pass.

When Leiter contacts M on the green scrambler, the south portico of the White House is shown through a window behind him. There are no structures directly south of the White House to the Tidal Basin except for the Washington Monument.

When Bond is driving to the Auric Enterprises building (in Switzerland), he's seen driving on the left hand side of the road but he should be driving on the right hand side in Switzerland (as shown in the previous scene).

Multiple errors in the drive supposedly to take the gangster to the airport. Leiters radar screen shows the Lincoln turning onto St. Andrews Church Rd. from Dixie Highway which was a 2 lane rural road, not the 6 lane commercial highway shown during driving scenes. A sign displays "International Airport" on an overpass, which the actual road was nowhere near any airport. Standiford Field, where they were presumably heading, did not become an international airport for another 25 years. Leiter drives past Opa Locka Blvd. and a Royal Castle hamburger place (a deep South restaurant not in Kentucky) and the scene ends with the Lincoln crushed at "Atlantic Metal". All are obvious Florida references nowhere near Kentucky.



Plot holes

If Bond's car has a bullet-proof rear window, as Q explains, there would be no need for a bullet-proof rear sliding panel.

After ejecting the guard, Bond tries to make his escape back out the front gate. However, he is thwarted by the old lady with the sub machine gun and ends up driving away and in the ensuing chase, crashes and is captured. Bond should have just keep driving out the gate since he knew his car and windows were bullet proof and he could have deployed his headlight machine guns to easily eliminate the lady.

Mr. Solo is driven away by Oddjob, who then shoots him before the car is crushed. Oddjob then has the remains loaded onto an open truck, which he drives back to the stud farm. Goldfinger then tells Bond that he has to arrange to separate Mr. Solo from his gold. Seeing as Solo had been shot, the simplest thing would have been to put him into another car for disposal, and return the original car. That way Solo's body would have been hidden and the gold could have been simply taken back out of the car without the need for a complicated separating process.

When Bond is fleeing with Tilly, he turns left at a fork in the road. Having driven the road and scouted the area during daylight, Bond knew that a cliff was in that direction. In short, he intentionally drove towards a dead end.

The lead henchman steps inside and presses a button on the wall to open the other large door. So it was entirely unnecessary to spend all the time laser-cutting the entire first door down and dragging it off with a truck when a small hole could have been cut just large enough to reach one arm in to press the button. And it wouldn't require a giant truck-mounted laser to cut through a relatively-thin roll-up door, anyway.



Character error

Bond squeezes the plastic explosive out of its packaging before laying it. This is unnecessary as it would have worked while still wrapped and as a professional spy he should have known this. Also it just increases the time that he might get caught and stopped.

The U.S. Army Brigadier General is addressed as "Brigadier"; U.S. Army, Air Force and Marine Corps officers of this rank are addressed as "General", since in the U.S. military it is a General officer's rank. "Brigadier" is strictly a British or Commonwealth form of address. It's understandable that Bond might make this mistake, but Leiter, an American, should know better.

When Bond disables Tilly's car, not only does he bust her tires, he also tears the side of her car to shreds. Yet Tilly makes no mention of this when she examines the damage, only remarking about her blown tires0

Speaking to Jill Masterson, Bond claims that the champagne should be drunk at 38 Fahrenheit, this is 3.3 Centigrade and barely above freezing. Most wine experts recommend 7 to 9 Celsius which is 43 to 48 Fahrenheit.

Goldfinger says in his briefing to the other criminals that Fort Knox contains the entire US gold depository. This is incorrect, though it does contain the most. For example, gold is additionally deposited at West Point Mint in New York State.