Goldeneye was a glossy ITV television movie about the secret life of writer Ian Fleming who had worked in British intelligence during World War 2. He is best known as the writer of the James Bond books.
It was shown at a similar time as the Bond movie Licence to Kill was released in the cinemas in 1989. Ironically the next Bond movie which was Pierce Brosnan's debut was called GoldenEye.
This movie also has a small part for an Austrian/German actor who came to live in Britain in the late 1980s to improve his English. Christoph Waltz would go on to become a double Oscar winner and go on to play the role of Blofeld in a Bond movie.
Although this film is based on the biography of Fleming by writer John Pearson. It is has been ineptly dramatised. A thinly sketched look at Fleming as the movie is more interested in (probably) fictionalised aspects of his life that inspired James Bond.
Charles Dance has a debonair air about him as Ian Fleming. Probably too handsome to be Fleming. Although Fleming was a rampant upper class womaniser despite his bad teeth which the film acknowledged (the womanising, bad teeth and his poor health as he died relatively young.) He was also keen on S&M.
Fleming was also very right wing and a raging snob that the film is quiet about. He was not really that nice a person if you were from the lower classes. No wonder he got on famously with pompous snob Noel Coward. Fleming's wife got revenge of his womanising by sleeping with Hugh Gaitskell, then leader of the Labour Party. Which I find to be very amusing and would had been great if the film dealt with it.
Goldeneye starts with Fleming talking to a journalist about his life in the secret service. A framing device I thought and then that portion disappeared. It was just interested in moments that inspired James Bond, like a woman in a bikini emerging from the sea in Jamaica.
