Bond-arama: No. 0017 Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

Let’s continue our journey through the James Bond films with No. 0017 of 0023: Diamonds Are Forever. This is a real disappointment. After quitting the series, Sean Connery returned for this film, only he clearly didn’t care, and the rest of the film just didn’t work. This feels like a low-budget, campy James Bond farce rather than a James Bond film.

Plot Quality: Diamonds Are Forever starts with something that could actually be a solid James-Bond-grade idea: someone has stolen enough diamonds to destabilize the diamond market if they release them all at once. This opens the door to a look at high finance, corporate espionage and the possibility of someone like SPECTRE seizing control of large parts of Africa. That could make a top notch story.

Only, none of that happens. Instead, Bond merely follows some stolen diamonds until the second plot emerges, which involves Blofeld using the diamonds to create a high-powered laser he’ll use to blackmail the nuclear powers “with nuclear supremacy going to the highest bidder.” Not only is this plot far less interesting than the one this film could have had, it struggles with legitimacy and it feels like it was tacked on because the writer didn’t know how to make diamond smuggling interesting and just wanted a big ending.

Unfortunately, this plot is threadbare and it’s made all the worse that Bond simply moves into each part of it rather than doing any actual work to earn it. For example, he’s told to go replace Peter Franks, who is smuggling the diamonds. This causes him to stumble upon the plot because the head bad guy scientist just happens to pick up the diamonds himself and take them right to the lab. From there, Bond goes to see the owner of the lab, who turns out to be Blofeld, who has imprisoned famous billionaire Willard Whyte, who is based on Howard Hughes, so he can use his satellite building facilities and his ties to NASA. Bond then “escapes” when Blofeld’s henchmen don’t bother killing him. He returns to have Blofeld’s number two tell him where to find Willard Whyte. Whyte then tells Bond where Blofeld is after Bond randomly mentions some of Whyte’s properties and Whyte shouts, “Baja?! I don’t have anything in Baja!” Good grief. Bond does no work at all throughout this movie. All of this gives the film a pedestrian, lazy feeling, like Bond is just going through the motions.

The film is beset by other bad choices too. For one thing, this film suffers from poor location choice. South Africa could be exotic, but we never see it. There are no grand vista shots, no cityscapes, no skylines, and not even an industrial shot setting up the mines. It’s just closed sets and one brief shot in a desert environment that could be outside Vegas. Then the film goes to Amsterdam, where we see a few seconds on the famous canal and then just inside sets. Finally, the film goes to Vegas. Only, whereas modern Vegas is amazing, Vegas in 1971 looked like a dirty, small town and this film makes it even worse. Again, you see no cityscapes or skylines. You basically see one block on the strip, a car chase in a parking lot, Bond hugging the side of a blue-screen building, and a few standalone buildings. The place looks like a dump. You also have Bond shooting craps in a casino where he definitely does not belong – he’s the only one in a tux and the locals dun look at him funny when he starts betting more than the $2 table limits. This is not an appropriate setting for jet-setting James Bond, and it feels like the director is mocking the city.

Even worse, as Bond wanders this barren, plotless landscape, he keeps running into people who try to kill him. But unlike prior movies where he saves himself or gets saved by some ally, here Bond is repeatedly saved by the villains themselves. The Slumber Mortuary guys have him dead, but they let him go because the diamonds aren’t real – something the film implies Bond did not know. The mob guys could have killed him too, but they let him go because they just wanted him to sleep with St. John. Blofeld could have shot him, but instead sends him packing in disgrace. But then he double-crosses Bond for no apparent reason except a desperate plea for drama, and he sends Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd to kill him, but they just put him into a construction pipe to sleep. Oddly, Bond doesn’t have Blofeld arrested at that point either. The film is littered with implausible non-killings and non-actions.

Finally, the film devolves into a circus-style ending with a helicopter raid on an oil platform. This comes from out of the blue; it feels like it could be the ending to another movie that was just tacked onto this one. It wasn’t earned.

Bond Quality: This is Connery’s final film, unless you count Never Say Never Again... which I don’t. And while it’s true that Connery at his worst was better than most of the others at their best, this was a little worse than Connery at his worst; this was Connery treating the role with contempt. His behavior swings between indifference and mocking throughout the film. He barely interacts with the other actors, and when he does, it’s usually just to look bemused at the other actor as if he were saying, “Are you’re really taking your role seriously?” At no point do you think he cares about the women he meets. At no point does his job seems to matter. He treats old acquaintances like Q and Felix like annoyances. And you never once feel from Connery that Bond’s life is in danger. As much as I’m willing to be an apologist for Connery, I just can’t here: he sabotaged this film.

The Bond Girl: As with other Bond films, this one has two Bond girls, though one is only in the film very briefly. The short timer is Lana Wood as Plenty O’Toole. She’s a gold-digger or a shill for a casino who latches onto Bond when he wins a lot of money in the most boring gambling scene ever in a Bond film. She will then be thrown out the window of his hotel room into the pool below by mobsters so that Bond will spend time with the other Bond girl. She makes a brief reappearance in a nonsensical way as she is found drown in a swimming pool when she apparently came to someone’s house looking for Bond. I suspect a scene hit the cutting room floor that would explain this. But without that, she seemed to know where the bad guys were and went there for reasons unknown, only to be mistakenly killed. That doesn’t make any sense.

The main Bond girl is Jill St. John, who plays Tiffany Case. She’s the Amsterdam connection of the diamond smuggling ring Blofeld uses. She comes with Bond when she thinks he’s a smuggler named Peter Franks and then decides to help Bond to see if she can avoid going to prison. St. John is not a bad choice, though she lacks the class of the prior European Bond girls and she comes across as “the ugly American” because she nags Bond constantly. And truthfully, she doesn’t seem interesting enough that Blofeld would have kept her in the end, where she turns into comic relief. She’s not great.

Villain Quality: Not good. It’s just a jump to the left, and then a step to the right... right into camp. Charles Gray who is best known for explaining “The Time Warp” in the campy The Rocky Horror Picture Show plays Blofeld. Gray plays the role for camp. Not only is he over-the-top British, but he doesn’t seem to care about his own plan. He just spends time hiding with a double he’s had made through plastic surgery and playing the narcissist; this is Mini Me played seriously. He even does a little pointless cross-dressing. His plan is generic, his means are weak, and almost everything he does is poorly explained and poorly fleshed-out.

Working for Gray, apparently, are Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd. They’re camp too. They’re homosexual killers who have been hired to kill off everyone involved in the Rube Goldberg diamond smuggling network. They’re probably the best thing about this film because they are creepy. But like many Bond henchmen, they’re stupid too. Instead of shooting people, they find elaborate ways to kill people, like dropping a scorpion down a shirt or leaving Bond in a sewage pipe to presumably die of boredom. In the end, they try to kill Bond with an exploding cake when they could have just shot him. Some of this comes with the territory, but in this case, it just has the feel or an uncaring director.

In the end, this film has the elements of a Bond film, they’re just used indifferently. You can almost hear the director saying, “Yeah, sure, whatever,” at every idea. And if it wasn’t for the cache Connery brings to the role, this could easily be one of the worst early Bonds ever – I suspect Lazenby in this film could have killed the franchise – but the film is saved by this being the last hurrah of Connery and probably our nostalgia for seeing early Vegas. . . even if you don’t see it here. Is this an acceptable Bond film? Yeah. It’s just not a good one. That’s why this film is No. 0017 of 0023.