Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

One More for the Money

Diamonds Are Forever is the film Sean Connery made to close his official run as Bond, and it’s the one where the series changed direction. George Lazenby had played Bond once, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and quit. The producers, desperate for a proven star, offered Connery a record fee to return, and he agreed, donating his salary to a Scottish educational charity he had helped found.

Guy Hamilton, who had directed Goldfinger, directed it, and it came out in December 1971. It was a big commercial success, and it set the tone for the lighter, sillier Bond films of the seventies. I give it a 5. It has some fun moments and a great theme song, and it’s a tired, uneven film that feels like a series losing its way.

It’s also a film shaped by what came before it. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had been serious, tragic and less successful at the box office than the producers hoped, and Diamonds Are Forever is, in many ways, a deliberate retreat from it: lighter, sillier and built to be a crowd-pleaser. It worked commercially, and it cost the series something it took decades to recover.

Revenge and Diamonds

The film opens with Bond hunting down Blofeld, apparently to avenge the death of his wife, Tracy, at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The film never says so directly, and the revenge is dealt with in a few minutes before the titles. That’s a strange way to treat the most emotional event in Bond’s life.

Then the plot moves on. Bond is sent to investigate diamond smuggling, following a pipeline of stolen South African diamonds from Amsterdam to Las Vegas, and he poses as a smuggler to follow the trail. It leads him to a reclusive billionaire, a casino, a space research laboratory and, finally, to Blofeld again, who is using the diamonds to build a giant laser satellite that can destroy targets on Earth.

The plot is convoluted and hard to follow, and the film seems more interested in jokes and set pieces than in making sense. It’s one of the weakest scripts in the series, and even devoted Bond fans struggle to explain exactly how the diamonds, the billionaire and the satellite all fit together.

Connery’s Last Official Bond

Connery was forty-one, and he looks heavier and older than he did in the sixties. He also looks bored. His performance has moments of the old charm and menace, especially in a brutal lift fight early in the film, but much of the time he seems to be going through the motions, trading one-liners without much energy.

It’s not entirely his fault. The script gives him little to play, and the film’s increasingly comic tone leaves him few chances to be the dangerous, cool Bond of the early films. He returned once more, unofficially, in Never Say Never Again in 1983, but this was the last time he played Bond for Eon, and it’s a disappointing farewell to the role he defined.

There are flashes of the old Connery: the menace in the lift, the dry humour in a few exchanges, the way he still moves through a room as if he owns it. They make the rest of the performance more frustrating, because they show what the film could have been if it had given him something to fight for.

The Lift Fight

The best action scene comes early. In Amsterdam, Bond fights a smuggler called Peter Franks in a tiny, cramped lift. It’s a brutal, close-quarters struggle, full of punches, kicks and broken glass, filmed in tight, claustrophobic shots that make the audience feel every blow. It lasts only a minute or two. It’s the most convincing piece of violence in the film.

It’s the kind of fight Connery did best, and it recalls the train fight in From Russia with Love. It’s also a sign of the film the producers could have made, tougher and more serious, before it turned into a comedy. Nothing later in the film matches its intensity.

After it, Bond swaps identities with the dead Franks and takes his place in the smuggling pipeline, a nice piece of plotting that sets up the rest of the film, and one of the few moments where the script’s cleverness matches Connery’s physical presence.

Las Vegas

Most of the film takes place in Las Vegas. It’s one of the most dated settings in the series. Bond gambles in casinos, visits a circus casino, is chased through the desert and across the city, and stays in the garish hotels of the early seventies. It’s colorful and loud, and it gives the film a cheap, tacky feel that suits its comic tone.

The most famous sequence is a car chase through the streets of Las Vegas at night, in which Bond, driving a red Ford Mustang, escapes the police by tipping the car onto two wheels to fit through a narrow alley. The stunt is fun, and it contains a famous mistake: the car goes into the alley on one pair of wheels and comes out on the other.

There’s also a chase in a moon buggy across the desert, after Bond escapes from a laboratory where astronauts are training in a mock lunar landscape. It’s silly and slow. It’s typical of the film’s increasingly cartoonish approach to action, where spectacle and silliness replace suspense.

Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd

The film’s most memorable characters are Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, a pair of assassins who follow the diamond pipeline, killing everyone who handles the stones. Played by Bruce Glover and Putter Smith, they’re polite, cheerful, sinister and clearly a couple, finishing each other’s sentences and holding hands as they walk away from their murders.

They’re unsettling and very funny, and they’ve become cult figures. They’re also a product of their time, and the film’s portrayal of them as a gay couple, with their relationship used as a source of menace and comedy, is uncomfortable to watch now. They’re the strangest and most distinctive henchmen in the series, and their final encounter with Bond, aboard a cruise ship, is a darkly funny ending for them.

Their scenes are as distinctive as anything in the whole series, with their own macabre rhythm, and they show that the film had moments of real invention, even as the main plot sagged. Glover and Smith are so memorable that audiences still quote their lines.

Blofeld

Charles Gray plays Blofeld, the third actor to take the role in three films, after Donald Pleasence and Telly Savalas. Gray, who had played a different character in You Only Live Twice, plays Blofeld as a smooth, arch, witty English gentleman, and he’s funny, but he’s not frightening. The menacing Blofeld of the sixties has become a comic villain.

The film uses several doubles of Blofeld, made through plastic surgery, and one of its oddest scenes shows Blofeld escaping disguised as a woman in a wig and dress. That’s a sign of how far the series had drifted from its roots, and of how little the film took its own villain seriously. Blofeld’s final fate, in a small submarine swinging on a crane over an oil rig, is left unclear.

It was the last time Blofeld appeared in an official Bond film under that name for more than forty years, because of the legal dispute over the rights to the character. The series wouldn’t bring him back properly until Spectre in 2015, and this rather silly version was the one audiences were left with for decades.

Tiffany Case

Jill St. John plays Tiffany Case, a diamond smuggler who becomes Bond’s ally, and she starts well, as a sharp, cynical, capable woman who’s more than a match for Bond. The film then turns her into a helpless comic character who makes mistakes and needs rescuing, a disappointing shift that reflects the script’s general lack of interest in its characters.

Lana Wood has a small, memorable role as Plenty O’Toole, a casino hanger-on whose fate is one of the film’s darker moments. The film also features two acrobatic bodyguards, Bambi and Thumper, who fight Bond in a desert house and are dispatched in a swimming pool. Like much of the film, they’re memorable for their oddity more than for any real menace, and they’re over almost as soon as they begin.

Willard Whyte

The reclusive billionaire at the center of the plot is Willard Whyte, played by the country singer Jimmy Dean, a thinly disguised version of Howard Hughes, who at the time was living in isolation at the top of a Las Vegas hotel. Blofeld has kidnapped Whyte and taken over his business empire, impersonating him by voice.

Dean is surprisingly good, a folksy, irritable tycoon who resents being held prisoner, and his scenes add some fun to the final act. The Howard Hughes parallel was topical in 1971 and gives the film a flavour of its time. The reveal of Whyte’s imprisonment in his own summer house, guarded by the acrobatic Bambi and Thumper, is one of the film’s more inventive sequences.

The Music

Shirley Bassey returns to sing the theme song, written by John Barry and Don Black, and she sings it with all her distinctive power. Diamonds Are Forever is one of the great Bond themes, slinky, seductive and sinister. It’s much better than the film. Bassey remains the only singer to perform more than one Bond theme, having sung Goldfinger and later Moonraker.

John Barry’s score is lush and effective. This is a real strength. Barry’s music gives even the weaker scenes a sense of glamour and scale, and it holds the film together when the script doesn’t. That’s a reminder that Barry was as important to the series as any of its stars.

Where Diamonds Are Forever Falls Short

The script, the tone and Connery’s fatigue. The plot is muddled, the humour is broad, and the villain is no longer threatening. The film treats the death of Bond’s wife as an afterthought, and its women are written as comic relief. It’s the moment the series began trading tension for jokes, and you can feel it.

On the other side: the lift fight, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, Shirley Bassey’s song, John Barry’s score and Connery, even at half strength. It earns a 5. This is a significant film in the series’ history and a disappointing one to watch, the moment the Bond films chose laughs over danger and set the course for the decade that followed.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Diamonds Are Forever

Only for Bond completists and fans of seventies camp. It’s a 5. Watch it for the lift fight, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd and Shirley Bassey’s theme, and as the film that turned Bond towards comedy. Connery deserved a better official farewell.

Frequently Asked Questions