There is no doubt that "Diamonds are Forever" is one of the most glamourous and wittiest of the Bond movies. Up on screen is the "glitter" of Las Vegas and the "sparkle" of the emponymous diamonds. The result is the chicest film of the series.

It also grabs the attention of the viewer with enough plot twists and turns to keep you enthralled. It is sheer cinema with it's huge budget on screen - but there is still a style to "Diamonds" that future films would not be able to emulate. The film oozes style - Sean Connery in tailored dark dinner jacket nonchantly steps onto the roof of a hotel elevator as it rises, and sniffs the carnation in his buttonhole. The one-liners are terrific, the girl alluring, the locations entertaining, the plot fiendish and the villain competes with Bond in a battle of dry innuendo. "Diamonds are Forever" is a triumph.

Of course, the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R Broccoli needed a success after "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and harked back to the "pride of their fleet" - "Goldfinger". They wanted that same tight, exciting, glossy adventure for "Diamonds are Forever" and this film does resemble it in some ways - American location, Felix Leiter, fun with lasers, not-clear cut heroine etc. The major method for it's success was the re-employment of Connery back on the team. With him were screenwriter Richard Maibaum, composer John Barry, singer Shirley Bassey, production designer Ken Adam and the director of "Goldfinger" - Guy Hamilton. It is his light touch that Hamilton brings to "Diamonds" - he is an exceptionally stylish director and truly "gets" what James Bond is about. It is he who brings the light tongue-in-cheek to this film. It works well here, but probably set the pattern for the Roger Moore Bond's of the seventies.

It is also the first Bond film to totally disregard the Fleming plot. Written in 1955 Ian Flemings novel is a beautifuly styled book which sends Bond against the gangsters running the racing and gambling fraternities in America. He follows a diamond pipeline from Sierra Leone to Las Vegas teaming up with beautiful diamond smuggler Tiffany Case. There are some gratuitous deaths and some superb imagery but the novel is rather a tame book compared with what the producers could put up on screen. So they borrow the title, heroine, location and a few characters but invent their own story - and for the most part this works.

The diamond smuggling plot is kept. The pipeline runs from mines in South Africa, via Amsterdam, to Las Vegas. The beginning of the film is explaining the pipeline - and this is one of the highlights. The links in the pipeline - the diamond smugglers - are slowly being killed off and what follows is a montage of very entertaining deaths by Wint and Kidd. Back in London, the British government is worried about the loss and puts 007 into the pipeline to see whether someone at the end is hoarding gems. He takes the cover of Peter Franks and along with the delectable Tiffany Case smuggles $100,000 of diamonds into America in a dead body. The diamonds are tracked through a few people to Dr Hans Metz who takes them to a space research facility out in the Nevada desert. The facility is owned by industrialist Willard Whyte, a rich recluse, who hides at the top of the Whyte Houe casino in Vegas. 007 infiltrates his penthouse, and realises that it is his old nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who has insinuated himself into Whytes empire and now runs the conglomerate. Blofeld, of course, is up to no good and is using the vast amount of diamonds in a space satellite to produce a laser beam which can be fired from orbit. His idea is to menace the western powers and hold them to ransom, with nuclear supremacy going to the highest bidder.

It is an outrageous story and rather good fun. If you "get" James Bond then the diamond satellite story is all part of the genre to be enjoyed or derided depending on your point of view. Personally, I think the more "over the top" a Bond romp is the more enjoyable it becomes, and this is a cracker. There are so many enjoyable set pieces to "Diamonds are Forever" - the first meeting with Tiffany Case in Amsterdam, Circus Circus, Wint and Kidd in the final scene aboard the ocean liner, Bond mountaineering outside the Whyte House, the moon buggy chase and of course the chase in Tiffany's mustang with the Las Vegas police department which ends in the car turning on it's side as it glides through a narrow street. If there are any criticisms of "Diamonds" is that the storyline - particularly the diamond pipeline - requires real concentration to follow. I have a feeling a lot of scenes were cut from the film. In particular Plenty O'Tooles murder in Tiffany's swimming pool which is never really explained satisfactory. And can anyone tell me why the diamonds ended up at Las Vegas airport? Was that where Shady Tree deposited them before being killed by Wint and Kidd?

But there is so much to enjoy in "Diamonds" - M's exasperation at the cockiness of his top spy, Moneypenny posing as a customs officer and Jimmy Dean as the "hick made good" Willard Whyte which is a real eye-popping performance. Of course this is enhanced by one of the best soundtracks of the series by John Barry. The theme song belted out by Shirley Bassey is very catchy, and seems to permeate the film. The eerie music seems to enhance the sinister mannerisms of Wint and Kidd and the romantic scenes with Tiffany Case.


Sean Connery as James Bond 007

Sean Connery has gone on record to say that he enjoyed making "Diamonds are Forever". Perhaps the proxmity to the golf courses of Nevada helped but you can see it in his performance - he is having a ball. Perhaps it is the thought of all the money he is making. George Lazenby could easily be described as a disaster as Bond, not really wanting him back, the producers offered him an insulting amount of money and started scouting around for someone else. The head of United Artists had a more practical solution and went directly to Sean Connery - he was offered $1,250,00.00 and 12.5% of the grosses to come back as Bond. Plus UA would finance a film of his own choice - this was a deal unprecedented at the time and certainly put a smile on Connery's face.

Of course his return was the best thing about the film and you can see his pleasure in the performance. There is a definite twinkle in his eye as he stalks around the film with an old pro's grace. He has aged since "You Only Live Twice" but in this film this only seems to make him sexier. It's hard to pinpoint which scene is probably his best - there are so many good one's - the briefing with M where he reels off his knowledge of diamonds much to M's exasperation or his toying with Bambi and Thumper? His scenes with Tiffany Case are very special but anyone who doubts that Connery was too old for the role should watch the fight in the Amsterdam lift. The power behind the man as he tussles with Peter Franks in a confined birdcage elevator is astonishing.

The glitter of Las Vegas

"Critics and material I don't need.I haven't changed my act in forty years..."

So says the rather slimy comedian Shady Tree, who is a take on every "has been" comedian who has ever played Vegas. Las Vegas was probably at it's height in the early seventies. Sinatra and Elvis Presley were playing there and it was entertainment capital of the western world. It is a perfect location for a Bond film. There is enough deceit and avarice in the glittering city for the producers to base a good story. Las Vegas has a very dazzling frontage but go beneath it and there is a seedy underbelly with enough gangsters and ne'r do wells to hang a good story on. There is a theme of falseness running throughout the entire film - the fake Blofelds, counterfeit diamonds and money, false identities, simulated moon surface and sheer phoniness of the desert city.

It is also at the start of the 21st century fascinating to see the Vegas of yore. When Bond sneaks into Dr Metz's van which heads into the desert the camera pans up from a great height and we see where the city finishes. At the end of Las Vegas Boulevard South the road peters out into desert. This was in 1971 - in 2003 this area is covered by the New York, New York hotel, the Tropicana and the turrets of 'Excalibur'. It's almost as if Vegas is a tiny village in 1971.

One of the things that has really changed is Fremont Street. Nowadays the entire street is covered in a dazzling laser show but in the film it is the multi-coloured lights of the 'Golden Nugget' casino and the like. An exciting car chase ensues against the Las Vegas police department which involves Tiffany's red mustang mounting the pavement and flipping on two wheels to squeeze through a narrow alley. If you ever have the opportunity of seeing this film at the cinema - go - the lights of Fremont Street light up the entire auditorium in pulsating colour.


Jill St John as Tiffany Case

One of the sparkling jewels of "Diamonds are Forever" has to be Jill St John as Tiffany Case. She's not the best American Bond girl (that honour goes to Lois Chiles in "Moonraker") but her performance is absolutely dazzling. The scriptwriters copped out at the end turning her into a bimbo in a bikini aboard Blofelds Oil Rig but up onto she is kidnapped by Blofeld in drag (only in a Bond film) the character is fizzy, cocky and full of life. Her best scene has to be at the beginning where she meets James Bond posing as Peter Franks whilst getting dressed. The script and chemistry between her and Connery in this scene ("that's a nice little nothing you are almost wearing....I don't dress for the hired help Franks..) is astounding. The scene is very close to the meeting in Flemings novel where Tiffany greets Bond in her underwear while sizing him up to be an effective diamond smuggler.

This Tiffany doesn't have the neurosis of Flemings heroine. There isn't the mood swings that the literary Miss Case has. What you have is a tough operator, a woman who was brought up on the "wrong side of the tracks". It is this greed which is the key to the movies Tiffany Case. She is a crook for whom diamond smuggling is a way of life - and she is very proffessional about it. It's only when the bodies start piling up along the diamond pipeline that she throws in with the good guys. She doesn't know that she is inadvertantly working for SPECTRE, and they are slowly winding up the pipeline.

Jill St John is very proud of her role as Tiffany Case. St John was one of the "faces" of the swinging sixties in America. She used to hang around with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. If anyone signifies the "ratpack" image of late sixties/early seventies Vegas it is Ms St John. She has gone on record to say she was honoured to be a Bond girl and there is quite a chemistry between her and Connery. The book's Tiffany Case proposed to James Bond and she does the same to 007 in the last scene on the ocean liner. The sparks between her character and James Bond were good in real life, both she and Connery flirted outrageously while filming.


Willard Whyte and Bambi and Thumper

Blofeld and SPECTRE must be in financial straits. Probably bankrupt after 007 destroys their volcano and Swiss Alp operations they haven't got the monetary clout to build from new so come up with an ingenious plan. Billionaire Willard Whyte is one of the richest men in America and is a recluse in his own Las Vegas hotel. Who is going to miss someone who has been missing for years? Blofeld impersonates Whyte and uses his empire for his own diabolical purpose. This is a clever ruse, but the public has probably guessed that the producers wouldn't kill off their villain in the pre-title sequences (throwing him into a vat of boiling mud) so his revelation near the end of the film doesn't have the shock value it should have.

The whole story is inspired by Cubby Broccolis friendship with Howard Hughes. Hughes became a virtual recluse towards the end of his life and the bulti-billionaire wouldn't leave his penthouse at the top of his Las Vegas hotel. In the script Hughes becomes Willard Whyte, a cowboy billionarie wonderfully played by Jimmy Dean. Whyte electronics is used by Blofeld to create the satellite with a diamond laser. When Whyte finds out he teams up with 007 and the CIA and it is through him that they work out where Blofeld is holed up - on his new Oil Rig off the Baja peninsula in Mexico. Jimmy Dean, the country singer, gives a terrific performance as Willard Whyte. Although, every time I see him I cannot think of his musical hit - "Big bad John". Still he comes through in the end leading the helicopter attack on the Oil Rig as Blofeld tries to blackmail the western governments.

Guarding Whyte in his condo out in the Nevada desert are a pair of female bodyguards known as Bambi and Thumper. One of the most memorable scenes in the film is Bond's tussle with them. Sean Connery is knocked, kicked and thrown about the room by these two circus acrobats. This is what James Bond should be about - a bizarre pair taking on him in an imaginative fight whilst partaking of witty dialogue. I suspect this is the feminists favourite scene in the entire film.


Blofeld and Wint and Kidd

"If at first you don't succeed....Mr Wint"
"Try, try again Mr Kidd....."

They don't make villains like this anymore. One of the highlights of "Diamonds" are these two sinister killers. They are always in the background with no one knowing their faces and only Blofeld and Bert Saxby knowing their identities. Thus when it comes to the final scene aboard the ocean liner - while the audience knows they are the villains, Bond has no idea until they make a mistake about the wine (I'm afraid our cellar is rather poorly stocked with clarets.....Mouton Rothschild is a claret...). Bruce Glover and Putter Smith put in a superb performance. They are openly gay which was rather daring for 1971 and their assassination of the members of the pipeline is very eerie. Their best performance may come at the beginning of the film where a South African dentist is killed with a scorpion down his back, and a helicopter pilot is blown up in mid-air.

They are directed as rather subtley camp rather then outrageous and it is interesting to think what the gay lobby would make of them today. But whenever they appear on screen the audience catches its breathe as if wondering what they are going to do next and their appearance in the final scene is a real surprise. Their aftershave and lack of knowledge of wines is their downfall - alerting 007 to the fact that they tried to kill him twice before. The fight at the finish where they take on Bond with a 'bombe surprise' and a skewer of flaming kebabs is extraordinary. His method of dealing with Mr Kidd - smashing and throwing a bottle of flamable brandy over him - is pure James Bond.

And then there is Blofeld......

Charles Gray is an actor for who can charm and ooze class from every pore - but he is the weakest Blofeld. I like him, but he doesn't have he menace of Savalas or Pleasance - the two actors who played the supervillain before him. Charles Grays Blofeld is undoutedly the most charming and has such a cut glass accent that he comes across of something of an aristocrat. Gone is the baldness of the previous Blofelds, the plastic surgery has given him sharp features and silvery hair. The Mao suit is still there as is the white persian cat.

And for once the white persian cat is more then a prop. In the best scene in the film 007 uses a piton gun and mountaineering saddle to gain entrance to Willard Whyte's eyrie on top of the Whyte House. There, to his shock, is not one but two Blofelds - the arch villain has made duplicates of himself. There does, however, seem to be only one white persian cat. Bonds reasoning is that if he kicks the white persian cat it will flee, distressed, to the real Blofeld. In a piece of superb action he duly does this and fires a piton into the forehead of the Blofeld on the sofa. Unknowing to him, the Blofeld has duplicated the cat as well and he has picked the wrong one. A cat with a diamond studded collar then enters the scene. I'll leave the last word to Blofeld.

"Right idea Mr Bond....."

"But wrong pu*sy....."


Classic Bond scene: Cremation at Slumber Inc

This film contains more classic moments then most with the confrontation with the two Blofelds in the penthouse the standout scene in the entire film. The dialogue is light and witty in "Diamonds" and who can forget Whyte's bullying of the technicians at Bandenburg launch base or 007 trying to be Klaus Hergersheimer, low level scientist in the laborotory - only to have the real Klaus Hergersheimer walk in a few minutes later.

But my favourite is at Slumber Inc (one of the few names to make it from Flemings novel) where Bond passes on the diamonds to their next link in the pipeline. Fleming and the producers had a thing about coffins and there were always a few jokes in each film. Slumber Inc is a quick-fix, over-the-top funeral parlour on the edge of Las Vegas run by the oily Nathan Slumber. Upon arriving with Ms Case from Los Angeles Bond is driven to the parlour in a hearse with a number of stereotypical gangsters. Going along with the game 007 pretends to be the grieving brother, while the body containing the diamonds is put through the crematorium. The diamonds are returned to him and he passes them onto the next person by leaving them in the garden of rest.

But Wint and Kidd are waiting for him. He is coldcocked and put in a coffin, the homosexual hitmen then press the requisite buttons and the coffin rolls into the incinerator with James Bond locked inside. The heat brings him around and he realises he is about to be burned alive. Panic sets in and he starts hammeing and beating at the coffin lid. The audience begins to panic too as they wonder how he is going to get out! I won't tell you how he does - but it is abrupt and surprising.

Everything works in this scene - acting, direction and pace. The swirling angelic music as the coffin rolls forward and the fires start up is sweat-inducing. And as the coffin starts to melt - you do wonder if this is the end for James Bond.


There are a couple of other characters which need to be talked about. Running to casino for Blofeld is the treacherous Bert Saxby. He carries out the dirty work for the head of SPECTRE including the execution of Willard Whyte towards the end. He botches this and ends up being shot by Leiters CIA for his pains. Every time the film appears on TV my father pops up with a useless piece of information as Bert Saxby is played by Bruce Cabot. For film buff's Bruce Cabot was the hero in one of the worlds first blockbusters - King Kong. He spent his time running away from the giant ape with Faye Wray back in 1933. Not quite as successful is Norman Burton as Felix Leiter. Burton is overweight and rather dull, he doesn't live up to the previous Leiters. He is a Felix Leiter devoid of any kind of charisma.

The production design is all we expect from a Bond film. Ken Adam comes back to design the sets and creates the chicest film of the series. With Willard Whyte's penthouse is a glittering metallic silver remeniscent of the diamonds that seem to permeate this film. The producers do seem to catch the mix of glitter and sleaze which is so much a part of Las Vegas. If there are problems to "Diamonds" then they are small (disjointed editing, too much humour) and you are simply won over by the scale, dazzle and audacity of it all.

It is classic Bond. And is one of those ones you never really quite tire of watching. The script is so sharp that you know the one-liners but the actors deliver them in such a fashion that you cannot help but enjoy them all over again. This was the Bond that gave the team a boost in the arm and set them on course for one of the most successful era's - the seventies. The fashions of the seventies - in all their gaudy might in this fil - may have dated. But the script is still fresh and exciting after all these years.

This is the Bond to see to get an idea what Bond is about. It glitters and dazzles as never before, as flawless as the diamonds it portrays.





Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12