Diamonds Are Forever **** (1971, Sean Connery, Jill St John, Charles Gray, Lana Wood, Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewelyn, Lois Maxwell) – Classic Movie Review 953

Lana Wood: ‘I’m Plenty.’ Sean Connery: ‘I bet you are.’ Wood: ‘Plenty O’Toole.’ Connery: ’Named after your father?’ The 1971 spy thriller Diamonds Are Forever finds Sean Connery enjoying his sixth James Bond movie.

Lana Wood: ‘I’m Plenty.’ Sean Connery: ‘I bet you are.’  Wood: ‘Plenty O’Toole.’ Connery: ’Named after your father?’

Director Guy Hamilton’s 1971 spy thriller Diamonds Are Forever finds Sean Connery enjoying his sixth James Bond movie, taking the 007 role back from George Lazenby, who only got to play it once in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). John Gavin was contracted to do it, but in the end Connery was paid a then-record $1.25 million (£23 million in 2014 money) to return, ensuring that the film was a commercial success.

James Bond (an older, grimmer-looking but particularly charismatic Connery) is ordered to investigate a megabuck diamond smuggling racket, a mission that leads him to Las Vegas. There he uncovers an extortion plot headed by his old arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofield, played by purring Charles Gray, the last actor to play Blofeld. His dastardly plan is to use the diamonds to build a giant laser and destroy Washington DC, extorting the world with nuclear supremacy.

Gray, who had played a good guy, Dikko Henderson, 007’s Japan contact, in You Only Live Twice (1967), is perfect as the feline-stroking, velvety-voiced nemesis of James Bond. So it is a shame he didn’t get to reprise the role.

Along the way, Bond meets the alluring Tiffany Case (Jill St John, the first American Bond girl), the lovely Plenty O’Toole (Lana Wood, sister of Natalie) and of course M, Q and Miss Moneypenny (Bernard Lee, Desmond Llewelyn and Lois Maxwell as usual).

Upping the ante, director Hamilton (in the second of his four Bond films) makes Diamonds Are Forever markedly more violent, more lavish, more camp and more preposterous than previous Bond movies. Trying to access and re-create the magic of Goldfinger (along with its director), Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz abandon Ian Fleming’s source novel and come up with a crowd-pleasing screenplay that is expert, complex and exuberant.

But it has an uncomfortable tendency to tip over into smutty Carry On humour, reducing the sophistication level considerably. And then there’s silly stuff like Bond finding himself driving a moon buggy with antennae revolving and robot arms flapping. But that is balanced by exciting stuff like the Las Vegas car chase scene, particularly when Bond drives the Mustang on two wheels.

This was the seventies, and, unpleasantly, in a mood of casual but calculated homophobia, two of Blofield’s nastiest hoods, assassins Mr Wint (Bruce Glover) and Mr Kidd (Putter Smith), are portrayed as vicious gay stereotypes and they are rewarded by meeting a particularly unpleasant end in the film’s finale. They are systematically killing diamond smugglers.

Acrobats Donna Garrett and Trina Parks play Bambi and Thumper, Blofield’s operatives who have to guard reclusive billionaire Willard Whyte (Jimmy Dean). This doesn’t do much for the sophistication level either.

Locations include Las Vegas, Amsterdam and Lufthansa’s hangar in Germany. Finally around this time people started noticing how special production designer Ken Adam’s sets for the series are.

Connery said he’d never do another Bond movie, but then he returned to the role for one last time in Never Say Never Again in 1983. So did Daniel Craig after Spectre in 2015 before his casting in Bond 25 was announced in 2017. It became No Time to Die (2021), with Craig returning to the role for one last time.

For many years, this was the last Bond movie by Eon Productions to use SPECTRE or Blofeld, which had not featured in Fleming’s novel Diamonds Are Forever. After this, writer Kevin McClory’s legal claim against the Fleming estate that he had created the organisation for the novel Thunderball was upheld by the courts. Blofeld is seen but not identified in For Your Eyes Only (1981), as Eon could not use McClory’s works.

However, McClory died in 2006, and in November 2013 MGM and his estate settled the issue, with MGM acquiring full film rights to the concept of Spectre and all associated characters. So Spectre marks Spectre and Blofeld’s first appearance in an Eon Productions film since 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever with Christoph Waltz playing the organisation’s leader.

Jill St John (born Jill Arlyn Oppenheim on 10 August 1940) is best known as Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever. Her films also include Holiday for Lovers, The Lost World, Tender Is the Night, Come Blow Your Horn, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination, Who’s Minding the Store?, Honeymoon Hotel, The Liquidator, The Oscar, Tony Rome, Sitting Target and The Concrete Jungle.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 953

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