Diamonds Are Forever in Review

I wasn't a fan of Jill St. John as Case, either, but it was probably the better choice over Wood.

Wood was quite a woman. Still is, probably.

Wood could have played Tiffany but she was perfect as Plenty.

St John meanwhile reprised her gangster-moll role from Batman TV series, a few years earlier. IMO she was perfectly cast and effortlessly brought the sass and brass the role required. The Bond and Tiffany tete-a-tete, when they first meet, is one of my favourite exchanges in all of Bond. Sean ever so deftly tosses lines at her and she ever so smoothly blows them off, but the stage was brilliantly set for a future dalliance. A-level flirting on display here.

Any aspiring young male smooth-talker need study this scene.

Played this at HBO (Malaysia) last night.

My...my..what fun it still is. Wife was a bit annoyed with me mouthing the dialogues ahead. There'll never be one like this ever. Was thinking about you, tiffanywink (by the way, what was your username at mi6?)

groucho070 wrote:

Played this at HBO (Malaysia) last night.

My...my..what fun it still is. Wife was a bit annoyed with me mouthing the dialogues ahead. There'll never be one like this ever. Was thinking about you, tiffanywink (by the way, what was your username at mi6?)

"Wife was a bit annoyed with me mouthing the dialogues ahead" Yes we Bond fanatics have to watch that.

"Was thinking about you, tiffanywink (by the way, what was your username at mi6?)" The answer is on the previous page.

But of course, timmer :D

Long live this thread, may there be more appreciation for this underrated gem...

groucho070 wrote:

But of course, timmer :D

Long live this thread, may there be more appreciation for this underrated gem...

Long live the awesomeness that is DAF. My first Bond. My favourite Bond!

btw, DN, GF, DAF, LALD and TMWTGG are the 5 Bonds that I never weary of. And its not a coincidence that Remo Williams, The Adventure Begins, director, Guy Hamilton, directed 4 of them. ;)

FRWL, TB, OHMSS and YOLT are brilliant too but they require more of a viewing commitment.

LALD, my compulsory viewing if am in Sir Rog's mood. All Connery Bonds I can watch anytime, and I have included OHMSS too. But DAF if I want to have shitload of fun, yeah baby!

By the way, I remember that when I was a kid, I came across an old movie magazine (local) that was promoting DAF. In it was a coveted poster of Sean on the floor during the Bambi/Thumper episode. I mean literally on the floor. Have you ever come across that still?

Oh, the poster got lost alongside my various paper clippings on Bond when my mom threw them thinking they were trash :(

groucho070 wrote:

By the way, I remember that when I was a kid, I came across an old movie magazine (local) that was promoting DAF. In it was a coveted poster of Sean on the floor during the Bambi/Thumper episode. I mean literally on the floor. Have you ever come across that still?

This image comes up on a google search! That could be the photo. Sean's definitely on the mat here.

Not quite as dire a situation as having GF's laser beam homing in on your privates, but still a predicament.

Bond getting whupped up on by a coupla broads was not my favorite segment of DAF!

:x

Jill St. John for Tiffany Case.

Lana Wood (or any buxom, moderately talented bimbo) for Plenty O'Toole.

Don't mess with success.

Loved Diamonds. Cut my teeth on it (NPI). Love it still. Jill St. John wasn't the only element from Batman to make the transition. In all a very successful first exposure to the world of 007.

BTW: Bond 'might be gay' in QoS? Where does that come from?

Thanks, Timmer. Looks like a DVD grab. But quite close. I think the one I saw was a proper still taken, perhaps, after the shots. The girls were not in it.

But whaddya know, this thread is getting attention :cheers:

Bond deserved to get beaten up for that hideous pink tie.

I'm probably one of the few that thought Sir Sean could pull off the pink tie.

Pink tie? What pink tie? ;)

"Thank you, Python. Now, put Groucho on...
Groucho, are you F***IN' blind?!"

:twisted:

I am actually colour blind...

Nice tie. But a tad short.

I wonder where that tie is now?

Harry Saltzman was buried with it.

Or, rather, Connery made sure it was buried with him.

CJB wrote:

Bond deserved to get beaten up for that hideous pink tie.

I don't mind the pink tie so much,( it was the early 70's) but yes it's way too short. It's like half length. I guess that was normal or at least accepted in 1971. I think anything went. A hideous fashion decade unless you were a rock star.

tiffanywint wrote:

CJB wrote:

Bond deserved to get beaten up for that hideous pink tie.

A hideous fashion decade unless you were a rock star.

Indeed. And in such stark contrast to that most beautiful period, the early-to-mid-sixties.

Ruffled shirts rule!

A Guardian article 27-9-2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/sep/27/favourite-bond-diamonds-are-forever


My favourite Bond film: Diamonds Are Forever

The glamour has lost its sparkle and Sean Connery's 007 is jaded and woozy, but that only makes the seventh Bond a rough Diamond

Let's get the caveats out of the way first. Judged against the usual checklist of what makes a great James Bond movie, Diamonds Are Forever is not a great James Bond movie. Sean Connery's last official outing as 007 lacks the radioactive virility of his first three assignments. Nor, for that matter, does it possess the playful snap and panache of the first three Roger Moore vehicles that followed. Diamonds is the Bond series' unlucky number seven: punch-drunk and paunchy, wanton and woozy. I think it may be my favourite.

Diamonds are Forever
Production year: 1971
Country: UK
Cert (UK): 12
Runtime: 120 mins
Directors: Guy Hamilton
Cast: Charles Gray, Jill St John, Sean Connery
More on this film

Connery thought he was out but the studio pulled him back in – offering a then-unheard sum of £1.25m (equivalent to £20m today) to re-engage the actor's services and thereby salvage a stuttering franchise. And yet Connery clearly does not want to be there. He shuffles through the motions like some ageing heavyweight showboater, flirting with disaster, his toupee slipping. When Bond is not fighting for his life and banging his elbows inside a cramped Amsterdam elevator, he's being kicked to hell by a pair of self-regarding girl acrobats in the Nevada desert. He's knackered, out of shape, halfway through the exit door. Legend has it that the very last scene Connery actually filmed was the one at the crematorium, in which Bond is knocked senseless, dropped inside a coffin and pushed towards the flames.

But the genius (intentional or otherwise) of Diamonds Are Forever is in the way it takes its lead from Connery's bruised, jaundiced performance. The later Roger Moore missions (Octopussy, A View to a Kill) made the mistake of variously disguising or compensating for Bond's advancing decrepitude and wound up looking ludicrous. Diamonds, by contrast, matches the star's tone and tempo quite beautifully.

Fittingly, the plot seems to drift in and out, like ground-fog or the frequency of a long-distance radio broadcast. Bond is on the trail of diamond smugglers and the trail leads him first to obligatory Bond girl Tiffany Case (Jill St John), who keeps changing her hair colour, and thence to the upper-crust Blofeld (Charles Gray), who plans to hold the planet to ransom and auction nuclear supremacy to the highest bidder. "The satellite is at present over Kansas," he explains, eager to demonstrate the power of his outer-space warhead. "But if we destroy Kansas, the world may not hear about it for years."

The film comes into its own during its extended middle portion, played out amid the casinos, circuses and funeral parlours of Las Vegas. This is an upside-down, hall-of-mirrors landscape in which an elderly hoodlum is booked to perform a standup show at 6pm and where a pair of dubious gay killers skip hand-in-hand through the desert beyond town (007's sexual politics are as ossified as ever). Much of the action pivots around the invisible figure of Willard Whyte, a thinly-veiled Howard Hughes, gone to ground in the penthouse suite of the palatial "Whyte House" and apparently running business from a bank of phones while sitting on the toilet – much as Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have done. "This is not the real White House and he's not the president," cautions Bond at one stage. The reminder, though, only adds to the suspicion that it is and he is – and that we are basically adrift in a corroded parallel America in which Vegas plays Washington DC and the moon landings are mocked up on a neighbouring sound-stage.

Is this the western democracy that 007 is fighting to preserve? If so, his mission appears fatally hobbled from the opening credits. If so, moreover, nobody around him gives much of a damn. After stumbling across the moon-landing set, our hero boosts a car and lights out across town with the Vegas cops in hot pursuit. In the midst of the chase, director Guy Hamilton suddenly, devilishly, opts to cut away to show the chase from the gloomy interior of a Fremont Street arcade. Inside, under glass, the tourists are lined up like zombies at the slot-machines, utterly oblivious to the screeching tyres and wailing sirens just yards from their heads.

No doubt each era gets the Bond it deserves. Cubby Broccoli's franchise started out in the early 60s fired by a sleek moral certitude, prowling a world of clearly defined good and evil before slipping into jokey self-parody during the mid-to-late 70s. Diamonds, though, is the missing link, the crucial transition; ideally placed at the turn of the decade and implicitly haunted by noises off in the nation at large. Here is a Bond film in which the old glamour has lost its sparkle and the resolute hero has lost his way. It's jaded, uncertain and disillusioned. It's vicious, mordant, at times blackly comic. It's oddly brilliant, the best of the bunch: the perfect bleary Bond film for an imperfect bleary western world.

Favourite line: I do like "Alimentary, Dr Leiter" (Bond's neat response when asked the whereabouts of the diamonds on Peter Franks' body). But my real favourite is Jill St John's caustic rejoinder to the little boy at the water-balloon stand: "Blow up your pants!"

Favourite gadget: The electronic voice machine that enables Sean Connery to speak in a flawless American accent. If only he could have taken it away with him.

Nice review St Mark, DAF isn't quite in my top ten but I think it takes an unfair amount of shtick because its out of step with the films that came before it. Good to hear from someone who loves it for what it is.

For me DAF is all about the score. If I were struck blind, this is probably the thing I'd listen to most often. when the movie falters on visuals or plotting, Barry is there, doing what Jerry Goldsmith did so memorably with so many distinctly unmemorable movies, propping it up wonderfully.

In the main I think of DAF as a proto-Moore movie, but in spite of that I do watch it on occasion (am halfway through it right now, watching about 20min at a time this week), because there are still one or two moments when Connery has the magic, the still-unmatched eye of the tiger expres​sion(that look which, outside of the title sequence, is entirely absent from NSNA and does more even than the lanquid pacing to distance that one from Eon's Connery's.)

DAF was my first exposure to 007, and I've never lost affection for it.

Those who say that Connery was bored, uunengaged and just shuffling through the motions need to watch YOLT again. Perhaps it was just that $1m+ paycheck that put the sparkle back in his eye, but so what? Motivation is motivation.

As an entry-level Bond film, DAF still ticks all the boxes, and it truly was the right vehicle for the seventies. If you wanted gritty, angst-laden action films there was always Serpico and the French Connection. If you wanted a distraction from Vietnam and gas shortages there was DAF and the Moore films to come...