Diamonds Are Forever (1971) Anyone who's stopped in to visit this blog even casually knows of our great passionate love for all things James Bond.....(and the one and only ultimate Bond, Sir Sean Connery)
We still re-visit this one every year but not because it's one of the best of the series.....
In fact, we more than agree with fellow Bond fanatics that it's one of the worst.....(followed by "The Man With The Golden Gun".....)
But 1971 found us suffering from a crushing romantic break-up and we embraced "Diamonds Are Forever" as break-up comfort food, gorging on it multiple, multiple times.....(the same way jilted girls in rom-coms are seen been binging on tubs of Haagen-Dazs)
We did take enjoyment from the movie, .even though there were whole chunks of it looked pathetically weak, slack and indifferently staged.......
We could hardly believe this sloppily made entry into the series came from the same production team who created the beautiful, action-packed near perfect Bond film "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"
'Diamonds' had to heavily depend on the enormous good will that all the previous Bond films had built up over 10 years........but in reality, it was a pick-up-the-paycheck deal for everybody involved..
Sir Sean, only 40 years old at the time, looked overweight, out of shape and only mildly interested in playing 007. What he most resembled most was the fake-boozer Dean Martin wandering through the imitation-Bond 'Matt Helm' movies.
The film surrounding Connery unfolded like a bizarre collection of tired, spoofy skits directed at a pokey, lackadaisical pace by Guy Hamilton.
It's fitting that almost half of it takes place in seedy, gaudy pre-theme park Las Vegas......the entire film plays like an exhausted stand-up comedy routine from a jaded, dissolute lounge comedian......(and Bond actually encounters a jaded, dissolute lounge comedian in the course of the story......)
And no one can escape discussing this film without dealing with the the gay killers, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, played by the hammy, campy Bruce Glover and the deadpan, non-acting jazz musician Putter Smith......(Guy Hamilton apparently thought the mere sight of Smith was hysterical......it wasn't....)
Well, we'll give the movie this much credit......unlike other films of that era (including Martin Balsam's mincing, lip-pursing gay in Connery's "The Anderson Tapes"), "Diamonds" uses the limp-wristed, flouncy-bouncy gay shtick sparingly....)
What it doesn't spare are especially spectacular, grisly deaths for Wint and Kidd, designed to send audiences out with a big laugh and a feeling that they've see a satisfying James Bond movie.......
No, they didn't. Not even close.
We could go on and on about this........Charles Gray's oddball portrayal of Blofeld as some kind of snobby, cross-dressing Oscar Wilde sophisticate (we kept wondering, if Blofeld's now such an epigram-spouting pseudo-aristocrat, why's he still dressing like Chairman Mao?)
And then there's good-ole-country-boy singer and sausage king Jimmy Dean as a character supposedly modeled after the eccentric, reclusive Howard Hughes.......(again, we wondered about how the obviously garrulous, effusive Dean ,more or less playing his own public persona, is supposedly some kind of mysterious, Hughs-ian recluse.....)
Then we come to the worst edited and staged action sequence in any Bond film. 'Goldfinger' established what had become a reliable Bondian finale trope, a full force military-style attack on the villain and his minions....(repeated in "Thunderball", "You Only Live Twice" and "On Her Majesty's Secret Service")
"Diamonds" attempt at this sequence is beyond painful to describe in its awfulness....a helicopter assault on Blofeld's oil-rig lair........poorly staged, slowly edited and littered with that singularly terrible special effect of using cartoon animation for copter explosions.
Yet Connery enjoyed making the film, which he forced producers Broccoli and Saltzman to make on a swift, efficient schedule or run the risk of paying him massive overtime bonuses). As for his sorry physical appearance, simply compare him in this film to how more fit and healthy he looked 13 years later in the 'renegade' Bond film "Never Say Never Again"
And you can compare the advances in special effects with a side by side viewing of 'Diamonds' with 2002's 'Die Another Day'. Both films feature the villain deploying an orbiting satellite to shoot frickin' laser beams at the earth. The 'Diamonds' sequences are woefully cartoonish up against the relentless CGI of 'Die'.
Script-wise, we'll never know why Connery was to taken with the film's co-writer Tom Mankiewicz', who peppered the screenplay with lame, unfunny non-sequitur gags that sounded cribbed from terrible TV sitcoms. (Mankiewicz went on to pen "Live and Let Die" and the wretched "The Man With The Golden Gun", equal to 'Diamonds' in its low energy and pathetic attempts at humor.)
Having gotten all this off our chest......we admit to watching it every year during every holiday season (when the film was first released)........with all its myriad faults, we've never forgotten how much this ridiculous, low-grade excuse for a James Bond film somehow calmed and soothed our wounded heart......
But even as bad as the movie turned out, we grinned as widely as any Bond fanboy during its few high points.....the terrific one-on-one brawl in the tiny elevator, the car chase down in the middle of downtown Vegas (yes, even with the infamous tilted car flub)......and Bond's first real encounter with female empowerment in the gymnastic amazons Bambi and Thumper........
Will we watch it again next year? You bet. But we'll never rate it any higher than deserves.....1 &1/2 stars (*1/2).
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