00 Week: The truth of the matter, Bond decided over coffee, was that he felt homesick for his real identity. He shrugged.

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

1971

Directed by Guy Hamilton

Written by Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz

Spoilers: severe

Diamonds Are Forever, Ian Fleming's fourth James Bond novel, is a new candidate for my favorite—Dr. No remains the other contender, though I'd give Diamonds fewer notes—and this may be telling of how readily the author could let the woolier nonsense get away from him, because it feels like it's about as close as Fleming could get with Bond to just writing a meat-and-potatoes crime novel.  Still, it is a good crime novel, that slowly but surely grows to Bondian (at least book-Bondian) proportions, involving a private Western theme park for its villain, as well as Bond killing said villain with his own crashing train whilst escaping with his newest babe, and it concludes with one of the more movie-Bondian codas I've seen in the books so far, allowing Bond, not very realistically, to be on hand in Africa to tie up the loose ends of his diamond smuggling case with an anti-aircraft cannon.  Fun stuff, and it trains Fleming's exoticizing travelogue lens upon America (how is an MI6 officer allowed to kill Americans on American soil?), which works better than I'd have thought.  Hell, it's almost not even racist.

By 1971, "James Bond disrupts a diamond smuggling pipeline" would have been determined to have held insufficient wow factor, or WTF factor, for the plot of a Bond movie, and, in the 70s, the connection between the Bond novels and the films adapting them was only going to fray further.  Yet while I have no evidence to support it, I can't shake the feeling that Eon Productions and especially their main Bond screenwriter Richard Maibaum really did choose Diamonds Are Forever purposefully, for the single reason of how that novel's title, however unintentionally, found resonance with the conclusion of the Bond adaptation they'd just done in 1969, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.  That is, once you've burned through You Only Live Twice, as Eon already had in 1967 (for Fleming's Live Twice was the actual sequel to Secret Service), Diamonds Are Forever is clearly the title that works the best—depending on the scope of your adaptation, it could even work better—and in either case it's simply too perfect to have been an accident that it was Eon's follow-up to the film that chronicled our hero's brief engagement and briefer marriage.  As for the plot, the cartoonish inflation that was now customary—in this case, going from "diamond smuggling" to "the diamonds turn out to be for Ernst Stavro Blofeld's space laser"—doesn't seem like it should pose a problem.  Quite the opposite.  Yet something must've gotten lost: by the time Diamonds was made, about the only resonance left was the title, and its aggregation of parts—diamond smuggling, a space laser, and a vengeance quest for the wife and life stolen from James Bond—don't actually hinge upon one another more than slightly.  And furthermore, we find ourselves at a milestone, the first outright bad Bond movie.

There are perhaps more fundamental reasons why, but the most obvious is that Secret Service's Bond, poor George Lazenby, was out.  Snatched up into stardom, he quit after only the one film, citing the terrible experience he'd had with his director, who didn't know how to work with him and made it clear how much he disdained trying.  That director, Peter Hunt, didn't return either, but let's save that.  For now, Eon was Bondless, and the first thing was to reconsider was how much of a follow-up to Secret Service this was going to be, and through a bizarre labyrinth of redrafting that eventually included a new screenwriter, Tom Mankiewicz—I won't go through every bend, but the churn of ideas included Auric Goldfinger's twin brother, a naval battle between mock-ups of Roman galleys and Chinese junks, and Howard Hughes getting replaced by an evil double, inspired, presumably, by the real industrialist's mental illness and self-isolation—they arrived upon the Diamonds we got, which is hardly any follow-up at all.  It wouldn't necessarily have to be in order to be "good," I suppose, though there's a certain hollowness to it when Blofeld's the villain anyway.  Simultaneously, Eon had been sent scrambling for their third Bond—so desperately that they were considering Americans (the most comical to imagine being Clint Eastwood*)—but, in the end, they dumped a pile of bags marked with pound sterling signs in front of their first Bond, so that if it's perhaps not strictly true that Secret Service and Lazenby were deemed failures in their day, the act of bringing back the reluctant Sean Connery for a salary one-seventh of their film's entire budget strikes me, as it has struck many others over the years, as exactly what an admission of failure would look like.

So let's cut, literally, to the chase: without mentioning Tracy Bond, indeed so barely implying her previous existence that if you'd skipped Secret Service I think you'd be legitimately baffled by the bee in Bond's bonnet, our hero is on Blofeld's trail, violently ascending the ladder of SPECTRE in pursuit of their secret chief.  The face is obscured.  But the voice, in its cruelty as much as in its accent, has already told us that Connery's back by the time he comes sauntering down to a sunbathing woman, and this first sixty seconds of montage will be the best thing the movie ever throws at us, aggressively cutting within each scenelet and cutting even harder from location to location as Bond gouges a world-sized wound into SPECTRE for purely personal reasons, finally "seductively" enticing the female enemy only to strangle her with her own bikini top lest she tell him "where is Ernst Stavro Blofeld?"  It is obviously the case that "revenge for Tracy" ought to belong to Lazenby's Bond, and the weird truncation here is an acknowledgment of that fact; but at least the effect is still interesting.  What it feels like is that Bond's tragedy has transformed glib and carefree Lazenby into sneering and thuggish Connery, and shockingly nasty even by those standards.  Bond soon finds Blofeld (he actually doesn't, what a tweest), the latter preparing a precautionary surgical double in some secret compound; and soon Bond drowns both the would-be double and Blofeld in boiling mud—which is also pretty interesting, as an oblique reference to a scene from the novel, where a petty criminal's tortured by the novel's most sadistic characters, and Maibaum and Mankiewicz have seen fit to give that to Bond instead.  Well, obviously, we can assume that Bond and Blofeld aren't really done with one another yet (then again, For Your Eyes Only), but they will be for a while, and Connery's performance will not be in conversation with Lazenby's or Lazenby's film ever again, so this will be the last time the movie ever gives any impression that it wants to continue Secret Service's story.  In retrospect, even the brutal breathlessness of it feels like they just wanted to dispense as quickly as feasible with their obligation to what, in 1971, was probably a very small minority of fans who gave a shit about Bond serialization.

But it does blast us into Maurice Binder's credits sequence, as well as Shirley Bassey's title song, a decent-enough song for the returning chanteuse, with some neat lyrics from Don Black** comparing the clarity of diamonds to the duplicity of men that, of course, doesn't do much for the whole "this movie is about Tracy to the bare minimum extent it has to be" thing.  (I'm hung up on this and I don't even like Tracy; I realize nobody wants to be a nerd about Bond, but I do suspect it's a big, sometimes-unstated reason for Diamonds' latterday reputation being near the rock bottom of the franchise.)  Well, Tracy-related or not (I guess it's arguable), Binder's credits sequence ought to be far better it is, and it's down to some downright-unaccountable technical ineptitude that it isn't: it's the first of Binder's sequences to feel like he's fully internalized that Robert Brownjohn's credits sequences established the format—even if Brownjohn's sequences were rather limiting in their format—but by way of Blofeld's orphaned white cat (Blofeld has given it a diamond collar), Binder's struck on some really lovely notions about diamonds and cats and moody colors and silhouetted nude women (barely so, almost just "nude women who have some modesty preserved by the colored lighting"), including a finale where a woman appears to welcome a diamond into her womb.  But I presume the cat was uncooperative, so Binder's manipulated the footage to force the cat into his timing scheme instead of, well, any of the better alternatives, which means, amongst other things, that we get Blofeld's cat appearing to headbang in time to "Diamonds Are Forever."

So it's diamond smuggling that Bond's sent to investigate, with a market manipulation aspect to the plot that's either a misdirect or an artifact of when this was Diamondfinger, and Bond is dispatched to the Netherlands (on a marvelous hovercraft ferry that I wanted desperately to see take part in an action scene) to insert himself into the smugglers' operations, masquerading as one Peter Franks (Joe Robinson), whom he winds up having to kill before the eyes of his handler in the conspiracy, Tiffany Case (Jill St. John), likewise convincing her that this "Franks, Peter Franks" has actually murdered James Bond, which means that Franks must be one serious dude.  They cross the Atlantic to Las Vegas, but what neither Bond nor Case know is that this is the operation's final run and the smuggling pipeline is being dismantled behind them by the murderous duo known only as Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith) and Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover).  Bond gets a clue when, arriving at his smuggler's drop in a crematorium***, he's also thrown into a coffin to burn—however, he's prepared for this contingency and didn't give his contacts the real diamonds, so (cleverly enough on this screenplay's part!) instead of escaping from this most inescapable of all Bondian deathtraps, they have to let him out.

In fact, everything so far is reasonably good, though maybe it's telling that this is where Diamonds stops much resembling its source material besides the Vegas setting; still, like the book, it has managed a taut little crime thriller, with the benefit of having a provision of movie-Bond action-thrills, especially Bond and Franks's claustrophobic battle in an old-timey lift.  It is, pretty easily, the best-choreographed and best-edited action here—despite some whiffs, particularly one distractingly fake punch that still made it into the finished sequence—with a clear intention to be compared to the train fight in From Russia With Love, and making a good accounting of itself even so, from its opening grace note of a space that's so confined that Bond rearing back for a punch breaks the glass behind him and alerts his quarry, to its enjoyable conclusion ("I think you killed him!"/"I certainly hope so!", which isn't a very Bondian quip, but the jolly enthusiasm is great).  And even the half-suspense/half-comic lead-up, entailing Connery pretending to be a satirical Dutchman is good, leaving the distinct impression that somebody involved must've had a negative experience with a foreigner who kept insisting on using them for English practice.

There's also Kidd and Wint, and at least they've got an energy.  With an introduction that involves clasping hands and skipping across the desert after murdering the South African end of the diamond pipeline (itself benefiting from the dry sarcasm of laying the exposition for Bond's mission over a montage of the first phase of the smuggling process, in a way that emphasizes the sourness right-minded Britons felt towards South Africa****), they're the earliest I'm aware of in the line of homophobia-inflected evil queers who were going to be all over the place in 70s thrillers.  Still, they benefit from making themselves feel dangerous and weird as a duo (besides the "evil queer" thing, anyhow, for instance almost uniformly adding a stilted [honorific surname] to every line of dialogue with one another), as well as in individuated ways forwarded by their performers (both are sinister, but Smith is gleefully psychotic while non-actor musician Glover seems easily-amused but dim).  Decent Bond villain henchmen, all told, at least up until an epilogue where they've continued to hound Bond and, because this is basically a comedy scene in a movie that's already often become its own laughless Bond spoof, no real attempt is made to translate their previous effectiveness into a direct confrontation with our hero, who pierces their cover with wine facts.  (The book's finale for Kidd and Wint is way better.)  St. John, for her part, has been adequate enough: I also like Case better in the book (if I'd known, I'd have compared criminal aristocrat Tracy unfavorably to criminal proletarian Case), but there's a book-accurate "tough broad" quality to St. John's performance in the early going that certainly could have worked out nicely, at least if that was going to be Case's actual function in the movie.  In the movie it's mostly not wearing clothes and owning a Ford automobile.

So nothing miserable, anyway, but in Vegas it all begins crumbling.  It's not that I have too much objection to the frequently sloppy plotting, like the inclusion of a secondary Bond Girl in the form of the nonsensically-named Plenty O'Toole (Lana Wood; but let's make a note to reuse the name for whenever they manage the first trans Bond Girl), who's apparently some part of the overarching criminal plot, though said criminals previously ejected her from Bond's hotel room because when Maibaum or whoever was writing that part of the script, they didn't know that yet.  It's not that it gets wackier here, either (at this point, you should expect and desire wackiness out of your Bond movie), so I don't even have as much of an objection as I should have to, say, the visual comedy of an elephant at the Circus Circus doing a double-take after it wins at the slots (one thing I learned from Diamonds is that the Circus Circus, best-known to me from Hunter S. Thompson, appears to have been intended principally for families with children), nor do I oppose the memorable sight of Bond having a chase in a moon buggy he stole from a NASA contractor.

In fact, the latter threatens to give the movie the jolt it's been needing, because the real problem is how damned curdled it's been getting, slowing down when it ought to be speeding up.  The secret of the diamonds, as intimated, is that Blofeld (Charles Gray) plans to make a satellite-borne space laser out of them; for the "satellite" part of the plan, he's taken the place of Willard Whyte, the reclusive casino and aerospace magnate whose performance by Jimmy Dean, when we meet him, doesn't even attempt "recluse," let alone "specifically, the madman Howard Hughes, the one freak brainstorm these writers kept in."  (Just to be clear, Blofeld's subterfuge doesn't directly involve plastic surgery, either.  It's just Gray pretending to be a different shut-in on the phone.  Though while we're on the subject, the screenwriters must've thought that his casino's name, "The Whyte House," is much less annoying than it obviously is.)  Whyte's pointless imprisonment, anyway, is being overseen by another pair of henchpeople, another same-gender evil duo but women this time, Bambi (Mary Hiller) and Thumper (Trina Parks), named after two males.  They may or may not be gay but they definitely give us the most disappointing and anticlimactic action sequence, each performer being capable of some rather flamboyant gymnastics and, accordingly, beating the holy hell out of Bond for quite a while, even proposing to drown him, until Bond... pushes their heads underwater and they, well, just stop being physical threats, I guess, because the scene is done even if it feels only half-over.

But that's the movie, which just feels like a collection of heaving "okay, whatevers."  Not much in the back half of it pops, and when it does it usually falls right back down, exhausted with itself.  Take that moon buggy chase, which develops out of a tedious "comic" infiltration of Whyte's aerospace factory out in the Nevadan desert (it entails flimflam against a subordinate who almost verbatim says, "please leave and stop obviously committing espionage, I'm on the phone with my supervillainous boss"), though John Barry's score is at least trying to make it halfway-suspenseful.  The chase is prompted by Bond blundering his way into what is either a training exercise or, as I prefer it, an actual joke about faking the moon landings, and this involves one of my favorite shots in the movie, one of the "astronauts" pretending like he's on the moon and therefore has to move slowly even while attempting to stop Bond—so it's more like he's pretending he's underwater—because, you know, that's good stupid.  The chase itself should be, built as it is around the funny idea of a lunar rover being so much better-suited to the rough desert terrain than actual cars that Bond's pursuers only destroy themselves (the functional vehicle they built didn't entirely live up to this, but that's the editors' problem); and this joke is indeed amusing, the first three times.  But it's drawn out, like so much of this is drawn out, and bleeds with a little buffering (also drawn-out) into a (still drawn-out) car chase through Vegas.  It's adroit enough, though there might be twenty other movies from 1971 that have better car chases.  Even its signature climax—Bond throwing the car onto two wheels to get through a narrow alleyway, probably the film's most iconic visual besides Moonman Bond—is harder to take seriously than it already would be, thanks to the noneuclidean geometry invoked by the editors to "fix" a continuity error ("fucking up which side the car is tilted on" is the level of professionalism we're enjoying on this seventh Bond film) that would've been less distracting if it had been left unfixed.

Things really seem like they should be getting back on track when Bond "takes the elevator" (in an outside sort of way) to Blofeld's impenetrable penthouse atop the casino, which is just one of those extremely cool images even Diamonds will still drop on you from time to time, as we get a good infiltration scene now and a whole good tete-a-tete(-a-tete) with our hero, our villain, and our villain's new double, who is Blofelding to the utmost.  The bad news is it's Gray Blofelding, and Gray is the store-brand Blofeld, with neither the feverish quality of Donald Pleasence nor the leonine menace of Telly Savalas.  Now, I've seen Gray do charismatic evil and be good at it (cf. The Devil Rides Out), but he only sort of hits "smarmy" with his Blofeld, and he has hair, which just sucks.  Still, it's a gas of scene—I love the twist after Bond attempts to identify the real Blofeld by seeing what happens when he kicks his own cat at his face—but it's also, ahem, a knock-out gas of a scene, placing Bond at Blofeld's mercy and opening up a third act that's just outrageously bad at hiding that the screenwriters have exhausted all their ability to make Bond clever enough to survive competent villainy.  So even by Bond movie standards, you get re-reminded basically every sixty seconds that Blofeld isn't killing Bond solely to keep the movie going, bottoming out with Blofeld whining because Bond keeps messing with his laser satellite control tape.  But then, this is but one manifestation of a Bond who feels lesser than in his usual incarnation: Connery isn't entirely checked-out, but he's certainly not checked-in, and it feels like half the movie involves Felix Leiter (Norman Burton, not even one of the good ones) doing the real heavy lifting.  And that's before Q (Desmond Llewelyn) shows up to jape about a casino.

It's boring, and the finale with Blofeld trapped out on his oil rig command station is nearly unwatchably so—it's certainly never very clear why several AGM-12s aren't preferable—with Bond showing up and getting locked in a closet with a hole in it (exactly like in Secret Service, yes, but that scene was awesome, and presentation matters), with the wrinkle that Case has insinuated herself into Blofeld's pants in order to help, because I guess Blofeld is all about the puss—well, the vaginas, now, but she's so goonishly inept at it (firing a machinegun causes her to pratfall off the rig) that it amounts to the first signal that the Bond films, in the 70s, are going to get actively and angrily sexist, which, in my book, is different in kind from providing harmlessly-leering fantasy.  (It's the first time movie-Bond ever calls a woman "bitch," admittedly a word Fleming uses as often as a 90s rapper.)  All along, though I have some affection for the cutaways to Blofeld's acts of space terrorism, the "action" is mostly helicopters exploding via charmlessly-fake superimposition effects, apparently the result of a movie that, despite all that money spent on Connery, was still millions less expensive than Bond movies from the mid-60s, because when you haven't made a single movie yet that hasn't dectupled its budget, that's when you start pinching pennies.  It also means that even though production designer Ken Adam is back, there's only brief glimpses of stunning design—a gaudy funeral home, Blofeld's cold yet over-decorated penthouse, a mansion seemingly made out of strewn slabs of rock, a hotel room with, inter alia, a bed made out of an aquarium—which, now that I list it out, is the main thing here in conversation with Fleming's contempt for Las Vegas.  But Vegas is still mostly just Vegas; that oil rig, an oil rig.  Whyte's factory is more like the place you'd fabricate the props for a Corman movie.

But I suggested, earlier, there are more fundamental problems than Lazenby-or-Connery, or even Bond's soft-pedaled vengeance, which doesn't even allow Blofeld to understand he's being killed by Bond before Bond batters him to pieces (for as long as we even get inserts of him in his escape "bathosub," he keeps bitching at his crane operator).  Diamonds brought director Guy Hamilton back, and of course that makes sense: Hamilton's Goldfinger is amazing.  But it prompts the question if it was, fully, "Hamilton's Goldfinger," for below the marquee at least one equally-important name is missing.  This is most apparent in the absence of Peter Hunt, editor and second-unit director for the whole series till he graduated to directing Secret Service, whereas even the new editor and second-unit director, John Glen, wandered off until eventually reteaming with Hunt in the mid-70s, whereupon the director apparently gave his loyal friend permission to accept work from Eon again.  (Look, there's some kind of untold story here, right?)

Diamonds was edited by members of the rotating crew who would cut the next two Bond films, editors who knew Bond movies were supposed to run about two hours but were handed material that'd barely be sufficient for 90 minutes, and maybe that's why it's so Goddamn logy: not merely were there no hard choices about what to cut, barely any "choices" had to be made at all.  It's probably no coincidence that these three films, also all under Hamilton, so maybe the director does matter, are the worst classic Bond films, beginning a figurehead regime of sorts that wasn't reflected at the box office, which at least meant that it could get fixed.  But the nature of the Bond movies coming up is going to make it feel like it took longer than just three movies before it was.

Score: 4/10

*They also pursued Adam West, but I'll stick by this.

**I prefer his movie title songs about gold.

***Uh, you know diamonds burn, right?

****Even Fleming, though his book puts the pipeline's origin in French Guinea, was sour about African diamond mining, so you know it was bad.