Bond Retrospective: "Diamonds Are Forever"

Diamonds Are Forever

 

Released: 1971

 

Actor: Sean Connery

 

Villain: Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Charles Gray)

 

Henchman: Mr. Wint, Mr. Kidd

 

Allies: Felix Leiter

 

Bond Girl: Tiffany Case (Jill St. John)

 

First Appearance: none of significance

 

Precredits sequence: Bond tracks Blofeld down, and seemingly kills him in revenge while uncovering his cloning facility.

 

Plot: Bond, with operation bedlam thought to be complete, is assigned to track down a diamond smuggling ring. Bond fakes himself as one of the smugglers, and gets invoked with a girl, Tiffany Case. The real smuggler tracks him down, but Bond kills him and smuggles the diamonds inside the smuggler's corpse. At the funeral home, the next chain in the ring finds that the diamonds are fake, as Felix Leiter has the real diamonds. Bond then goes to Vegas, to meet the next part of the chain, involving a guy called Wllard Whyte. Case gives the diamonds to the next chain, Saxby, and Bond follows him into a laboratory, where a space laser is being built. Bond escapes in a ridiculous moon buggy chase, and later Bond climbs into Whyte's room to find that he's Blofeld. Bond realizes the diamonds are used for the laser, goes to the sea area where the laser is, and eventually destroys it with Tiffany's help. Blofeld's goons, try to get him at the end, but Bond disposes of them, and we are promised LALD.

 

Thoughts: Terrible Bond movie. Unnecessarily complicated plot, Blofeld was different yet again, the henchman were a joke, some scenes (car tipping?) were just ridiculous. And Bond just lost his wife. All we got was a precredits revenge sequence, and now he's good? I think when younger, I didn't get the plots to any Bonds, so this seemed fun. Now, seeing how good the earlier Connery films were, this one is like nonsense. A sign of things to come, I guess, with the Moore era. Oh well.

 

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