- How did it come to this? Just four short years after the thoroughly entertaining You Only Live Twice, we have the debacle that is Diamonds are Forever. Amazingly, it is not the worst Bond film, an honor that surely belongs to one of the offerings from around the 1980's. Still, considering that the last collaboration between Sean Connery and Guy Hamilton resulted in Goldfinger, it's impossible to view this film as anything but a disappointment.
- Where to even begin? Maybe I should start generously by listing the things Diamonds are Forever gets right. Probably the film's greatest success is its music, including Shirley Bassey's excellent title song and John Barry's ever-enjoyable scoring. In terms of acting, while Connery was hardly at his best in this film, I can only imagine that things would have gone worse without him. As Tiffany Case, Jill St. John is adequate, which is to say that she is no more awful than the average Bond girl, and Charles Gray is appropriately cheesy. The best casting move was to include gangster character actor Marc Lawrence, who improves any film in which he appears. Jimmy Dean, the sausage magnate, and Leonard Barr, the vaudeville comedian, are strange casting choices, but not ineffective...okay, enough dawdling. Let's talk about the rest of the film.
- The first and most unavoidable problem is the henchmen. The painfully unintimidating Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) and Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith) are basically just two goofballs, strongly implied to be a gay couple, who go around setting strange death traps. We're talking scorpions down the shirt, crematorium antics, and exploding cakes, here. In a series that featured characters as imposing as Red Grant and Oddjob, I'm obviously a little underwhelmed by two clowns whose defining characteristics seem to be smelling "like a tart's handkerchief" and resembling Meathead from Archie Bunker, respectively. The film's other prominent henchmen (or is it henchwomen?) are two deadly acrobats named Bambi and Thumper (Lola Larson and Trina Parks), an invention requiring no further comment.
- Unfortunately, the film's plot and direction also present substantial problems. Campiness is the order of the day, meaning trips to the circus, police car pileups, moon buggy chase scenes, Blofeld look-alikes, and...did I mention exploding cakes? The final fight with Wint and Kidd, the latter of whom wields flaming kabobs, is particularly absurd, rivaling even Bond's face-off with Herve Villechaize in The Man With the Golden Gun. Blofeld, too, is decidedly less interesting now that we can see him, although I'm not sure that's any fault of Charles Gray's. By the film's end, one almost feels sad for the supervillain since he still hasn't learned how to properly kill Bond (not to mention that he has a scene in a dress). I'd like to say that this film served as an opportunity for the series to improve, but...James Bond will return in Live and Let Die.
- This is the last canon Bond film to feature Sean Connery.
- Charles Gray also appeared in You Only Live Twice.
