WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT?  Blofeld, now with hair (the better to battle the ever-balding Bond, I suppose), has a plan to take over the world.  Well, at least he’s recovered his ambition after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where he was planning to hold the world hostage until it gave him a title.  After faking his death (at the hands of James Bond), Blofeld goes to Las Vegas, kidnaps reclusive, eccentric Texas billionaire Willard Whyte (easy peasy), takes over his aerospace empire, uses his team of engineers (and a ringer) to design and build a satellite with a big laser-beam on it capable of, yes, destroying the world.  Once he has demonstrated the awesome power of this satellite, the world will simply turn over all the power to him.  Because that’s how the world is.

When is this nefarious scheme revealed?  I’m glad you asked.  An hour and thirty-four minutes into the movie, that’s when.

ABOUT THIS DIAMOND-SMUGGLING RING: Here’s how it seems it’s supposed to work: poor, black South African mine-workers steal diamonds from their mine.  They cheerfully hand them over to a dentist, who hands them over to a guy in a helicopter, who hands them over to a little-old-lady schoolteacher, who takes them to Amsterdam and hands them over to comely young Tiffany Case, who hands them over to some guy, who travels to Los Angeles and hands them over to the director of a funeral home and his Jewish comedian friend (it’s a well-known fact that Jewish comedians make the best diamond smugglers), who hands them over to, I guess, this Willard Whyte fella, who could afford to buy them retail.  The simpering gay assassins follow this trail every step of the way, killing everyone who comes in contact with the diamonds.

Now then: Bond inserts himself into this ring, killing the “some guy” to whom Tiffany Case hands over the diamonds and taking his place.  He hides the diamonds in the dead man’s intestines (digestive humor accounts for at least half the jokes in Diamonds Are Forever) and flies with the body to Los Angeles, posing as the dead man’s brother.  In this particular cutthroat diamond-smuggling ring, no one seems to notice or care that their courier is dead and accompanied by a man they’ve never seen before.

WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD?  Once he has “killed” Blofeld before the titles, Bond is bored and resentful when he is asked to investigate a mere diamond-smuggling ring.  Why is he investigating a diamond-smuggling ring?  Because it’s important to the South African diamond-mine people of course, who apparently hold considerable influence with British Intelligence.  Well, if it’s important to South African diamond-mine owners, it’s important to James Bond — anything to help out some fellow privileged, wealthy , powerful racists.

Anyhow, Bond shrugs his shoulders and gamely investigates the diamond-smuggling ring, which leads him first to Amsterdam and then to exotic, mysterious Los Angeles, and then to gaudy, trashy, depressing Casino-era Las Vegas (honestly, I kept waiting for Bond to run into Nicky Santoro — now that would have been a movie!).  It seems that the diamond-smuggling ring leads to the penthouse of Howard Hughes-like billionaire Willard Whyte (although it seems counter-intuitive that a billionaire would need to smuggle diamonds — why not just buy them?), but once Bond gets to Whyte’s penthouse, he is surprised to find that Whyte is not Whyte but is, in fact, Blofeld — that guy he hates!  Quel coincidence!  Blofeld employs his simpering gay assassins to kill Bond by shooting him strangling him running him over with a car putting him inside some kind of pipe.  This brilliant, devious scheme somehow fails and Bond manages to free the kidnapped eccentric billionaire (who, being straight, white and wealthy, obviously can’t be all bad) from his vicious, beautiful, bi-racial, bikini-clad captors, make his way to Blofeld’s oil-rig HQ, and blow shit up before Blofeld can do too much damage.

HELPFUL ANIMALS: I’ve lost track of how many Felix Leiters this is so far, but this one is crankier and less remarkable than ever.  High-ranking CIA agent?  He doesn’t seem to have the qualifications of a local police detective.  He’s disorganized and powerless.  There’s a scene where he and his team are staking out Circus Circus, and all I could think is that Casino‘s Ace Rothstein would eat this guy for lunch.

WOMEN: Bond seems to be through with them.  The first one he meets he strangles and then punches in the face, another gets tossed out a window and into a swimming pool (and then, for no particular reason, winds up dead in another swimming pool).  He has sex only with dizzy nudist gold-digger Tiffany Case, and even then can’t keep from carping at her, calling her a “stupid twit” in a moment of anger.  He’s gotten angry with civilian birds before, but the insults seem to be a new, unpleasant wrinkle.

HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY?  Not cool at all!  In fact, the narrative demands that he start out uncool, giving him not one but two uncool deaths before the titles even begin.  From there, the relatively cool Blofeld of You Only Live Twice is systematically reduced in stature — he is made to imitate a shallow Texas drawl, flee a Las Vegas hotel dressed as a woman, and dangle helplessly from a crane, until he ends his life as an angry, blustering red-faced clown.  In fact, one of the primary dubious achievements of Diamonds Are Forever is turning it’s antagonist into what we have come to recognize as a “Bond Villain,” a vain, silly man with no real plan other than “arching” Bond.  When Bond finally gets into Willard Whyte’s penthouse and finds Blofeld there, Blofeld is, literally, doing nothing but sitting there waiting for Bond to show up.  Think of that — he’s got a satellite to build and launch, he’s got an oil-rig space center off Baja California teeming with what must be a thousand last-minute crises, but tonight he’s got nothing better to do than sit in Willard Whyte’s penthouse waiting for Bond to show up.  With his double (oh yeah, there’s a whole pointless, go-nowhere subplot about Blofeld manufacturing doubles of himself).  And his cat.  And his cat’s double.  And what if, by chance, Bond did not show up, I wonder?  Would Blofeld have waited there all night?  Would he have canceled his satellite launch?  Would he have delegated the running of his space center to an underling?  “I can’t make it to the world-blowing-up ceremony, Bond hasn’t shown up yet!”

At one point in Act III, Bond asks Blofeld a question about his operation and Blofeld sighs and says “Science was never my strong suit.”  This from a man who, two movies ago, figured out a way to design and build a secret aerospace program inside a hollowed-out volcano.  What, I wonder, is Blofeld’s strong suit, besides the high-collared tunic he’s been wearing since 1963?

Charles Gray plays Blofeld this time, exposing the meagre all-around cheapness of the production.  Gray played helpful animal Henderson in You Only Live Twice (which goes unremarked upon) and would later stake his claim to camp immortality as the no-necked narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which, frankly, is a better use of his talents.

The second villains, the simpering gay assassins, as you may have guessed, I have very little patience for.  I don’t know if it’s just the performance of Bruce Glover, who plays Mr. Wint, the more simpering of the two, or if it’s the haircut of Putter Smith, who plays Mr. Kidd, the more clown-like of the two, but these two get my hackles up.  Perhaps I’m overly sensitive to negative portrayals of gays in movies (and their “humorous,” brutal deaths), but these two offend in a way that, say, Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love does not.  Rosa Klebb indicated her homosexuality exactly once (just in case we didn’t “get” it from her haircut and mannish demeanor) and then got on with the business of being a power-mad killer.  Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd remind us in every scene they’re in that they are, in case we forgot, homosexual men.  We are plotting to kill a man, says Mr. Wint, and then spritzes himself with cologne (which smells, we are told later by Bond, like “a tart’s hankerchief”*), closing his eyes and swooning with the sensation.  We have just blown up a man in a helicopter, says Mr. Kidd, let’s walk off hand in hand.  For we are, as you know, homosexuals, and that fact is always uppermost in our minds.  Mr. Wint dies when Bond literally shoves a bomb up his ass; Mr. Wint, we see by the look on his face, is conflicted by this experience, because on the one hand he knows he’s about to die, but you know, on the other hand, he greatly enjoys having things jammed up his ass.  Because he is a homosexual man, and that’s how they are.

Putter Smith, I have learned without surprise, is not an actor, but a musician someone connected to the production saw onstage in a band and thought would make a perfect Bond Villain.  Which he would, if Bond habitually fought hapless clowns, which I’m afraid he will continue to do for a long, long while.

(*It occurs to me now that the cologne might actually be named A Tart’s Hankerchief, and Bond is merely demonstrating his expertise in identifying perfumes, much as he is able to identify fine wines.)

Slightly more cool are Bambi and Thumper, the limber, bi-racial, bikini-clad assassins guarding the kidnapped billionaire.  They are ridiculous, of course, but they do bring a cheerfully electric energy to the movie, especially Thumper, who really seems to be happy to be there, and one is sad to see them brought low by the blandly brutalizing Bond.

NOTES: The reader may have deduced by this point that Diamonds are Forever is a comedy.  The central twist, where Bond discovers, after an hour of detective work, that the object of his search just happens to be, by utter coincidence, his arch enemy, pretty much defines the comedic (as opposed to dramatic) approach to narrative.  It is certainly better appreciated if it is viewed as a comedy.  I don’t mind Bond becoming a comedian, but I wish he would be a generous, light-hearted comedian instead of the bored, smirking thug he is here (I am told that the producers briefly considered casting Burt Reynolds as Bond for this movie, and it’s not hard to imagine him playing some of the scenes as written).

There has been a lot of carping in this space about the “Moore Bonds” and how they ruined the franchise.  That may be so, but the Moore Bonds, I’m afraid, begin here with Diamonds Are Forever.  Everything in Diamonds Are Forever points to taking the piss out of James Bond and his formula, from the silly moon-buggy chase through the desert to the ever-decreasing menace of its antagonists to the rushed, who-cares sloppiness of its climactic battle.

More than the negative portrayal of gays, I’m concerned about the brutalization of women in Diamonds Are Forever.  The director, in the DVD commentary, notes how proud he is of the opening-sequence scene where Bond deftly removes a woman’s bikini top and then strangles her with it.  It was very important for the film’s success, he explains, to receive a “U” certificate from the British censors, and this is how they did it — by having Bond strangle a woman instead of seducing her.  Sex with a woman?  We don’t want kids seeing that.  Strangling a woman?  Punching her in the face?  Throwing one out a window?  Drowning one two three in a pool?  Perfectly acceptable family entertainment.

And, as long as I’m citing petty liberal grievances, I must note that Blofeld’s cat is brutalized again, this time during the title sequence, where it is made to angrily yowl,repeatedly, for no apparent reason.

Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, in addition to being repellent stereotypes, are also terrible assassins.  They meet the diamond-smuggling dentist out in the desert, intending to kill him, and choose a scorpion they happen to find on the spot to accomplish that task.  What kind of assassin is that?  Where is the planning?  What is Blofeld paying them for?  And of course they pick the largest, darkest scorpion known to humankind, when even a schoolchild knows that the big black ones are actually the least deadly ones.  Later, as noted above, they try to kill Bond by placing him, unconscious, into a pipe, which is then laid into the ground, at least twelve hours later, by a construction crew who luckily does not notice the tuxedo-clad Scot in their pipe.

Tiffany Case is flabbergasted when she realizes she is working with James Bond.  Why?  Well, he is, apparently, world-famous, as all  truly successful espionage agents are.  This is another example of the reflexive, winking comedy that informs the tone of Diamonds Are Forever, and which does a great deal to deflate whatever narrative tension inherent in the drama.

Sean Connery here stops sounding like James Bond and starts sounding like Sean Connery.  Which is fine — who doesn’t like Sean Connery’s accent? — but jars when the movie is viewed too close to his other Bond efforts.

The Howard Hughes-ian Willard Whyte is played by country singer Jimmie Dean, who, it pains me to say, does not remotely begin to suggest  the daring, peculiar, brilliant, aging, paranoid, OCD-afflicted Howard Hughes.  Hughes, I have learned, was a great fan of the Bond movies and generously offered the use of all Las Vegas (which he owned at the time) for Diamonds Are Forever; I wonder if, after seeing the result, he came to regret his decision.

Diamonds Are Forever holds a special place in my memories because it was the first “new” Bond movie I was aware of.  I had seen Goldfinger on television, so I knew who Bond was, and I was even aware that it was somehow special that Sean Connery was back playing Bond (his salary, a then-astronomical $1.25 million, plus 10% of the gross, had made outraged headlines).  I clearly remember the commercials contantly playing on TV, emphasizing a stunt where Bond tips a car over on its side to drive through a narrow alley.  1971 witnessed the beginnings of the burgeoning car-crash-movie genre, and I remember my older brother being oh so excited by this new Bond movie and its exciting, special car stunt (I was ten and too young to see something as “adult” as Diamonds Are Forever.  Ha!).  That stunt now goes by in a ho-hum matter of seconds and seems utterly unworthy of note.

In the middle of Act II, Blofeld turns the tables on Bond and orders him out of his penthouse at the point of a revolver.  And I thought “wait a minute, Bond can take on a volcano full of bad guys, why is he acquiescing to a guy with a revolver?”  But then I realized that, having punched through the stratosphere with You Only Live Twice, there was, in 1971, no place for Bond to go but to comedy.  Bond and Blofeld are play-acting now, just kidding, players on a stage who do what’s expected of them for the entertainment of adolescents and their aging fathers.  Diamonds Are Forever is the point where Bond Movies turn from being thrillers to being pageants, if not pantos.

The production, I should note, is quite substandard, especially for a Bond movie.  The photography is unremarkable, the lighting high-key and punishing (the better to indicate comedy, I suppose), the supporting players obvious and shrill, the special effects hurried and wan.  Perhaps this comes from its lower-than-usual budget (most of which got soaked up by Connery’s salary), perhaps it comes from moving production from England to Hollywood, perhaps it comes from choosing crass, ugly Las Vegas as its prime location.  By the time Bond has a car chase up and down Fremont Street (and then up again, because Fremont Street, let’s face it, isn’t that long), outwitting a redneck sheriff and his bumbling cops, he stops being a class act and starts anticipating nothing less than Smokey and the Bandit.