Mr. Sleeman Is Coming

     Diamonds Are Forever

     Guy Hamilton (1922-2016) had already directed ten films before making his first James Bond movie, Goldfinger (1964).  He went on to direct three more Bonds: Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, The Man With the Golden Gun.  He directed, too, the Michael Caine spy thriller, Funeral in Berlin, and the amazing Battle of Britain, one of the two best aerial combat films ever made, the other being The Blue Max.

     That Hamilton worked well with action scenes cannot be sensibly disputed.  I'd put his abilities against Michael Bay's any day.  A fight in an old-fashioned hotel cage lift in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), wherein Bond (Sean Connery) fights to the death a man he's impersonating, nearly dying himself, is one of the most realistic one on one combat scenes in any Bond film, surpassed only by Connery's fight in a train compartment with Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love.  For any such scene, the viewer must be presented with the question, What are the stakes?  In the lift fight, could Bond die battling an adversary of equal strength and size?  Yes, he could.  In the end, Bond's cunning saves his life.  He thinks, too, to substitute his i.d. for the dead man's so that when Tiffany Case (gorgeous redhead Jill St. John), a worker in the diamond smuggling operation investigated by Bond, goes through the man's pockets, she discovers that "James Bond," a British secret agent, is dead--shit will hit the fan.

     Diamonds are used to power an intense laser placed on a satellite, a death ray put into use by Blofeld (Charles Gray) to blackmail nuclear weapons-capable governments.  Gray, with his snide manner, his projection of haughtiness, makes a good villain.  Hamilton holds back on Blofeld's introduction to the plot until over halfway through the film, a good strategy, since there's something menacing going on that doesn't entirely account for the events moving Bond and the other characters from South Africa to the Netherlands, to England, to France, to Los Angeles, to Las Vegas, to Palm Springs.  

     The Howard Hughes-like character, Willard Whyte (played effectively by Jimmy Dean), doesn't realize Blofeld has been impersonating him in communications with the aid of a voice-alteration gadget.  Blofeld and his exact doubles live in Whyte's penthouse suite atop the Whyte House in Las Vegas while Whyte himself holes up in his remote mansion in the Nevada desert, guarded by two strong and lithe bikini-wearing Amazons, Bambi and Thumper.  It's ridiculous, gratuitous, but they nearly drown Bond as he tries to see Whyte to get him to stop the satellite's deployment.  Whyte finally realizes he's been made into a chump by some of his treacherous employees working for Blofeld, including King Kong (1933) star Bruce Cabot.  

     Tiffany Case, meanwhile, having screwed (in the literal sense) James Bond twice, gets kidnapped by Blofeld's men and taken to the oil platform where the satellite's operations are directed.

     In a typically eccentric British plot nugget, the operations codes for the satellite and its laser are contained in an audiocassette entitled, Great Marching Songs.  Bond makes it aboard the oil platform,  is captured on purpose, Blofeld unwisely doesn't order his men to kill him.  The troublesome agent substitutes an authentic cassette of Great Marching Songs for the coded one, but Tiffany Case, who didn't see this happen, trying to help Bond and aid the furtherance of world peace, later puts the deadly one back in its place.  She's not with the villains (as Bond suspects through much of the film), but her knowledge of what's going on isn't always perfect.

     By this point, armed helicopters have come to attack the platform in a spectacular battle scene, highlighted by Blofeld's "bathysub," a small and sleek vehicle with teardrop windows, vulnerable while a crane operator lifts and lowers it to the sea.  By this point, Soviet and Chinese nuclear weapons bases have been attacked by the death ray--Washington, D.C. is next.  Bond breaks free of his guards, overpowers the crane operator, then starts pulling levers and pushing buttons, giving Blofeld, helpless inside his escape vehicle, a bad ride.  Cursing in a PG-dignified way, Blofeld has to endure whatever Bond's ineptitude with the crane's controls dishes out.

     The platform, ablaze and smoking, men dying, some jumping into the sea to save themselves, anti-aircraft guns firing and sometimes eliminating a helicopter, explodes enough to destroy the control room where the Great Marching Songs tape is about to trample Washington to dust.  Bond swings Blofeld's vehicle like a wrecking ball into the exploding control room and then follows Tiffany into the sea, making a beautiful swan dive definitely not performed by Sean Connery.

     An entertaining entry in the Bond series, for sure.  Two gay assassins, Mr. Wint (Bruce Glover) and Mr. Kidd (Putter Smith) make funny villains as they trade weird observations, followed always by utterances of each other's names.  Lana Wood (Natalie's younger sister) plays Plenty O'Toole, enough said.  

     A car chase on Vegas's neon-lit Fremont Street, with Bond driving a red Mustang Mach One, makes for a fun sequence reminiscent of the Fast and Furious movies.  Connery, by the early 1970s, was hardly the youthful Bond of Doctor No (1962).  He finished his run as Bond with Diamonds, except for his one shot return in Never Say Never Again (1983).  Jill St. John, at least, is just ten years younger than Connery, while Kim Basinger, his leading lady in his last Bond movie, is twenty-three years younger, reflecting, I think, the unreality of a secret agent doing such hazardous work in his fifties, a gent looking craggier by far than when he last played the role.  It's a way of saying that Connery made a wise choice backing out of the series in 1971.  His return in the later film reflects the desire of audiences to watch him play again the role he made famous, even if it were to be in a remake of Thunderball (1965), a much better film.

     

Vic Neptune