Connery’s return is a shrug, and the film seems to know it. Las Vegas, John Barry and two courteous killers keep it watchable; a script that loses track of its own diamonds and a leading man going through the motions keep it from being much more.
Sean Connery had left the part after You Only Live Twice (1967); here he is back, and Diamonds Are Forever opens as if he had something to settle. Bond chases Blofeld across three countries, breaks into a clinic where surgeons are making copies of the man, and drowns the one he takes to be real in hot mud. It is a fast, cold, ill-tempered five minutes. The rest of the film is none of those things. It is a Las Vegas caper with a Bond in it, and the Bond would rather be somewhere else.
The job M (Bernard Lee) gives him is a diamond pipeline. Stones leave South Africa through Amsterdam for the United States, and somebody at the far end is hoarding them rather than selling. Bond takes the name of a smuggler, Peter Franks, meets Tiffany Case (Jill St. John), and follows the diamonds to Las Vegas and the casino of Willard Whyte (Jimmy Dean), a billionaire nobody has seen for years. Tom Mankiewicz and Richard Maibaum’s screenplay is at its best here: the lines are quick and the smuggling has a mechanism you can follow. Then the diamonds stop mattering and the film turns into the world-in-peril story the series had told before. We will not describe the last act; nobody making it seems to have believed in it.
What holds it up is the furniture. Ken Adam builds a penthouse at the top of Whyte’s casino with a glass lift on the outside, and a desert laboratory with a mock moon surface inside it. Ted Moore shoots Las Vegas at night from the road, so the neon runs across car bonnets and the whole town looks wet. John Barry’s score is slower and sleepier than his work on Goldfinger (1964), strings over brass, and Shirley Bassey’s title song is the one thing here that means every word it says. Donfeld’s costumes are kind to St. John and unkind to everyone else.
The real invention is the hitmen. Bruce Glover and Putter Smith play M. Wint and M. Kidd as a couple: they hold hands, finish each other’s sentences and kill every courier on the pipeline with elaborate good manners, a scorpion down a dentist’s collar, a drowning in an Amsterdam canal. Every time they appeared we cheered up. Charles Gray plays Blofeld as a club bore explaining the wine list, and we never believed he could hurt anyone.
Connery is the problem the film cannot solve. He is heavier, greyer and plainly unbothered, delivering the dry lines with the old timing while letting somebody else do the running. The exception is the best scene in the picture: a fight with the real Peter Franks in an Amsterdam lift, two men in a box the size of a wardrobe, a fire extinguisher, broken glass, no music. It is ugly and quick and it made us sit forward as nothing else here managed. Then he goes back to leaning on things. St. John begins as the sharpest person on screen and is written down to a woman being told to stand still. Lana Wood’s Plenty O’Toole gets three scenes and one dress. Norman Burton’s Felix Leiter is a man with a clipboard.
Bert Bates and John W. Holmes cut the Las Vegas car chase properly, the Mustang tipping onto two wheels to squeeze down an alley, going in on one side and, as everybody has noticed since, coming out on the other. It is the last piece of action anyone bothered with. The later set pieces are noise without geography, and by the final half hour we were bored, and then mildly cross about being bored by something so many talented people had made.
Guy Hamilton directed Goldfinger, the film that fixed the formula, and here he runs it with the conviction taken out. Some critics have come to love it for that, as the moment the series stopped pretending and started smirking; we can see the appeal without sharing it, because a joke about tiredness is still tired. Watch the first hour, the two hitmen and the car, and put the kettle on for the rest. It runs 120 minutes and carries a PG.
