When On Her Majesty's Secret Service under performed at the box office in comparison to the previous Bond films, the blame was unfairly placed on the shoulders of George Lazenby, who decided not to return, and the decision was made to bring back Sean Connery. So, the producers basically backed the Brinks truck up to Connery's house and started shoveling out money until he agreed to return for one more outing. Unfortunately, the result is the rather bland and by the numbers Diamonds Are Forever.
We catch up with James Bond on the rampage with only one target in mind, Blofeld. He's willing to do anything to get the information he needs, including physical violence. Soon, he's led to Blofeld's lair. Blofeld (played this time by Charles Gray) is in the process of creating a series of duplicates through the aid of plastic surgery. After a quick altercation, Bond sends Blofeld into a pit of boiling mud to his death. Upon returning to England, Bond is given his new assignment by M (played by Bernard Lee) to look into diamond smuggling and the possibility that they are being stockpiled in an attempt to depress the market by dumping them all at once. Adopting the cover as a diamond smuggler, Bond meets up with Tiffany Case (played by Jill St. John) and the two of them work together to smuggle a set of diamonds to the United States with a trail that leads them directly to a very much alive Blofeld, who is using the diamonds as part of laser satellite as part of an extortion scheme.
There is something very routine about this film. After Peter Hunt was unable to return to the series due to a scheduling conflict, the producers brought back Guy Hamilton, hoping to recapture the magic of Goldfinger, as well as Shirley Bassey to do the title song. Unfortunately, it didn't work and this film somehow feels more dated that the one that preceded it. The plot itself follows the same formula that has worked so well for the previous Bond films, but this time around it just feels stale, especially the final showdown on Blofeld's hideout, an oil rig in the middle of Pacific Ocean in this case. It also has some of the goofiest action sequences of the series, with the chase through the desert between Bond in a Moon Buggy and several goons on three wheelers as a stand out. It doesn't help that is had a largely bored seeming Sean Connery in the lead role, backed up by one of the most useless Bond girls in the series in the form of Tiffany Case. To go from the feisty and independent Tracy, who had pretty much rescued herself when Bond showed up to this woman, who's response to danger is to cower in corner is a sad state of affairs. Charles Gray certainly makes for an interesting Blofeld, chewing the scenery at every turn and even turning up in full drag at one point for absolutely no reason. His casting is a curious choice considering Gray had a small part in You Only Live Twice in a completely different role.
There's also this extremely unpleasant stream of homophobia running throughout the film in the form of two assassins, Mr. Wint (played by Bruce Glover) and Mr. Kidd (played by Putter Smith). They are very clearly a gay couple, even walking off into the sunset hand in hand after blowing a drug smuggler's helicopter, with the smuggler inside. Heck, I even kind of liked them. There was something colorful and intriguing about these two in a psychotic and deranged sort of way. Are they a positive portrayal of gay men? No, probably not but they are at least entertaining. Of course, I stopped being entertained when they both received the most brutal deaths in the film, by the hands of uber-macho Bond himself with one burned alive and the other literally having a bomb shoved up his rear. It was at this point I was no longer enjoying Diamonds Are Forever and was quite ready for it to be over, thank you very much.
Overall, Diamonds Are Forever is easily my least favorite of the Connery Bond films. It never really quite breaks free of the well worn formula. For the most part Connery seems bored by it all and it's not hard to see why, because for much of the film I rather was as well.
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