Poorest editing job for any 007 movie? (Tire from Moon-car enters from screen-right, yet no tire missing on moon-car.) Yes, asshole, I get the Capricorn One-slo-mo dude in the space suit. “Get him off there, that NOT a TOY!” Yes it is, fuckstick. Its a fucken made-up-in-a-garage TOY.
The two gay dudes ALREADY HAVE the real diamonds, why then the whole Peter Franks thing? Global market destabilization, my ass. Who thought this shit up?
How did they get the dimonds back? Moonraker 6? (and don’t ask about transporting a space shuttle on the back of a 747, fully fueled and somehow able to generate enough lift and thrust to fly away, that is a different movie. Did they leave the keys in it?)
And probably the most important question:
Bond enters the casino, goes to the craps table, says something along the lines of “7 on the ‘High-Road’ ,”( and some other gibberish…) then, “THE LIMIT ON ALL THE NUMBERS!!!” (Are you shittin’ me?) ITS CRAPS!!! That means lose. Plenty O’Toole says, “Boy you sure know how to play this game!” Or some inane shit.
For fuck’s sakes. I mean I woulda bitch-slapped them both.
The pros of DAF outweigh the cons. First, you have the elevator fight between Bond & Franks. Back in the day, that was one of the most intense & brutal scraps ever put on film. Second, third, fourth - infinity, you have a half-dressed Jill St. John. Who needs a plot?
Messrs. Kidd and Wint did not have the real diamonds. I gather that small shipments had been making their way from South Africa to Amsterdam where Miss Case had been stockpiling them for a larger shipment to Las Vegas. And Kidd and Wint’s job was not to smuggle the diamonds, but to kill each link in the chain as they were no longer needed.
And the idea of market destabilization had nothing to do with Blofeld’s real use for the diamonds, it was just the level of threat necessary to get Bond assigned to the case.
You can fly a Space Shuttle off the back of the carrier aircraft. It’s unrealistic as presented (no fuel, and you’d need cooperation of the 747 crew) but not completely without precedent.
Bond wins at games of chance. That’s just the way his world is.
Actually, the sleeping car fight scene in From Russia With Love pretty much beats all other Bond fight scenes for brutality up until the stairwell machete fight in Casino Royale. (The cold open fight scene with Col. Bouvier in Thunderball, the bobsled fight in On Her Majestsy’s Secret Service, and Bond’s fight scene with the driver in You Only Live Twice come in close.)
Any Jill St. John, while decorative, is definitely in the lower half of Bond girls. She’s almost completely useless, and has a whiny voice to boot. They may have well cast Lucille Ball.
You can separate and glide (albeit, not too far) from the back of a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, but the Orbiter is unpowered.
Like the way he always wins at baccarat even though it is strictly a game of chance.
shrug I can name a half a dozen better Bond girls offhand. And Connery was really showing his age by the time of Diamonds Are Forever. Setting the film in Las Vegas–hardly an exotic or romantic locale, even by 'Seventies standards–was also a major flaw. Really, the only thing good about the film was the Shirley Bassey-voiced title song.
I have to comment on this. Everyone nowadays seems to think that the scene with the astronauts is meant to be a faked moon landing a la Capricorn One* and current conspiracy theory. This idea did not exist in 1971 when this film came out. It wasn’t intended to be fooling anyone (even though, for instance, the Paradox Press Big Book of Conspiracies and a great many people on the Internet seem to think so). Nobody was thinking along those lines in 1971.
What the guys in the spacesuits are doing is going through the motions for the mission. admittedly, doing this in the big water tank they have for this would be better training, but I’m sure they trained in full suits on dry land. and, besides, it lets Bond crash through the scene.
So the “moon buggy” he gets into is supposed to be a functioning piece of NASA equipment they’re learning to use while dressed up in bulky suits. It’s not a toy, but probably grotesquely expensive.
None of this saves the movie. DAF has some wonderful stuff in it, along with scenes that make little or no sense and are extremely embarassing. On balance, it’s the least of the Connery Bonds, but still better than most of Roger Moore’s.
Everyone says that Kidd and Wint are gay. I’ll have to confess that, while there is nothing in the movie to contradict that interpretation, I don’t see anything in the movie to support it. Just two guys, doing a job they seem to enjoy.
Mind you, I’ve been accused of being somewhat clueless in this area, so I may just be missing something.
Call me immature, but my favorite part is when Bond shoves the bomb up Kidd’s ass and throws him overboard as he’s screaming “WOOOOO.”
The kicker is when Bond says, “Well, he shertainly left with his tail between his legs.”
yeah, the second killing in S. Africa - the helicopter pilot
also, when bond is stuck in the pipeline with his “pet rat” he comments that one of them smells like a “tart’s hankerchief” - and since we know that it’s Wint’s broken perfume vaporizer that Bond is smelling, you can make all sorts of sociological inferences you like about that.