Diamonds Are Forever is a 1971 spy film and the seventh film in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions. It is the sixth and final Eon film to star Sean Connery, who returned to the role as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond, having declined to reprise the role in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969).
The film is based on Ian Fleming's 1956 novel and is the second of four Bond films directed by Guy Hamilton. The story has Bond impersonating a diamond smuggler to infiltrate a smuggling ring and uncovering a plot by his old enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld to use the diamonds to build a space-based laser weapon. Bond sets out to stop the smuggling but discovers he must defeat Blofeld before he destroys Washington, D.C., in his plan to blackmail the world with nuclear supremacy.
After George Lazenby left the series, the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli tested other actors, but the studio United Artists wanted Connery back, paying a then-record US$1.25 million salary for him to return. The producers were inspired by Goldfinger; as with that film, Hamilton was hired to direct, and Shirley Bassey performed the title song. Locations included Las Vegas, California, and Amsterdam. Diamonds Are Forever was a commercial success and received positive reviews upon release. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Sound.
Diamonds Are Forever was followed by Live and Let Die in 1973, with Roger Moore succeeding Connery as Bond.
Plot
To avenge Tracy, James Bond hunts Ernst Stavro Blofeld. At a facility where Blofeld lookalikes are being created through plastic surgery, Bond kills a test subject and later the "real" Blofeld.
While the assassins Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd kill people involved in a diamond-smuggling operation, M suspects that South African diamonds are being stockpiled to depress prices by dumping and assigns Bond to uncover the smuggling ring. Impersonating the smuggler Peter Franks, Bond travels to Amsterdam to meet the contact Tiffany Case. He kills the real Franks, then switches IDs to fake his own death and assume Franks's identity. He and Tiffany go to Los Angeles, smuggling the diamonds inside Franks's corpse.
At the airport, Bond meets his Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contact Felix Leiter and travels to Las Vegas. At a funeral home operating in the smuggling ring, Franks's body is cremated, and the diamonds are passed on to the smuggler Shady Tree. The funeral home operator, Morton Slumber, double-crosses Bond, and Wint and Kidd try to cremate him alive. However, Tree stops the process after discovering that the diamonds in Franks's body were fake, planted by Bond and the CIA. Bond tells Leiter to ship the real diamonds. At the Whyte House, a casino and hotel owned by the billionaire Willard Whyte, Tree works as a stand-up comedian but is killed by Wint and Kidd, who do not know that the diamonds were fake.
At the craps table, Bond meets a woman named Plenty O'Toole, and later brings her to his room. Slumber's henchmen ambush them, throwing O'Toole out of the window and into the pool below. Bond instructs Tiffany to retrieve the diamonds at the Circus Circus casino. Tiffany reneges on her deal and flees, passing off the diamonds to the next smuggler. However, seeing that O'Toole was killed after being mistaken for her, she changes her mind and drives Bond to the airport, where they see the diamonds given to Whyte's casino manager, Bert Saxby. Saxby later keeps a rendezvous with a scientist who takes the diamonds. The scientist goes to a remote research laboratory owned by Whyte, where a satellite is being built by a laser refraction specialist. Bond sneaks into the laboratory and, after being caught, escapes by stealing a moon buggy, fights his way out of the facility and reunites with Tiffany. Later in the evening, Bond and Tiffany evade the police in Las Vegas.
Bond climbs to the Whyte House's top floor to confront Whyte. He is instead met by two identical Blofelds, who use an electronic voice synthesiser to sound like Whyte when communicating with the outside world. Bond kills one of the Blofelds, who turns out to be a look-alike. He is then knocked out by gas, picked up by Wint and Kidd, taken out to Las Vegas Valley, placed in a pipeline and left to die. He escapes, then calls Blofeld, using another voice synthesiser to pose as Saxby. He locates Whyte's desert home, defeats bodyguards, and rescues Whyte. Meanwhile, Blofeld abducts Tiffany.
With Whyte's help, Bond raids the laboratory and uncovers Blofeld's plot to use the diamonds to create a laser satellite, which has already been sent into orbit. With the satellite, Blofeld destroys nuclear weapons installations in the United States, the Soviet Union and China, then proposes an international auction for global nuclear supremacy.
Whyte identifies an oil rig off the coast of Baja California as Blofeld's base of operations. After Bond's attempt to change the cassette containing the satellite control codes fails, Leiter and the CIA launch a helicopter attack on the rig. Blofeld tries to escape in a midget submarine, but Bond gains control of its launch crane and uses it as a wrecking ball, destroying the satellite control room, the base and presumably killing Blofeld for good.
Bond and Tiffany head for Britain on an ocean liner, where Wint and Kidd pose as room-service waiters to serve them a dinner with a time-bomb hidden in a cake. However, Bond unravels their disguise and they attack him. He sets Kidd on fire, making him jump overboard, then throws Wint overboard holding the bomb which explodes seconds after. Seeing Blofeld's satellite still in orbit in the sky, Tiffany asks Bond if they can get the diamonds back to Earth.
Cast Sean Connery as James Bond, MI6 agent 007. Jill St. John as Tiffany Case, a diamond smuggler and Bond's love interest. Charles Gray as Ernst Stavro Blofeld: The head of SPECTRE and Bond's archenemy. Gray had previously appeared in the series when he played Henderson in 1967's You Only Live Twice. Lana Wood as Plenty O'Toole, a woman Bond meets at a casino. Jimmy Dean as Willard Whyte, an entrepreneur, loosely based on Howard Hughes. Bruce Cabot as Albert R. "Bert" Saxby, Whyte's casino manager who is in cahoots with Blofeld. Cabot also provided the voice of Bond when he is imitating Saxby using Q's machine. His name is a reference to the producer Albert R. Broccoli. Bruce Glover and Putter Smith as Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, Blofeld's henchmen. Norman Burton as Felix Leiter, a CIA agent, and Bond's ally in tracking Blofeld. Joseph Fürst as Professor Dr. Metz, the world's leading expert on laser refraction, a scientist on Blofeld's payroll. Bernard Lee as M, head of MI6. Desmond Llewelyn as Q, head of MI6's technical department. Leonard Barr as Shady Tree, a stand-up comedian and smuggler. Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny, M's secretary. Margaret Lacey as Mrs. Whistler, a teacher and diamond smuggler. Joe Robinson as Peter Franks, a diamond smuggler whose identity is taken by Bond. David de Keyser as Doctor. Laurence Naismith as Sir Donald Munger, a diamond expert who brings the case to MI6. David Bauer as Morton Slumber, the president of Slumber Incorporated, a funeral home. Marc Lawrence and Sid Haig as Slumber Inc. attendants.
In uncredited roles, Lola Larson (a stage name used by the gymnast Mary Hiller) and Trina Parks appeared as Bambi and Thumper, Whyte's bodyguards; Shane Rimmer as Tom, the director of Whyte's astronautics facility; Ed Bishop as Klaus Hergersheimer, a scientist involved with building the satellite; Henry Rowland as Doctor Tynan, and Cassandra Peterson as a dancer. Peterson says in her autobiography that she was in the film but believes she did not make the final edit. It has been rumoured that Peterson and later star Valerie Perrine played Shady Tree's "Acorns", the showgirls who support him during his standup routine. They were actually played by the performers Jennifer Castle and Pat Gill.
Production The producers originally intended to have Diamonds Are Forever re-create commercially successful aspects of Goldfinger, including hiring the director, Guy Hamilton. Peter R. Hunt, who had directed On Her Majesty's Secret Service and worked in all previous Bond films as editor, was invited before Hamilton, but due to involvement with another project could only work on the film if the production date was postponed, which the producers declined to do. As a condition for Hamilton directing after his difficulties with trade unions during the filming of Battle of Britain, Diamonds Are Forever was the first Bond production to be based primarily in the United States rather than the United Kingdom.
Writing While On Her Majesty's Secret Service was in post-production, Richard Maibaum wrote several drafts about Bond avenging the death of his wife Tracy. The characters Irma Bunt and Marc-Ange Draco were set to return and Bond mourning his deceased wife Tracy while Louis Armstrong's "We Have All the Time in the World" played in the background. Harry Saltzman had suggested Thailand and India as potential filming locations. When George Lazenby departed from the role prior to the film's release, a complete rewrite was requested, in addition to Maibaum's script failing to impress Albert R. Broccoli and Saltzman. Following this, Maibaum wrote an original script with Auric Goldfinger's twin seeking revenge for the death of his brother. In this version, Goldfinger's brother was a Swedish shipping magnate armed with a laser cannon held within the hull of a supertanker. The idea was borrowed from an early draft of On Her Majesty's Secret Service in which Ernst Stavro Blofeld was to be Goldfinger's twin brother, with Gert Fröbe set to return. The film would have ended with a boat chase of Chinese junks and Roman galleys on Lake Mead. The plot was later changed after Broccoli had a dream, where his close friend Howard Hughes was replaced by an imposter. Hence, the character of Willard Whyte was created, and Tom Mankiewicz was chosen to rework the script.
Mankiewicz says he was hired because Broccoli wanted an American writer to work on the script, since so much of it was set in Las Vegas "and the Brits write really lousy American gangsters" – but it had to be someone who also understood the British idiom, since it had British characters. David Picker, then-president of United Artists, had seen the stage musical Georgy written by Mankiewicz, and recommended him; he was hired on a two-week trial and kept on for the rest of the film, as well as several subsequent Bond films. The idea of Goldfinger's brother was scrapped, and Blofeld was written back into the script. Mankiewicz later estimated the novel provided around 45 minutes of the film's final running time. The adaptation eliminated the main villains from the source Ian Fleming novel, mobsters called Jack and Seraffimo Spang, but used the henchmen Shady Tree, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd.
Casting George Lazenby was originally offered a contract for seven Bond films but declined and left after just one, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, on the advice of his agent Ronan O'Rahilly. Producers contemplated replacing him with John Gavin, although the actors Clint Eastwood, Adam West, Burt Reynolds, Robert Wagner, Brett Halsey, Malcolm Roberts, and Ranulph Fiennes had also been considered; Eastwood, Reynolds, and West had stated that Bond should not be played by an American actor, with West stating he was doing "something else" at the time. Reynolds would later regret the decision to turn it down, stating he "could have done that". Michael Gambon rejected an offer, telling Broccoli that he was "in terrible shape". The producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wanted to cast Roger Moore, but he was busy filming The Persuaders! The singer Tom Jones stated he was considered for the role, but Broccoli felt that he was too famous and people would not have believed him as Bond.