Connery's return to the Bond role after George Lazenby's single outing was the most anticipated casting event the franchise had produced, and Diamonds Are Forever knows it. Guy Hamilton's 1971 film is built around that return, using Las Vegas as a setting that suits Connery's older, more relaxed Bond and making no apology for prioritising star power and popular entertainment over the espionage seriousness of the earlier films.
At a Glance
Director: Guy Hamilton
Runtime: 120 minutes
Starring: Sean Connery, Jill St. John, Charles Gray, Lana Wood, Jimmy Dean
Release: 1971
Critics Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, broad, brash, and knowingly so)
Audience Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, reliably enjoyable)
Plot
Bond investigates a diamond smuggling operation that leads to Blofeld's plan to use a space-based laser weapon. The structure is the franchise's most overtly comedic to this point, with a lightness of touch that works with the Nevada setting but occasionally undermines the tension the more seriously intentioned entries sustain. The oil rig climax gives the film a suitably brash finale, and the film's willingness to embrace the city's excess as a register rather than merely a backdrop gives it a tonal coherence the more generically located entries did not always achieve. Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd appear throughout as a deadpan henchman pairing whose scenes operate almost as a separate comic register within the film.
Characters
Connery plays Bond with a physical authority that remains intact, though the more comedic tone gives the character a lightness the franchise's stronger entries do not share. That lightness is not entirely a liability: there is a relaxed confidence to this Bond that fits a film operating in a deliberately lower gear. Jill St. John's Tiffany Case is a diamond smuggler of wit and infectious energy whose comic timing matches the film's playful approach, making her one of the most entertaining Bond women of the period. Charles Gray's Blofeld is a figure of considerable theatrical energy and limited menace, his multiple doubles providing the film's most inventive conceit. The decision to play him primarily for laughs is a choice the film commits to consistently, even if it drains the antagonist dynamic of the threat the earlier Blofeld appearances generated.
Meaning / Themes
Wealth and destructive power sit at the film's centre: the diamond smuggling operation that funds Blofeld's ambitions, and the capacity for destruction that accumulated wealth enables. The Las Vegas setting gives these themes a visual language the more neutrally located entries could not access, with the city's neon excess and performative affluence providing a backdrop that makes Blofeld's destructive vanity feel contextually appropriate rather than merely cartoonish. The film's comic treatment of its own formula is also a kind of self-awareness about the franchise's direction, acknowledging the distance it has travelled from the espionage intelligence of the early films.
Direction
Hamilton's direction is confident and purposeful throughout. The Las Vegas car chase is the film's kinetic centrepiece, a sequence whose two-wheeled stunt gives the film one of its most purely entertaining practical moments and whose use of the city's streets and casino forecourts makes the location feel fully inhabited rather than merely decorative. The neon-lit casino sequences have a visual energy that distinguishes them from the more conventionally staged action of the preceding films, and Hamilton uses the city's architecture with more spatial intelligence than the setting's reputation for cinematic excess might suggest. Hamilton pitches the film at a register of broad comic energy and popular entertainment, a decision that fits the Nevada backdrop and Connery's evident comfort with the material. Shirley Bassey's title song and John Barry's score lean into the same brassy, pleasure-seeking register, giving the film a sonic identity that complements Hamilton's approach far better than a more sombre accompaniment would have.
Final Verdict: Diamonds Are Forever is the franchise in a deliberately relaxed mode, and it is more honest about that than its detractors tend to acknowledge. Connery's return gives the film a star power that carries its weaker passages, St. John's Tiffany Case is the most enjoyable Bond woman of the period, and Hamilton's use of the city is sharper than the film's reputation suggests. It is not trying to be From Russia with Love, and judged on its own terms, it largely succeeds. The film was made primarily to lure Connery back after Lazenby's departure, and that commercial imperative is visible in every creative decision, but the tension between calculation and craft is precisely what makes it the most contested of the Connery entries.