Diamonds Are Forever Review

[amp316]

okr said:

"This is one of the better car chases you will ever see."

I disagree.

The car chase in Diamonds Are Forever is defnitely not among the better ones, it's not even among the best ones of the 70s. Why do the Las Vegas cops wear helmets in their car? Why does the chase contain one of the most obvious (and now famous) goofs in any car chase ever and instead of a re-shoot they decided to correct it with something impossible even for a bond movie? (You can't flip the wheels in an alley that narrow.)

The 70s was the decade for movies with car chases (most, if not all of them, inspired by the most famous one - Bullitt, 1968): Vanishing Point, French Connection, The Seven-Ups, The Driver, White Lightning, Smokey & the Bandit, Fear is the Key, Convoy, Duel, What's Up Doc... Hell, even Walter Matthau and John Wayne had better vehicle chase scenes in one of their 70s movies than Connery in the terrible Diamonds car chase.

As for the movie:
Many scenes feelt like a ripoff, just like the weak title song. Also, I always hated the not-so-subtly concealed negative attitude towards gays/lesbians in that movie. Worst Bond with Connery. Good for him that he got the chance to return once more, so this one won't be remembered as his last Bond movie.

Connery chose his 70s screenplays more wisely before and after this retrospectively redundant Bond movie:
The Anderson Tapes, The Offence, Murder on the Orient Express (love that one), The Wind and the Lion, The Man Who Would Be King, Robin and Marian (adore that one), A Bridge Too Far, The Great Train Robbery (really like that one), Outland. He worked 3 times with Sidney Lumet (who became one of the best and most important directors of the 70s), John Huston, Richard Lester, Michael Crichton. He had already worked with Hitchcock and Lumet in the 60s, but it was his choices of 70s screenplays that made him a complete actor. And John Boorman's Zardoz may have been incredibly pretentious scifi philosophy crap which made Barbarella look like a doctoral dissertation, but this wasn't Connery's fault and today his appearance in this movie at least makes for one of the most hilarious image searches.

I said that it was one of the better car chases that you'll see.  I did not say that it was one of the best.  Did you see me comparing it to the one in the French Connection or Bullitt?  No, that was you...  About the car flipping from the one side to the other; that was a major mistake that I didn't put in the OP because I tried to keep it under 100,000 words.  The original scene had the car coming out onto the street with a large group of people watching.  Director Guy Hamilton did like the crowd and wanted the end shot again.  The problem was that they couldn't get the stunt team back and had to use another group.  Turns out that they could only do the stunt the other way.  What Hamilton should have done was either use the original footage that he didn't like or not show the car leaving the alley.  Still, I thought that the way that Bond got all of the squad cars to crash into each other in the parking lot was very clever and well set up.  Sorry if you didn't.

I see that you say that the movie has a negative attitude toward homosexuals.  Why?  Because WInt and Kidd are hit men?  So what?  It's not like the movie is claiming that everyone that's gay is evil.  Is Goldfinger claiming that all Koreans are evil because of Odd Job?  Is The Man With Thre Golden Gun  claiming that all people with three  nipples are evil because of Francisco Scaramanga?  Are all straight people evil beacuse of the way Blofeld acts toward Tiffany?   

I do agree with you that Connery left the Bond role at the right time and he went on to do the wonderful movies that you mentioned.  What I don't agree with you on is that Diamonds Are Forever is the worst Connery Bond.  Never Say Never Again is much, much worse and sadly the last Bond movie that he's remembered in.

Also, don't ever mention Zardoz in any of my threads again.  That's a horrible black mark on Sir Sean Connery's wonderful career.  It's even worse than Never Say Never Again.  :p