Guy Hamilton
Agente 007 - Una cascata di diamanti

Everyone should be given the credit they deserve.
And so it is only right to attribute to the creators of "Diamonds Are Forever" (1971) the origin of one of the silliest openings in the entire Bond saga.

For those like myself, who still tear up at the mere thought of the ending of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", seeing Connery beat up a Japanese guy, punch an Egyptian, attempt to strangle a woman with the top part of a bikini, and finally kill Blofeld by drowning him in a tub of soup, is not just bad.
It's mean-spirited.

Just as it is mean that a song with a fantastic hook (so far my favorite!) like
"Diamonds are fore-vah! Fore-vah! Fore-vah!
Pa-ppa-pa pa-ra-pà pa-ra-pà...”
was used in the non-secret service of a movie that, given the quality of the preceding chapter, offers the same pleasure as white bread with mayonnaise after tasting my super peppery carbonara.

It's certainly my fault for not being very sharp, but I didn't quite get the plot of "Diamonds Are Forever".
There are these two killers straight out of a Coen brothers' film who go around killing everyone and stealing diamonds.
00nuisanceno is supposed to go to Amsterdam, take the place of a known diamond smuggler, and at a certain point, must bring the diamonds to the United States because it seems there's an incredibly rich tycoon behind all this who wants all the diamonds for himself.
Basically, he's the grandson of Auric Goldfinger.
James hides the diamonds in the rectum of the diamond smuggler’s corpse mentioned earlier but, as soon as he arrives in America, he is kidnapped by the henchmen of a funeral home, who cremated the body, give him back the diamonds in an urn, but immediately tell him to place it in a niche in the cemetery out back and at that point 00faintlight gets hit by the Coens...

More or less from this point, I stopped trying to make sense of it, and I must admit, the situation improved.
There's a space laser, submarines being blown up, two trapeze artists taking Bond down, and a secret oil platform, which 00watchtower discovers because in the tycoon's penthouse there's a replica of the Earth's surface and... no. This is really too hard to explain in words.
Spectacular finale with the Coen brothers eliminated: the first with two incendiary skewers to the heart, the second with a bomb up his butt.

The real problem is that "Diamonds Are Forever" is a film without balls.
They wanted to bring the brand back to more classic territories, to win back the audience disoriented by the serious and dramatic tones of the previous film.
But they did it in the worst way, exaggerating certain caricatured aspects, bordering on parody, that unnecessarily stretch the plot and lower the level of the film.

They recalled the Scotsman, who, mind you, despite some gray hair, is still a hunk, but he's still a monument to reheated leftovers at the level of getting off to swimsuit photos of your ex found on Facebook and has such a disinterested look that it feels like you're in class, last period, on a Saturday, during math class, on a beautiful late May day.

The Dutch setting of the first part struggles to withstand the comparison with the much more fascinating, exotic, and mysterious settings of previous films, and in any case, the script and direction don't do much to fully exploit its potential.
The move to the States certainly revitalizes the film, but at that point, it's mainly the confusion and excess of situations and characters that cause a bit of loss of direction.
And when you see Bond escaping from I don't remember who, for I don't remember why, driving a kind of lunar module retrieved from a movie set in the middle of the Nevada desert, even the eyebrow of perplexity gets tired of raising itself every 4 seconds, packs its bags, and leaves slamming the door.

Then again, in truth, "Diamonds Are Forever" is full of awesome scenes.
It features what to this day is the best hand-to-hand combat I've seen in the entire series (inside an elevator!), the car chase through the streets of Las Vegas is masterful, and the scene on top of the skyscraper is dizzying, at least for someone like me who gets dizzy even sitting on the couch when asked to lift his feet to vacuum.
Let's not forget the few but intense scenes dedicated to the full and ripe melons of the unfortunate secondary Bond Girl Plenty O'Toole.
But the feeling is that of watching a collage of sequences that are quite effective but too disconnected from each other, lacking the necessary cohesiveness.
What a pity.

As if that weren't enough, even the official Bond Girl, Jill St. John, as the shameless Tiffany Case, left me cold.
Essentially because I don't like her physically.
There is nothing really wrong with her, but nothing that would make me want to frantically search on Wikipedia to see if in her early career she had to bow to the reasons of the star system by acting in some low-quality porn.
And then I don't like her hairstyle.
With that red perm, she looks like my aunt on a Friday morning, just out of the hairdresser.
At least I give her credit for being among the boldest and most brazen Bond girls so far in the saga, since, practically, for a good portion of the film she is shot only from behind.
Not to mention that there are photos of her with nipples hard as pointed and well-polished stones, perfect for my slingshot of love...

And now... Long live the ranking and may Odin bless it!

"Best Boom Bond Movie"

1) On Her Majesty's Secret Service;
2) From Russia with Love;
3) Goldfinger;
4) Dr. No;
5) Thunderball;
6) Diamonds Are Forever;
7) You Only Live Twice;

"Best Boom Bond Pussies";

1) Daniela Bianchi – Tatiana Romanova;
2) Diana Rigg – Tracy Di Vincenzo;
3) Honor Blackman – Pussy Galore;
4) Ursula Andress – Honey Rider;
5) Claudine Auger – Dominique "Domino" Derval;
6) Jill St. John - Tiffany Case;
7) Mimi Ayuhara and the other Japanese girl who dies;

BartleBond will return with "Live and Let Die".