In Sean Connery’s final, official turn as Bond he gets stuck into the seedy underbellies of Amsterdam, Las Vegas and, er, an oil rig off the coast of California. Along the way, he picks up an interesting Case, gets into Plenty of action and courts the attention of a pair of ‘problematic’ gay hit men. Oh, and Blofeld is back. In drag.

If this is your first time reading a re-view on LicenceToQueer.com I recommend you read this first.

‘Inspired by Diamonds Are Forever’ by Herring & Haggis

“The name’s Bond, Flaming Bond?”

At the start of Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond is angry. If we have seen the previous film we understand why he's harbouring bloody thoughts about Blofeld and taking his feelings out on everyone he encounters: he wants revenge for the death of his wife, Tracy. Bond's rampage climaxes with a more-than-usually sadistic treatment of a woman, using a symbol of her femininity (her bra) to literally choke information out of her. Bond proceeds to kill Blofeld in an appropriately grotesque fashion but there is no real catharsis for Bond besides the satisfaction of a 'job well done'. Indeed, when Bond discovers halfway through the film that he only killed a clone and he comes face-to-face with the real Blofeld there is still not even a mention of his being a widower. In fact, if anyone went into Diamonds not having seen the previous film, they would be clueless about why Bond was so obsessed with killing Blofeld in the first place. Following the opening titles, M makes it clear that it was a “vendetta” but Bond's dead wife being the motivator isn't mentioned.

Did the death of Tracy actually mean anything to Bond? After Tracy is killed in the book of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, we find Bond at the start of the next book plunged into a nervous breakdown, the repercussions of which are felt throughout the whole of that story. Nothing of the sort in the films. Of course, M's remarks are intended to be meta-textual, the sequence serving to tell the audience that the traumatising events at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service should just be forgotten so we can all get on and have a good time at the movies.

I have always found Tracy’s death at the end of the OHMSS film genuinely distressing and its dismissal in Diamonds frustrating - but, before coming out, also kind of liberating. Like many queer people, I grew up thinking I would never be able to have a happy long-term relationship. Perhaps as a kid, I wallowed in OHMSS’s downbeat ending for this reason - Bond’s fate, that of perpetual singlehood, would be my own. I know - how melodramatic! But on the flip side, I told myself, Bond was OK on his own after all, as shown by Diamonds Are Forever. Therefore, I would be fine on my own too - better off without a wife/whoever! [Not for the first time - and certainly not for the last - I am slightly concerned with how much I have allowed James Bond movies to influence my life.]

Without further ado, Diamonds plunges us headlong into the mission briefing in a comfortingly familiar oak-panelled office, complete with the requisite decanter of booze. Bond always has a (stereotypical) gay man’s taste for the finer things in life, and his expertise in food and drink appears inexhaustible. In Diamonds Are Forever, it’s his knowledge of sherry that is aspirationally impressive. As he is wont to do, Bond identifies the vintage of his beverage, “an unusually fine Solera” as a “‘51”. When M points out that there is no year for sherry, Bond takes great delight in correcting his boss: “I was referring to the vintage on which the sherry is based, sir. 1851, unmistakeable.” This gag only made it into the film because the screenwriter, Tom Mankiewicz, made the same mistake - thinking there was a vintage for sherry - and was corrected.

Later on, to avoid detection Connery mimes kissing someone else while waiting for smuggler Peter Franks to turn up in Amsterdam. We don’t know if the imaginary person is intended to be a man or a woman. But hey, anything goes - it’s Amsterdam!

Bond uses the Playboy Club and Casino membership card from his own wallet to falsely identify the deceased Peter Franks as Bond. While this might appear to offer conclusive proof that Bond is 100% heterosexual, Playboy was a gay ally before it was cool. Two years before the release of Diamonds Are Forever and a few months before the 1969 Stonewall riots, when homosexuality was still classified in the US as a mental disorder, Playboy magazine published a letter entitled “Gay is Good” written by gay rights activist Frank Kameny.

Peter Franks isn’t the only alias Bond takes. Across the whole series of films, Bond adopts many aliases. He is, after all, a secret agent. But in Diamonds Are Forever, he takes leading a double life to extremes: first he poses as smuggler Peter Franks, then as radiation protection supervisor Klaus Hergersheimer, then he takes on the voice of Blofeld’s/Willard Whyte’s security specialist Bert Saxby and finally steps out of a giant rubber ball onto Blofeld’s oil rig base as Unnamed ACME Pollution Inspector (tongue is squarely in cheek by this point).

Bond’s taste in hotel accommodation is very… flamboyant. From the comfort of the most luxurious bathtub available at the Hotel Tropicana in Vegas he phones his BFF Felix Leiter to tell him all about his plans for the evening: “I’ll probably take in a show or something”. Later, he’s checked into the bridal suite of the Whyte House and spends more time looking at the fish swimming around in his aquarium bed than Tiffany who is lying semi-naked right next to him.

The line Connery delights in as he steps out of the pipeline, still dressed in his dinner suit, makes him sound more like a character in an Oscar Wilde farce than a super spy, especially in contrast with the blue-collar guys bickering over whose turn it is to crawl through the pipes: “I was just out walking my rat and I appear to have lost my way.”

Bond shows off his Epicurean sensibilities in the final scene, his survival depending as much on his combat abilities as his knowledge of wine - as well as his nose for perfume. “Mouton Rothschild IS a claret,” he says with disdain in the final scene, unmasking Mr Wint as a villain, and definitely NOT the sommelier. He follows it up with a staggering display of shade-throwing: “And I’ve smelt that after shave before. And both times I’ve smelt a rat.” This makes his a snob, but does it make him stereotypically gay?

I bought a pink tie just like Bond’s so I could re-create Connery’s infiltrating-reclusive-millionaire’s-summer-house look. Of course, everyone today knows that real men wear pink. But back in 1971, this was a bold fashion choice for a straight guy.

Friends of 00-Dorothy: 007’s allies

M is at his most irascible here, appearing only briefly to unsympathetically chastise Bond for his personal obsession with hunting down Blofeld and hoping he'll get down to business as usual. Clearly he didn’t like his best agent being tied down with a woman.

Moneypenny shows off one her best ‘lewks’ in any Bond film, disguised as a customs officer. The exchange between Bond and Moneypenny is one of the wittiest and warmest. After she drops not-too-subtle hints about him returning from Amsterdam with a matrimonial diamond ring, Bond replies “would you settle for a tulip”? Their mutual smiles make it clear that they both understand what is really going on here: there’s not even the hint of a possibility of Bond settling down - at least with a woman. At least, not after what happened the last time (see previous section).

Q has a bit more to do than usual, turning up in the final third to help Bond change his voice so it goes down a few octaves. I can relate. I do this whenever a plumber comes ‘round to fix the boiler.

Leiter (played here by Norman Burton) is definitely one of the straighter Felixes, almost parodically so in the scene where he and Bond gawp at the female trapeze dancers swirling past their viewing screen. Perhaps they are less interested in the women and more transfixed by their sequined leotards? Director Guy Hamilton said that he intentionally went for a more “buttoned down” Leiter to contrast with this film’s characterisation of Blofeld. Speaking of which...

Shady characters: villains

This isn’t the first time Charles Gray has played gay in a Bond film. Although he appears only very briefly as Bond’s contact Dikko Henderson in You Only Live Twice, he still has time in that film (before being unceremoniously assassinated) to inform Bond about his dalliances with “the doorman at the Russian embassy”. Although Blofeld doesn’t say he has relationships with men in Diamonds Are Forever, it’s abundantly clear that everyone concerned knew what they were doing. Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz has used the euphemisms “fussy” and “prissy” to describe his conception of Blofeld. But the proof is in the film itself. Mankiewicz wrote the campest lines of dialogue for any Bond villain.

In order the order they appear in the film, here are my top 5 Blofeld lines from Diamonds Are Forever:

[As Bond is using a water gun to squirt the mud off his hands - the mud he has just used to drown/suffocate someone] “Making mud pies 007?”
[Calming a very stressed Dr Metz as USA, Russia and China react to their laser attacks] “The great powers are flexing their muscles like so many impotent beach boys.”
[Informing guards to take every precaution once Bond is aboard his lair before turning away to slink up the stairs] “Search him from his toenails to the last follicle on his head and then bring him to me.”
[Playing the audio content of the tape which Bond has tried - and failed - to smuggle onboard the oil rig to swap for the real computer tape] “I do so hate martial music.”
[Justifying to Bond his supreme confidence that his plan with work by quoting a 17th Century French philosopher] “As La Rochefoucauld observed, ‘humility is the worst form of conceit.’

Even on the page these lines are brilliantly camp, and Charles Gray delivers all of these (and the rest) to deliriously funny effect, often while slinking up a set of stairs, crossing his legs theatrically or gripping a cigarette holder longer than any that ever belonged to a femme fatale. (If you’re a fan of Coronation Street, the British soap opera invented by a gay man, Bet Lynch played by bisexual legend Julie Goodyear may spring to mind.)

It’s important to note that Charles Gray did not himself identify as gay, although several of his celebrity friends have been content to label him as such since his death in 2000. Certainly, he was no stranger to stories beloved by queer audiences, including the professor/narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Mycroft Holmes (brother of Sherlock) in the 80s and 90s TV series, taking over as the show lead when the gay actor, Jeremy Brett, passed away.

It matters little whether Gray himself was gay or not. Blofeld is clearly intended to be queer. All Bond villains are ‘other’ in some capacity, often physically and/or ethnically. Blofeld’s otherness is his queerness. Even a late scene where he comments on Tiffany’s “nice cheeks” is quickly followed up with a withering “if only they were brains”. Maybe he’s sapiosexual, attracted to people based on their intelligence?

With Mr Wint and Mr Kidd there is no ambiguity about their preferences. What’s debatable is how we, as the audience, are supposed to take two male psychopaths who are in a loving relationship.

As soon as they appear in the film they are finishing each others’ sentences, talking almost rhapsodically about a scorpion, a creature as deadly as themselves. Seconds later, they make contact with a dodgy diamond-smuggling dentist Dr Tynan who grins knowingly and says, with a mix of embarrassment and derision “Oh, I see”. It’s arguably what queer academics call a ‘micro aggression’, a brief injection of prejudice into an interaction.

To my mind, this introductory sequence is the filmmakers making a contract with the audience: this is how to feel about Wint and Kidd throughout the rest of the film. But it’s not over yet. This being a Bond film, they have to have their cake and eat it so they engage as many demographics as possible. I doubt any of the chief players on the production team seriously considered how a queer audience member might feel while watching Wint and Kidd. Certainly, no one has gone on record to say as such. The closest we get is screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz on the DVD/Blu Ray commentary for Diamonds Are Forever. Looking back in the early noughties, he said “It was a very risky kind of deal, the relationship between Mr Wint and Mr Kidd. We wouldn’t get away with it today.” Presumably, he’s taking the angle that they are presented in a manner which would be taken as homophobic decades after the film’s initial release. He continues: “They were clearly two gentlemen who kept company with each other. Even though they’re vicious, they’re funny-vicious.” Wint and Kidd are just another example of gay men being used as comic foils then? An update of the ‘sissy’ characters from cinema earlier in the century? But are we supposed to be laughing with the dentist? I would argue not. After the awkwardness has subsided, Kidd distracts the dentist with phantom wisdom tooth pain. We know what’s coming. We remember the scorpion. A desire for schadenfreude builds. We want the dentist to pay the price for his homophobia. Wint pulls up his shirt (no jokes please) and we are kept waiting, for just a few seconds, before the bigot feels the inevitable sting. He expires and we are glad of it. We are complicit in Wint and Kidd’s crime and, perhaps by extension, their ‘lifestyle choices’.

That’s how I have always read this pivotal introductory scene anyway.

The second murder comes shortly afterwards and we don’t get any schadenfraude this time but we don’t feel bad. We’re pretty sure everyone Wint and Kidd come into contact with are up to no good.

As a kid, I reacted differently to the very last shot of the scene, with Mr Wint and Mr Kidd walking away, hand in hand, ‘into the sunrise’, depending on whether I was watching the film alone or with my parents or grandparents. If I wasn’t alone, I froze, determinedly staring straight ahead at the screen, not focusing on anything in particular, so scared anyone would see a parallel between the psychopathic killers/gay lovers and me. However, if I was all by myself, I would stare with intent. I would stare at their interlocked fingers and wonder if I could ever find the same kind of happiness with another person (minus the murderous occupation of course).

Objectively-speaking, I know Wint and Kidd are, to use an overused term nowadays, ‘problematic’. But when there are no model couples for a young gay kid to emulate, they really made an impression on pre-teen me. Rewatching the film I was struck by how sympathetically the two straight actors, Bruce Glover (father of actor Crispin Glover) and Putter Smith (a jazz musician appearing on film for the first time), portray Wint and Kidd. My favourite moment is Wint glaring, jealously, at Kidd after he’s told his partner “I must say Ms Case sees quite attractive, for a lady.” Kidd laughs, nervously, aware that he has upset his beloved.

Their final onscreen moments recapitulate everything that is positive and everything that is problematic in their portrayal. As a flaming (as in, on fire) Kidd vanishes over the side of the cruise liner, never to be seen again, the look of loss in Wint’s eyes is genuine. Less genuine (and logical) is the look of pure pleasure Wint gives, accompanied by a high-pitched “ooooohhh”, as Bond pulls his coattails between his legs, before spinning him over the side to join his lover in oblivion. Ending Wint and Kidd’s careers with a cheap anal sex joke leaves a sour after taste.

No doubt, the schadenfreude that queer audiences and allies felt at the homophobic dentist’s demise at the start of the film is not felt here.

Wint and Kidd are definitely not characters you could “get away with” today. With good reason. But, for a time, they were the only significant ‘out’ representation in Bond films. And, for this kid growing up fearing their gayness, that was better than nothing.

We can’t move on from villains without making an observation about Blofeld’s fabulous laser satellite, encrusted with diamonds (or are they rhinestones?). He uses it to target Chinese rockets, a Russian submarine and a US nuclear missile topped with a angry red nose cone. This won't be the last time we encounter boys trying to outdo each other with their toys.

You go gurls!

At least in the first half of the film, Jill St. John as Tiffany Case really does give as good as she gets from Bond, and does it wearing a more impressive wig than Sean Connery. It’s a shame she’s somewhat sidelined in the middle and reduced to a bikini bimbo in the finale. Still, the image of her wielding a machine gun while wearing said red and purple bikini is a camp sight to behold. It’s a shame the filmmakers didn’t capitalise on it and allow her to shoot down more of the bad guys, exploitation-movie style, rather than just falling backwards off the oil rig. A machine gun-wielding bikini babe who knows what she’s doing is the only reason I would ever want Tarantino to make a Bond movie. I’d love to say it was the fact that the film was made in the early Seventies which led to Tiffany suffering from a lack of third act agency but the same thing afflicted Madeleine Swann in the shoot out/escape from Blofeld’s lair in 2016’s Spectre.

Plenty O’Toole has a name fit for a drag queen. Interestingly it was Jill St. John who was originally cast to play Tiffany Case and not Lana Wood. Lana, a life-long Bond fan who read all the novels, must have been disappointed when it was decided fairly late on that Jill St John would take the role of Tiffany and Lana would play Plenty O’Toole. Ironically, she has very little screentime, but she does make it count. You could hardly call her a fully-formed character: she’s there to move the plot along and be this film’s sacrificial victim. When she’s found drowned later on, it’s genuinely affecting and (I found, when watching this as a child at least) quite disturbing. It ups the stakes and, while nothing justifies Bond slapping Tiffany around the face, Plenty’s demise goes some way towards explaining his sudden burst of anger. Very clearly a ‘gold digger’ at the craps table, moving from one high roller to another, Wood nevertheless gives us the feeling that Plenty has a heart of gold. Lana Wood herself has said that the world of Bond was a world she could relate to. She has also said about her private life that “even if a relationship was going well, I would run away before I could get hurt”, a line that could easily be taken from Bond’s internal monologue, and perhaps even dialogue in the Craig era. Plenty gives off a similar vibe. I’m not for a moment suggesting Lana Wood is queer, just that the fear-of-being-hurt sensibility is something many queer people can relate to.

There’s a really curious shot shortly after Plenty gets unceremoniously thrown out of the hotel window (presumably at Tiffany’s behest, although this is never really clear). Just before Bond gets into bed with Ms Case (both figuratively and literally), the camera focuses on Tiffany’s face while, offscreen, Bond takes off his clothes. In 1975, film academic Laura Mulvey drew our long overdue attention to how much of filmmaking exploits the ‘male gaze’ - that is, heterosexual men making films where the camera lingers on the female form for purposes of gratification. You could argue that this shot is just another example, a heterosexual director (Guy Hamilton) lingering on a pretty lady’s face. However, I would contend that this is a rare example in a Bond film of a female point of view. By watching Tiffany’s gaze follow Bond around the room we imagine him getting undressed. Is it a concession to the heterosexual female and gay male audience? It’s highly likely of course that producers just thought that no one wanted a protracted sequence of Bond struggling to take off his socks. In film-making terms, it’s an economical way of telegraphing Bond getting his kit off. There is, however, a wonderfully prosaic shot straight afterwards of Bond putting his clothes on hangers, almost as if he’s delaying getting beneath the sheets, perhaps because he knows he’s ‘lost’ Tiffany’s game and played into her hands (again, both figuratively and literally). The shot where she stubs out a post-coital cigarette in the ashtray (almost buried in Connery’s copious chest hair) is one of my favourites in the whole film. It somehow sums up Tiffany’s character: pragmatic, in charge of her appetites - as well as those of Bond. It’s just a shame that, post-conquest, she is one who has been conquered, like so many other ‘Bond girls’ that came before her, and the many in the films yet to come. At least Tiffany gets the final line in the film, and it’s appropriately hard-boiled and level-headed: “How the hell do we get those damned diamonds down again?” Although it’s said with a smile, it’s clear that Tiffany won’t allow conventional romance to change her. As all queer people come to learn, she knows that staying true to herself is the most important thing of all. Her resisting the conventional heteronormative coupling makes it hard for the film to put its queerness back in the box.

Finally, Bambi and Thumper should probably be classified as villains, but they’re bodyguards for Willard Whyte, who is revealed to be an ally. One commentator has described them, damningly, as a “male-fantasy lesbian stereotype pair”, presumably reading queerness into a stereotypically ‘femme’ Thumper turning down Bond’s advances and beating him up instead along with her more ‘masc’ partner Bambi. I’m not sure. Perhaps lesbian viewers find Bambi and Thumper to be characters they can identify with? Or maybe they are problematic, like Wint and Kidd. If so, please get in touch.

Camp (as Dr. Christmas Jones)

The title song from Diamonds Are Forever is a camp classic, dripping with over-the-top phallic imagery, equal parts hilarious and obscene. Or is it? A somewhat coy Don Black claims he wrote the lyrics entirely about a diamond, a position that becomes untenable when you get to the verse containing the unambiguous imperative to “touch it, stroke it and undress it”. Composer John Barry was less prudish, revealing in a 1997 documentary that he directed Shirley Bassey, who was struggling to find the meaning in the lyrics, to sing it as if the diamond was a metaphor for a penis. To my knowledge, queer icon Shirley Bassey has never confirmed the story. Gay singer David McAlmont’s sinuous take on the song for David Arnold’s Shaken And Stirred project not only corroborates Barry’s story but turns it into a queer anthem with a video that’s a paean to gay self-empowerment. My other favourite cover version, by the Arctic Monkeys, is less overtly sexualised, but almost as queer. Barry’s fellow Yorkshireman Alex Turner bravely refuses to straighten out the lyrics, an annoying tendency among some male artists when they take on a song written for straight women to sing about loving men. It’s somewhat thrilling and quite amusing to hear “unlike men the diamonds linger” sung in lugubrious Sheffeldian tones.

Even Bond, the master of inappropriate quips, winces at Shady Tree’s joke about a then-in-the-closet gay superstar: “People say I have the body of Rock Hudson. If he ever finds out what I'm doin' to it - he'll be madder than hell.”

Is it really necessary to destroy 80 cars in the Las Vegas strip chase? This sequence, along with the boat pursuit in Live And Let Die (also directed by Guy Hamilton) ushered in the crash ‘em smash ‘em era of 70s vehicle chases. Arguably, the only reason it existed here was that Ford were so pleased that Sean Connery would be driving their new Mustang on screen that they offered to fork out for every single vehicle on the picture. They re-wrote the sequence to take advantage of this generous offer. A ludicrously camp example of film-making excess.

Let’s not even get into the moon buggy chase.

Queer Verdict: 006 (out of a possible 007)

Although not well-served by most film critics, Diamonds Are Forever serves strong queer interest with the villains a particular stand out, including some who are, for once, overtly gay. This is a pretty queer movie even without the subtext, with some truly camp dialogue, even for a Bond film. And then there’s THAT song. The ending tries to shove the film’s queerness back in the heteronormative box, but we are left with a feeling that some of it has escaped. The whole film has a lustre that lingers in our retinas long after the credits have rolled, like the light glistening off a drag queen’s tiara.

What do you think? How queer is Diamonds Are Forever? Leave your comments below.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, comments from the filmmakers have been taken from the DVD commentary

Queer re-view: Diamonds Are Forever