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I would also have kept the film in Amsterdam longer ( a boat chase on the canals was a missed opportunity!) and finish it in South Africa. The Las Vegas setting lets it down!
Also agree more should have been made of Bond avenging Tracy than the throwaway pts. Maybe have Bond kill Blofeld halfway through the movie, for to realise the main protagnist to be Willard Whyte or Tiffany?
Sounds a bit like NTTD!
DAF is such a mess...where to begin? I think it would have been better if they had had Pleasance or Savalas as Blofeld.
The novel wasn't very good. I can undersand the changes.
I actually liked the book, for me, in terms of quality, it's still much better than the film imo.
What was the abandoned ending? Something about a mine and a train wasn't it? I'm not keen on the oil rig ending at all.
Agreed with the comments above about Tiffany starting out well as a super-smart diamond smuggler and turning into a bikini-wearing moron by the end. In some ways this film feels like different people wrote the two halves of the movie.
Also, just don't put Felix in it at all. Funnily enough, I can see Jimmy Dean (Whyte) playing a surprisingly faithful and potentially best screen version of Felix, as I think he's really good in this.
Wint and Kidd are creepy and evil enough with a hint of menace. Shady Tree is a hoot, I love Morton Slumber and who doesn't like Klaus from Section G. LOL!
Yes @mtm one draft had Bond fighting Blofeld in a salt mine(?) and there were no doubts when it came to Blofeld's demise. I suppose a missed opportunity in the film might be that we never know whether Blofeld lives or dies. Unlike YOLT where we see Blofeld clearly leaving the volcano after triggering the self destruct, Blofeld is last seen suspended in the sub.
I believe Bond reached the mine by a parasail? Blofeld by more conventional means, maybe the train. It was scrapped due to cost.
I might say first what was not a missed opportunity: having Sean Connery return was the right move. Now why didn't they make it a straight vengeance story I don't know. I think audiences would have accepted anything as long as Connery was Bond. And thar includes a much darker movie than what we got.
As others have said it’s a shame we didn’t get a better version of Tiffany Case (not my favourite Fleming novel either, but Case is a very viviid character). I think Jill St. John was perfectly capable of playing a more world weary version of the character. She sort of does during her initial appearance before the film defaults to the ‘bimbo’ concept.
I suppose other missed opportunities would be not including the scene where Plenty sneaks back into Bond’s hotel and finds Case’s address… for the longest time I never understood why Plenty (heck, it’s not even very clear it’s Plenty) winds up dead in her pool. Perhaps not leaning more into Blofeld’s ‘double’ concept is another (I know the film has to involve diamonds in some form, but the laser satellite thing is so lame. Why not a film about Blofeld trying to replace White/someone more important with a similar double? It’s a bit daft but the film’s supposed to be to some extent).
I think it's one of the least good Bond movies, but it's probably one of the more important ones as it marks a new tone and direction that the movies went in, and one which was very successful for them. So in terms of opportunities taken, they probably took the right one for the continued longevity and success of the series.
Commercially they made the right move. To be honest I’d argue with that in mind they do a good job with the PTS. It can easily be viewed as a mini revenge subplot with the rest of the film taking place some time after. But if you hadn’t watched OHMSS previously it still makes sense.
i suppose it marks one of the first times in the series such a radical course correction was taken and paid off (even the films from GF onwards, while different, weren’t as radical a departure). I agree, not my favourite, but an important one.
That’s the beauty of DAF - if you wish to view it as such Blofeld does in fact die at the end.
Plus they have the neat little gag about Bond having taken a holiday- it refers to the PTS with Bond 'killing' Blofeld, but some audience members can take it as a wink to Connery having sat the last film out.
I think I'd still lose the diamond ring gag from Moneypenny though- for anyone who did remember OHMSS it comes across as incredibly crass and insensitive from her! :D
I agree @mtm it comes across as a cringey answer to the question, though Bond does set it up with the "what do you know about diamonds Miss Moneypenny." The last scene of Maxwell and Connery together and it takes place at a border crossing. Those two had great chemistry and were always a highlight of the office scenes.
Ironically, Sean and Lois filmed their shots separately for that scene!
Apart from the one where they're in the same shot together! :D
Not quite: "What can I bring you back from Holland?"
So OHMSS not being acknowledged here doesn't makes sense.
Where Majesty’s elevated the character of Bond/the film series to new and exciting possibilities, Diamonds walks back on all that promise and instead the result is a drab film that lacks every bit of style/sophistication that some of its predecessors effortlessly had.
I say this as somebody who dearly loved Diamonds when I was younger, but I can’t say I don’t dream of a version of the film with Hunt behind the camera directing, and setting a whole new tone/style for Bond in the 70s different than what we had.
Overall, DAF is one of my least favourite films in the series. I tried a few years ago to pitch an alternative take, so clearly I would change a lot of things in the story but, again, it falls more into "What If?" territory than missed opportunities.
Perhaps it would have been similar to Martin Campbell in which something about that particular director working on a Bond film would have resulted in better work? His career outside of Bond is very hit or miss too.
Well, Campbell needs a good script too. That's the problem, they need a good script.
I think it's more on his handling of a scene or the performances of the cast really.
And he remained consistent in those films (OHMSS included and yes, his non-Bond films, in Gold, his handling of Moore in there didn't fit the character, who was supposed to be a bit hard, to say).
The thing with Campbell is (for how he's such an overrated Bond director for me), still managed to make an appropriate mood or tone for a scene or the acting of the characters for such a particular scene, this is most obvious in Casino Royale.
Hunt, often comes sometimes as a bit uncertain with some tones of the scenes (the Piz Gloria scenes for example), and there's Blofeld romancing of Tracy in the previous film where it kinda goes off the rails for the character (it comes out of nowhere, and this likely came from Hunt).
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think Hunt (or let’s say the film) is uncertain about what he’s doing during the Piz Gloria scenes. The tone in certain places with all its bawdy late 60s humour/vibe is pretty purposeful, even if I don’t think it’s fundamentally the right one.
Also I have no idea where Blofeld trying to romance Tracy came from, but it may well have been a scriptwriter or producer thing. Directors can make notes on scripts during development, but usually these sort of big plot decisions come from those parties. The only note about Hunt’s involvement during the writing of that moment I can find is him bringing on Simon Raven to polish up the dialogue, which is where we get the poem/dynamic of Tracy using it to distract Blofeld.
But yeah, I really don’t know what Hunt would have done with Moore, or even Connery. I suspect pre TSWLM most directors would have struggled a bit to get Moore’s Bond right and we’d have always gotten a version of the more tongue in cheek DAF (I will say that Hunt may have given us a more polished film technically speaking though - some of the filmmaking in DAF is atrocious).
The tone of OHMSS is fine. It was a Bond movie after all. But this movie is not as realistic as you want it to be.