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Diamonds are Forever: overreaction to ohmss or overdue recalibration?
In 1969, James Bond got married and became a widower all in the course of one movie, and to the tune of over 80 million worldwide. Definitely not a flop, it was a drop from the grosses of the previous James Bond movie. So what happens next?
The sky is falling.
Do you pick up with oo7 on his personal mission of revenge? Or do you get nostalgic for 1964 and move heaven and earth to make the world think it's like goldfinger all over again?
In the end, they went with goldfinger redux and you have to wonder. Were they right? Box office grosses state they were, but I disagree. They went the safe route and overreacted. The bond movies were never allowed to mature back then. They regressed and the series was certainly not the better for it.
The sky is falling.
Do you pick up with oo7 on his personal mission of revenge? Or do you get nostalgic for 1964 and move heaven and earth to make the world think it's like goldfinger all over again?
In the end, they went with goldfinger redux and you have to wonder. Were they right? Box office grosses state they were, but I disagree. They went the safe route and overreacted. The bond movies were never allowed to mature back then. They regressed and the series was certainly not the better for it.
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Comments
OHMSS may not have grossed as much as the other's had since Dr No but by no means was it a flop so it's a shame that EON wanted to go as far as away from a faithful Fleming adaption with the follow up but I can understand why they wanted to revisit the territory of Goldfinger and repeat some of its successful ingredients. That said I'm glad we didn't get Goldfinger's brother as the villain and an American Bond.
That said, and it pains me to say it because I loathe DAF, I don't think the franchise could have survived another OHMSS-like movie with Lazenby at the time. A OHMSS-like movie with Connery, if his mind had been into it, might have been successful. DAF was sadly a necessary evil at the time. Sadly, it meant Blofeld turned into a joke and the franchise into a spoof of itself.
Connery fans will forgive anything he does, the film has one of the finest Bond themes and a quality score but outside of that it's thankful Moore picked up the baton, while I'm not the biggest fan of his era he made the character his own and always treated it with nothing but respect, Connery was absolute opposite of that.
OHMSS has aged gracefully and looks lavish and is still the classiest and best entry of the series. Never been a fan of Guy Hamilton's direction and wonder if they got Terence Young to direct the sublime PTS to GF.
Connery not playing the part was unfortunate I guess but then who knows if OHMSS had worked with a Connery that didn't really want to be in it.
DAF certainly is the low point in the series for me quality wise, at least the other weaker films had good production value.
Connery having made 6 movies can be forgiven to have one clunker in his tenure.
Moore also never gets much or any heat for AVTAK because he has made 7 movies.
If an actor only has made 2-4 movies a "bad" one is weighed much more.
Luckily to this day all 5 actors except Lazenby had one movie that is considered to be a failure or bad. So DAF having the stigma of being the "bad" one of Connery's tenure doesn't really matter.
Even when you look at the least liked Bond movies, they still are all much better movies than most than were released in the same years as they were.
The 60's were coming to an end and OHMSS was a great way to end it.
Was DAF an overreaction? I don't know. It was certainly a reaction to a series that seemed to be in decline at that point (financially speaking). I mean, they threw the kitchen sink at OHMSS (Rigg, faithful adaptation of an excellent novel, amazing director, great action, best score, beautiful locations etc.) and it didn't do as well nor was it as critically well received. It certainly did not have the same cultural impact DC had with a similarly 'deep' novel and with similar resources thrown at it (arguably OHMSS had even more investment).
The 70's with DAF became a new template which ushered in what was to become the Moore era with its lighter plots and more comedic elements. The series survived, thrived, and reinvented itself, allowing it to be here today.
I don't consider DAF the nadir by any means. That was unquestionably the late 90's/early 00's from my perspective. Thank heaven for reboots....
It's strange that DAF gets a lot of flack for not being a proper continuation to OHMSS, but the very same people willfully ignore their own favourite later Bond movie and its sequel. Example, not that GE was that great but its sequel TND was a poor continuation of the previous story. For me, DAF should be viewed as a seperate standalone movie.
I think @beatles gives a good response too. The "lighter" approach was where Cubby wanted to take it. DAF could've been maybe even worse if John Gavin or Adam West had played OO7. How would they have explained a change in nationality? However, I did read that other Bond actor choice Burt Reynolds was at least willing to attempt an English accent.
Anyway, I think its great that OHMSS gets a lot of love today. So much so that we'll get to see an even more expanded version maybe next year of OHMSS?
DAF served as a homage to the golden era that had preceded. Bond films have been high camp since day one, but camp tinged with real and palpable danger and suspense.
People get seriously beat-up and killed in Bond films. The violence is convincing. DAF just continued this theme but within the context of the loud and flamboyant new decade.The '60s was done. The 70's decade was pure excess.
In DAF Sean was as dangerous and deadly as ever. It's also one of the most stylish and smart films of the series. The Barry score creates much drama and danger.
Blofeld, Wint Kidd, are all high-camp villains but very deadly. Tiffany Case is brash and brassy as would befit a 70's Bond girl ensconced in the Vegas criminal underworld.
Also worth remembering, this movie does not actually come off the back of OHMSS the way QoS follows CR.
Two years have passed since Tracy was killed. Bond is long past grieving. No-one grieves for two years, especially not an agent like Bond who is used to death.
Rather, when we encounter Bond in pts, he is in full revenge mode, finally having tracked down Blofeld.
Sean may not have a gym body, but what 40 year old guy did back then.
Connery is a naturally powerful intimidating bruiser of a man. He pulls off Bond as tough and as effortlessly as he ever did -smooth yet brutal when need be.
I found him utterly convincing, and of course there is also the continuity with the 5 films he already did. This is the same Bond that took down Grant on the Orient Express. Peter Franks gets similar treatment.
I think Laz turned in a first rate performance as Bond in OHMSS. A very worthy stand-in for Connery. Actually the best performance I believe of all of Sean's successors. Has a lot to do with being cast young. I think a 30-something actor with the right look, and requisite athleticism is most convincing as Bond, and I do not mind if such actors continue into their 40's, as long as they started young.
The GF touch is apparent in DAF, and it works to a tee I think.
I thoroughly enjoy this film. It is easily my favourite of all the Connery films, and thus of the whole series, as I rank the Connery films 1-6 as the best of the lot, followed by OHMSS.
Hamilton's camp-danger touch, Barry's awesome score, Sean's relaxed but deadly performance, Tom Mank's very smart dialogue, Bassy's epic opening number,numerous benign bizarre elements,colour excitement, danger, humour. It's all there.
A hugely entertaining film. Saw it again a couple of years ago at a TIFF high-def Bond festival. Real crowd pleaser. Audience actually applauded when it was done,as they did at end of TB too.
Best camp-danger film ever made IMO.
I first saw DAF in my early teens when it first came out in 1971. At the time, I bought a full colour brochure (which, to my shame, I have subsequently lost) and unfortunately, I was too young to have one of the famous vodka martinis that were being served in the cinema lobby.
The movie quite literally crashed into being and we were all enthralled right until the end. The first exciting movie car chase had only just been invented in the movie Bullitt and DAF seemed determined not to disappoint on this front, and disappoint, it most certainly did not. Throughout the Las Vegas chase scene, we were all (young and old alike) rapt and on the very edge of our seats. Blofeld in drag seemed quite a natural thing at the time because everyone was au fait with Howard Hughes' (an analogue of Willard Whyte aka Blofeld) habit of leaving his hotels in drag to avoid publicity. This was current knowledge then, but today it's history.
We all left the movie theatre much shaken and stirred because everything was then cutting edge and we hadn't seen anything like it before. This is why DAF, for me, will always be special in spite of its shortcomings as seen from the so called elevated perspectives of today, where we can dissect movies frame by frame whenever we want, sniggering at the seeming ineptitudes of a more primitive society. Don't forget, though, that DAF was exactly what audiences wanted in 1971 in much the same way that CR was what audiences wanted in 06.
OHMSS is one of my favourite Bond movies and it's sad that the sequel planned for it didn't feature the same actor to play Bond, but that didn't matter. My greatest niggle though, is that the "revenge" plot easily lost momentum and yielded to a more formulaic approach. This, I think, was a missed opportunity to take Bond into uncharted waters, that clearly Eon felt was just not worth the risk.
My POV is that after the audiences' response to the ending of OHMSS, EON simply applied Karl Marx's formula: "First as tragedy, then as farce". Honestly, I think that with Lazenby, DAF would have followed a similar premise to the film we now know, just that IMHO it would have started with Tracy's death, some violent revenge scenes and a slow but steady turn to slapstick comedy that would have reach its summit with that bizarre boat chase and, again, a serious and violent climax in those salt mines.
I wish there was at least a storyboard of that brilliantly crazy scene.
Exactly my point. DAF was a movie for its time. It may look a bit quaint and twee now, but back then it was a movie to assuage even the most vivid of imaginations. With Apollo 14, the space race had been re-energised (by Apollo 13), so we wanted space. The car chase was still a nascent film spectacle, so we got that too. Vegas was everyone's dream destination, so everyone went there. The Vietnam War was at its height, and many Americans needed a US-based adventure to escape into -- box ticked.
Film producers, both then and now, have to give the public what they want.
(I think that a character we all know well said something like that somewhere.) ;)
I believe Clint Eastwood would have been the only American that would have succeeded as Bond.
Having said this we can probably be thankful he didn't do it, because his successor probably would have been James Brolin.