Diamonds Are Forever

Apart from a clumsy climax, a wry and exhilarating bit of entertainment. The film's virtues stem mainly from a sense of self-parody, an intelligent script, the deft handling of the Las Vegas locations, and the presence of Jill St John instead of the usual array of pneumatic androids that super-bureaucrat Bond preys upon. Although the Bond films have succeeded in referring only to themselves, Diamonds achieves somewhat of a breakthrough by being set in a kind of socio-political reality: the Howard Hughes-type recluse in his Vegas empire; the implications of the nuclear blackmail game; the peculiarly Californian obsession with mortuaries; right down to the fey but villainous homosexuals and the pair of beautiful killer-karate female bodyguards who initiate 007 into contemporary femininity. On the debit side, the plot is about as watertight as a sieve, and the unwillingness of Bond's enemies to fill him with lead - instead opting for elaborate and ludicrous devices from which he escapes far too easily - has become tiresome.