I thought Lucian Freud overpainted that? If that’s still on the market Freud’s œuvre is going to see a major reassessment…
As for the empty wine bottles: proper. I knew a guy back in the 1980s who was so helplessly in love with the design of the John Player Specials cigarette carton - black with artfully distinctive branding embossed in gold; the packet was indeed designed vaguely along the lines of something you might see in a Bond film - that he collected them. His home looked like a tobacconist’s storehouse, hundreds of empty JPS cartons glued to panels and pinboards and scattered all around the house.
Now I cannot vouch for him to have also been a contract killer; we only met briefly and not quite socially, private affairs weren’t discussed. But if he was I suspect he was not exactly in the one million dollar a hit range of the spectrum.
Oh. Apparently, someone didn’t get the memo…
We did receive a cease-and-desist letter yesterday morning from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Pomegranates. Check your mailbox.
First the frickin’ National Audubon Society, now this lot… all I ask for is peace, quiet and KGB support to undermine Western potency. Ah well, time to unleash the dragon and get back to some “toppling”. Fnarr.
That one was entirely your own fault.
We knew that they were alert already and that they had an eye on us, but no, Mister Jim just had to set in motion his elaborate* plan for revenge on those poor spoonbills for what their guano had done to the good Doctor (as if they’d done that themselves).
*more or less a real life version of Crazy Chicken, with the difference that after the first couple of shoots, the entire colony of spoonbills took off, but instead of fleeing towards the open sea, they took direction towards the shooting party while relieving themselves. An unforgettable experience…
Go back to your “toppling”, you. I’m sure it’ll be very much of help with our pleas for lifting our lifetime ban from the Audubon Society…
Fecund as it is with abject sloppiness, starting with the script and along the way noting how frequently and intrusively the reflection of the arc light(s) appears, one might consider raising the question for Diamonds are Forever much like shooting fish in a barrel (or shooting Roseate Spoonbills on my island).
There’s so much other fruitsome stuff to satisfy one’s penchant for the grimly tatty that today’s “Slopper” isn’t so much an error as such, but a query whether they really meant it.
When Bond (if it is he) arrives at the oil rig in his skin-tight body-hugging huge round silver ball thingy, Blofeld (if it is he) orders him to be searched “from his toenails to the last follicle on his head…”, to which Connery appears to smile quite wryly, appearing to appreciate the pointlessness of the last bit of that command.
Given that by this stage many folk, not least those producing the enterprise, knew that Sean Connery had committed proudly to the lifestyle choice of being very bald for a forty year old, and that lots of animals were wantonly murdered during the course of production to generate whatever it is that’s slumbering on his head (should it wake, kill it with fire), is this comment:
Proper, in that it’s another self-aware moment amongst many in this slovenly pantomime, and one of the subtler and more underappreciated ones; or
Slopper, in that they didn’t intend this but it happens to be a fine joke nonetheless and considerably less forced than most of the jokes shouted at us during the film.
While I suspect this was simply a case of sloppy seconds, thirds or whatever number of writers was tasked to randomly slap lines onto scenes - Moneypenny asking for a diamond ring from Amsterdam might as well have asked for the barely used one Bond should have lying around at his home; M asking for some actual work out of Bond after his successfully avenging that woman who happened to be gunned down because of Bond’s work - I vote for proper.
It’s like one of those rare instances when you just blurt something out that surprisingly sounds clever and insightful - while only you know it’s patently neither because your brain was hardly involved at all.
Admittedly, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER is decades ahead of its time with this kind of meta-comment. It’s almost participatory theatre where the play takes place amidst the spectator ranks (because there was no more money left to deck out a proper stage or a pink tie that doesn’t come from the Laurel & Hardy remembrance fundus) and the play itself is ad-libbed because who cares about Kansas, apart from Toto and that brat Dorothy?
Proper. Since it is a really great throwaway joke and Connery is in on it (he is so good with these small gestures, like the fluttering hand in the casino in TB).
And this is actually, like all the inconsistencies and weird ideas and mistakes and general sloppiness, what makes DAF so fun as a rewatch: nothing’s really at stakes, not even the personal grievances, but everything is put out there for entertainment, knowing full well that all of it wouldn’t matter if it weren’t a Bond film.
And only a Bond film can do that and get away with it.
(I maybe made the perfect argument why Christopher Nolan should NOT direct any of these. Because everything would have to be just too proper. Even the sloppiness would be turned into one perfectly organized slop.)
“Diamonds, they’re not sloppahhh, only propahhh” are in fact discarded Don Black lyrics from the original song. Or from “Oliver” I can’t quite recall.
I’m going with Slopper. For all the wit in the Mankiewicz’s script (by any metric it’s very clever and funny), for all of SC’s “I’m happy to go around one more time” vibe, however outlandish the whole thing gets, jokes about his own “recession” are a bridge too far; some things are untouchable and I’m not sure “Hey Sean, how about this line about your hairline” is most definitely not a hill any screenwriter wants to die on. (what is that now, 4?).
Purely as an aside, in one of my more highbrow incarnations (Sir Lord of Plankattack, as it were), I was fortunate enough (well, not for the dead guy) to attend a funeral about 7 years ago where Dame Shirley was on-hand (Westminster Abbey the whole thing), and even at aged 80, watching men in uniform completely star-struck in her presence, was a testament to the absolute star power she possesses. She was in attendance only as a member of the congregation, yet still had an aura that only the greatest of stars emit. Not just a voice, for sure.
I’m going with Slopper. As plankattack says, there’s no way the filmmakers begged and bribed Connery to return to right the ship only to say, “We’re gonna poke fun at your baldness, now.” Maybe I could believe it if the idea came from Sean himself, but in the absence of confirmation, I say nay.
In a similar vein – and apologies to Jim if this one is planned for later – there’s no way the filmmakers desired the nervous tittering that came when late-stage Roger, with his grandpa pants elevated to a sternum-high “waistline,” uttered, “You know what they say about the fittest.”
In defense of DAF (I don’t have to, we have an expert here): Connery was very fond of „boy-o“ Mankiewicz‘ work and told him to keep going after the first 20 or so pages. So I suspect he was okaying every line about him before saying it.
And throwing his hairpiece away at the end of „Wrong is right“ must also indicate he was perfectly fine with jokes about his hairline.
Come to think of it, there is an interview (on youtube) in which the balding interviewer asks Connery about his baldness and Connery is absolutely fine with it.
and he reviewed all pages. He was getting paid too much money, and was now at a new status to let such things worry him. Connery was in on the joke, and fine with it.
I thought Proper/Slopper would be toupee-focused for DAF, but with regard to its peregrinations during the film.
There’s another guy in the mix, though, and that’s Cubby Broccoli. I can’t imagine he was overly pleased at having to have Sean back at all, but a bald joke would be a further acknowledgement that this is “the Sean Connery Show” and not a James Bond movie. Yes, Connery is bald, but James Bond is not. I can’t see Cubby sitting still for it.
Did not the script even play with that other Connery comment on Bond - Connery’s ‘slash my wrists’ moment - to let him suffer from rheumatism and be disposed by two girls*? It’s fairly evident DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER is one continuous joke on everybody, Connery, Eon and the audience. Connery and the audience didn’t seem to mind; only with us hardcore fans the film had a difficult standing.
And while the dreaded slump of the seventies held the series in its chokehold till 1977, Connery’s last appearance was still enough to keep him and McClory in the Bond business over a decade later. Initially, he even wanted to play 007 bald in NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN.
*Can’t find the quote right now; something along those lines and definitely what the Bambi-Thumper scene picks up - until it moves into the pool.
Thanks for this Dustin. It makes the pool reinvigoration even more meta-.
I have always said, the pool rebound simply had to happen: Bond needs to win, so he wins. Similar to why no one ever just shoots Bond in the head, and has done with him.
I really have to find the source for that quote, I’m fairly sure it must have been from around the time between YOLT and DAF, but it could also have been from past DAF and before NSNA so it might have been influenced by that ‘71 outing. But I somehow doubt that because Connery was relatively soon after DAF involved in the WARHEAD project that would throw a spanner into TSWLM’s works. Wouldn’t be good advertising to go on the record with such an idea if he was part of a new Bond film in the early stages.
Strange thing is, however I put it into search engines, I draw nothing but blanks or the usual articles about Connery’s Bond films. Will have to get up from my desk and reach into my bookshelves…
I think the exact quote can be found in the 4th of December, 1971 edition of the Radio Times in the UK. And then reprinted in both the TV Guide in the US and Reader’s Digest. All under the title of “More hands make less work”…
(The Reader’s Digest edition was accompanied by a seniors-aimed ad for rheumatism medication)
James Bond is dead, or perhaps for the sake of this artifice, never existed.
Still in the realm of the films, he was not around to prevent nefarious schemes threatening humanity via his generally successful combination of firing a gun, wristwatch modelling, “being good at card games”, driving like a lunatic, consistently situation-appropriate garb, random punching, targeted provocation, cirrhotic liver, arthritic martial arts, sheer bloody luck and leering.
As a result, both of the villainous schemes below succeeded (assume they were in the same timeframe rather than the chronology of the films). Assume no-one else was sent in his place, other than the occasional 008 who fouls it up and probably dies or is badly, badly maimed.
Which would have done the most damage to people and the planet? Which, if unprevented, would have been worse?
