Diamonds Are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971): No, this isn't going to be a diatribe on the "Roger vs. Sean" saga--film's equivalent of the Lincoln-Douglas debates--or the "Pierce" insurgency, or the "George Lazenby Is King" revisionists, or a pop quiz on the abberant nightmare that is Casino Royale.

And there can be no doubt as to what is the "best" Bond installment--for mine that that would be The Spy Who Loved Me, though I'd concede that for die-hard Connery-ites, it would have to be Goldfinger.

Today it is time to speak of a "favorite" film; "favorite" in its best sense: a guilty pleasure; a stolen tryst; an irredeemably corrupt schlock masterpiece with the intellectual nutrition value of a Hershey bar. Maligned and misunderstood, spurned by even loyal Bondistas, but ultimately more sinned against than sinning, Diamonds are Forever is my favorite Bond installment.

Diamonds Are Forever is a pure product of its era: the frenetic, schizoid climate that was the very early 70's. This was the era which ushered in dropout classics such as Alice's Restaurant and Easy Rider; but it also heralded President Nixon's silent majority, who flocked to True Grit and Dirty Harry. DAF sought both audiences: from this contradiction, greatness emerged. And it came in the form of excess.

Much of DAF was filmed on location in Las Vegas at the height of its Elvis phase, and many of the same paradoxes of the Late Elvis Era apply to the Late Connery Era. On the one hand, The King had become an establishment darling, a proven moneyspinner, and a favorite of GOP types--standing apart from the anti-war movement, he was more apt to be found receiving FBI accreditation in President Nixon's Oval office. On the other hand, he was promiscuous, devoured buckets of strange pills, wore mascara and sported a purple cape. The same bizarre, delectable blend of right-wing psychedelic camp emerges in DAF (except that, unlike Sean, Elvis never had to wear a rug).

Excess even preceded DAF: you'll recall it was Connery's last "official" Bond--Lazenby had just been canned after one installment (On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)), and Moore was yet to come. Effectively, this was the thus the second of three farewells for Connery--the first being You Only Live Twice (1967) and the third being the "unofficial" Never Say Never Again (1983). For his penultimate comeback, Connery extracted a rich price. In negotiations, Cubby Broccoli ceded a stupendously generous package (by 70's standards)--enough, it is said, for Connery to found a small school in Scotland.

We should have guessed that DAF's sex element was going to be over the top. In Ian Fleming's novel, a willing female supplicant utters the immortal words: "I want it all, James. Everything you've ever done to a woman. Now. Often." (In college I kept a copy of this passage above my dorm-room bed, hoping I'd find a girl who'd recite those words to me. Sadly, she never came.)

The dialogue in DAF is no less tasty. When J.B. is introduced to our female lead, Tiffany Case (Jill St-John), she asks what he thinks of redheads. "I don't mind," replies J.B., "so long as the collars match the cuffs."

The villain in DAF is of course Ernst Stavro Blofeld, with Shakespearean actor Charles Gray in Ernst's last major appearance (a faceless Ernst was later to die plunging down a chimney stack in For Your Eyes Only.) Blofeld's henchmen, far from being the usual iron-stomached thugs (e.g. Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love) or mutant freaks (e.g. "Jaws" as played by Richard Kiel in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker; or Herve "The Plane, the Plane" Villechera as "Nick Nack" in The Man With the Golden Gun) are actually a pair of perfume-scented gay lovers who insist on calling each other "Mr. Kidd" and "Mr. Wint." All very endearing, unless and until one of them plops a scorpion down your back, as they do at an early stage of the picture.

Blofeld himself seems a bit of a switch-hitter, or at least a dabbler in transvestitism: in one scene, he eludes his pursuers by sneaking out of a casino dressed in drag and heavy make-up. This lapse into queendom neatly presaged Charles Gray's triumphant cross-dressing performance, four years later, as The Narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Blofeld's arsenal of other deadly tricks in DAF includes cloning and nuclear warheads. J.B. also has to combat a particularly mean horde of scantily clad female karate killers. Clearly, it is DAF on which Mike Myers drew most directly in framing the Austin Powers series. (Incidentally, it's quite unfair to lambaste Roger Moore as the architect of Bond camp: DAF is easily the campiest of the Bonds.)

Sadism and gallows humor reach new heights in DAF. J.B. arrives in the U.S. accompanying a corpse, ostensibly his deceased brother, but in reality, as a vessel for smuggling diamonds. When Felix Leiter greets J.B. and asks which part of the stiff holds the gems, J.B. replies, "Alimentary, my dear Felix."

Willard Whyte, J.B.'s enigmatic ally, is a departure from the usual, stock-standard rogue-millionaire pal, an all too familiar figure in Bondland (e.g. Topol in For Your Eyes Only, the Count in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Robbie Coltrane's KGB mafia man in Goldeneye and The World is not Enough). For Willard Whyte is a thinly veiled reference to Howard Hughes, who in 1971 was still alive and well and living in a weird germ-free bubble somewhere in California.

This lends a frisson to much of what goes on with Willard Whyte's magic satellite, but it doesn't end there. The Howard Hughes references also set up DAF's crowning moment, the scene which ensures its place in the Conspiracy Theory Hall of Fame:

On M's orders, J.B. is asked to sneak into Whyte's secret Nevada laboratories, to see whether there is a correlation between the worldwide diamond shortage and WW's nefarious scientific researches. J.B.'s presence is detected by agents of SPECTRE, and in fleeing the secret laboratory he strays into a strange hangar. The hangar houses a movie studio where, without explanation, we see a lunar module sitting on simulated moon surface, with a number of astronauts milling about the American flag in faux slow-motion. Unfazed, J.B. leaps onto the studio floor, jumps into the fake lunar rover and speeds off into the Nevada desert, cleverly evading Blofeld's goons.

Together with Capricorn One and Sneakers, DAF is one of the few films which have alluded to the most way-out of way-out conspiracy theories, that the moon landing were faked, the TV feed all pre-recorded in a secret desert hangar. Indeed DAF is the only film which directly depicted NASA in pari delicto (Capricorn One featured a fake Mars landing; Sneakers only contained a passing dialogue reference).

The climactic DAF ending, aboard Blofeld's oil rig, is a bounteous joy. Jill St-John steals the show in two pioneering moments. In the first, she deprives Blofeld of the nuclear codes by hiding them down her bikini bottom (they are embedded on audio cassette, which in turn becomes embedded somewhere in her posterior). For sheer erotic suggestion, this secreting is rivaled only by Jodie Foster's announcement, in Sommersby, that she hid her favorite family jewel by "sitting on it, in a manner of speaking."

Jill's second great moment is her botched (but bouncy) attempt to administer a sub-machine gun while clad in a two piece swimsuit--neatly anticipating Quentin Tarantino's "Chicks Who Dig Guns" by more than a quarter century.

This is not everyone's favorite Bond film, but it's my favorite. I admit: I have long since discontinued my boycott of the Academy for failing to reward its true value; Bond films, I realized, have never been Oscar bait. But if measured by the yardstick of sheer, unadulterated fun, Diamonds are Forever is the film for me.