Trailer
Plot summary
M believes that someone is stockpiling South African diamonds to push prices down and sends James Bond to find the smuggling ring. Bond takes the identity of the smuggler Peter Franks and travels to Amsterdam to meet his contact, Tiffany Case, then goes with her to Los Angeles, the diamonds hidden inside Franks' corpse. In Las Vegas, CIA agent Felix Leiter is his ally, and the gems pass through a funeral home toward the casino of the billionaire Willard Whyte, where the smuggler Shady Tree works as a stand-up comedian. Two assassins, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, kill people in the same diamond operation.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To lure Sean Connery back as James Bond, United Artists paid him a $1.25 million fee, which he used to establish the Scottish International Education Trust, letting Scottish artists get funding without leaving their country.
- Before Sean Connery returned, the producers considered John Gavin, Clint Eastwood, Adam West, Burt Reynolds, Robert Wagner, Brett Halsey and Ranulph Fiennes for Bond; Reynolds later regretted turning it down, and Michael Gambon rejected an offer by telling the producers he was "in terrible shape."
- Jill St. John was first offered the smaller role of Plenty O'Toole, but on the recommendation of Sidney Korshak she landed the female lead as Tiffany Case instead, becoming the first American actress to play a Bond girl.
- The stunt driver hired to jump the Ford Mustang over parked cars in the Las Vegas chase could not pull it off and wrecked several cars in the attempt, so with only one car left, stunt driver Bill Hickman was brought in and completed the jump in a single take.
- The film's moon buggy, modeled on the NASA lunar rover but fitted with flailing mechanical arms for spectacle, was built by custom car fabricator Dean Jeffries on a rear-engined Corvair chassis, and its fibreglass tyres had to be replaced during filming after the desert heat and rough soil destroyed them.
SPOILER
While filming Plenty O'Toole's death in Tiffany's pool, Lana Wood had her feet loosely tied to a cement block on the sloped pool floor, and it moved deeper with each take until she was submerged and had to be rescued after onlookers noticed.- The Las Vegas shoot relied on producer Cubby Broccoli's friendship with Howard Hughes, whose hotels hosted most of the filming, while the Circus Circus owner, a Bond fan, let the crew use his casino and gave himself a cameo.
- The villain Willard Whyte, a reclusive billionaire loosely modeled on Howard Hughes, was invented after producer Cubby Broccoli had a dream in which his friend Hughes had been secretly replaced by an imposter.
