Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 76: Sat Mar 19

Diamonds Are Forever (Hamilton, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.25pm


The Prince Charles Cinema continues its full 007 Retrospective showing every James Bond movie over the coming months. You can see all the details of the screenings here.

The press reviews of the films don't normally capture the excitement of this retrospective for Bond fans and I have been recommending the Blogalongabond series by Neil Alcock (aka @theincrediblesuit on Twitter). Here is his take on tonight's movie.

Here's Xan Brooks with an excellent critique of Diamonds Are Forever for the Guardian series My Favourite Bond film:
No doubt each era gets the Bond it deserves. Cubby Broccoli's franchise started out in the early 60s fired by a sleek moral certitude, prowling a world of clearly defined good and evil before slipping into jokey self-parody during the mid-to-late 70s. Diamonds, though, is the missing link, the crucial transition; ideally placed at the turn of the decade and implicitly haunted by noises off in the nation at large. It's a Bond film in which the old glamour has lost its sparkle and the resolute hero has lost his way. It's jaded, uncertain and disillusioned. It's vicious, mordant, at times blackly comic. It's oddly brilliant, the best of the bunch: the perfect bleary Bond film for an imperfect bleary western world.
You can read the full article here.

The influential American critic Andrew Sarris also loved the film and wrote a most readable review which you can find here.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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