DAF is a family film, you watch it on Bank Holiday Monday and the jokes, delivered impeccably by Connery, come thick and fast.
Great soundtrack, and always a change of scene to something new. Good banter with Miss Case.
It works less well for the DVD era and solo viewing, where you want to take it seriously and it doesn't stand up to that, the production values are poor too, no point on a BluRay for this. Fans get miffed it didn't follow up the theme of OHMSS, which has been reconstructed as the perfect Bond film.
If I want a laugh I'll watch Laurel & Hardy thanks
I love the script. It's truly mile a minute with the one liners and banter. Connery while sporting the graying sideburns is back on form and seemed to revel in the light atmosphere. A great change of pace movie with an all time classic theme and score from Barry. Cheap no doubt, camp all the way, this is another enjoyable Bond outing.
The only "guilty pleasure" Bond film I watch. It was basically proto-Moore, and to be honest, it looked more like Connery was having a bit too much fun (at his own expense) rather than being bored (in YOLT, he REALLY looked bored).
I hadn't seen Diamonds are Forever until recently, having heard that it was supposed to be fairly poor, but I loved it. And I think Charles Gray was much better as Blofeld than people gave him credit for.
I think I'll just have to learn not to trust the general consensus on Bond films; I hadn't seen On Her Majesty's Secret Service - which is often panned as the worst of the lot, as is George Lazenby - and yet it's undoubtedly now in my top three, and Lazenby was brilliant. And then there's Die Another Day, which I first saw when I was about 7 and so could barely remember anything about it until I rewatched it recently. All I remembered was that it was insanely far-fetched, which, along with the general consensus that it's a crap film, led me to believe that it was awful. And whaddya know, I loved it. Granted, it's definitely not one of the best ones, but it was thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish.
Similarly, I've never understood why Goldfinger is always ranked as the best Bond film. I've seen it loads of times, and it is a good laugh to watch, but there are other Bond films that take on a much more serious tone and still manage to be just as, or even more, entertaining, such as my top three: the aforementioned On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Dalton's The Living Daylights, and Brosnan's GoldenEye.
I think the official follow up imo to OHMSS when it comes to Tracy's death is the opening to FYEO. Even though the death of Blofeld looked alot more goofy it did at least bring closure to Bond losing Tracy.
I think the official follow up imo to OHMSS when it comes to Tracy's death is the opening to FYEO. Even though the death of Blofeld looked alot more goofy it did at least bring closure to Bond losing Tracy.
I dunno, I think Diamonds are Forever did a good job with wrapping that up to begin with; it begins with Bond tracking Blofeld across the globe by interrogating a number of leads, before eventually finding him (or, as it turns out, his clone) and killing him by drowning him in boiling clay. I just think it's a shame that he didn't continue that merciless attitude when Blofeld resurfaces *ahem* later in the film. Although, from a psychological point of view, I suppose it makes sense.
I fell in love with Diamonds Are Forever when I saw it as a kid in the cinema on its initial release. It was an 'event' movie owing to Connery's return to the series, and phenomenally successful at the time. The film has worked its magic for me ever since, and I believe it to be a masterpiece of camp. Connery's relaxed performance as a maturing, sexy comedian is one of his most entertaining. There is a knowing wit in the screenplay which simultaneously celebrates and debunks Connery-AS-Bond's superstardom: audiences at the time really 'got' that and responded to it. Charles Gray's louche turn as Blofeld blends with the overall tone of the film: his camp persona brought amusing new meaning to the trope of the character's attachment to his Siamese pussy cat. John Barry brilliantly complemented the location work with one of his most evocative soundtracks. Occasional moments of startling violence (still regularly cut from TV broadcasts) and a taste for dark humour and the bizarre lend the film a frisson which is often overlooked.
One of the biggest kicks I got from visiting the 'Designing 007' exhibition at London's The Barbican Centre this week was looking at Tiffany Case's original 'Circus Circus' trouser suit displayed in the 'Casinos' room against a big screen projection of the relevant scene. For me it was the pop cultural equivalent of a pilgrimmage to Lourdes!
It seems necessary to have to defend DAF from time to time on forums like this but I'll never tire of doing so.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Fans get miffed it didn't follow up the theme of OHMSS, which has been reconstructed as the perfect Bond film.
I agree: the oft-recycled fan criticism of DAF that it chooses not to be a serious sequel to OHMSS is misplaced.
The common complaint is that although OHMSS ends with Blofeld's murder of Tracy, DAF deals only briefly / perfunctorily with the business of Bond's single-minded hunt for Blofeld, in the pre-credits sequence - and even that has elements of slapstick. Connery's subsequent exchanges with the 'real' Blofeld seem on the surface to be almost genial. We have to wait till CR/QOS before we get a linked pair of films which seriously address the theme of Bond's follow-up to the death of a loved woman.
But all this misses the point, as Napoleon Plural argues. DAF should be enjoyed on its own terms. It chooses to leave alone OHMSS, a film which performed relatively slowly at the box office. It sets out instead to be a light-hearted romp which celebrates, with audiences, Connery's return to the glittering playground of 007 - a mileu presented, entertainingly, as more decadent than ever with the demise of the swinging sixties.
Anyway, our current notion of serious sequels wasn't in place in 1971: it wasn't until 'The Godfather: Part II', later in the 70s, that a cutting-edge template for sequels was established. The Bond genre wasn't interested in high levels of continuity between films until CR/QOS, and even there the efficacy of this approach (in QOS) has proven debatable.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I manage to dislike it entirely on it's own lack of merit and am not at all concerned that it does not attempt to follow on from OHMSS.
Other criticisms frequently levelled at DAF are that it isn't, like FRWL, a taut thriller and that its climax is relatively lame. John Brosnan was publishing these complaints as early as 1972, in his book 'James Bond In The Cinema': "there is no real sense of menace in the film ... [and it] has a very weak squib of an ending when one compares it to the climaxes of DN, GF, YOLT, and OHMSS."
DAF admittedly has a loose structure with a nominal plot, but it doesn't want to be a taut thriller any more than it wants to be a sequel to OHMSS. It's also undeniable that the climax is staged on a smaller scale than in some previous Bonds, and that some of it is played for laughs. So what's cool about DAF? In 'The James Bond Man: The Films Of Sean Connery' (1983), Andrew Rissik nails it. He eloquently places the film in a specific pop-cultural context, comparing its style with other decadent movies of the time: "[They conveyed] a sense of decaying Carnaby Street glamour combined with an idea of the movie as a pictorial and psychological game: they dealt in weird, contorted relationships between pictorially interesting groups of people, in visual glamour and the kind of rather fey obscurity that was increasingly going with it." Liking this 'cultural moment' or not is (and was) probably just a matter of taste.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I wonder... if I had seen OHMSS first, and expected the next movie to follow form, and then saw DAF, I suppose I'd be pretty miffed myself. As it was, DAF was my first Bond movie, so....
I wonder... if I had seen OHMSS first, and expected the next movie to follow form, and then saw DAF, I suppose I'd be pretty miffed myself. As it was, DAF was my first Bond movie, so....
I think mainstream audiences of the day were just loving having Connery back as 007 in a glittering, fun-filled movie. That's my recollection, anyway. Although John Brosnan, whom I've quoted above, was writing in 1972, I'd hazard that his objections to DAF represented fannish, minority dissent. I suspect, ironically, that his complaints are more likely to resonate with the notional Bond fan of today, whose reified, critical experience of seeing DAF is typically alone, out of time, as part of a close-knit series of DVD viewings of the 60s/70s Bond movies as a set.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I loved John Brosnan's book, I got it when I hadn't even seen all the films and videos hadn't been introduced, so it was the first way I found out the order of the movies, my first reference book.
Excellent as he was as a writer he says the series peaked with Goldfinger and from then on he's sort of nitpicking the series a bit, as well as enjoying it. He brings his own baggage to it, his own pov, which is fine but of course if something like YOLT was your first and fave film, you'd be thinking, hey, where are the gadgets? in FRWL, you'd have a different criteria.
He did a follow-up, only in the States, that went up to Moonraker I think. Though he reviewed all the films up to GE in Starburst magazine, just not as throughly. He'd touch on some minor aspect, such as how the history of Alec Trevelyan, based in the grim reality of a WW2 event, was a nasty aspect not quite right for a Bond film, or something like that.
I loved John Brosnan's book, I got it when I hadn't even seen all the films and videos hadn't been introduced, so it was the first way I found out the order of the movies, my first reference book.
It was the same for me. I bought the book as a child and read it over and over again. I hadn't yet seen FRWL, YOLT or OHMSS, but I devoured Brosnan's chapters on these films without a care about 'spoilers', learning about their existence in the canon for the first time. Reading the chapters on the films I'd already seen, DN, GF, TB and DAF, was, back then, the only available way of re-living the thrills. I didn't always agree with Brosnan's opinions, so, in a sense, reading the book at a young age was a milestone in my education: I learned to be critical of published points of view!
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Before I had watched DAF, I had pretty much written off everything pre-GoldenEye. And even then, the only Bonds I actually liked were GE and CR. I liked Roger, but I hadn't really ever seriously watched his films, so those don't really count. Anyway, DAF (and The Hill, in a weird kind of way) made me into the hardcore Bond fan that I am today, so for that I love it. It's also one of the most fun and funny (both intentionally and unintentionally) Bonds.
I won't be posting again for a while, so I hope the mods don't mind if I copy to this thread my final word (for now) on DAF. I'd written and revised this post for the 'Confusing Dialogue' thread, as part of a discussion about the conversation between Sir Donald Munger and Bond during Bond's mission briefing, but I wanted to put it here, too, to complete my case that DAF is a fun, clever movie:
There are two instances of conversation which leave me pondering.
The first is from DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER:-
"You've been on holiday, I understand. Relaxing, I hope."
"Hardly relaxing, but most satisfying."
Does anyone else think like me that this is a cheeky in-joke reference to Connery's non-appearance in OHMSS? It doesn't seem to fit in any other context.
Actually, I think he was referring to Bond taking a sabbatical to go and hunt down Blofeld, as depicted in the pre-title sequence. He probably thought the Blofeld clone he did kill was in fact Blofeld, which is why it was "most satisfying".
The lines are indeed an in-joke about the fact that Connery had taken a 'holiday' from the Bond series since YOLT. This break had been busy but 'satisfying' for the actor as he'd had the chance to focus on other movies/roles. But yes, on the surface Bond seems to be referring to his apparently successful hunt for Blofeld in his own time.
Interesting. Where did you come by this information?
Sorry if I gave the impression that this interpretation of the lines was based on some sort of inside information. It's merely an inference, albeit well supported by the internal evidence discussed below. As James Chapman puts it in his 'Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of The James Bond Films', Bond's exchange with Sir Donald Munger is "referring to his [Connery's] 'holiday' from the series and, by implication, to the four non-Bond films - 'Shalako', 'The Molly Maguires', 'The Red Tent' and 'The Anderson Tapes' - that he made in the interim."
At the height of sixties Bondmania, before the Eon series had weathered its first instance of re-casting the lead, the publicity for YOLT had loudly insisted: "Sean Connery IS James Bond". Note Connery's wry delivery of a line in DAF, "We were inseparable, you know." The proclamation in the YOLT posters of an absolute equation of identities between Connery and Bond is partly explained as Eon's marketing strategy for undermining a rival (phoney) Bond - Feldman's 'Casino Royale'. Subsequently, however, as far as Eon's Bond was concerned, Connery's deliberate absence from OHMSS necessarily broke any notion of a natural 'bond' between the actor and the role, slowing box office returns for OHMSS. (The fact alone that Connery was missed put George Lazenby at a disadvantage, irrespective of any shortcomings in Lazenby's own performance. The subtext of Tiffany's exchange with Connery in DAF is irresistible: "You've just killed James Bond!"/"Is that who it was? Well, it just goes to show: no one's indestructible!") Post-OHMSS, Connery's celebrated return to the series for DAF, re-coupling his name with Bond's, was announced in the posters without, this time, an absolute equation of identities, as merely a matter of "Sean Connery AS James Bond [my capitals]" - i.e. a reversion to the wording in the publicity of the early 60s, prior to YOLT. After all, as was now clear, "We DO function in your absence, Commander." The eye-rolling Bernard Lee's line is a defensive message on behalf of the producers: the Bond franchise had managed without Connery, albeit not as successfully. That said, and crucially, DAF exudes a sense of how special it was to have its star back in the shoulder holster. The image of Connery rising atop the scenic elevator for 'The Starlight Lounge', carnation in lapel and flanked by neon-lit, diamond-shaped star decorations, is a glitzy image of his superstardom in ascendancy. "Priceless!" - but debunked at the end of the ride by his need to duck to avoid being crushed.
Connery, with all his pulling power as Bond, was lured back for DAF only after unprecedented financial incentives, including a million dollars which he donated to the Scottish International Education Trust. Emerging from a coffin, Bond says to Morton Slumber and Shady Tree: "You get me the real money, and I'll bring you the real diamonds." If the 'real diamonds' represented, at some level, the sparkling success of Connery's on-screen presence as Bond, the proven asset of his "incomparable charm", it's tempting to read this money-for-diamonds line as an oblique allusion to the actor's contractual negotiations with United Artists/Eon's producers for a substantial reward to appear in DAF (tempting - especially since Broccoli himself, like the exasperated Slumber, had a background in the funeral business, as a coffin-maker). Exercised by the enormous cost of signing Connery for just one more Bond movie, United Artists' money men might also have shared Blofeld's sentiment: "Such a pity. All that time and expense - just to provide you with one mock-heroic moment!"
Thus DAF's writer Tom Mankiewicz was clever and sly enough to incorporate to his screenplay reflexive in-jokes/semi-jokes about Connery's relationship with the series. For his part, Connery, who said he approved of the screenplay's wit, improved his performance to something considerably more polished than his bored plod through YOLT. In DAF, M is perhaps again speaking for the producers when he says, "The least we can expect from you now is some plain, solid work!" (In fact, the only part of DAF in which Connery noticeably sags is during the short but pedestrian expository scenes with Willard Whyte and the CIA agents in the penthouse suite, working out what Blofeld is up to.) In any event, Connery had decided that DAF was definitely his swan song as Eon's Bond. There would have to be a different lead for LLD, hopefully more successful than the last pretender, Lazenby. As Connery remarks in DAF, with a twinkle in his eye, "I think we ought to let Mister Bond take the load from here on out." This left the producers with the headache of finding a new star once more. Accordingly the last line goes to Tiffany, looking up at the night sky after John Barry's cruise-ship mood music has played like a mock requiem and Wint and Kidd have been despatched: "James... how the hell do we get those diamonds down again?"
Mankiewicz's new comic emphasis on the fact that Bond is a PERFORMED role fits, in DAF, with his pervasive theme of phoniness, a theme which ranges from cloned (and drag artist) Blofelds, to a pretend girl-to-gorilla transformation for the kids; from a ludicrous 'zero gravity' simulation at the space research center (given the lie by Bond's sprint across the fabricated moonscape), to a 'red herring' pussy cat and a fake 'bombe surprise' dessert; from "Felix Leiter, you old fraud" to Bond's own false identities in this movie (Peter Franks, Klaus Hergesheimer and his ruses as the smoocher outside Tiffany's apartment and as the genial Dutchman in the elevator); from Bond's bogus finger whorls, to Tiffany's changing hair colour, to voice boxes cunningly set to impersonate Willard Whyte and Burt Saxby. Indeed, phoniness is so integral to DAF's comic strategy that it allows us to forgive, if we're willing, even unintended moments of exposed artifice, such as the poor special effects work on the exploding helicopters in the film's playful climax.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
That's a brilliant post, Shady -- bravo. I asked the question not out of skepticism but rather because I had a feeling you would provide a foundation for your answer. Good stuff indeed. BTW, I am a big DAF fan myself. Cheers.
Comments
If I want a laugh I'll watch Laurel & Hardy thanks
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
I think I'll just have to learn not to trust the general consensus on Bond films; I hadn't seen On Her Majesty's Secret Service - which is often panned as the worst of the lot, as is George Lazenby - and yet it's undoubtedly now in my top three, and Lazenby was brilliant. And then there's Die Another Day, which I first saw when I was about 7 and so could barely remember anything about it until I rewatched it recently. All I remembered was that it was insanely far-fetched, which, along with the general consensus that it's a crap film, led me to believe that it was awful. And whaddya know, I loved it. Granted, it's definitely not one of the best ones, but it was thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish.
Similarly, I've never understood why Goldfinger is always ranked as the best Bond film. I've seen it loads of times, and it is a good laugh to watch, but there are other Bond films that take on a much more serious tone and still manage to be just as, or even more, entertaining, such as my top three: the aforementioned On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Dalton's The Living Daylights, and Brosnan's GoldenEye.
I dunno, I think Diamonds are Forever did a good job with wrapping that up to begin with; it begins with Bond tracking Blofeld across the globe by interrogating a number of leads, before eventually finding him (or, as it turns out, his clone) and killing him by drowning him in boiling clay. I just think it's a shame that he didn't continue that merciless attitude when Blofeld resurfaces *ahem* later in the film. Although, from a psychological point of view, I suppose it makes sense.
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
One of the biggest kicks I got from visiting the 'Designing 007' exhibition at London's The Barbican Centre this week was looking at Tiffany Case's original 'Circus Circus' trouser suit displayed in the 'Casinos' room against a big screen projection of the relevant scene. For me it was the pop cultural equivalent of a pilgrimmage to Lourdes!
It seems necessary to have to defend DAF from time to time on forums like this but I'll never tire of doing so.
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
I agree: the oft-recycled fan criticism of DAF that it chooses not to be a serious sequel to OHMSS is misplaced.
The common complaint is that although OHMSS ends with Blofeld's murder of Tracy, DAF deals only briefly / perfunctorily with the business of Bond's single-minded hunt for Blofeld, in the pre-credits sequence - and even that has elements of slapstick. Connery's subsequent exchanges with the 'real' Blofeld seem on the surface to be almost genial. We have to wait till CR/QOS before we get a linked pair of films which seriously address the theme of Bond's follow-up to the death of a loved woman.
But all this misses the point, as Napoleon Plural argues. DAF should be enjoyed on its own terms. It chooses to leave alone OHMSS, a film which performed relatively slowly at the box office. It sets out instead to be a light-hearted romp which celebrates, with audiences, Connery's return to the glittering playground of 007 - a mileu presented, entertainingly, as more decadent than ever with the demise of the swinging sixties.
Anyway, our current notion of serious sequels wasn't in place in 1971: it wasn't until 'The Godfather: Part II', later in the 70s, that a cutting-edge template for sequels was established. The Bond genre wasn't interested in high levels of continuity between films until CR/QOS, and even there the efficacy of this approach (in QOS) has proven debatable.
Other criticisms frequently levelled at DAF are that it isn't, like FRWL, a taut thriller and that its climax is relatively lame. John Brosnan was publishing these complaints as early as 1972, in his book 'James Bond In The Cinema': "there is no real sense of menace in the film ... [and it] has a very weak squib of an ending when one compares it to the climaxes of DN, GF, YOLT, and OHMSS."
DAF admittedly has a loose structure with a nominal plot, but it doesn't want to be a taut thriller any more than it wants to be a sequel to OHMSS. It's also undeniable that the climax is staged on a smaller scale than in some previous Bonds, and that some of it is played for laughs. So what's cool about DAF? In 'The James Bond Man: The Films Of Sean Connery' (1983), Andrew Rissik nails it. He eloquently places the film in a specific pop-cultural context, comparing its style with other decadent movies of the time: "[They conveyed] a sense of decaying Carnaby Street glamour combined with an idea of the movie as a pictorial and psychological game: they dealt in weird, contorted relationships between pictorially interesting groups of people, in visual glamour and the kind of rather fey obscurity that was increasingly going with it." Liking this 'cultural moment' or not is (and was) probably just a matter of taste.
#1.TLD/LTK 2.TND 3.GF 4.GE 5.DN 6.FYEO 7.FRWL 8.TMWTGG 9.TWINE 10.YOLT/QOS
I think mainstream audiences of the day were just loving having Connery back as 007 in a glittering, fun-filled movie. That's my recollection, anyway. Although John Brosnan, whom I've quoted above, was writing in 1972, I'd hazard that his objections to DAF represented fannish, minority dissent. I suspect, ironically, that his complaints are more likely to resonate with the notional Bond fan of today, whose reified, critical experience of seeing DAF is typically alone, out of time, as part of a close-knit series of DVD viewings of the 60s/70s Bond movies as a set.
I loved John Brosnan's book, I got it when I hadn't even seen all the films and videos hadn't been introduced, so it was the first way I found out the order of the movies, my first reference book.
Excellent as he was as a writer he says the series peaked with Goldfinger and from then on he's sort of nitpicking the series a bit, as well as enjoying it. He brings his own baggage to it, his own pov, which is fine but of course if something like YOLT was your first and fave film, you'd be thinking, hey, where are the gadgets? in FRWL, you'd have a different criteria.
He did a follow-up, only in the States, that went up to Moonraker I think. Though he reviewed all the films up to GE in Starburst magazine, just not as throughly. He'd touch on some minor aspect, such as how the history of Alec Trevelyan, based in the grim reality of a WW2 event, was a nasty aspect not quite right for a Bond film, or something like that.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
It was the same for me. I bought the book as a child and read it over and over again. I hadn't yet seen FRWL, YOLT or OHMSS, but I devoured Brosnan's chapters on these films without a care about 'spoilers', learning about their existence in the canon for the first time. Reading the chapters on the films I'd already seen, DN, GF, TB and DAF, was, back then, the only available way of re-living the thrills. I didn't always agree with Brosnan's opinions, so, in a sense, reading the book at a young age was a milestone in my education: I learned to be critical of published points of view!
Sorry if I gave the impression that this interpretation of the lines was based on some sort of inside information. It's merely an inference, albeit well supported by the internal evidence discussed below. As James Chapman puts it in his 'Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of The James Bond Films', Bond's exchange with Sir Donald Munger is "referring to his [Connery's] 'holiday' from the series and, by implication, to the four non-Bond films - 'Shalako', 'The Molly Maguires', 'The Red Tent' and 'The Anderson Tapes' - that he made in the interim."
At the height of sixties Bondmania, before the Eon series had weathered its first instance of re-casting the lead, the publicity for YOLT had loudly insisted: "Sean Connery IS James Bond". Note Connery's wry delivery of a line in DAF, "We were inseparable, you know." The proclamation in the YOLT posters of an absolute equation of identities between Connery and Bond is partly explained as Eon's marketing strategy for undermining a rival (phoney) Bond - Feldman's 'Casino Royale'. Subsequently, however, as far as Eon's Bond was concerned, Connery's deliberate absence from OHMSS necessarily broke any notion of a natural 'bond' between the actor and the role, slowing box office returns for OHMSS. (The fact alone that Connery was missed put George Lazenby at a disadvantage, irrespective of any shortcomings in Lazenby's own performance. The subtext of Tiffany's exchange with Connery in DAF is irresistible: "You've just killed James Bond!"/"Is that who it was? Well, it just goes to show: no one's indestructible!") Post-OHMSS, Connery's celebrated return to the series for DAF, re-coupling his name with Bond's, was announced in the posters without, this time, an absolute equation of identities, as merely a matter of "Sean Connery AS James Bond [my capitals]" - i.e. a reversion to the wording in the publicity of the early 60s, prior to YOLT. After all, as was now clear, "We DO function in your absence, Commander." The eye-rolling Bernard Lee's line is a defensive message on behalf of the producers: the Bond franchise had managed without Connery, albeit not as successfully. That said, and crucially, DAF exudes a sense of how special it was to have its star back in the shoulder holster. The image of Connery rising atop the scenic elevator for 'The Starlight Lounge', carnation in lapel and flanked by neon-lit, diamond-shaped star decorations, is a glitzy image of his superstardom in ascendancy. "Priceless!" - but debunked at the end of the ride by his need to duck to avoid being crushed.
Connery, with all his pulling power as Bond, was lured back for DAF only after unprecedented financial incentives, including a million dollars which he donated to the Scottish International Education Trust. Emerging from a coffin, Bond says to Morton Slumber and Shady Tree: "You get me the real money, and I'll bring you the real diamonds." If the 'real diamonds' represented, at some level, the sparkling success of Connery's on-screen presence as Bond, the proven asset of his "incomparable charm", it's tempting to read this money-for-diamonds line as an oblique allusion to the actor's contractual negotiations with United Artists/Eon's producers for a substantial reward to appear in DAF (tempting - especially since Broccoli himself, like the exasperated Slumber, had a background in the funeral business, as a coffin-maker). Exercised by the enormous cost of signing Connery for just one more Bond movie, United Artists' money men might also have shared Blofeld's sentiment: "Such a pity. All that time and expense - just to provide you with one mock-heroic moment!"
Thus DAF's writer Tom Mankiewicz was clever and sly enough to incorporate to his screenplay reflexive in-jokes/semi-jokes about Connery's relationship with the series. For his part, Connery, who said he approved of the screenplay's wit, improved his performance to something considerably more polished than his bored plod through YOLT. In DAF, M is perhaps again speaking for the producers when he says, "The least we can expect from you now is some plain, solid work!" (In fact, the only part of DAF in which Connery noticeably sags is during the short but pedestrian expository scenes with Willard Whyte and the CIA agents in the penthouse suite, working out what Blofeld is up to.) In any event, Connery had decided that DAF was definitely his swan song as Eon's Bond. There would have to be a different lead for LLD, hopefully more successful than the last pretender, Lazenby. As Connery remarks in DAF, with a twinkle in his eye, "I think we ought to let Mister Bond take the load from here on out." This left the producers with the headache of finding a new star once more. Accordingly the last line goes to Tiffany, looking up at the night sky after John Barry's cruise-ship mood music has played like a mock requiem and Wint and Kidd have been despatched: "James... how the hell do we get those diamonds down again?"
Mankiewicz's new comic emphasis on the fact that Bond is a PERFORMED role fits, in DAF, with his pervasive theme of phoniness, a theme which ranges from cloned (and drag artist) Blofelds, to a pretend girl-to-gorilla transformation for the kids; from a ludicrous 'zero gravity' simulation at the space research center (given the lie by Bond's sprint across the fabricated moonscape), to a 'red herring' pussy cat and a fake 'bombe surprise' dessert; from "Felix Leiter, you old fraud" to Bond's own false identities in this movie (Peter Franks, Klaus Hergesheimer and his ruses as the smoocher outside Tiffany's apartment and as the genial Dutchman in the elevator); from Bond's bogus finger whorls, to Tiffany's changing hair colour, to voice boxes cunningly set to impersonate Willard Whyte and Burt Saxby. Indeed, phoniness is so integral to DAF's comic strategy that it allows us to forgive, if we're willing, even unintended moments of exposed artifice, such as the poor special effects work on the exploding helicopters in the film's playful climax.